THE NEXT DAY. BUFFALO, NEW YORK. 3 AM EST. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18, 2025.
Kelleys Dancer crept through the dark; even under
black sails, with the moon not yet up, and no lights on shore as
they approached, they couldn’t be sure they weren’t being
watched.
And then once we’re on the canal, it will be worse,
Larry thought. Painting the canoes black won’t
help much there.
They sat murmuring
together in the bow, while Rosie took the helm.
“I’m thinking your
problem won’t be rapids, but mud,” Barbara said. “The water from
all those broken dams is long gone. But Stone sent us to
investigate the Canadian shore, ’cause they wanted us to find out
if pure-fusion fallout behaved like they thought it would. Well, it
did—the Geiger counter hardly made a noise, so there wasn’t much
lasting contamination, but practically everything was dead except
grass and bugs. No plants or trees to hold the soil; upstate New
York was on that same wind path, so lots of streams and small lakes
will be silted up.”
Kelleys Dancer crept slowly south and east, aided
by the slow current in eastern Lake Erie that pulled toward
Niagara. After a while Barbara took the helm and Rosie went forward
and began sounding with a bob on a line. Whenever they tacked, he’d
scramble to adjust the triangular foresail.
At quarter of four,
off to starboard, a dim, low urban skyline appeared, with a small
knob that had to be the lighthouse, their landmark. The sun would
follow less than an hour behind the moon; they needed to
move.
The last they heard
of Rosie and Barbara was a whispered “Good luck” as Chris and Jason
climbed into their black canoe and followed Larry, paddling slowly
across the dark harbor. Behind them, they could hear the creak and
thump of Kelleys Dancer tacking to head
back to the western end of the lake.
The canal entrance
loomed in front of them like a concrete-scabbed wound. Paddles came
up dripping scum, black at first, but as the sun came up the color
of a bloody bruise, climbed, and turned the gold color of old
chicken fat, the slime was a deep blue-green, in long yarns and
strands.
Two hours later the
land they paddled through was still urban, though empty and dead.
The green scum smelled like fresh horse manure when the paddles
turned it over. Chris, in the bow of the lead canoe, saw a headless
corpse still wearing a bra and panties; a swollen hair-covered lump
that must have been a dead horse or cow; and scattered human bones,
including two small skulls, around the black smear where a rubber
raft had rotted.
“Kids trying to get
out of the city that way?” Jason asked.
“Or kids looting
somebody’s abandoned raft, killed by something bigger and meaner
than them,” Chris said. “Or maybe feral dogs got them and it just
happened to be near a raft. The amount of really sad shit that
happened is just plain impossible to imagine.”
Apart from the green
slime, nothing lived; the trees that leaned over the canal had no
leaves, the clay and stone banks eroded without plants growing on
them, no fish jumped in the water, no bird flew overhead, nothing
scuttled in the dead brush. Skeletons of humans and dogs lay on the
banks; probably for a while the bodies had swarmed with beetles and
worms, but now those were gone.
By noon they were
well into suburban areas. Jogging trails and little decorative
shopping malls bordered the canal at intervals between long
stretches of factory yards and common dumps. Hearing booming and
thundering ahead around a bend, Larry had them pull over and tie
up; Jason drew the short straw. He came back to report an old
landfill seething with fires and explosions. “Probably the biotes
that infected it are methanogenic,” Jason said. “And lightning or
something started the rising gas burning.”
Not wanting to give
up the canoes, they walked along the bank opposite the landfill,
towing the canoes on long ropes. “‘I got a mule, her name is Sal,’”
Jason said. “Except I don’t. I got me.”
“But we can probably
do better than fifteen miles today,” Larry said, “and right now,
every mile is looking like a blessing.”
After relaunching the
canoes, they paddled till twilight. The sun crawled down behind
them, turning from mucus-yellow to gory red again; they slept under
the beached, overturned canoes that night, taking turns sitting
watches.