State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (28 page)

Whatever happened back there at the bungalow, I have a feeling that the result of it is a death sentence for all of us. A sense of overwhelming dread haunts me the entire flight. The only thing I can think is that my mother took advantage of Hannah’s absence from the Foundation and went behind my back to try and launch some kind of takeover operation. And here I had Hannah on the verge of agreeing to make a deal. My diplomacy was destroyed by my mother’s betrayal. I’d be even more furious with her than I am if I weren’t so worried.

I see the fires from a long ways off.

High clouds hover over our burning mountain hideaway, catching the firelight and reflecting it back so that a second fire seems to burn there upside down in the night sky. The horror of what I’m seeing takes several seconds to sink in, and then I’m pounding on the cockpit glass as the drone descends.

“Let me out!” I shout. “Let me out now! Oh, God, please let my mother and Jimmy be okay. Please.”

As the drone approaches, I glimpse just how bad it is. The shelter walls are gone, and the exposed living space is engulfed in flames. The watchtower is burning too. Smaller fires dot the dark landscape on either side, and a few fires even dance like windblown torches on top of the wall. It looks as if some kind of burning accelerant were dropped from the sky. Then the view is wiped from my window as the drone sinks beneath the flames to enter the hidden runway underneath it. If the door even opens, I’m fully expecting to land in a furnace and cook to death where I sit in this stupid cockpit. I even brace for it.

But the door opens, and the drone comes to a halt in the untouched hangar. No flames, no destruction. The canopy lifts open, and I leap from the drone and race for the ladder. I’m halfway up it when I realize that the hatch leading to the shelter above is closed. There’s a keypad on the ceiling next to it, but I have no idea what the code is. Then I hear crying coming from somewhere below. I look down from the ladder and see feet sticking out beneath a spare portion of drone wing that’s leaned against the hangar wall. I drop to the floor and rush over and pull the wing away.

My mother sits with her back to the wall, her knees pulled up to her chest. Her head is down and she’s sobbing. I drop to my knees in front of her and gently lift her head up. Her face is covered with black soot, and her eyes are red from crying. She looks surprised, as if she doesn’t believe she’s really seeing me, but then she throws her arms around my neck, pulls me to her, and clings to me as if her life depended on it.

“Where’s Jimmy, Mom?”

Her muffled sobs continue. She doesn’t answer.

“Mom, where’s Jimmy? I need to know where Jimmy is.”

When she still won’t answer me, I pry her arms loose from my neck, pull away, and look her in the eyes.

“Damn it, Mom. I asked you where Jimmy is.”

She cocks her head as if she didn’t understand what I said. Then I see why. Blood trickles from each of her ears.

“Mom, are you okay?” I ask, mouthing the words clearly so she can read my lips. She nods that she is. “Where’s Jimmy?” She shakes her head. “Mother, tell me where Jimmy is.” When she still doesn’t answer me, I scream at her. “Tell me, dammit!”

“He went to warn them,” she says. “I tried to stop him.”

“Warn who? The Motars? At their camp?” When she nods yes, I point up to the closed hatch. “What’s the code?”

She reaches for my neck again, but I push her hands away.

“Tell me the code or I’ll jump out the damn hangar door.”

She drops her chin to her chest. Then she raises her hand in front of her bowed head and holds up three fingers, then two, then five, then three again. I let go of her shoulders and race up the ladder.

As I punch in the code, I hear her say, “Be careful.”

The flames whip wildly in the wind, showing a path then covering it up again. I weave my way across the ruined shelter, dodging the fire, and emerge on the other side unscathed. I can smell burning flesh from our meat locker and my own singed hair. On the path now, running—down and up and over. Quiet your mind, Aubrey, focus on the task. The clouds reflect back the fire that I’m heading for and illuminate the mountains like a strange hellscape I might have run through in a nightmare. I hear distant explosions and faint screams. In the glow of this dreamy apocalypse, I see drones flitting across the red sky above the Motar’s hidden valley, like enormous bats or sky-bound Manta rays, ejecting bombs from their bellies and then banking left or right to make way for more of their kind. For one brief moment those burning clouds twist in my frantic mind to become waves of red hair, and I see Hannah’s face leering at me from the night sky like some she-devil risen from the depths of hell to claim as her dominion the mountains and the night and each of our sad souls.

We should have killed her when we could.

I ford the river at a dead run. I know the water must be cold, but I can’t feel it. The drones have finished their work, and by the time I arrive only a few glide overhead, their silhouettes black against the burnt sky. I pay them no mind. The valley leading to the hidden camp is dotted with flaming carcasses of horses and of men. I zigzag between them, checking for Jimmy. I come on sights of horror where horse and rider have melted together into one pile of burning flesh. I see a man with a perfectly round hole blown in his chest and just the fatty edges of it rimmed with sizzling blue fire as he lies on his back, staring with frozen bewilderment at the burning sky as if to ask it why. I see another without his head. Two charred women are laid out arm in arm on the ground, as if they’d spontaneously combusted while embracing there. I wander through this scene of senseless slaughter, stopping at each new sight of gore just long enough to make sure it isn’t Jimmy before moving on again. One man clutches my ankle as I try to walk away, but he’s lying in soil drenched with his own blood. The last of his life is leaking out of him in weak spurts from his two severed legs. There’s nothing I or anyone can do. I jerk my foot away and keep moving.

As I approach the cliff that leads to the hidden camp, my panic is replaced by a slowly building horror. I pass through the secret entrance and walk toward the blind bend, expecting the worst. The worst I can imagine turns out to not be bad enough though. The waterfall reflects back the fire and seems itself to be made of liquid flames. The channel of black water passes beneath the remnant embers of the bridges, and the framework of tents stand strangely intact and still burning. Nothing is left untouched by fire. It smells sweet and putrid and nauseatingly like charcoal. There are bodies here too, but mostly those of women and children. I wonder if the men had mounted their horses in an attempt to lead the drones away.

Then I see him standing in the middle of the burning camp, wide-eyed and naked as if he himself had just been born from the flames. If he sees me, it does not register on his face. I wade into the channel, swim across, climb out the other side, and run to him where he stands.

“Where’s Jimmy?” I ask. “Where’s my friend?”

The boy just looks at me queerly.

I strip off my wet shirt and cover him. Then I walk him toward the exit, but he plants his feet and pulls away from me.

“Come on, we’ve got to get you out of here,” I say, my voice drowned out by the waterfall and the crackling flames.

The boy turns and runs farther into the camp. I chase after. He leads me across the hidden valley along the winding central path. He’s surprisingly fast, and I follow by the glimpses of him I catch in the firelight as he passes the burning tents. I’m nearly out of breath by the time we reach the end of the camp, where the backside of the enclosed valley narrows to just a crack that the channel water spills out of, into the blackness of the gorge beyond. The boy stops at something on the path. When I catch up to him, I see his mother, the healer, lying heaped on the ground with a gaping hole in her side. The boy takes my hand and pulls me farther along the path to where the channel gives way to rapids that tumble down the gorge. There we find the old man. We’re beyond the flames now and in the shadows in which he lies, I can’t tell what wound might have killed him, but his one good eye has rolled back into his head. It stares up at us whitely from his blackened face.

When I look up I just catch sight of the boy slipping from my view onto a narrow ledge that leads out from the camp and into the gorge. I flatten myself against the cliff and follow him. Rough steps of wet stone lead down alongside the cascading falls, and in the dark and rumbling spray of shadowed mist I find the boy kneeling over Jimmy. I drop and gather my best friend in my arms. He’s limp and cold and badly burnt.

But he’s breathing, dammit, he’s alive.

I look around instinctively for help, but other than the boy’s shadow standing nearby, we’re completely alone. I look to the crack of light above us where the camp still burns, and I begin to piece together what must have happened. The riders headed out the front to lead the drones away, while the others tried to sneak the boy out the back. I can see the relay now as he was handed off from his mother to the old man and finally to Jimmy who managed to see him safely out before collapsing.

I look back to Jimmy in my lap. As my eyes adjust to the dark, I see that the left side of his face is covered with pale patches of waxy and oozing burns. He trembles in my arms.

I stand and get behind him and gently hook my arms under his pits and begin dragging him back up the steps. I stop when the boy blocks me. He points down, away from the camp. I’m too wrecked by shock and grief to argue or ask why, so I turn Jimmy carefully around and ease him down instead, following the boy into the shadows of the gorge.

It’s slow going. The wind picks up, and the clouds that had been reflecting the fire drift away and reveal the clear, cold sky above, the stars twinkling there as if nothing at all has changed.

The boy runs ahead, disappears, and comes out again with a lantern. He leads me the last several meters down the gorge to the entrance of a cave. The cave appears to have been carved by some undercurrent in a time when the water raged through here much higher than it does now. Although it’s not deep, it’s well-protected and dry. Several stuffed mattresses line the far wall, and the boy leads me to one of them with his lantern. I lay Jimmy down. The sight of his face in the lamplight makes me cringe. I can’t imagine the pain he must be in.

I take up the lantern from the boy and inspect the cave. There are recesses in the walls filled with supplies. I hand the boy an empty clay jug and motion for him to go outside and fill it with water from the falls. Then I find some blankets and a clean bundle of cloths. I remove Jimmy’s kilt and inspect his bruised and battered body, but other than a few bad blisters on his left hand and arm, the bulk of his burns are isolated to his neck and his face. He’s shivering, either from cold or from shock, and I cover him up to his chest with the blankets. The boy returns with the water and I wet a cloth and gently begin to clean Jimmy’s burns, scraping away the dirt and the charcoal and the seared pieces of outer skin. The worst is a portion of his cheek that was pierced by something hot. Although the wound is cauterized and not bleeding, I can see his lower teeth peeking through. When his wounds are clean I drape them with dry cloths. Then I sit on the edge of the bed and watch him, wondering what else I can possibly do except pray.

“You’re gonna be okay, buddy. I’m here now.”

He opens his eyes and looks at me, and then he shudders with a spasm of pain and closes them again.

I sit watching him for hours, not daring to take my eyes off of him lest he might suddenly stop breathing. I play a mental game with myself, willing him to inhale after every exhale and holding my own breath until he does. He sometimes stirs and moans, but other times he appears to be peacefully sleeping. As the night passes, I’m vaguely aware of the boy squatting nearby, getting up and leaving several times, but always coming back again. Then, just as the first light of dawn is spilling into the cave, he comes back from one of these outings with my mom, both of them wet from swimming the channel.

She kneels beside me where I sit my vigil and looks down on Jimmy. She winces when she pulls the cloth away from his face. She’s on her feet again immediately and rummaging through the supplies, laying things out on the floor to inspect them in the dim light of dawn.

“Will he be okay, Mom?”

I take her lack of an answer at first as meaning that she doesn’t think he will, but then I remember her bleeding ears and I turn and ask again louder. When she doesn’t look up at me from sorting her supplies, I give up and turn back to Jimmy. A few moments later I feel her hand on my shoulder.

“Move aside, Son,” she says.

I rise to let her work. I’m walking out of the cave to wash my face in the cold falls when I hear her say:

“Yes, he’s going to be fine.”

The tent frames and bridges still smolder, but the bodies don’t.

The smell is so overwhelming that I can taste it. I hold a cloth over my nose as I walk through the wreckage of the camp looking for survivors. The boy is now clothed in tattered furs he’s collected from the rubble. He picks through the ashes ahead of me, poking at things with a tent stake he’s pulled from the ground. He seems curiously detached and unaffected, as if this were just some random place he’d stumbled on and decided to explore before heading back to his home. But there is no home for him now. Or for any of us either.

I come upon the old man’s story chest, lying on its side with the sand spilled out. I kneel and scoop a handful up and watch the breeze catch it as it falls out through my fingers. If each grain is an hour of our lives, where does it all go? The old man’s stick and brush are protruding partway from the chest. I take them up and draw the face of God in the sand.

Then I ask of it, “Why?”

It does not answer, of course.

I remember the old man drawing the city, the bomb coming down, and the destruction that was left in its wake. I look around at the camp now, and I can’t help but think that his scene has lifted off the sand and sprung to life.