The Road Ahead

by Adrian Bonenberger

  The helo didn’t fall all at once. It shuddered and dropped, his ammunition belt rippling weightless for a moment as he floated in the fuselage, heat billowing from the cockpit, one pilot blown apart and the other on fire. He could hear both of their voices in his helmet though he was sure that one of them was already dead. He clawed the walls, his gloves slick with hydraulic fluid, the bay packed gray with smoke and by the time he caught some netting, the bird had leveled, a lieutenant’s hand on the stick, driving it down as he burned.

  He lay with the insects in the shade of a rock and watched the road and building for hours. There were stores like it every thirty miles, empty since the uranium mines closed a decade before. They used depleted uranium in ammunition. Dead metal. His focus shifted from the wide horizon to the sandy soil inches from his eyes, ants suddenly incredible in size. When the sun got overhead he stood up and approached from the rear. He hoped for the usual finds: matches or lighters, toilet paper, canned goods, bottles of anything. The deserted roadside shops often left plenty behind, just locked the doors and drove south with the last of the miners and trucks, carrying off little more than the alcohol and cigarettes.

  The door in back had been pried open and he curled around the tossed refrigerators to get inside. He felt something like excitement, an archeologist’s thrill in entering a tomb. He let his guard down. The floor was bare wood, a dirty oval of footsteps worn around the shelves in the center of the room. Old tins of tuna fish were stacked on a shelf marked “cat food” above swollen cans of clam chowder. Desiccated fruits and vegetables shrank dark and hard in bins by the door. He walked as if he were looking at relics in a museum, trying to see them as ordinary. No bottled water or soda. He made his way to the counter still looking back at the shelves, turned, and a boy stood up.

  The youth was malnourished, lank, with angry eyes and a mouthful of something he wasn’t chewing. He was dark tan, the edges of his ears scabbed from sunburns. His hair was blonde, likely Pashtun or from seed left by Greek, British, or Soviet armies, a desert child from anywhere. A fly smacked against the window. He looked past the boy at the cracked pouches of condoms, mousetraps, and corroded batteries. There was a faded photograph of a man, shirtless and thin, leaning on a truck holding a baby with one arm and a rifle with the other. Far behind them, a woman was digging with a shovel.

  “Salaam!”

  It was strange to hear his own voice and he expected to wake up. The boy rolled his eyes to the window, then turned his head, spat a stone the size of a small chicken egg into his hand, and made a sound as if it were still in his mouth. There was too much story here. He suddenly felt light, his senses returning. He noticed the boy’s pockets bulged. A looter. He watched the boy’s hands. He could hear an old truck in the distance. It had lost its muffler and was running rough, chugging and growling down the road. The boy’s eyes stayed hard. He put the rock back in his mouth and gurgled a word that sounded like “run.”

  The space behind the store was all bad real estate. No cover and long bare miles to dull wax-sloped hills. The grass was wiry, low, and dry. He was already running hard when he heard the engine cut off, his pack swinging like an infant latched to his shoulders and his boots chiseling the gravel. He didn’t look back, just fell forward, his legs trying to keep up with his panic. He made it about a hundred yards before he slowed to a trudge. He could feel the bones in his legs, heavy, stiff, and grinding at each joint. His pack lurched with a smack and he fell too fast to put his hands out. He thought he’d been pushed down and he grabbed a stone and scrambled to stand only to find himself alone. He heard the second shot. It burst through his right arm and spun him around. A man was standing behind the store reloading.

  Blood streamed down his arm and he clutched the hot wound. He was running again, his legs hollow with adrenaline. The sun was high and he leaped as if dodging trees, making it hard for the man to aim. A bullet popped near his head, a brief hole through the air, another skipping on the dust past him like a stone on water. He’d been roaming through this territory as if it were ungoverned frontier, back and forth following the ranges and badlands, eluding all the hard men living thin and policing their claims. Now he understood. They shot foreigners and trespassers, likely shot each other. It was tribal here and they considered everyone to be invaders.

  He ran until the store fell behind a hill, then turned and headed west, the sun in his eyes. His pulse thumped in his ears and he could barely hear any other sounds. He stumbled like a drunk, the cobbled ground loose and uneven. His hand stayed clamped to the hole in his arm and the blood had clotted into a paste. His mouth was drying down into his throat but the water jug in his pack had been shot through. Far ahead he saw the glass and metal glint of a junkyard, a crumpled island of old machinery littering a low mesa. He checked the horizon behind him, listened, and then hurried on with the last of his strength, climbing the pile to a van at the top.

  As his helicopter struck the ground, its wheels bent and he pitched forward toward the open gun door. The blades chopped at rocks and splintered as the bird tilted, a blast of sawed stone blowing in. It smelled like too many things. Fuels and lubricants, smoke and exhaust, blood and plastic, gunpowder. He’d been sprayed with hydraulic fluid and dust stuck to him. His helmet was still on and through the sound of the engine rattling apart, he heard a voice coughing his name. The cockpit was bright now, its windows facing the sun, and he made his way over the punctured floor strewn with straps and bullets. CWO Stevens on the left was headless and disemboweled, his body opened and absurd. But Lieutenant Conrad was alive, wet with puss, his arms split open to the red muscle. Conrad looked him in the eye. They paused. The pilot nodded No. They had joked about being captured, what they would say before executions. Conrad wanted to say, “I will never shop here again.” His eyes moved slowly down to the pistol strapped on his gunner’s leg, then back up to his eyes, lifted his chin once and coughed into his mic. The words were slurred, his throat boiled, but they had an understanding. The pistol was light, like it was made of wood, everything still buoyant with terror. Conrad looked away, stared out the window at the sun.

  The van moved sometimes. He was sure of it. Most of the wrecks shifted at night, the scrape of metal coming from different directions throughout the junkyard, and he thought the van was tilting more than it had been when he moved into it a week ago. It sat on a pile of crushed cars, springy with tires. He preferred being up high. The dogs lived on the ground level and he could hear them scampering around in the dark, chasing rats and dragging death and old garbage back from somewhere. The morning would reveal their work, piles of meager shit that other dogs had found no reason to eat and scratch marks here and there. He didn’t see the dogs during the day. They hid in the catacomb of station wagons, smashed buses, and wreckage, but as he explored the expanse of ruin he could hear them snore as if the entire scrapyard was a single den, the rise and fall of piled cars caused by the breathing of thousands of sleeping animals. He also knew he was being watched. Dogs had watched him since the crash. He found a hand scythe in the bed of a truck and carried it with his good arm, picking through the trunks of cars and piles of parts in the early morning and late afternoon light. He stayed in the van when the sun was highest and during the night. He hadn’t seen the pickup, but he’d heard it far away a few times.

  His arm itched. He remembered that this meant healing rather than infection. A bottle of alcohol had kept it clean, but he was running out. He’d been fired on plenty of times, but he hadn’t been hit with a bullet until he ran from the boy. He couldn’t make sense of the boy.

  A barrel of rainwater kept him alive. He scooped a layer of oil off the top and screened the water through a thick cotton shirt he found in a dump truck. There was no food and he’d been hungry for days. He had to brace for another week of recovery before braving the desert again. He could see it shimmer and lift, a horizon without a surface between him and the mountains. The water was getting low and rusty in the barrel and there were still no
signs of rain. He would have to move again sooner than he wanted to, trap some dogs, make a fire, and cook them while the rest watched from the dark spaces in the cars. He worried about making smoke. The dogs thrived. They must have found a spring, maybe old rainwater held cupped in a million dents at the bottom of the piles. He imagined the metal caverns, musty with dog breath, licked clean, all the creatures sick with fuel on their tongues and sustained by rot and cannibalism.

  He crouched in the van, the side door wide open, and felt like he was back in the helicopter. It was strange to be at this height but completely still, hovering without the vibration of blades swirling over his head and the sound of the air being cut open. No dust blown away beneath him and no machine gun to lean on. He could see far down the track that tow trucks and cranes had once used to haul the wrecks in and stack them. There was a scar pressed into the roof above him from the magnet but somehow the van had not been crushed. It perched on top of the heap overlooking the alcove where the crane had circled dropping cars in place. He was thinking about bait.

  He had a bloody rag from his arm and a pair of socks that stank from two weeks’ wear. There was some water. He gathered plenty of fine wire brake cables, a hammer, some tent stakes and crimpers and fashioned a snare. It was the one skill he thought of least value when he took the survival course and had not studied it with any seriousness, focusing instead on maps and how to start fires. His lack of attention cost him almost two days of tinkering, looping, and knotting wire the wrong way. After many elaborate mistakes, he was embarrassed to discover the clean simplicity of a snare’s design. In the late afternoon, he climbed down to the surface.

  It was like descending into a canyon and the ground was already in shadow when he got to it. He felt exposed there at the end of the long dirt passage, trapped as he pounded stakes and set snares. He made a square of four trip lines and placed a shallow glass headlight of water in the center with his soiled offerings. The alcove darkened as he worked and he began to rush, dropping things and pausing more often to listen, holding his breath. He finished and scrambled back up, cutting himself on a gouged Toyota hood he could have avoided if he had moved with any care at all. Back in the van he could still see the sun low in the sky. It was as if he had found a membrane separating time and that he could hide in daylight while the other world, a mere twenty feet away, was dark with dusk. He dressed the wound on his hand as the sun set.

  A sharp bark straightened him. He had fallen asleep and forgotten to close the door. Now it would creak and slam if he pulled it shut. He was in view. He peered out. It was quiet again and he sensed dogs staring up at him in the dark, seeing him weak. The crescent moon was slight, the land black as the sky. His eyes were pulled so wide they hurt. A shrill yelp broke from below, its echo sounding as if it had come from inside the van. A dog began to whine, probably caught in his snare. It became mad with fear, shrieking incessantly, and wild barking spread throughout the junkyard, a land of dogs all drawn to the peril of one. Another wail rose up and he could hear the pant and paws rushing down the track toward him. The violence began in an instant, the ground below muscular with the snarl and savagery of animals tearing each other apart. He slammed the door, locked it and gasped, drowned out by the shriek of dogs being eaten alive.

  He thought of his pilots and searched his chart for the spot. An officer had pointed to it after a flight brought him in and they asked short questions from a long list. Some of the questions sounded the same, but the words were rearranged. He was their only survivor. One of the pilots was missing his head. The officer kept asking the questions without frustration, even after he had stopped answering.

  Blood was sprayed on the plexiglass, one man decapitated and splayed on his seat. His head lay strapped in its helmet between his own feet, eyes bright. The other pilot was broiled, uniform and skin melting from his arms, one hand still locked to the stick. He shook, his scorched throat coughing words. He was giving instructions.

  “Do you know if he shot himself or if he was executed?”

  What could he say to anyone? How could he answer, as a witness would, about what it was like to fall all the way down? He had been thinking through the short questions ever since, staring at desert, at streams bleeding through canyons, at treetops swaying in wind, stepping like a hunter through empty houses and brush. He was animal now and what could he tell them about evasion charts except that they were to keep him away from everyone? He had carried the Warrant Officer’s head that night, buried it in its helmet under stones somewhere out there, safe from dogs and the Taliban. He didn’t tell them that. And he didn’t tell them that he shot the other pilot.

  He looked at the blood on his uniform. It was almost black on his boots and arms. He wanted to tell the officer that the pilot was calm while he burned, the other ripped open, shreds of him on all the instruments, his intestines spilled over his legs and sucked out of the hole the rocket had made. His body was torn in ways blood couldn’t imagine. Everyone was murdered in Afghanistan. No one was buried complete. He wanted to say that the dead pilot was from Maine, somewhere along the coast, and that he could remember him talking about ocean. He wanted to say that the pilot’s head spoke to him in the desert as he carried it away and that he could still hear the other man coughing his name.

  He found belongings left along trails from the south, clothing and water bottles. Refugees running from war and from soldiers like him. He ran the same routes they did. There were bodies too, but he didn’t stop to bury them. They hadn’t been found, some of them for many years, picked over by vultures, pieces dragged away by dogs. He knew he was in a good area when he found a skeleton. The only safe people to be around were dead and if he found them, he was where no one was looking. He followed the charred slopes south for a while, against the direction the flames had moved. The pattern of ash was called the “burn mosaic.” He liked that term. A map of the fire. The graveyard of coal-black stumps went on for miles. They seemed to move at night, tilt and straighten like exhausted guards, an army waiting for dawn to scar the next green-treed ridge with war. It was in the mountains that he found the bones of a man burned by wildfires or napalm. He lay like a god-king surrounded by his possessions in the outline of a tent; pans, knives, batteries, and canned goods rusting in the ash. The man wore dog tags, a veteran who hadn’t made it back, died in his sleep like the rest of them, smothered by smoke. But he hadn’t been captured. No one but nature had taken him alive. All of this was mean, gritty sleep. Out here on the fringe, you could still escape occupied territory. People could live in caves and shacks, gnawing on wilderness in between the storms, laying low as herders and patrols passed by, their names on no lists, just men and women broken away from expectations, severed from nations, following the pollen and the seed.

  He found a house sitting like litter at the base of the ashen valley, saved by solitude. From the hill the home appeared untouched. No outbuildings burned. No doors swung open. A house and some sheds at the end of the line, someone’s failed settlement. He had been moving at night and staying on high ground during the day. Not all the way on top of anything since the van. He would find a slope in the darkness, climb to its crest and survey the pitch for any lights or fires, then drop down ten or twenty yards and circle for cover in rocks or shrubs that would conceal him from view in daylight. He was always fascinated by what the land actually looked like lit up, a grand illusion. Moving at night he just imagined it. He had never been to this part of the country on ground level and nothing looked familiar despite years of searching this place from above. Maybe it had been somewhere else. Was it here he’d been flying over? No. Not here exactly. He watched the house all day, his eyes dry with fear of blinking, missing the moment when someone would open a door or pass by a window.

  A dog crossed the road in a series of diagonals. It stopped every once in a while, looking, raising its head to taste the air, then padding on. The day was long with staring. He fell asleep, waking near dusk, afraid to move. He lifted his head and
a vulture lurched away from him, hissing as if it had been stabbed in the neck. It came at him flapping hard, losing feathers, its long wings sweeping the dirt and beating at the air to push its body up. It leapt forward onto him, its weak spiked feet pressing into his chest with unexpected weight. He grabbed a wing and grappled for a grip on the other, threw the thick bird on its back, and rolled onto it. He punched at it, teeth clenched, the vulture scratching at his stomach with its dull talons and throwing its beak at his eyes. It was all violence, close quarters, and he drew himself up, jerking his knees onto the wings where they met its body, choking the bird with both hands. It took a long time to die, its short neck hard with muscle. Finally, it spat a yellow stew of rotten meat and wheezed, air finding a way through despite the tight grip of his hands. He was yelling at it, in English, demanding that it stop struggling, blurting out questions. It died in a series of convulsions, the tips of its wings shivering.