What Came After Read Online Free PDF

from over the Volkswagen into a couple of salvaged backpacks with a week’s worth of food. Half of what money they had folded in his pocket along with some other things. That Polaroid photograph. His pack was the size of a footlocker and hers was more like an underfed hatbox. Not even that big. His was made of threadbare canvas and hers was made of stiff plastic falling apart at the corners. Bright red and acid yellow, printed on the back with an outsized drawing of a white cat wearing a purple bow on one of its ears. To see her trudging around the house with that cat on her back made him think of a moth he’d seen pictured in an old magazine, a bug with the huge and startling eyes of some predatory bird etched on its wings to ward off predators.
     
    *
     
    They set out before dawn, everybody in tears.
    Rain had come overnight and passed on over but the highway was still wet and the trucks kicked up water. He took off his Red Sox cap and cinched it as tight as it would go and put it on Penny’s head, but it was soaked through to begin with so it didn’t help much. He asked her what she thought they could do. Did they have anything they could use for a raincoat. Thinking of the tarp. He was a little bit reluctant to cut a hole in it for their heads to poke out but what could you do. You had to make sacrifices.
    She thought and thought. The two of them walking along getting wet. Ruminating. Finally she turned that face up and looked at him from underneath the brim of his ball cap and said, “Maybe we should just get away from these trucks.” Pointing off into the fields. A gray access road cutting in among the green. Why not.
    The fields came right up to the highway here and right up to the edges of the access road too. Cultivated fields fenced in high, sixteen feet of chain link and barbed wire, with PharmAgra tags clipped onto them every so often. Fields of green beans and sweet corn mainly, but here and there tobacco as well. Tobacco the state’s oldest crop, from back before there’d even been a state of Connecticut, and persisting now that the state existed mainly in memory. The way things of the world will persist.
    He hadn’t wanted to take these access roads for fear of meeting his neighbors on their way to the fields and having to explain himself. This ridiculous dream of getting Penny in front of a doctor. A specialist no less. The chances they were taking, and the waste of time if nothing else, in a world where every productive minute mattered. It was absurd. Liz had been right. Anybody they might meet would see that and say it. But they’d gotten such an early start that the roads were empty. Empty and quiet and damp from the rain so the dust hadn’t risen yet. They walked side by side. Dirt roads covered this part of the state in a rough grid. Old pavement here and there where it endured somehow, but mostly plain dirt. They’d walk west a few hours he figured, and then turn south and that way they wouldn’t lose too much time. Cut into Ninety-Five just a hair later than if they’d stuck to Ninety-One. That was where the truck traffic would be anyhow. The real truck traffic. Loads heading all the way to the Mason-Dixon in a straight line except for that boomerang around New York where the two of them could bail out and see what their future held. If they managed to get a ride to begin with. As long as his breath held out, they’d walk. Then they’d keep on walking.
    Penny marched along like a trooper. That little white cat bouncing up and down and looking backwards but the girl herself looking everywhere all at once or trying to. Craning her neck to capture the whole vague world any way she could. The westbound road and the fencelines along it and her own stretched shadow marching ahead. A landscape that rose and fell after they’d turned south onto a track where the sounds of the nearby highway died out and they were back in the cultivated wilderness.
    Men emerged from high gates into the fields,