When progress burns the night's bright trail
Lost tracks to where the sky grows pale
The quiet thunder wheels tell tales
Only embers beyond the night's soft veil
Only embers between the beast and the rail
– Raziya and the Sings, Freedom
July 4th, 2032. The day the turquoise gulf waves outside of Coatzacoalcos yielded a body. A not quite human body. He floated six miles toward land before dying, ebbed in soft half-consciousness.
This is the end. I am the last of the company men...
We solemnly swear to constant vigilance...
We have failed...
The rough ocean caps filled his eyes and the hard salt burned his lungs, the water was an alkaline bullhorn SOS stuck on repeat. The sky flashed perfect blue between the diminishing waves. There had been a purpose, a goal—something about an Ikoem sister and her daughter. But the central directive was as blurred as the dark shapes of great barracudas darting at the edges of his fading vision.
All abnormalities will hereby be rendered obsolete...
And now even he was barely intact, bleeding and exhausted. Reduced to senses relaying information to a lone flickering consol in an abandoned mind.
I will not break the Second Oath of Nihilism. I will not fear...
The purpose binds. Purpose is life. Without many the one is without purpose...
He flailed, and it did nothing to adjust his course in the shifting, timeless waves. The waves always win.
The Ikoem girl must...
Must what?
Despite his formidable, linear will, wired like a black box in a bomber plane, he could no longer remember the directive. All memory swam about, listless as the rocking waves, and began to lose cohesion along with his flesh.
The purpose binds. Purpose is life. Without many the one is lost...
Purpose is blood, nerve, collagen, pulse...
Forward to eternity, no divergence from the norm...
Neurons sputtered at random, flashing migraine static across his dying eyes. He became the colorless cubic heart, giant and pulsing, at the center of the monolith against a sky of white, at the precipice of man's development. In the dark hollows below, he glimpsed the gray-clad ranks of his comrades, their hard-set eyes like the shells of carrion beetles crafted into their pale faces, the color of truth and clarity. Cogs in a machine.
Culture is the cancer that metastasizes across the great Gray road, forward to eternity...
The water was growing gentler and warmer as he approached land. An infinity of sand sparkled before dying eyes, the corneas now beginning to sluff off, nibbled by thousands of tiny fish. Kingdoms rising and falling... if there had still been someone there to recognize the scene before him, he may have thought that it was unbearably lovely.
The golden seafloor would have been visible in the clear water, ten or twelve feet below. Those eyes saw it approach but registered nothing. His heart ceased to beat. Veins and capillaries contracted and collapsed under the pressures. Blood oozed in dark jellyfish plumes from a hundred gashes across his large body. His lungs filled with salt water and sparkling starlight sand. His starved brain flooding with hypoxic blood.
Hey ho, the great gray road, forward to eternity...
Finally, his broad, limp form was tossed past the breakers into the beach surf, where it lodged in the smooth sand, mostly bare. Tiny fish nibbled at wounds in his ashen skin in the tide pools around his body, recognizing him with piscine placidity as they might recognize a shipwreck or a coral reef. He became a passive fixture of their silent kingdom, now until forever.
Or so it might have been, had the five drifters not seen him, slowly being buried by the tide.
✧
The cloudless evening sky was violet, the ocean air gentle. Blonde, sunburned Kevin "Dimple" Rhodes watched Summer gaze across the Gulf, her clear eyes just a shade darker than the ocean. The breeze danced through her chocolate cinnamon hair, flapping the yellow bandana like some ancient flag. Her fingers courted her old Stella guitar strings, stirring the voices of her companions.
Rolando – small for fifteen and easy to miss even in a crowd of five – had been lost in thought as the others sang and spoke, long black locks mimicking the Coatzacoalcos waves. Wednesday was grinning in her homespun tie-die dress, gray beginning to show in the roots of four-foot sun-bleached locs. Her companion in a faded bomber jacket, Uncle John, tended to the slow-roasting cans, his gray-gold hair clumped with sweat despite the cool of evening.
And beyond their song, the drifting body nestled into wet sand.
The five had sat on the windswept beach since afternoon, far from the hustle of making ends meet, from the posturing of politicians in towers of war, from water shortages and brain implants and famines. Two old and three young, and as many shades of skin among them as the patchwork stitching on their vagabond clothes.
The hobo stove, the twisted swath of metal like a robot vulture perched in the trash fire. No one had charged for ocean access. The desalinator dripped beside them, just enough for the five. Cans of Juanita's beans, carne asada, pickled nopalitos, and clumps of instant coffee floating in condensed milk hung over lapping flames. The flavors mingled with smoke, a thousand campfires on a thousand beaches from stories told since the dawn of time.
Dimple tossed another roll of newspaper into the fire with his all-American hands. He pulled Summer close, kissing her light brown freckled neck as she sang. There was no life like this in the civilized world. No freedom like the senses you were born with. In his dried out little hometown of Boone, Colorado, a man's life started out counted by school bells. Then came Ego brain implants, quarter whistles, factory bells, and water ration alerts. Finally, gameshow commercials, medication timers, and heart rate monitors. Your hours were counted, divided into neat little boxes.
Watching Summer play, Dimple couldn't help but remember how she'd freed him, when they'd first met on a day much like this. She'd been high on mushrooms, twirling fire sticks on the green, before the red sandstone columns of the Norlin Library. After three days naked in Summer's single bed, making love on the hour, eyes and bodies joined, they'd left school to ride the rails, and days were no longer counted.
✧
"Whatcha thinking 'bout?" Summer asked, taking in Dimple's grin with a smile to match.
"When we left the rest of it for this. For the rails," he said.
"For me, it was 10 years ago today," Summer told the others, folding her story into her song. "My dad and I left my mother in Dos Cebezas. Slipped away through darkness." She'd been thirteen when her father had come back, lean and sick and black as night, a shadow of the man she'd known as a girl. "Jumped the Union Pacific line, up the Central Valley, towards Mojave, Fresno, Oakland. Days quiet, evenings musical, Death Valley nights moonlit violet. He taught me where to sleep and eat, where to find fresh water for less than seven bucks a glass. How to find your fulcrums, to tell which lines got collectors and busbars... made me sing again when I'd gone silent." And the last bit added with a grin wide as Dimple's. "Most of all, he taught me how to play this damn thing."
Summer strummed her dad's favorite – Kris Kristofferson's Me and Bobby McGee, recalling half a lifetime ago, when her voice blended with his bloodhound bey. In her mind's eye, the man and woman in the ballad made their way from Kentucky to sunny California, making the road their home, until the woman stole away one night in Salinas, for reasons Summer would never know. Just the way things go, no matter where you roam.
They were adrift, parentless, sons and daughters and dreamers of the sky and sea. Summer leaned back in Dimple's strong arms, cradling the guitar, and smelled the ocean and the roasting hobo burritos mingled with Dimple's shaving cream.
But as it had a thousand times before, her voice broke off. The beast of progress had knocked on the evening's quiet door.
Only embers between the beast and the rail.
The surf receded and the pale body remained, half-submerged just within the soft breakers. Her breath caught in her throat, the way it always did, when the beast came knocking. When it knocked, you answered.
✧
Rolando Ruiz had been watching the others, smiling, half-looking for patterns in the rushes. He enjoyed the stillness, the music of their voices, and letting that almost-forgotten thing – paz? – wash over him.
But he stood bolt-upright the moment he saw the body, but found himself unable to move.
Wednesday turned to follow the girl's gaze, her eyes narrowing when she caught sight. "John... JOHN!"
John looked up, face red and baffled. He dropped his tin spatula in the sand, jaw working.
Wednesday was already halfway down the beach.
The shape in the water was so still. Pale blue sea foam lapped against perfect white sand around it, with all the malignancy of a puppy licking a hand. Rolan didn't fear it, exactly—not after all he'd seen on the road from Maras. But it wasn't just a body, somehow. It caught the light oddly, like it had been cut and pasted from a very old photo.
Thoughts clamored, the way they always did – recent headlines about uprisings and droughts swelling form the deadly Global Water Accords of 2029, faces of political leaders that might match this one, strikes and rebellions, the direction of the wind, the interval of the gulf tide, shifts in gulf stream direction against body-mass index averages, as a function of hours afloat... Freighter shipping schedules, timetables of New Ferrosur and surrounding railways, cargo manifest rosters, bulk shipping demand adjusted for shifting market pressures in Central American and Caribbean exporters across hundreds of industries, murder rate statistics...
It all painted a wheel in Rolan's mind, at the hub of which rested a grim conjecture: the most likely place and time of homicide, assuming the body was or wasn't dumped from a ship, from land, from canal...
His knees snapped into gear, and he bolted his friends.