State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (29 page)

My mother nurses Jimmy all day in the cave while the boy and I dig the graves. The shovel handle is short, half of it having burned in the fire, and it makes for difficult work in the hard soil. The boy drags over a pickaxe nearly as large as he is and begins to help. It isn’t much of a burial, but by early afternoon we’ve got most of the villagers lined up in a shallow trench and are covering them with soil, sand, and ash. I reach inside the old man’s bloodied furs, retrieve his jade snuff bottle, and hand it to the boy. He looks at it in his hand for a moment as if he’d never seen it before. Then he stuffs it away in some hidden pocket amongst his clothing. We toss our tools to the far bank, swim across the channel and collect them again, move to the outer valley, and begin to dig there.

The horses we leave, but where the riders and horses have been burned or blown to bits together, we try to sort out as best we can those parts which are human and drag or carry them back to our hole to be interred. I whisper an apology to the legless man who clutched at me for help the night before. As I drag him backwards over the bumpy ground to the grave, his head lolls and bobs this way and that, as if to say that it’s no big deal. The sun has nearly set by the time we cover them.

We pass the night together in the cave, but we might as well each be alone. My mother’s hearing is still fragile at best, and the boy speaks a language I don’t understand, so there is little talking between any of us as we huddle beneath blankets to stay warm. When Jimmy sleeps his breathing is irregular and shallow. When he wakes he moans with terrible pain. We pile blankets on him, heat water and make tea and try to coax him to sip it when he’s alert. So far he hasn’t said a word.

In the morning, the first of the survivors arrives.

I wake to find a young warrior standing over me and the boy standing by his side. The boy points to Jimmy then to me and talks with a great sense of urgency. The warrior hears him out, then nods, turns, and runs from the cave. He’s back by late morning with three elder sisters. They gather around Jimmy and inspect his wounds. One of them massages his limbs while the others mix up medicines from the cache of supplies. Less than an hour after they arrive, his burns are coated with a white paste and covered again with fresh cloths.

My mother and I leave him temporarily in their capable hands and hike back to our ruined shelter to retrieve what we can. It’s a solemn march there, and I feel several times that my mother wants to say something but doesn’t dare for fear that I blame her for Jimmy. I guess I do, a little.

When we arrive at the shelter, the fire is completely out. It must have rained the night before, because puddles of black water collect in the low parts of the floor. I put my hand out and stop my mom from going farther when I see the strange pod lying where our table used to be. It’s a huge half cylinder made of carbon fiber and concave on one side.

“Do you think it’s a bomb?”

“Come again, Son.”

“A bomb, Mom. A bomb. Do you think it’s a bomb?”

“I don’t know what’s inside this one,” she says, “but it’s a cargo carrier for a drone. We used them to deliver supplies.”

“Well, I doubt she sent us algaecrisps,” I say.

“I doubt that too, Son.”

“Let’s just leave it alone.”

We walk as far around the cargo container as possible, punch in the hatch code, and descend into the hangar. With the shelter now destroyed, I can see how it serves as a bunker and why my mother retreated there. I retrieve my reading slate and my strike-a-light from the drone. My mother digs through her supplies and comes up with a small first aid kit.

“I wish we’d known that was there when you were snake bit,” I say. “It would have helped.”

“I’m glad you didn’t,” she replies. “There are painkillers in here, and now we have them for Jimmy.”

“I had her agreed to a deal, Mom.”

“What’s that, Son?”

I’m not sure why I chose now to confront her, but I can’t keep it in any longer.

“Hannah, Mom. She had agreed to release Red. And the others too. But then the professor told her what happened at the Foundation, and the deal was off.”

My mother leans against the drone and hangs her head.

“I’m sorry, Son.”

“Why did you betray me?”

“We had been planning this for a long time now. When Hannah picked your birthday to meet, it was just too perfect.”

“So my birthday was day zero?” When she looks up at me, I repeat myself. “My birthday. It was day zero in your note?”

“Yes,” she says, nodding. “I had programmed a virus into the Foundation’s software system years before. It was supposed to shut down their warning systems so we could sneak into the control center, take over the drones, and prevent Holocene II from being flooded long enough for the others below to rally support. Then they’d planned to bring up a train filled with enough converts to physically take over. But I never should have let Beth and Jillian try it alone. And my hack failed. The warning systems worked.”

“Mom, your hack probably failed because we reloaded the mastercode after the Foundation flood. That’s why we went to the Isle of Man, remember?”

“I thought you went for the encryption code,” she says.

“We did, but only because we had first gone down to the basements and retrieved the backup mastercode and reloaded it. I thought I had told you that part.”

She sighs and says, “I’m afraid this is all my fault, Son. I blew it.”

“Don’t say that, Mom. This is Radcliffe’s fault, and this is Hannah’s fault, but this is not your fault. No way.”

Her eyes well with tears, and her voice quivers when she says, “So you don’t blame me for what happened to Jimmy?”

I shake my head no and hug her. We stand there in the hangar, wrapped in one another’s arms, and we both cry gently for a long time. We cry for what’s happened to the Motars, we cry for what’s happened to Jimmy, and we cry for what’s happened to us.

When we climb back up to the shelter, I find a single eagle feather floating in one of the sooty puddles. I almost pick it up for Jimmy, but then I think better of it.

We’re several meters down the path when I stop.

“I have to know what’s in it.”

“What’s that?” my mother asks.

“The cargo container. I have to know what’s in it.”

She seems to agree. We hike back up to the shelter and eye the container from every side.

“Maybe it fell off a drone by accident,” I suggest.

She shakes her head. “What are the chances of it landing right here, if it did? No. This is meant for us.”

“What if it’s a trick? What if I open it and it explodes?”

“I have some cable down below in the hangar,” she replies. “Maybe we could use that.”

Thirty minutes later, we’re crouched on the wall twenty meters away with the end of the cable in my hand.

“Pull it hard,” my mom says. “Even though we unlatched it, they’re air tight and they sometimes like to stick.”

I count to three. When I jerk the cable, the cargo container pops open but nothing happens. We wait a minute, then I creep forward to see what’s inside. A few days ago my mother would have insisted on going first, but something has changed in her after the other night.

“Be careful,” she whispers behind me, as if I were creeping up on some sleeping beast that might wake.

The container is as wide as a drone and nearly as long. It opens on its end rather than its side, likely designed that way to hold more weight in flight. But because it’s so deep, I can’t see anything inside other than shadows. I kneel down and reach in, but I don’t feel anything either. So I lie down and reach in all the way to my shoulder and feel around. Still nothing. I crawl inside the container, waving one arm in front of me. My hand closes on something soft. I grip it and pull. Whatever I’m dragging is heavy and hardly gives, but then something breaks loose, and the thing I’m gripping gets light. I back out of the container into the daylight, sit down and look at Red’s hair and the top of his sawed-off skull in my hand. Crude staples bend out from the fleshy edges of his scalp where the crown of his skull that I’m holding had been reattached.

I turn and vomit on the ground.

When I look up again, my mother has her back turned and her head hung. I want to fling the thing away from me just to get it out of my sight, but it somehow doesn’t seem like a proper way to treat a dead friend’s remains. I set Red’s scalp of red hair carefully to the side and crawl back into the container. When I drag his body out, my mother is waiting there to help me. We pull him clear of the container and lay him out on the ground. We look at his naked body and his gaping skull.

“That monster Hannah must have put him in Eden while he was still awake,” my mother says.

“How do you know that?” I ask.

“Because his eyes are open.”

I bend to close his eyes but the lids won’t shut.

My mother walks away and comes back a minute later with two small stones and covers them.

“I guess we should go and get the shovel,” she says.

“There’s another one.”

“Another shovel?”

“No. Another body?”

She looks like she might faint. Then she steps over to the open container and kneels to crawl inside. I rush to her and hug her, preventing her from going in.

“Why don’t you get that shovel,” I say.

She nods, stands, and walks away without a word.

It takes her over an hour there and back. By the time she returns, I have Red and Mrs. Hightower lined up next to the softest piece of earth I could find at the base of the wall. The spot overlooks the peaks and valleys to the east. It makes me happy at least to know that they’ll be silent witness to a million amazing sunrises. My mother and I dig without talking. I’ve now buried, burned, and fed more corpses to sharks than I care to recall. Every time it’s a somber and serious business.

When we finish we lay them side by side in the shallow grave. I replace the top of Red’s skull where it belongs. One of Mrs. Hightower’s arms is frozen at the elbow, ninety degrees and pointing out. The hole isn’t deep enough to cover it. I force it down to her chest, but it springs up again, so I find a large flat rock and weight her arm to her chest with it. Before we cover them up, my mother kneels and places her open hand on Mrs. Hightower’s forehead.

She says, “Forgive me, Beth.”

I say the same thing silently to Red.

With the hard soil packed back on top of them, we stomp it down. I feel like some mad murderers celebrating on their victims’ graves. When we finish I’m crying. My mother wraps her arm around me, and we stand and look down the mountain together—two filthy and tired travelers missing their friends.

“This has to be stopped,” my mother says. “Hannah has to be stopped. Somehow, some way.”

I agree with her, of course, but her attempt to take over the Foundation failed miserably. The proof of that is now beneath our feet. Every one of her allies is dead except possibly Jillian. Her communications equipment is destroyed. All we have is one two person drone and the three of us here in these wild mountains, along with a few Motar survivors, trying to get by somehow on our own.

The sun sets on our way back. The sky explodes with pink light that seems to make everything seem farther away and more beautiful. We wade across the river and walk across the valley. I feel guilty for the peaceful feeling I have, knowing that this had been the scene of such horror just a few nights before. My mother seems to feel it too, because she smiles at me and takes my hand in hers without a word.

The sun, on its way to light some new day, is dragging the pink down out of the sky as we enter the hidden valley. In the soft light of dusk, with the bodies gone and covered up, the destruction seems almost necessary somehow for the birth of a new beginning. Someone has laid salvaged timbers across the burned bridge. We cross it and walk the path through the ruined camp. When my foot lands in the old man’s sand, I stop in my tracks. My mother halts and turns back.

“Is everything okay, Aubrey?” she asks.

“You said Hannah needs to be stopped.”

“Yes,” she says, “I did.”

“To what lengths would you go to stop her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would you stop her at any cost?” I ask.

“I don’t understand your question, but the answer’s yes. I would stop her at any cost. Wouldn’t you, if there was a way?”

“Yes,” I say, nodding. “And maybe there is a way.”

“What are you thinking, Aubrey?”

“Dust to dust. What if the end is in the beginning?”

“I don’t understand what you’re getting at, Son.”

“Mom,” I say, looking up from the spilled sand, “exactly how much do you know about thermonuclear weapons?”

Her weary eyes widen, and she asks, “Do you mean like the hydrogen bombs that were used in the War?”

“Yes, exactly.”

“I know a little. Why?”

“I have an idea, although it might kill us if this works.”

“Show me again exactly where it is.”

My mother holds the lamp up over my shoulder so she can see in the dim cave. The boy, the warrior, and the three sisters crowd around her, looking too. I brush the old man’s sand clear and draw for them again the mountain crater that Jimmy and I crossed so long ago now, sketching the missile hanging from the ice ceiling above its hidden lake.

“I fell in here. And the missile is maybe five meters or so from the shore in the ceiling here. And most of it is in the ice, but the front part is exposed.”

I look up. They’re all nodding, even though my mother is the only one who can understand what I’m saying.

“And you’re sure it looked intact?” she asks.

“Oh, yes. You could still see the strange characters written on it. But how would we fix it, since it was a dud?”

“It’s not a dud, Son.”

“Then why didn’t it go off?”

“Because it never got low enough. The mountain stopped it before it reached its targeted elevation.”

“Don’t they explode when they hit something?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “Too much of the explosion would be absorbed by the ground and wasted. These hydrogen bombs were designed to detonate at a particular altitude above their target. My guess is that this one was aimed at the Foundation, which was then a secret military base. It must have missed its mark and buried itself in the ice on the mountain’s summit.”