Read State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy Online
Authors: Ryan Winfield
State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (38 page)
He didn’t answer, but had she been able to see the pained look on his face, she might have regretted having even asked.
They arrived at the cove two days later.
The sun was shining through high clouds. He stood on the bluff and looked down at the beach, remembering. He saw them swimming together there as kids, and it ripped at his heart that he couldn’t go back and do it all over again. Time seemed an evil and unrelenting mechanism to him.
He unhitched the horse from the wagon, smacked its hindquarter, and shooed it away. It ran a few meters, then turned to come back. He chased after it with his hand raised.
“Get out of here!” he shouted. “You’re free now.”
The horsed shied, neighed, and stepped back. Then it turned away and began to graze.
The rigor had passed. When he picked Jimmy up from the wagon, he draped him limply over his shoulder and carried him down off the bluff and into the cove. Jimmy’s frame had been wasted by age and by disease, and he hardly weighed anything at all. Aubrey brought him to their cave and sat him against the wall. Then he returned to the wagon for the fox, brought it down, and laid it out across Jimmy’s lap.
It took him most of the afternoon to break the wagon apart and haul its wood down into the cove. Then he walked the beach, collected driftwood, and added it to the pile. He slept that night with Jimmy in his arms. The fact that Jimmy had now been dead several days did not bother him at all. The fact that he himself was still living did.
When the sun rose, he rose. He was not hungry, so he set right to work on constructing the raft. He tied together the wagon timbers, lashed the wagon basket onto them, and then piled it high with driftwood. After ensuring it would float, he carried Jimmy from the cave and laid him out on the raft. Then he laid the fox in his arm and tucked the fox’s head in the nook of his neck. He bent and kissed them both.
He paused before lighting the pyre with the strike-a-light in his hands, remembering that birthday party long ago and half way around the globe. He had never wanted to cry so much as he did now, but he was numb with grief, and no tears would come. So he struck a spark. After starting several small fires around the base of the pyre, he fanned them with his hands to coax them up. Then he pushed the raft out into the cove and sat down on the sand to watch it burn.
“Say hello to your mom for me,” he said.
The raft rolled gently on the waves. The fire rose up and engulfed his dead friend. It burned and burned and burned. Eventually the pyre caved in on itself and sank, hissing and smoking, beneath the waves. Three hours later the tide washed Jimmy’s charred corpse up onto the beach at his feet. He sat looking at it with disbelief—the blackened flesh, the scorched grin. He went to his friend on his hands and knees. He sat in the shallow water and took him in his arms. He cried and kissed his head, cried and cried some more.
“I love you,” he said. “I love you so much, and I miss you. I know you told me to forgive her, and I know I said I would, but I hate her, Jimmy—I hate her, I hate her, I hate her. I’m not as good as you. I never could be. Oh, God, I miss you. Please, let me break my promise and come with you. Please.”
The tide was coming in as he spoke. Soon the waves were lifting them. Water was entering his mouth. He was coughing and talking incoherently and crying. He pulled his friend to his chest, laid back, and kicked off past the waves and away from the shore. As they floated together out of the cove and into deep water, the sun was setting on them. He looked up, and he could see Jimmy there in the molten sky, lean and bronzed and forever young, a wide smile stretched across his proud and perfect face. He hugged his friend close and closed his eyes. As his head dropped into the silence beneath the waves, he could hear the children laughing in the camp and Jimmy’s mother calling them in to supper just one last time.
Some three hundred years later, their legend was still alive. Families on vacation could rent bungalows on the edge of the valley and look down from their glass decks at the fields and the river and what was left of the rotting cabin on the hill. Some said that if the wind was gentle and just right, you could hear poems being read. Yet others said that on still winter nights, you could sometimes glimpse a lone campfire burning across the way at the valley’s edge, high in the cold and lonely mountains where no living soul, night or day, dared tread.
At least that’s what they said.
THE END
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For more information go to:
State of Nature
Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy
By Ryan Winfield
Copyright © 2013 Ryan Winfield
All rights reserved.
Please visit
www.RyanWinfield.com
Kindle Edition
Cover art by Adam Mager
Cover art and design Copyright © 2013 Ryan Winfield
Cover image:
kaipic.com
/ Flickr Open / Getty Images
The Licensed Material is being used for illustrative purposes only; and any person depicted in the Licensed Material, if any, is a model.
Author photo: Sarah T. Skinner
www.sarahtskinner.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used here fictitiously. Any resemblance to any real persons or events is entirely coincidental.
Summary: After leaving the Isle of Man, Aubrey and Jimmy return to the Foundation to confront Hannah about her betrayal and to free the people of Holocene II only to find themselves facing new and more difficult challenges in a world where nothing is as it seems.
BIRCH PAPER PRESS
Post Office Box 4252
Seattle, Washington 98194
CHAPTER 2
Hannah, How Could You?
CHAPTER 8
BethAnn, the Beach, and the Vote
CHAPTER 11
Subterrenes and Strange Dreams
CHAPTER 13
Monkeys, Skulls, and Blue Holes
CHAPTER 17
The Rest of the Story
CHAPTER 18
Stories and Wild People
CHAPTER 21
Killing Time, Catching Eagles
CHAPTER 22
Flying Eagle, Falling Drone
CHAPTER 25
A Message in the Sky
CHAPTER 27
Face to Face with Hannah Again
CHAPTER 28
The High Cost of Betrayal
CHAPTER 30
This Had Better Work
CHAPTER 31
Engineering a New Beginning