State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (33 page)

“Hey, Mom, can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” she says, as if waking from a dream. “What is it?”

“If this works, how do we go forward from here?”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“I mean how do we start over again and make sure people don’t end up making the same terrible mess of things? How do we make sure that this is the last bomb and not just the one that paves the way for future wars?”

“Those are good questions, Son. And the fact that you’re even asking them tells me that you’re ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“Ready to lead the new state of nature.”

“A state of nature?”

She turns and trains her eyes on me and says, “I’ve been asking myself those same questions for a long time, Aubrey. It seems to me that even the most atrocious horrors are born out of some truth. Radcliffe wasn’t completely wrong.”

“What do you mean, Radcliffe wasn’t wrong?”

“Every other animal has external checks on its population. Humans need one too. But it needs to come from us.”

“I don’t understand how you’d do that, though.”

“Well, even in the most primitive states of nature, humans give up certain freedoms in order to enjoy those same freedoms from others. If you murder someone you can expect their tribe to take revenge, and so on and so forth. Unspoken agreements are created. But now we need to make a collective agreement. Once a stable population is established, no one should have the right to more children than it takes to replace themselves. And no one should have the right to destroy the planet’s resources for future people who haven’t had a chance to enjoy them yet. Our knowledge and technology is advanced beyond that now.”

“But who gets to decide that, Mom?”

She waves my comment away. “Someone has to.”

“Isn’t that the same thinking that got us here?” I ask.

“Oh, Son. I wish things were so simple. You’re ready but you still have a lot to learn. Everything I know and believe is in that reading slate of yours under the title
State of Nature
.”

“You wrote a book?”

She shrugs. “More of a long essay, really.” When she sees the shocked look on my face, she adds, “What did you think I was working on at that silly computer all the time?”

“Mom, how come you didn’t tell me any of this?”

“It wasn’t time. And now isn’t the time to talk about it either. Let’s just sit here quietly and enjoy the view.”

She puts her arm around me. We sit together and watch the sky turn red and the lake reflect it back like a molten pool of fire in the center of all those pink mountains and dark trees. There will be plenty of time tomorrow to think of bombs, and of new states of nature, but right now all I want to think about is how safe and warm it feels sitting here next to my mom.

“I’m really sorry that I wasn’t there for you growing up,” she eventually says.

“It’s okay,” I say. “You’re here for me now.”

She nods but doesn’t respond.

“I love you, Mom.”

At first I think she doesn’t hear me, but a minute later she squeezes me tighter and says, “I love you too, Son.”

I dream that my mother kisses me goodbye.

I wake and the dream was real. My mother is gone.

I’ve never moved as quickly as I do now, casting off my bedding, racing for the randkluft, climbing the rope. I roll out into the dim-blue dawn just in time to see the drone skating across the crater, engines laboring loudly under the warhead’s weight, skis kicking up chunks of ice. I run after it and watch with horror and disbelief as the drone hits the upward slope of the far crater edge, launches out, and falls down out of sight.

“No, Mother, no!”

Only my breathless cry chases the drone now.

I reach the edge and look over to see the drone fighting to pull out of its heavy downward glide. I know if it gets too low, the nuke will detonate. But the drone eventually levels out. The glacier falls away beneath it. I don’t know whether to cheer, curse, or cry. I stand silently by and watch the drone shrink into the distance and disappear from my sight over the dark treetops. I shake my head.

“Why, Mother, why?”

Wind whistling in the crevasses is the only answer I hear.

Despite the cold, I don’t dare go back for my fur. I just sit on the crater’s edge and look out toward the lake and the paling blue sky and pray that she delivers the bomb and comes safely back for me. An intolerable fear keeps telling me otherwise, but I push it from my mind. The minutes tick past; the waiting becomes unbearable. I count to a hundred and back to zero, then start again. Why, I don’t know—maybe just to mark out with some arbitrary number the last moment of this world as I’ve come to know it; this last bit of hope for my mother’s safe return that I cling to with every breath.

The sun has yet to rise, but on my count of sixty-five, it is suddenly there in front of me, with such white-hot brilliance that I instinctively raise my hands to cover my eyes. I can see every bone of my fingers intricately set in the red-glowing flesh that surrounds them. Only when the light and the heat have faded do I remove my hands and look with terrific awe at the ball of orange fire above the lake. The fire fades, consumed by an enormous black and blue-glowing cloud, the edges stitched with a dazzling display of electricity. Then the top blows off, and a thick column of black smoke rises, mushrooms, and rises again until its three times as high as I now sit, and the top of it is dragged away east in the jet stream.

Thirty seconds later the shockwave hits.

I see it advancing across the treetops like a hurricane wind. When it reaches the slopes, it brings with it a continuous crash of thunder that rumbles, cracks, and echoes back from the surrounding peaks with such an awesome noise that I sit open-mouthed in awe and face down the hot breeze, just listening. I can hear the clack of falling ice and the soft resound of distant avalanches long after the wave has passed.

The black mushroom cloud seems fixed in place above the lake, as if it were now a permanent scar on that horizon. and I know in my head and in my heart that no one, and I mean no one, could have flown that drone low enough to drop that bomb and then have had enough time left to escape its terrible unleashing. Hannah, the professor, and my mother are all mixed together now with the same decaying particles of radioactive waste rising above the lake and into the blue morning sky. Here one moment; not a single distinguishable cell left the next.

I sit for a long time and watch the cloud form, rise, and change shape. I sit until the other sun rises and catches the floating particulate in a rainbow of light that would move me to tears for its beauty on any other morning than this. I sit until the sun is high in the sky and the radioactive cloud has been pulled away further east, leaving the site of its destruction almost visible through the haze—the blast radius, the scorched trees, the draining lake. I sit until the sun is at my back; the snow melts around me and soaks my clothing through. I sit until the sun finally sets and the scene that I still can’t quite believe fades once again from my view, retreating into the blue out of which it had come like some apocalyptic vision visited on the world from humankind’s collective nightmares.

When I sat with her here yesterday she knew, she knew. And now I know it too. She’s never coming back.

When I finally rise from the crater edge, my legs walk themselves to the rope. I somehow descend into the dark cavern below without really even wanting to. I walk the shore blind and find my mother’s bed by memory and curl up on it. I bury my nose in the damp and musty furs and smell them for any lingering scent of her that might remain. But even that seems too much to ask of this cruel world.

I know I sleep at some point because I wake in the pitch black of night. It takes me several moments searching my foggy mind to recall the horror of exactly where I am and why. My father and my mother gone. Jimmy far, far away. Even the thought of Hannah and the professor being dead leaves me more saddened than glad. Everyone and everything that I’ve ever loved is gone or at least unreachable to me now. I lie in the dark crater of the mountain and turn these thoughts over again and again in my mind as one might turn over an interesting stone. But there’s no joy in this inspection. No, no joy at all. Only the cold hard reality of a pill too big and too jagged to swallow. It’s just me left here all alone.

In the morning I lie to myself about what has happened—my mother is just up getting something out of the drone. But the decapitated missile hangs above the lake as a stark reminder otherwise. Our abandoned plasma torch hangs from the ice screw next to it, and I would give anything to see my mother up there working. And maybe she is and always will be. Maybe the crazy professor was at least right about that. Perhaps time is just some cosmic trick to prevent everything from happening all at once. But true or not, I guess I’ll never know. And if my mother is still somehow beside me now, I sure can’t feel her presence through all this heartache and sorrow.

I have no idea what to do or where to go.

But I know I can’t stay here.

I pack up the remaining rations along with my reading slate and a few potentially useful tools. I tie them in my mother’s fur, wrap it around my shoulders, and secure it with straps made of rope. Then I fill the canteens in the lake, coil the remaining rope, and climb onto the sunlit summit. I stand there deciding which way I should go. I know from crossing with Jimmy that the lake side is a much gentler slope, but I can’t even bring myself to look in that direction now. Instead I head for the western edge to leave the summit and the sight of my final memories of my mother behind.

I’m vaguely aware of coming down the glacier. Then again, maybe I’ve fallen into a crevasse and this is all just a dying dream. I almost wish it were. I stumble and climb, descending in wide switchbacks from one end of the glacier to the other. The crevasses are less open now in spring than they were when we had come up last summer. The recent snow provides some traction. One wide crevasse proves impassable, and I have to drive my mother’s long screwdriver into the ice, tie the rope to it, lower myself past it, and leave the rope behind.

By late afternoon I’m nearly down. I sit on a wide ledge of glacier ice, chew tasteless jerky, and drink water from my canteen, watching clouds pass in front of the sun. I remember sitting here with Jimmy and marveling together at the moon, neither of us sure we would survive to see the summit. I’d give anything to go back there now—to have Jimmy here with me, to have my mother still alive in China, to have my father still alive underground. It’s hard to imagine that since that night when we sat here, just clueless kids, not even knowing yet who was behind the Park Service, everyone we had met since then was gone. Mr. and Mrs. Radcliffe—Gloria and her brother Tom—my father—Finn, Bree, Junior—all the people on the Isle of Man—Roger and Bill—Seth and Mrs. Hightower and Red—the Motars—the professor—Hannah—and now my own mother—every one of them dead.

I’d cry but there seems little point anymore.

Evening finds me on the lower mountain at the top of the trail where we met that wild man and his mutant boy all those months ago now. I keep on moving down, crossing the river in the dark with my clothes and my makeshift pack held over my head. It occurs to me how silly I must appear to the eyes of watching animals, a pale and steaming refugee climbing from the water shivering and naked, ill-suited to this unforgiving life. I’d give anything to change myself into the lowest squirrel and be able to scamper away without a thought or care beyond my burrow. Instead I torture myself with an endless loop of what-might-have-been and if-only.

In the morning I follow the river north, not wanting to see the trestle again, and not wanting to go near the cove. I do the only thing left for me to do. I walk. I walk sunup to sundown, in fine weather and in rain. Each night I unpack, sort my meager rations, wrap myself in my furs, and try to sleep. Mostly I sit awake and listen to the night sounds. Days pass into weeks, how many I can’t possibly know. My pack lightens, and the soles of my shoes wear themselves through. I tie tree bark to them and keep walking. I’m sleeping more and eating less. When my rations run out I begin to scavenge, eating frogs, salamanders, and worms from overturned stones.

A hailstorm catches me one morning in the middle of an open meadow with nowhere at all to go. I sit down where I am, hold my fur pack over my head, and watch the huge balls of ice pound the ground around me. When it passes, the meadow is so thick with hail I can hardly keep from slipping. I cross it with my arms outstretched for balance like a crazed lunatic on roller skates. I corner a small trout trapped in a riverbank shallow, snatch it up and bite into it raw, the fish still flexing as I eat. When I finally cast the fish aside, I look back and see a lone wolf dodge out from the shadows where it had been following me to finish off what I left behind. Come night I make a fire. The strike-a-light that Jimmy made me for my birthday works perfectly. I sit long after I have the fire going and look at it in the glow of the flames.

In the morning the wolf is still on my trail.

And it’s there the next day too.

Every day it gets braver and closer. I can make out its mangy, patchwork fur and its hip bones articulating beneath its thin flesh as it jogs along behind me with its long tongue lolling from its slavering jaws.

Then one morning the smell of smoke from my burned-out fire wakes me just in time to see the wolf flattened to the ground and crawling toward me. I rise, slower than I’d like, and chase it away with stones. It snarls and backs off into the brush, but when I set out walking again, it follows. At first I’m worried. But then a strange sense of acceptance settles on my journey. Perhaps this is how things are meant to end for me. Earth knows I’ve eaten my share of creatures in my short time here. And isn’t providing energy to a starving wolf a worthy way to go? I know Jimmy would have it roasting over coals as he wore its fur, or perhaps he’d train it and have it fetching him small birds that he’d drop from trees with arrows. I wish Jimmy were here with me now, but he might as well be on Mars.