Devastated Lands

by Bruce W. Perry

  "Make sure your seat-belts are on," he said to the others. He figured he only had fifteen minutes to the Tacoma metro area. He hoped they'd be free of the gang once they hit the coast.

  Now the pickup was close enough so that he could see two men in the front seat. Behind them, the cloud from Rainier had blackened; it pulsated with fiery eruptions like lightning strikes from a thunder cloud. The highway in front of him was empty and blown with a wind from the east that sent debris cart-wheeling across the road.

  "He's closer," Mikaela said. Both she and Amy were staring out the back window.

  "Are they bad men?" Amy said.

  "We don't know them," Cooper said. His own crossbow was in the cargo seat with his rucksack. He shot a glance at the gas gauge; plenty for now.

  When he looked back to the mirror, he noticed something else. He didn't recognize the amorphous but looming form at first. It was dark, steaming, otherworldly like a mirage, and it seemed to rise up from the horizon. It was higher than the highway's roadbed, like a giant malignant shadow, and much wider than the highway.

  "Shit! A lahar!" he screamed, pinning the accelerator to the floor. In the mirror, he watched the lahar, a blackish brown churning wave, overtake the pickup, which rose up on its rear axle then flipped over front-wise. It was engulfed by the speeding tsunami, a raging mud river of splintered rocks and trees, and boiling melt-water.

  CHAPTER 14

  The lahar bore down on them from behind. It was about 30 feet as its highest. The pickup following them had been crushed into a third its size. It bobbed sickeningly on the crest of the flowing slurry, burst into flames, and was consumed. Shane saw moving shadows of the two people inside. He had the accelerator of the Subaru pinned. Amy screamed bloody hell in the backseat.

  "It's another one of those la-hairs! Behind us! Get us out of here! Go! Please! Go!"

  "Everybody hold on!" he yelled, fecklessly, knowing they didn't have any other choice. He could feel the lahar's vibrations in the road as they flew an bounced along. His frantic eyes darted back and forth between the rearview mirror and the eerily empty landscape through the windshield. This land was poised for epic destruction.

  It was wooded suburbia, with an oncoming mall, Lowe's and Walmart, on the right. Going up to 80 m.p.h., he was able to put several hundred meters between himself and the lahar, which filled his mirror with a frothing, greenish-black mass casting a dark shadow on the remaining highway.

  He could see it crushing the adjacent landscape as it devastated Walmart, rolling over the one-story warehouse and the cluttered parking lot like an ocean of molasses over a toy house. Neighborhoods, trees, bridges, overpasses, highway signs, vehicles of all kinds, parking lots; one second they were there, another they weren't. The lahar devoured everything in its path, engorged with the pulverized detritus of human sprawl.

  Disordered thoughts raced through his mind: he figured the lahar would fill the valley, so their only option would be to seek higher ground at its periphery. But where was higher ground? He only had minutes, maybe one minute, to make a decision. Just when he had decided that he would attempt to out-run the lahar to the coast, hope that it would lose some momentum by spreading laterally throughout the river valley, Mikaela screamed and pointed across the front seat, "Look! Those horses! Follow them!"

  To the north, perhaps a mile away, he saw a huge herd of horses stampeding in a cloud of dust into a cleave in the far-off foothills. The hills sat alongside the valley. When they neared this spontaneously formed migration, a natural spectacle that struck them dumb, he noticed that they weren't just horses: it was a river of all kinds of animals; cattle, sheep, deer, elk, even dogs, coyotes, and smaller mammals like fox and weasels, all following an incalculable drive. Appealing to an imprecation from the blood.

  When Cooper looked up, he could see a giant flock of birds flowing in the same direction, to the north of the valley.

  "Follow them Shane, go! After them!" Mikaela screamed, jumping up and down in the backseat. He jerked the speeding vehicle onto the breakdown lane and then rattled across an open field. He made a dirt road and lurched along it at high speed. They bounced along in the dust cloud, watching the animals thunder on galloping hooves just ahead of them, with a motion he'd only seen in cable broadcasts of Alaskan elk migration, or the wildebeests in Tanzania.

  Now he drove almost directly north, nearly perpendicular to the oncoming lahar's path. It could overtake them at any moment. He noticed the animals shift in a wave pattern, moving slightly west, toward the coast. He followed.

  "What's it doing?" he screamed to the others, over a strange roar, and the galloping hooves. "The lahar! Where is it?"

  "It's close! It's spreading out!" Mikaela yelled back. "We're okay…maybe."

  "Maybe? For how long? Can we make it! I mean in this direction? Can we?"

  "Maybe 30 seconds."

  "What!"

  "We need to get to higher ground! In 30 seconds!"

  "Holy shit!"

  The animals poured like flood waters into a shallow pass. The road rose imperceptibly. Cooper dared a look to the right, past Beatrice, who stared with mute, morbid fascination, literally blind to what was happening, outside her window.

  He saw the towering putrid mass, bigger than any of the others, carrying smashed debris like so many squashed trinkets. It looked like the sludge coughed up by deep oil wells, but multiplied by a magnitude of millions. It was not 100 meters away. Closing fast. It blocked out the sun.

  The giant herd angled west, and he was speeding uphill at greater than 45 m.p.h. Amy screamed; Turk barked relentlessly, driven almost mad by the dreamy grandeur of stampeding animals. The herds didn't seem to notice, or acknowledge, them.

  "We've only got 50 meters!" Mikaela screamed, her hand on the passenger door handle, as though she was willing to jump out with Amy and run. The Subaru ground through rocks and sand, skidding into a rising switchback. Heads down, the animals tore up the road just ahead and alongside them. Cooper didn't dare look to his right; but one more switchback and they were in the clear.

  He watched the upper layers of the lahar roll past, with a dour majesty, like the view of a giant ocean liner leaving its mooring.

  He began to breathe again.

  CHAPTER 15

  He reached a pullover, a kind of overlook. He slammed on his brakes. The lahar flowed beneath them, carrying a plunder of death and destruction. The sound was deafening. It moved with a malevolent stateliness, filled with torn-up bits of the landscape they had just driven through.

  Cooper put his head on the steering wheel and rested. Black smoke from engine oil and dust from stampeding animals rose into the air, already fetid with the lahar's fumes. The animals dispersed; a portion of the herd, the stragglers, many of the slower moving cattle, hadn't made it. A few horses and sheep loped up the road and around the bend, or stood mutely on the edge of the climbing road, heads down, as if mourning the destruction.

  Cooper got out of the car and stood looking at the lahar and the ruined landscape. It had been despoiled by geology and humans were no longer imperial.

  The others got out and stood by the side of the road, Amy holding Mikaela's hand. Turk leapt from the car, stared at the animals wandering nearby, and began barking. Beatrice broke the silence.

  "Thank you for saving us back there."

  Cooper glanced at her then away; he was suddenly exhausted, and hungry. When was the last time he'd had a full night's sleep?

  "It was Mikaela's idea, and it turned out to be the right one."

  "I'm thirsty!" Amy cried out. "Where're Millie and Tom?"

  "We brought them in the car," Mikaela said testily. "Remember?" She took Amy back into the car and came back with some water, too, in a half-gallon jug she'd filled back at the house. They passed it around. The Subaru seemed spent; the fenders were dented and muddied, pinging noises came from its joints, and a slight steam wafted from the hood.

  "This road must go somewhere," Mikaela said. "How much gas do
you have?"

  "We're actually doing pretty well with the gas." They would have to find a new route to the coast. He took a drink and gazed out over the valley, which had now been scoured by at least two Rainier lahars. Smoke rose everywhere he looked, nothing much moved. It looked primeval; the leftover region after an asteroid strike.

  The valley wasn't utterly dominated by lahar, however. It hadn't stretched to the valley's complete width. Varied buildings were still standing, some, in the town they had just come from.

  Beatrice began to cry softly. She took her sunglasses off, long enough for the hazy sunlight to strike her face. "Poor Dan. He was probably caught in that, this horror. A terrible, terrible thing." She sobbed into her hand.

  "That's okay Beatrice!" Amy cried out. "One of those la-hairs killed my family!" Her voice betrayed the matter-of-factness of youth.

  "Listen, Beatrice," Cooper said. "I've got to confess. I have something to tell you. I feel bad I didn't tell you before. That's my fault. I found a man on the second floor of your house; in the bedroom. Where you got your clothes. He had passed away."

  She turned toward him. "You found Danny?"

  "Yeah." She seemed to be looking at the mountains, Mt. Baker and the fuming Rainier, and not his face.

  "Well…it's not your fault. But I wish you'd said something before. We were married 30 years. We were soulmates. We were, really." She looked away with her wet cheeks and swallowed. She put her sunglasses back on, composed herself.

  "I feel sad, but a strange sort of sad, one that has relief in it, too. That explains why he never contacted me; he must have fallen, in all the stress. Had a heart attack. That's awful news, I've been dreading it, but uncertainty and ignorance is worse than bad, I suppose. I'll go back for him, his remains. The town might still be standing!"

  "I doubt that," he said, although he had visual evidence of some buildings that were still intact, out off the highway, which hadn't been completely buried. At least not yet.

  "Think we should start up the car again?" Mikaela said.

  Cooper got into the car and it sputtered to life, a rattling coming from under the hood. Civilization, he assumed, lived on the other side of these foothills, unless they'd also been buried by lahars. Or descended into a primitive chaos.

  They all got in, and the car pulled back onto the dirt road, which seemed designed for utility vehicles. It offered no guarantees that it would connect them to the coast.

  As they rolled slowly up a moderate hill, animals impassively parted. Deer scattered up the hillsides, limping through rocks on boney legs; cows lingered on the precarious roadside, vacuously nodding their heads. Cooper could see herds of black and brown horses reconstituting themselves. They ran together along a border of trees below.

  He was half tempted to use his crossbow on one of the deer or sheep for food, but he couldn't get himself to do it. He felt a strong kinship with the animals, and a kind of gratefulness.

  The road headed down into a draw that was mostly woods. He saw an excavation like a large quarry, and a half-baked wooden structure that contained a pile of sand. He vowed to take the first road heading west. The sun was beginning to set, into the vivid horizon, which was blood red. He longed for an unobstructed view of the sea.

  In the distance, he spotted the beginnings of a suburb, neighborhoods and parking lots, perhaps 20 miles away. From the backseat he heard, "The gals, and the canine, have to make a visit to Mother Nature."

  "Haven't we had enough of Mother Nature for one day?"

  He pulled the Subaru over to the side of the dirt road. Mikaela, Amy, and Turk clamored out. Turk immediately lifted his leg on a rock, then stood at attention, his nose in the air and ears twitching. Cooper figured it was the herds of animals he smelled.

  Beatrice chose to stay in the car. She'd settled into a graceful sadness; he didn't feel the stab of blame. Amy began to run across a field toward some trees, with Turk in pursuit. Mikaela cried out, "Don't go far! Slow down!" It reminded Cooper, who was following them, clutching his crossbow, of when he first saw Amy, standing in the flowers calling for Turk.

  He walked across the field behind Mikaela. It felt good, safer, to be on the other side of the hillsides from the lahar, which was like an ever-present malignancy.

  "Tell me about this boyfriend of yours. What's his name?" He had a half-crushed candy bar, a Charleston Chew, from the mom-and-pop shop back in Orting. He tore off a piece and handed it to her.

  "Muhammed Lassiter."

  "Where's he from?"

  "Originally, Egypt. His father's a Muslim. His mom worked for the State Department in Cairo. Then they moved to Spokane. That reminds me…" She pulled a cell phone out of her pocket. Habitually, she attempted to power it up, but of course failed.

  "Once I can recharge this thing, I'll try to send him a text. I have no idea where he is now."

  "Where did you meet?"

  "At the gym. He's into martial arts, too."

  "So you kicked and wrestled each other. How romantic." He wanted to kid her. He felt a need to lighten up, draw back the curtain on this darkness that enveloped them.

  She half smiled. "Actually, I thought he was funny. And smart." Then they saw Amy and the dog disappear into a dip in the field, toward some trees. Mikaela cupped her hands over her mouth and cried out. "That's far enough Amy!"

  Cooper stole a glance at the car; it sat quietly on the empty road.

  "Is he religious?"

  She looked at him, somewhat warily chewing the candy bar.

  "Muhammed? Yes, he is. He goes to a mosque, he does his daily prayers, at sun-up and sundown. I respect it. It's a discipline, like mixed martial arts."

  "Has he tried to convert you?"

  "To Islam?"

  "Yeah."

  "No. He wouldn't do that. That's not his thing, conversion."

  "Do you think he wants to marry you? I've heard a Muslim man can be quite conservative, want to bring up the children as Muslim."

  "My, my, you are full of questions today, aren't you?"

  "Just curious, you know. Looking for distractions. Sorry if I was pressing too hard. I just want to get us out of here. You know, it's funny. I'm an escapist by nature. Now I truly need to escape. Actually, I'm exhausted. I need to face plant."

  "Me too. Before, how did you usually escape? As in life? Getting away."

  "The mountains, mostly. I'll do a big mountain climb, or a ski. Often alone. It's when I feel most at peace, in the mountains. Sometimes the desert."

  "I went to the desert with Muhammed once." They stood still in the long grass, keeping Amy in sight. "Utah, outside of Moab. We hiked to the Colorado River as the sun was setting. Pure bliss. I slept in the desert by a fire, in our own campsite. That's what I love about the West, its beauty, wide open spaces. Its remoteness. It fills my spirit, like a sail."

  "I couldn't have said it better myself. You're reminding me of Telluride. As soon as we get our butts out of this clusterfuck, I'm inviting you and Muhammed to Colorado."

  "It's already on the calendar."

  He decided to stop while she went on to a copse of trees, where they saw the dog wagging his tail. He found himself jealous of this man named Muhammed, who'd he'd never met, but had Mikaela's attention and respect. He couldn't deny it, he and Mikaela had formed a bond, naturally, as they fought for their lives.

  When he had gotten most of the way back to the car he heard truck engines from over a knoll. He called out over his shoulder, "Mikaela, stay in the trees with Amy!" Then two lorries appeared coming up each side of the road. They blocked any escape for the car.

  CHAPTER 16

  They were both heavy pickups, Ford F-450s, with men in the back. The men were armed, wearing dark fatigues. There were about four in each truck. He wanted to crouch in the weeds and arm his crossbow, but it wasn't going to do any good. Why now? he cursed to himself.

  They pulled over at each side of the Subaru. The men disembarked. Beatrice had opened her passenger door and tentatively
stepped onto the roadside. The men approached her, aggressive and unfriendly like.

  His instincts told him to run, but that would draw them to Amy, Mikaela, and Turk. When he was spotted, three of the men began to stride towards him; he noticed two of them had white-painted faces. A sickening resignation settled over him. He had the gruesome image in his head of Beatrice being immediately slaughtered. And himself.

  "You can drop whatever you've got in your hands there pard!" one of the men yelled out. He gently placed the crossbow on the ground. He didn't think they'd seen the others down in the woods.

  They got to within about three meters of him and stopped. Over their heads, he could see two of the men, one of them with his hands on Beatrice, leading her to one of the trucks. She cringed and flinched when the man seized her arm.

  "You're smart not to run," the one in the middle said. He had a pistol on him, an unshaven face with beefy jowls, and long black greasy hair that didn't fit the fatigues. It was unsoldierly.

  "Where'd you guys come from?"

  "I'm asking the questions. That your car?"

  "No, it's hers'. Hey, tell them to take it easy with her, okay?" Cooper said "She's blind. And harmless. She hasn't done anything to you. I'm just giving her a ride to her house. That was some disaster back there, right? Totally out of this world. Why don't you let her take the car, and let's all move on out of danger. We have to keep moving."

  "Why don't you take your panties out of a twist," he said, and two of them men laughed inanely. "Where are your other pals?"

  "Pals? What do you mean by that?"

  "What does it sound like, moron?"

  The man walked up to him, with his scowling mug not a foot away, and placed the barrel of his gun on his chest. He smelled like a whole pack of Marlboros, no filters; and sourly of bourbon. "The other people that were with you. That's a big car. Got any young chicks with you, Studly?"