State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy

by Ryan Winfield

  The boy turns and runs farther into the camp. I chase after. He leads me across the hidden valley along the winding central path. He’s surprisingly fast, and I follow by the glimpses of him I catch in the firelight as he passes the burning tents. I’m nearly out of breath by the time we reach the end of the camp, where the backside of the enclosed valley narrows to just a crack that the channel water spills out of, into the blackness of the gorge beyond. The boy stops at something on the path. When I catch up to him, I see his mother, the healer, lying heaped on the ground with a gaping hole in her side. The boy takes my hand and pulls me farther along the path to where the channel gives way to rapids that tumble down the gorge. There we find the old man. We’re beyond the flames now and in the shadows in which he lies, I can’t tell what wound might have killed him, but his one good eye has rolled back into his head. It stares up at us whitely from his blackened face.

  When I look up I just catch sight of the boy slipping from my view onto a narrow ledge that leads out from the camp and into the gorge. I flatten myself against the cliff and follow him. Rough steps of wet stone lead down alongside the cascading falls, and in the dark and rumbling spray of shadowed mist I find the boy kneeling over Jimmy. I drop and gather my best friend in my arms. He’s limp and cold and badly burnt.

  But he’s breathing, dammit, he’s alive.

  I look around instinctively for help, but other than the boy’s shadow standing nearby, we’re completely alone. I look to the crack of light above us where the camp still burns, and I begin to piece together what must have happened. The riders headed out the front to lead the drones away, while the others tried to sneak the boy out the back. I can see the relay now as he was handed off from his mother to the old man and finally to Jimmy who managed to see him safely out before collapsing.

  I look back to Jimmy in my lap. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I see that the left side of his face is covered with pale patches of waxy and oozing burns. He trembles in my arms.

  I stand and get behind him and gently hook my arms under his pits and begin dragging him back up the steps. I stop when the boy blocks me. He points down, away from the camp. I’m too wrecked by shock and grief to argue or ask why, so I turn Jimmy carefully around and ease him down instead, following the boy into the shadows of the gorge.

  It’s slow going. The wind picks up, and the clouds that had been reflecting the fire drift away and reveal the clear, cold sky above, the stars twinkling there as if nothing at all has changed.

  The boy runs ahead, disappears, and comes out again with a lantern. He leads me the last several meters down the gorge to the entrance of a cave. The cave appears to have been carved by some undercurrent in a time when the water raged through here much higher than it does now. Although it’s not deep, it’s well-protected and dry. Several stuffed mattresses line the far wall, and the boy leads me to one of them with his lantern. I lay Jimmy down. The sight of his face in the lamplight makes me cringe. I can’t imagine the pain he must be in.

  I take up the lantern from the boy and inspect the cave. There are recesses in the walls filled with supplies. I hand the boy an empty clay jug and motion for him to go outside and fill it with water from the falls. Then I find some blankets and a clean bundle of cloths. I remove Jimmy’s kilt and inspect his bruised and battered body, but other than a few bad blisters on his left hand and arm, the bulk of his burns are isolated to his neck and his face. He’s shivering, either from cold or from shock, and I cover him up to his chest with the blankets. The boy returns with the water and I wet a cloth and gently begin to clean Jimmy’s burns, scraping away the dirt and the charcoal and the seared pieces of outer skin. The worst is a portion of his cheek that was pierced by something hot. Although the wound is cauterized and not bleeding, I can see his lower teeth peeking through. When his wounds are clean I drape them with dry cloths. Then I sit on the edge of the bed and watch him, wondering what else I can possibly do except pray.

  “You’re gonna be okay, buddy. I’m here now.”

  He opens his eyes and looks at me, and then he shudders with a spasm of pain and closes them again.

  I sit watching him for hours, not daring to take my eyes off of him lest he might suddenly stop breathing. I play a mental game with myself, willing him to inhale after every exhale and holding my own breath until he does. He sometimes stirs and moans, but other times he appears to be peacefully sleeping. As the night passes, I’m vaguely aware of the boy squatting nearby, getting up and leaving several times, but always coming back again. Then, just as the first light of dawn is spilling into the cave, he comes back from one of these outings with my mom, both of them wet from swimming the channel.

  She kneels beside me where I sit my vigil and looks down on Jimmy. She winces when she pulls the cloth away from his face. She’s on her feet again immediately and rummaging through the supplies, laying things out on the floor to inspect them in the dim light of dawn.

  “Will he be okay, Mom?”

  I take her lack of an answer at first as meaning that she doesn’t think he will, but then I remember her bleeding ears and I turn and ask again louder. When she doesn’t look up at me from sorting her supplies, I give up and turn back to Jimmy. A few moments later I feel her hand on my shoulder.

  “Move aside, Son,” she says.

  I rise to let her work. I’m walking out of the cave to wash my face in the cold falls when I hear her say:

  “Yes, he’s going to be fine.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Dust to Dust

  The tent frames and bridges still smolder, but the bodies don’t.

  The smell is so overwhelming that I can taste it. I hold a cloth over my nose as I walk through the wreckage of the camp looking for survivors. The boy is now clothed in tattered furs he’s collected from the rubble. He picks through the ashes ahead of me, poking at things with a tent stake he’s pulled from the ground. He seems curiously detached and unaffected, as if this were just some random place he’d stumbled on and decided to explore before heading back to his home. But there is no home for him now. Or for any of us either.

  I come upon the old man’s story chest, lying on its side with the sand spilled out. I kneel and scoop a handful up and watch the breeze catch it as it falls out through my fingers. If each grain is an hour of our lives, where does it all go? The old man’s stick and brush are protruding partway from the chest. I take them up and draw the face of God in the sand.

  Then I ask of it, “Why?”

  It does not answer, of course.

  I remember the old man drawing the city, the bomb coming down, and the destruction that was left in its wake. I look around at the camp now, and I can’t help but think that his scene has lifted off the sand and sprung to life.

  My mother nurses Jimmy all day in the cave while the boy and I dig the graves. The shovel handle is short, half of it having burned in the fire, and it makes for difficult work in the hard soil. The boy drags over a pickaxe nearly as large as he is and begins to help. It isn’t much of a burial, but by early afternoon we’ve got most of the villagers lined up in a shallow trench and are covering them with soil, sand, and ash. I reach inside the old man’s bloodied furs, retrieve his jade snuff bottle, and hand it to the boy. He looks at it in his hand for a moment as if he’d never seen it before. Then he stuffs it away in some hidden pocket amongst his clothing. We toss our tools to the far bank, swim across the channel and collect them again, move to the outer valley, and begin to dig there.

  The horses we leave, but where the riders and horses have been burned or blown to bits together, we try to sort out as best we can those parts which are human and drag or carry them back to our hole to be interred. I whisper an apology to the legless man who clutched at me for help the night before. As I drag him backwards over the bumpy ground to the grave, his head lolls and bobs this way and that, as if to say that it’s no big deal. The sun has nearly set by the time we cover them.

  We pass the night together in the cave, but we mi
ght as well each be alone. My mother’s hearing is still fragile at best, and the boy speaks a language I don’t understand, so there is little talking between any of us as we huddle beneath blankets to stay warm. When Jimmy sleeps his breathing is irregular and shallow. When he wakes he moans with terrible pain. We pile blankets on him, heat water and make tea and try to coax him to sip it when he’s alert. So far he hasn’t said a word.

  In the morning, the first of the survivors arrives.

  I wake to find a young warrior standing over me and the boy standing by his side. The boy points to Jimmy then to me and talks with a great sense of urgency. The warrior hears him out, then nods, turns, and runs from the cave. He’s back by late morning with three elder sisters. They gather around Jimmy and inspect his wounds. One of them massages his limbs while the others mix up medicines from the cache of supplies. Less than an hour after they arrive, his burns are coated with a white paste and covered again with fresh cloths.

  My mother and I leave him temporarily in their capable hands and hike back to our ruined shelter to retrieve what we can. It’s a solemn march there, and I feel several times that my mother wants to say something but doesn’t dare for fear that I blame her for Jimmy. I guess I do, a little.

  When we arrive at the shelter, the fire is completely out. It must have rained the night before, because puddles of black water collect in the low parts of the floor. I put my hand out and stop my mom from going farther when I see the strange pod lying where our table used to be. It’s a huge half cylinder made of carbon fiber and concave on one side.

  “Do you think it’s a bomb?”

  “Come again, Son.”

  “A bomb, Mom. A bomb. Do you think it’s a bomb?”

  “I don’t know what’s inside this one,” she says, “but it’s a cargo carrier for a drone. We used them to deliver supplies.”

  “Well, I doubt she sent us algaecrisps,” I say.

  “I doubt that too, Son.”

  “Let’s just leave it alone.”

  We walk as far around the cargo container as possible, punch in the hatch code, and descend into the hangar. With the shelter now destroyed, I can see how it serves as a bunker and why my mother retreated there. I retrieve my reading slate and my strike-a-light from the drone. My mother digs through her supplies and comes up with a small first aid kit.

  “I wish we’d known that was there when you were snake bit,” I say. “It would have helped.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t,” she replies. “There are painkillers in here, and now we have them for Jimmy.”

  “I had her agreed to a deal, Mom.”

  “What’s that, Son?”

  I’m not sure why I chose now to confront her, but I can’t keep it in any longer.

  “Hannah, Mom. She had agreed to release Red. And the others too. But then the professor told her what happened at the Foundation, and the deal was off.”

  My mother leans against the drone and hangs her head.

  “I’m sorry, Son.”

  “Why did you betray me?”

  “We had been planning this for a long time now. When Hannah picked your birthday to meet, it was just too perfect.”

  “So my birthday was day zero?” When she looks up at me, I repeat myself. “My birthday. It was day zero in your note?”

  “Yes,” she says, nodding. “I had programmed a virus into the Foundation’s software system years before. It was supposed to shut down their warning systems so we could sneak into the control center, take over the drones, and prevent Holocene II from being flooded long enough for the others below to rally support. Then they’d planned to bring up a train filled with enough converts to physically take over. But I never should have let Beth and Jillian try it alone. And my hack failed. The warning systems worked.”

  “Mom, your hack probably failed because we reloaded the mastercode after the Foundation flood. That’s why we went to the Isle of Man, remember?”

  “I thought you went for the encryption code,” she says.

  “We did, but only because we had first gone down to the basements and retrieved the backup mastercode and reloaded it. I thought I had told you that part.”

  She sighs and says, “I’m afraid this is all my fault, Son. I blew it.”

  “Don’t say that, Mom. This is Radcliffe’s fault, and this is Hannah’s fault, but this is not your fault. No way.”

  Her eyes well with tears, and her voice quivers when she says, “So you don’t blame me for what happened to Jimmy?”

  I shake my head no and hug her. We stand there in the hangar, wrapped in one another’s arms, and we both cry gently for a long time. We cry for what’s happened to the Motars, we cry for what’s happened to Jimmy, and we cry for what’s happened to us.

  When we climb back up to the shelter, I find a single eagle feather floating in one of the sooty puddles. I almost pick it up for Jimmy, but then I think better of it.

  We’re several meters down the path when I stop.

  “I have to know what’s in it.”

  “What’s that?” my mother asks.

  “The cargo container. I have to know what’s in it.”

  She seems to agree. We hike back up to the shelter and eye the container from every side.

  “Maybe it fell off a drone by accident,” I suggest.

  She shakes her head. “What are the chances of it landing right here, if it did? No. This is meant for us.”

  “What if it’s a trick? What if I open it and it explodes?”

  “I have some cable down below in the hangar,” she replies. “Maybe we could use that.”

  Thirty minutes later, we’re crouched on the wall twenty meters away with the end of the cable in my hand.

  “Pull it hard,” my mom says. “Even though we unlatched it, they’re air tight and they sometimes like to stick.”

  I count to three. When I jerk the cable, the cargo container pops open but nothing happens. We wait a minute, then I creep forward to see what’s inside. A few days ago my mother would have insisted on going first, but something has changed in her after the other night.

  “Be careful,” she whispers behind me, as if I were creeping up on some sleeping beast that might wake.

  The container is as wide as a drone and nearly as long. It opens on its end rather than its side, likely designed that way to hold more weight in flight. But because it’s so deep, I can’t see anything inside other than shadows. I kneel down and reach in, but I don’t feel anything either. So I lie down and reach in all the way to my shoulder and feel around. Still nothing. I crawl inside the container, waving one arm in front of me. My hand closes on something soft. I grip it and pull. Whatever I’m dragging is heavy and hardly gives, but then something breaks loose, and the thing I’m gripping gets light. I back out of the container into the daylight, sit down and look at Red’s hair and the top of his sawed-off skull in my hand. Crude staples bend out from the fleshy edges of his scalp where the crown of his skull that I’m holding had been reattached.

  I turn and vomit on the ground.

  When I look up again, my mother has her back turned and her head hung. I want to fling the thing away from me just to get it out of my sight, but it somehow doesn’t seem like a proper way to treat a dead friend’s remains. I set Red’s scalp of red hair carefully to the side and crawl back into the container. When I drag his body out, my mother is waiting there to help me. We pull him clear of the container and lay him out on the ground. We look at his naked body and his gaping skull.

  “That monster Hannah must have put him in Eden while he was still awake,” my mother says.

  “How do you know that?” I ask.

  “Because his eyes are open.”

  I bend to close his eyes but the lids won’t shut.

  My mother walks away and comes back a minute later with two small stones and covers them.

  “I guess we should go and get the shovel,” she says.

  “There’s another one.”

  “Another s
hovel?”

  “No. Another body?”

  She looks like she might faint. Then she steps over to the open container and kneels to crawl inside. I rush to her and hug her, preventing her from going in.

  “Why don’t you get that shovel,” I say.

  She nods, stands, and walks away without a word.

  It takes her over an hour there and back. By the time she returns, I have Red and Mrs. Hightower lined up next to the softest piece of earth I could find at the base of the wall. The spot overlooks the peaks and valleys to the east. It makes me happy at least to know that they’ll be silent witness to a million amazing sunrises. My mother and I dig without talking. I’ve now buried, burned, and fed more corpses to sharks than I care to recall. Every time it’s a somber and serious business.

  When we finish we lay them side by side in the shallow grave. I replace the top of Red’s skull where it belongs. One of Mrs. Hightower’s arms is frozen at the elbow, ninety degrees and pointing out. The hole isn’t deep enough to cover it. I force it down to her chest, but it springs up again, so I find a large flat rock and weight her arm to her chest with it. Before we cover them up, my mother kneels and places her open hand on Mrs. Hightower’s forehead.

  She says, “Forgive me, Beth.”

  I say the same thing silently to Red.

  With the hard soil packed back on top of them, we stomp it down. I feel like some mad murderers celebrating on their victims’ graves. When we finish I’m crying. My mother wraps her arm around me, and we stand and look down the mountain together—two filthy and tired travelers missing their friends.

  “This has to be stopped,” my mother says. “Hannah has to be stopped. Somehow, some way.”

  I agree with her, of course, but her attempt to take over the Foundation failed miserably. The proof of that is now beneath our feet. Every one of her allies is dead except possibly Jillian. Her communications equipment is destroyed. All we have is one two person drone and the three of us here in these wild mountains, along with a few Motar survivors, trying to get by somehow on our own.