The Wild Lands

by Paul Greci

  “Wounds,” Max says. “Like this.” She pulls her shirt up and a pink scar a couple inches long runs up her side. “The skin of the land might cover a metal fence, or a pipeline, or a road, but we’ll be able to tell.” She pulls her shirt back down.

  I think of Fairbanks. Was it just a big zit on the earth that got burned off the surface? But people are part of the planet, too. They’re natural. But sometimes what they do is unnatural. Where do you draw the line? I mean, people have to live, too. But the earth doesn’t care. The earth just is.

  I put my share of the last Snickers bar into my mouth. We have six jars of salmon left. Why did I decide to haul the whole pack up at once? If we would’ve taken the supplies up a little at a time we’d be set. My dad wouldn’t have let that happen. I hope we’ll be able to find Dylan and Mike’s uncle’s cache.

  And this guy, Uncle Mark—is he still around? And is he crazy like Dylan’s dad? Like Dylan?

  We haven’t seen a sign of anyone since that last dust plume days ago, not even footprints, and truth is, I don’t want to see anyone. I don’t want to deal with the stress of figuring out who’s dangerous and who isn’t. And what about Dylan? What if he didn’t go north? What if we run into him? I just want to find some food so we can keep going, because it’s still a long way to the coast.

  Well, that’s not true. I want more than food. I want to take Jess and swing her around like I used to when she was little. I want to hear her laugh and scream with delight, and see her hair flying behind her. To see her being a kid.

  And I want to get to know Tam, if she’s into getting to know me.

  I want a life. A life where I’m not constantly on the lookout for thieves and murderers. I want a life where I can lie down at night and close my eyes.

  CHAPTER

  45

  “HOW ARE WE GONNA CROSS that?” Jess asks.

  As near as I can tell, we’re standing on a large floodplain at the confluence of the Delta River and a roiling creek that flows out of the Black Rapids Glacier, or what’s left of the glacier. According to the map, the old road runs along the other side of the river above the floodplain for a while. If we can get across, this will be the easiest place to access the road.

  But the brown-gray river water churns with three-foot standing waves tipped with dirty froth. The far side looks unreachable from this spot.

  The cache Dylan marked should be on the other side of the river and down the road, on the far side of the pass that leads out of the Sacrifice Area and into the Buffer Zone. Dylan labeled these areas on his map pretty much the way my dad talked about them.

  Black Rapids Creek is impressive on its own, and probably accounts for half the flow of the river.

  “We could do a rope crossing of the creek, then keep hiking up the river until we find a spot to do another rope crossing,” I say. “We lost part of the rope in the sinkhole, so it couldn’t be too long of a crossing.”

  Max keeps her eyes trained on the far side of the river. “It’d be better to cross here in terms of finding the cache. Otherwise we might have to backtrack.”

  “That cache might not even exist,” Tam says. “Even if it does, crossing here would be group suicide.”

  “We have to get to the other side to follow the route,” Max says. “Could be food at the cache.”

  Tam bangs her stick on the ground. “The map,” she huffs. “If we didn’t have that map, maybe we would’ve found a quicker way through the mountains to the west, instead of walking for three extra days and then getting stuck right here. Following that crazy asshole’s scratch marks on an ancient map!” She shakes her head.

  “Tam,” I say. “The cache—if we can find it—could have some food stored in it.” I glance at Jess. She’s taken off her pack and is sitting on it, staring upriver. I know she’s hungry, but with only six jars of salmon left we have to make them last.

  “So you’re really counting on that cache?” Tam asks. “Stupid.” She twirls a finger at the side of her head. “Dylan might be waiting there, ready to kill us.”

  “I’m not counting on anything, but if that cache exists, I want to find it,” I say. “And if Dylan’s there, I’m willing to take that chance. I mean, we’ve got almost nothing left to eat.”

  Tam turns to Max and asks, “What do you think we should do?”

  “We all agreed to go in this direction,” Max says. She puts her hand on Tam’s shoulder. “We’ll figure this out. We’ve survived this long.”

  “That’s my point,” Tam says. “We have survived this long. We don’t want to screw up now by chasing something that probably isn’t there.” Then she walks off and sits on a rock about fifty feet away.

  I want to follow Tam and try to convince her that we’re doing the right thing by trying to find the cache, but part of me doesn’t know if that’s actually true. But another part of me knows that I can only push Jess so far. For her age, she is freaking incredible, but I can’t keep expecting her to do everything the rest of us can on so little food. I want to find that cache for her.

  I squat down next to Jess and say, “We’ll figure out a way to cross. On the other side, that’s where we might find more food.”

  She turns away from me so her back is to the river. I hear her sniffling and I think, How is she ever going to cross the river if she’s so scared she won’t even look at it?

  Max comes over, sits on the other side of Jess, and puts her arm around her. “Remember when you climbed that cliff to get out of the fissure? That river behind us is like another cliff to climb.”

  Jess sucks some air in through her nose. “Yeah, but—”

  “You guys,” Tam yells, “I think I see something.”

  I stand and see Tam pointing upriver. I scan both banks and see nothing. But then I catch a flash of yellow in the water. Then red. Then green. Upriver about a hundred yards, coming around a bend. Jess and Max are standing and facing the river, too.

  We all watch in silence as a procession of bodies floats by—coming from the exact direction we need to go.

  CHAPTER

  46

  “BODIES OR NO BODIES,” I say, “we still need to get across the river.” We headed about half a mile up the Black Rapids tributary after the thirty or so fully clothed bodies floated by on the river.

  “I’m not going to waltz into a bloodbath,” Tam says. “Especially with no weapon. We need to at least make some spears. Whoever’s responsible for this is beyond evil.”

  “More death,” Max says. “Always more death. You can’t avoid it. Especially now.”

  “Maybe they all caught some disease.” Jess’s voice cracks. “No one has any medicine.”

  “Or maybe not,” Tam says. “Maybe they were gunned down.”

  Jess turns away from the river.

  “Whatever happened to them,” I say, “no matter how many there were, we can’t change it. And we might never know.”

  “I don’t want to know,” Tam says softly. “I just want it all to stop. I hoped once we got far enough away from Fairbanks that the craziness would stop. That we’d be safe—at least from people. Guess I was wrong.”

  A cold wind is blowing down from the mountains above the headwaters of Black Rapids Creek. Snow isn’t out of the question. I just want to make it through the pass before the winter sets in.

  We split a jar of salmon. Then Tam and Max spend some time attaching stone spearpoints to the ends of our sticks while Jess and I climb a hill to get a better view of the river and the creek in hopes of finding a safe place to cross.

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “The farther we walk up the creek, the smaller it will get. Maybe I’ll even be able to carry you piggyback.” I smile.

  She wipes her nose with her shirtsleeve, then says, “Only if you want to. I can walk myself.”

  “Of course I’d want to. It’d be fun.” I touch her cheek and a small smile appears on her face, and I feel myself smiling back.

  I glance down at the river. More and more bodies keep
coming around the bend. I turn to Jess. “I don’t see any great spots to cross yet, but we’ll find a place.”

  Jess looks me in the eye. “Trav, how do you think all those people died?”

  I take a deep breath. I wish I knew who the people were and where they’d come from. Maybe I should fish a few bodies out of the river and examine them. Maybe we’d learn something valuable, something that would make the difference between life and death. Or maybe we’d catch some disease and die.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Are the people who killed them going to come after us?” Jess asks.

  I take a breath and say, “Whatever happened to those people, it’s not going to happen to us. Not if I can help it. Let’s get Max and Tam. We need to make a decision.”

  CHAPTER

  47

  “IN DYLAN’S PHOTO THE ENTRANCE to the cache looks rocky, like it’s on the side of a cliff,” I say. “But we don’t need to worry about that yet because it’s on the other side of the pass in a different valley. The river there should be flowing south, not north.”

  “Then why can’t we just wait to cross the river?” Jess asks. “And just keep following it until it really braids out and gets small?”

  “According to the map, the river bends away from the road and ends up at some lakes to the west,” I say. “We can’t afford to walk that far out of our way. We’ll use up all our food.” The pack at the bottom of the sinkhole flashes in my mind and I hate myself for not trying to haul it up in smaller loads.

  Tam picks up a rock and throws it into the creek. “Quit talking like this cache is a done deal. It might not even exist.”

  I know she’s right, but I need something to keep us moving in the right direction. If we just flail around moving east to west and west to east, we’ll starve.

  “Even if we don’t find the cache,” I say, “at least we’ll be moving in the right direction. If we follow the river, besides going out of our way, we’ll be going toward where the bodies came from.”

  Max hasn’t said a word since she and Tam joined us on the hill. They used the drawknife that Mike and Dylan left us to whittle away the ends of the sticks we’ve been carrying until they were thin enough to split. Then they made tiny splits in the very ends and wedged a spearpoint in each one.

  Now Max hands me one of our new spears.

  “Nice,” I say, fingering the point. It sticks out about two inches from the end of the shaft.

  “Throwing them won’t do much good,” Tam says. “But if you have to stab something”—she pauses—“or someone. It should work okay. I wish I had some arrows. Those willow shafts we cut—they’re too flimsy. And without fletchings, they’re even more useless.”

  “Your dad,” Max says to me, “he knew what he was doing when he went after these spearpoints.”

  I just nod. Yeah, he did know, but if he’d really known what he was doing, he would’ve listened to my mom and got us all on one of those buses heading north. “My dad was pretty stubborn and driven,” I say. “Sometimes I felt more like his worker than his son.”

  “At least you had a dad,” Tam says. “And now you’ve got memories. Since my mom died when I was six, all I’ve known is institutional living and running. Foster homes with people who didn’t care. A group home stuffed full of girls who turned on each other for their own survival when supplies got scarce. I tried to stay out of everyone’s way after that, but I couldn’t. I had to fight if I wanted to eat, because some girls would take anyone’s food they could. The really timid ones would just hand over part of their meal to the bullies so they wouldn’t get pounded. I fought to keep mine. The counselors lost control. They called themselves house parents, but they were parents in name only.”

  “The land is my parent,” Max says. “I feel—”

  “Big friggin deal,” Tam says. “The land is dead. You always say that kind of crap. Even when we lived in the group home, you acted like some kind of Earth mother.” She turns her head away and spits.

  “I can’t help it if I feel connected—to everything,” Max says softly. “It’s a gift and a curse. That fire burned me deep, but I’ll heal, just like the land.”

  “The land might not heal,” Tam says.

  Max frowns. “This place is hurting enough without your negative energy pounding it down more.”

  “I know,” Tam says, “it’s just that sometimes I can’t take it. All I want is to live without being in constant danger and to have enough food to eat. I’d live in a cave if it was safe and I wasn’t going to starve.”

  Max faces Tam straight on and says, “Girl, you’re part of this place, whether you want to be or not.” She points at me and Jess. “We all are.”

  “But you want to be here,” Tam says. “I don’t. When those buses left and they abandoned us, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. Instead, I had to instantly start fighting for my life and basically haven’t stopped since.”

  Max puts her arm around Tam. “You were a fighter long before the government abandoned us. That’s why you’ve survived as long as you have.”

  Tam leans her head on Max’s shoulder. They start talking softly and I motion for Jess to follow me.

  “We need to give them a little space,” I say as Jess falls in beside me.

  “Are they going to be okay?” Jess asks as we climb a little hill.

  “Yes,” I say. “They’re just two good friends helping each other out.”

  At the top of the little hill we turn and face downriver, and my breath catches in my throat.

  Back from the way we’ve come, something interesting is going on. There must be a shallow gravel bar or some other obstruction on the river bottom, because the bodies are piling up and spreading out. Forming a dam.

  CHAPTER

  48

  “THERE MUST BE SOMETHING STICKING up from the bottom of the river,” I say. “Something that the first few bodies lodged onto, then the rest piled up behind them.” The upstream end of the wall is jagged, but the downstream end is almost straight, like whatever is catching the bodies runs the width of the river. Maybe there’s some old pieces of pipeline there. Whatever it is, it must be just below the surface, because we can’t see it.

  “When the water rises, they’ll just keep going downriver,” Tam says.

  The bridge of bodies cuts a crooked line across the dark water, which spills through the downstream end of the body dam, creating a two-foot waterfall across the entire river where there used to be rapids a little while ago.

  Max says, “There must be at least a hundred bodies. Maybe two hundred. All that potential—gone.”

  We’ve all seen bodies, especially after the fires, but I’ve never seen this many in one place. And I think it’s more like a thousand. Some are faceup, others facedown. Limbs are tangled across one another like they were all taking part in a group wrestling match and were frozen in position mid-match.

  They don’t look mangled or cut up. And I can’t make out any bullet holes or stab wounds or protruding arrows from where I’m standing.

  No one says anything for a while. We all just keep staring, studying, like maybe we’ll see something that will make it all clear.

  When you encounter charred bodies, it’s easy to figure out that the people probably burned to death, or if you find a skinny corpse or two in a crawl space with no food, that they probably starved. And bullet holes are easy to spot on gunned-down people.

  But this is different. I mean, the bodies look untouched.

  Then Tam says what we’re all thinking. “I wonder if it’s stable enough to cross.”

  “Would they just move every time you stepped on one?” Max says.

  “All that movement might disturb them,” Jess says. “They might get washed downstream when we’re on top of them.”

  “What about diseases?” I ask. “What if they’re infected with something and we catch it?”

  “If we just stay over here,” Max says, “there’s a good chance we’ll starve to
death.”

  Tam nods. “We should at least take the risk and try to get across the river.”

  I take a breath. “We’ll have to go one at a time.”

  CHAPTER

  49

  MAX AND TAM CRAWLED ACROSS the body bridge one at a time.

  I don’t want Jess to go alone, but I know that two people on the bridge will make it more unstable. I want to be on the other side encouraging her, but I also want to be on this side in case she gets scared and won’t cross or has to come back. And I want to be on the bridge with her in case it gives out, or she falls in and gets pinned between two bodies.

  I feel my teeth grinding together. I don’t like any of the options. Max and Tam are staring at us from across the river. I know the longer we wait, the more chance there is that conditions will change and make the crossing even less safe.

  But she’s my sister, and I’ve promised that I’ll do everything I can to keep her safe. To keep her alive. To keep her from suffering. To do what my parents couldn’t do.

  “Jess,” I say. “I think you need to go next. But remember, you can always turn back if it doesn’t feel right.” If she makes it across and I don’t, at least she’ll be with Tam and Max.

  She nods. “I can do this.” But her whole body is shaking.

  “I know you can,” I say, trying to believe my own words. Trying to believe that the bridge will hold her like it did Tam and Max. Trying to believe she won’t slip and get pinned under the bodies by the current or be swept downriver. Trying to believe that I won’t be standing here watching my sister drown among a bunch of corpses. Or that I won’t drown trying to save her.

  Jess unbuckles her waist strap, gets on her hands and knees, and puts her palm onto a corpse.

  “Stop,” I say, then I grab her leg and pull her back.

  The bridge is shifting. It’s swaying from underneath in the middle of the river, like something is pushing up from the bottom, or like an ocean swell is coming downriver.