Upon This Rock

by David Marusek

  Jace looked at Beehymer. What he wanted to say was, You have got to be out of your skull, old man. What he did say was, “I was looking for something a little — nicer.”

  “Thought you might say that. Follow me.” Beehymer led Jace outside to the second, still extant shed. In contrast to the first shed or the house itself, it was of recent construction. Its paint was fresh, the roofing looked good, and the sole window was intact. Inside the shed were work benches, shelves, and bins. There was even an iron anvil in the corner. But what caught Jace’s attention was the twin bed at the far end, next to a camp stove, a propane lamp, and a dish rack. Somebody had been living here.

  “I let people stay here sometimes,” Beehymer said. “And lookie here.” He hoisted up a foam-insulated trapdoor and shined a flashlight down a large, rectangular hole in the ground that was maybe ten feet deep (3 m). “Original root cellar. Never freezes down there, no matter how cold out it gets.”

  Jace nodded his head. “Let me get this straight,” he said, helping Beehymer lower the trapdoor. “You’re asking fifty-six thousand dollars for a shed with a root cellar.”

  “Not at all. The town lot by itself is worth what I’m asking, maybe more. The house is a bonus to sweeten the deal. And don’t forget the well. It’s rare to have one here. They used dynamite to dig it.”

  “I’m sure the well is great. But the house is more like a giant liability than a sweetener. It’s a mess of lead paint and probably asbestos insulation that needs to be torn down and safely disposed of.”

  “You could do that. Tear it down and build new. But let me ask you this. You ever hear of historical preservation?”

  “Like what the park service is doing at Caldecott?”

  “That’s preservation on an industrial scale. What I’m talking about is smaller. You never wondered why folks around here aren’t tearing down all these firetraps? Because they’re historical, that’s why. All you need to do is get the house listed on the National Register of Historical Places.”

  “Um, how do you do that?”

  “It’s a cakewalk; this whole town pre-qualifies. And not just the General Store and museum. Private residences too. Hell, even that sorry knocked-down shed out front qualifies as an historical place. Then, when you’re registered, you apply to the state office of History and Archeology for a grant — up to fifty thousand dollars. I said grant, not loan. I’m talking about free money. Fifty grand. You live in this shed while you’re working on the house. That little wreck of a house can pay for itself in no time, lead paint and all. That is, ranger, if you wanted to become an inholder.” He sneered the final word.

  The old coot was probably right; the lot alone at fifty-six thousand was a bargain, and it could only appreciate in value. And because he was a young man of uncommon practicality, and unlike most American men of his age, Jace Kuliak had a nest egg of CDs tucked away in his bank back in Menominee that wasn’t earning any interest. He was able to put his hands on about half of Beehymer’s asking price. For the rest, well, wasn’t that what family was for? [see Sex on a Glacier]

  A Portent in the Sky

  PS1 1.0

  A WINTER’S DAY is short at both ends, and by the time Poppy Prophecy left the Mail Day gathering at the Sulzer house it was twilight. He steered his Polaris back through the comatose town, past the boarded-up People’s Museum, past the picturesque log church, across the frozen river, and out the Stubborn Mine Trail. Crybaby Bunyan and his raven-haired daughter had still been enjoying the Sulzer hospitality when he left, and their own house was dark when he passed it at Mile 8.

  The trail grew narrow and rough soon thereafter, and as Poppy bounced along, he entertained thoughts of going to Anchorage. He could take Adam in the pickup, go out, load up, and be back in four or five days. They could stop in Palmer on the way and see what was going on with NJB. As he neared Curve Canaveral, he was already braking when his sno-go headlight went dim and the engine faltered and died. The machine ground to a halt.

  What now? Poppy gave the engine a few pulls, but it didn’t catch. He had filled the tank that morning, so he knew he had plenty of gas. It was probably a loose spark plug wire. He dismounted and lifted the engine hood to check. But his flashlight wouldn’t work. Great. While he was patting his pockets for a butane lighter, a dizziness came over him, and his knees grew wobbly. He clutched the handlebar to steady himself as he turned around and sat down hard on the sno-go seat. He felt faint. Was he having a stroke?

  The hood slammed shut and, somewhere in the darkness, a tree limb snapped and crashed to the ground. Poppy’s body seemed to grow heavier by the moment, and he, too, crashed to the ground, sprawling beside the machine. Limbs and boughs were falling all around him, and he could scarcely draw breath.

  With a pop, night became day. The light was brighter than the sun, so intense it cut through his shut eyelids. His arm was too heavy to move to shield his face. It took all his will power just to turn his head facedown in the snow. Even then the light was dazzling.

  Pressed to the ground, he wheezed and fought for every breath. He head swam, and he passed out.

  When Poppy came to, the sky was dark again, and the oppressive weight was lifted from him. He sat up and leaned against the machine as he gathered his wits. His flashlight worked fine now, and he shined it all around. The ground nearest him was littered with broken branches, and the snow was compressed, as though pressed down by a giant hand. But not far away from him the snow looked untouched. The sharp boundary between the two areas extended in a broad arc into the woods. His sno-go had stopped just inside the compressed area.

  When Poppy was able, he got back on the sno-go and yanked the cord. The engine fired on the first pull, and he resumed driving around Curve Canaveral, scanning the dark valley below. When he reentered the woods, he had to go around limbs and whole trees that had fallen across the trail. He paused when he found the boundary again that ran along the forest floor. It was like a long, curved porch step of snow. No, whatever had happened was not of earthly origin. It was a miracle of the first order, a sign. It had sign written all over it. Thank you, Elder Brother Jesus, but what does it mean?

  PS2 1.0

  WHAT WITH THE freight sled loaded down with expedition trash, and despite the already broken trail, Jace’s return ride to town took considerably longer than his freewheeling ride out. By the time he reached the Mizina, he was tired but not yet ready to call it a day. The mild weather was holding, and he decided to take a smoke break. He stopped where he found a jumble of driftwood poking up through the snowpack and built a fire on the riverbank.

  Across the river flats, the snowy slopes of Stubborn Mountain glowed under a three-quarters moon. The mountain stood apart from its neighbors, and Jace could see it in its entirety, bottom to top. It had an iconic mountainy shape, like what you could use for a smartphone app. Click here for Mountain. It was named Stubborn because during the last Ice Age, it had blocked the unstoppable advance of the Caldecott Glacier until it forced the wall of ice to split into two channels and flow around it.

  Jace jabbed his campfire with a stick, sending an armada of burning embers into an ocean of sky. The temperature was dropping, and a frozen haze obscured the stars. Jace took a final hit off his joint and flicked it into the flames.

  He used the stick to trace a ridge down the ghostly mountainside to where the Prophecy compound was located. He wondered what she was up to at that very moment. Probably up to her armpits in kids and cares. Cleaning up messes. Making dinner. And speaking of dinner, it was getting to be time to head home and find some dinner of his own. He raked snow into the fire and stirred the ashes.

  One of the tie-downs that secured the bundles of trash to the sled had come loose, and while he was fixing it, he heard something odd. It sounded like bacon sizzling, or soda fizzing, or maybe a hissing cat. He turned all around to find its source, even pulling back his hood to free his ears.

  When Jace looked at the mountain, he saw something weird in the darkness —
darker darkness. As though a triangular piece of the night sky was missing, stars and all, along with the snowy flank of Stubborn Mountain. And then the odd triangular shape lit up from within, revealing itself to be a giant cone, hollow apparently, resting on its base, and as tall as the mountain behind it.

  At the same moment, a bright object, like a shooting star, entered the cone at its apex and streaked at supersonic speed straight down toward the ground. It spit out flames and sparks in all directions as it fell. But the closer it approached the ground, the slower it went, until it hardly seemed to be moving at all. The cone surface, like welder’s glass, dampened the intensity of the light. And for all the pyrotechnics involved, there was no sound but the constant hissing.

  Jace watched with his mouth hanging open, too awestruck to be afraid. By the time he remembered his phone, it was too late to record the event. The object — a meteor? a top-secret military weapon? an alien UFO? — had touched down, and its light was extinguished. The cone went dark as well, allowing the stars and mountain to reappear.

  Holy, holy shit.

  The ranger dug out his Garmin GPS and used his bearings to guesstimate those of the object. He put a pin in its location and jumped on his snowmobile.

  Jace drove straight for the likely landing zone. He was forced to break new trail, and the loose snow and his heavy load bogged down his engine. So he stopped to unhitch the sled before continuing. He drove cautiously and kept a sharp eye on everything within the range of his headlights.

  He’d covered about six miles when he saw something and stopped again. There was a shallow ledge in the snow, like a step about eighteen inches deep (46 cm). The snow on his side of it was pristine while the snow on the other side looked flattened and compressed. The ledge itself extended in both directions in a gentle arc as far as his flashlight could reach. Could this be the imprint of the giant cone?

  Using his flashlight as a probe, Jace dismounted and poked at the air above the snow ledge. Nothing. He dropped another pin on his map and continued across the ledge.

  The compressed snow covered an area that encompassed river flats, foothills, and the western flank of Stubborn Mountain. Jace searched for a couple of hours. It would have helped to know exactly what he was searching for. Would the bogey still be hot? glowing? radioactive? Was it as large as a house or small as a stone? Would it shoot laser beams at him?

  Daylight would have been a big help too. So would a full belly. The temperature had continued to drop, and both he and his snowmobile were running low on fuel. Whatever the object was, it would probably keep until tomorrow. That is, unless the Prophecys saw the light from their compound and decided to check it out. That possibility alone kept him searching for another hour before finally calling it quits. He backtracked to the curved snow ledge he’d found and followed it, stopping a half-dozen times to log more GPS coordinates. If the object had landed in the center of the cone’s base, as it had appeared to do, and if he could remember enough high-school geometry, he’d be able to use the GPS record to calculate its location. For now, though, he retrieved the trash sled and headed home to the chalet.

  The Toothache

  TT1 1.0

  POPPY PROPHECY KNEW what the sign meant. Knowledge had burst upon him during the last part of his ride home. After he left the area of pressed snow and broken limbs, the Holy Spirit lit up his mind with understanding. A flash of insight. No words were uttered, just a jolt of pure knowledge: The unbearable light in the sky was the focused attention of the Creator gazing down upon you and your family. It meant, Pay attention! It was his own personal burning bush. It said that the time had come. The state plowing the road was no accident. The Lord God says, I am pushing obstacles out of your path, my son. Take Adam with you in the pickup, yes. But also take Hosea and Proverbs in the bus. This will be your last chance to stock up on essentials. Take advantage of it.

  “Yes, Lord, I will. I will put everything I have into food and supplies.”

  Poppy Prophecy drove into the yard and parked the sno-go next to its mates. He deftly removed one of its spark plugs with a socket wrench that he kept in a pocket. But then, on second thought, he screwed it back in.

  The little Yamaha power generator in the pump shack behind him was chugging away, and there were electric lights burning in the bathhouse. He took the sack of mail and tromped across the snowy yard.

  The cur Crissie Lou loitered outside the bathhouse door and slunk away as he approached.

  The boys had covered the laundry table with sheets of plywood and covered the floor with plastic tarps. Tubs of hot water were simmering on the wood stove. Roasts, ribs, and steaks lay in glistening heaps upon the table. The children, from age eight on up, were wrapping family-sized portions of Father God’s bounty in butcher paper.

  When Poppy stepped into the room, everyone stopped, and the younger ones chorused, “Welcome home, lord.”

  “We didn’t lose much, lord,” Hosea said, pointing a knife at a tub of oil-tainted meat. Even though they had substituted cooking oil for the chain oil, some fouling was inevitable.

  Poppy ignored him, ignored all of them, and crooked a finger at Adam. Adam came around the table and followed him wordlessly out to the porch.

  “Yes, lord?”

  “Looks like you’re about finished in there.”

  “Yes, lord. A little more wrapping and stacking. Then clean up. We’ll let them age a couple of days before we freeze ’em.”

  “Good. Let Hosea handle the rest. I have something else for you to do. I want you to get the Dodge and bus ready to roll first thing in the morning.”

  “Lord?”

  “You heard me. I’ll explain at Worship. We’re leaving in the morning — you, me, Hosea, and Proverbs.”

  “Where are we going, lord?”

  “Anchorage, you fool. Where else is there to go?”

  “We’re going on a supply run? But the road . . .”

  “Let Father God handle the road. We need to concentrate on making this trip count because it’ll be our last one — ever.”

  “Lord?”

  “Not now. You’ll learn everything tonight. So stop the flapping and start the doing. The plug’s already in the Polaris.”

  “Yes, lord.” Adam turned to go, but Poppy stopped him.

  “You didn’t see it, did you?” It was more a statement than a question.

  “See what, lord?”

  “The light.”

  Adam shook his head.

  “Didn’t any of you see a bright light in the sky about an hour ago?”

  “I don’t think so. No one mentioned anything. Of course, we were all probably indoors.”

  “You’d see this light through solid walls.”

  POPPY PROPHECY PULLED the keyring from his belt and unlocked the solid oak door to the prayer cabin. This was a log structure that originally served as the business office for the mine. An old Meilink floor safe still squatted against the back wall.

  Poppy dropped the mail bag on the desk and lit the propane lamp. Then he knelt in front of the barrel stove to build a fire. It would take hours to heat the place, but Poppy needed to come back after dinner to draw up a shopping list. A blessing though it was, four thousand dollars would not long keep his family, and he had to plan their purchases with care.

  When the fire was good and started, Poppy tossed in a couple of more sticks and cranked the door shut. He emptied the bag of mail on the desk and put to one side the boxes of gold chains and tacks to take into the house. That was when he noticed the lavender envelope again. He snatched it from the pile and reopened the barrel stove door.

  Poppy didn’t know who this girl was, but it was obvious that she had designs on his son. The Bible said that these were not the times when women should bear children. His sons and daughters would be better off waiting out the next seven years as virgins and then go out among the survivors to find spouses. But that whole argument had made a lot more sense back when his oldest boys were still teenagers. His family
had been manning the ramparts and keeping the faith for a long time, and now the oldest were adults. He had never intended for his offspring to remain celibate forever. What would be the point of that? Still, when had Adam met this girl?

  Poppy closed the stove door and took the fat envelope back to the lamp light. Her name was Susan Krae, and she was from Soldotna on the Kenai Peninsula. Adam must have met her that time the family was looking for land near Homer. Poppy couldn’t think of any other occasion Adam would have had to be south of Anchorage on the Kenai. But that was three years ago. How had the boy managed to keep this liaison secret for so long? Had he made Ginny Sulzer his co-conspirator, asked her to hide his letters inside the pages of his magazines? No wonder the boy was always so eager to make the mail run. It was one thing to disobey him, but lying and deceiving on top of it? Not tolerable.

  All he could tell of the girl short of opening and reading her letter, something he had every right to do, and might yet do, were the six lines she had written in her own hand — the address and return address:

  Mr. Adam Prophecy

  It was odd to see his firstborn idiot addressed as a mister. But it showed an upbringing of respect on the girl’s part. On the next line she wrote:

  Stubborn Mountain Mine

  Which meant that either his son had withheld from her the true nature of their mission, or that she had the good sense not to broadcast it via the U.S. post. Either way, it showed a maturity in one or the other of them that boded well.

  Poppy dropped the envelope on the desk for further pondering after dinner.

  TT2 1.0

  THE BIG HOUSE, a long, low structure, had been the original copper mine mess hall. Successive mine owners had built upon it, and the Prophecys built upon their work, erecting two bunkroom wings on the sides of the enlarged common room.