With the funeral pyre complete, I begin stacking the bodies on, layering pieces in, leaving room for the fire to breath. The work is messy and hard, the bodies slippery and smooth, the hunks of flesh surprisingly heavy with the weight of death.
I finish and stand back and look.
The pyre is three meters across and two meters deep, the bloated limbs and heads poking out from the stack. I begin to sob uncontrollably, stomping around camp, snatching personal effects off the ground and adding them to the pile. Necklaces, clothing, children’s toys. A little seashell comb. An apron that belonged to Jimmy’s mother. Then I use Jimmy’s strike-a-light and start several small fires around the base.
Exhausted and drained and covered in blood and sweat, I turn and see Jimmy propped up in the cave watching me, and he’s crying, too. We sit inside the cave with arms around one another and watch it burn.
It starts slow, but as the sky darkens, the fire spreads. It works its way up the pyre in little advances and short runs of flame and soon flesh begins to sizzle and fat begins to burn. By the time the sky is fully dark, the pyre is completely engulfed and burning so bright and hot that we shield our eyes and sweat rises on our brows and we scoot farther into the cave to escape the heat. Three, five, maybe ten meters the flames rise lashing into the night, and the cove is lit on all sides with an eerie glow of flame and shadow. The dark water is unusually calm and a second fire burns on its mirror-like surface, stretching to the cove mouth and out into the open ocean. The fire hisses and pops, and caves in on itself as it burns. I watch shadows and outlines of bodies fall together in sweet embrace as their flesh evaporates and drifts away like departing smoke-colored souls turning a slow and final dance high into the night.
Jimmy leans into me and I caress his hair.
I sit with him sleeping in my arms and watch the fire burn down, casting its flickering orange ghosts onto the cove walls. I think about my people down in Holocene II loading up into train cars at thirty-five and heading off to Eden, and I wonder what they do with the bodies there. Burn them, bury them, grind them up to fertilize our food? I wouldn’t be surprised. Nothing seems impossible now in this new nightmare world.
Jimmy’s eyes open, blink away tears, shutter, then close again. My eyes droop, and fight though I do, they close, too.
CHAPTER 18
The Storm Passes
Black smoke.
Burnt flesh.
The fire is smoldering when morning breaks on the cove. Jimmy is smoldering, too. He’s hot to touch and dripping with sweat, and when I pull the makeshift bandage away to look at his wound, it’s bright-red and puffy with yellow pus leaking from between the stiches.
I drag him farther into the cool shade of the cave. I fetch clear water from the stream and kick up hot coals at the edge of the fire and set the water to boil. The fire is horror to look at, the bodies not completely burned. The charred, eternal grins of fleshless faces smile at me from the ashes.
I spend a solid hour cleaning Jimmy’s wound. Then I make him drink what water’s left. He’s hardly conscious, and I worry about water leaking into his lungs, but his throat moves and I assume he’s swallowing. I collect the few remaining shreds of prized cotton clothing, tear them in strips and dress Jimmy’s leg. Then I drape damp cloths over his burning forehead. It’s clear he has an infection, and it’s clear he’s going to die. He needs medicine, and he needs it now.
I search the collapsed remains of the supply tent, but find nothing except some herbs and pouches of dried roots. I have no idea what they are or how to use them, and I doubt they’d help even if I did. What he needs are antibiotics. I rouse Jimmy to ask if they have any, but he just stares at me, delirious, as if he can’t understand my words. Then it occurs to me that he’s never even heard of antibiotics, doesn’t know they exist.
My mind races for a solution.
“Think, Aubrey, think.”
I’m back in Holocene II now, sitting in my testing seat, the questions coming fast. Twenty-first century medicine—I have to know this, I have to. Then an image pops into my head: the melon field. In my mind I’m there again, and I see the cracked and rotten melons I passed over, melons covered in furry mold.
It takes me all morning to find the field again, but when I do I scour the patch, ignoring the ripe and almost ripe, picking only the rotten melons and gathering them in Jimmy’s netted sack. I sling the sack over my shoulder and run with it back to the cove where I find Jimmy freezing and covered in sweat.
I swaddle him in furs and heat more water, boiling dried fish into a brine and making him drink it. Then I set up my lab and go to work. I lay a square of tent skin just inside the cave where the sun will hit it but the wind won’t. Then I shave mold off the rotten melons with Uncle John’s knife and spread it out on the skin to dry, piling the scraped melons in a shady nook and sprinkling them with water, hoping they’ll mold again.
By afternoon the mold is dry. I shave it loose and fold it in the skin, setting the skin against a rock and pounding it with a stone. I pour half the powdered mold into boiling water, being careful not to let it blow away, and when the tea cools, I feed it to Jimmy. It smells awful, but he swallows it down. I make a paste with the remaining mold, drain the puss from his wound, clean it, and smear the paste on. I can’t be sure there are even any active antibiotics in the mold I’m using, and even if there are, it won’t be very concentrated. But it’s the only hope I have and I cling to it all night as Jimmy moans with fever.
In the morning, the melons are molded over again, but it’s not enough. I race back to the patch and pick another sack full and carry them back and repeat the process.
Days pass like this. Scraping melons, drying mold. Making broth and making paste. I create an assembly line in the mouth of the cave. Five sheets of drying mold, melons piled high in the shade. I make Jimmy a bed from furs and wash him twice a day, turning him every few hours so he doesn’t develop sores. I feed him nothing but fish brine and mold. His tongue turns green. He stinks of spoiled bedding and sweat. I fashion him a diaper from found clothing, changing it several times a day and washing it in the surf.
I can’t stand the bony faces grinning at us from the ashes so I pile the fire with fresh fuel and burn it again. I add to the fire all night, the crackling flames my only companion, and in the morning I scoop sand over the few bones that remain.
On the fifth morning, Jimmy’s fever finally breaks. He’s still not talking, but he seems more alert, sipping brine on his own and even trying to refuse my mold tea.
That night the storm comes …
At dusk, dark clouds gather offshore and rain drops like black fingers on the horizon, white combers rising on the surf. A cold wind races in from the sea and rips howling through the cove. The tide comes on fast, swells of seawater funneling into the cove, waves stretching high onto shore. In the pitch dark of night, the water comes crashing into the cave, and I drag Jimmy back to the farthest wall to keep dry. Outside, the tempest rages on in the dark, and I huddle beneath the skins with Jimmy as we’re blasted with cold spray, and for the first time in my life I pray. I pray to anything that might listen to deliver us from this bloody hell. I pray for the storm to stop, for Jimmy to be better, for all of this to be just a nightmare from which we’ll wake. And as if in mocking answer, the storm intensifies, the waves surging, heaving logs into the cave where they crash against the walls, the bang and clatter jolting me where I sit, peering over the skins, the cold sea-spray stinging my face.
During a break in the barrage, an enormous bird flutters into the cave and perches a mere meter from where we huddle. Its magnificent silhouette is visible only when a retreating wave reflects a tiny bit of starlight into the cave, and when it spreads its huge wings to shake them dry, they stretch out in front of me and I can smell the musty odor of its plumage.
“You leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone,” I say.
Jimmy stirs in my lap. The bird turns its shadow head away as if agreeing to my terms,
and together we watch the storm.
Come morning, the bird is gone. No feather, no print—nothing to mark its ever having been. I check on Jimmy in my lap. He’s sleeping. Not delirious with fever, not passed out with fatigue, but really sleeping, his face relaxed and even content in the low gray light. I slide from beneath him, get up and stretch. Then I step to the cave entrance and look out.
It’s gone.
They’re gone.
Everything is gone.
The storm waters have retreated, taking everything with them. The fire, the ashes, the bones. The tents and cookware. The blood. Everything. No boats, no men, no mothers—no children laughing in the surf. There is no evidence left of our life here. No record of the horror that happened. The cove is as pristine and new as if the Earth itself were called out of the storm and created just last night.
The beach is clean and smooth, the wet sand undisturbed, glistening like a blank canvas waiting for some new life to make its mark. The giant sea turtles rise again on gentle waves, silent witnesses, their sad, unblinking eyes staring out from ancient and leathery heads, their beaked mouths open as they feed.
CHAPTER 19
There’s Nowhere to Go
Jimmy limps.
The crutch helps some, but not much.
“I dun’ wanna go,” he says, breaking his sullen silence.
“Me either,” I say, “but we can’t stay in the cove.”
I lead us north up the coast, retracing our journey.
We stop often to rest Jimmy’s swollen leg, nibbling on the little bit of dried fish we stuffed in our pockets before leaving the cove. I carry bedding bundled in Jimmy’s netted bag; he carries the canteen around his neck. We have our packs stuffed with furs but little else. I bring two melons, hoping to continue culturing mold, but they quickly dry out in the sun and I leave them lying baked and useless on the ground behind us.
We pass through the quiet redwood forest, somehow less impressive to me now. Reaching the boulder-strewn riverbed where I first joined the men and ate meat around their fire, we stop and make camp. We have no energy to build a fire tonight, and nothing to cook even if we did, so we lie huddled together beneath the furs and sleep beneath the cold, clear stars.
Late the next morning we come to the caldera where I met Jimmy and where we netted pigeons. His leg is too injured still for him to descend, so I leave him at the caldera lip and head down alone. I see no pigeons this time, and I have nothing to bait them with even if I did. I climb back out an hour later with only the canteen filled from the lake.
Another cold and hungry night beneath the stars, another day of Jimmy limping beside me on his crutch, and we arrive again at the cliffside caves where Jimmy’s mother nursed me.
It takes us several hours to shimmy down the path, the ledge being too narrow for Jimmy’s crutch, and him crying out in pain every time his weight hits his wounded leg. The cave is exactly as I left it, seemingly a lifetime ago. I make a bed inside the inner room and lay Jimmy on it just as I once lay.
I set about caring for him and the days bleed together until I lose track of them entirely. I spend mornings hunting food, or carving spears and catching fish. I collect water from streams and boil it, cleaning Jimmy’s wound. I find another gourd and make a second canteen. I drop my threadbare jumpsuit shorts, fashioning a kilt from skins. I tie a strip of leather into a thong and I hang my father’s pipe around my neck.
In the evenings, I squat in the cave doorway and watch the sun slide down into the ocean, the horizon burning itself into night. I can see the curve of the Earth, and I imagine our planet hurling through the deep void of space, a lucky accident circling a dying star, nothing but the net effect of some random chaos set in motion by chance, before even space or time began to expand. I used to believe in science, maybe even some cosmic wisdom behind it. I used to stare out my bedroom window in Holocene II, looking down on that Level 3 Valley, and I would tell myself that something out there, something above, knew of my existence and would not deny me.
Now I believe in nothing.
At night, I sit in the dark humming to Jimmy his mother’s song, sometimes holding him the way she held me.
One morning walking, a rabbit stops to consider me and to my surprise, it sits there looking confused while I snatch it up and break its neck. Must have never seen a human. Hanging it from a branch, I clean it with Uncle John’s knife. There isn’t much to it once the fur is off. We cook it that night over our fire, and the next day I dry the skin and cut it into thin strips and braid the strips into a thick thread that I use together with a worn leather pouch to make Jimmy and I shoes.
Jimmy’s leg heals.
He sleeps less and eats more.
He even starts telling me which herbs and spices to hunt for, making the food I cook taste better, and that’s how I know he’s better even though he says he isn’t. That, and he refuses to let me see his leg anymore when I come to empty his bedpan.
He’s physically healed but emotionally wrecked. As long as he stays tucked away in the dark, he seems able to blot out the memory of all that happened in the cove. We never talk about it. He grows weak from inactivity, turns pale from a lack of sun, and I stop bringing him food, making him eat instead with me in the outer cave just to get a spot of sunshine on his skin.
One night, after watching the sun sink beneath the waves, and after watching the sky burn red long after, I crawl into the inner cave with Jimmy and tell him what I’ve decided.
“I’m leaving in the morning.”
“Why would ya leave?” he asks.
“It’s just time to go.”
“Go where?”
“I don’t know.”
“You dun’ know ’cause there’s nowhere to go.”
“Maybe I’ll go back to where that train crashed,” I tell him. “Back to where I first climbed out into all this mess.”
“And what then?”
“Then I’m gonna follow it wherever it was headed and get some questions answered.”
“Follow the train?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Find out who’s responsible for all this.”
“For all what?”
“You know for all what—the Park Service.”
He drops his head. “Who’s gonna take care of me?”
“Aren’t you coming?”
“No, I ain’t comin’.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause it’s stupid.”
“Stupid?”
“Yeah, way stupid.”
“Fine. You’re on your own,” I say, heading for the flap to the outer cave. “I’m out of here.”
“What’ll ya do if ya find ’em?”
“Uh, well …,” I stammer, pausing to turn back and wondering the same thing myself. “I’m not sure.”
“Sounds like a great plan.”
“Anything beats rotting in here with you.”
“Suit yerself,” he says, flopping back on his bed.
“I’m leaving at sunrise,” I say. “And not one minute after.”
“Good luck,” I hear him reply as I shut the flap.
I storm into the outer cave and sit in the doorway to watch the stars and wait for morning.
Part Three
CHAPTER 20
Just Passing Through
Jimmy nudges me awake with his foot.
“Sun rose an hour ago,” he says, looking down at me, the hint of a smile playing on his face. I scramble up from the cave floor where I fell asleep and brush myself off.
With everything we own strapped to our backs, we set off together north toward the delta where I first saw him squatting on that rock and sending the sun to bed. We have the crude kilts we’re wearing, our fur-stuffed packs, the shoes I fashioned together, and two full water gourds. Jimmy has his knife, I have Uncle John’s, and we each have a spear carved from red alder.
Even though Jimmy’s leg is fully healed, he walks with a limp, and
we use our spears as walking sticks to lighten the load. The days have grown shorter, the morning air crisp with the coming fall. When we reach the delta and turn east to follow the river, the trees have already turned and their orange leaves catch the setting sun and cast the hills in a painter’s light.
We walk until dark and we make a fireless camp on a sandy shoal beside the river. We lie there beneath the clear night sky and listen to the soft ripple of water rolling over stones.
“Aubrey?” Jimmy says softly, just before we drift off.
“Yeah, Jimmy.”
“Thanks.”
“Thanks for what?”
“Thanks for ever-thin’.”
“Even for making us leave?”
“Yeah,” he says. “That too.”
In the morning we bath in the river, wading in the cold water, spearing trout. I gut them while Jimmy builds a fire. The fish make a light breakfast and we’re both still hungry, but we lick our fingers, kick sand over the fire, fill our canteens, and set off following the river up.
The river runs lower than before, and when we reach the falls, they look like no big deal so I don’t even bother bragging about climbing down them myself. Above the falls, the fields of wheat have been trampled and eaten down to the nubs by some grazing beasts, leaving the river fully exposed, its banks littered with the gray carcasses of rotting fish everywhere. Nothing left but bony heads with hooked snouts and hollow-picked eyes. I poke one with my spear and a cloud of flies rises into the air, revealing the inner framework of a fish, the intricate woven basket of tiny translucent bones, and then the flies settle again. The whole river reeks with a rotten odor that reminds me of the cove, and we leave our canteens unfilled and move into the quiet alpine forest, heading higher.
By late afternoon, we come to the edge of the treeline and stand looking up the canyon at the trestle where I stood and watched the sunrise on my first day in the world.
“So that’s it, eh?” Jimmy asks.
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