As if God Himself had placed this animal in front of Jonah, the deer turned broadside.
The scenario that was made available could not be better. He squeezed the trigger.
As soon as the bullet left the chamber, he knew it would find the animal’s heart. The buck took off running, but ran completely opposite of where Jonah assumed it would.
It ran toward the Deathlands as fast as it could.
Jonah had never seen an animal in the Deathlands, as he assumed that they were all as afraid of it as the townspeople were. There was nothing that drew them into it; no nourishment or shelter existed in the naked expanse. But in this instance, nothing was drawing the animal into the desolation – it was simply fleeing from where the bullet originated, with no thought as to where it would go. Just away.
Jonah let out the air that he had stored in his lungs, pausing a moment to celebrate his assumed kill. The buck ran hard in a straight line, slowing down in the distance, but still with strength in its muscles. Blood dripped on the pale ground, as if glowing in contrast. It ran so hard that it was soon out of sight, which gave Jonah a surprise.
I have to go into the Deathlands to retrieve it.
Though he had spent so much time looking into the wasteland, he'd never dared step foot in it. And he'd never had the intention of traveling so deep into it that he would not be seen from the edge. He somberly gathered himself and his belongings and eased down the tree.
He stared across the expanse as if the deer was gone forever, never to be found. But he saw the trail of blood leading into the heart of the sterile landscape, and knew that he could not give up.
As he walked to the edge, where the green stopped and the gray began, he recalled some of the tales that his childhood friends had swapped.
“I heard that if you touch the Deathlands, your whole body shrivels up.”
“Well, I heard that somebody got close to it, and his brother died at the exact same time!”
“I know somebody that saw the Deathlands swallow up a horse, like it's just a huge mouth.”
Ghost stories, he reasoned. Just tales to keep kids away. They only want to make sure no one gets lost.
Walking very far into the Deathlands would surely disorient anyone. No landmarks, no indication of direction. He couldn't count on following the trail of blood back out once he went in, because it could easily seep into the ground, or a rain storm could come while he was out there and wash it away.
After looking around, he decided on a way to lead him back out of the expanse; he would wrap pieces of his orange sleeves around limbs that he would stick into the ground. He gathered sturdy branches, took off his jacket, and ripped his sleeves off in strips. His mother had dyed the shirt with carrot juice, and he hoped it would stand out against the pale gray ground.
He tossed the homemade flags into the trailer, and walked the bike to the edge, sticking the first flag in the grass just outside of the edge.
Just stupid ghost stories, he pleaded with himself, almost expecting the flag to be consumed by the dirt. He looked behind him, as if his parents were watching, shaking their fingers in disapproval.
He took his first step onto the undiscovered land.
And nothing happened.
He wheeled the bike and trailer onto the gray ground cautiously. Gazing around him preparing for some unseen danger, his mind was continually trying to decipher the sounds coming into his ears. Birds in the distance sounded like warnings, the wind against his face like screams.
Slowly, he followed the spattering of blood, sticking flags into the ground as he walked. The flags did not go in easily – it was as if the ground was solid, not like rock, but not simply dirt. He hammered them in with the butt of his gun.
Gaining confidence with each step, he picked up speed, and eventually hopped onto the seat of his bike, constantly looking back to make sure he was always within sight of the last flag. He placed fifteen flags before he saw the deer in the distance.
How in the world did it survive this far? he wondered.
He returned thanks, remembering his prayer before the hunt – thinking especially of the perfect shot he had.
He slowed down, slid off the seat, and wheeled his bike toward the carcass.
About two feet before he reached the lifeless animal, his trailer ran upon something large and solid. Intrigued, as the rest of the land had been eerily smooth, he wheeled the bike out of the way and inspected the ground.
It was a mound of dirt – or whatever the substance making up the ground was – that rose about three inches above the rest of the surface. He leaned down, and ran his hand over the mound, for a brief moment looking up to again confirm that no one – and nothing – was watching.
Why am I so paranoid? There's nobody for miles... And if the Deathlands were... cursed... I would've already seen or felt something.
He started to dig away at the mound, and to his surprise, soon found a piece of rusted metal. He continued to dig, at first simply moving loose dirt. However, in not too much time he had to use the remaining limbs from unused flags in place of a shovel.
The emerging object was a large wheel, about the width of his forearm. Six spokes led towards the middle, still submerged in the ground.
I've seen one of these before... At the junkyard. What could it be doing out here?
He continued to remove the dirt from the wheel, expecting it to come free from the ground. He would take it to John Schultz, and perhaps even get something in return for it. All the scrap metal he'd ever seen was at Schultz’s junkyard, and he couldn't think of anything else he could do with it – but he didn't want to just leave it out here. He tugged on it from both sides, his sleeveless muscles tensing, but it didn't seem to give.
He took a limb and struck the dirt near the middle of the ring of metal, where it seemed to converge, assuming that it was merely more solid ground that held it there.
As he dug, he found that the wheel was attached to something - something bigger - and he couldn't help but continue unearthing what he found.
After he had been at it for some time, he had uncovered a surface wider than the wheel itself. Knowing that it might take far too long to dig the entire thing out of the ground, seemingly impossible actually, he started to simply rub the sandy gray dust off what he had already exposed. He started near the base of the original metal ring. As he rubbed he recognized that it was more metal, but it curiously had no rust. In fact, it was perfectly polished.
He had never seen perfectly polished metal. Everything he had seen, even the new creations from the blacksmith, were dented and rough. Gun barrels, even meticulously maintained, had grown dull. Whoever placed this in the ground obviously spent a long time with every inch of its surface area – or had built some fantastic machine to polish it for them. And to find metal that had been exposed to the elements without rust was very strange.
Continuing to clean the surface, he uncovered a curious patch of colors. Jonah had never seen such precision. A perfect rectangle, seemingly in the metal, with alternating stripes of red and white. In the top left corner of the rectangle was a smaller rectangle of blue with a large number of perfect white stars spaced inside equally.
And below the image, chiseled in tiny immaculate text, were three simple words.
MADE IN CHINA
CHAPTER TWO
Jonah woke up early, removed the quilt from his body and returned it to the trailer where he had unpacked it the evening before. It was just after dawn, and a slight chill was still in the air. He used coals to relight the fire that he built the previous night and huddled close.
He thought about yesterday, wondering if it had been a dream. Noting that he just saw the large buck in the trailer when he returned the quilt, he knew that it was no dream.
Yesterday, after digging even more, then staring at the extensive amount of polished metal for longer than he knew, he realized there was nothing he could do at the moment. He had a dead deer next to him, and multiple traps still se
t from the previous expedition. He could have tried to continue to dig, but he didn't know when he would completely lose daylight. He definitely didn't want to try to navigate with the flags in the darkness.
He had loaded the deer into the trailer and placed a final flag. Not that he'd need the flag to see the gigantic hole in the ground in the middle of a gray canvas, but he had figured the precaution couldn’t hurt.
When he had turned to leave, he surveyed his surroundings. He knew that the Deathlands went on beyond what his vision could take in when standing on the edge, but when in the middle of it... It was overwhelming. In the distance was the fifteenth flag, and the fourteenth was nowhere to be seen. He couldn't see anything in any direction. For a moment, he naïvely thought that he must be in the center of this desert, but then realized he had no idea just how much farther in the center might be.
Perhaps he could walk, placing another fifteen, thirty, even a hundred flags and not reach the other side. For all he knew, there was no other side... He always assumed that the Deathlands was like a pond in the middle of the land. But the thought crossed his mind that it could be the other way around – the town might be the island in the middle of a desolate ocean.
He had learned in school that the earth was round, and man had once explored the entire planet in search of new places in ships as large as their town. He knew that there came a point when nothing was left to explore – no new lands to discover. He had also heard stories that something terrible had occurred, generations in the past, which caused countless communities to disappear and numerous lives to end.
However, he knew no one that traveled further than a town or two away. What if the great disaster was that these oceans that he had heard of became the Deathlands? What if the undrinkable water had dried up, and all the life sustained by them ceased?
After shaking his head, as if to force the thoughts out, he had pedaled his bike towards the flags, towards the edge of the bare ground, towards life as he'd always known it. However – a massive piece of underground metal with perfect colors and letters in a place that was completely off limits to everyone that he knew...
That didn't fit into life as he'd always known it.
Obvious questions about the object arose. How did it get there? Why is it still there? How has nothing unearthed it before now? How are the metal, letters, and colors so perfect and uniform?
His first thought in trying to answer the questions were to find the similar scrap wheel that he knew he'd seen at Schultz's... Maybe he'd even know what China was, or why it would be etched into the surface he’d discovered.
When he crossed the threshold back to grass, he had quickly switched to task mode. He field dressed the deer and went around to check his traps – two squirrels and another rabbit. Not bad for so little effort, but not great, either, he thought. After washing himself in a stream that was just beyond the brush where he first saw the buck, he returned to his preferred hill. He had started a fire, filled his belly, and fallen asleep.
Currently, while warming breakfast over the fire, he was wondering what to do.
If he went home now, which is what he would normally do after a successful kill of this size, he would be hard pressed to find a reason to return for a few days without raising suspicion. With a large supply of meat that would last the Whitfields for well over a month, he would have no reason to return to hunt. And since only a couple of days ago he had basically insisted that his father come with him on a future trip, riding in the trailer, he couldn't simply reject him from tagging along if he waited to return until his family was again running low on meat. Especially since he'd have enough time over the next month to modify the trailer the way he had talked about with his father.
I could leave the deer, he briefly thought, but that would be a terrible waste of good meat.
Considering how little big game he had seen for the past few months, it would be downright stupid, he reasoned, shaking his head at even having the thought. The buck lying in his trailer might very well be the last deer that he would see in this area. Returning empty handed would feel bad enough without knowing that there would be a rotting carcass where he was standing now.
He thought about butchering the deer there on the trailer and stocking it into the ice box and smokehouse without anyone knowing. That would definitely be better than wasting the deer, no question.
The problems he faced would be in how he would actually do it, though. He knew that if anyone saw him while he was riding up or loading it, he would be found out. Besides, what would his mother say when there was an ice box magically full of venison – a place that she frequented at least every other day?
Another unusable idea.
Jonah stared out over the barren land, slowly chewing the leftovers from the previous dinner as morning vittles, with his curiosity burning inside him. He had no idea what the metal piece was, but he felt the need - the compulsion - to find out.
He couldn't let anyone know that not only had he set foot on the Deathlands, but that he also dug up a mysterious object inside it. Either they'd never let him leave because of the rules and stories, or he would not be able to keep the gawkers away.
In both cases, he would lose the secret that he felt he owned at this moment.
He searched for ways to convince his family that he needed to come back to this place, without raising suspicion. Something that would draw him to his normal sanctuary, but with no expectation of bringing anything back beyond what he took with him. Some reason for stuffing his satchel full of supplies, and no questions of why.
What, besides wild game, could bring me back here? he wondered, his lips moving as if the motion would spur on a conversation. Some other resource or necessity...
He jerked as the idea started forming in his head.
He could create the need. He could leave something here - something important - so that it would be obvious that he should come back. Instead of planning on returning from his next trip without meat, he could return with less now.
But what could he leave?
He couldn't leave something as crucial as his gun or bow. He would never be that irresponsible – his family knew that, so it would most likely raise suspicion. On top of that, he couldn't risk actually losing either, or allow them to sit in the dew or rain.
Nor could he leave something as commonplace as his knife, fashioned from animal bone and a piece of metal from Schultz's wares. His father would be quick to make a new one, anxious for the contribution he could make.
Glancing over his belongings, the decision seemed simple enough; he would leave his satchel.
It contained a handful of things that might be seen as unacceptable to lose – namely his stock of bullets. Considering that, and the fact that the small bag was fashioned by his mother out of the hide of the first deer he had killed, he assumed the return for it would raise no questions.
Realizing that he knew a way to buy time, he hesitated. He squinted his blue eyes in the direction of his questions. It did not make sense to waste these hours. If he returned now, he would merely get home early to daydream about where he was at this exact moment. It was early, and no one expected him home until the next day. He didn't like the idea of letting the meat from the hunt the day before sit overnight, so he decided he'd return tonight – but he could still explore.
Jonah mounted his bicycle, and again trekked toward the object. After his sleep, he had forgotten the length of the distance that he crossed before, still following blood stains on the ground and the protruding flags. He kept the time in mind, knowing that he had a long ride back home, this time with the extra weight of the meat in the back. He realized it might have been a good idea to have left the trailer by the tree, but it was too late to consider it now. He continued to pedal.
He arrived at the object, unchanged from the previous day. It seemed as if even the wind was afraid of stirring the dust that he had disturbed.
He studied the gleaming surface while pacing around it, as if it were
a coiling snake. After circling for an extended period, he approached with hesitation and even a bit of grace – as if the object had to be charmed for it to answer his questions.
He resumed unearthing the area surrounding the wheel. As if someone had placed his greatest treasure a few feet below the surface, he put his questions into the form of the labor of his dig; quickly, but careful not to harm what was below the dirt.
Over the next few hours, he uncovered a slightly rounded raised edge, forming a perfect circle hovering six inches below the wheel. Below the edge, the metal continued straight down for at least the length of the tips of his fingers to his wrists. The width of the circle was about the same size as the family's well opening – roughly the size needed for a man to move around inside.
Is there something below this surface that could be drawn up like water?
He knew it could not be water that would be drawn up... Any water that might have pooled below the surface would have at least caused seedlings of grass to spring up. But regardless of what would come out of the object, the thought occurred to him that he was staring at a sealed hole. Much in the same way his own well was covered by wood and stone, this hole might be enclosed to keep away the elements and animals.
Perhaps the purpose of its seal was not to keep something out of it, he wondered, but rather keep something in it. And that the thing inside of it – if that was the case – was killing the land. But much like the legend of the box given to Pandora, that thought was quickly suppressed by the weight of his curiosity.
He tugged on the wheel, hoping that by loosening the ground from around the edge he would have released its hold.
Still nothing.
He took one of the largest limbs from in his trailer, inserting it below the wheel spokes and rested one end on the ground. He crouched as low to the ground as he could, and placed the other end of the limb on his shoulder. Creating as much leverage as possible, he began to stand up, staring at the wheel with bulging eyes. Harder.
The Surface's End Page 2