State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (18 page)

“The place where I wrecked?”

“Yes,” she says, suddenly looking sad. “I planted those explosives myself and set them to detonate when the lower tunnel doors opened. It was just supposed to block the tracks and stop the train. I didn’t think it would do what it did.”

“I nearly died when that rockslide came down.”

“I know,” she says. “And Nicole did die.”

“Nicole?”

“Seth’s wife. She had agreed to help me rescue you, and she was in the car of retirees ahead of yours. I had sent her down a key, and when the train derailed, she was supposed to let you out and take you to me. I was waiting to fly you here.”

Then I remember boarding that train for the Foundation and the retirees getting into the car in front of me. I remember a woman had looked back and made eye contact with me.

“So what happened?” I ask.

“Nicole and you never arrived where I was waiting, so I eventually left the drone and hiked to the trestle. It was getting dark, and the tunnelrats were already there working. When I saw the train ... well, I’ll just say that it was the worst moment of my life. I thought for sure that I had killed you. I didn’t know what to do. I knew Robert would figure out what I had done. I couldn’t go back, so I came here alone.”

“Why this place, then?”

“I had been here before. It was an old workstation of ours that we had abandoned after the two scientists assigned here committed suicide together. And I have to tell you that I nearly followed in their footsteps that first several months here alone. I thought I had killed you, Aubrey. My own son.” She chokes up and looks away. Then she takes a deep breath, appearing determined to keep it together, and continues. “Then I heard that you weren’t dead, that you were back. I can’t tell you how happy the news made me. I remember I went out on the wall there and looked up at the stars and I cried until there weren’t any tears left. I only hoped that Radcliffe wouldn’t completely brainwash you before I could get to you. But he hadn’t, and, of course, you know the rest, because here you are.”

“This is a lot to digest,” I say.

“Yes, I know it is. And you should take all the time you need and ask all the questions you want.”

I lean back against the edge of the pool and look at her. She’s beautiful in an unconventional kind of way, and I can see how my father would have fallen for her. I’m torn between wanting to love her because she’ my mother and hating her for what she did to my father. The father who raised me, anyway. The thought of him walking into Eden to be with her when she was here the whole time sends a shiver up my spine, and despite the warm water, I’m suddenly cold. It’s horrific what he went through, and I’m not sure if I can forgive her.

A loud screech turns my head skyward. An eagle cruises in wide circles high above our heads. My mother sees it too.

“It’s time to go,” she says, wading over, stepping out of the pool, and grabbing a towel.

She seems in a hurry to get back, so I get out and dry off as quickly as I can. As I pull my shoes on, I look at her where she stands, already dressed and waiting on me.

“He was my father, just so you know.”

She tilts her head and looks down at me. “Radcliffe?”

“No”—I shake my head—“Jonathan VanHouten. He might not have donated his sperm, but he was my father, and I don’t ever want to hear anything different.”

She nods. “Fair enough.”

She leads me quickly up the return path—so quickly that I struggle to keep up, despite my legs being longer than hers. When we turn the corner, I see the eagle again. I follow its flight with my eyes and see it land on the outstretched arm of a man sitting a horse. There are several of them there on top of a distant ridge, mounted on horseback and watching us. Because they’re bundled up in brown furs, they have the appearance of being continuations of the horses themselves, as if they’re really strange, star-gazing centaurs from a reading slate fantasy book.

“Who are those strange men?” I ask.

“Just look ahead and keep walking,” she says.

“I thought I seen ’em too,” Jimmy says.

“You boys keep clear of those people,” my mother replies.

Jimmy and I have decided to ditch our zipsuits. We’re sewing kilts from alpine deer skins my mother had in her chest.

“If you want us to stay away from them, Mom, you need to tell us who they are. Otherwise, we’ll find out for ourselves.”

I’m testing this idea I have that if I call her Mom, she can’t refuse me anything. She looks over from her computer desk, where she’s been diligently typing for hours, and sighs.

“I don’t know much about them except that they’re wild,” she says. “They’re wild and they saved my life.”

Jimmy and I both stop our sewing and sit with our half-finished kilts in our laps.

“They saved your life?” I ask.

“Now you gotta tell us the story,” Jimmy says.

She smiles and turns her chair around to face us.

“Okay, since you enjoy stories, I’ll tell you what happened. As soon as I arrived here, I knew that Robert would be sending drones to all of our old places to look for me—maybe to report back, maybe just to bomb them out. So I took the launch tubes off of my drone and converted them to fire by hand.”

“You can do that?” I ask.

“Oh, it’s quite easy,” she says. “You have to understand that down in Holocene II they think they’re building them for unmanned exploration. The drones are weaponized later at the Foundation. I had to hack their onboard programming, of course, to make them seek the metallic signature of a drone instead of the heat signature of a human.”

“So what did you do with them?” Jimmy asks.

“I sat up in that watchtower and waited. Day and night. I pretty much came in here only to eat and use the privy. It became an obsession of mine to shoot down a drone. I don’t know why. I guess I was angry at the way everything had turned out—about having thought that I lost you in that train wreck. But I also had a more practical reason to do it. I knew with resources stretched as thin as they had been at the Foundation, if I was able to shoot down a drone, Robert would think twice before sending another. It wasn’t a permanent solution, but it would buy me some time.”

“Did you get one?” Jimmy asks.

“It’s my story,” she says, “you either listen to how I tell it, or I go back to my work and you can go back to your sewing.”

I slug Jimmy in the shoulder. “Never mind him. Tell us.”

“Okay, then,” she says. “But don’t hit Jimmy, Son, even if you’re only playing. It’s bad manners. So, getting back to my story. I was using the radar on my drone to send up an alarm if anything approached, and every day I sat in that tower and waited. And every morning I’d see these riders on horseback, the ones you’ve seen now. They’d come to the ridge look at me. And every day they got a little closer. I was sure that they were sizing me up and making plans to kill me. They’re wild, I tell you, wild. Once, one of them sent his eagle down to the tower. It perched on the sill, filling the entire window, and looked in on me with eyes so intelligent that I half believed one of the men had turned himself into the bird. Then off it flew, directly back to its owner, as if to report what it had seen. I swear I saw that bird whisper in the man’s ear. But then I hadn’t slept in a while either by then.”

“Do they all have eagles?” Jimmy asks. “And how do they catch them? How do they train them?”

“I don’t know,” she says, “but let me finish, will you? One morning, a few days later, they dismounted their horses and came down to the wall and stood not a hundred meters away, taking counsel. They all had bows and one had a spear. I knew my time had come, and I made my peace with it. But just then my alarm went off. I grabbed my rocket and rushed to the window. Sure enough, I saw the silhouette of a drone coming in from the east, marked out against the sun like a bird. Of course, I forgot all about the men on the wall. I raised my rocket and waited. And I kept waiting. I wanted to be sure. Then, when the drone was sweeping in low, so close now that I could see the Park Service emblem on its nose, I fired.”

She stops talking and looks at us with a smile on her face, as if that were the end of her story. The room is silent. We sit on the edges of our seats, our half-completed kilts forgotten on our laps. Afraid to be chastised again for interrupting her, Jimmy nudges me to say something.

“Come on, Mom,” I say. “Tell us what happened next.”

“Well, I really don’t know,” she says.

“You didn’t hit it?”

“Oh, yes, I hit it all right. But I didn’t know it until a week later when I found the wreckage. I think the blowback from the rocket slammed me against the stone wall and knocked me out. It really was a bad concussion. I’m lucky I survived. I woke days later in my own bed. My wound had been cleaned and dressed. The blood had even been washed from my hair.”

“So the wild people helped you,” I say.

“I assumed it was them,” she replies. “Although I never did see or talk to them. But from that day on, I began finding gifts left at my door. The bow and arrow I gave to you, Jimmy, that was from them. The milk in the fridge is from them. Most of the furs you’re wearing. In fact, I’m certain that I’d never have made it once winter set in if it weren’t for their gifts.”

“They seen you shoot that drone is why,” Jimmy says.

“You think that was it?” she asks, as if considering it for the first time.

“Sure,” he says. “I know we never took well to strangers, but if they was against the Park Service and we seen it for our own selves, then they was friends of ours.”

“You have a very wise friend there, Son,” she says to me.

“Yeah,” I say, grinning, “most of the time he’s all right.”

Jimmy slugs me in the shoulder. “Whaddya mean, most of the time?” he asks.

By the next afternoon, Jimmy and I are roaming the snow-covered hills in our new kilts, looking for the wild people and their camp. He has his bow and arrow over his shoulder, just in case we run across something actually worth hunting, since that’s what we told my mother we were heading out to do.

“They gotta have a place around here somewhere,” Jimmy says. “If it was me, I wouldn’t be too far from that hot spring.”

“Let’s try over there,” I suggest, pointing. “On the other side of those cliffs, where I saw them.”

We walk awhile without talking, listening to the sound of our breathing and our shoes crunching in the new snow. It’s hard to believe that just a few days ago, we were trudging through a rainforest halfway around the world.

“Your mom sure is somethin’,” Jimmy says.

“How so?” I ask.

“The way she shot down that drone. She sure is cool.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“What? You dun’ like her?”

“I like her. I’m just not sure about everything. I mean I had her built up in my mind one way, and she’s nothing like it.”

Jimmy nods that he understands.

A few paces later, I add, “Maybe I’m just not sure yet if I can trust her.”

“What makes you think you can’t?” Jimmy asks.

“Well, she lied to my father, for one thing.”

“That’s true,” Jimmy says. “But your father isn’t you.”

“And you know what else is strange?” I ask. “I remember when Dr. Radcliffe was showing me his control room for the first time, explaining the drones and how they hunt humans and all that. Gosh, what a nut case he was, now that I think about it. But while we were down there, he mentioned to me that they had lost a drone in China. He said they sent another after it and that they lost it too. And here he was talking about my mother and I didn’t even know it. And maybe worse, he was my biological father, and I had no idea about that either. I mean, it makes me wonder what else I don’t know right now.”

“That makes sense,” Jimmy says. “But jus’ remember how lucky you are.”

“Lucky? How am I lucky?”

“I’d give jus’ about anythin’ to find out my mom was still alive, even if she had lied to me.”

I stop in my tracks and look up at the clear blue sky. He’s right. I would have traded my left arm and maybe my right too just days ago if I had thought it would bring my mother back. And here she is, and I’m refusing to forgive her for being alive. Maybe I should give her a chance. Movement catches my eye. I spot an eagle soaring on a high breeze.

“Look, Jimmy. An eagle. Think it’s one of theirs?”

“I dunno,” he says, “let’s follow it.”

We take off at a jog, losing sight of the eagle when we dip down into a gulch and then picking it up again when we come out the other side. We climb a small peak to get a better view and see that the eagle is circling above a wide valley with a river running along its edge. The snow is trampled on both sides of a shallow ford, the river having recently been crossed by horses.

“That’s where I’d build a camp,” Jimmy says, pointing to the other side of the valley. “Under those cliffs.”

There’s a hill between us and the base of the steep granite cliffs, obscuring the view of where any camp might be.

“Should we go check it out?” I ask.

“The universe hates a coward,” he says.

We scramble down to the banks of the river and cross it in the tracks of the horses, with our shoes slung around our necks and our new kilts hiked up. The water is only knee deep, but it’s cold enough that I can’t feel my legs or my feet when we wade out the other side. With our shoes back on, we jog the rest of the way, trying to warm up.

When we crest the hill, we both come skidding to a halt. Several feet away, a fawn stands staring at us with enormous, dewy eyes. The young deer is spotted, not unlike the kilts we’re wearing, and it’s tethered by a rope to a wooden stake driven into the ground. The snow is trampled in a circle that marks the end of the leash. When neither of us moves to harm it, the fawn drops its head and begins grazing on the frozen ground.

“It must be someone’s pet,” I say.

“I dunno,” Jimmy replies. “Why would you keep one? I ain’t never seen anyone milk a deer.”

The fawn raises its head to look at us again, as if perhaps it had heard us talking and might speak to clear things up. Then a shadow races across the snow, swelling as it approaches, until it casts a pool of darkness over the fawn. Then a golden eagle slams into the fawn’s back, digs its talons into its neck, and bears down on it. The fawn’s front legs buckle, and its head drops to the snow beneath the weight of the great raptor. Its helpless hind legs continue to rear and kick, and the eagle’s wings continue to beat wildly, so close that they blow wind in our faces. Surprisingly, neither the eagle nor the deer makes a sound. The struggle lasts for several seconds. Then the eagle severs the fawn’s spine with its powerful beak. The fawn twitches once and is still. The eagle tucks its wings and perches atop its kill, looking at us as if we were nothing more than a sideline curiosity.