Phytosphere

by Scott Mackay

  At last she found herself exhaling. Lightning flashed yet again. She caught a glimpse of the truck climbing the road into the mountains, a quarter mile distant.

  She turned to her daughter. “I told you not to leave a note.” Her tone was icy, and she didn’t mean to speak so harshly to her daughter but couldn’t help it.

  “I didn’t leave a note.”

  “Then why is Buzz following us? I told you this would happen.”

  “Mom, I didn’t leave a note. How could I leave a note? You were hovering over me like a vulture.”

  “I left a note,” said Jake, defiance in his voice.

  She turned. She barely discerned the outlines of Jake’s face in the dark. “Didn’t you hear what I was telling Hanna?”

  “Mom, I wasn’t going to have Dad come home and not know where we were.”

  “Yes, but I said I was going to keep foning him.”

  “Don’t worry. I didn’t say Marblehill. I used a clue. Like I said we should.”

  Her lips pursed, her eyes momentarily moistened, and she felt an odd mixture of sympathy and pity for her son; he was, after all, only twelve, and was bound to do childlike things. He couldn’t reason the situation through the way an adult could, and really, when it came right down to it, how could you control your kids in a circumstance like this? A clue. Like it was a game.

  “And what did you put in your clue?” she said, hoping for the best.

  “I said we were going to Chattahoochee. I didn’t mention anything about Marblehill.”

  Her exasperation jumped a notch. “Yes, but Buzz knows Marblehill is in Chattahoochee. A clue like that…it’s not really a clue at all.”

  And of course kids might think they were outsmarting adults, but they rarely did.

  “Hanna said I should make sure it was a clue Dad would get.”

  Now he was blaming Hanna, another kid thing to do. She wanted to trust him, but how could she ultimately trust a twelve-year-old?

  Jake tried to stick up for himself some more. “It’s a good thing I had to take a pee, otherwise he’d have caught us for sure. Now he’s never going to find us.”

  “Yes, but he doesn’t have to find us. There’s only one road into Marblehill, and if he doesn’t find us now, he’ll be waiting for us once we get there.”

  Hanna interrupted her. “Mom, there’s a big dog out by the car.”

  She turned. The lightning flashed. She saw the dog. Just a glimpse of it; a large white mastiff, what she would have called a British bulldog, only she didn’t know breeds that well. The dog was huge, and so skinny she could see its ribs sticking out from under its fur. The ribs scared her, because she had never seen a dog so emaciated before, and when dogs got that thin, that starved, with no owners or masters around, it meant trouble. She didn’t forget Buzz, not entirely, because Buzz was definitely a big problem, something they would have to face, like a hurricane brewing out in the Atlantic that was going to get here sooner or later. But for the moment she shoved Buzz to the back of her mind and concentrated on the dog. Not only the white dog, but also another dog that was now coming up the street. This was a big dog too, but it was a dark one, and in the next lightning flash, she saw that it had some Rottweiler in it.

  Jake suddenly got up and extended his hand. “Here, boy.”

  She pulled him back. “Jake, what are you doing?”

  “I want to see if he’s friendly.”

  “He might have gone wild. Look at him. And now there’s two.”

  “Mom, why can’t we have a dog?” he asked.

  “You know why. Because of Hanna’s asthma.”

  “Maybe when Hanna goes to college.”

  As if the future were still the same, and not vastly altered. In the next lightning flash she saw both dogs looking up at the church, sniffing the air. Then they started nosing around the car. It was so dark she could hardly see. She hoped that by the next flash they would be gone. This wasn’t right, dogs in the pouring rain like this, alone, at night, without masters, their ribs like the bars on a jail cell.

  They slavered around her car, as if, even through all that metal, they could smell the vacu-paks of Chinese noodles and cans of Irish stew.

  Another dog came along. She was relieved to see that it was a lot smaller, one of those Jack something terriers, and she thought this dog would just sniff the car with the others. And it did for a while, but then came trotting up the steps, and it didn’t even look like a dog anymore but more like some creature from the depths of Hell, because all its fur was plastered to its skinny body and its ribs were like the fingers on a corpse, and when it barked, it wasn’t so much a bark as a shriek, the oddest and most unnerving thing she had ever heard, as though the animal were possessed.

  The bark acted like a siren call to the other two animals. They stopped sniffing the car and came up the steps. The bulldog’s chin was up and his jaw was forward, and he looked like a prizewinning fighter ready to jump into the ring and tear someone to pieces. She didn’t feel safe up here on the church steps anymore. Hadn’t she read about this somewhere, dogs going wild, turning feral, packing, cooperating in order to get their gullets filled with whatever fresh meat they could find? And it was like she could sense they were feral because she herself had gone feral. The darkness had changed her into something that was dangerous: a cop killer. So what had it done to these dogs? Their owners had obviously abandoned them. She knew it was happening all over the country: pets getting abandoned. But what actually happened to animals when they were forced to live in darkness all the time, and when they had no choice but to subsist on food that didn’t come out of a can but had to be found or killed?

  The Jack something terrier shrieked again. The shrieking acted like amphetamines on the bulldog. It shifted and pranced over the churchyard, like it was slowly working itself up. Meanwhile, the big, dark dog growled, an unearthly sound, and in the next lightning flash she saw its face, like one of those African masks, murder sketching its way across its emaciated features. She felt compelled to get back to the relative safety of the car.

  “Jake, do you have your safety off?”

  His hand roved to the butt of his gun, and he nodded. The air was filled with the smell of dog saliva. The proximity of the animals set Hanna’s lungs off. She wheezed, and after a moment she coughed. The coughing must have enraged the bulldog because it charged the church steps, making a feint all the way to the bottom, then turning away and going back to the yard.

  “Okay… walk slowly to the car. Hanna, stay between Jake and I.” She pumped a round into her rifle.

  “Don’t make any sudden moves.”

  But it was no good and she knew it, because the second they rose from the church porch, the dogs went wild, growling and barking and working themselves into a frenzy. She thought she and her children would be trapped here, and that Buzz might come back, and that they would wind up in a gunfight with the sheriff’s brother. So she tried the church door, but it was locked. They had no choice. They had to go to the car.

  She and her kids went down the steps, and it was indeed no good, because the little dog came right up to her and tried to nip her heels. She kicked it out of the way, and that’s when the bulldog tried to get around in back of Jake and rip a chunk out of his thigh, and as much as she liked dogs, and would have owned one if Hanna hadn’t had asthma, she knew she had no choice. She fired at the bulldog, clipping its haunches. It went squealing away, at first not knowing if it had been crippled or not, but then falling over and trying to drag itself through the muddy churchyard with its front paws. The way the white mastiff acted was a horrible reminder of Brennan Little.

  The other two dogs bolted.

  But the bulldog…

  Goddamn that bulldog. Her eyes flooded with tears. The thing yelped in exquisite agony. It tried to crawl away, but it couldn’t move. She remembered a dog up the street from her childhood home in Kansas, and how friendly she had been with it…. She was really a dog person. But now she had to put th
is one down, and it was breaking her heart.

  She walked across the churchyard and got it over with.

  Once in the car, they headed up the mountain; and while she had gotten her tears under control, she still felt so blue about the dog that she wondered if she would ever feel unblue again. Jake reached forward and patted her shoulder.

  Hanna, meanwhile, was wheezing and wheezing. “Mom, I’ve got to have some.”

  “Sweetie, it’s not time yet. And it’s dangerous if you take too much. You know what Dr. Saleh says.”

  “Mom, I’ve been taking a few extra hits every now and again, and it hasn’t killed me.”

  “It’s only been making you high,” said Jake.

  “Jake, you don’t know what you’re talking about, so just shut up.”

  “Kids at my school use puffers to get high,” said Jake.

  “That’s because kids at your school are stupid, just like you. Mom, can I have some?”

  She didn’t want to fight it. She was too upset about the dog. “Does your heart feel funny at all?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Jake… dig it out. One puff, Hanna. We’re running out.”

  “I’m going to need at least three.”

  “Three? Have you been taking three all along?”

  “Mom, I know what I need. This nursing home stuff isn’t as good as the usual stuff.”

  “Yes, but you’re supposed to take only two puffs.”

  “I’m nearly seventeen. I think I can look after myself.”

  Jake handed the puffer forward. Hanna lifted it to her mouth like an old pro. She pressed the mouthpiece between her lips, squeezed the plunger, and inhaled. Glenda heard a little burst, but it was weak, and she was indeed afraid that they were running out. Hanna squeezed again, and this time nothing

  happened. Her daughter pulled the bronchodilator away and looked at it as if it were a criminal. Then she tried again, but again got nothing. She pulled it away from her lips a second time.

  “It’s empty, Mom. These nursing home ones are no good.”

  “But that’s the last one we have. It’s supposed to last us to Marblehill.”

  Like the drama queen she sometimes was, Hanna flung the empty inhaler over her shoulder into the backseat with the carelessness of Henry VIII tossing away a chicken bone. “Great. What am I going to do now?”

  Glenda could have argued with Hanna, underlining for her daughter the foolhardiness of what she had done, especially with the overdosing. But where would it get her? Instead, she simply contemplated their grim, drugless situation. They weren’t a quarter of the way to Marblehill, and Hanna was out of inhaler.

  The wheezing would start. The coughing would start. And it wouldn’t let up. And her daughter would weaken. And to be weakened in the new Stone Age was more dangerous than overdosing with Alupent.

  So she didn’t rant the way she might have in normal circumstances, but let it go, hoping that somehow, up the highway, they might find an abandoned pharmacy, and that in that pharmacy they might conceivably search out some medicine that Hanna could use.

  She gripped the wheel and peered out the windshield, racking her brains for a solution, but the only fix she came up with was getting to Marblehill as soon as she could, where Neil was stockpiling medicine for the long haul.

  She glanced up the hillside and saw that her brother-in-law was right: erosion had become a big problem. All the small plants on the forest floor had died a long time ago. Root systems had rotted in the ground, and that’s why the ground had that stinky smell so much of the time. But now the rain was washing everything away, and she saw that many of the dead trees had toppled one against the other, so that the forest looked like a crowd of drunks, all leaning trunk to trunk for support.

  And what was this up here? She eased her foot on the brake. Damn. Part of the road had cracked away into the gully below. She stopped. Mud from the hill had washed over the road, but it wasn’t deep, and she could easily get through. What bothered her were the big cracks and how a giant slab of asphalt curved over the hill like a macadamized waterfall.

  “I’m going to take the car across this section myself,” she said. “You guys get out and walk.”

  They grumbled a bit—kids always grumbled about having to walk—but at last they left the car and trudged down the highway, getting drenched to their skin in the rain. She put the car in gear and proceeded, thinking to herself, day at a time, day at a time, day at a time —and the road held, felt solid under the car, and after a few minutes she made it across the cracked section, the highway became whole again, and the kids got in.

  Hanna’s eyes had that glassy look they always had after a hit of Alupent. Glenda gave Jake a glance.

  Jake was looking at Glenda as if he were curious about what she was going to do next. And she realized that they were all getting to know each other in an entirely unexpected way, and that they weren’t just a family anymore, but survivors, and that the issues were no longer those of getting to school on time or finishing homework or trying to get more hours at the nursing home, but of simply trying to stay alive.

  Jake said, “Mom, I’m sorry about the note. I just thought…”

  She continued along the highway. “What’s done is done. And maybe he didn’t even see the note.

  Maybe he just guessed. He knows we go to Marblehill from time to time. And he knows we’re broke and can’t go anywhere else for a holiday. I mean… where else would we go? So… maybe it’s not your fault.”

  “It’s just that I didn’t want Dad to die of a broken heart.” He could hardly get the words out because he was all choked up.

  “It’s okay, Jake. Don’t worry about it. We’ve got the rifle. We’ve got the gun. We should be okay.”

  They had gotten no more than another mile when she saw what she at first thought was some kind of optical trick sneaking in from her left field of vision, changing the monotonous look of the highway so that the road appeared to be bending in an odd way, out toward the valley. But then she had to ask herself, was it the movement of the car toward the trees, or of the trees toward the car? Because the trees really looked like they were shifting, and she suddenly remembered a line from grade ten English class, “Till Birnam wood remove to Dunsinane,” because the forest honestly looked as if it were moving. The apparition was so strange, so unexpected, that she felt momentarily dizzy. Then all the bits of visual information collected into a coherent whole, and she realized she was seeing a landslide, like a freight train filled with upright trees rolling down the mountainside at fifteen miles per hour, not in a great rush, but indomitable and massive, the whole dead forest skiing downhill en masse.

  “Holy shit!” said Jake. “A landslide!”

  She slammed the brakes and the car jerked to a halt. Her body was now rigid and her heart pounded, and panic overcame her like a tsunami. She put the car in reverse and backed up, nearly swerving over the edge—God, she wasn’t good at driving in reverse. She slowed right down, because she thought that maybe her reverse driving might kill them. Yet she was desperately fearful that the landslide would spread. Would the mountain suddenly flatten like a mound of strawberry jam? No. This section held, and at last she brought the car to a stop, and they watched the landslide from a safe distance.

  It wasn’t until the landslide petered out that she thought of practicalities. How were they going to get around it? Would they have to take a detour?

  She took a nervous breath. “Hanna, let’s see the map.”

  Hanna dug out the map. The thing was at least twenty-five years old, and falling apart. Glenda had a look. She studied the various highways and side roads. Yes, a considerable detour. How could they do that, and get all the way to Marblehill on their remaining charge without having to walk part of the way?

  And how could they possibly walk when Hanna had run out of medicine and wouldn’t have the breath for it?

  “If we don’t find a way around this,” she said, “we’ll have to go back to
Dunstan and take 74 to Charlotte.” She peered up the road. “I’m wondering if we can get around on the right shoulder.” Was it worth it? Could they take that risk? “There’s a little ledge along there.” She turned to her kids. “What do you think?”

  Hanna and Jake inspected the ledge.

  “Are you insane, Mom?” asked Hanna.

  Glenda stared at the huge, muddy impasse. Which was the greater risk? Trying to get by on the right

  shoulder or going back and having to walk in the dead, dark countryside around Marblehill, the place where Buzz was most likely to ambush them? She thought the road was at least worth investigating.

  “We should see how extensive the landslide is,” said Glenda. “If it’s a mile wide, we’ll turn back. If it’s just a little ways…because if we have to take 74 to Charlotte, we’re not going to make it all the way to Marblehill on this one charge. We’ll have to walk partway.”

  “Maybe we’ll find some place to charge further along,” said Jake.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “Everything’s closed in Wake County. I think it’s the same everywhere.”

  She had a look at the ledge a second time. “You guys stay here.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Jake. She could tell he was trying to make up for leaving the note back at the house.

  “Jake, don’t desert me,” said Hanna.

  “I’m going with Mom,” said Jake. “You’ll be okay in the car.” Jake reached over the seat and patted his sister’s shoulder. “Just sit back and relax. It shouldn’t take long.”

  “Mom, make him stay here.”

  “Give her the gun, Jake. Just in case.”

  “Mom, that’s my gun. She doesn’t know how to use it.”

  “She says I get the gun, Jake. Hand it over.”

  Jake reluctantly gave her the gun. “Just don’t point it at us. You’ve got to think safety first with a firearm.”