by Weston Ochse
Funny. Try as he might, he couldn’t remember what he’d wished on that day.
A scream shattered the moment.
Pearson’s eyes refocused on an impossibly-towering pagoda easily reaching more than fifteen stories. A silhouette stood atop it, arms outstretched to the heavens. The scream came again. Now that he’d heard it twice, he knew who it was. But knowing didn’t make him understand the why of it.
He sat up, the sudden movement creating a butterfly blizzard. Reaching up, he meant to swat the insects out of his way so he could see, but he jerked his hand back at the last second. With so much death, perhaps reaching degrees of planetcide, he couldn’t bring himself to harm something so beautiful. Instead he lowered his head and stood, careful as dizziness threatened to take him back to the ground.
The butterflies scattered allowing him to see his surroundings for the first time. He was in the middle of a grassy expanse between not one, but three towering pagodas, each more than two hundred feet tall. In the distance lay the hint of a town at the base of a tall range of mountains slicing across the sky. Behind him lay the wreckage of the plane, one wing missing the other snapped in two. The tail section was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps it was beneath the sultry waves of the lake, its dark blue hues promising an impressive depth. And, of course, there were the butterflies. The grass was dotted by yellow and blue flowers, their blooms as frequent as dandelions. Each of these served half a dozen butterflies, as if they were fonts of nectar, lepidopter fast food drive-thrus the beautiful creatures couldn’t pass up.
The bomber crew’s gear had been piled nearby. The water, rations and wire pulled from the guts of the plane were the most noticeable. A parachute had been unraveled and used as shelter, the green silken fabric billowing in the wind. Beneath this a form kneeled, as if in prayer. A few feet away lay another form. This one stopped Pearson’s heart for a split second. Covered with a cloth, there was no mistaking the dead body. He walked over and made out the neck cranked at an impossible angle. A white hand had slipped from beneath the cloth. He’d already pegged the man atop the pagoda as the colonel, and the man inside the tent praying could only be Rasheen. That meant that the body could only be that of Captain Rick Matthews. A memory of the man’s tiny son being held high by a once proud papa sent a shiver of gravitas through Pearson.
A scarlet butterfly twisted and fell, finally landing on the fabric of the tarp. It flapped its wings several times, then took to the air, awkwardly towards the lake. If the dead told secrets, it would carry it all the way to the far horizon.
“He never did strap in,” Rasheen said, coming up beside him.
Pearson shook his head. “He wanted to be a hero.”
“Not everyone can be who they want to be.”
They looked up at Freed, knowing that the words equally applied to their leader who’d wanted desperately to lead a charge into the valley of death.
“We were worried about you. How do you feel?” Rasheen touched Pearson’s forehead. “You were unconscious for two days, you know.”
“Why was I in the field?” Pearson asked eyeing the wide space beneath the parachute cloth.
“Blame me.” Rasheen grinned sheepishly. “I thought the fresh air would do you good. Nothing else was working and we didn’t have the medicine to do anything other than fix a scab. I figured the butterflies and the children would do you good.”
The butterflies... children?
“What children?”
Rasheen grinned despite himself, the expression odd for a face that had been the perfect foil for a world-sized frown. “Seems the People’s Liberarion Army had a school for General’s kids here in Dali, which is where we landed. Matthews plotted us a perfect place whether he knew it or not. The local battalion deployed to the Tibetan Border to quell an attack by Bhutanese forces eager to take advantage of the conflict.”
“Leaving the place...”
“As devoid of war as the face of the moon.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Never.” But his grin fell.
“What? Is there a catch?”
“No. No catch. Just Colonel Freed.” Pearson followed Rasheen’s gaze to the top of the northernmost pagoda. “He’s never coming down.”
“What do you mean never?”
“What I said. He said never. He means never. Personally, I think he’s lost it, but if you ask him he’s taken the high ground and is trying to reestablish coms.”
“But the screams?”
“Yes. The screams. Seems his plan doesn’t always work. The screams are akin to a release valve on a process. Without it I think his head would explode.”
“Good thing for his release valve then.”
“Sure.”
“He have any hope of talking to anyone?”
“Nope.”
“You sound so certain.”
Rasheen shrugged. “EMP killed it all, especially out here in bumfuck China. To think Yunnan Province shielded their infrastructure from EMPs is akin to believing Hong Kong Fooey was a real martial arts master. There are no coms. You heard the radio traffic. The whole world went nuclear.”
“Then it’s all turned to Milton?” he said, using the reference they used in flight school referring to Paradise Lost.
“Absolutely. Abandon all hope.”
They stood staring at their surroundings for a few minutes.
“How are our supplies?”
Rasheen shrugged. “We have about four weeks of rations, but look around you.” He encompassed the land with an outstretched hand. “We also have all this. Fish in the lake. Birds on the wing. Eggs in the morning. Steak in the evening. This place has it all.”
“Are you sure the locals are okay?” Pearson found it hard to believe that they’d stumbled upon the golden buffet at the end of the world. There had to be a catch.
“Oh yeah. They’re perfectly fine.”
“I’m asking because we’re not exactly everyone’s most favorite people right now.”
Rasheen waved away Pearson’s doubt. “These folks are beyond politics. They’re not even really Chinese. They call themselves the Bai. From what I get talking to Ms. Mei, they’re some lost Tibetan tribe. They’re artists and architects and writers. These pagodas were built more than 1300 years ago. Can you believe it?”
Pearson was struck by Rasheen’s easy adoption of this new land and new way of life. He seemed almost too eager to embrace it. A strange light lit up the man’s eyes, perhaps a fervor designed to hide other emotions.
“Before everything started, the town had a population of about twenty thousand. About a third were conscripted and moved to the Gobi for some hush hush project having to do with suborbital platforms. The remaining men were drafted to form battalions that went to reinforce China’s Taiwan grab. If you remember the lessons about Chosin Reservoir from the Korean War, General MacArthur had thirty thousand crack United Nations troops on the Chosin Reservoir in the middle of winter back in 1950. The Chinese have one commodity they have more of than anyone else and that’s people. Outgunned and outmaneuvered, the Chinese decided to help their North Korean commie brothers and threw Chinese bodies at our forces until they were driven from North Korea. It was a blistering defeat. Like the Frozen Chosin, the Taiwanese didn’t know what hit them.”
“So who’s left?”
“Besides a thousand children? About the same amount of adults if I figure right. Only a handful are helping the kids, the rest are scattered, doing their own thing. I see them occasionally and try and flag them down, but they won’t come near us.”
“I don’t blame them. They have a right to be afraid. Look at what we did to the planet.”
Rasheen stared at him for a moment, the excitement in his eyes replaced momentarily by a pain that caused his head to bow and his eyes to lose focus. Then he shook if off and forced another grin. “Enough of th
at. I got this figured out. It’s a glass half empty or glass half full scenario. On one hand it’s the end of the world. On the other it’s our chance to influence a new beginning. I won’t lie and say I didn’t wish this never happened, but it did and we have to live with the results.”
He had a point. They were alive. And by all accounts, their future, which had looked bleak as they outraced the pressure waves over Shanghai, now looked promising.
A bell gonged in the distance. Before the reverberations died, a new sound arose – something like traffic or the waves in the ocean. Pearson turned towards the town of Dali which lay over the crest of a hill. The sound came louder and louder. Soon, a single child shot into view, running, his mouth open, arms windmilling as he ran and tumbled in the tall grass. Then more kids appeared, and more, and even more, until the entire grassy knoll was covered with children. The sound of the noise was no longer a mystery. School had let out and what he’d heard was the combined cries of a thousand children released from scholastic servitude, their destinies and lives once again their own.
A human wave rolled towards Pearson and Rasheen. For a moment, Pearson wanted to run. But he held fast and braced himself as the children broke around him, their arms grasping him, touching his skin. Shouts of “Hey Ren” filled the air. He had no idea what it meant, but they seemed to be talking about him. He laughed and held out his arms. Twenty children immediately latched onto him and pulled him towards the center of the triangle made up by the pagodas.
“Hang on, Pearson. They’re going to take you for a spin.”
Pearson managed to turn as he was dragged away. Rasheen was similarly engaged, an almost beatific smile on his face as the children pulled him in a slightly different direction, their destination roughly the same acre of grass that made up the center of the park.
What did he mean by a spin?
It didn’t take long for Pearson to discover what was meant, and he laughed until his chest ached, his joy overcompensating for the heartbreak that threatened to take him down; memories of a dead America and a dying earth temporarily forgotten in the exuberance of youth as he danced.
THE CHILDREN LEFT just as night fell, swept away by the women who ran the school. They waved from a distance, but seemed unwilling to get any closer. The event left Pearson breathless and exhausted. When the last child ran over the hill into town, Pearson allowed gravity to take hold and sank to a sitting position. Then he lay on the grass and was soon fast asleep, not waking until the stars had twisted past midnight.
He found his way to the rations. A box of Meals Ready to Eat had already been opened and he selected the 3000 calorie Chili with Beans. Filling a canteen of water, he sat on a stack of rations and ate his food cold.
He smelled the scents of jasmine and other more exotic flowers. The lake sounds included a lone bird honking somewhere down the shore. A slight wind cooled his skin. He could have been anywhere doing anything. He didn’t have to be in China, but a tiny part of him was happy he was here.
The children had needed him as much as he’d needed them. They’d grabbed and touched his black skin to see if it would rub off, even smelling their hands afterwards. Such was their experience; his was no less wondrous.
The Bai were a very light-skinned, Chinese ethnic group who favored white clothing. Many of the children had silver jewelry, but not a one of them had gold. Instead of an indication of wealth, this probably had more to do with locale and geographic availability. Interesting that the word bai meant white. That he’d ended up in the land of the whites at the end of the world wasn’t lost to his cynical side.
Finishing the main course and the crackers, Pearson tore open the chocolate brownie. It tasted a lot like chocolate flavored sand and he had to work to swallow it, drinking water to choke it down. As he ate, his gaze went heavenward where he saw Colonel Freed sitting Indian style on the top story of the tallest pagoda. He looked so lonely up there. What could he possibly want? Or expect? Everyone he’d ever known was dead or dying and he couldn’t seem to let go. Clearly he wanted no part of the children, the Bai, or the land around them.
“Colonel Freed,” he shouted.
Nothing.
“Colonel, what’s going on?”
Still nothing.
“Dewey, talk to me!”
Colonel Freed stood and disappeared into the pagoda, effectively turning his back on everyone.
There was nothing more to say. The man had heard him and ignored him. Pearson couldn’t help wonder what rules of humanity the man now followed and why he’d willingly disregard the living for the memories of the dead.
THE NEXT MORNING ran into the next, and the next. The children had established a schedule. They’d come down to the pagodas in the morning shortly after first break in school and spend ten minutes with Rasheen and Pearson. Then they’d return after school and spend half an hour. The times in between and after were filled with introspection and reflection and regret for Pearson and Rasheen.
“Do you miss them?” Pearson asked one day.
Rasheen’s eyebrows rose questioningly.
“Your wife and little boy?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“I don’t know. I just want to understand. I want to know how you feel.” Pearson shook his head. “I overstepped my bounds. Sorry, man.”
Pearson returned to inventorying the rations. They’d decided to keep to their own food until it ran out. They’d lugged Colonel Freed’s share to the base of the pagoda where it had disappeared inside. With Matthews’ share, and rationing to two meals a day, they had enough to last them three months. Long enough to not only determine if they were going to be staying, but also to determine if there was any radiation that could harm them.
Rasheen helped for a minute, then sighed. “No need to be sorry. The rules are different now. You didn’t overstep.”
Pearson had lost already and in that losing, he’d known the tragedy of acceptance. The knowledge that the next morning when you woke up that person you loved wouldn’t be there and would never be there was a thing he’d learned to accept.
“Of course I miss them,” Rasheen began. “But I can live without them. In fact, knowing that they died immediately actually helps. I couldn’t handle it if I thought they were still alive and trying to survive. The radiation poisoning, starvation, and all-out chaos would be too much. I’d move Heaven and Earth to return.”
“It’s as if we never thought about what we’d have to do when it was all over.”
“Yeah. The problem was that we survived. No one was supposed to survive. They had no plan for what next.”
AS WAS BOUND to happen, Pearson and Rasheen began to bond with some of the children. Most of them treated the Americans like they were nothing more than rare two-legged beasts escaped from some far away zoo. But several children seemed more intent to know them, practicing their English when they got the chance. One little girl who couldn’t have been any older than ten, with hair cut like a page boy and small beaded braids along the sides, decided that she would befriend Pearson.
At first she asked things like his name and his birthdate.
“Nin gui xing?” came her pixie voice.
“What?” Pearson had knelt so that he could be eye to eye with the little girl. “I don’t speak Chinese.”
“Nin gui xing?” she asked again. This time, before he could answer she asked, “What is your name?” The words were clear except her tendencies to pause after each syllable.
“Leroy Pearson, USAF,” he answered with a smile.
“Lou Roy,” she mimicked. Then she repeated it and clapped her hands. Soon she was zooming around with the other children shouting “Ta xing Lou Roy... Ta xing Lou Roy.”
Pearson wasn’t sure what the girl’s words meant, but the human connection left him feeling whole for the first time in a long time. No longer was he merely a strange man by
a busted airplane in the middle of the children’s playground. He was now a real honest-to-God being. He’d become Lou Roy the hay ren, which he’d found meant black man, to a host of Chinese children. He joined them as they flapped like butterflies, bringing his arms out like an airplane and chasing after them. And as they ran, they shouted Lou Roy and giggled, as if he were an absurd monster meant for them to tease. Even after they left, the feeling stayed with him. That is, until the Colonel began to scream again.
Rasheen and Pearson, who’d been lying on their backs, staring at the stars and arguing over which sport was America’s game, baseball or football, leaped to their feet and ran to the base of the pagoda. Backlit by flame, Colonel Freed stood naked and screaming at the sky.
Pointing towards the door, Pearson gestured for Rasheen to go up.
Instead, the other shook his head. “He’ll never listen to you. Let me talk to him. You go up. You might have to save him.”
Pearson entered carefully, finally finding the stairs centrally located in the low-ceilinged pagoda. He climbed, spiraling upwards into the darkness. Meanwhile, he could hear Rasheen pleading with the Colonel not to hurl himself off the building, to stop screaming, anything. But the Colonel would have none of it. He screamed obscenities, cursing China, the United States Air Force, trans fats, nuclear fission, Oppenheimer, the Hamburgler, and Styrofoam. Noting was safe from his vitriol.
But there was an undertone to the maniacal diatribe. This was not merely a we’re all gonna die breakdown. Within the Colonel’s words was a thread of hopelessness that came from deep within the soul. Unlike Pearson and Rasheen, it was clear that the Colonel didn’t want to live. Whether he couldn’t live with what he’d taken part in, or this was no longer a world he wanted to be a part of it didn’t matter. Despite how Rasheen constructed the argument for life, the Colonel had already decided his fate.
This thought spurred Pearson to climb faster. Exiting the stairwell, Pearson immediately saw the fire. Fed by the Colonel’s clothes and what remained of his rations, it blazed behind him, serving as a formidable barrier for Pearson to pass. On the other side stood the Colonel, his arms in the air. Backlit by the fire against the night sky, his skin glowed red like a demon from some horror movie.
