by Nick Cole
I am angry because…
Because of that, my friend. Because of that, and nothing more.
“Is there anything else you’re not telling us, General?” asked the Old Man.
“No,” replied General Watt. “There is nothing. I know very little beyond our limited access to a failing satellite network. In truth…”
Pause.
Static.
The Old Man saw the satellite in his mind, aging, drifting steadily out over the Pacific horizon once more.
“The truth, General.”
“Call me Natalie.”
“The truth, Natalie,” said the Old Man softening his tone.
“The truth is, I don’t even know if this plan will work. It is merely our last chance. I didn’t want to tell you about the Radiation Shielding Kit because I estimated that you might not want to become involved if you knew there was a possibility of being exposed to high levels of radiation. Though I have no contact with those on the surface, I hypothesize that a fear of radiation poisoning has evolved into a healthy respect, if not outright avoidance policy, among postwar communities.”
Sometimes she sounds so detached. As if the world is little more than mathematical chances and equations that must be solved so that an answer can be found.
And hoped for, my friend. After so many years of living underground, what else might she have except some numbers that give her hope?
And if I know she is lying to me, why are we continuing down this road?
Because you don’t know if she is lying to you.
“All right, General,” said the Old Man. “I’m sorry. Thank you for trying to protect us.”
I should turn back now. We…
“Natalie.”
“Natalie,” agreed the Old Man.
Natalie.
“The shielding kit will protect you through most of southern Colorado. All you have to do is get close to the collapsed backdoor entrance and then aim the Laser Target Designator at the back of the mountain. We’ll do the rest.”
The rest.
Do I want to know what the rest is? Not today. There has been too much already for just today.
That is the love of letting things go for now.
THE DAY THAT follows is hot and dusty.
They pass through the crumbling remains of eastern Southern California.
All day long they maneuver through scattered debris, time-frozen traffic jams, and long-collapsed overpasses while the Old Man scans the western horizon.
I was raised over there, beyond those mountains that stand in the way, near the sea. Like you, Santiago.
I have not thought of those places since the bombs. Which is not true.
In the days after, I thought of them all the time.
And then you married your wife and forgot them, my friend.
Yes. There was the work of salvage and you had to concentrate to dig out its story. There was no time for where I had come from. There was no time to think of where I could never go again. There was salvage. My wife. Our shack. My son. His family. My granddaughter. They were my salvage and they replaced all those burned-up places that were gone.
“Grandpa, how will we know where the 395 is?”
I thought only of them, my new family, in the days that followed the bombs.
“Roads lead to roads,” he said. “If we follow this big road, we will find another road. In time we will find this little highway once called the 395.”
The dull hum of the tank’s communications system.
“Some always leads to more, right, Grandpa?”
“Right.”
Some always leads to more.
THAT NIGHT THEY camp near the off-ramp at the intersection where the big highway spends itself into the untouchable west and the little ribbon of road the map names the 395 drops off into the lowest places of the earth. Death Valley.
They eat rations heated in the Old Man’s blue percolator and sit around a campfire made of ancient wood pulled from the wreckage of a fallen house built long before the bombs and well before the science that would reveal their terribleness.
Yucca trees, spiky and dark, alien against the fading light, surround them and the silent tank.
The Old Man thinks of the fuel gauge and its needle just below the halfway point.
The drums atop the tank are empty.
If you think all night you will not sleep, my friend.
Natalie says there will be fuel, of a sort, in China Lake.
General Watt.
Natalie.
She sounds old. Like me.
“Grandpa, why do they call it the Death Valley?”
She has been quiet for most of the afternoon. Her questions have been few, as though the place that makes all her questions is overwhelmed by the road and our adventure upon it.
Maybe the world is bigger than she ever imagined, my friend.
“It was called Death Valley even before I was born.”
“So not because of the bombs?”
“No. When people first crossed this country I guess they didn’t like Death Valley, so they chose a bad name for it.”
“Did everyone avoid it?”
The Old Man tries to remember.
Instead, he remembers other things.
Ice cream.
A place he worked at.
Steam.
The beach.
“No, I remember people went there on vacation. It was a place people needed to go and see what was there.”
She watches the fire.
He can see each question forming deep within her.
I can almost snatch them out of the air above her head.
Tonight, when I sleep, I would like to really sleep. Only sleep, and no nightmares.
Especially the one nightmare.
Yes.
The one in which she is calling you as you die, as you abandon her.
As you fall.
As you leave, my friend.
Yes. That one.
No, Grandpa, I need you.
Yes.
“Will it be dangerous there?” she asks.
The Old Man searches the night for one of Natalie’s satellites.
“No. No more than any other place we have been.”
“I’m not afraid, Grandpa. Just the name, it’s a little scary.”
“Yes. Just a little.”
She laughs.
I know what it is like to be afraid of a name and also a nameless thing. My sleeping nightmare is like Death Valley to her.
“Since we might be the first people to cross Death Valley in a long time, we could give it a new name. One that isn’t so scary.”
She stops chewing and he watches the machine inside her turn. The machine that makes an endless supply of questions. The gears and cogs that labor constantly so that she becomes who she will become in each moment and the next.
Sometimes she is so exact.
It might be against her rules to change the name.
To change the game.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
I would change that if I could.
“What could we call it?” she asks.
She is willing to rewrite history. Willing to make something new. Willing to change the rules of the game.
“I don’t know. I guess… when we get there we could see what we think of it and then come up with a new name. What do you say about that?”
They both hear a bat crossing the lonely desert, flying up the desolate highway, beating its leathery wings in the twilight.
Tomorrow we will follow him beyond those rocks and down into the desert at the bottom of the world.
“I would like that, Grandpa. Yes.”
IN THE DARK, the Old Man is falling into even darker depths.
I was falling.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
Yes.
The nightmare.
If only I could change it like we’re going to change the name of Death Valley.
The Old Man drinks c
old water from his canteen.
His granddaughter sleeps, her face peaceful.
No, Grandpa. I need you.
The Old Man lies back and considers the night above, though his mind is really thinking of, and trying to forget, the nightmare all at once.
I wish I were free of it.
I wish I could change the rules of its game.
If she called me by another name, then the nightmare wouldn’t frighten me anymore. Then, I would remember in the dream that she calls me by another name and I could hold on to that.
And thinking of names, his eyes close and the sky above marches on and turns toward dawn.
Chapter 16
The morning sky is a clean, almost electric bright and burning blue. The desert is wide, stretching toward the east and the north. Small rocky hills loom alongside the road.
They have finished their breakfast and make ready to leave.
The Old Man starts the auxiliary power unit and a moment later, the tank. He watches the needles and gauges.
What could I do if there was a problem with any one of them?
Natalie might know something.
We should get as close to Death Valley as we can today. Then cross it tomorrow.
He watches his granddaughter lower herself into the driver’s seat. She smiles and waves from underneath the oversize helmet and a moment later her high soprano voice is in his ear.
“Can I drive today, Grandpa?”
“Stay on the road and when we come to an obstacle, like a burned-up car or a truck that has flipped across the lanes, stop and I’ll tell you which way to go around, okay?”
“Okay, Grandpa.”
They cross onto the highway and she pivots the tank left and toward the north. She overcorrects and for a moment they are off-road.
“Sorry, Grandpa!”
“Don’t worry. You’re doing fine.”
She gets them back on the road and the tank bumps forward with a sudden burst of acceleration as she adjusts her grip.
“Slow and steady,” he reminds her.
“I know, Grandpa.”
They drive for a while, crossing through a high desert town whose wounded windows gape dully out on the dry, brown landscape and prickly stunted yuccas as peeling paint seems to fall away in the sudden morning breeze of the passing tank.
“Are you excited about finding a new name for the valley we’ll cross tomorrow?”
She doesn’t reply for a moment as the tank skirts around a twisted tractor trailer flipped across the road long ago. Inside, the Old Man can see bleached and cracked bones within the driver’s cab.
“Yes, I am.”
The dull hum of the communications system fills the space between their words. Each time they speak, they sound suddenly close to each other.
“If you were going to give me a new name, what would it be?”
The dull hum.
Wheels turning.
“Why would I do that, Grandpa?”
Why would you indeed?
Because I am frightened that I might die and leave you abandoned out here, all alone.
Because a nightmare torments me and calls me by the same name you do.
Because I am trying to change the rules of the game.
And.
Because I love you.
“Oh, I don’t know,” says the Old Man. “Sometimes ‘Grandpa’ makes me feels old.”
“But that’s who you are. You’re Grandpa!”
Silence.
If we can change the name of a valley, can we change my name?
“I don’t know,” he hears her say. “You’re not so old, Grandpa.”
“I know.”
“But I guess… I guess if you wanted to be something else, I could call you… Poppa, maybe?”
I like that.
If I were Poppa, then when I was stuck in the nightmare, I could remember my new name.
And then I would remember it is just a nightmare, and that all I need to do is wake up.
I don’t ever want to be anything else but Poppa.
“I like Poppa. It sounds young. Like I’m full of beans.”
Silence.
They start up the grade that climbs into rocky wastes beyond the fallen buildings of the little town that once was and is now no more.
Where did all the people go? To our west is the Central Valley, Bakersfield, and the Grapevine. I remember passing by those fields on long highways. Long drives are some of my first memories. We had family in Northern California.
Fried chicken.
Summer corn.
White gravy with pepper.
Sweet tea.
The Kern River.
There was a song about the Kern River. My father always sang it when he thought of home. When he found himself in places far away, places where the big jets he flew had taken him. Places not home.
“Poppa?”
The Old Man felt the heat of those long-gone kitchens and early Saturday evenings when the Sacramento Delta breeze came up through the screen doors. Evenings that promised such things would always remain so.
How did they promise?
The Old Man thought.
Because when you are young and in that moment of food and family and time, you cannot imagine things might ever be different.
Or even gone someday.
“Poppa!”
That’s me. I’m Poppa now.
“Yes. What is it?”
“Just practicing. You need to practice too if you’re going to be Poppa now.”
“Okay. I’ll be ready next time.”
“Okay, Grandp—I mean… okay, Poppa.”
Fried chicken.
Saturday dinners.
The heat of the oven.
The Kern River.
Poppa.
THE DAY WAS at its brutal zenith when they saw the Boy crawling out of the cracked, parched hardpan toward the road. Their road. Dragging himself forward. Dragging himself through the wide stretch of dust and heat that swallowed the horizon.
“Poppa, what do we do?”
She has taken to Poppa. She’s smarter and faster than anyone I ever knew.
“Poppa!”
I don’t want to stop and help this roadside killer.
He thought of the drawings inside the warehouses.
He thought of what the world had become.
He thought of the Horde.
The Roadside Killer.
But you told her, ‘The world has got to become a better place.’
“We’ll stop and see what this person needs.”
The Old Man grabbed his crowbar from its place inside the tank.
They stopped the tank and climbed down onto the hot road, feeling its heat melt through the soles of their shoes, new shoes from long ago that they had taken from the supplies Sergeant Major Preston had stocked.
The Boy was young. Just a few years older than his granddaughter.
One side of him was rippled by thick, long muscles.
The other is thin, almost withered, like that other boy who chased me across the wasteland.
The Boy was mumbling to himself through lips that bled and peeled. His skin, though dark, was horribly burned, even blistering. On his back was an old and faded rucksack. He wore tired, beaten boots that must have once been maroon colored but were now little more than worn-through leather. He wore dusty torn pants and a faded and soft red flannel shirt. At his hip, a steel-forged tomahawk hung from an old belt. And in the Boy’s long hair, attached to a leather thong, a gray-and-white feather, broken and bent along its spine, lay as if waiting for the merest wind to come and catch it up.
He is like that other boy who tried to murder me.
The Old Man looked down and saw his granddaughter’s big dark eyes watching him. Watching to see what he would do next.
Inside them he saw worry.
And…
Inside them he saw mercy.
They knelt down beside the Boy.
The Old Man let
the crowbar fall onto the road.
“Who is he, Poppa?”
“I don’t know. But he needs our help. He’s been out here far too long.”
“I’ll get some water, Poppa.”
The Boy began to cry.
Shaking, he convulsed.
Crying, he wheezed, begging the world not to be made of stone, begging the world to give back what it had taken from him.
“Who am I?” sobbed the Boy.
“I think he’s asking, who is he, Poppa!” said his granddaughter as though it were all a game of guessing and she had just won.
The Old Man held the shaking, sobbing Boy and poured water onto his cracked and sunburned lips in the shadow of the rumbling tank.
“He doesn’t know who he is, Poppa. Who is he?”
“He’s just a boy,” said the Old Man, his voice trembling.
“Who am I now?” sobbed the Boy.
The Old Man held the Boy close, willing life, precious life, back into the thin body.
“You’re just a boy, that’s all. Just a boy,” soothed the Old Man, almost in tears.
The Old Man held the Boy tightly.
“You’re just a boy,” he repeated.
“Just a boy.”
Chapter 17
The Boy lay on the floor of the tank atop the Old Man’s sleeping bag.
When they’d lowered him through the wide hatch after helping him up from the hot crumble of the road, he’d mumbled, “M-One Abrams,” and after that he had said nothing.
Now the Boy lay on the cool floor of the tank as the Old Man ran the air-conditioning system at full power. The Old Man wondered about fluids and their replacement and how much farther the tank could go without such vital substance.
They crossed broken landscapes and high rocky hills where the thin remains of fading white observatories still waited for someone to come and look at the stars.
The Old Man could feel unseen eyes watching them as they passed such forlorn places.
They drove through an intersection where large slabs of metal and iron, long ago fused into uselessness, lay behind a crumpled fence alongside the road.
There were once many power transformers here. During those hot days near the end, when the systems began to collapse as unchecked energy surged toward its maximum output, wild power must have flooded through the lines, overloading overridden breakers, and suddenly everything began to melt in volumes of hot white heat. That is the story of this place.
