by David Boyle
“That’s Bird Island, and the one on the left is where you guys camped, yes?”
“Correct.”
Mark suggested they land on the island they’d camped on in hopes of using it to scout a route through the splintered debris cluttering the channel. Wheajo paddled, no arguments, no suggestions, Mark knowing that to Wheajo it was all a waste of time.
The power of the explosion became ever more evident. The out islands had been nearly wiped clean, the trees and other vegetation sheared off at essentially ground level. A massive thirty foot stump jutted skyward across the channel, the trees nearest relatively intact, the damage increasing further away in what was a vague but unmistakable cone-shaped blast pattern. The tiny cove Hayden had so lovingly described was a mass of shattered timber and leafy debris. Huge stumps stood just east of the cove, the mammoth trees that had earlier graced the east side of the cove lying shattered and stacked along what seemed half the length of the island to a point where the shock wave had weakened sufficiently that the forest was strong enough to withstand the blast.
There were notches cut at intervals up the beam of the once magnificent skyscraper across the channel. “That’s the evergreen, isn’t it?” Mark sighed. “Or what’s left of it.”
“Affirmative.” Charlie’s canoe and the uppermost portion of the evergreen had been vaporized, the section above the stump reduced to splinters during the explosion, the fires ignited by the ensuing fireball quickly extinguished by the torrential rains. “Impressive that so much of the tree remains.”
The islands were in shambles, the trees that had survived the blast scarred by flash burns and scalding. Mark had had long discussions with both Hayden and Ron about making the lake their home while waiting for the storm, having argued that the island’s isolation made them more defensible than their home base on the river. All of them had been severely damaged, and Mark was sobered by the realization that if he’d won the argument, they’d all be dead.
Mark thought that through. Would be dead? He sighed. We still are.
The channel was filled with floating debris, the largest pieces washed by the blast to opposite ends of the big island.
Mark started for the raft. “Let’s go, Wheajo. I’m thinking we can beat our way through this crap if we come at the cove from around the end of the island.”
“You do recognize that our mission has failed.”
“Do you really want to go back and tell McClure that we just turned around and left? I sure as hell don’t.”
They maneuvered the raft along the lakeside shore of the out island. There were dinosaurs splashing in the shallows far to the north. “If I got the story straight, it’s up that way where Bull and Hayden found the broranges.”
“You are in this place and considering food?”
“Thinking ahead is all. If we can’t find the brizva, or like you said it didn’t survive the explosion, what better place to spend the rest of our lives? Unless that pile of timber goes away, say, burns in a fire, nothing big is going to bother trying to get past that for the next… hell, fifty years. Least here there’s no way we’d starve to death.”
Wheajo leaned out, stroking. “Another option I presume?”
“I guess you could say that. Just let’s hope we don’t have to use it.”
*****
Ron had taken the canoe downriver for lack of anything better to do. He was still angry that he’d let Mark do the earlier trip, and knew in his heart that if he hadn’t been so bull-headed, Tony would still be alive. Mark would surely have picked up sooner on Sabrefang, and she’d be dead because he wouldn’t have missed the bitch.
And what would Wheajo find when he checked the dawzon? Be a hell of thing if the storm had knocked the canoe loose. Getting the thing up the first time was a bear, and he wasn’t looking forward to possibly having to do it again.
Ron checked his watch. Two hours. Another hour, maybe less, and they’d be back at the river and wondering where he was.
Snarls sounded in the forest. Pack animals, moving fast. Hunting.
Ron spun the canoe quietly around. A mile to the creek. Half an hour’s paddle, less if he felt like pressing. Either way, he’d be there waiting when they got back.
*****
Mark and Wheajo had pushed, shoved, and forced the raft through the debris choking the channel and grounded it on the eastern shore of the cove. The stumps nearby were absolutely huge, the trees likely centuries old when an exploding alien device from the future had ended their lives. There were shattered limbs floating in the cove, on shore, and bunched against the row of huge stumps. Swatches of sand showed here and there, the water in the cove crystal clear beneath the debris. Dead fish of various kinds bobbed among the ruins.
Just walking was risky, sharp splinters poking in every direction. Wheajo was studying the blast pattern; Mark staring solemnly at the water.
It was hard to let go, to finally admit that the little bastard in his head was right about his never going home again, and that he’d never see his wife, or his kids, or watch them grow old and start families of their own, thoughts that burned like acid in his brain, and he grabbed his paddle and slashed at the water, screaming, “No, no, no!” at the top of his lungs. “This cannot have happened! Not this close!” Ripples bled across the once picturesque cove, a fleck of white swirling amid a flurry of leaves. “Not this fucking close, damn it!” he screamed at the sky. “You hear me? It can’t!”
Mark slumped to his knees, his gaze drifting past the splintered morass to where the once mighty evergreen had held Charlie’s beater canoe, now vanished along with his life. “You believe that shit? The whole world’s been damn near blown away and the bark this side of the fucking thing hasn’t been touched.”
Wheajo explained that the canoe had been positioned with the hull facing in the opposite direction, leaving the near side of the evergreen shadowed from the effects of the blast. “Shock phenomena are not immune to chaotic localized effects.”
A gust sent ripples along the ragged ends of the raft.
“Perhaps we should start back.”
“I suppose.” Mark sighed, staring across the lake. The wind was picking up, and if nothing else the trip back could get interesting. “I was almost going to say we should have brought the lifejackets. Funny huh? Lifejackets? Like, why the fuck care?” However Ron and Hayden were going to take it, Mark was certain the news was going to absolutely crush Charlie.
“We do need to do some tightening up first,” Mark said, glancing about the lashings. “Dig out the rope and we’ll throw a couple loops around the logs. Wraps along this edge look pretty frayed.” He again caught a glimpse of white beneath the surface. Fish were floating belly up in the water—he peered through a gap in the debris—but no, it wasn’t a fish. Wheajo had spotted it too. “A fin maybe?”
“Perhaps,” Wheajo said, unbuckling the backpack. “Or a fragment of vegetation.” The raft wobbled as Mark teetered past and hopped ashore.
The shoreline was a jumble of splinters, and Mark stumbled when a log shifted under foot. He hit the ground hard, and came up gasping. “Holy…!”
“Are you injured?”
“Nothing I can’t handle.” Mark stripped away a tattered frond. “Can’t say the same for him though.” The tail was missing, a jagged stake driven squarely through the chest of a small feathered dinosaur. “Pinned him like a lawn dart.” Mark got to his feet. “Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He stepped into the wonderfully clear water, careful not to stir it as he swept aside the debris. Waist deep, he made a stab, but missed. “It’s not a leaf, Wheajo. Almost like…” He removed his hat and glasses, then snatched a breath, reaching. He straightened up. “Answers that question,” he said, slopping his hair off his face before slipping on his glasses.
Wheajo cinched the rope tight. “And?”
“I’m guessing it’s a piece of the flag,” Mark said, heading to shore. “Charlie’s donation to the cause, if I got the story right.
”
“You must be mistaken.”
Mark squeezed the water out. “It’s part of a shirt, Wheajo. Even got part of… what is this? An ear? It’s Charlie’s alright.” Wheajo hopped from the raft. “One of his stupid T-shirt collection.”
Wheajo hurried over. “May I?”
“It’s no big deal. Sure as hell nothing to get excited about.”
Wheajo examined the fragment. The faces, the edges. “The deal, as you say, is a remnant that cannot possibly have survived.”
“Yeah, well, it did. Wind probably blew it down from the tree…,” Mark said, his voice trailing off.
“Probably indeed,” Wheajo said. “Blew down from the tree—”
“After the brizva got hit….” For the first time since cresting the ridge, Mark could see a glimmer in the abyss. He stared past the cove to the towering stump. “It worked, didn’t it? First the brizva, then the dawzon. All that lightning at camp? Same here. There wasn’t just one strike, but two.”
“Evidently. I caution, however, that such a sequence does not exclude—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mark said, splashing away. “But even one chance in a million is better than what we had a minute ago.” Debris was everywhere, scattered across the cove, along the sand bar and out into the lake. Finding anything as small as the brizva would be next to impossible.
“I will create the necessary search pattern.”
Mark stopped along the sandbar. “Okay, sure,” he said, unbuckling the holster. “But first I want to check around the base of that evergreen.” He waded out, sweeping the surface with one hand and holding the cartridge belt with the other. The water was cool, and filled with wooden needles. “Watch if you head over. This shit is nothing but sharp edges.”
That two strikes could occur at the same location in a natural setting was so improbable that Wheajo had never considered the possibility. Yet the evidence was mounting that such was indeed the case. His earlier calculations had determined that a typical strike would charge the brizva sufficiently for a minimal mass transport while retaining ample margin such that the device would not reach saturation. Two successive strikes would likely have exceeded those limits and triggered protection protocols within the brizva, the excess current then traveling along the sapling to the hull and, ultimately, the dawzon.
The antenna had required strength, resilience, and poor conductivity, all properties that the sapling had possessed. With a second strike a possibility, Wheajo realized that if its surface had not been completely wetted beforehand, the overflow current could have been internalized, vaporizing the entrained sap in a longitudinal explosion that would have weakened or severed the sapling. The distinction was crucial. If the sapling had simply fractured, the brizva would have remained attached and been destroyed when the dawzon subsequently exploded; if severed, the brizva itself might possibly have survived.
Wheajo visualized the antenna, the sapling bent to the wind atop the truncated evergreen, the strike he’d planned on, and the one following, and the antenna’s long tumbling arc. Even if the sapling had separated, the limbs could yet have prevented the assembly from reaching the ground. Myriad factors needed to be considered, all of which, including wind speed and direction, could vary so widely that only through use of the yaltok would a reasonably accurate prediction of ground track be possible. Without it, Wheajo would have no choice but to estimate the antenna’s most survivable location.
He stepped past the dinosaur with the splinter pinning it to the ground.
“Found something!” Mark yelled from behind a battered cycad, waving when he got to his feet. “Check it out. It’s a piece of the cable!”
Wheajo’s assessment had clarified two factors: that there had, in all probability, been three strikes, not two, and that the brizva, if intact, would likely retain some portion of the cable—Mark’s discovery favoring the postulate that the antenna was not in close proximity to the dawzon when it exploded.
A flight of pteranodons buzzed the cove. Mark ducked; Wheajo barely noticed. “Is it metallic?”
“They do that often?” Mark asked, swiping at his sleeves, the leather-winged fliers screeching out over the lake.
“I asked you a question. Is it, or is it not metallic?”
“It’s a piece of the jacket. The plastic part.”
“It’s like it melted through on the thin side.”
“Very well,” Wheajo said, apparently satisfied, wading in and continuing around the cove.
Scorched and shredded timber, leaves, and evergreen boughs covered the ground. However much they needed to search, they couldn’t afford to go over the same ground twice. Mark found a convenient shard, and after wedging a leafy piece of frond in a crack, jammed it into the debris. “I find anything else, I’ll put down another marker.” Wheajo was busy stacking timbers in a tripod shape just shy of a quarter the way around the cove. “That’s the line, right? The brizva is down somewhere from the evergreen to there?”
“As best I can determine,” Wheajo said, tamping the sand tight around the foot of an upright. “If the brizva survived, I believe it will be found along a radius approximately three boat lengths from the stump.”
A mass of dangerously pulverized limbs surrounded the former evergreen, the unstable piles stretching away in a roughly circular pattern that extended past the cove and into the lake. Mark dearly hoped Wheajo was right. If the brizva were to have followed the outer limits of the limbs down, it now lay buried and unrecoverable under tons of interlaced wooden rubble.
Hunched over and searching among the limbs, Mark was midway through his first pass across the line when Wheajo joined in, each then slowly scanning in parallel, first to the south, then north. Then back again, the gap gradually widening between them.
Minutes passed.
An hour.
Back and forth across the oftentimes resilient, always spiked mounds, heads down, eyes peering through and among the twisted maze of branches. On one sweep, a bit of melted plastic, then endless leaves, vines, shattered trunks. On another a piece of tape. Timbers shifted. Splinters scraped. And always another sweep. A feather. On the outbound leg an occasional glimpse of bare ground, on the inbound leg a hopelessly entangled section of singed rope.
The clouds were thinning, shafts of sunlight sweeping across the north end of the lake. “This is impossible,” Mark said, rubbing his knees. “It’s just too thick. All this leafy shit. I just can’t see how I’m ever going to spot the brizva in here.”
“Surely you realize the brizva is not your sole objective.”
Mark came up blinking. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“If events transpired as we suspect, a large portion, and possibly the entire support structure will have survived intact.”
“Gimme a break. You’re talking the whole antenna assembly.”
“I am.”
Mark tipped his hat back, then swiped the sweat from his forehead. “So that’s what the metallic thing was about.” Wheajo had been covering a lot more ground than he had, and now he knew why. “Damn, if I would have known….” He scrunched his forehead. “Wait a minute. I spotted tape earlier. That count?”
Wheajo nodded. “Most definitely.”
“Lock down where you are, then come give me a hand. That tape is over this way. And you have to look close, ‘cause it’s almost on the ground.” Sunlight blazed across the island, shadows and light slanting through an already indecipherable maze. Mark stopped at a limb he’d posted, squinting, and spotted the dark inner core of a trunk. “Yeah, this looks familiar,” he said, and went to a knee, tearing through the branches.
“Here,” Wheajo said a moment later.
“Tell me you found it.”
“I see tape.” Wheajo reached through the tangle and removed a leaf. “And yes, the cable is attached.”
“That’s good, yes?”
Wheajo snapped a limb and tossed it away. “An encouraging find, we must yet determine whether the brizva is present.” T
he next limb down was too big to break. “Your help would be appreciated.”
The limbs were the next thing to woven. “Here,” Mark said, and handed over his hunting knife. “If you can notch it, maybe we can break the thing. I’ll see about finding us a pry bar.”
The angles were all wrong, and watching Wheajo reminded him of trying to cut roots in a post hole. The log Mark settled on was way too long, but with nothing to use other than a seven-inch hunting knife, they had to make do. They worked Mark’s pry bar into place, and with both of them applying their weight, eventually snapped the obstruction. Wheajo reached down, hacking, an eager hand waiting to clear the discards.
Chopping and prying, they burrowed into the brush pile and slowly revealed ever more of the antenna. The jacket was bubbled along its length, but even the molded-on hook that held the bowstring looked in good enough shape that there was a chance Charlie could put his compound back together. And once they were home, and Charlie got a new leg, he and Bull, and maybe McClure, would get out hunting together. Hit some new rivers. Get into those bowls of popcorn they talked about—Mark yanked out another branch. Get totally wasted. Yeah, and start living again!
Wheajo helped Mark reposition a stout section of timber, which they used to lever the logs sufficiently far apart to where Wheajo was able to work the antenna free. Scorch marks blackened the brizva where the cable entered the device.
“That doesn’t look good.”
Wheajo said nothing as he peeled away the tape holding the brizva to the former sapling, noting the bits of metal peppering the flash-hardened flakes of wood. “There were indeed two follow-on strikes,” he said, turning the brizva in his hands, still peeling.
Mark took the sapling with its still attached transmission cable, his heart pounding as Wheajo fingered the controls. But there weren’t any lights. No hum. “Come on, come on….”
The control panel flickered, symbols appearing as the illumination steadied. Wheajo entered new instructions, and a different set of characters scrolled into view. Wheajo studied the readout.
