“Mister King," a familiar voice called from beyond the quarantine hut's door, "you may come out.”
Thank god, King thought as he quickly pulled the door open and stepped out into the morning sun. He took a deep breath of air, fresh with a hint of sea salt in it. He complained, "It stinks in there. I got used to it yesterday, mostly by falling asleep. But as soon as you wake up, it's back."
The man who'd dealt with him the most the day before flashed a basket, telling him of its contents. Bran spoke of mate, which King indeed had not heard of before, saying, “It's a hot caffeinated drink, a tea of sorts. You won't like it ... but it grows on you."
"As long as it's caffeine, I'm happy," King said. In Newfoundland, they'd had a caffeinated drink made of mushrooms, originally found in the wild but these days grown in greenhouses, specifically for their caffeine content, though, they did have other uses as well. It had a nasty taste that required a great deal of honey sweetener. King had never had coffee, which a lot of people back during the day had said tasted nasty without additives, too. If he had had coffee, he would have considered it less objectionable than the mushroom substitute.
"I have some sweetener, too," Bran continued. "We trade dried and smoked fish and things made of seashells and the like with a village located inland … over the range.”
King followed Bran's nod toward the mountain range behind them. Bran was fairly well educated in world geography, and he probably could have named this range off the top of his head if he had any idea where he was. He suspected by the vastness of the shoreline and range that he was in Greenland. If he asked Bran to confirm that, would the man do so? King had a sense that the villagers preferred their isolation, something Bran would confirm later in this morning's conversation.
Bran suggested that the two of them take a walk. Stepping away from the quarantine hut, King got his first look at the gathering of people a bit farther up the hill. He was surprised at the vast number of them: men and women, old and young, casually dressed for labor and more formally dressed for, he presumed, official duties that related to the arrival of a stranger from a distant land.
And there was Annie. King couldn't help but smile to the young beauty, recalling their exchange the day before when she'd discovered him passed out on the shore. She seemed to be as excited to see King as he was to see her. That excitement was dampened a bit when King Annie's protector, the man named Paul, stepped out of the crowd and in front of the girl he obviously considered his own.
When Bran joked about not farting into the wind, King couldn't help but laugh. "As badly as I smell, I doubt I'd smell you, sir." King reeked not just of human odor but of the sea in which he'd been lost for what he assumed had been two, maybe three days.
King dug eagerly into the basket of food, marveling at the offerings. There was fresh baked bread that was still warm; sliced meat, both freshly cooked and jerked; cheese and goats milk, the former presumably made from the latter; and berries, some of which he was familiar with and others of which he'd never seen before. He offered some to Bran, getting a polite wave, as he would have expected because of the whole quarantine thing.
The mate was, like the mushroom drink, kind of nasty. King added the sweetener, which turned out to be dried cubes of honey, something he'd never seen done to the bee produced sweetener before. It made the drink palatable, but only barely so. Still, it was caffeine, and he needed it badly. King told Bran about the mushroom drink, adding, "It's caffeine, but it's gross, too."
“Speaking of knowledge,” Bran said with a serious tone, “What can you tell me about what's happening out there in the world?"
King had expected this, of course. In the villagers' eyes, he was a stranger from a strange land. Bran continued, "First, where did you come from? My daughter said something of Newfoundland. Is that where you are from?”
"It's not where I'm from," King said, "but ... it is where I came from."
His answer was rather cryptic, King knew. He clarified, "I travel a lot. My last location was Newfoundland, a coastal settlement called New Eastport."
After global warming had reached its extreme and melted what was left of the world's ice caps, glaciers, and snow fields, a lot of New settlements, villages, and towns appeared. The old communities had disappeared as sea levels rose around the world.
"I stayed there about a year," King continued. "Nice people. Safe community. They fished and grew terraced crops. Before that, I was farther south: Nova Scotia, New England, the Carolines, New Mephis."
King didn't explain that New Memphis, Tennessee, was now a coastal city. Rising ocean levels had driven the Gulf of Mexico north up the Mississippi until Old Mephis had disappeared, first into the Mississippi River itself and then -- after continually rebuilding on higher and higher ground -- into the waters of the unrelenting and expanding Gulf.
"The Bug," King mused softly. "It's still out there, unfortunately. It pops up once in a while. There's good news, though. Most of the survivors today have a partial or full immunity to it. When it does appear, it doesn't normally take many lives, if any at all. At least ... that's been my experience. I've heard stories about entire communities dying, likely from a variant of the Bug. I know this will sound contradictory, but ... the increased lethality of it is actually a good thing. It means that it kills the carriers off before they have a chance to spread it to other communities.
"As far as the wars go," King continued, "those are over. There are still troublemakers out there, of course ... people who would rather take from others rather than work hard themselves. Militias. But they're few and far between.
"As far as population, it's rebounding but slowly," he said between bites of breakfast. "Communities don't get very big, though. Large towns lead to large problems. The old world diseases that had been eradicated by vaccines returned. Measles, chicken pox, even the black plague. They run through communities, killing as much as thirty or forty percent of the people before waning.
"There's a lot of land out there to live in," King said, finishing the mate with a grimace. "Once a community starts getting bigger ... once rivalries and discontent rise ... people just leave ... migrate, emigrate, whatever you want to call it. Rebuild somewhere else."
“Should we worry that – like you – they will be coming here, too?" Bran asked bluntly. "I mean no offense, but … honestly … we're happy with the way things are now. We have no desire to once again be part of that world out there.”
"You shouldn't worry," King said. "I only got here because my ship got caught in a storm and broke up." He looked around, venturing, "I'm assuming I'm in Greenland, right? It wasn't my destination at all. I was trying to get to Ireland ... England maybe."
