by Nick Cole
He climbs up out of the hatch and runs forward through the night across the warm rock.
Don’t trip and break anything. A hand or a wrist, or even a leg.
Yes, that would be bad.
Below, the ledge falls steeply down a small hill onto a ridge that seems to cut back toward the road.
We could make it back to the road that way.
You might also get stuck.
Time.
Back in the tank, the Old Man starts the machine toward the ledge.
“Hang on,” he mumbles over the intercom.
The near horizon is gray rock and long shadows in the brightness of the tank’s lamp. The darkness of the night seems to devour the ground just beyond the light as the earth falls away and disappears.
Like the surface of an asteroid tumbling through the dark.
There is a moment when the tank is pointing straight toward the horizon, and a moment later it feels as though the gun barrel is aimed down into a black pit that lies just beyond the shattered rocks that dot the arc of light. All of them feel as if they are falling out of their seat belts and harnesses.
The tank picks up speed and the Old Man is leaning hard into the brakes as the tank slides forward into what must be an abyss.
The tank hovers halfway down the cliff and the Old Man can hear himself muttering.
“Poppa?” asks his granddaughter, breaking the dull hum of the intercom net.
The Old Man can see that the ridge ends abruptly and well before connecting with the broken road that winds off toward the unreachable north.
If I back up, the temperature will rise. It’ll put too much strain on the engine.
The Old Man gives slightly on the brakes and the tank begins to ease forward, the gun barrel pointing even lower.
A hundred yards later, the tank is sliding down through rocks and dust, and the Old Man can only give and release on the brakes as the massive war machine slides faster and faster toward the unknown, unseen bottom.
Ahead, a large rock juts out of the dust that seems to chase and overtake the tank every time the Old Man jams his feet onto the brakes.
The Old Man engages the right tread and steers wide of the rock, clipping it at one edge and sending a spray of gravel off into the night.
“Wheeeeeee!” squeals his granddaughter over the intercom.
It feels like we are being bounced to death.
Like a roller coaster.
She has never known roller coasters. So this is her first roller coaster.
And though the Old Man is frightened, afraid he has chosen badly from the start and will soon be responsible for unnamed tragedies that lie in each moment beyond the high beam, he smiles.
I remember roller coasters…
Concentrate! You must pay attention now.
Still, I am glad she is having fun.
At the bottom of the steep and never-seeming-to-end slide, the tank lands and the Old Man yanks it sideways into a skid and finally a halt.
An avalanche of falling dust shrouds them for a moment.
The Old Man is shaking. Sweating.
“Poppa?”
When the Old Man speaks, he hears the fear in his own voice. The age too. “Yes?”
“That was fun! I hope there’s more.” And she is giggling and laughing and the Old Man laughs too, though he doesn’t know what he is laughing at.
You are laughing at yourself.
No, not because of that. I am laughing, because for another moment, we are still alive, despite all my failures.
Yes.
And I am laughing also because of the sound of her laughter. My granddaughter’s laughter is a good thing.
The best thing.
AT DAWN THE Old Man saw the rubble of a wide and tall hacienda set within the crevice of a hill by a road leading up out of the far side of Death Valley.
It has been a long night.
Longer than the night you walked after the motel and the moon went down and you were all alone in the dark?
Yes, it feels longer than that one.
The journey down into the bowl of the deepest desert hadn’t ended at that teetering ledge. For hours, the Old Man had coaxed the giant tank down through wadis and ravines and hills that may have been as steep as that first, terrifying, almost-drop.
She’d laughed all the way.
At the bottom, they’d gotten out to stretch their legs and feel the cool of the night drying the sweat on their bodies.
Even the temperature gauge was back to normal.
The road at the bottom disappeared underneath the drifting desert, and the Old Man thought, ‘Surely this must be the bottom.’
But it wasn’t.
No.
They’d crossed the valley and climbed a road that was mostly intact as it wound its way up through wicked formations of wind-carved rock.
Then down again.
By that time, his granddaughter and the Boy had been asleep.
Then it was just me. Alone in the night and crossing the desert.
Like before.
The tank rolled across the bottom of the ancient ocean.
In the night, the Old Man spied the skeletal remains of sunken RVs drowning amid the sand and rock.
The blackened frames of buildings clustered by the side of the road and the Old Man wondered what their story of salvage was.
Old habits die hard.
I think you should keep that habit. The fuel you’ll need is more than what you have. You have a long way to go before this is done. Far beyond tonight, my friend.
Yes.
In time, the rolling motion of the tank and the Old Man’s concentration on the mere rumors of road that lay buried beneath the mercurial sand lulled him into a thoughtlessness where even his constant memories could not find him.
I am too tired to remember.
When he came to the bottom of the desert, he found something in its center he had not expected to find. Clusters of feathery green trees, clutching at the lowest point of the desert, drifting like remembered seaweed in the moonlight. Moving slightly in some soft breeze that had wandered far and long to arrive here on this late night.
Like us.
In the center, at the bottom of Death Valley, next to a wide swath of dry alkali flats, there was life.
The Old Man shut down the tank and crossed the thin sands alone to feel the feathery branches and touch the soft white bark of the trees.
A strong breeze came up and the branches whispered all around him.
There was once an ocean here and this was its bottom.
I have seen its shores far up near where we obtained fuel from the old spaceship runway. Since then we have fallen and fallen into its dry depths.
As though sinking, my friend.
Yes, as though we were sinking.
‘And underneath this tree,’ the Old Man thought to himself, feeling its soft bark, ‘is what remains of that long-ago ocean.’
SOON HE IS back aboard the tank and rolling on toward the east; his granddaughter and the Boy remained undisturbed by his stop in the night. By the last of the moon’s light, the Old Man watched the white alkali flats spread away to the south.
What lost things lie within you?
What are your memories?
Blankness surrounded him and there was nothing but the road and the night long after the moon had crossed the sky and fallen into the shadows of spiky mountains on the far horizon.
Just before dawn, when the Old Man suspected there might be something, some structure within the rocks ahead, he rubbed his tired eyes and thought of oceans buried deep beneath the desert.
Those alien creatures that had lived within it and along its shores must have thought their world would never end. That the sea and their islands would always be there, long after even they had gone.
Just as we did before the bombs.
And…
One day, will we be just a few savages alongside a ravine at the bottom of our history, clutching at
the remains of what once was?
Like those soft feathery trees in the moonlight at the bottom of a dead ocean.
Can we ever be forgiven for what we did?
IN THE GRAY light of first morning, the Old Man shut down the tank in the shadow of an ancient pile that rose up from the desert floor.
The hacienda had once been a hotel or a desert resort.
There might even be salvage within, but I am too tired to think about that right now.
He waited through the morning silence for his granddaughter and the Boy to finish their sleep. He watched the daylight rise and turn to gold, sweeping away the long night.
My life since the bombs has been like those trees at the bottom of the ancient ocean.
And yet, you are still here, my friend.
Yes.
Chapter 22
The Old Man awoke after noon. He raised a hand, shielding his eyes from the glare of the blinding sun.
He lay in the thin shadow of an ancient building.
He was alone.
He drank warm water and listened to the silence.
Far away, in the building above him he could hear his granddaughter’s voice. She was talking to someone.
The Boy.
He listened to them as they explored the ruin.
In time they returned to him.
“Poppa!” She dropped a sack of treasures onto the pavement of the courtyard where he had been resting since they’d awoken that morning. “We found salvage.”
The Boy appeared and the Old Man was comforted by the tomahawk the Boy kept at his belt and the dead snake in his hands.
I should have known better than to bring her. If the Boy had not been with her she might have gotten hurt.
I must be more careful.
But I was so tired.
On the ground lay a corkscrew, a feather duster that looked in good shape, and a bowling ball.
“What’s this?” she asked holding up the corkscrew. “A weapon?”
He must have killed the snake with his tomahawk. The young are always impressed by the accomplishments of weapons.
“No.” The Old Man picked up the corkscrew and inspected it. A wooden handle from which the thin spiral of the metal corkscrew rose up. He spit on it and polished it. “But it could be if you needed it to be.” He put the handle in his fist and let the corkscrew erupt through his middle and ring fingers. “You could punch with it like this.” He showed her.
Eyes wide, she watched, and when he had given the corkscrew back to her she also made a weapon of it.
Should I have done that? Should I have shown her how to make a weapon out of something that isn’t one?
The world is a dangerous place now, my friend.
A moment later she grabbed the feather duster.
“This, Poppa? What is it? What was it for?”
The Boy set to gathering thin strips of the darkish deadwood that lay scattered about. The Old Man’s mouth watered at the thought of the cooked snake.
I like snake.
“That’s…” But the Old Man could not think of what a feather duster was once called. He knew what it did. But its label remained lost and no matter how hard he tried, he could not dig out a name for the feather duster within the cemetery of his mind.
My mind is like a burial place for the forgotten dead.
He remembered the ancient tombstones he and Big Pedro had come across out in the southern reaches of the desert, far out beyond the village. Far out beyond any salvage spots anyone could remember, they’d found the little cemetery resisting the desert. Surrounded by sinking ironwork, the nameless graves waited, their markers shifting in the sand throughout the years.
“No good,” Big Pedro had said all those years ago. Malo. Bad.
When I’d turned to face him he had seen a look in my eye.
I’d wanted to open those graves and search them.
I’d shamed him.
The Old Man picked up the feather duster.
“You cleaned things with it?” Then, “It made dust go away.”
For a moment, the name leapt out of the bushes clustering at the edge of his thoughts and then ran off down the road.
Later they finished the snake, which there was a surprising amount of.
It was a big snake.
As they sat waiting out the heat of the day, the Old Man thought of Big Pedro.
He was a good man.
I was wrong to have even thought about disturbing those graves.
What could we have found?
That was not the point.
I had grown calloused. I had gotten used to searching the things of dead people because we needed to survive. Taking their things and making them mine. Ours.
It was survival.
It was wrong.
Like the corkscrew.
Yes, that felt wrong even in the moment I was showing her how to make it a weapon.
He waited.
Waited for the answer he must give himself.
But what lies ahead is very dangerous.
To think that everything will be as easy as it has been up to this point is childish. She might need a weapon.
Now she has one.
I wish the world were different.
The world is what it is, my friend. The world is what it always has been. A very dangerous place.
Feather duster.
Chapter 23
It was late in the day, after they’d eaten the snake seasoned with some pepper that had survived the Old Man’s charity, when they began the climb up and out of the valley. The grade was gentle and the climb little more than a final sweep up onto the eastern desert plain.
There are maybe eight miles between here and the secret testing area.
You are trying to think of other things.
Yes.
The Old Man watched the Boy as he rode atop the turret, eyes constantly scanning the far horizon.
Yes, I am trying to think of other things than the right tread of this tank.
“What shall we call the valley now that we have seen it?” he asked his granddaughter over the intercom.
There was a pause and he knew she was thinking. He knew her face when it thought. The pressed lips, the eyes searching the sky. Thinking.
“It wasn’t scary, Poppa.”
“No, not so much.”
Remember the fall to the bottom. That was scary to me when we drove in the dark and I could not tell where the edge was and what would happen next. It is even scarier to me now when I think back about it. That is how you know things were really very dangerous, when you think back and are still frightened about what might have happened. That is the fear of what-might-have-been.
“How about…” she said through the dull hum of the communications net.
The Bottom of an Ocean Valley.
The Roller-Coaster Valley.
The Valley of the Longest Night.
“How about the ‘There Is Nothing to be Afraid of Here Valley,’ Poppa?”
How about that?
SINCE THAT AFTERNOON, after the long night of driving through the bottom of the once-ocean, the Old Man had felt the falseness in the right tread, and if he listened closely, a metallic clank that had not been there before. A clank he sometimes heard and other times, when he was sure he would hear it, not at all.
Maybe it is just an uncertainty and nothing more?
For now?
Yes, for now. And it could be these jury-rigged joysticks Sergeant Major Preston fixed up. That could be the problem.
Then you should ask your granddaughter to take over and guide the tank from the driver’s compartment. See if she notices it also.
But the Old Man could not bring himself to ask her.
If it’s true…
Then it is true.
Yes.
That night under desert skies turned western flames surrendering to the blue comfort of night, they sat and watched their fire.
I cannot stop thinking about the bad tread.
But what can you do about it?
“Where are we going?” asked the Boy.
The Old Man looked up to see both of them watching him.
“Tomorrow,” he began, “at noon, I’ll call the General and find out where we must go exactly. From what she has told me, we must find a device somewhere within this area. She tells me the device will help free her and those trapped within their bunker.”
“What does this device do? Is it a weapon?” asked the Boy.
“I don’t know,” mumbled the Old Man, feeding dry sticks into the fire.
But you should know.
Yes.
“Poppa?”
“Yes.”
“I’m hungry.”
And there is that too.
JUST BEFORE NOON the Boy raised his hand. The gesture was so sudden and the Boy so long unmoving, the Old Man felt electrified at its sudden movement and meaning. The Old Man stopped the tank. Below them, in a long valley amid the salt flats, lay the once-secret base, Area 51, where Natalie had directed them to find the Laser Target Designator.
The Boy scrambled across the tank and shouted above the engine’s roar in the Old Man’s face.
“There are goats, big ones, along that ridge.” The Boy pointed toward a jumble of rocks that looked like some bygone battleship crossing the ocean of a wide desert. The Old Man could not see any goats.
But he is young and his eyes are good.
“I’ll hunt one and bring it down into the base. It might take me a while.”
The Old Man nodded and the Boy climbed down from the rumbling tank and loped off in his awkward manner toward the distant rocks.
Later, after the engine had faded from whine to silence, as the wind whispered through the ancient hangars, sweeping tumbleweeds along the dry runway, the Old Man watched the distant rocks and saw nothing of the Boy.
“Where is this laser machine, Poppa?”
The Old Man turned to the base.
There is no one here and there hasn’t been for a long time.
The broken stalk of a control tower rose above the airfield. Debris remained scattered across the blistered tarmac.
