The Beautiful Land

by Alan Averill

  “Yes, you did,” says Tak as he bounds off toward the canteen. Picking it up off the ground, he gives it a little shake. “There’s even water in there!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It’s either that or Scotch, in which case I’m totally going to kiss you.” Tak unscrews the cap, sniffs the contents, then takes a drink. “No, it’s water. Really good water, too. Dude, Sam, this is too much.”

  “I can’t believe I did that.”

  “Okay, try again! Come on, come on! Try again!”

  “What should I make?” asks Samira. “Food? Like, freeze-dried rations or something?”

  “No, try something big! Like a car.”

  “A car? Tak, no. I’m not bringing a car here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because this place is wonderful, and I’m not going to drop some crappy metal car down in the middle of it!”

  “Okay, okay! What about a horse? Or maybe a dog or something.”

  Samira thinks about this for a bit. “A dog would be fun.”

  Tak claps his hands together twice, then points at the ground expectantly. Samira rolls her eyes at him, then lowers her shoulders and lets her mind go blank. She’s never owned a dog before—her parents weren’t much for animals—but she had friends with dogs, and so she tries to concentrate on those. It’s harder than the canteen, and she finds herself getting slightly frustrated as the minutes tick by.

  “Dammit,” she mutters. “I don’t think this is working.”

  “It’s gonna work,” says Tak. “Come on. Just concentrate.”

  She closes her eyes and thinks about a scrawny brown dog that used to roam the neighborhood when she was stationed in Tikrit. The other Marines called him Bones because of the way his ribs stuck out, and whenever he came around, they would chuckle and laugh and toss him little bits of food. Once, Samira snuck outside the perimeter and brought him an entire shank of ham that she stole from the commissary storeroom. The dog wolfed it down in an eyeblink, then pattered over to Sam and allowed himself to be scratched.

  “Oh, shit,” says Tak quietly.

  Samira opens her eyes. There’s a dog lying on the patch of grass. It looks like a cross between Bones and the dog her friend Kerri used to own back when they were in elementary school. Tak slowly kneels down next to it and places his hand on the dog’s side. After a moment, he moves his hand in front of its face, then looks up at Sam and shakes his head.

  Samira feels tears coming and quickly turns away. But when she hears Tak struggling to pick the dog up, she starts running in the other direction. She hears him yelling from somewhere behind her, but she doesn’t care. The idea that she did this, that she somehow willed an animal into existence and killed him in the same heartbeat, is simply too much for her to bear. She runs without seeing, feeling the grass slap against her hands and the red sunlight beat down on her face, until she finally collapses on the ground in a fit of tears.

  When Tak finds her, she’s sitting with her knees against her chest by the side of a small stream. Cottonwood trees line the banks, sprinkling small tufts of white fur into the afternoon breeze. He stands behind her for a while, saying nothing, until finally coming over and sitting next to her.

  “I killed it,” she says.

  “You didn’t kill it, Sam.”

  “I did.”

  “Look, maybe it was already dead to begin with. Maybe you can’t bring a living thing into being. Maybe it just doesn’t work that way.”

  “Or maybe I stole someone’s dog from another timeline and killed it when I brought it here.”

  Tak shakes his head. “You remember what we talked about last night? Before we…Before? When you were talking about a person being the sum of their memories? Maybe you just didn’t remember the dog well enough.” He leans over and places a hand on her shoulder. “I don’t think you killed it, Sam—it just never really existed in the first place.”

  “I want to stop making things now.”

  “Are you sure? Because we could really use more water or a gun or—”

  “Tak!”

  “Yeah, okay. All right.” He grabs a stick from the riverbed and starts drawing small squiggles in the wet earth. “Probably for the best. I don’t think we have a lot of time left anyway.”

  “I know,” says Samira as she stares out over the water. “I can feel the Machine pulling on me. I’ve been feeling it for a while now, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

  Tak sketches out a tall building, follows that with another, then adds a few stick people at the bottom. He keeps glancing over at Sam to see if she’s actually angry with him or just frustrated, but can’t seem to find the answer he wants. Only after he draws half of a city into existence does he see fit to talk again.

  “I’m sorry, Sam,” he says suddenly without looking up. “I’m really sorry.”

  “About what?” asks Samira.

  “About this. About bringing you here. I didn’t…I didn’t know that the Beautiful Land was going to be like this. I can see how happy you are here. How peaceful everything is. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have told the Machine to pull you back. I would have let you stay here.”

  Samira turns to him with an expression that he can’t quite place. “And what?” she asks. “You’d go back yourself? Find Judith, take out Yates, and save the world while I stay here? I wouldn’t want it to be like that, Tak. I couldn’t live with myself if I sent you off alone.” She seems ready to say more, but instead drops her eyes to the squiggles in the dirt. Tak offers her the stick and she takes it, adding a small smiley face on the outskirts of his city.

  “I don’t know how much you remember about the war,” she says as the stick conjures more smiley faces from the mud. “I mean, you were hopping around other timelines for a lot of it, but even if you were there, it never really got the kind of attention it needed. People knew about it, but they didn’t…They didn’t really think about it. And none of them knew what it was really like. You’ve seen a couple of my memories—my friend getting shot, the guy in the chair—but those are just images. Actually being there is indescribable.”

  She drops the stick and reaches out for Tak’s hand. When she finds it, she grabs it tightly, as if he might try to flee before she can finish what she is trying to say. As she speaks, Tak watches her move and listens to her voice and wonders how he could have ever left her.

  “Most of the soldiers I met joined the military because they wanted to make a difference,” begins Samira. “They liked the feeling of being a protector, the thought of keeping an entire country safe. But I didn’t join to protect anyone. I joined because I was lonely and sad, and I thought it would harden me.”

  Tak’s eyebrows rise slightly at this news. “I thought it was for the college money.”

  “That’s what I told people, but it wasn’t the real reason. I was just tired of being depressed all the time. Mom was always so sick, then you left, and it was like…I just didn’t want to feel anything anymore.” She picks up the stick with her free hand and throws it into the river. It bobs on the surface of the water for a bit before the current slowly takes it away. “But my plan didn’t work. I went to war, and I saw terrible things, but instead of numbing me, they turned me into this emotional, quivering mess. Now everything I see makes me scared or upset or sad. Hell, I get sad when I look at signs.”

  “You what?”

  “Remember that sign for the water-heater repair place by my old house? The one where the heater is on a pair of crutches and has a bandage over his eye?”

  “Yeah, sure,” says Tak. “Ricchardi Plumbing or something like that.”

  “That’s it. Well, a couple of years ago, I was lying on a cot in the middle of Fallujah and trying to sleep and all of the sudden that sign popped into my head. At first it was just another random memory of home, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to feel bad for the water heater. Because he’s never going to get better, Tak. He’s a sign. No one’s ever going to come along and
paint a new sign where he’s jumping around with a big smile on his face, or holding a baby water heater on his shoulders. He’s going to be leaning on that crutch with that terrible look in his eyes until the end of the world. And the more I thought about that, the sadder I got, and after a while, I just started bawling.” She stops talking for a moment and dabs moisture from the corners of her eyes. “Dammit. I’m getting upset just thinking about it.”

  Tak chuckles and pulls her close, letting his skinny arms enfold her. “I’m sorry,” he says as he tries to stifle the laugh. “I’m not laughing at you.”

  “You should,” she replies, sniffling once. “It’s really stupid.”

  “You must hate those stick figures on warning labels.”

  “Oh God, you have no idea. Or the one they put on electric fences where the little guy has lightning bolts shooting out from everywhere? That one gets me every time.”

  A bird drops out of the sky and lands on the bank of the river. It pokes its beak into the water a few times until it emerges up with a long, thin worm. As the two of them watch, it tilts its head back and pulls the morsel down its throat, then flutters its wings before flying off.

  “I’m not saying these things so you think I’m crazy,” says Samira, as the bird transforms into a tiny speck on the horizon. “I’m telling you because I need to do this. I need to help you save the world. Because if I do something that important, I might finally be okay again.”

  “It’s going to be hard,” says Tak. “I mean, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, but it’s going to be really hard. I think the timeline is going to be seriously screwed up when we get back. We could find a world overrun with birds. Yates might chase us down. There are a million things that could go wrong, you know? Our chances of actually pulling it off are pretty fucking slim.”

  “I know.”

  “But hey, if everything goes off the rails, at least we got each other. Right?”

  She smiles and looks around the Beautiful Land for what she is increasingly sure will be her final time. The river bubbles and gurgles. A warm breeze ruffles the overhead leaves of the cottonwoods. I wish things didn’t have to end this way, she thinks, as Tak tightens his grip around her. I wish we could just stay here until the end of time.

  They are still sitting by the river when the Machine calls them home.

  chapter twenty-nine

  Samira and Tak stand on the edge of the tree line and watch the city burn. Ahead of them, some twenty miles distant, lies the metropolis of Seattle, Washington. The pair had hoped to catch a glimpse of a few identifiable landmarks as a kind of welcome-home present, but the familiar skyline is currently consumed by a thick pall of smoke. Only the tops of the tallest skyscrapers are visible, and most of those have bright orange flames roaring from the upper rows of windows. As they stare in growing horror, a tiny speck of a man emerges from one of the windows, pauses for a moment, then leaps, plunging straight down before vanishing into the smoky dark below.

  Samira is crying. Tak would like to be, but he is so shocked by what he’s witnessing that the tears won’t come. Instead, he just stands in place with a hand over his mouth and a desperate look in his eyes. He’d expected something like this, but he didn’t expect this. No amount of worst-case-scenario judgments or hopeless prognosticating could have prepared him for what his home world had become.

  Soon a plane flies by—a military transport with four massive engines. It soars off toward the burning cityscape, where it circles twice before dumping a huge load of bright red powder onto the downtown corridor. The stuff drifts down like feathers in the wind before disappearing into the smoke. When things clear again, the flames are diminished. After a few minutes, however, they start licking up all over again.

  Moments later, another plane roars overhead. Before this one can reach the flames, it begins to wobble back and forth as the engine chugs and sputters. Suddenly it flips over and goes hurtling down into the waters of Puget Sound, exploding into a huge blue wall of foamy water. The noise of the impact reaches their ears as a sad little thud.

  “This is…” begins Tak. He wants to say something else, to somehow inject hope into the conversation, but for one of the few times in his life, words fail him. His eternal optimism has never seemed so misplaced or foolish. There isn’t hope here. There can’t be. The idea of walking into that hell, finding a single woman, and taking her a thousand miles across the country is laughable. Better to stay put and live off the land for as long as they can. Maybe better just to find a weapon and end it all before something terrible ends it for them.

  “This is everywhere,” whispers Samira. “Isn’t it? All the cities of the world are going to be like this.”

  “I…I don’t know,” responds Tak. “Probably. Oh God, this is…This is just so fucked-up.”

  He expects Samira to start crying anew, but instead her tears dry up and vanish. She reaches out and takes his hand, her skin chilly in the early-morning air. “Well, nothing worthwhile is ever easy, huh?”

  Tak glances over at her with brows knitted. It sounded to all the world like she just made a joke, but one look at her face wipes that thought from his mind. Samira isn’t joking this time, or trying to deploy sarcasm as an air bag against their current predicament. Her mouth is a thin slit of determination, and her eyes are clear.

  “What are you saying?” he asks. “Sam, you can’t seriously think that we’re going to—”

  “Yeah. I do. That’s exactly what I think.”

  “Sam, look at it. Look at it! Going down there is suicide.”

  “Your friend is down there somewhere, right?” says Samira.

  “If she’s not dead.”

  “Okay. Then we have to go down there and get her.” She turns to Tak and smiles, a reaction so crazy, he can’t help but return it. “Tak, we don’t have a choice. This is it. Either we go down there and find this fail-safe of yours, or we stay here and everyone dies. Even us. I can’t go out like that. I have to try. Even if it’s useless, which it probably is, I just can’t do it.”

  Tak exhales and watches his breath fog off and away. Pay close attention to that breath, buddy. You probably don’t have a lot of those left.

  “You’re right,” he says finally. “I mean, yeah. You’re right. We have to try.”

  Samira wraps her other hand around his and pulls him close. They stand there like that for a little while, two small glimmers of light amidst the raging fires of a world gone wrong. He starts to feel he could wait there forever, but then she plants a quick kiss on his lips, drops his hands, and reaches down to double-knot her sneakers. When this is done, she takes a few steps down the trail, feet crunching across pinecones and dead leaves, before turning back with a sad expression in her eyes.

  “Well, come on,” she says. “Let’s do this thing and get the hell out of here.”

  Tak looks to the sky as if waiting for a better option to present itself, then gets his legs under him and follows. The two of them scamper down the mountain and away from the cluster of trees, becoming smaller and smaller until they finally disappear into the growing gloom.

  the end of all things

  chapter thirty

  The first time Samira entered Fallujah was at night. She saw the city through night-vision goggles as a series of glowing green-and-black blurs that occasionally sprang to light when a tracer exploded overhead. That initial look betrayed the actual horror that the area had become, allowing her to believe that perhaps she had been misinformed as to how bad the thick was in this part of the world. But when dawn came, it revealed a twisted, pockmarked city filled with death and decay in equal measure. Between the heat and the stench and the surviving rebels who occasionally sprang out of nowhere to spray fire at her platoon, it seemed she had discovered a literal hell on Earth.

  But that city was already dead. Here, in Seattle, the city is just beginning to go. And that made things far worse.

  Currently, Tak and Samira are picking their way across the I-90
bridge, a half-mile span of concrete that floats on the surface of a lake. Cars, some burned, some not, lie scattered on the road like small toys. A couple have fresh corpses behind the wheel, but most are empty. Whether the drivers abandoned their vehicles and tried to escape on foot or decided to leap into the icy waters and end it all is unclear, and Samira doesn’t really want to think about it. It’s taking all of her willpower just to keep moving toward a skyline that seems almost entirely on fire, a city choked with the stench of ash and blood and filled with uncountable screams. She doesn’t want to go into that place. She wants to turn around and flee, and she knows that if she breaks, Tak will be right behind her. But she keeps walking forward all the same.

  Halfway across the bridge, they encounter an overturned dump truck. The hopper’s load, some two tons of dirt, has been spread across the road, and the steady rain is turning a large stretch of highway into a soft brown sludge. She and Tak maneuver wordlessly around the twisted shell of the truck and trudge through the muck. Samira manages to avoid looking inside the cab, but Tak can’t help himself—when he takes a glance, he sees an overalls-clad man with his mouth hanging open and a giant hole where his left eye should be.

  When Samira breaks free of the mud, she pauses to dangle her legs off the side of the bridge and into the coldness of the lake, shaking her feet around until the scum is washed away. Whatever good vibes she took from the Beautiful Land are long gone, and her mind is awash with thoughts of cleanliness and cracking knuckles and self-inflicted wounds. Tak’s presence is the only thing keeping her from going completely mad.

  Just before she stands, she glances out at the calm blue surface of the lake, where an abandoned sailboat is tacking back and forth on the wind. The vessel’s name is the Anne Marie, and the entire stern is splattered with red. She can hear the creaking of empty sails over the sounds of the city and the misty rain falling on the water. It is a sound that will stay with her forever.