SIX

Two men with long-handled gaffs stood on the bank of a narrow, fast-moving river, about a half mile from the guarded wall at the base of the mountain, well screened by the terrain and trees. A glow of orange was all they could see to indicate the lights and barbed wire and high electric fence that made for a two-hundred-yard cleared zone on the Appalachian side of this wall, a perimeter that flanked the entirety of the small state that had seceded from the rest of America to form a theocracy.

While the river came from the direction of the wall and flowed from the base of the mountain, it did not pass under the wall. It flowed out from a cave just above the two men. An underground river that surfaced here. They’d been alerted that a couple of Appalachians were about to escape, helped by the Clan. The two men had blankets and ample food waiting for the Appalachians.

Johnny Brannon was here in case either of them needed medical help. As a physician’s assistant and a father of two young boys, he had difficulty finding time for much when it came down to it, but he made time for this.

Like Abe Turner, the older man, Brannon lived in Lynchburg. Small towns had all but disappeared after the Wars. Too difficult to protect against roving bands of Illegals. The landscape here in the Carolinas and all along the eastern seaboard was a lot different than it had been a hundred years earlier. After the Wars, the natural evolution of societal living had been a regression to the walled cities of ancient times. Influentials had shifted to city-states, linked by high-speed rail at three hundred miles per hour, where it was possible to protect about thirty thousand in the inner core with twenty-foot-high walls and patrolling soldiers. Generally about a hundred thousand camped outside the walls, the daily migrant workers who were allowed through the guarded checkpoints into the city to supply cheap labor. All open land between the city-states was country without law and structure.

Abe Turner scanned the fast-moving water with his flashlight.

“Matthew 4:18, brother,” Abe said. Abe had escaped Appalachia about a decade earlier but refused to talk about the circumstances.

For the sake of God’s love, Johnny Brannon, the younger man, told himself, find the patience to let the old man ramble.

“Yup, like Jesus said,” Abe continued. “I will make you fishers of men.”

Matthew 4:19. Johnny internalized the correction. No point making Abe feel bad.

Johnny couldn’t spend as much time on the Bible and the history of it as he’d like to but still gave serious effort to learning. His wife was tolerant of his faith but wasn’t a believer.

“Who knew it could be so exciting to be a follower?” Abe asked. “We’ve got gaffs here, not a rod and reel, of course, but we’ll still pull them out, like fishers of men.”

“Didn’t the disciples fish with nets?” Johnny asked. He couldn’t help himself after all. But Abe could be so pompous and condescending. Johnny sometimes thought that was the reason Abe liked being a believer. Everyone had to be nice to him.

“Maybe some used nets,” Abe said, “but when Jesus is in your heart, he speaks right to a person. I’m no net fisherman, so how could Jesus be speaking to me about net fishing? What I hear is the Lord telling me to use the right kind of bait and to reel in all those unbelievers who need him so bad.”

So imposing your modern-day perspective on a manuscript thousands of years old is the best way to understand the Bible? Choose an interpretation that makes you feel good? Johnny was thinking something different. That the fishing Jesus saw involved throwing a net out and dragging it back in, keeping it in constant repair. This took hard work and patience, often with a lack of results. Fishermen of that day had hands scored with scars, sore backs. It wasn’t as exciting as reeling in a hard-fighting bass.

Johnny was determined to be respectful of the older man, however, and didn’t speak those thoughts.

Johnny took his mind off the minor irritation by thinking how brave these Appalachians were, so determined to get away from the religious prison of their country, wondering what it would be like going through a long underground river, not quite knowing what was waiting Outside or even if you’d make it.

This was just the starting point. Johnny and Abe would get the men from the river onto a train, on the northeast route for a couple hours of high-speed to Lynchburg. The underground railroad rotated city-states that accepted refugees on a six-month basis. Johnny and Abe, as volunteers from Lynchburg, had only made four trips in the last four months; one of the reasons volunteers traveled with the refugees was to form an immediate friendship and bond.

From what Johnny knew about Appalachia, the trip would be an incredible culture shock. Behind the electric perimeter fence that surrounded all of the steep and remote valleys of Appalachia were small towns, heavily policed by the religious leader, Bar Elohim, and all travel, except for religious leaders, was done by horse and buggy. In Lynchburg, the refugees would for the first time see how Industrials and Illegals camped in shantytowns and soovie parks outside the walls, just for the chance to migrate into the city in the mornings to work for minimum wage, only to be forced back out again in the evenings. The alternative was to try to live in the lawless open land between city-states, where the survival rate for any but the savage and strong was too low to make the risk worthwhile.

The refugees at least, while never granted voting rights and doomed to remain among the Invisible, could eventually earn the right to get identity chips in their fingers and a form of citizenship as asylum seekers from the oppression of Appalachia. While unable to vote, they would have the right to legal work and to rent apartment units within the protection of the city walls, largely invisible within the system, unlike the Industrials, who had no citizenship and were forced to accept bar-coded facial tattoos if they wanted to enter the city for each day’s employment. Smaller bar codes could have served as a way for computers to keep track of their movements, but facial tattoos were the most effective way of identifying the Industrials at a glance, and this made protecting the Influentials much easier since Industrials composed the bulk of the population. To minimize the chance of riots, Influentials barred them from gathering in groups and made them leave the walled cities before curfew. The lowest class were the Illegals—those who refused facial tattoos for the sake of freedom and were reduced to hiding in the city sewers or prowling in gangs outside the city walls, among the shanties and soovies, with a curiously structured society of their own.

Thinking about the tremendous adjustment these refugees faced took Johnny back in his memory to the previous time he’d been here along the river. Unfortunately, with Abe.

Six or seven weeks back, they’d waited along the water, expecting only a young woman. Instead, there’d been a National Intelligence man, drugged for short-term memory loss. They’d only been able to figure out his identity from a card in his sodden wallet. Carson Pierce. They’d never heard from him again, of course, nor ever learned what had taken him into Appalachia and then out again like this.

And there’d been an old woman with him—Gloria—and an odd pair of friends. A big, big man, gentle in the face. Billy. With a chatterbox kid who could barely see. Theo. Johnny had gotten the two of them into an apartment in Lynchburg and found them a job, then helped them run away, somewhere into the shanties or soovies.

About a week later, they’d been alerted to come back for the woman. But she hadn’t appeared in the river. Instead, she’d walked up behind them. Completely dry. In a dark cloak that hid most of her body. She too had settled into an apartment, only to disappear a little later.

Lightning flashed from a faraway thunderstorm.

“End times are upon us,” Abe said to Johnny before the rumbles reached them. “Won’t that be great? Just like that lightning. Flash, we’ll be taken away. All the sinners who deserve God’s wrath will get left behind, and we’ll be sitting in heaven, just laughing at all the wrongdoers and the full dose of God’s punishment inflicted on them. Plagues. Wars. You name it.”

Johnny was rescued from one of Abe’s usual end-time rants by the sight of a yellow life jacket in his flashlight beam floating down the current.

“Abe.” Johnny pointed.

The life jacket was empty. Abe snagged it with his gaff and dropped it at his feet.

Johnny scanned the river. Then came the second life jacket. Not empty.

“Hold the light for me!” Abe said. Unnecessarily.

Johnny did as directed.

“Hey!” Abe shouted. “Over here. Ready to help!”

The man kicked in the water toward them. As Abe reached out with his gaff, what Johnny saw in his flashlight beam was a snapshot of a man’s face that would be burned forever in his mind.

The contrast of wet facial hair and emaciated face showed someone who had been in a prison for weeks, barely fed. And the remnants of the right eye, dark and wrinkled, like a puckered prune.

The man’s other eye was milky and, in the brief time that Johnny had the light on it, seemed to wander.

Poor man, Johnny thought. What kind of hell have the religious zealots in Appalachia put him through?