All Good Children - Catherine Austen [91]
Dallas and I groan in unison.
As we approach Syracuse, the toll-booth operators smile at us. “Christmas shopping?” they ask.
After Syracuse, the highway leads to nowhere but Freaktown and the border, and the guards are not so friendly. “Where are you headed?” a butchy white woman asks at the last toll. She surveys our salt-and-pepper family with a scowl.
“We’re going to a funeral,” Mom says.
Hopefully it won’t be our own.
EIGHTEEN
We hit Freaktown sooner than expected. I thought we’d see blackened forests or glowing craters or shanties on the outskirts, but there’s an ordinary town ahead, flat and dated, at the end of an empty highway. There’s an official welcome sign that says the population is 120,000, but it’s at least thirty years old. It’s been painted over with the words, Welcome to Freaktown, in six-foot letters. I shiver when the headlights reveal the sign. Not because I’m scared of Freaktown, although that’s true enough, but because the bottom of the sign is scrawled with the word, WITHSTAND. We’re driving slowly. The sign does not blur by. I am not imagining things. The word WITHSTAND stares me in the face in my darkest hour. It’s like God is talking to me. I don’t like it.
The highway turns into Freaktown’s main street, the only route to the bridge north. The road is broken and bumpy but not much worse than where we’ve come from. There’s no other way to go forward. “Maybe we should wait till morning,” I suggest.
“Don’t be silly,” Mom says. She turns down the high beams, dials up the heat, checks that the doors are locked. We breathe shallow and cringe into our seats.
Abandoned fast-food restaurants fringe us on both sides: Denny’s, MacDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Taco Bell, Dunkin’ Donuts, Arby’s, Jack in the Box, Pizza Hut, A&W, Baskin Robbins, Quiznos, Domino’s, Hardee’s, Dairy Queen, Roly Poly, Church’s Chicken, Burger King, dozens of them side by side with gas stations, empty for twenty-five poisoned years. Bits of siding, lights and drainage pipes are torn off the exteriors, and if we had the balls to stop and look inside, we wouldn’t find appliances. But the shells are intact, happy and colorful after all these years under a brutal sun.
I’ve studied North American history but I’ve never imagined anything quite like this. This is a landscape paved in grease and gasoline, prosperity and peace. A world where everybody had a car and a doctor and a right to an education, where entire lifetimes were spent in weekend shopping sprees and drives to the beach just to look at the waves. It boggles my mind, the number of people with cash required to make this street exist. “What do they eat here now?” I ask. “Do you think there’ll be roadblocks?”
“Shut up,” Dallas says. “You’ll scare your sister.”
“She’s asleep.”
“Shut up anyway.”
“They’re not going to eat us, honey,” Mom says, but really she doesn’t have a clue.
After the last fast-food restaurant, the road climbs a hill. Mom slows at the crest, expecting to descend into total darkness. But the town below us flickers with light. Smoke rises from chimneys, windows sparkle in a rainbow of colors.
“Oh my god,” Mom whispers. “I forgot it’s Christmas.”
She eases the car down the slope.
Freaktown does not look like the Freakshow footage. It’s just a rundown town, probably rundown long before the disaster. The main street is lined with three-story stone and brick buildings with stores on the bottom and apartments on top, nineteenth-century styling—patterned brickwork around the windows, recessed entrances, wooden awnings. The original signboards have been painted over in several languages to read, Doctor, Appliances, Food, Housing, Trade, Clinic. Most of the glass in the display windows is still in place, and where the windows are broken, they’re boarded up and painted to look like vistas—forests, oceans, fields of wheat, white gabled houses with rabbits in the yard. This is not what reality programming led me to expect. You need a fully functional brain to transform a broken window into a view.
“What’s their power