The Wildlands

by Abby Geni

  “Is that you?” she whispered.

  “It’s me,” Cora said.

  “Oh God. Thank heavens.”

  She switched on the lamp. Her glasses were on the coffee table, lenses winking at her. When she put them on, the world came into focus. She reached for her shoes.

  “Where are you?” she said. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine. Tucker was hurt bad . . .” A wave of static swelled, and Cora’s voice slipped away into a sea of gray rustling.

  “Are you there?” Darlene cried.

  “Better now,” Cora said at the same time. “He’s better.”

  The connection between them faded in and out, tenuous and rough. Cora’s breathing seemed to stretch along the line. Darlene tucked the phone between her chin and shoulder and dug through her purse, trying to find her car keys. She pictured her sister’s face—feathery eyebrows, button nose, butterfly mouth. She knew every inch of Cora’s body. She had wiped her sister’s behind, bathed her, bandaged her scrapes and bruises. She imagined the knobs of Cora’s spine, the scar on her left knee, and her nubbly belly button, not an innie or an outie but something in between.

  “Tell me where you are,” she said. “I’ll come get you.”

  “What?” Cora said. The word caught and repeated in space, bouncing and reverberating: What? What? The pitch rose and fell, now deeper, now shriller, as though a chorus of other children had joined in too.

  Darlene tried to stand still, hoping the reception would improve.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said. “God, I’ve missed you. Just tell me where you are.”

  “No,” Cora said.

  The throng of other voices dropped away. Suddenly the line was perfectly clear. Darlene stood frozen in the middle of the living room.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “No,” Cora repeated. “I’m staying here. With Tucker.”

  She spoke without hesitation or sorrow. She was not asking for permission; she was stating a fact.

  For a moment, Darlene wondered if she was still dreaming. The conversation had all the surreal hallmarks of a nightmare. The static on the line had lifted, but the conversation still did not make sense. The clarity of their phone connection seemed to operate in inverse proportion to the clarity of Darlene’s brain: the crisper her contact with Cora, the more confused she became.

  “With Tucker,” she said. “You’re with him right now?”

  “Of course.” Cora laughed, a note like a struck gong. “I’m always with him.”

  “But . . .” Darlene began, then faltered. “It’s time for me to bring you home.”

  The line shivered with shadows again. There was a clatter, and Darlene heard her own voice resounding in her ear, thin and altered, faintly repeating her final word: home, home.

  “Home,” Cora said.

  Or maybe she had not spoken at all. Darlene could not be sure if it was only an echo, her own voice distorted into her sister’s.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Time to come home.”

  “No, I’m not going back there,” Cora said. “I just thought I should call to tell you I’m okay.”

  Darlene dropped her purse with a thunk. Her keys skittered across the linoleum.

  There was a flurry of muted rustling on the line, as though her sister had covered the receiver with her palm. Darlene plugged her free ear with a finger, focusing all her attention on the noises inside the speaker.

  A second voice. Low and gravelly. For an instant, Darlene could not tell whether it was real or not.

  Tucker. His growl, his cadence. Tucker and Cora were talking back and forth. Darlene could not catch any words, just the interplay of soprano and baritone.

  Then Cora said, “Tucker says the cops are probably trying to trace this call right now. You can tell them not to bother. This is a burning phone.”

  In the background, Darlene heard her brother laugh. A ripe, hearty chuckle, as vivid as though he were in the living room with her.

  “A burner phone,” Cora said, correcting herself. “It’s a burner phone. That means it’s disposable and nobody can trace it. Not for a few minutes, anyway. All right, Tucker. You don’t have to be such a show-off all the time.”

  “I don’t understand what’s happening,” Darlene said.

  “It’s the SIM cards too,” Cora said. “Tucker switched them . . . What?” She broke off, listening to something Darlene did not catch. A moment later, she exhaled a sticky breath and said, “Oh yeah. I’m not supposed to tell you about that, Darlene.”

  The moon dipped behind a skein of cloud, darkening the world. Darlene felt a swoop in her gut, the first cold wave of terror. She was astonished by the intimacy that seemed to exist between her brother and sister. It had never crossed her mind that she would end up feeling like a third wheel, listening as her siblings communed on the other end of the line.

  “Where are you?” she repeated helplessly.

  “I’m on an adventure,” Cora said. “Tucker has a plan.”

  “What kind of plan?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Anthropocene Mass Extinction?” Cora spoke the words with great care, enunciating each syllable.

  Darlene reacted without thought. She flung her phone away, tossing it onto the floor as though it had stung her. Her fingertips were burning. The phone rolled, bumped against the couch, and stopped. Darlene whimpered a little, shaking the feeling back into her hands.

  Then she lunged for the phone and brought it to her ear again.

  “What did you say?” she said. “I don’t think I heard you right.”

  “The Age of Humans,” Cora said. “It’s happening right now. There’ve been five mass extinctions on our planet so far. A meteor, a volcano, and some other things, I forget what. This one is number six.”

  Darlene began to cry. The tears came suddenly and oddly, striping her cheeks, cool and quiet. A wellspring bubbling up from some interior cavern.

  “You sound like Tucker,” she said. “Just like him.”

  “Yeah. We’re the same now.”

  In the distance, Tucker piped up again. Every time he spoke, Cora immediately fell silent. His words apparently took priority over hers. It was as though some part of her was always waiting for his voice, ready to give it her full attention.

  Darlene dried her eyes with her sleeve, but the tears continued to pour. For weeks, she had been waiting for this call. She had run scripts in her head. She had practiced with Roy, then on her own, rehearsing in the bathroom mirror. She thought she was ready for any possible contingency. But she wasn’t prepared for this. She could not have imagined this strange child—the one imitating her sister, mimicking her voice, unrecognizable and eerie.

  “What happened to you?” Darlene whispered.

  “Nothing,” Cora said. “I’m great.”

  The line flooded momentarily with a harsh electric sizzling. Darlene wiped her eyes and tried to gather her wits.

  “Does Tucker have any idea what he’s done?” she said. “Does he realize how much trouble he’s in? Bombing and kidnapping and God knows what else.”

  “Kidnapping?” Cora said. “How could he kidnap me? He’s my brother.”

  Darlene pressed her fist against her brow. She reminded herself that she was speaking to a child, and she made her tone gentle.

  “Honey, it’s gonna be okay. The police are looking for you. They’re looking for you right now.”

  Cora laughed. “They won’t find us.”

  That laugh. So confident. The girl sounded giddy, almost drugged.

  “Tucker doesn’t have the right,” Darlene said. “He doesn’t have custody of you, and he knows it. He cannot just force you to go away with him—”

  “He didn’t,” Cora said, her voice higher now. A small child. A child on a field trip. “I wanted to come. He asked, and I said yes.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Darlene snapped. �
�That’s not what happened.”

  She did not mean to say this. She was still trying to have the conversation she had rehearsed, one in which the world possessed order and balance. But the world no longer possessed order and balance. Darlene caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror over the TV. She looked wild, her hair disheveled, her eyes pink and brimming.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “Please. I know you love Tucker. I know you’ve missed him. But . . .” She trailed off. “Something happened to his mind. It’s not his fault. Tell Tucker I said that, okay? It was the tornado’s fault. I don’t blame him. But you both have to come home now.”

  There was stillness on the line, pristine and profound. Darlene thought for an awful instant that the call had been disconnected. But it was only a respite from the static. When Cora spoke, her voice was dreamy but bell clear.

  “The tornado was a gift,” she said.

  “What?”

  “A gift. Tucker told me so. It opened his eyes. It showed him reality. Most people go their whole lives without that. They’re too sheltered. But Tucker and me—we see it now.”

  Darlene began to pace around the living room, skirting the coffee table. A wind buffeted the trailer, and the front door squeaked on its hinges. She wanted to throw her phone again, hard enough this time to shatter the screen. She wanted to make a mess—fling plates at the wall, kick over the TV. She wanted to rip the door down, she wanted to punch through the walls. In that moment, she could have pulled No. 43 apart with her bare hands.

  “Everything happens for a reason,” Cora said. “Animals lose their homes and their families all the time. Human beings come in and take everything from them. That’s what a mass extinction is. And that’s what happened to us. The tornado took everything. Do you see? We lived it, Darlene. Now we know.”

  Darlene moved faster. Her breath was tight in her chest, her gait brisk enough to jingle the cutlery. The tiny, shabby trailer was no match for her anger. On the other end of the line, Tucker’s voice rumbled like faraway thunder.

  “I have to go,” Cora said. “That’s long enough.”

  “Where are you? Tell me right now.”

  “Oh, Darlene.” It was an indulgent sigh.

  “You have no idea what I’ve gone through. I’ve been sick with worry. Sick and frantic.”

  “I’m fine.” Cora sounded tinny, a little hollow.

  “Tucker’s dangerous. Did you know he has a police file? He’s a criminal. Please listen to me. You have to come home, you have to. I miss my little sister.”

  “Oh,” Cora said, a long, slow exhalation that looped around Darlene’s neck like a rope. “She’s already gone.”

  A flurry of other voices rang out in a sudden, blistering chorus, loud enough that Darlene jerked the phone away from her ear. She heard what sounded like a woman shouting—a man complaining—not Tucker—not Cora—only strangers. Too many sounds to name, at once human and mechanical, a soup of words and crackles and electric chiming. They were not talking to one another, and they were not talking to Darlene. All across Oklahoma, these unknown souls were having individual conversations, chatting on the phone about the weather, spilling secrets, sharing gossip, unaware that their voices had been gathered up and mixed into a cacophony, deafening and indecipherable, without meaning.

  Then there was silence.

  “Are you there?” Darlene shouted. “Cora? Cora, where are you?”

  She looked at the screen in her hand and saw the truth—dark, blank, the call terminated. She looked around No. 43 and saw it for what it was—a beat-up thirdhand trailer on its last legs, the door ill hung, the furniture salvaged from alleys, the window screens patched, the washer/dryer unit listing to one side, the paint peeling, the plumbing rusted, not a scrap of comfort to be found, bleak and grim and hopeless. Something within Darlene splintered. She held the phone as if it were her sister’s hand and broke down, her body wrenched with sobs as she slumped onto the couch. She had never been more alone.

  And just like that, Cora was gone.

  JULY

  20

  The room was so dark that I might as well have left my eyes closed. Groggy and disoriented, I waved my fingers in front of my face. I could not see my own hand, not even a flutter of motion against the black.

  Tucker’s gush of breath at my side was the only verification that I was awake—that the physical world still existed at all.

  “Tucker,” I whispered.

  The rhythm of his snoring did not change. I sat up and groped across the uneven floor for the flashlight. My brother and I usually slept with it between our bodies, but now I could not find it. My hand bumped the base of the bucket we used as a toilet, sloshing the urine inside.

  “Tucker,” I said, louder this time.

  No response. I felt a surge of claustrophobia. I remembered now that I had been dreaming about being buried alive—thinning air, the mass of earth pressing down above me, dying by slow degrees in a sealed coffin, never to be rescued.

  Maybe I was still dreaming. After all, I was with my missing brother in a ruined tornado shelter, beneath the absence of our former home, amid the wreckage of our former neighborhood. I did not know what time it was, what day it was. The air was scented by a foul combination of mildew and sweat. There was no electricity and no running water. The background thrum of human life was absent here—no appliances, no plumbing, none of the mechanical purr that had once been so omnipresent. The bunker was small enough that I did not want to get to my feet without first locating the flashlight; I might brain myself on the shelves.

  I whimpered a little as I searched the floor. At last, I touched the solid fact of my brother’s hand—his skin warmed by fever, burning like an ember in mine—and shook it.

  “Wake up,” I said.

  He grunted. “Gimme a minute.”

  I stayed where I was, clutching his hand. It always took him a while to untangle his mind from sleep—especially now, when he was still healing.

  For the past few weeks, Tucker and I had lived underground. The hours passed with excruciating slowness. In the morning, the space would be tolerably cool, but it was no match for the Oklahoma sun, and by the afternoon the bunker would become a black oven that trapped and intensified the heat. The stench was a hand pressed over my mouth—our urine evaporating and condensing in the pail, the rotting residue inside the cans of food we had all but emptied, the mud and rodent droppings. Tucker’s sweat and mine were each different enough to stand out from the other. The top note of the whole mess was the clotting of his injuries. I did my best to change his dressings and spread disinfectant on his wounds, but his recovery was sluggish and ripe.

  He spent most of his time asleep, weak from blood loss and shock. So I napped too, sprawled on the floor beside him. There was nothing else to do. I was not allowed to go outside in daylight. Tucker did not have a real cell phone with apps and games, just a plastic bag of disposable devices that were to be used once and thrown away. I had never gone so long without looking at a screen. I missed the TV with a visceral ache, almost the same way I missed Darlene and Jane. I would count breaths until I lost track. I would try to decide whether I could detect a whiff of hazardous waste in the grotesque miasma (even though Tucker kept telling me not to worry about it). I would replay my favorite movies in my mind, attempting to remember every scene in the right sequence. Sleep was a welcome respite from the darkness, the silence, and the unrelenting odor.

  The only thing that kept me sane was Tucker’s voice. Whenever he was awake, he would lecture me. At first these conversations had been few and far between—but as he began to heal, he was alert more and more. He would tell me what he learned during his time away, and I would hang on his every word. His voice was true and certain. Everything else was unreal and dreadful: absenting myself from home and school, unwashed and greasy haired, sleeping on cement, buzzing with pent-up energy. It was a strange kind of torture. There was deprivation (no light, no clock, no Darlen
e, nothing familiar) and constant, terrible stimulation (the stench, the heat). All I had to cling to were Tucker’s lessons.

  He often spoke about how life on earth was in free fall. Half the primates on the planet were at risk for extinction. No more monkeys and lemurs, he had whispered. No more gorillas. Half of all invertebrates were endangered too. Insects, mollusks, and octopuses—bye-bye, guys. A third of all vertebrates were at risk. Forty percent of fish. Hundreds of bird species are already toast. The amphibians are hanging on by a thread.

  Tucker said that insects were dying out in droves. Bees were in trouble. A third of all the butterflies were already gone. Almost all the species of Orthoptera have kicked the bucket. That’s crickets and katydids. He explained that when the pollinators died out, so did the plants. The forests of our world—all the prairies and orchards, each green and growing thing—would wither. And whose fault is it? Who’s polluting the air and water?

  Humans, I would answer.

  Who’s chopping down the rain forests?

  Humans.

  Who’s bringing in invasive species?

  Humans.

  There was often a call-and-response aspect to these lectures. I could not just listen passively. Tucker required me to be intent and engaged.

  Half the animal kingdom would be gone in a few decades. There was no question about these facts, no debate in the scientific community. The pattern was clear. The usual extinction rate for a stable ecosystem was one to five species each year. Animals were now dying out at a thousand times the rate they should be. Dozens of species went extinct every single day.

  Who’s destroying their habitats?

  Humans.

  Who’s killing them for sport?

  Humans.

  What does Anthropocene mean?

  The Age of Humans.

  Now I felt my brother shift in the darkness beside me. He sighed, exhaling, letting go of my hand. A moment later, the flashlight clicked on. The bulb was dim and sputtering, but my eyes still took a moment to adjust. I flinched as Tucker swiveled the beam, illuminating each corner of the little space in turn.