What Came After Read Free Page B

iron block. He hammered at it with a kind of brutal delicacy, the blows ringing and the metal sending off sparks that flew out the door and either vanished into the air or slipped into the cracks in the broken concrete. Running into those cracks and down along them like water and dying.
    The boy was enchanted. He watched as the man sized the metal he’d been hammering and grunted some sort of rough satisfaction toward it. Watched as he snapped his head backward to raise the helmet’s big pitted visor on its hinges and kept watching as he plunged the worked metal into a bath of water that boiled and steamed and sighed and finally grew quiet. Wondering how much heat the metal might hold even now. Wondering when you could touch it again if you ever could.
    The man’s thick glasses were fogged over and he didn’t see the boy and he didn’t see the boy’s father when he came. Careening around the corner and spying the boy and launching himself across the lot to embrace his son and squeeze him tight for protection or punishment or both. Probably not making any distinction between the two. Carmichael looked up from his knees and saw the man with the iron bar raised up for appraisal and the raising of it could have been a threat, some territorial maneuver not quite comprehensible from this side of those fogged glasses, but it didn’t seem that way.
    “Tell you what,” said the mechanic to no one but himself. “I think we’ve just about got it licked.”
    “Got what licked?”
    The sound of Carmichael’s voice surprised the mechanic, and he slid his glasses down to see. One fingertip of his glove leaving a crooked black trail along the bridge of his nose. He set down the bar and saw Carmichael kneeling there on the pavement and looked at him the same way he’d look at anybody. Unsurprised. “That little problem you’ve been having.”
    “With the car?”
    “With the car.” The way you’d say it to a well-meaning idiot. Like what other problem was there.
    The bar was still smoking and the water bath was still steaming and the Franklin stove was still glowing, blue inside and red outside. Carmichael studied it. “That’s not a wood fire you’ve got going in there,” he said. Not a question. He wasn’t accustomed to asking questions. He knew everything.
    ‘“No sir, it’s not. It’s natural gas all the way.”
    “I’ll be.” Carmichael shook his head. “Where would somebody get natural gas out here?”
    “I don’t know where somebody else might get it,” he said. “Me, I get it from the dump. I pipe it in.”
    “The dump.”
    “The dump. The garbage dump. Anaerobic decomposition. If you wait long enough, all kinds of things will turn into gas.” He reached behind the stove and turned a valve and the flame died.
    “I’d forgotten that,” said Carmichael, as if he’d ever known. Rising to his feet to reassert his position.
    “I’m not surprised you’ve forgotten,” said Weller. “People have forgotten a whole lot of things.”
     
    *
     
    Behind the shop was the house and behind the house was a leaky quonset hut full of machines. A ruined wonderland brought back to something near life. Old tools restored and new tools invented. A dozen pumps and engines in various stages of restoration. A handbuilt gasburning generator piped into the same cobbled line as the Franklin stove, making electricity to run an air compressor and drive a handful of scavenged power tools and heat water for the house. A water tank on the roof to pressurize the plumbing.
    Like everyone else in the cities, Carmichael had heard stories about the wonders and oddities to be found out here in the Zone. Wonders and oddities and terrors too. But he’d never heard the first suggestion of anything like this. Nobody’d heard of anything like this. Gas power and hot water and rudimentary sanitation. All of it, old technology and new, made to rise up and walk by one man.
    What looked like a boarded-up greenhouse was attached to