The Park Service 01: The Park Service

by Ryan Winfield

  “Great,” I mutter. “Guess I have to hold it.”

  The train jerks forward and stops. I catch my balance and head back to my seat in the rear. Another jerk, another stop. Then a steady acceleration that pushes me hard into the seat before leveling off and gliding along silent and smooth.

  Almost immediately the lights cut out, leaving the car in total blackness. The projection screen glows. A sepia flicker, a run of antique film counting down, 10 to 1. Then I’m barreling down an old iron track with snow-covered trees rushing past and a glorious alpenglow peak rising ahead as the train charges full steam into a mountain pass.

  This is a nice touch. It must be old film from a camera mounted on the front of an actual train. I’ve seen educationals showing footage from planes, and even satellites, but never anything this old. It must be really ancient footage, from before roads and cars and freeways replaced the trains, from before fighter jets and drones cruised through our polluted skies, from long, long before the War.

  I settle into my seat and pretend I’m the engineer guiding the silent train as it winds its way up, plowing through drifts of snow, snaking around bends in the tracks, crossing a trestle over a deep and rocky gorge, up, up, up—

  A single lighted headlamp boring into the past like an eye, sweeping across the landscape, the trees, the fast approaching night, following the tracks toward the bright northern star.

  The seat is cold and hard when I wake, its edges cutting into my thighs—certainly not designed by our engineers. The screen is dead now, the dim lights back on. I stand and stretch, walking to the front and checking the door again. I consider peeing on the floor, just to ease the pressure on my bladder, but decide instead to sit and wait. I feel the force of the train arcing left, and I stare at the blank screen and try to imagine the cars ahead, sliding along the tunnel, rushing like a giant worm deep underground.

  It happens so fast there’s no time to prepare—

  A vibration running along the metal floor and tickling my feet, a metallic warble followed by a screech, the sound of steel tearing open. And then I’m weightless for one quiet, suspended moment before my head slams against the metal seatback in front of me and the lights go out …

  … I come to in pitch-black confusion.

  What just happened? The cold metal floor presses against my cheek; something hard is crushing my hip. My fingers move, searching—my face, my chest, my legs. Wet pants. Is it blood? No, it’s urine. I’ve wet myself. I wiggle my toes, bend my knee. Throbbing pain. My hands find a lump on my forehead, but no blood. My foot finds a surface, I push my hip free from where it’s wedged. When I sit up, the entire blind Earth seems to spin fast and in the wrong direction.

  Hearing a soft whistle coming from the front of the dark car, I shimmy free and crawl toward it. The car must be on its side because the seat backs now hang from the side wall, and I grab them one by one and pull myself along. The whistle grows louder as I move forward, and I feel a cold blast of air against my face. Must be a ventilation fan. I grab for another seatback and my hand lands on stone. Hard, cold stone. I turn my face toward the rush of air and see a gash in the car illuminated by sparkling benitoite outside. Must be a cavern out there.

  I scramble to my feet and use the seatbacks to climb the wall toward the opening. Easing my head out, I look out on an immense darkness, cold and crisp, the blue-jewel cavern ceiling glinting on the metal surface of the tipped train.

  “Hello!”

  Hello, hello, hello … my voice comes echoing back.

  Carefully, I hoist myself from the crippled car and stand outside. A cold blast hits my face, and I look away, blinking to clear my watering eyes. When I look back, I see the shadowed cavern spread out before me.

  It’s gorgeous! Like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I can feel the size of it. The emptiness, the space. The ceiling is high, its blackness punctuated by a million luminescent jewels. It’s cold here. And it smells funny, too. Or maybe it just seems like it because it doesn’t smell—at least not like conditioned air.

  From somewhere out of the blackness below, a strange but beautiful song erupts. A high and tiny warbled kind of birdsong like I’ve heard in educationals. Another joins in. And another. A whole chorus now of pitch-perfect birds singing in the dark below. Then, as if responding to the singing, an orange glow fades slowly brighter on my right. A light unlike any light I’ve ever seen. Not the dead white glare of light-emitting diodes, not the blue-black flicker of ultraviolet, but a soft golden glow.

  The birdsong rises, and the orange glow comes on fast, the fading sky-hung jewels shrinking from the advancing orange into a deep, deep blue, a blue like I’ve never dreamed.

  Then, from between two jagged peaks in the wall, a yellow fireball climbs into view, blinding me. I turn away and face the fresh breeze, looking out on the twinkling stars of forgotten constellations sinking in the deep-blue horizon, sent back into the blackness of space by the sun rising over the world.

  I’ve died and gone to Eden.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 6

  What in the World Happened?

  Sunlight on my face …

  For the first time ever in my life.

  I’m standing on top of the wrecked train car, its front half pinned beneath a rockslide at the entrance of a tunnel, its back half lying free on a steel trestle spanning a deep canyon.

  The trestle connects two mountainside tunnels, the one caved in ahead, and one lower behind. I feel bad for those few retirees ahead of me, crushed beneath the stones, but I feel lucky that I moved seats and survived.

  I look out and devour the view—

  The canyon leads down to a pine forest. A real forest, just like my name—Van Houten. The sky is full blue now and the singing birds have ceased, the only sound that of the wind whipping up the mountain slope. Cool wind on my cheeks, warm sun on my neck—so unlike anything I ever imagined.

  I’m seeing everything I’ve read about for the first time. A distant bird circling above the trees, its flapless wings riding an invisible current. A green valley below the forest, a silver river snaking through its center. And beyond the valley, far beyond, I can just make out white lines of surf on the blue ocean.

  For a moment, I fear it’s another virtual reality scene like our beach. But I search the sky for any sign of a screen and can’t find one. It’s real! The world is real. All those lessons, all those educationals, all teaching me that there was nothing on the surface—but here it is, in living color.

  Does no one know?

  I don’t understand: the surface is uninhabitable, has been for almost a thousand years, they told us. Lingering radiation, disappearing atmosphere, walls of advancing ice.

  Where am I and how did I get here?

  Then I see a column of smoke against the distant horizon, near the ocean shore, black and straight in windless skies until it catches a high draft and is whisked away in a hazy smear.

  If there are fires, there are people.

  Something near catches my eye—a small white butterfly rising in the gusts and then falling again as it flits blindly across my view in wild little arcs. A real live butterfly! My hand jumps to my pocket and I breathe with relief when I feel my father’s pipe. I pull it out and look at it in the sunlight. It looks smaller, more ancient somehow. As if it were an artifact sifted from the ground, a mined relic remained long after its entombed owner had gone to dust. I remember my father rushing to the elevator, and thrusting the pipe into my hand, and I can hear his parting words again as the door sealed shut:

  “I love you, son.”

  I wish he were here to see this.

  A great rumbling stirs somewhere above, followed by a crunch of stone, a peel of metal. I turn and see rocks tumbling down the slope and slamming into the overturned car and have to dodge left to avoid being brained by one.

  Stuffing the pipe back in my pocket, I lower myself onto the trestle, hustling along the tracks away from the falling rocks. When I reach the steel d
oors standing open on massive hinges, I peer down into the tunnel descending into the mountain like some throat thirsty to swallow me again.

  No way am I going back in there. I’ll take my chances out here with whoever’s fire that was I saw.

  I shimmy away from the tunnel and step from the trestle onto a ledge in the canyon wall. It looks impossible to climb at first, but I find handholds in the stone, and every few meters there are trestle braces to use as steps on my slow climb down.

  No sooner do my feet touch the ground when a hollow, mechanical knocking comes rattling out from the tunnel above. Clack, clack, clack—some persistent machine working, maybe some tunnel rat crew coming to repair the tracks. Not wanting to find out, I race, slipping and sliding, down the canyon slope.

  I’m not sure what I’m running from, but I run for my life anyway. I run toward the trees, the forest, my only chance. Free now of my underground prison, I won’t go back. Ever! My toe catches a stone, sending me flying headfirst down the slope and the only thing that saves my face are my hands. The rock grates the skin off my palms, chips of rock wedged in the meat. I wipe my bloody hands on my jumpsuit, and keep moving.

  Down, down, down.

  The trees grow tall, blocking out the view beyond, and I run for them even faster now. A bee buzzes by, grazing my ear. I leap over shrubs, clearing them easily with the slope on my side, and with one last push, I’m safe in the shade of the trees.

  Spent, I throw my arms around a mossy tree and hug it as I catch my breath—my chest heaving, my heart pounding, my neck dripping with sweat. But I feel alive.

  I look back up the canyon at the trestle and I’m shocked at how far I just ran. I shiver at the thought of how close I was to missing all of this. Had it not been for a chance rockslide, the windowless train might have slipped through these mountains with me sealed inside. Going where, I wonder. But who knows? Who cares? I’m here now—I’m here and I’m free.

  It’s magical. The colors, the smells. All the things I’ve read about but thought I’d never see are animated around me.

  As I start into the forest, the trees grow thicker with every step, sunlight filtering down through the pine canopy, dropping in freckled shafts at my feet. I scoop up pine needles in my raw hands and hold them to my nose. Something furry scurries up a tree, stopping halfway and turning to peek down on me before chittering and continuing to the safety of the bows. A squirrel, maybe. The forest is quiet. But it’s an alive kind of quiet, as if you could sit and listen all day and hear the trees grow.

  I drop to my knees and inspect a caterpillar crawling across my path. These are supposed to be extinct, too. But here it is, a real would-be moth living in a real forest. When I pet its fuzzy back, the caterpillar drops on its side and curls into a ball. I scoop it up and inspect its black and orange stripes.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I promise, poking it in my hand.

  It rolls itself tighter in response.

  “Okay, fine,” I say, slipping the caterpillar into my breast pocket. “We’ll talk later.” A pinecone drops, landing beside me. I look up and see a gray bird perched on a limb, taking me in as if I’m as foreign to it as this new world is to me. “You see,” I say to my pocket as I get up to walk on again, “I probably just saved you from being that bird’s lunch.”

  The bird flits from tree to tree following me, its curious head twisting as if listening to hear some whisper on the wind. And the wind does whisper, too. High in the treetops it passes in swooshing waves, rustling the canopy and then disappearing.

  When you listen, the forest is far from quiet.

  Coming to a fallen tree across my path, I sit down to rest and take stock of my situation.

  Basically, I’m a mess. My jumpsuit is torn and dirt-covered from my fall, bloody handprints smeared on its legs. My hands are caked with drying blood, and when I wiggle my fingers they crack open and ooze again. Other than the clothes on my back, I have nothing. No water, no food—just my father’s pipe. I remember my uneaten lunch ration on the train, but it’s way up there and I wouldn’t go back for it even if I could.

  My mind races with questions that need answers:

  Who lives up here?

  Why have we’ve been lied to?

  What in the world happened?

  Still, as bad as things appear, and despite these questions running through my head, nothing can dampen my mood. I’m here in the open air, no longer trapped underground. And if I find that fire, I’ll bet I find people too. Maybe they’ll have some answers. But I know it’s water I’ll need first.

  Remembering the river I saw in the valley below the forest, I set off moving again toward lower elevations.

  First water, then the fire.

  CHAPTER 7

  The Boy Who Sits on Water

  Grass.

  Brushing against my legs, rising to my chest.

  No, not just grass—wheat gone wild.

  Here we’re eating algaecrisps by the kilo and there’s wheat growing up here like weeds. Why don’t we know about this? Why are we still underground?

  Threshing through the wheat, I grab handfuls of it as I go, ignoring the pain it causes my bleeding palms, sliding my fist up and stuffing seeds into my pockets.

  I burst without warning onto the sandy riverbank, freezing in mid-stride when I see it—

  There, not more than a few meters away, in shallow water with the current parting around its enormous body, is a grizzly bear staring straight at me. No surprise, no fear—just the cold, calculating curiosity of a predator sizing up prey.

  It lifts its muzzle, nostrils dilating as it breathes me in. My pulse races, my pits sweat, my legs vibrate with terror telling me to run. But I can’t move—I’m frozen with fear. I’ve read very little about bears, except that they’re supposed to be extinct, along with everything else. Yet somewhere deep in my DNA a little voice whispers for me to remain very, very still.

  A long time passes. Me standing statue still, the grizzly an unmovable mountain in the current, our eyes locked in some timeless standoff between man and beast. The river bubbles by. A gust of wind carries its musty scent to my nose, then passes by rustling the wheat on the bank behind me. My mouth is dry, my saliva metallic with fear, and when I swallow, I can feel my Adam’s apple lift and then drop again.

  A splash at the grizzly’s feet.

  It breaks the stare and looks down.

  In a brown-blur flash of power and speed, it plunges its jaws into the river and pulls out a huge silver salmon, flailing, helpless now in the iron-grip of its teeth. With great sloshing strides, the grizzly carries its catch several meters downstream and climbs dripping onto the bank where it holds it still with its claws and rips out mouthfuls of meat.

  Overtaken by thirst, I inch toward the river and sink to my knees, keeping my eyes on the bear as I lower my mouth to the current and drink great gulps of clean, cool water.

  When I stand, my belly is weighted with river water and the grizzly is picking at the salmon head, now attached to a rack of near translucent bones. Before it can turn its attention back to me, I step backward and disappear quietly into the wheat.

  The sun moves west; I move west.

  Using the treeline as a guide, I walk through the valley in the direction of the river’s flow. Hydrated, I feel my energy return and my steps lighten—like I’m walking in a daydream. All my life reading about the world of old, curled up nights with my lesson slate, imagining myself living in another time when everything wasn’t doom above. And now here I am on a pristine planet as if it were up here all the while.

  Shadows lengthen, pines stir restlessly in blue skies. Soon, the valley widens, the forest recedes, and I’m walking on near barren rock as the river fans out to cover the entire valley floor, its shallow progress dotted with humps of sun-dried boulders here, pierced by gnarled tree trunks washed downriver there. Before long, mist rises in a rainbow before me, carried on an almost deafening roar, and I come to the edge of a falls where the river spills
over the lip of the valley a hundred meters or more to froth and foam in the water-cut pools far below.

  When the beauty of it wears off, I realize the hopelessness of my situation. The waterfall is an impossible obstacle, and even if I weren’t stuck up here, I’m not even sure where I’m headed except down. Down in search of food and shelter. Down toward the spire of smoke still visible in the distance.

  For a moment, just a quick and jarring moment, I wish the train hadn’t crashed. I wish I hadn’t discovered the surface here thriving on, hidden from us below. I miss my father already. Mostly, I miss his face across the breakfast table, my fondness for algaecrisps already improving. I miss our housing unit. I miss my routine. I even miss Red. I long to hear the metal door bang behind me as I head to the education annex with my lesson slate in my hands once again, the lesson slate that was my only friend, the very lesson slate that taught me everything about the world and then lied to me about it being gone.

  I’m about to turn back and find another way down when a faraway flash of silver catches my eye. Training my gaze to the edge of the waterfall, I see another flash. A sort of silver leap followed by a splash. Salmon. Lots of them. Climbing the falls in steps at its edges where the water tumbles down into tiers of swirling pools. An indicator species the lessons called them—nearly extinct even before the War. But here they are thriving.

  I notice the slope on the far side of the falls is less severe, tufts of grass and stringy roots dangling from the rocky face where they stretch to catch the mist from the tumbling water. I strip off my shoes, tie the laces together, and hang them around my neck. Then, with my jumpsuit legs rolled up, I wade across the river at the edge of the falls. The water is cold, the current strong, but it’s shallow enough that I make quick progress.

  Safe on the other side, I lower myself onto the slope and climb down, gripping the rock with my bare feet, ignoring the pain in my hands as I stick them into cracks or grab onto roots, searching for suitable handholds. Halfway down, something tickles my neck. I reach up and cut off the caterpillar’s escape.