“Look,” Hannah says, pointing.
The lake house is a tiny speck beneath us, the peninsula fading to a sliver as we climb. The drone turns east and blazes across the mountains, passing over snowy peaks until they give way to arid mountain ranges that roll down into desert plains. The drone dives, plunging toward ground, and I instinctively pull my feet off the floor as if to brace for a crash that would vaporize all of us anyway, but the drone levels out and jets across the desert only a few hundred meters above the sand.
The desert goes on for minutes, and kilometers cruise pass fast as I watch the bright sun directly overhead cast our shadow like a giant bird racing beneath us on the surface of the sand, the winged-shadow growing and shrinking as we pass over high dunes and the low valleys between them. The sands eventually thin, revealing tufts of dry grass and lone trees standing like lunar sentinels in the moonscape land. Then the desert floor falls away and we dive into a wide red-rock canyon flying over domes and hoodoos and ruddy reefs of rock connected by long spans of weather-carved bridges high above deep river narrows zigzagging on the canyon floor.
Hannah takes my hand in hers and squeezes it.
“Wow,” she says. “It’s so amazing.”
Dr. Radcliffe inspects our faces, seemingly more interested in seeing our reaction to the landscape than he is in seeing the landscape itself. But then if he really is nine hundred years old, he’s seen it all plenty of times before I’m sure.
The canyon rises to a tableland plateau, the plateau drops to prairie, and we race so close to the surface that we drive out herds of grazing buffalo and set them thundering off across the plains in front of us, kicking up great clouds of dust as we pass. Amazed, I look back and see thousands of them charging after us, tossing their shaggy-horned heads, wrestling invisible reins.
“Majestic, aren’t they?” Dr. Radcliffe says, watching me look. “Hard to believe they used to slaughter them for pelts and leave the naked carcasses to bloat and rot in the sun.”
“I don’t believe it,” Hannah says. “Who could kill them like that? And who would waste the whole animal?”
“We did, dear,” he whispers. “We did.”
The drone flies smooth and silent, propelled by its electric engines, and from my quiet seat inside the protected bubble it almost seems as though I’m watching some 3D theme park ride of a wild and long lost America. But it’s real, and I’m seeing it with my own eyes.
The drone accelerates now, and the vistas pass by so fast that only snapshots of things appear and then disappear miles behind us in a flash. Shallow lakes littered with white cranes frozen on one foot, all head-cocked as if listening to us pass overhead. Golden fields stretching miles in every direction with invisible winds seething across the headed grass. Trees appear and grow thicker. As we blaze by a swath of yellow-leaf forest, a million starlings rise before our drone and swell in a massive murmuration blacking the sun. Several soft thuds knock against the viewing-bubble glass, and we bust through them, leaving a blue hole bored through the flock. I turn and watch as the sky-lit tunnel swells slowly closed behind us.
Now we climb from the valleys, nose up, ascending a mountain where patches of snow shine like frosty jewels in the shadowed crags. Then we cut through a ceiling of cloud and when it clears, the world is winter white before us all around, and we follow the line of a snow-covered ridge.
Hannah grasps my arm. “Look!” she says, pointing.
Puffs of pure powder rise from the steep slope, stirred by the prancing hooves of mountain goats thrusting in a single-file line through deep drifts of snow and cresting the ridge to walk in a long row on its back. Their shaggy white coats and long bearded faces give them the appearance of ancient men bent to the ridgeline, climbing to some high house of worship.
As the drone climbs above the mountains, Hannah opens her cloth-wrapped lunch, and I realize that I haven’t eaten all day. By the look of the sun, it must be early afternoon already. Without taking our eyes off the passing terrain, we sip fruit juice and eat cute veggie sandwiches with their crusts cut off. I even find a package of algaecrisps from Holocene II.
The drone clears the mountain range and turns northeast and cruises to lower altitudes where the sun drops behind us and lights the northern Midwest wetlands in a golden glow. We drop lower and parkland forests of spruce and alder rise into view. I notice patches of small brown hills moving on the wetland plains. I lean forward and look closer. I see brown fur, high haunches, head-bent and moving slow, grazing. When one swings its massive head to track us as we pass, I see the giant curved tusks and the lolling trunk.
“Are those mastodons?” I say, pointing.
“Holy moly,” Hannah says.
“Woolly mammoths,” Dr. Radcliffe says, a level of pride in his voice. “They’re one of my proudest achievements. Brought them back from complete extinction with a five-thousand-year-old tooth. I’d bring back mastodons too, but so far a suitable DNA sample has eluded us. Maybe you two will do it.”
It’s hard for me to believe we just passed a heard of wooly mammoth. I remember reading about them in my lesson plans, about how modern man hunted them to extinction when the glaciers of North America retreated. But here they are—real wooly mammoths, walking the Earth and grazing on American grass as if they’d never left, as if we’d never arrived.
“See there?” Dr. Radcliffe says, indicating massive rivers of ice twisting through northern valleys. “The great lakes.”
“They look like glaciers, Dad.”
“So they are, sweetie. So they are. Now that humankind isn’t pumping all that carbon into the atmosphere, the long overdue glacial period can return to do its work.”
We bank southeast, flying over hills set afire with turning leaves, and Hannah points out a row of glassy alpine lakes. I point out a green river valley and ridges of rock that rise from the treeline like humps of landlocked whales. After a while, Dr. Radcliffe points our attention to a wide, white-water falls dropping in stages and narrowing into a river that snakes away and widens into a tideland estuary of a distant bay.
“That’s the Potomac,” he says.
“The Potomac?”
“Washington, D.C.—that was our country’s capital.”
Hannah and I lean forward and search the river banks, but no sign of any monument or building remains.
“Was it all destroyed in the War?”
“Much of it,” Dr. Radcliffe says. “But we’ve been hard at work razing the ruins and returning things to their natural state. New York was the most difficult, as you might imagine, but you’d be surprised how much help we had from rising seas and earthquakes. It was as if we’d held some great force of nature at bay. Something patient. Some force deep inside the Earth that rose to sweep away our history the minute we were gone and no longer carving up her surface. Or almost gone, anyway.”
We recline in our seats and look over the passing world, each of us silent with our own thoughts.
The drone climbs.
Turns south.
Accelerates.
We move so fast, I watch the coastline slide by beneath us, cutting the blue water into jagged inlets, bays and saltwater lagoons that glimmer for miles beneath the waving heads of palm trees quickly disappearing behind us. Rocky bluffs, sandy beaches. Great reefs reaching out like pink fingers disappearing at the dark line of some deep ocean shelf. I spot a line of black dashes following the coast south, and I know they’re whales. I’m reminded of the horror in that cove and the Park Service slaughtering Jimmy’s family, but from this distance I can also see the slaughter of that whale and hear its muffled cries as the harpoons pierced its flesh and its blood leaked into the sea.
The drone rises above some turbulence, and I see the horn of land we’re following, another sea bordering its other side. I know from my lessons that we’re traveling over what used to be the state of Florida. From this height, the white-sand beaches glow in the afternoon sun like bright electrified borders between the green vegetat
ed land and the blue Atlantic Ocean.
The drone drives the land out and then descends over a stretch of island keys dotting south from the Continent like the humps of giant turtles walking out to sea.
The landing gear drops; the drone drops.
A runway appears before us, distorted heat waves rising from its surface. The drone eases in and touches down. Brakes and slows. Taxies now to the end of the runway where it turns in a roundabout and comes to rest facing the way we came.
CHAPTER 28
Stories and Storms
We step out into the humid, tropical air.
The steps retract, the door seals shut, and the drone lowers on its hydraulic landing gear. Dr. Radcliffe places his hands in the small of his back and stretches, and it occurs to me for the first time how very tired he looks. He leads us off the runway down weathered steps toward a white-sand beach where small waves drift in and slide up the shore and hiss as they sift the sand and drain back again.
At the bottom of the steps, just above the beach, a path leads us to a manufactured cabin sunken into the hillside, its covered porch providing unobstructed ocean views. It looks like some time has passed since it’s been used. The windows are streaked with salt; a drift of windblown sand is piled in front of the metal door. Dr. Radcliffe lifts a weatherproof cover from a keypad and types in a code. The door locks retract with a click. He opens the door and ducks inside, and we follow.
The cabin is small but comfortably furnished with a main room overlooking the ocean, a small kitchen, a solar bathroom, and two windowless bedrooms in the back.
“What is this place?” I ask.
“It’s one of our outposts,” Dr. Radcliffe says.
“Is this where you and Mom stay when you tour?”
“One of many,” he says. “This is the southernmost border of the Park. The Continent too, for that matter.”
“What’s out there beyond?”
“It’s a big world,” he says, looking out the window and sighing. “We’ll need to have that talk another time. Right now, I’m tired. Why don’t you two go out and explore.”
“But, Daddy,” Hannah says, “the Park Service?”
“This island is a safe zone,” he assures her. “The drones overlook it. Other than maybe being bitten by mosquitos, you two have nothing to fear here.”
He retreats into a back bedroom and pulls the door closed. Hannah and I kick off our shoes and head outside.
We walk barefoot along the beach, beneath the soft light filtering through shoreline palms and dappling the quiet waves. I take her hand in mine. A hermit crab scuttles along the beach. Bits of pink coral. A white shell.
“Isn’t it great?” she says. “It’s everything I ever imagined and more. The world, I mean. I read about it, and I dreamt about it, but I never knew it could be so beautiful. Did you ever think it could?”
I smell the salt breeze, feel my toes sink in the warm sand.
“No. I couldn’t have imagined it being so … real. I read about the world, too. That’s all I did was read. But we were five miles underground and taught that all this was gone for good.”
Hannah stops and turns to face me. Her long lashes catch the light like threads of fire gold that flicker when she blinks, and she looks at me with the most intensity I’ve ever known.
“You do want to protect it, don’t you, Aubrey?”
“Yes. I do,” I say. “It’s too beautiful not to.”
“Oh, good,” she sighs. “I knew you would.”
“But we’ll have to figure out a better way. Some way that works without killing people.”
“Do you like people, Aubrey?”
“I like you.”
Her lips curl in a smile. She lifts onto her toes and kisses me. Her mouth is soft, her tongue warm. I reach to pull her closer, but she breaks away and jogs down the beach laughing, her red hair bouncing in the breeze, her feet kicking up white sand. I chase after her. She’s fast. The sand slows me down, but I’ve grown strong since I’ve been above ground and I pump my legs and take long strides and just as I’m about to overtake her, my toe catches a buried stone and I trip and fall on my face and eat a mouthful of sand. I sit, rubbing my toe and spitting sand. Hannah stands over me laughing. I grab her wrist and pull her down and we wrestle on the beach. We roll into a wave and she screams from the sudden chill of the water. I laugh, she punches my shoulder. We crawl higher on the beach together, away from the waves, and we lie there side by side looking up at the blue sky and listening to the surf.
I remember the electric beach down in Holocene II and all my Sundays there dreaming of the real ocean, wishing I lived in another time, in another life. And here I am living another life. And not just any other life, either—a life beyond any life I dared to ever dream …
We walk back to the cabin in the magic glow of twilight, the tall palms leaning shadowed against a purple sky, the white luminescent sand warm beneath my feet, the ocean breeze cool on my cheek. I look over my shoulder at the impressions our feet leave in the sand, side by side footprints like invisible lovers forever walking on the deserted beaches of time. A high wave rolls dark up the shore and slides back again, wiping the sand clean and sweeping the invisible lovers out to sea.
When we reach the cabin, Dr. Radcliffe is sitting on the porch in a folding lounge chair with two empty chairs beside him. A candle flickers in a star-stamped lantern, casting a tiny constellation on the deck at our feet.
“Nice night for a walk,’ he says, almost to himself.
Hannah bends down and kisses her father on the forehead and then she drapes herself into the seat next to him. I sit too.
“Rain’s coming,” he says.
“Rain?” Hannah says.
“Probably some thunder with it.”
“How can you tell?” I ask.
“I can smell it,” he says. “That, and it comes almost every night this time of year.”
“You come here a lot?”
He nods, gazing out to sea. We sit listening to the waves until the light fades and only the candle stars and the white sand and the broken tumble of the surf are visible in the night.
“I met your mother here,” he says, out of nowhere.
“You always told me you met at work,” Hannah says.
“We were here working,” he says. “Well, sort of working. Officially, we were here for a company retreat—celebrating our first patent for an injectable liquid computer. Unofficially, those of us on the board were celebrating our partnership with the government to take over the labs at Holocene II. We were a big company. I hadn’t met your mother, but I’d seen her. Hard to miss that red hair. She was gorgeous. Well, she still is …”
His story trails off, his mind apparently drifting elsewhere, and he stretches his feet and rubs them together as he stares at the black ocean as though he were expecting a ship to return.
Hannah tugs his sleeve. “Tell us how you met, Dad.”
“It was a Sunday afternoon. Everyone was getting liquored up with the tourists on margaritas in the pub.”
“Margaritas?”
“It’s a nasty tequila drink. I excused myself and went for a walk to see a very famous writer’s house they had turned into a museum. The museum was closed, and all I got to see through the gates were fifty cats lying on the porch. As soon as I hit the main street again, a crack of thunder lit the sky and the rain came down as if the whole ocean had been carried into the air and dropped. I ducked into a creamery to stay dry.”
“A creamery?”
“An ice cream shop, dear. Thirty seconds later, your mom stepped in, dripping. We looked at one another standing there soaked as two seals, but neither of us said a word. We just watched the rain. And boy, did it rain. Water rose in the streets, flooded the sidewalks. It poured halfway into the creamery, forcing us both together at the far wall. A stray dog came in and joined us. Shook us both wet, I remember. A rooster, too.”
“Are there still roosters here, Daddy?”
&nbs
p; “No, they were domestic animals mostly. Twenty-some billion had to be exterminated. There are red junglefowl here, though, and if you see one you’ll swear it’s a rooster like you’ve read about. That’s where they came from anyway.”
“Okay, back to you and Mom …”
“We stood in the creamery marooned on a little dry patch in the back. The rooster watching the dog, the dog watching me, and me watching your mom. I was starstruck, lost in her stormy red hair as she stared out into the rain. I asked the kid behind the counter how long it usually kept up like it was. He just shrugged and said it was hurricane season in Florida, as if that were all the answer my question deserved. The rain kept coming and I kept staring at your mom. Finally, she looked at me with those green eyes. I was struck dumb and said the stupidest thing I could have said.”
“Oh, no,” Hannah cuts in. “What’d you say, Dad?”
“Can I buy you an ice cream?”
“That’s not bad. It’s kinda cute.”
“You think so?”
“Yeah. What’d she say?”
“She smiled at me and said: ‘I thought you’d never ask.’”
“Why haven’t you told me that story before, Dad? It’s so absolutely romantic.”
“Romance makes me shy,” he says, shrugging. “Or maybe because I don’t like to think about the way things were before. About all those poor people who used to live here. There was much worse than rain coming and they had no idea.”
“What do you mean by much worse?” I ask.
“The War,” he says. “The dark years of the War.”
I wait, hoping he’ll say more, but he doesn’t. He just sits there rubbing his feet together and staring out into the dark.
Soon, a drop of rain slaps against the metal roof above the porch. Another drop. Then, as if those lone two raindrops had given us fair warning, the rain dumps down. It slams against the roof and rushes off the edges in a shower onto the beach. It falls in massive drops, dimpling the sand. Waves wash up and smooth the sand clear, and the rain pounds the dimples back again. The candle flickers wildly in its stamped lantern and the stars dance on the slats of the porch.
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