Appleseed

by Matt Bell

  Time and miles pass. To ease the hours as they walk, they sing together, their voices forming rough harmonies over snatches of half-remembered hymns, bawdy folk tunes; at night they crowd beside their campfire to dry their bones, lighting their pipes and talking of the nurseries they’ll plant every year forever, of the matured orchards they’ll revisit this autumn. “I believe in the promise of the wilderness,” Nathaniel says, staring into the firelight, as nightly he repeats his self-made creed. “I believe this continent’s far territories, each equally dense and foreboding and unpathed, await only the bravery of good men. And I believe in the taming of those wilds, how any acre not put to use is an acre wasted.”

  The good earth, the invincible earth, the earth that can only be improved, made more useful, better suited for Christian inhabitation; an earth giving up its treasure for the good of mankind, a race of which Chapman is at least partly a part.

  Mostly this future waits its distant turn. In the present, there is the dark forest to navigate, there are nurseries to plant and land to claim with trees, trees they’ll one year sell to settlers surely following behind them. Every morning Chapman and Nathaniel roll their dew-soaked bedrolls, pack their one pot, Nathaniel complaining his clothes will never dry from the forest’s damp, Chapman leading his shivering brother onward, his hooves following the trails of other hooved beasts. Unlike Nathaniel, who slinks off to hunt whenever the opportunity presents itself, Chapman never eats the flesh of these animals. But neither does he fear starvation, not here in the bountiful Territory, its lands filled with bright bunches of berries, with undomesticated fruits and wild corn, with pale tubers hidden beneath the rich dirt.

  Despite the ever-present chill beneath the canopy’s shade, sometimes a bright shaft of sunlight beams through wherever some tree has fallen beneath the weight of winter snow or the sharp crack of spring lightning. Weeks into their journey, the brothers stand in one such pillar of light, clapping each other’s shoulders affectionately, this man and half-man united by their journey and by the destiny Nathaniel has designed for them to earn.

  “I believe, brother,” he says, his face flush with the sunbeam’s warmth, “that you and I can put this place to its right uses, that you know best what might grow where, what land might take our seeds and make them thrive.”

  In this Nathaniel is correct: whatever else Chapman is, his wildness is a boon, his faunish body a living dowser for good earth. By his guidance the brothers soon arrive at a sharp bend in a river’s creased arc, fertile soil holding a stand of tall trees tucked inside its watery curve, some of them healthy and whole, some recently lightning burned and therefore easier to remove.

  “Here,” Chapman says, “right here,” he repeats, pointing at the level stretch of riverbank that surrounds them.

  “Yes, brother,” Nathaniel agrees, rubbing his hands together. Even with the land waiting to be cleared, it’s possible to imagine a humble house appearing here, a home where a man and his wife and his children might grow some crops and raise some stock and even catch fish for dinner, brown trout leaping over a manageable rapid, their mouths hungry for the hook.

  Chapman is one of a kind; he’ll build no house nor plant any garden, he accepts he’ll have no wife and raise no children, not like this, not as a species of one, half wild and half man, alone in the world except for his human brother. Later, Nathaniel says of his own prospects, deferring any pursuit of his desired family until he’s made his fortune in apple trees. For now only today exists, and today they’ll plant a nursery so some other man might come here and finish the work, all that must be done to settle this land as Nathaniel’s Lord intends: to the good life of husbandry and stewardship, to the total dominion promised all righteous men willing to put to profitable use every square inch of this God-gifted earth.

  John

  The Manifest Earth

  John squeezes sideways through a slim slot in the Utahn stone, his shirt rasping against the rough surface of the red rock canyon, its walls baking with the desert summer’s heat; he emerges covered in rust-colored dust, dust worn free by burning winds over tens of thousands of scorching days. On the other side of the slot waits a high-walled cul-de-sac of stone, a roofless chamber gaped toward the sun and the wind, its floor piled with hundreds of sun-bleached bones, startlingly white femurs and skinny ribs and cracked skulls, other joints and struts of the many shattered skeletons cast into this pit. A bone might last forever in the desert, but it’s not the bones John has come to see. Painted across the chamber’s red rock walls are varnished figures, tall black smears of charcoal, once colorful inks blanched gray by time. Nearly every figure is male, each is an exaggeration of a man: men running, men hunting, men worshipping, raising lanky arms to a distended sun, their torsos overly long, limbs stretched and unarticulated.

  Giants of a vanished earth, giving praise to a world now gone.

  John’s come to stand among them, to confront their remains. He traces the black lines of the petroglyphs, their meanings opaque, untranslatable. Perhaps this one a bird. Perhaps this one a fox. Perhaps this one an ancient bear, more dangerous than the recently extinct grizzlies. Whatever the original intent, eventually the mode of every sign becomes elegy, even ink scraped into timeless rock. John kneels, scattering bones and stones, then runs his hands through the dust. He smears the cooling smatter over his face in hot white streaks, inhaling a deep breath of bone and rock; he matches a set of ancient antlers, rattling the bleached bones, their knotty knobs cackling as he raises the horns. When the bones touch his forehead, he starts, surprised at the feeling of bone on skin, his face flushing with shame or fear or both.

  John throws the antlers away, lets them clatter forgotten to the canyon floor. In the quiet that follows, he stands, wiping his hands on his jeans, then turns in a circle to take in the paint and the bones one more time: intellectually he understands what he sees, but as always the feeling eludes him. Maybe it’s too late for him to feel what he thinks the people who worshipped here must’ve felt: to be of the world, not against it; to live with the plants and the animals, not apart or above them. It’s not so easy to shake off his culture, his fading but still omnipresent civilization, despite all it ruined and wasted, despite knowing all he knows about what it’s cost, what it will continue to cost; maybe he won’t ever be able to feel at peace with the world or at home in it, not as he desires.

  Maybe not. But what he does next doesn’t have to be for him. Maybe all he can do is keep trying to give the world back to itself, to continue to free whatever he can from the long damage of human want.

  Despite the disappointment in the Canyonlands, John’s pilgrimage continues. The next morning, he drives north into Wyoming, through the Grand Tetons toward what was once Yellowstone. At the park’s southern entrance, he retrieves his bolt cutters from the truck’s bed, then clips the chains sealing the gate. His presence here is a crime unlikely to be punished, the Park Service already shuttered ten years, but still he notes the solar panels powering roadside wireless readers, there to record his ID and report his trespass, a sure danger if he hadn’t already disabled the pebble buried in his right hand, that inescapable bit of Earthtrust tech embedded now in nearly every American body.

  Earthtrust. After the catastrophic California earthquake finally struck, it was Earthtrust that pushed an emergency funding bill through the last true Congress in Washington, a rushed order seizing all lands west of the Mississippi; then using eminent domain and the president’s emergency powers to create the Western Sacrifice Zone, a long-planned takeover waiting only for the right shock: half the country abdicated and sold to Earthtrust for dollars an acre by a weakened government busy fleeing to dryer land in Syracuse.

  “We hoped these days would never come. We promised to be prepared for when they did,” Eury Mirov had said then, the Earthtrust director’s broad smile flashing from the country’s every telescreen. “Now we are ready. Now we are coming to the rescue.” Two weeks later, unmarked convoys of soldiers and squadr
ons of lifter drones swarmed the West Coast, rescuing whoever they could—whether or not the victims wanted rescuing—and evacuating them to resettlement camps hastily erected in the Mojave, then to Ohio, where the first Volunteer Agricultural Community was being built even as Oregon and Washington seceded.

  In those days, John had been in Ohio too, with Earthtrust, with Eury. He’d known her since childhood, but in those first months of the country’s collapse he’d felt constantly off-balance, unable to understand how Eury had moved so fast, carrying out previously unspoken plans with a brutal tactical efficiency he hadn’t realized she’d possessed. When he left her company, years after his first misgivings, he fled into the Sacrifice Zone with Cal and the others also quitting Earthtrust, all of them together promising to somehow one day push back. He hadn’t wanted to meet violence with more violence, like Cal had; he’d simply wanted to atone for his part in what had happened, for the world he’d help bring into being.

  Today he arrives at Yellowstone’s Lamar Valley by noon, driving a browning landscape whose mountains no longer promise any hint of snowpack, only burned trees cascading down the slopes. John parks his truck at the top of a narrow ridge, leaving the unmaintained park road to walk into the valley on foot. Thirty years ago, John’s father had brought his son here to share his awe of this greatest of America’s preserves, the size of its wild-enough herds of buffalo and elk and bighorn sheep, the promise of spotting wolves at dawn; as a child of ten, John had stood shoulder to shoulder with other tourists to watch the last pristine bison herd, the Lamar Valley bison the only such animals never interbred with cattle to make them tamer, more amenable to human contact.

  Now the Lamar Valley’s previous beauty has become a starkness unbroken by movement, its emptiness a bleak power. John takes in the eerie near-silence of the valley, no sound except the wind rustling dry plants, the river trickling down below; at the river’s edge, he momentarily closes his eyes to listen to the water’s gentle rush whispering over worn rocks, breathing deep the elusive scents of the dry grass and the sparse plants along the riverbank. Before he opens his eyes, he tries to picture that long-ago day spent at some similar part of this river with his father, when the hundreds of bison roaming the prairie had been entirely uninterested in the encroaching crowds. He’s come today hoping for any sign of the old magic he’d sensed then, so different from what he’d felt amid the fields of his father’s farm. If he could only see that something of the wild majesty that was had returned to this place, to these parklands emptied of people with the rest of the Sacrifice—but when he scans the opposing bank’s tree line, his gaze meets not the bison he craves but instead the narrow wedge of a wolf’s curious face, impassively peering from the pines.

  John startles. He knows he shouldn’t approach—the wolf’s a hundred meters away, atop a steep embankment on the opposite side of the river—but he can’t help himself. How lonely he’s been, how devastated he’s become by his aloneness in the months since he last saw Cal or any of the others he’d come west with; now his loneliness colors every empty landscape, anywhere once home to more bountiful life. He fords the river, splashing loudly, the wolf already backing away from the tree line. Slowed by his sloshing boots, John clambers atop the ridge, pulling himself up by the fracturing branches of the dry pines; he’s soon out of breath, breathlessly hopeless. Likely the wolf was never there. Just more wishful thinking, in a world quick to punish such thoughts.

  But then he finds it again, twenty meters away: gray furred, steel eyed, healthy enough, with no sign of mange or malnutrition.

  The wolf permits John’s gaze, gazes back. Then it begins to nose through the grass at something John at first can’t quite see, then can’t look away from: surrounding the wolf are the corpses of dead bison, erratic boulders of shaggy fur.

  John approaches slowly, wary of the wolf and its snuffling progress. He counts a dozen giant bodies, then glimpses more hidden by the rustling grass: here a powerful leg ending in a strangely dainty hoof, there a horn curving through the stalks. Through the tall cover, he sees an unnervingly large yellow eye, open and staring, jaundiced and bloodshot; it’s all he can see of a massive head except for the curve of one broken horn, the rest of its bulk obscured. The eye is cloudy, staring at nothing—and then it moves, rolls crazily in the broad black-furred face.

  John cries out, unnerved; the wolf continues to pace nearby, unperturbed, its tongue lolling loose between its teeth. Watching John inch toward the injured bison, the wolf’s face is blank, its mask that of every wild mammal, full of nuances John’s never learned to read, but when he gets too close, it barks with a high-pitched yip, then barks again, the sound sharper now. At this second yip, the bison cries out too, its mournful groan shivering John’s skin. He carefully pushes back the grass to reveal the unbelievable bulk of the injured animal, its hooves jerking dreamily, its body rocking in the dusty earth as it tries and fails to stand. It’s a last juvenile, orphaned and alone, its stout ribs pressing through stretched skin and matted fur, its bold shoulders too atrophied to lift its heavy skull.

  John kneels, rests his hand on the bison’s bony crown. The bison snuffles, presses back against his touch—or so John imagines. Not everything in the world exists for him, and certainly not this futureless herd. The wolf lingers nearby, packless in this valley where the most successful reintroduction program in the country once thrived. It stalks uncannily from corpse to corpse, nosing each of the dead bison in turn, sniffing and prodding but not eating. Something’s wrong, John realizes: a wolf alone wouldn’t ordinarily pass up such an easy meal. He stands, determined to shoo it away from the juvenile, but as he rises, he hears, distant but closing fast, the telltale sound of approaching rotors.

  John flees, quick as he can go, back the way he came, sliding down the slope, feet clumsy in wet boots; he hits the river fast, slipping into the shallow water, crashing over loose rocks. Only when his scramble reaches the other bank does he risk a look back. Above the ridge a dozen drones fly, heavy lifter quadcopters with bright yellow claws dangling underneath, arrayed in formation around a cargo drone the ungainly size of a dump truck. John should keep running, but curiosity and duty override his caution. He reverses direction, heads back across the cold river, then crawls up the bank to pause among the pines at the rise’s lip. The noise from above is incredible, the downward thrust of the drones’ rotors flattening the prairie to expose more corpses alongside the barely breathing juvenile and the improbably calm wolf. The heavy lifters descend, belly-mounted winches dropping claws on high-tension cables, their serrated jaws opening to dig into deadweight. One by one they ferry the bison into the cargo drone’s open hatch, its bulk swaying and dipping with each catch, until one final drone lowers itself over the last living Yellowstone bison.

  John forces himself to watch. The juvenile bellows a sustained cry, guttural and grieving as it struggles against the steel claw; its legs kick with late strength as it’s lifted from the brown grass, its hooves running futilely on air until the drone deposits it among the massed dead of its herd.

  John hears the creaking cargo doors closing, then the heavy rushing wind of the drones turning in formation. Soon the sky is empty, not even a cloud remaining to color the sunset. Once again the voice of the world reduces to the howl of hot wind crossing the lonely expanse of the Lamar Valley, rasping the thrashed and flattened grasses where the bison lay down to die. Only the wolf remains, sitting on its haunches, staring at John, its expression blank but its eyes alive, watching.

  As the wolf finally rises and trots away, headed in the same direction the drones flew, John begins to shiver, his skin goosefleshing. It’s one hundred degrees in Yellowstone today, one hundred degrees at least—but once John begins shivering he can’t stop, not for a long time, not until his anger once again overtakes his fear.

  From that anger, John knows: sooner or later he’ll have to plant a bomb.

  For five years he’s done this. Wherever he travels, he looks for chances to blow h
oles in dams over dry riverbeds, to use the truck’s winch to tear down anti-erosion embankments bolstering curves of freeway, to rip free chain-link fences from litter-strewn roadsides. The gutted cities, the thousands of kilometers of empty concrete claiming the earth for no one there—John’s task is endless and likely futile; he tries anyway, believing nature can reclaim what humans have taken, as long as you give it somewhere to start.

  This is what John wants, what he followed Cal to try to make real: a rewilding of the West, beginning with a dismantling of the human ruins.

  The highway leading south from Yellowstone is officially closed and theoretically vacated, the asphalt in disrepair but serviceable enough, its flaws jolting the truck without slowing its passage. The truck’s bed holds the makings for improvised weaponry: bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, canisters of gasoline, left-behind blast caps, and pilfered sticks of Tovex. Fossil fuel explosives to undo a fossil fuel economy, to break the infrastructure left behind when everything west of the Mississippi became the Sacrifice Zone, half a country forcefully evacuated so American lives might flourish elsewhere.

  Whatever might be reused, John wants destroyed. If the steel was left to be recycled, it would only be made into something else, some new construction, some other machine. John doesn’t want more machines, doesn’t want more telephone poles and wind turbines stabbed into the landscape. He wants precious minerals and untapped oil left in the ground, he wants water to flow only where it wants to flow. No more unregulated, unrestrained extraction; no more conservation in one place making expansion possible somewhere else.