State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy

by Ryan Winfield

  “You can communicate with Holocene II, though, right?”

  She nods. “I have a back door into their system, and I send and receive short text messages. But it only works when the satellites are lined up with my dish, which is on a nearby peak but hard to get to. That’s where I was when you both showed up, adjusting it for a connection so I could get some word from Beth on how long you had been out there.”

  “Well, have you talked with them since we got here?”

  “Yes, I have. What are you driving at, Son?”

  “Do you know if Bill ever made it back?”

  The second I ask it, her eyes drop to the tower room floor. She slowly shakes her head and says, “I’m afraid not, Son. And worse, the tunnelrats discovered the opening and filled it in, so even if he had found it again, he would’ve been trapped above in the jungle alone. I’m sorry.”

  “Can’t you have them reopen it?”

  “No, the Foundation is monitoring all subterrenes now.”

  “So Hannah knows we got away, then?”

  “Probably,” she says. “I’m guessing that’s why this drone was just here. They must be looking for you.”

  That night, as Jimmy and I lie in the hammocks that we’ve rigged up for ourselves, I can’t seem to fall asleep.

  “Jimmy,” I whisper. “Are you awake?”

  “Yeah,” he whispers back. “I’s thinkin’ on trappin’ birds.”

  “What do you want a bird for?”

  “I dunno. Huntin’ maybe. What’s on your mind?”

  “I was thinking about Bill.”

  “It’s sad, ain’t it?”

  “I keep imagining him out there in the jungle all alone.”

  My mom groans in her sleep, the bedding rustling as she turns over. We lie quiet for several minutes. Then Jimmy says:

  “He was a good man, I know that. He stayed behind so we could go. He sure was a good man.”

  “You think he’s dead, then?”

  “I ain’t said that.”

  “No, but you said he was a good man.”

  “Well, however you say it, he was.”

  I stare up into the blind darkness and try to picture Bill’s face. It’s already fading away to just a blur, same as my father’s image has. My real father. The man who raised me. I only wish I could forget Radcliffe’s evil face instead. Why is it that anger sometimes outlasts love? I push my thoughts of Radcliffe away and focus instead on my real father and on Bill. As I drift off, they merge together into the same person in my mind.

  “Yeah,” I say, almost to myself, “he was a good man.”

  CHAPTER 20

  Going Back For Bill

  “Absolutely not,” my mother says.

  “You have to let me go and try to find him.”

  “I said no, and that’s that.”

  “But this is important to me, Mom.”

  “Calling me ‘Mom’ won’t work this time, Son. There’s no way I’m sending you off by yourself all the way back to the Yucatan. No way. Not now, not ever.”

  I get up from the table and pace the shelter.

  “So you’re just going to let him die there, then?”

  “He’s probably already dead,” she says.

  “We don’t know that. You don’t know that. If there’s even a chance, then I have to go. It isn’t right to abandon him there. It wasn’t right when you abandoned me, and it isn’t right now.”

  “I didn’t abandon you, Son.”

  “Yes you did!” I turn to her and shout. “You left me down there. You left Dad down there. And you ran around up above watching your precious little drones slaughter humans, and now you’re letting another good man die just like you let my dad die. It’s as if you have no heart at all. At least Bill was there for me growing up, Mom. Unlike you, Mom. He watched over me on the beach. You were nothing but a fake memory given to me by my father, who you didn’t even deserve, by the way. You didn’t deserve him loving you. Not him, not me.”

  I’m breathless when I finish my rant.

  My mother is looking at me through tears. She appears to want to say a thousand things at once but can’t find the words for any of them. She stands, crosses the room, and hugs me. I resist at first, but then I sink into her arms and sob.

  “I’m sorry, Son. I’m so, so sorry. I love you.”

  “Why do you love me?” I ask. “Why?”

  “Because you’re my son.”

  “But I’m also Radcliffe’s son. And when ... when I think about that, I want to jump of a cliff and just end my life.”

  “Don’t say that, Son.”

  “But it’s true. I don’t want him in the world, Mom. Not in Hannah, not in me. I don’t want him inside me.”

  She walks me over to the bed and sits me down. Then she kneels in front of me and looks into my eyes.

  “You listen to me now. You are not defined by whoever happened to give you your DNA, Son. You’re defined by your choices. And the choices you make are yours. All yours. And you even wanting to risk going back to rescue Bill tells me that you’re so far from Radcliffe and that entire lot of lunatics he was in league with that you might as well be alien to them. Do you hear me. Son? Are you listening?”

  I nod that I do, my throat too constricted to speak yet.

  “Now, I’ve known Bill since he was younger than you are. And I’m the one who’s responsible for him being where he is, whether he’s out there alive or dead. So I’ll leave tonight and go see if I can’t find him, okay? I’ll try, Son.”

  “No, Mom. It’s too dangerous.”

  She smiles and wipes a tear from my cheek.

  “Now you know how I feel about you leaving. But only one of us can go, or there’d be no way to bring him back here if he was alive. So I’m going and that’s that.”

  Hours later, when Jimmy bounds in the door to show off the half-dozen rabbits he’s killed, I can tell that he immediately senses something’s wrong, because the smile drains off his face.

  “What’s goin’ on?” he asks.

  “Mom’s going to go back and look for Bill.”

  “Oh,” he says, nodding. “When’s she leavin’?”

  “Soon. She wanted to wait so she could say goodbye to you. She’s down taking a soak in the hot spring now.”

  “Should we go down’n join her, then?”

  I shake my head. “She said she wanted to be alone.”

  “Won’t she be lone enough in the drone?” he asks.

  Suddenly, I realize that she’ll be alone out there for days, and an uncomfortable ache appears in my gut. I change the subject. “Where on Earth did you get all those rabbits?”

  “You’d be surprised how easy it is to get ’em when there’s snow on the ground.”

  “Yeah, but what are you doing with them?”

  “I got an idea,” he says. “Come and help me, will you?”

  We take the only knife in the shelter, along with a pair of cutters from the hangar tool chest, and carry them out to the wall near the watchtower. Jimmy’s lays out the dead rabbits. They look like a family of bunnies sleeping side by side. Then he begins to gut them. But he doesn’t throw away the entrails like we usually do. Instead, he carries all their parts and pieces into the watchtower and lays them out on the floor to dry. Skins cut and laid flat. Intestines stretched out on the stones. Tendons and ligaments carefully removed from the muscle.

  “What’s all this stuff for, anyway?” I ask.

  “Jus’ somethin’ I’m workin’ on,” he says.

  “At least tell me why we’re putting it in here?”

  “We can’t leave it on the wall,” he says. “It’ll get carried off by scavengers. I figured this was better’n the shelter.”

  “It’s going to stink, so you figured that part right.”

  When we’re finished, we gather the edible pieces of meat up in our arms and carry them to the shelter and boil them.

  “It’s not as much as it looked like,” I say.

  “No,” he
agrees. “There’s lots of extras on ’em.”

  We’ve got all the meat boiled, along with some dumplings I make from the leftover yams and breakfast barley, by the time my mother comes in, steaming from her bath. Her wet hair shines almost blue-black in the LED lights. It’s slicked back against her head, making her appear more like a girl our own age than someone old enough to be my mother, and certainly not someone who’s been around for over three hundred years.

  “Smells good,” she says.

  We eat our supper around the table together, and none of us mentions my mother leaving. It’s almost as if we’ve made a silent agreement that it won’t be real until it’s spoken of. But as our plates clear, I notice that we all begin to eat more slowly, picking at the last of our food.

  “There’s more if’n you want it,” Jimmy says.

  Mom smiles but shakes her head. “I’m so full already, I’m afraid I might pop,” she says. “And besides, I had better get dressed now and get going.”

  She changes behind the curtain while Jimmy and I clean the dishes by taking them outside and rubbing them out with handfuls of snow. When she emerges again, she’s wearing a crisp Foundation zipsuit. She’s so small without all the furs and clothing that she looks like some young pilot just out of training and about to make her first flight. I have to remind myself that she’s managed to survive for a long time already.

  It’s a depressing descent into the hangar for all three of us.

  She triple checks the flight plan and makes sure she’s got plenty of water and food loaded into the second cockpit from a store of rations she keeps in the hangar.

  “What’s that?” I ask, indicating the controller in her hand.

  “This allows me to manually pilot the drone. The autopilot will take me to the temple; then I’ll search for him on my own.”

  “Promise me you won’t go in on foot,” I say.

  She nods. “I’ll land just long enough to refresh myself and sleep. I’ll give it a few days. That’s all I have supplies for. Then I’ll have to come back. I’ll do my best, Son.”

  Then she starts to climb up into the cockpit, but she stops herself, backs down, and steps over and wraps her arms around me. I hug her back, and for the first time we feel like equals in that embrace: equal in our fear for the other’s safety; equal in our commitment to doing right by Bill; and equal in our need for hope that no matter what happens, all will turn out well.

  She pulls back and looks into my eyes.

  “I love you, Son.”

  “I love you too, Mom.”

  When she turns to Jimmy, he sticks out his hand to shake, but she smacks it away and hugs him too. He’s smiling hugely when she pulls away. Then she kisses me quickly on the cheek and climbs up into the drone.

  “Remember the rules, boys,” she says. “Take your shoes off inside. And don’t you leave the door open, Jimmy. And stay away from those wild people too.”

  Then she grins at us and pulls the lid down, waving once from behind the glass before turning to look down the runway. I’m vaguely aware of the tunnel door opening to reveal the blue twilight, even though I can’t take my eyes off my mother in her cockpit. I expect her to look over at me for one last goodbye, but she just looks straight ahead, as if staring down her destiny. Then she’s gone in a flash. Jimmy and I run toward the opening to see her off, but before we get there the door closes, sealing her out there somewhere in that big blue evening sky.

  I never do get to wave my final farewell.

  CHAPTER 21

  Killing Time, Catching Eagles

  I swear Jimmy kills every living thing on the mountain.

  At least you’d think so by seeing all those curling pelts and shriveled entrails spread out on every inch of the watchtower floor. He even lays them out on the steps, and we have to descend the stairs our knees to keep from slipping and cracking our skulls.

  When he opens the door again to carry in yet another load, the reek of rotting flesh nearly knocks me over.

  “Aren’t you going to tell me what all this is for?” I ask.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” he says.

  Mountain hares, tiny deer, even a wild boar—there’s so much meat from all these kills, Jimmy digs a hole in the frozen ground to store it all in, then covers the hole with heavy rocks.

  “Is there anything you haven’t shot?” I ask.

  “Yeah. I seen a wild dog and froze. Couldn’t let the arrow go. Looked too much like Junior. I sighted a big mountain cat too, but I jus’ couldn’t even raise the bow.”

  He covers his meat cache with his rocks again.

  I just shake my head and say, “Well, whatever you’re up to, if another ice age comes we’ll be set to survive it. Assuming we don’t die of scurvy or some stupid thing.”

  It’s nearly impossible for me to sleep come night, because all I do is worry about my mom. I know she brought supplies enough to search for as long as a week if she needs to, but I keep wondering when she’ll be home. I feel sick with guilt over having encouraged her to go, but I think I would have felt just as bad if we had done nothing for Bill. And this new guilt is added to the ache already in my guts over Red. There has to be some way to free him, to free all of Holocene II. I know my mother must be working on something, and I even sit down at her computer to see if she left any clues about it, but I can’t bring myself to betray her trust by turning it on.

  The next morning, apparently satisfied with his collection, Jimmy skips hunting and locks himself away in the watchtower, working on whatever mad designs he’s dreamed up for the dead beasts in there. I go for a walk alone along the wall.

  It’s still too cold yet for the snow to melt, but the wind has blown it away from the high places. It’s now mostly stacked up in deep drifts that soften some of the harshness of the mountains. It’s beautiful, really. I know this wall is ancient, and I can imagine the ghosts of tourists standing here before the War, marveling at the snowy landscape and snapping photos of one another to share with friends back home.

  I walk a little farther, and the wall fades away into hardly noticeable heaps of old stone. Those early scientists with the Park Service must have maintained their section of wall for this outpost, before their numbers began to thin. I wonder why so many of them ended up committing suicide. But then I’m only fifteen, no, almost sixteen, years into my millennium.

  I stand on the wall and gaze east, wondering about my mom. She’s so far away, though, I might as well turn and look west for the same news. Nothing. Just blue winter skies and me here half a world away, wondering if she’s alright.

  Jimmy comes in from the watchtower long after dark and gives me a rawhide lanyard.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “So you can wear your dad’s pipe like you used to.”

  I admire its craftsmanship. It really is a thoughtful gesture, and I waste no time threading the pipe onto the lanyard and hanging it around my neck. Feels like old times.

  “I appreciate the gift,” I say. “I just hope it didn’t take all those animals to make it or else I’ll feel bad.”

  “Nah,” Jimmy says, “I’s jus’ tryin’ out my technique.”

  “Technique for what?”

  “For braidin’ my rope.”

  “What are you making a rope for?”

  “You’ll see,” he says, “you’ll see.”

  We eat a cold supper and turn in, lying in our hammocks in the dark and listening to the wind whistle faintly by outside.

  Jimmy must hear my thoughts, because after a long time with no talking he says, “She’ll be alright.”

  “Thanks, Jimmy. I really hope so.”

  I eventually drift off, and if I dream I can’t recall it when some sound at the door wakes me. Could it be my mother? No, she’d come in through the hangar below. I get up and go to the door and open it. The mountains to the east stand black against just a hint of blue dawn. A basket and a clay pot of milk rest on the ground in front of the door. I step out and just catc
h sight of the fur-clad gift giver padding away down the path and into the shadows.

  After breakfast, Jimmy leads me out to a plateau several minutes hard hiking from the shelter. Once there, he begins to dig a hole with the rock he used to dig his meat cache. It looks like slow and difficult progress in the frozen ground.

  “I’ll help you, but only if you tell me what you’re doing.”

  “I’m diggin’ a hole.”

  “Yeah, I can see that much. For more meat?”

  “Nope.”

  Giving up on getting any answers, I pick up my own rock and kneel down to help him.

  “How deep’s it gotta be?”

  “Jus’ deep enough for me to lie down in,” he says.

  “Well, whatever you’re doing, I sure hope you don’t turn out to be digging your own grave.”

  With the hole dug we hike down past the hot springs until we find some trees with needles still on their branches. Jimmy breaks off a pile of heavy limbs, and we drag them back up to the bluff, the needles sweeping the trail behind us as we go. He covers the hole with the branches and stands back with his hands on his hips, admiring his accomplishment.

  “It isn’t deep enough for a trap,” I say, “so what it is?”

  “If I tell you what I’m doin’, will you help me?”

  “How can I answer that if I don’t even know yet what I’d be helping you with?”

  “I’m gonna get me one of them eagles.”

  I know he’s not kidding about it either, because the next morning he wakes me up early, dressed like some mad, fur-clad zombie risen from the dead. He’s covered nearly head to toe in animal pelts, and he’s wearing a rawhide glove to his shoulder. He has a small lasso of woven rope looped around his waist and a dead rabbit in his ungloved hand. I look him over from my hammock and yawn.

  “You look ridiculous.”

  “Come on,” he says, “they like to hunt in the mornin’.”

  “What about breakfast?”

  “Grab some jerky. I already melted snow and filled us up some water bottles.”

  At least he’s taking my mind off of worrying about my mother, I think, as I begrudgingly get up and dress. It’s still gray out when we leave the shelter. The entire hike to the plateau I can’t take my eyes off Jimmy’s insane costume. He lumbers along the path, walking woodenly with the loose parts of his costume flapping in the light breeze.