My wristband pinged. A text from Irene, sent hours back, just now getting through: “Keryn: Bus not running. Lost many to Dorcas virus, but contagion has passed. We need help.” GPS coordinates were attached, showing them in the hills outside Coalinga. Two hundred miles from Berkeley.

Without treatment, Dorcas virus kills half the people who get it. It first hit epidemic status in rural areas of Central America. The bus often traveled along the US/Mexico border; likely they picked it up before useful information about it spread online, given the spotty internet in such regions. Before the virus reached the Bay Area, medical researchers had found it was transmitted by bodily contact—not airborne—and that an already developed antiviral reduced the death toll to ten percent. A good public health response had blocked the spread in the Bay Area and other functioning urban regions, but the epidemic had left a horrible toll in more rural parts of the country.

I pinged Naheem at the hospital and Amanda in security to get help putting together a rescue trip. If Irene said there was no contagion on the bus, there wasn’t, but the virus could still be active in the area around Coalinga and other places between here and there. And there could be trouble even without the virus. The current drought has wiped out most of the farms and other work south of San Jose, leaving it with a mix of survivalists, gangs, and communes—some foolish, some benign, many dangerous. Best to be prepared for anything.

Fortunately, both medical and security were willing to help, because I was going no matter what. I owe everything to Irene.

We traveled in one of the university’s field work vehicles, a boxy truck covered with PV that could travel up anything that might pass for a road. It held an ambulance’s worth of medical equipment, sleeping bags and tents, multiple barrels of water, and several weeks worth of freeze-dried food. The university didn’t want its people to die if they got stuck outside civilization.

Lin, one of Amanda’s security team who was also a paramedic, drove. Since the old federal highway system crumbled from lack of maintenance, people in the Bay Area have stopped driving much. Many don’t know how; between expanded public transit and the convenience of bicycling, few find the need. I learned to drive on the bus, but that was twenty years ago. I’m rusty.

We made our way south through Oakland on International Boulevard, which is in pretty good shape—though slow—because of the buses that run along it. It’s a two-lane road, with community gardens and mini-parks in what were once extra lanes and parking spots. Solar panels top every roof, and each building—residential, retail, old warehouse or factory turned into some combination of the two—has a huge water tank set up to collect run-off from the roof during the rainy season. One of the reasons the Bay Area survived the parade of systemic crashes of the 2040s and ’50s was that it had already put in place renewable energy sources and water systems.

Only the four of us went—a minimum crew for leaving the city. The university preferred sending larger teams when people left the safe confines of Berkeley and Oakland, but it was a month to spring graduation and many students and teachers were out in the field finishing projects. They had few people to spare. Still, we had support and permission. I’m not the only researcher at the university with ties to the bus, and I’d reached out to Naheem and Amanda in particular because I knew they’d had crew or students who’d come to Berkeley by way of Irene. That got us to telling stories about her.

“The most intuitive guards I’ve ever had were people Irene referred to us,” Amanda said. “I’m not sure how they developed those skills. I didn’t want to ask, for fear I’d find out something the university couldn’t ignore.”

Naheem laughed. “Yeah. I had two women several years back in the nurse/midwife program who probably got their background practicing medicine without a license. They should have been training as MDs, but they wanted a faster program so they could get back to the people who needed them.” He turned to me. “You seem to know her better than the rest of us. How’d you meet Irene?”

“I grew up on the bus.”

“You grew up with Travelers?” he said.

I nodded.

Travelers is the name Berkeley anthropologist Grace Wong gave to the various groups who took to moving around the country in old buses and RVs, offering entertainment and education to people who live in the places civilization forgot. She documented a troupe who travels the Great Plains, another in old Appalachia, some in the Old South and in New England. In Louisiana they are keeping Zydeco and Cajun music alive; one in Alaska documents those among the indigenous who still manage to fish despite the warming waters. These forgotten places have their own cultures, their own ways worth saving, and the Travelers collect those even as they entertain and educate.

The bus I grew up on was called the Chatauqua Frontera—“chatauqua” because Irene, who was there from the beginning, liked the reference back to the nineteenth century educational movement of the same name, and “frontera” because a lot of the travel was along the US/Mexican border, though the bus did range up through California to the Pacific Northwest from time to time. Like most Travelers, they brought entertainment—plays, music, storytelling—along with news. They held workshops on everything from computer programming to the latest wrinkles in growing food with minimal water to making wooden toys. And here and there, they collected people who needed help or who had something that should be shared with a wider audience.

The internet continues to thrive and expand, and development of new tech devices and ways to use them keeps many major cities humming. But the underlying infrastructure that keeps the world connected is not well distributed, especially in the places that never got much coverage in the first place. Travelers like Irene and the Chatauqua provided a different kind of network.

I spent ten years with the Chatauqua Frontera. They gave me a life in a time when an orphaned child—especially a dark-skinned one of uncertain parentage—would have fallen through the cracks. Irene and the others rescued many people, adults as well as children, and made all of us feel we were special and loved, no matter what horrors we had seen. They didn’t just rescue us because we needed help, though they helped everyone they saw in need; they saved us because they thought—no, knew—we had something to offer to the future.

Irene brought me to Berkeley when I was sixteen and convinced the powers that be to let me start taking classes. I ended up with a PhD in microbiology and a lab where I could continue my work on the interactions of bacteria and viruses.

Irene had faith in me. I’ve tried to live up to that.

“What was it like, growing up with Travelers?” Lin asked. The truck was moving slowly, and electric engines are quiet, so we could hear each other even though Naheem and I were in the back and all the windows were open to give us a breeze.

I had a lot of trouble answering that question before I became friends with people who were raising children, because I didn’t understand how different my life had been from that of people who lived in relatively stable urban areas. Watching my friends at the university who were raising kids in as safe an environment as you can get these days showed me what the question meant.

“A different place every week, studying things as they came up, taking care of the little ones, performing in our plays. Tech tools so far out of date that you wouldn’t have believed they would still work. And sometimes the bus broke down in the middle of nowhere and we ran out of food and the grownups worried a lot.”

“I think all grownups worry a lot,” Amanda said. She grew up in a co-op community in West Oakland where adults outnumbered kids two-to-one and everybody made a point of providing support for each other.

“But not all of them have to worry about breakdowns and a lack of food,” Lin said.

“Mine worried about sea level rise,” Naheem said. “We were in Alameda, and the house kept flooding. We had too much money tied up in the house to move—it kept dropping in value—so we were stuck trying to work with it.”

“We had to keep moving because the rent kept going up,” Lin said. “I wish we’d had co-ops down the Peninsula back then. Real estate stayed crazy even as the roads fell apart from floods and landslides.”

Maybe nobody growing up in the twenty-first century gets a stress-free childhood at that, even the ones in the good places. Mine was just more exotic.

“I loved it, most of the time,” I said. “It was like being on permanent vacation. And I was too young to realize how much I should worry.”

“Did you ever get attacked?” Naheem asked.

I flashed on the image of Adrienna, who had entranced audiences when she told stories, falling off the stage as a self-proclaimed protector of the white “race” opened up with an assault rifle. Blood everywhere, and the local authorities let him get away to kill again. “Let’s just say I learned to handle a gun at an early age.”

That was something else we had in the truck: weapons. We were peace-loving folk, for the most part, but we weren’t planning to be anyone’s victims.

Even back when old I-5 still functioned between Berkeley and Coalinga—before neglect, not to mention serious floods in the Central Valley, took their toll—it took four hours to get there unless traffic was unusually good. These days travel time is double or triple that, minimum. There’s not much in the way of traffic, but the roads that still exist are small and full of potholes. As we moved out of the urban areas into what had once been farm and ranch country, the road got worse.

Five years back the area had seen a lot of floods, but now we were firmly back in the drought. Even though it was spring, the landscape along the road was brown—a decayed brown, not the golden color that used to come when the rain patterns were something close to normal. There were no animals grazing along the road, and nothing was growing in the fields that had once held garlic or strawberries. The farther south we drove, the worse it got.

The landscape kept us on edge, so none of us was really surprised when Amanda, who had been running a wide-range satellite-based scan of the area as we drove, said, “We’ve got a situation ahead.” We’d just turned down State Highway 25, a few miles south of Gilroy.

“Do we negotiate?” Lin said.

“No. From what I’m picking up, they’ve got the road blocked with something huge. People around here are pretty desperate, and someone must have recruited a lot of folks to block the road that thoroughly. Turn left next chance you get. We’re going to go the long way round.”

We went east for several miles before the road turned south again. “This will get us back to 25 way south of Hollister,” Amanda said. “That ought to do it.” But she kept watching the scan.

Nothing happened as we circled around, except that the lack of pavement meant we were going ten miles an hour. No one would take this route out of choice. We didn’t talk much.

We got back on 25 a few miles north of Los Pinos. “Look at the land,” Amanda said, gesturing to the brown fields and hills in all directions. “It’s even worse than I thought down here. No telling what we’re going to run into.”

The next hour was uneventful, but I didn’t relax because it was clear that Amanda hadn’t. She continued to watch the scan. Just south of the Pinnacles, she said, “Fuck. There’s something a few miles ahead.”

“Go around again?” Lin said.

“We can’t. None of the roads off of here go anywhere except up to a few houses. I doubt that would be a safe choice.” She sighed. “This looks like a small deal. We might be able to negotiate our way through it. It’s either that or turn around and go back, see if we can get east over to one of the roads on the other side of where 5 used to be.”

Before one of us could point out how that would take hours, she added, “And there’s no guarantee we won’t run into something similar over there.”

Lin nodded. He slowed down. The rest of us reached under our seats for guns. Amanda set a small automatic rifle on the console by Lin. Negotiate, yes, but be prepared for more. The truck was well-armored, but it wasn’t invincible and neither were we.

I did deep breathing exercises. As we got closer, we could see that the roadblock was a couple of dead trees piled in the middle of the road. Maybe ten people stood around them, most of them holding a weapon of some kind. Lin pulled to a stop about thirty feet from the barrier.

“Stay put,” Amanda said. She got out of the truck, holding her gun loosely in her hand. We aren’t fools, her gesture said. “What can we do for you folks?” she said.

“That’s a fancy vehicle you got there. Think we’ll take it.”

“No,” she replied. “We need it. But we can trade some supplies for safe passage.”

“What kind of supplies?”

“Something to treat Dorcas virus. Maybe some food.”

“You got something for the virus?”

“Naheem, hand out some of the antiviral,” Amanda called. She backed up to the truck, never taking her eyes off the guy who seemed to be in charge.

Naheem held a package out the window. Amanda took it and walked toward the spokesperson, who was also holding a rifle loosely. She handed it to him. “A sign of our goodwill.”

The man took it, glanced at it, then tossed it back to someone behind him. “Get Gail to look at that,” he said. “What about the food?”

I had already pulled out a box of the freeze dried stuff. It took two hands to hold it. Amanda pulled out a weapons sling made to hold her gun in a ready position, and put it on, still never taking her eyes off the crowd. She stuck her gun in it, then picked up the food and carried it over.

The man pushed the box behind him and someone opened it. “A lotta stuff here,” the person said.

“Good enough,” the spokesman said. “Okay. You can go by.” He turned to his people. “Start moving those trees.”

Amanda backed toward the truck as a couple of people began to pull on the barrier. And then, without warning, someone behind the trees fired a shot. Amanda went down.

Lin was out of the truck before I could move. The spokesman screamed, “Get that son of a bitch.”

I thought he meant Lin at first, but then I could see a bunch of people piling on somebody back behind the barrier. The spokesman meant to keep his bargain, and his people had grabbed the shooter. Lin pulled Amanda into the back of the truck, and Naheem went to work on her while Lin jumped into his seat and gunned the engine. He drove into the ditch, people scattering out of our way, and around the barrier, and sped away as fast as that truck would go.

“How is she?” I was scared of the answer.

“She was wearing Kevlar,” Naheem said.

I’d forgotten that. Of course Amanda wouldn’t have got out of the truck without wearing some kind of armor.

“I’m fine,” Amanda said, though her voice was weak. “It just felt like a bad punch to the plexus.”

“Which is why you went out,” Naheem said. “The Kevlar just barely stopped it. Where are they getting that kind of artillery out here in the boondocks?”

“We need the scan running,” Amanda said. “There could be more trouble down the road.”

Lin said, “Keryn, would you give it a try?”

It was fancy new tech, too expensive for anyone but security folks and cops, so I’d never used anything quite like it. But it turned out to be similar to most GPS systems; it just provided more information. The satellites had been collecting that kind of data for decades, but it had taken a long time—and a collapse in a lot of government oversight—for someone to make a workable portable device.

It took me a few minutes to get the hang of it. “I don’t think anyone’s chasing us, and there’s nothing up ahead in the next ten miles.”

“This is probably the best place for us to stop, if we need to,” Lin said.

“Don’t stop,” said Amanda.

“Naheem?” Lin said.

“Stop,” he said. “Don’t argue, Amanda. I can’t check you out for internal injuries while we’re rattling around like this.”

“I’m fine,” she said.

“No point in running any risks, when you’ve got me here to make sure. We’re likely to need you again.”

A dirt road came up on our right. It seemed to lead down to a creek bed—bone dry of course. “This should work,” Lin said. “Out of sight, but not much of anywhere.” He pulled off and turned the truck around so we were facing out. Leaning over the seat back, he asked Naheem, “Do you need any help?”

“It would make things easier, but we might need you to get us out of here fast.”

“I can drive,” I said. “It’s been awhile and I’m sure I can’t maneuver as well as Lin, but I know how.”

Both men exhaled. It was clear Naheem did want help. Lin crawled between the seats. “You sit there, ready to move. If you see anything on the scanner, yell out and then take off.”

I nodded. I stared at the scan, which wasn’t showing anything. From the back I heard a slight whir from the portable imaging device. Amanda let out a soft grunt a couple of times as the two men moved her around to check for other damage spots.

I would have sworn we sat there for an hour, but when I checked the time only fifteen minutes had passed when I heard Naheem say, “Looks like you came through okay. No bleeding that I can find. I’ve taped up the rib you cracked when you hit the ground. Let’s get down the road.”

I moved over, and Lin crawled back through. He drove off without fanfare. I kept my eye on the scan. Once we were a mile or so down the road, with nothing showing up, I asked him, “How come you jumped out to get her instead of opening fire? I was ready to shoot until you did that.”

He shrugged. “Instinct. It felt like those folks were dealing fair with us, by their standards. Grabbing Amanda instead of shooting anyone seemed like the right call.”

“I’m glad it was.”

“Me, too.”

We drove in silence for the next hour. The sun set. “How’s our power?” I asked Lin, more to be social than because I was worried.

“We’re okay. Got lots of sun today and haven’t had to pull on the battery too much. And it’s not likely to be overcast tomorrow.”

No. Not much chance of that.

“We’re getting close. Can you check the GPS and see if you can take us directly to their location? I don’t expect they’re in town, and I’d rather not meet any more people.”

“Sure.” I plugged in the numbers and gave him directions. Twenty minutes later we were driving down a dirt road that didn’t seem to go anywhere when I saw our lights flash onto a familiar shape. “That’s them,” I said. I reached for the door handle—we were driving about five miles an hour—but Lin stopped me. “Wait. Give them a yell first.”

I’m sure he was right, and I wasn’t wearing Kevlar, but I leapt out anyway. “Irene,” I called out, giving it the Spanish pronunciation to let her know it was me. I’d always preferred to call her that, though she answered either way.

“Keryn, is that you?” said a young voice. It cracked a little.

“Yes. Where is Irene?”

Someone stepped out of the bus and stood in our headlights. Short and skinny was all I could make out. “Come inside. She’s been waiting for you.”

She was in the back part where everyone slept, lying on a bottom bunk, propped up by pillows. A toddler sat beside her, holding a picture book. “I knew you would come,” Irene said as I leaned over to kiss her.

Her thin white hair was brushed up behind on her the pillow, as if she’d been too hot and pushed it off of her neck. There was an ashy tone to her skin, turning the light brown to gray. When I’d seen her on the bus’s last trip to the Bay Area a couple of years back, her hair had reached this stage of stark white, but had still been thick, and she’d moved with the same vigor I’d always known. I’d realized then she was getting old, but that hadn’t prepared me for the shock of seeing her so frail.

The other thing that was different was that there were only the three of them—Irene, the teenage boy who’d showed me in, and the toddler. The last time there’d been at least fifteen adults on the bus along with the usual scrum of kids. I didn’t know which frightened me more: seeing Irene so weak or seeing the bus without that teeming community. It was as if everything important from my childhood was disappearing all at once.

In the spring of 2040—thirty years back—I was sitting on the bumper of an ancient sedan on the shoulder of a highway outside of Flagstaff, waiting to flag down the next vehicle that came along. My mother lay dead in the back seat. I thought she was very sick and was hoping that someone would come along to help her. I was five years old.

I’d been there six hours. Four vehicles had passed, and all four had refused to stop for a tiny child standing in the road. One had even tried to run me down; I’d scratched up my legs and arms landing on the gravel shoulder when I jumped out of its way. That had reduced me to tears, but I was still determined to get help when I saw the bus lumbering along in the distance. Once again I walked out to the middle of the road and waved my hands. It came to a stop about twenty yards short of me.

The bus had once transported children to school, but any trace of its original mustard yellow color had long been painted over with symbols and pictures. The top was covered with PV panels. There were words on the message board above the driver, but they weren’t ones I had learned in the reading lessons I’d had from my mother. Irene got off the bus and walked toward me.

A short woman, with generous curves, her gray-streaked black hair pulled back carelessly, skin a lighter brown than mine. She squatted when she got close, so she’d share my level, and said in gentle tones, “Hello there. What’s your name?”

“Keryn,” I said—the automatic response of a child to that question from an adult. I grabbed her hand. “Mommy’s sick.”

She let me drag her to the car. My mother’s body had already begun to decay in the warmth of the Arizona sun, and Irene knew the truth from the smell before she reached the car. Despite that, she opened the door and took my mother’s wrist, to feel for a pulse. I am sure she did this for me. Then she led me back toward the bus, where some of the others had raised a shade and unloaded some chairs. She sat me down and explained that my mother had died, and then she held me while I cried and cried and cried.

Others from the bus took my mother’s body out of the car, examined and washed her. Someone stitched together two sheets of canvas to make a shroud. Others dug a hole in the ground in an area past some stunted trees, out of sight of the road. When I finally stopped crying, Irene got me a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of water. They let me touch my mother one more time before they lowered her into the grave, covered her with dirt, and said a few words. Then they packed up everything of value in the car—including the solar panels from the roof and the certificate documenting my birth in Houston—and put me and my things on the bus.

I remember all the details of that day with a crisp clarity. My memories of the time before it are little snatches—with my mother in a store somewhere, a scary man, a tiny house where I had a tinier bed in a corner. My memories of the time afterward, with Irene and the others on the bus, make up most of what I know of my childhood. But I do not forget that first day.

I learned later that burying her in that way was illegal, even in the chaos of the Forties, but that they had examined her well enough to conclude she had bled to death after an abortion. Had they called the authorities, I would have been put in an overburdened and badly run child “welfare” system, and the others might have been arrested even though all they had done was stop to help. The Forties were not a time when Travelers could trust officials in the areas they passed through, and the people on the bus were permanent Travelers.

Irene introduced me now to the young man who had brought me inside, Luis. He was fifteen or so, with dark brown skin and hair that stuck out in all directions. “You probably saw him the last time we were here, but kids change so fast. And this is Becca,” she said, patting the leg of the child next to her. The little girl smiled at me and then ducked her head behind her book.

The others joined us at that point. Irene greeted them with thanks for coming to their rescue. “I’m afraid it’s the end of the bus. We hit a boulder in the road and bent the frame. I’m not even sure how Luis wrestled the bus this far off the road, but it’s not going to move again.”

“I’m sure he had great driving teachers,” I said, flashing the boy a smile to hide my despair that a child had to drive that behemoth in hopes of getting them somewhere to get help.

The power still worked. Lin figured out that they hadn’t had any dinner—it was after eight o’clock—and bustled around the kitchen turning some of our dehydrated food supplies into a meal. “We’ve been eating once a day,” Luis explained. “To stretch things.”

Amanda helped Lin. She was still moving slow, but she waved away my offer to take her place. “You sit with Irene.”

I did. I sat and held her hand and didn’t say anything though there were hundreds of things I wanted to tell her, and hundreds more I wanted to ask.

Naheem gave each of the children a quick exam—eyes, ears, throat, temperature. Blood draws to check for the virus and other more invasive tests could wait for morning. Then he turned his attention to Irene, using the same simple tools. I could tell from his face that he didn’t like what he heard through the stethoscope, and her blood pressure numbers were extremely high for someone who hadn’t moved much all day. He asked her to squeeze his arm, and even I could see that her right hand barely pressed against him. When she sat up, she used her left to push herself around.

“You haven’t been taking good enough care of yourself,” Naheem scolded in the universal tone doctors use to chastise patients for not taking their meds or getting enough exercise.

“At my age, there’s only so much that can be done,” she replied. “I’d still be falling apart even if I were in your fancy hospital up there in civilization. Me and the bus have a lot in common; we’re tough, but even we have limits.”

He laughed. Lin and Amanda brought us bowls of rice and veggies, and we sat around, chatting about nothing in particular. Becca, no longer shy, bounced around among us, telling stories and asking impossible questions. But soon she was starting to droop. Luis picked her up. “Time for bed, Boo. All these fine folks will be here in the morning when you get up.”

She protested loudly for maybe five minutes, but he was firm. He settled her into a bunk a row back. We could hear him telling her about the wolf cub who saved the other animals from a fire—a story Irene used to tell me—as we sat quietly once again.

Eventually Amanda broke the silence. “I think the best thing to do is pack the three of you into our truck tomorrow and head back north. I hate leaving the bus here, but our vehicle isn’t big enough to tow it.”

“It’s had its day,” Irene said. “If we leave it here, maybe someone else can make a home in it. And you can grab some of our panels and batteries.”

I tried to keep back tears. If Irene could be calm in the face of this loss, I owed it to her to be stoic. But a few dripped down my face.

She patted my hand. “I’ve done my mourning, but you need to catch up. This was your place, too.”

Naheem said, “I’ll run a quick blood test in the morning, just to make sure you’re not carrying anything we can’t handle. Though I don’t expect to find anything.”

Irene nodded. “Becca’s mother died of Dorcas virus, but the child never got that sick. And Luis and I seem to be immune, for some damn reason. The others…” Her voice trailed off.

Lin went outside to do guard duty as Luis came back in. “You should get some sleep, too, Abuelita,” he said to Irene.

“I’ll do it soon,” she said. “But I need to talk to Keryn first. Why don’t you start setting up beds for everyone?”

“Come help us get things out of the truck,” Amanda said. They all went out, leaving me with Irene.

“You need to know. We found Luis about eight years ago, wandering around in the desert near Tucson. He’d been alone awhile, but he’d managed to make himself a shelter and even get water out of cactus. If he knows what happened to the rest of his people, he’s never told me. But,” she stopped to take a deep breath, “but he has no birth certificate, or anything like that.”

I nodded.

“He’s so bright. Like you as a kid. Always figuring something out. No telling what he’ll do if he gets half a chance.”

“I’ll handle it,” I said. “Any kid who can drive this thing and take care of a baby will find a place in Berkeley. And we’ll get him into school.”

“Don’t tell Amanda about the papers. She has responsibilities. It might cause conflict for her.”

I nodded again.

“Becca was born on the bus. We did affidavits documenting that. They’re with the other important papers. Luis knows.” She paused again to breathe. A few tears dropped down her face. “Those two are all that’s left now. I don’t know which was worse, losing the children or losing people I’d been with for forty years.”

I patted her hand and tried not to cry myself.

“Anyway, Becca needs a home. I can’t… And Luis is too young.”

“I’ll take care of her,” I said. “There are other kids in our co-op. And you taught me about taking care of kids just as you’ve taught Luis. I’m rusty, but I can figure it out.”

“I knew I could rely on you. You have always been a rock.”

“And we’ll get you better soon, so you can hang around and be abuelita to them both.”

She let a corner of her mouth turn up. “I’d like that.”

The others came back in and started making up bunks. Luis gave me a meaningful look. I got up. “We’re all tired. I’ll let you get some sleep.” I watched as he helped her to her feet and helped her toward the composting toilet in the very back.

Naheem handed me my bag. “She’s dying,” he said softly.

“But you can help her?” I whispered back. “If we can get her back to Berkeley?”

“I can make her comfortable. If she makes it through the night and we don’t have too much trouble on the way back, I can maybe buy her a little more time in the hospice. But I think she only hung on this long to make sure the children got to someone who could take care of them.”

I couldn’t say anything, but I nodded to let him know I heard.

“It’s a tough ending for a good life,” he said. “But she did so much for so many. I hope someone can say the same about us when we reach this point.” He patted my shoulder and went to set up his own bed.

I lay down and let my tears flow until I fell asleep.