Epitaph Road

by David Patneaude

  and hope became heartbreak.

  But only the bear came.

  — EPITAPH FOR JOSHUA WINTERS

  (NOVEMBER 7, 2029–AUGUST 6, ABOUT, 2067),

  BY CINDY WINTERS, HIS WIFE, PAIGE WINTERS, HIS DAUGHTER,

  AND CHARLIE WINTERS, HIS SON,

  DECEMBER 20, 2068

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I heard the cry of a bird.

  I opened my eyes and blinked out at the glassy gray of the lake. It was early dawn. The sun was still on its way. Low clouds, pillowing against the hills, clinging to the water, would delay its arrival. The resident loon patrolled the shoreline, looking for breakfast, reminding me of my own hunger. I sat up, trying not to disturb the blankets covering Tia, who was still asleep or pretending.

  I got up and walked barefoot to the beach. The loon, thirty feet away, didn’t alter his course. He was used to me by now. At my approach, a trout swirled in the shallows and headed for deeper water, but the bird, too independent or proud to accept my help, continued on.

  I picked up a flat rock and sent it skipping across the surface. Then another. And more. I began to lose the stiffness in my body from another night of sleeping on dirt and cedar boughs. Seventeen nights now, fifteen in this place.

  Today we were heading back — hiking to the remains of the Foothills compound, climbing into Gunny’s pickup, bypassing the mines, driving to the little bay where we left Mr. Lucky, cruising to Afterlight and Seattle and whatever awaited us there.

  Dad had led us here — the place where he and Aunt Paige and my grandmother once waited in vain for my grandfather. Dad thought it would be safer in case PAC came calling again with its armored vehicles or helicopters or a second helping of the Bear and plans to finish the job. It was a long two-day trudge from the lab, and for much of the way, even when I was watching and listening for signs of Elisha in Dad and Tia and analyzing my own state of health, I stewed over our decision not to come here earlier, before we ever set foot in the lab.

  Sunday would still be alive.

  But at what cost? Dad had argued the night we arrived, and even Tia took his side. What would have happened if we hadn’t been there to push the button? Would Dr. Nuyen have gotten out safely and in time to blow the place? If not, would Wapner and his men and their Formula T have killed practically every female in the world?

  They convinced me, mostly.

  But I couldn’t forget Sunday’s face in that little window.

  Or Gunny’s lantern fading into the night.

  Or Margaret Nuyen’s brave farewell from the tunnel floor: Tell Merri I love her. I hoped I’d get the chance to deliver that message.

  I walked back up the low bank to the campsite. Tia was still sleeping. On the other side of the fire pit, Dad was sitting up, wrapped in his covers. He nodded to me, but he was distracted, studying the area of damp dirt that lay between us.

  I followed his gaze.

  I saw indentations. Deep impressions in the soft ground. I stepped closer. They were prints, huge ones, dozens of them, crisscrossing the campsite as if the big animal that left them was pacing back and forth, waiting for someone to wake up and give it its proper respect.

  “A bear?” I said. Tia didn’t stir. She wasn’t faking.

  Dad nodded. “Big one.”

  “Your bear?”

  He smiled. He’d filled my head with images of his bear. “I doubt it. How long do bears live anyway?”

  I shrugged. I didn’t know. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to believe it was Dad’s long-ago visitor. “You want to go down to the lake?”

  Dad stretched and stood. He shuffled over and settled in next to me, close. He was wearing socks, formerly white, but they were stained the color of the soil under his feet. He had a three-week growth of beard and a head full of tangled hair and rumpled ratty clothes that had been in and out of the lake a number of times.

  He looked just right.

  “You know when I first saw you and the girls?” Dad said. “When I got off Mr. Lucky and you were waiting for me on the beach?” He put his arm around my shoulders and we gazed out at the lake. “And I made the boneheaded mistake of thinking — saying — you were thirteen?”

  “It wasn’t a big deal. You had a lot on your mind.”

  “It was a big deal. Even with everything else that was happening and would happen, the fact that I didn’t even know my own kid’s age bothered me the most. It drove me nuts. Especially when I thought about what you’d done for me.”

  “Now you know. I’m fourteen. I’ll be fourteen for a long time.”

  “I don’t want to be wrong again,” Dad said. “When you have a birthday, pass your trials, learn to drive, get out of school, figure out what you want to do with your life, I want to be there.”

  “My life —” Should I tell him I had dreams of moving here — to the Peninsula — when I got older? Living the life of a loner?

  Did I, still, after everything I’d learned and seen?

  “As soon as I can,” Dad continued, “I want to find some moorage for Mr. Lucky and me on the Seattle waterfront. I can go fishing from there and still spend a lot of time with you.”

  My chest filled with something warm. I thought of my long-ago poem, the one on the wayfarers’ wall. The words —thinking of me— were true, after all. They were true. But for a moment I considered telling him not to do it, that it would mean giving up his freedom, being under someone’s —everyone’s— thumb again.

  But did he really have freedom here in the hinterlands? In the end, the throwbacks and loners of Afterlight and the rest of the Peninsula had only one freedom — the freedom to die.

  And a new dream was beginning to materialize in my head. If Dad came to Seattle, maybe I could live with him on Mr. Lucky. Because the idea of moving back in with Mom after all this, even if Aunt Paige returned to the house, even if Tia was still there, felt like a nightmare.

  “That would be great,” I said. I would bring up my new dream later. One step at a time.

  Dad gave my shoulder a squeeze and let me go. I found Tia’s hand in the mound of blankets and tugged her to a sitting position. “Come on,” I said.

  She rubbed at her eyes. “What, Kelly?”

  Kelly. Her new nickname for me. A term of endearment, she called it. Coming from her, it was okay; I’d put up with anything that might soften the pain in her eyes.

  For more than two weeks Dad had observed and sympathized with that pain, too. He’d decided to team up with Tia, adopting the Kelly tag, with only an occasional and secretive twinkle and wink of his eye.

  I still called Tia Tia. As often as I could.

  “We’re going down to the lake, Tia,” I said. “Take a look for Dad’s bear.” I gestured at the tracks all around us.

  Her sleepy eyes grew wide. She scrambled to her feet, grasping my hand hard, scanning our little clearing for signs of something big and bad. When she was satisfied that the something had gone away, she gulped in a big breath and let it slowly out.

  We walked to the water’s edge. The loon was out of sight. The morning had grown brighter. I wondered what was happening out in the world. How many throwbacks and loners and innocent kids and bystanders had died from this Elisha? Had the quarantine worked? Or had someone miscalculated? Had Elisha spilled over? How much information had gotten out? We had no radio, no news, true or otherwise.

  How would we be treated when we returned?

  Dad stared across the water at the opposite shoreline, eyes narrowed against the gathering light. Tia and I followed his lead. Did he see something? A shadow moving through the undergrowth? An image conjured from a memory?

  “Sunday would like it here,” Tia said.

  I felt pain at the sound of Sunday’s name. I welcomed it. I wouldn’t ever let myself forget that she’d died because of me.

  “She’d want to meet this bear,” Dad said, making Tia smile.

  A breeze kicked up, rippling the lake, reshaping the wisps of fog.

  “Wi
ll they believe us about Formula T?” I said.

  “They have to,” Dad said.

  “Dr. Nuyen said it was up to us to stop Wapner, Kelly,” Tia said. “We did it.”

  For now, I thought, remembering her words from a couple of weeks ago that seemed like a couple of years ago. Until the next wacko scientist decided to even the score. Would someone else be there to stop him?

  And what about the world’s reigning wacko scientist, Rebecca Mack? Would anyone ever stop her? What was going to happen when old age finally took her? Or someone — a militant Fratheist, maybe — decided to speed her death along?

  That idea — putting an end to her — intrigued me for a moment as I once more pictured Gunny slipping away to die and I imagined all the others who were massacred on Rebecca Mack’s orders. But would PAC wither up and die along with her? Or would it be like Hercules slicing away at the Hydra — two fresh and fearsome heads replacing her one?

  From somewhere far down the shoreline, the loon cried again. The sound, skimming unhindered across the water, was sad but reassuring. It will be okay, it said . It will be okay.

  I kept staring. On the distant bank, something moved.

  The wind, I suspected at first. The wind in the tall spidery bushes bordering the lake.

  But I kept my gaze fixed on the spot. I held perfectly still, waiting. And deep into that long breathless moment, I swore I glimpsed a flash of silvery brown, the wagging side to side of a huge shaggy skull, the sweep of a giant paw.

  I swore I did.

  We’d arranged with the funeral folks for a return to ashes and dust,

  imagining our souls rising in pale smoke

  to mingle with the clouds and reunite with each other.

  But the fearsome mass-killer thing came calling,

  and the body I loved so much — yours — ended up

  not wafting to the heavens as cinders and grit but here,

  decaying in this crowded restless resting place.

  We plan in comfort. We learn in sorrow.

  — EPITAPH FOR BRANCH CARROLL

  (NOVEMBER 23, 1992–AUGUST 9, 2067),

  BY KIMBERLY CARROLL, HIS WIFE,

  DECEMBER 22, 2068

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The surface lost most of its chop as Dad steered Mr. Lucky around the breakwater and into the harbor. From a quarter mile away, Afterlight looked like a ghost town. But as we approached the refueling dock, I saw, through the morning fog and drizzle, a wispy column of gray smoke rising into the sky from the back edge of town. And then I saw people — all females — on their feet, shuffling along, carting stuff from shore to dock to boat.

  Dad aimed us at a berthing space. “Half the boats are gone,” he yelled from the wheel as he maneuvered us close and I threw a line to a woman standing near the stern of an ancient wreck of a boat. “And I don’t think they’ve gone fishing.”

  The woman glanced at Tia but saved most of her attention for me, then Dad, as he stepped onto the deck. “Where you been?” she asked him as two girls — nine or ten years old, maybe — emerged from the cabin of the old tub, staring.

  “At sea,” Dad said. “Up north. What happened here?”

  “The Bear,” the woman said, blank-faced. She eyed the name on our boat. “You got lucky. Missed the Bear, missed the Coast Patrol.”

  I leaped over the side, caught an aft line from Tia, and half-hitched it to a dock cleat. Tia, then Dad, followed me over. “The men?” I asked her. “They’re all dead?”

  “A few took off for the hills once they figured out what was happening. They haven’t returned. All the rest are dead, my man included.”

  “Sorry,” we said in unison.

  Glassy-eyed, the woman shrugged. “Never should’ve come here. People said it wasn’t safe.”

  “You buried them already?” I asked, wondering about traces of the Bear still hanging around. I pictured the mass grave at Epitaph Road, even though I estimated the entire population of Brighter Day to be less than a thousand. Much less now. Dad handed me the nozzle end of a fueling hose. I stuck it in Mr. Lucky’s filler pipe and started the flow.

  “Cremated,” she said, and Tia’s hand went to her mouth. The breeze picked up. From Mr. Lucky’s hold, overwhelming the smell of diesel, came the stench of rotting salmon. As soon as we’d gotten on board we’d dumped the carcasses and cleaned up as best we could, but the stink hung on.

  “Is that the smoke?” Tia murmured, nodding toward the distant plume.

  The woman nodded. “The co-op. Old wood. Good for burning. We moved all the stores out, all the bodies in. Then we torched it. If you need food or anything, some women are rationing out supplies near the marina entrance. They’ll be surprised to see you, but they’ll be generous. Everyone’s leaving, heading back to so-called civilization, so there’s no reason to be stingy. The stuff wasn’t exactly ours anyway.”

  “You’re going to Seattle?” Dad said.

  “Soon.”

  “In that?” I said, gesturing toward her boat.

  “It floats,” she said. “It runs.”

  “Anyone else leaving soon?” Dad said.

  “A couple of other boats.”

  “Same shape as yours?”

  “About.”

  “We’ll join you,” Dad said. “Just to make sure everyone arrives safely.”

  The woman gave Dad a look, as if she wasn’t quite sure about the idea or him. “That okay?” Dad said.

  “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s good.”

  “Elisha’s Bear,” Tia said. “When did it hit?”

  “Going on three weeks, probably. A day, or maybe two days, after all those cops showed up in town. And the other two.”

  “You see planes?” Dad asked. “Helicopters?”

  She shook her head. “Thought we heard some. Didn’t see any.”

  “Other two?” I said. “What other two?”

  “City women, nosing around, acting like they were interested in being here. I think they were just interested in slumming, looking down their noses at us.”

  “What did they do?” Tia asked, and I got this empty feeling in my chest, recalling the junkyarddog items about women planting the deadly test versions of Elisha’s Bear.

  “Drove around, walked around, stopped at the co-op, ate at the café, went on a hike.”

  “To where?” Dad said.

  “Rainbow Falls.”

  Dad shook his head. “More likely the reservoir. The trail passes right by Afterlight’s water source. You were drinking it. Showering in it.”

  “What?” the woman said.

  “We’ll tell you,” Dad said. “Let’s all go take a look at those supplies.”

  How much longer will it last?

  Looking for you around every corner, reaching for you in the night,

  walking into our apartment after a long day of distractions

  and being freshly surprised at the empty cold silence.

  — EPITAPH FOR SETH FRANKLIN (MAY 3, 2043–AUGUST 7, 2067),

  BY HEATHER FRANKLIN, HIS WIFE OF FIVE MONTHS AND FOREVER,

  DECEMBER 23, 2068

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  As our small raggedy fleet approached the marina, the setting sun broke through the clouds and lit up the glass faces of downtown Seattle’s tall buildings. I couldn’t tell if they looked friendly or menacing. What kind of welcome would Tia and I get? And what had happened here? Had Elisha slipped past the quarantine?

  But as we nudged against the dock we saw men, looking healthy and unconcerned.

  “Do you think they know anything, Kelly?” Tia said.

  “If they don’t,” I said, looking around at the other boats tying up around us, “they will soon enough.”

  Dad had to make arrangements for moorage space, and he wasn’t ready to take on the city or Mom, anyway, so he gave us money for cab fare and turned us loose. We promised to find him at the marina by the next afternoon.

  My e-spond and Tia’s were history, destroyed
and discarded during our adventure, but we could have borrowed someone else’s phone to call my mother — a stomach-turning idea — or hers. We didn’t. We decided our first hellos should be face-to-face.

  So we climbed into the backseat of the cab without preliminaries. We would show up at our house unannounced, carrying nothing but Dr. Nuyen’s battered backpack and its contents — the scary metal containers, the data storage chips. We had to do this, I knew, but my heart pounded. And as Tia pressed up against me, practically pinning me to the door, I swore I could hear hers pounding, too.

  Paparazzi, news buffoons, talking heads,

  muckrakers and mud-throwers, seeking sensation and spin,

  where were you when the devil was devising this sinister story,

  dreaming up something substantial and twisted for the world,

  full of conflict and consequence and aftermath,

  pictures at eleven?

  — EPITAPH FOR JATINDRA PATEL (FEBRUARY 6, 2061–AUGUST 9, 2067),

  BY MADHURI PATEL, HIS MOTHER,

  DECEMBER 24, 2068

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  According to the clock on Mom’s desk, it was past midnight. Tia and I were alone again, sitting close together on the couch, waiting for the start of the debriefing or inquisition or whatever it was that Rebecca Mack had in mind when she’d ordered us kept under wraps until she could fly in from San Diego.

  I couldn’t help picturing her on a broom.

  We’d struggled past a tearful reunion with our mothers and a wrenching encounter with Sunday’s. Then it was long showers, fresh clothes, and leftovers, all with Mom lurking around like a library cop. Finally, she dumped us in her office to watch over Dr. Nuyen’s precious backpack, which Mom had rushed in here earlier, even before the tears dried.

  Just for the record, none of those tears came from my eyes. Nothing about our homecoming felt especially warm and fuzzy to me. By now I mostly understood Mom’s role in all of this, and seeing her again was way more bitter than sweet. The thought of living with her in this house — even for a short time — made me long for cedar boughs and damp ground and a cold-water lake.