State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy

by Ryan Winfield

  When we enter a dense portion of jungle, I notice the trees rustling as we pass, as if something concealed there in the branches is following us. Soon, we’re all looking up to the canopy to try and spy what it might be. I hear a bark, followed by a high-pitched holler, and then more barking all around us. Then, all at once, the trees come alive, branches shaking violently, leaves dropping. Something wild has us surrounded.

  Jimmy bends and picks up a stone.

  The trees shake harder; the barking gets louder.

  Then, as if this weren’t enough, Roger screams bloody murder and jumps around like some berserker embattled with ghosts. What in all of Eden is happening here, I wonder. He hops and shimmies and jiggers as if he’s doing some lunatic dance, all the time surrounded by the shaking trees. It’s as if some maniac convention has convened right here in the jungle. Then Roger sheds his pack as if it was on fire, unzips his zipsuit, peels it off, and emerges from his discarded clothing naked and still dancing. No sooner is he free and away when a black monkey drops from a tree, races over and snatches Roger’s zipsuit, and carries it off. Two others drop and fight over his pack. Jimmy rushes them with his stone upraised, but they settle on sharing and scamper back up into the trees with the pack between them. I spy the other there, already picking the ants from the zipsuit fabric and eating them.

  Roger sits on the ground, crying. Fire ants crawl in his hair. Bill flicks the ants away one by one and then helps Roger to his feet. We all hurry past the swath of trees, away from the crazy monkeys and the ant nest Roger had been standing on.

  Roger plods along in silence, either unashamed or unaware of his nakedness. I want to ask him if he’s okay, but the answer is so obvious, the question seems silly. Bill tries to speak with him, but he won’t respond. He just walks with his head hung, as if marching to his own funeral.

  Sometime later, when the sun is high in the sky, we come to a small clearing in the center of which lies a perfectly round, perfectly blue, pool. We stop to collect ourselves and inventory our rations. I tear the top of my zipsuit free and pass it to Bill, who ties it around Roger’s waist like a kind of toga. Roger lets him do it but lifts no hand to help, almost like an infant being dressed. Then Roger flops down on the ground, lays his open palms in his lap and stares at them. Why, I can’t guess. Perhaps he’s reading his fortune.

  As we’re bending over the pool, refilling our water bottles, Jimmy points down into the blue water.

  “What’s that down there?” he asks.

  The water is so clear that it could be two meters or twenty meters deep. It’s impossible to tell, but several round objects are plainly visible lying on the bottom. They look like a dozen rusty cannon balls to me. Or maybe turtles. When I turn to ask Bill to come and take a look, I hear a splash and turn back. The ripples clear away from the water’s surface, and I see Jimmy swimming down into the depths of the pool. Bill joins me, and we watch as some trickery of liquid magnification causes Jimmy to shrink as he descends into the pool, and then grow again as he dives even deeper, returning to nearly his normal size as he reaches the bottom.

  “How deep do you think it is?” Bill asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But it must be deep, as long as it took him to dive it.”

  Jimmy picks up one of the balls and turns it over in his hands, examining it. He looks up to us on the edge of the pool, his face as plain as day down there on the other side of all that water. He seems to be deciding something. Then he swims back up, repeating the process of shrinking and then growing again. He breaks the surface, gasping for air, climbs dripping from the pool, and hands me a human skull.

  The skull is brown and ancient. It is a calcified and misshapen head, born from some alien species spawned from a human dream. The mandible is missing, and the row of upper teeth seem to silently snicker at us, suggesting that there might be some grand joke in death we can’t yet understand.

  “I wasn’t gonna disturb it,” Jimmy says, “but I thought you might wanna see it. I ain’t never seen no head like that one.”

  “How old do you think it is?” Bill asks.

  “I dunno,” Jimmy says. “But there was some slabs down there like the roof had fallen in on this hole not too long ago. I bet it was covered up for ages.”

  “Maybe we should put it back,” I suggest.

  “I agree,” Bill says.

  Jimmy reaches for the skull to return it, but before he can take it, Roger appears at my side and snatches it from my hand, scurrying off and cradling it to his breast.

  “Is he alright?” I ask.

  “I don’t think so,” Bill says.

  We pack up and move on.

  Bill checks his compass every half hour to confirm we’re traveling east, but I begin to wonder if maybe the thing doesn’t work. I bring this up to Jimmy on the sly, but he observes the sun moving across the sky for a while and puts my mind at ease by confirming our direction. We all cast worried glances back at Roger as he follows along behind us in his nearly naked rags, the charcoal dripping with his sweat and streaking his pale chest, the bared skin already turning red in the sun. He won’t let go of his skull for anything and keeps it cradled in his arm like a child, occasionally whispering to it as he lurches along.

  We camp beneath a sprawling tree with branches so thick we don’t even need to construct a shelter to stay dry. Before I fall asleep I notice Roger’s shadow crouched out in the pouring rain with his skull. When I wake at sunrise he hasn’t moved.

  After breakfast we cross through a lush valley of vines hanging heavy with chilies. The waxy skin of the fruit seems to capture and magnify the sun, and these hanging bulbs of living light are so plentiful along the path that their glow casts us all in hues of orange as we pass. Jimmy reaches out and plucks one to eat, but before he gets it to his mouth, he casts it away from him as if it were a coal. And it might as well have been for the way his hand is burned.

  We walk all day until finally, with our feet dragging and our patience running thin, we arrive at the lip of a wide escarpment that rings a much lower, much flatter piece of land. Far in the distance we can see the trees give way to two horizons—the dark blue ocean and the lighter blue sky above. But what draws my eye is a distant clearing in the middle of that lowland jungle, with a stone pyramid rising up above the trees.

  “That’s our rendezvous point,” Bill says, stepping beside me and stuffing his compass in his pocket. “We should make it there by mid-morning tomorrow.”

  “How old do you think it is?” Jimmy asks.

  “I’ll bet it’s pretty old,” I say. “From way before the War.”

  “Older than my bust?”

  “Oh, much older than that,” I reply. “Much, much older.”

  “Why do you think it survived all this time?”

  “Probably because they used stone and gravity to make it,” I answer. “All of our fancy skyscrapers rusted away. At least the ones that weren’t bombed. Concrete reinforced with steel rusts. That thing down is made of the Earth itself.”

  “I hate to admit how little I read growing up,” Bill says. “Guess I liked the beach more than my lesson slate. Were these the Aztecs here, Aubrey?”

  “No, I think the Aztecs came later,” I say. “If I remember correctly, these were Mayans.”

  “Whoever they was,” Jimmy says, “they sure knew how to build somethin’ that would last.”

  Jimmy and I get busy making a shelter by weaving a foliage roof above a round depression in the ground. Bill sees about nursing to Roger. He coaxes him to drink a little water, but Roger refuses to eat any algaecrisps or even a meal bar, fighting Bill away and claiming that Bill is trying to steal his skull.

  “I don’t know what to do with him,” Bill says when he joins us again. “He’s always been nervous, but not like this.”

  “Could be heat stroke,” Jimmy says. “I seen people get it worse. He needs shade and water and rest.”

  I nod, agreeing with Jimmy. “Why don’t you have him lie do
wn here awhile, Bill? In the shelter. Let him get some rest without worrying that one of us is going to snatch his skull.”

  It takes some convincing, but Roger eventually agrees to stretch out in the shelter. Bill stays with him to monitor his condition. Jimmy and I move far enough away to not disturb them and search up wood to build a fire. It’s plenty warm without it, and we have nothing to cook on its coals, but we build one anyway—maybe out of habit, or maybe because of some instinct imprinted in our DNA. We sit and toss twigs into the flames and look out over the darkening landscape as the top of the stone temple catches the last of the day’s light. It’s a patient place, and I get the feeling a person could sit here for a day or for a thousand years and never know the difference.

  I think about how strange it is that Jimmy and I have Dr. Radcliffe’s longevity serum inside of us, rewiring our cells right now so that we’ll live for almost a thousand years. Well, maybe we’ll live that long, if we somehow manage to survive this crazy adventure. What will it feel like? I wonder. A millennium. Ten, maybe twelve, lifetimes stretched together into one. It hardly seems right that Bill and Roger and the others will have grown old and passed away while we’re still in our prime years. I wish there were enough serum for everyone.

  “You know what this view reminds me of?” Jimmy asks, breaking the silence. “It reminds me of when we was sittin’ on the bluff above the lake after that wave. You, me, and Hannah. You was smokin’ your dad’s pipe and she was gripin’ about it, you remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember. You said she was a spoiled brat.”

  “Because she called me a savage first,” he says, defensively. Then he adds, “But I was right about her, wasn’t I?”

  “You’re always right, Jimmy. You always were.”

  “Not always,” he says.

  We watch as several columns of bats pour out of hidden caves on the jungle floor beneath us, twisting into the dusky sky and heading out for the night to hunt.

  “You ever think about runnin’?”

  “Running where?” I ask.

  “Jus’ gettin’ away from these two and all this talk about China and some Chief nobody knows nothin’ about. I mean, we could make out pretty good by ourselves here, Aubrey.”

  “We have to stop Hannah, Jimmy. We have to. And if this Chief—whoever he is—has some kind of plan, then we need to hear it. Plus, we need to save Red. We promised we wouldn’t abandon him there.”

  Jimmy sighs. “You’re right. I’m sorry I was bein’ selfish, same as when you woke me about goin’ back for Red. I shoulda got up with you that night. Truth is, goin’ back scares me.”

  “It scares me too,” I say. “But so do drones.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy sighs, “so do drones.”

  “Scary thing about them is you go so long without seeing one you forget. But it only takes one encounter and snap,” I say, snapping my fingers. “Just like that and you’re dead.”

  “I know it,” Jimmy replies. “We’d go years without a sightin’. Then you wake up one night to screams and half the group is gone. Well, you know. You was there in the cove.”

  Bill comes over and joins us, sitting down, crossing his arms around his knees, and looking into the fire. What is it that makes every man stare into a fire, I wonder. Does each see the same thing? Bill seems reflective, maybe worried. It’s funny, because when I was growing up, he was always tan and strong and ten feet tall to me. He was as unreal and as untouchable as the blue sky at that electric beach. But here now, above ground and sitting next to Jimmy, he appears small and fragile and tired. Maybe our adventures have aged us; I don’t know.

  “How’s Roger?” I ask him.

  “He’s finally sleeping, but I can’t pry that death head away from him. It’s falling apart already in the open air. All the teeth have come out, and Roger’s fingers broke through the crown. I just hope maybe it’ll wear down to some small token he can keep in his pocket by the time we get back.”

  “Get back where?” I ask.

  “To Holocene II.”

  “You mean you’re not coming to China with us?”

  Bill shakes his head. “We’re just taking you as far as that temple down there. Once your ride shows up, we go home.”

  “You’ll never make it,” Jimmy says.

  “Why not?” Bill asks. “We made it here.”

  “We did,” he says, “but we got lucky and come out here on this high spot and seen the pyramid down there. And findin’ the coast is a whole lot easier’n findin’ a hole in the jungle.”

  Bill turns and looks back over his shoulder at the dark and endless jungle, silhouetted against the last bit of visible sunset. He appears to be considering what Jimmy just said. I expect him to try and refute it, but he just turns back and stares into the fire again without another word.

  There’s no rain yet, and none of us wants to disturb Roger now that he’s finally resting, so we eventually find comfortable positions on the ground and watch the fire burn down to just glowing coals. It illuminates little ashen worlds for each of us to populate as he pleases. I see tunnelrats and sometimes dragons.

  A scream wakes me in the night, or so I think. I sit up in the absolute blackness and listen for a long time, but the only sound I hear is a distant rumbling that echoes faraway and deep in the belly of the night. Maybe thunder, maybe wind. But there is no lightning, and there are no stars. I can’t see my hand when I hold it in front of my face. My temptation to investigate is trumped by fear of tumbling off the face of the escarpment where we lay, or worse, stepping on a snake. I close my eyes and drift back into a world that’s even darker.

  In the morning, Roger is gone and so is the shelter.

  Swallowed in the night by the earth.

  We all three stand around the sinkhole in silent disbelief. A perfectly round tunnel bored into the center of the world, so bottomless in appearance that I can imagine him falling all the way to China and meeting us there when we arrive.

  I expect Bill to cry, or even scream Roger’s name.

  What I don’t expect is for him to jump in after him.

  CHAPTER 14

  Yet Another Goodbye

  Jimmy is faster than I am.

  And I’m thankful for it, because I would have missed him.

  Jimmy has ahold of Bill’s forearm, and he’s lying on his belly at the edge of the sinkhole as Bill dangles over the terrible void, calling out, “Roooooooggggggggggg!”

  Bill’s desperate lament comes whirling back up from the depths, as if perhaps Roger were down there yelling his own name up just to mock us. I dive for the dirt, reach in, and get ahold of Bill’s other arm. Jimmy and I haul him back onto solid ground. He sits there in a trance, shaking his head. I want to console him, but I don’t know what to say. Instead, I just sit with my arm over his shoulder, both to comfort him and to keep him from jumping into the hole again.

  After several minutes sitting like this, Bill pushes himself up, dusts himself off, and looks around as if just waking.

  “Well,” he says, matter-of-factly, “all of our supplies were lost with the shelter, so we had better not waste any time.”

  As we pick our way along the edge of the ridge, looking for a way down, I see just how stupid we were to have camped there. The sun-bleached and shell-encrusted limestone is dotted everywhere with dark, foreboding sinkholes. I have the uneasy feeling we’re treading on a fragile and hollow geologic crust deposited here by some upheaval of a prehistoric ocean. Wherever Roger is, I doubt if he’s alone down there.

  We reach the jungle floor again and walk into the sparsely treed landscape, a sad and silent procession heading toward a crumbling pyramid and the end of an adventure. I’m sullen over leaving one of our own behind. Several hours into our walking, Bill begins to cry quietly. He picks up a stick and hacks at bushes as we pass as if they might somehow be responsible. Jimmy and I just keep to ourselves and let him work it out.

  When we pass a shallow sinkhole filled with rainwater, we hold onto vine
s and lean down in and each drink our fill. Eventually, we begin to glimpse the top of the pyramid above the trees, but never in the same place. It plays some strange trick, constantly appearing in one direction and then in another, as if to taunt us now that we’ve reached the final stretch. Then, without warning, we push through a dense patch of jungle and emerge into a clearing, all three of us looking up at the pyramid, wild-eyed with wonder.

  “How did they build that?” Jimmy asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But I’ll bet it wasn’t easy. Look at those stones.”

  Despite crumbling blocks of limestone at its base, and the weather-worn edges nearer the top, the temple is in remarkable shape. As we approach it, a sort of silent reverence settles over our ragged group. We take slow and solemn steps. We climb the giant stairs, past the tumbled stones, weeds, and abandoned birds’ nests. Jimmy kicks an old brittle paper wasp hive, and it tumbles down and explodes in a puff of gray dust. Then we all three climb the last steps and turn to look down over the ruined kingdom. It’s not quite midday, and the sun and the sea are at our backs. Below us, the jungle stretches away in shades of green and gold that go on forever and then just keep on going after that.

  “What do we do now?” I ask.

  “We have to clear a runway,” Bill says.

  “A runway?”

  “For the drone.”

  “Well, how are we supposed to do that?”

  Bill points down to the wide courtyard in front of the pyramid, where two thousand years’ worth of weeds and small trees have made little progress against the heavy blocks of stone that lay as pavers there.

  “You want us to clear that?” I ask.