I couldn’t see their faces at first. The two bigger critters stood in the drainage’s bottom on rock scoured clean by past floods. They looked up at their younger brothers, who ranged across the hillside opposite, their backs to me. I couldn’t make out the mouths on the smaller ones further away. It was quiet for a while. Those little deer knew all they needed to about stealthy travel.
One started bucking and kicking at the slope. Dirt and gravel flew and tickety-ticked down the hill. Then something big came sliding down. I thought it was a just a big rock. Then I recognized it. A tortoise. My guts twisted.
I could make out the shell’s broad curve and the flat part on its belly. The young buck stopped digging. He knew what he’d gotten. He jumped and turned. He chased the tortoise downhill to where it had stopped. With a whip of its head, it tossed it down toward its elders.
The tortoise hit the rock bottom with a thunk and a scrape. The two elder stags danced around it for a full minute or two, swinging their heads and grunting. I squinted, stared, and wished for binoculars, but I still couldn’t get a good look at their mouths.
I did get a good look at Katy. More than halfway down the slope, she peered out from behind a boulder, pointing those damn specs at the fighting bucks. I eased over the hillcrest. Quiet as I could, I made my way down to her. She didn’t even turn to look when she felt my breath on her neck. She reached a hand out and grabbed my wrist after a quick fumble across my belly. It made me angry. I could’ve been a bear or wolf, and she hadn’t even turned to look.
It turned out to be a play fight. The bigger buck took the prize without striking a blow on the smaller one. It nosed the tortoise along the ground for a bit, shoving it up next to a step in the rock. It struck the shell with three tough chops from one of the bony plates in its rack. The tortoise stayed tucked up tight. The hits must’ve rung the tortoise like a bell, put it right out of its senses.
Katy let me go and took off again, slower this time and still quiet, but we were too damn close already. I cursed silently and followed her to the next boulder. We were close enough now to hear the critters breathe. I couldn’t help myself. I leaned out to look around Katy to see what was going on.
The big stag walked around the tortoise to get a better angle on it, I guess. Then I saw them: four giant incisors. The top two were like awls, the bottom two like chisels. It pulled its lips back and opened its mouth wider than I’d have thought possible. I’d swear it drooled on that tortoise’s shell.
I grabbed Katy’s arm and squeezed hard. It was all I could do to keep from screaming. That’s how terrifying a sight it was. Katy gasped, but those bucks didn’t hear it. They were too busy watching their headman tear the tortoise apart.
And I’ll be goddamned if they didn’t eat it. They’d gone carnivorous.
No, I won’t take that back. I will be goddamned. To make it worse, I felt a cold thrill over it. The Canyon and the radiation had both surely played a part in this, but by bringing in the tortoises, so had I. The deer’s usual forage had been lost to the changing weather. They couldn’t eat the cacti themselves. The radiation allowed a series of freak mutations that let them eat critters that could chomp on the prickly pear.
We watched them find and eat two more tortoises in a similar fashion. They shared each meal to some extent. The shell-cracker took his share first, but he left some for the littler ones. Another medium-sized buck came over the opposite hill, dragging a jackrabbit by its neck like a mountain lion would do. Blood dripped from its fangs when it dropped its prize at its fellows’ feet. The biggest buck lowered its head and took the choice cut. It tore the rabbit’s head off with a chomp and a quick twist of the neck.
That was too much. My legs went weak and my shoulders trembled. I must’ve lost my grip, because in a second, Katy had twisted loose. She took long steps to get closer to the stags.
In my horror, to my horror, I shouted after her, “No!”
The word came out as a breathy squeak. Every one of those animals raised their heads and turned their bloody mouths our direction. Their eyes blazed. Nostrils flared. The biggest stag lowered its head and pointed its wicked rack toward Katy.
Katy saw the threat. She stopped in her tracks, as frozen now as I’d been wobbly a moment before. She needed to back away, cede the territory to its obvious owner, but she didn’t know it.
The stag snorted and scraped a hoof on the rock. He took a step forward, putting himself between Katy and the others. He was just protecting his young and defending the food they needed. All Katy had to do was start walking backward. She didn’t do it, and I had no way to tell her. A word spoken then could startle the stag into a charge. I thought hard and fast, determined not to act rashly. The pulaski hung heavily in my hands. I suddenly knew what to do.
I swung the steel head back to my shoulder. The movement felt as natural as walking after years of using the tool. The next motion would be the sideways swing forward to bring the axe to bear on a standing tree, but I kept the blades high, next to my shoulder, with my forearm across my body. I walked forward slowly, with short, smooth strides. I put myself between Katy and the stags.
The big one raised its head a bit and stared, bug-eyed at me and that pulaski. It took a long, deep breath and then shot it out on the exhale, like a wave crashing in on the tide. Either me, the tool, or both had made it think twice. I stepped back, bumping into Katy.
She got the message and took a step back, waited a moment, and then took another. The stag held its ground but let its head rise a bit with each step we took backward, becoming less and less ready to charge. They kept their eyes on us until we got to the hillcrest. We stopped there and watched them back.
When the sun came over the hill and hit the ground down in the drainage, the biggest stag tossed his head around, proudly displaying his antlers as if showing off his lineage. He kept his eyes on me, so I raised the pulaski overhead, punching it toward the sky. That seemed to settle him down. He kept his head up, but I swore he gave me a quick nod before they all headed upstream toward the Redwall cliffs, to some secret place in deeper shade.
It gave me a good feeling. It was like the Canyon, with its ways and wiles, had made him and me both.
I felt breath on my cheek. Katy looked at me, really looked at me, but still through the specs. She saw my face now, but she’d also seen my expression as I’d watched those stags do their work. She likely had it recorded. You’ve got to know I was ashamed.
No, I take that back. I was mortified. Mortified at my role in what had happened to these critters and at the thrill of pride I’d felt about it.
I did this must’ve been written all over my face. Katy turned away, aiming her specs back at the now-empty canyon. If this wasn’t killer content, I didn’t care what was.
“Here,” I said, holding the pulaski out to Katy. “Do you want it?” My heart pounded and my eyes were wet. The damned tool weighed more than two kilos, and we both still had big water loads we needed to get us out of the Canyon. She would not be able to take it on the bus. I was asking her if she’d stay, but I wasn’t sure she understood the question.
She took it but held it like it was an artifact, not a tool she’d ever use again. She glanced at me with something in her eyes I hadn’t seen yet. Respect.
I swore her shadow shrank a centimeter as we both stood there, still and quiet. The sun’s heat built on my back.
I started to feel scared and sad. Finally, I asked, “You going to upload that?” It was an offer and a hard one to make.
She looked up at me. Her chin trembled. She looked nervous. She looked scared . . . and hopeful. My heart dropped.
“The media would swarm you. They’d swarm the deer, but they could probably do it in a way the deer wouldn’t mind.”
Not so for me. She knew that.
I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and then took a big breath and stood up straight. “It wouldn’t be so hard to take if I knew you’d use the money to go back to school. I believe you’d ke
ep your word if you promised me.”
She looked at me with a face full of wonder. Wonder on the verge of joy.
“Finish school before you upload it, is what I mean. I’ll front you the money from what I make at the outreach center.” That threw her through a loop, but I could see she considered it. “Maybe when you’re done, you’d consider a job down here in the Canyon. Mokiyesva could use someone with tech like yours to keep an eye on the backcountry.” It took a long time for tech to get obsolete in the Park Service. We didn’t have money to upgrade very often.
Katy smiled. She pushed the specs back onto her head and looked around. The rising sun lit the Canyon with a warm, golden light. “Maybe I would.”
She shifted the pulaski to a more comfortable position, holding it low at her waist, and started down the hill toward our camp. I let her get ahead. I stopped to see the skull on my way back. I knelt next to it and rested my hand on his head between the shattered antlers. To the best of my ability, I blessed it with a prayer about good intentions and unintended consequences. I prayed Katy would give attention before she decided what work she wanted to do to receive it.
It disturbed me that these peaceful grazers had mutated into eaters of living flesh, but I wasn’t ready to talk about it yet. Not with her. She was a young woman, starting out on life in a world gone so cruel that deer grew fangs and tortoises styled spikes. It was her world, our world, a world largely changed by us, and now I couldn’t deny my hand in it.
Her tattoos and way of looking past me through the specs still disturbed me quite a bit too. I spent more than a few silent miles trying to figure it. Maybe all this virtual communication was as much a defense mechanism as fangs or spikes. In a world of nine billion people, I could imagine a person might need a social buffer in the absence of having true physical space.
I wasn’t sure it made sense, but I determined to spend at least a few years at the outreach center trying to figure it. I’d at least learn something if I tried.
On the hike back out, I noticed Katy looked around sharper than she had before. Once in a while, she’d stop there in front of me. She’d hold up a hand for quiet, push her specs back, and we’d just watch and listen together.
I hoped she noticed the way light and shadow played across the Canyon’s walls, highlighting its fractal complexity. I wanted her to read the history written in its rockfall scars and imagine the full-flood glory of its ephemeral waterfalls. To the inattentive eye, the Canyon is just rock walls and river, but to those who watch carefully, it’s a temple made of living earth. You can’t make a person see it. They have to come to it themselves, each in their own way.
* * *
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
SARAH K. CASTLE has published short fiction in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Nature, and Helix. She received both her BS and MS in Geology from Northern Arizona University. In her career as an environmental scientist, she’s worked as a geologist and environmental scientist in national forests, oil fields, and a landfill. She lives with her family in Durango, CO, where she works as an air quality specialist.
HOT RODS
CAT SPARKS
The winds blow pretty regular across the dried-up lake. Traction’s good—when luck’s on your side, you can reach three hundred KPH or faster. Harper watches the hot rods race on thick white salt so pure and bright, the satellites use it for colour calibration.
Harper doesn’t care about souped-up hot rods. Throwdowns, throwbacks, who can go the longest, fastest, hardest. But there’s not much else to do in Terina Flat. She used to want to be a journalist, back when such professions still existed. Back when the paper that employed you didn’t own you. Back when paper still meant paper. Back before the world clocked up past three degrees and warming. Back when everybody clamoured for Aussie coal and wheat and sheep. The sheep all died when the topsoil blew away in a dust cloud stretching almost five hundred K. Ships still come for the uranium. Other countries bring their own land with them. Embassies, fenced off and private, no one in or out without a pass. Cross the wire and they get to shoot you dead.
Harper thinks about her boyfriend Lachie Groom as the racers pick up speed. The future plans they’ve made between them. How they’re gonna get the hell out of Terina, score work permits for Sydney or Melbourne. They say white maids and pool boys are in high demand in the walled suburban enclaves. Only, Lachie couldn’t wait. Said they needed the money now, not later.
The racers purpose-build their dry lake cars from whatever they can scavenge. Racers used to care about the look; these days, it’s all about the speed. There’s nothing new, no paint to tart things up. No juice to run on except for home-strained bio-D. You need the real stuff for startup and shutdown. The racers pool their meagre cash, score black-market diesel from a guy who hauls it in by camel train.
She can hear them coming before she sees them kicking up thick clouds of salty dust. The pitch drops dramatically as they pass; she takes a good long look as the cars smudge the horizon. Hot rods, classics and jalopies, streamliners and old belly tankers, all the side windows and gaps taped firm against the salt. It gets into everything: your clothes, your hair, your skin. Nothing lives or grows upon it. No plants, no insects, not a single blade of grass.
The short racecourse is five K long, the long one near to twelve. King of the short run is Cracker Jack, Lachie’s cousin—plain Cracker to his mates. Obsessed with Dodges. Today’s pride and joy is a 1968 Dodge Charger, automatic, gauges still intact. Purpose-built for the super speedway, veteran of Daytona and Darlington.
He loves those cars like nothing else alive. Spends everything he has on keeping them moving. Harper has come to envy the racing regulars: Bing Reh, Lucas Clayton, Scarlett Ottico. Others. There’s enough on the salt flats to keep them focused. Enough to get them out of bed in the morning.
Cracker nods at Harper; she throws him half a smile. Checks out his sweat-slicked, salt-encrusted arms. “I’ll take you out there,” he says, wiping his forehead. No need to specify where out there. She knows he’s talking about the American Base—and Lachie.
She doesn’t say no but he gauges her expression. “After sundown. The others don’t have to know.”
Unfortunately, in towns like Terina Flat, everyone knows everybody else’s business.
“Was a stupid plan,” she tells him. “We never should have . . .”
Cracker dusts salt flecks off his arms. “It was a fucken’ awesome plan. ’Bout time we got a look behind that wire. Found out what all the bullshit is about.”
She shrugs. Her and Lachie’s “plan” had sounded simple. Just two people trying to keep in touch. Inching around a Base commandment that seems much harsher than it ought to be.
Cracker tried to talk Lachie out of taking the job at all. Too late. By then, Base medics had tested his blood, piss, and spit. He’d signed away his rights on the dotted line.
Lachie’s been gone almost a week—the full week if you’re counting Sunday, which Harper is because she’s counting days, hours, minutes, seconds. Segregating Sundays is for the churchy folks. Whole town’s riddled with true believers since the heavens clammed and the good soil blew away.
“ ’S’no trouble,” says Cracker.
Harper shakes her head. Her eyes are focused on the middle distance. On Janny Christofides and that beat up 1968 Ford Mk 2 Cortina she loves more than most girls love their boyfriends. Janny’s boyfriend’s been on Base six months. She never wins a race but she keeps on trying.
Lachie’s not so far away, just over the wire on newly foreign soil—American, although it could just as easily have been China or India or Russia.
Once past that wire, you don’t come back until your contract’s through. Money comes out, sometimes with a message. Stuff like I miss you honey and I love you and tell grandma not to worry and its OK in here, the food is pretty good.
The whole town knows about that food. They watch it trucking in by convoy, trucks long enough to fit houses in them. Refrigerated, loaded u
p with ice cream. Bananas from the Philippines, prime beef barely off the hoof. They stand there salivating in the hot red dust. Whole town’s been on starvation rations since before the last town council meeting proper, the one where Mr Bryce got shot in the leg.
Crude jokes about Lachie circulate, not quite out of earshot. Somehow everyone found out about their ribbon secret. Voices carping on about how he’s probably too distracted. Too busy shagging those hot chick Growler pilots. Boeing EA-18Gs—sleek and fast—have been burning across the blanched blue sky all week.
She ignores them, watches as a flecked and rusted 1936 Plymouth sedan tailgates a ’58 Chevrolet Apache that once used to be red, apple rosy.
Cracker tries to shift the subject. Says those 18Gs were manufactured in Missouri—what’s left of it. Mumbles something about future threats across the electromagnetic spectrum.
Harper recalls peculiar ads on free-to-air: The smiling lady saying shit like Stealth is perishable; only a Growler provides full-spectrum protection. Making stealth sound like a brand of sunscreen. What use could there be for stealth in Terina Flat? Nothing but more sky than anyone can handle laced with impotent wisps of cloud.
The racers pass, wave, whoop, and holler, some of the vehicles disintegrating in motion, belching smoke and farting acrid fumes. People used to think that only topless roadsters could hit top speeds. Back when Lake Gairdner was the only lake to race on. Back before the Bases and the droughts. Back before a lot of things that changed this country into someplace you’d barely recognise.
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