Wildside

by Steven Gould

  “Sorry, boy. You can graze in the morning.”

  I got out another chemical ice pack and took 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. The thought of food made me sick, but I put some soup on anyway and stared blankly at the shadows while it cooked.

  What was I going to do?

  I hadn’t come up with an answer by the time the smell of burning soup pulled my attention back to the stove.

  “Dammit all to hell!”

  I wasn’t mad about the soup, though. I threw it out and, since something about the anger made me realize how hungry I really was, I put more on.

  Impossible kept calling to me, hungry, I guess. I thought about going out back and cutting a bunch of buffalo grass, but the thought of going outside, alone, with no one here to come after me—well, it brought up memories of Uncle Max’s skull, bleached and broken.

  I rummaged through the stores and finally took a package of bran flakes and emptied it into another bucket. Impossible sniffed it tentatively, than stuffed his head deep into the bucket. It apparently met with his heartfelt and enthusiastic approval. I just hoped he wouldn’t colic or something.

  I got the soup off the stove before it burned this time and ate it sitting on a mattress, a sleeping bag pulled around my shoulders. I thought about the previous night, when I’d shared that same bag with Clara. I wanted to think I could still smell her skin, but all I really smelled was the stink of horse urine from Impossible’s corner. Still, since I associated Impossible with Clara, it was something.

  The night was very long.

  At dawn I tethered Impossible on the grass halfway down the runway, then powered the Maule up and taxied it out of the hangar. At the noise from the engine, Impossible promptly pulled up his tethered stake and went charging down the runway, dragging the tether rope and the stake behind him.

  If he got himself eaten or broke his fool neck by stepping on the tether rope, Clara would never forgive me.

  I shut the Maule down and climbed out, whistling shrilly. Impossible stopped before the tall grass at the end of the runway and bounced on his front legs, tossing his head and whinnying, not running any farther, but not coming back toward me, either.

  I thought about trying to chase him on foot with my bum knee, then limped back into the barn and grabbed another box of bran flakes and a bucket. The knee was throbbing fiercely as I slowly limped back out to the middle of the runway, a good distance from the noisy and smelly airplane. I put the bucket down on the ground and slowly poured bran flakes into it. Then I backed away and sat, my shotgun in my lap.

  It took twenty minutes, but Impossible crisscrossed the runway, getting a little closer each time, and finally ate the damn cereal. I’d rescrewed the tether stake back into the ground by the time he’d finished, and this time, I didn’t do the half-assed job I’d done at dawn. The two-foot spiral was deep in the sod, the triangular top barely clearing the dirt.

  “Move that, you ambulatory pot of glue!”

  I loaded the Maule with six half-filled, plastic, five-gallon containers of aviation gas, a case of shotgun ammo, water, food, the gasoline-powered Weedeater, the chain saw, and all the rope I could find. With frequent stops to rest my knee and check for predators in the vicinity of Impossible, this took two hours.

  Then I mucked out Impossible’s corner and gathered grass, cut from where it grew tall on the runway’s edge, and piled it in the hangar where he could get to it. Then I moved him back inside and filled up his water barrel.

  He sniffed the grass in the corner disdainfully and looked at me.

  “Sorry,” I said. “No oats. No alfalfa. No bran flakes.” I patted his neck, then turned the generator on and shut the hangar door.

  The lights in the tunnel were working, though one fixture had come down in the cave-in when we’d moved the gate. It dangled, supported by the wiring, one of its two tubes shattered. I walked carefully, my eye on the ceiling, especially when I crossed the mounded dirt from the cave-in.

  There’d be no one to dig me out if it collapsed again.

  I had to dig for the gate solenoid. We’d buried it in our excavations, but I found it and the clamps where I thought it should be, under a foot and a half of dirt. I took it and some of the smaller pieces from my hoax gate machinery, about one armful, and carried them out to the hangar.

  When I was back in the hangar I had to wipe the sweat from my face before continuing.

  I took the batteries, car alarm radio receiver, and timers out of their hidden pocket at the back of the hangar, and got the solar panel down off the control tower, then loaded it all in the Maule. Finally, I went back into the hangar and shut down the generator.

  Before closing the hangar door from the outside, I looked back at Impossible. “Be back this afternoon.” I hoped it was true—if I didn’t come back, Impossible would die a horrible, slow death. I considered leaving him outside, untethered, but thought his chances of surviving that weren’t very good, either.

  I’d just have to be careful.

  With that in mind, I was meticulous in my preflight inspection and checklist. The Maule lifted off the ground, though drag from the growing grass, uncut since the tractor died, added a hundred feet to the takeoff run.

  It took less than two minutes to reach the gate. I couldn’t help compare it with my multihour, limping journey the night before. My knee ached sharply just thinking about it.

  The area around the gate was buffalo grass, perhaps a foot and a half tall, scattered with mesquite. I landed several hundred feet away, in an avenue between bushes. The ground was rough beneath the grass and the plane slowed quickly. Then I taxied between mesquite bushes until I was next to the gate, where I unloaded my supplies and equipment.

  It took the entire morning to lower the gate back onto its trailer. I used rope belayed to timbers which were lashed to the heftier mesquite shrubs, and pulled it slowly over, moving its support timbers so it never dropped more than a few inches at a time. When it was back on the trailer and lashed in place, I tried to pull it with the Maule, maximum thrust, taking cylinder head temperatures to dangerous extremes.

  It didn’t move.

  I shut down the Maule and pulled the trailer by hand, using the old trick of tying a long rope to a distant tree and making it as taut as possible, then walking to the midpoint and pulling it ninety degrees. The trailer moved inches. Tighten the rope—repeat as necessary.

  By late afternoon, I’d moved it thirty yards. This took 370 repetitions of the tighten/pull sequence. My knee was swollen again, and ached with a constant, fierce pain, and I had blisters on my hands. I’d also run out of ibuprofen in the plane’s med kit.

  I flew back, barely able to handle the rudder pedals.

  Impossible was very glad to see me.

  I spent the evening mothballing Wildside Base, including the Maule. I closed the shutters on the tower and moved the radio and computer equipment down into the hangar. I drained the gasoline from the fuel tanks and the oil from the engine, then replaced the oil, overfilling the crankcase. Then I disconnected the batteries and blocked the landing gear so the tires didn’t sit on the ground.

  Impossible, munching away on a box of Cheerios (hey, they’re oats, right?), watched my labors with interest. The work was exhausting but it kept my brain busy. Every time I sat still, the images that filled my mind were Clara, Rick, Marie, and Joey being interrogated by Bestworst.

  I worried about my dad, Luis, and Richard, but it was my friends who worried me most. The memory of a gun held against the back of my head added a palpable memory that made the back of my head hurt and my left ear ring.

  Finally, after mothballing the generator by the light of the camp lantern, I took four ibuprofen and lay down on a mattress.

  Sleep came with bad dreams and sweat.

  Saddling Impossible was an ordeal for the both of us. I’d never saddled a horse in my life, much less put a bridle on. I kept mixing up the straps, finally figuring out how the nose band buckled under the jaw. The saddle was easier
since there was really only one pad and one strap, with two buckles to do, but I fussed with it since I knew the saddle would roll underneath if it wasn’t tight enough.

  I closed up the hangar and jammed a stick in the latch, jamming it closed. It would be easy enough to remove it, but impossible to do so by accident.

  Impossible took off before I was in the saddle, dancing sideways with me draped ignominiously across the seat and trying not to drop my shotgun. I managed to pull myself upright and steered him back toward the gate. He wanted to trot, but my knee screamed every time he did. I held him, instead, to a walk, trying to sit back with a firm pressure on the reins. This mostly worked, though he seemed confused by the way I held my injured knee away from his side, trying to turn in that direction.

  I twisted in the saddle as I drove away from the base and felt like crying. This was my place—my beachhead into this world, and I might never see it again.

  I let Impossible drink a bit when we forded the stream, then nudged him on. He wasn’t even sweating when we got to the gate.

  But I was.

  I unsaddled him, replaced his bridle with his nylon halter, and tethered him in the grass.

  I dug a trench under the foot of the gate, a little deeper than the thickness of the frame, about two feet. Then I screwed four tether stakes into the soil, two to each side of the trench. When I stood on the end of the gate, the rear wheels of the trailer lifted and my end settled slowly to the ground. Without taking my weight off the frame, I used rope, running from stake to stake, to secure it down.

  The rest was rope work, timber props, levers, and sweat. It took until late afternoon to get the gate upright, with pauses to rest, eat, drink, and scare away some red wolves who were interested in Impossible.

  The gate was propped up with timbers again, and I’d filled in the trench so the inner frame was barely underground. I studied the layout carefully, running through the next steps in my mind. When no new disasters occurred to me, I went and saddled Impossible but bundled his bridle up and tied it to the back of the saddle. It was getting on toward dusk, a perfect time for predators, but also a perfect time for what I was about to do.

  I put Impossible in front of the gate and led his lead rope through the gate, where I tied it to the tongue of the trailer. He started to walk through, but I grabbed his halter and stopped him. “Whoa. Just stand right there, okay?”

  I stepped back, to the switch. If I stretched my arm out, I could just reach his rump while leaving my left hand on the switch.

  I took a deep breath then simultaneously threw the switch, smacked Impossible’s rump with the flat of my hand as hard as I could, and shouted at the top of my lungs.

  The gate opened, cutting Impossible’s lead rope, and he bolted forward, with a loud whinny. In his path stood a very surprised soldier, who tried to dive aside as the horse plunged at him. Impossible swerved, but his chest struck the soldier’s shoulder and the man went flying. Another soldier, farther back, took a step toward the gate, his rifle rising, and I threw the switch.

  Impossible’s whinny cut off sharply and I was alone again, just me, my pile of equipment, and the predators.

  An enormous weight came off my shoulders. As long as they didn’t shoot him, Impossible was safe. I could do anything, now, and succeed or fail, I didn’t have to worry about him.

  I hoped they’d feed him.

  I dropped the gate back to the ground.

  I didn’t mean to. Well, that is, I wanted it flat on the ground, but one of the mesquite bushes I was using to tie off a belaying rope tore completely out of the ground as I was lowering it. The gate dropped from forty-five degrees to flat with a thud that I felt from fifty feet away.

  Christ, did I break it?

  I walked slowly over to it. The sun was still above the horizon, but barely, throwing postcard streamers of light through clouds on the horizon. Dust still hung in the air from the fall, but there were no obvious cracks or dents. There was really only one way to know if it still worked.

  I flipped the switch with a length of sapling. There was a flash in the gate and, looking down through it, it seemed to be filled with dark earth.

  Perfect.

  The gate was opening underground on the tame side. How far remained to be seen, but it was what I was counting on. I shut it down and began working on the gate solenoid.

  It took an hour to rig. The more complicated stuff—the timer, radio receiver, charging circuit, and batteries—were still intact in one unit. All I had to do was mount the solar panel on an upright timber facing south, clamp the solenoid to the switch arm and the switch.

  The tricky part was mounting the wiring to the solenoid so that it would not be in the field when the gate came on and passing buffalo wouldn’t knock it down.

  I set it up using the timbers from the trailer, lashing them together to form a solid pillar and burying them three feet deep in the ground. I mounted the box of batteries, receiver, and charging circuit on top, with the solar panel, eight feet above the ground.

  I tried the remote control on the gate in the late dusk, standing back from the gate. It opened and shut on cue. I double-checked all the connections several times, then shook my head.

  Let it go, Charlie. It’ll work or it won’t.

  I turned on the camp lantern and began dismantling shotgun shells.

  There’s not that much powder in a shotgun shell. The front half of the thing is filled with lead shot or slugs and then there’s a plastic wad, and finally, the charge, in a quarter to a third of the cartridge’s length. It took me most of a case to get a pint of grains.

  I collected them in the bottom of a coffee can, brought along for that purpose.

  There was movement in the grass, something outside the light of the lantern. I sat, for a while, with the shotgun in my lap, looking out into the dark, but nothing came.

  After some time, I turned the gate back on and slid things—a shovel, the plastic cans of aviation fuel, the junk parts of my fake gate—across the slippery slope of the gate field. They slid through the air, as if flying, then dropped down onto the black dirt with little thumps.

  I suspected that the gate was about a foot and a half underground on the tame side. I hoped the vibrations weren’t detectable by anybody standing above it on the tame side. I carried the gunpowder in one hand and the lamp in the other, held far apart, and slid down the invisible slope.

  Then I realized my shotgun was still leaning against the column of timbers. I put the lamp and the gunpowder as far from each other as possible, and scrambled back up the slope. I had to kick off the ground and glide up. I took the shotgun back in with me.

  The next part was digging.

  I dug a circular pit, about two feet deep and five feet across, and arranged the six plastic gas cans within, like the spokes of a wheel, standing upright, touching each other at their corners and forming, at the center, an open hexagon. The cans barely stuck up above the terminus.

  I used some of my displaced dirt to fill the hexagonal center hole. When it was mostly full, I set the coffee can of gunpowder on the dirt, adding a little more dirt to bring its top level with the top of the gas cans, also sticking barely above the terminus. I covered it with a piece of plastic bag and a rubber band to keep the rain and wind out.

  The junk from my fake gate I dropped into the hole in the spaces between the cans. I started to throw dirt back into the hole, then stopped myself. It would probably work better with the empty space around it.

  The dire wolves showed up, then, but I didn’t notice at first. Not until I heard the one in the lead yelp as it bounced off the field behind my back. The one behind him swerved and glanced off the field to the side.

  I grabbed the shotgun as the first one recovered and jumped again, higher, but his back legs struck the field again, and he slid back. I almost fired, then, but stopped myself, switching my grip to the pepper Mace spray.

  There seemed to be only two of them and as they circled, testing the field, I s
aw blood on the shoulder of one of them. I realized that these must be the remnants of the pack that ran into me and Clara, and then the soldiers.

  When the wind was at my back as I pivoted to watch them, I sprayed, a wide aerosol pattern that the wind carried right into their faces.

  They ran, howling.

  Stay away from humans, guys. They don’t fight fair.

  Humans.

  I checked everything in the pit again, then threw the shovel out of the frame, picked up the lantern and the shotgun, and scrambled across the field, out of the gate frame.

  There was more digging to do.

  I kept expecting to run into the gasoline cans, which was reasonable, but of course it didn’t happen.

  My knee wasn’t working very well and I did a lot of the digging from a seated position, pushing the dirt out as best I could. It took until midnight to get to the bottom edge of the field, then I tunneled in, toward the center of the gate, having to make longer and longer trips out to get rid of the dirt. I switched to my flashlight then and turned off the lamp.

  At least I wasn’t worried about the tunnel’s collapsing on me. The field held the ceiling dirt encased like glass. Still, when I was digging up, once I’d cleared the field on the inside of the frame, I kept expecting to run into the bottom of the gas cans, but they weren’t in this universe, were they? I was coming up under the gate, through dirt on the wildside. The cans were buried on the tame side, going down through the gate.

  The dirt changed color when I hit the tame side and I turned off my flashlight and pulled down the dirt with my hands. My fingers encountered grass roots, then, and I slowed way down. My right index finger poked a hole through grass roots and dirt into emptiness. I pulled back and heard voices.

  Dammit.

  I pulled enough grass and dirt down to poke my survival signaling mirror partway out of the hole.