After the Zap

by Michael Armstrong

  I followed Max, trying not to look over the edge. There was a low railing, just enough to keep the dogs from leaping over, but from where I was, I could look straight down into a deep gorge. I shook my head and kept my eyes ahead. It was a long way down and I didn’t want to think about it.

  When Max’s team got off the bridge ahead of me, the bridge slipped back a little, so that there was a slight jump. Alice balked, but the other dogs kept coming behind her, and Berneece, the dog running lead next to her, had to pull her over. My sled wobbled a bit when I hit the ground, but I hung on and got off the bridge. Max was stopped just ahead. I pulled next to him, put my foot on the brake. Rindi came up from behind, and we turned to watch the bridge rise back up. It creaked up to the towers, hovered half-open for a moment, then slammed shut.

  “How do we get back over?” I asked.

  “I have this trained moose that pushes the bridge down,” Max said, winking.

  Rindi smiled. “It’s kind of a secret.”

  Max went ahead, then me again, and Rindi. The next, and last, obstacle was what Rindi called the Chute, that last big run to the bottom.

  I watched as Max went down the hill in a scree of ice. Rindi told me that the best advice she could give me was to “lean into the curves, keep your feet on the runners, and hit the brake bar only when you come into a corner.” Screw that; I was going to be on the brake bar the whole way down.

  I waited until Max was around the corner, got a tight grip on the handlebar, hunched down low, took a deep breath, and then let up on the brake bar. I yelled, “Hike,” but Alice didn’t need any prodding; she leapt into the harness and dragged the team pell-mell down the Chute.

  Alder and willow scrub had grown up over the old subdivision road, so that going down it was like going down through a tunnel of trees. Heavy snows had weighted the branches down so that they were hanging in the trail. As we went down springy branches whipped me in my face. I had to keep dodging limbs; one out of two I’d miss and get whapped in the head. It was the sort of run that probably got religious fanatics like the God Weirders off.

  We whipped around corners, through tunnels of trees, under overhanging arches of bent birch. The wheel dogs did the steering, big hunks of dog meat all foot and lots of lungs. Those guys would literally yank the sled around a corner, the control between me and that bitch of a hurricane up front. The wind was whistling in my ears, the ice screeching between my feet, the claws of the brake bar scratching in the snow. The frame of the sled made clicking sounds as the wood rubbed against itself, the handlebar twisting and bucking under my hands, the runners twisting and turning with each corner, each shift of my weight.

  Rindi had said there would be four corners before we hit a long ramp at the end. I had counted three and was looking forward to the fourth when I heard yelping up ahead. That didn’t sound good. I tapped the brake bar, felt the sled slide around the corner. I let up, saw the wheel dogs scramble, and then Alice started barking her head off. I came around the corner and there was Max.

  His sled was on its side and one of the drums of kerosene was spilling onto the snow. Max was pinned under the sled, trying to crawl out, a blotch of gas on his parka. The brush bar on his sled was snapped in two, and one end of the wooden front bow was sticking into his left wheel dog. The rest of the dogs were tangled in a bad mess and there was this big-ass bull moose stomping and snorting in front of the dog team. Max was yelling and screaming and waving his hands and shouting something.

  Rindi had told me one other command I should use, not too often, she said, and only when it looked like I was going to go dink in the wrong sort of way. This looked like the wrong sort of way. I didn’t really believe all that stuff about hyper-dogs and a secret army experiment, but when I looked at that moose stomping and snorting and Max lying on his side, I figured it was a good time to see if Rindi was right.

  I squinted my eyes like she told me and imagined a nice flat section of trail, no alders, close to the checkpoint. I took a long breath and said the magic words,

  “Jump, Alice. Jump your goddamn ass!”

  She jumped. And the world went all shimmery.

  CHAPTER 10

  I guess I got lucky. The world did this little dance with space and time and then the moose wasn’t there, Max wasn’t there, but the trail was there: clean and white and not a fearsome critter to be smelled. The dogs were running clean, lines tight, all forty-eight legs going up and down in metronomic rhythm, heads down, tails between their legs. We came to a flat hunk of land with no alders to whip me to shreds. As I came out of whatever hunk of space I’d gone into, I felt a whoosh behind me, like air getting sucked into vacuum. I turned around and looked.

  She was wearing the kind of face someone might be wearing if they were swallowing a maraschino cherry and their long lost cousin came up behind them and slapped them on the back. There were eyes sunk somewhere at the top of her head and I guessed the thin things on the edge of her teeth might be lips, but I wasn’t going to hazard a guess as to what the little blob of flesh in the middle of her face was supposed to be. Maybe a nose. She was surprised, all right.

  Alice had sucked us both into hyperspace.

  I hadn’t realized Rindi had been on my tail. I hadn’t known she had been heading for the same trouble I’d been heading for. When I said jump, Alice jumped, and the rest of the hyperdogs—Rindi’s, mine—jumped too, taking us both into . . . well, wherever it was we went. We had both kept from getting our collective faces stomped by 1,000 pounds of alces alces, and damned if I knew exactly how or why. Who was I to debate physics and cosmology?

  “Whoa,” I yelled at Alice. I put my foot down hard on the brake, and waited for the dogs to get it into their heads that they should stop and chomp snow for a while. I put the snow hook in the trail, stomped on it, then chanced getting off the sled. Alice kept the team strung out and didn’t utter a peep. I walked back to Rindi’s team, held her leaders while she put her snow hook in. She walked up to me.

  “You jumped?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “It seemed like the thing to do.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Alice has never done that before. Never.” She shook her head.

  “You didn’t tell your team to jump?”

  “Hell no, I just followed you.”

  “She sucked us both in.”

  Rindi nodded. “Both of us.” She looked back up the trail. “Sheet. Where’s Max?”

  I sniffed for smoke and didn’t smell anything, so I figured he wasn’t burning up yet. “Back there. He hit a moose.”

  “Damn,” she said. “Better go check on him. Turn your team around and follow me.”

  “Right.” I walked back to Alice, took her by the neckline connecting her to the other leader, Berneece, dragged the team around, then hopped back on my sled. Rindi got going, and I told Alice to chase. She did; no problem there.

  We stopped our teams about fifty feet from Max. He was still on the ground. His dogs were tangled like the web of a spider on some hallucinogen. The moose stood there, thinking, I guess, about how to get himself out of the situation nobly. Max had the Nissan pistol strapped to his waist, but he wasn’t in a position to use it. Not much a 9 mm pistol can do against a moose, anyway. By the time it got around to dying it might have put a hoof through your face. Guns: guns aren’t an answer to everything.

  I stopped my team behind Rindi’s and gave Alice a look of hot fear. The dogs all wanted to lunge after that moose but some shred of intelligence told them they might be wise to stay put. I hoped they did. Max was staring down the moose and Rindi was standing there trying to do something smart but not knowing what to do. How do you handle a moose, particularly when he’s in the middle of a dog team and ten well-placed kicks could wipe ’em all out?

  Max pulled himself up, stared at the moose. The moose pawed the snow, lowered his head, fur on the back of his neck ruffled and ready to roar. Max doubled up his fist and hit the moose in the nose.

  “Get the hell out of he
re!” he yelled at the dumb elk.

  The moose drew his head back, shook it. If he’d had hands he would have rubbed his nose. If he’d had hands he would have punched Max back. As it was, he pulled back his lips and burped. I could smell it from where I was standing: the moose’s breath smelled like rotten cabbage.

  Max pulled back his fist, ready to hit the moose again. “Move it, moose!” he yelled. The moose sighed—it sounded like a sigh—relaxed, and then wandered off in the brush, gingerly stepping over two dogs and crashing off into the brush, as if moose got punched in the nose all the time. They probably did.

  Rindi ran to the wheel dog with the brush bow in its side and I went to Max. I stoppered up the kerosene drum and then lifted Max over to the trail. He shook me off, stood up on his own.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “I’m not going to blow, if that’s what you’re thinking,” he said.

  I grinned; the thought had crossed my mind. “Good. You going to die?”

  “Not for a few months,” he said. “Aw, hell, I’m okay. How’s Frank?”

  Rindi looked up. She had cut the wheel dog out of his harness and was holding Frank’s side. There was a small puddle of blood in the snow. The dog’s eyes were slightly glassy, and he was breathing heavily.

  “He might make it,” she said. “Probably won’t. We can’t take him on, anyway. What do you want to do?”

  Max rubbed his side. “Kaditali Station can take him,” he said. “If they can save Frank, they can keep him until we come back. Put him in my sled. There should be a dog bag somewhere.”

  Rindi took the dog to the sled, pulled the bow out of him, bandaged his wounds, and wrapped him in a small sack. I helped Max straighten out his team.

  The broken brush bow was another problem. Max reached in his sled bag, pulled out a long piece of white plastic, the same stuff used for the sled runners, with holes at both ends. Max took some nylon cord, ran it through the holes, and tied it to the front of the sled, bending the plastic into a bow. It wasn’t as classy-looking as the wood bow, but it did the trick.

  Max pulled one of the team dogs back into wheel, gave pats all around to his dogs. We turned our own teams around and set out again. I was in the lead position and let Rindi go by. I was waiting for Max to go on, but he waved me ahead.

  “I don’t think I have to worry about crashing into you,” he said. “That was a fine run.”

  “Good leader,” I mumbled.

  I hoped he was right. I urged my dogs on and took off after Rindi. One more turn at the end of the ramp and we were into the flats. Another mile more and we were at Kaditali Station. Kaditali Station was a cluster of buildings at the head of the trail into Ship Creek. What we found there made the moose encounter look like a charming cocktail party conversation.

  Someone didn’t like Kaditali Station.

  There were sled tracks going in and out of the station, lots of tracks, maybe ten teams worth. A sled was on its side, busted into kindling, and still attached to the sled was half a team, about six dogs, all dead, blown to bits by some large-caliber firearms. A large raven, about the size of an infant, was picking at the eyes of one of the dogs. A guard shack by the trail was shot to pieces and on fire, all the windows punched out and the door kicked open. A man’s body slumped out of the doorway, blood from his face dripping the snow.

  Across from the guard shack was a small lodge, a house really. Most of the windows were shot up, and flames licked out of the dormers on the roof. There was another body outside the lodge lying face down in the snow; someone had cut his hands off.

  We staked our teams out and walked slowly towards the guard shack. Max had the Nissan pistol out and loaded a clip into the butt. Rindi went up to the guy dripping blood and felt the carotid artery on his neck; she shook her head. I ran over to the burning lodge and went inside.

  The upstairs had burned into oblivion, but the flames hadn’t crept downstairs yet. The lodge had probably been a nice place a while ago: thick logs, an oak bar that looked as if it was made from one tree, tacky beer company signs, a dart-board, a rack of pies on a gleaming chrome lazy Susan. Big, heavy spruce tables kept the floor from bouncing around in earthquakes. There were two bodies on the tables: a little kid and a woman in a cocktail dress. I went to the kid first.

  He looked about ten, cute little rugrat, brown hair falling into his eyes, eyes the color of varnished wood. His eyes stared straight up and they didn’t blink. He was wearing a red-checked flannel shirt and overalls. His shirt had been ripped open and the bib of his overalls was peeled back over his stomach. His chest was a puddle of red and on his stomach was a blob of white fibrous stuff: his lungs. The bones in my legs rippled into cartilage and my face felt cold. I grabbed a chair and sat down.

  His heart. Someone had ripped the kid’s lungs out and removed his heart.

  A burning timber crashed down next to the woman in the black cocktail dress. I took a couple of breaths, got up, walked over to her. She had shoulder-length brown hair, heavily made-up eyes, and black-painted lips. Her lips had bled where her braces had cut into them. She was wearing fishnet stockings, spike pumps, and a red plastic rose in her hair. A little name plate over her breast said that her name was Sherry. Sherry’s underpants had been pulled down to her knees and her hands, too, had been chopped off. Dried blood caked the ends of her stumps. I put a finger on her throat, felt for a pulse: nothing. Her blank eyes stared up at the burning ceiling. I pushed her eyelids shut. The flames started licking down the walls. I dragged her body to the door, then went back and got the kid.

  Rindi helped me get the bodies outside and away from the collapsing lodge. Max had found some tarps and we laid it over the stack of bodies, like they were a cord of firewood and not remnants of life. Ravens flew above us in a slow spiral, cawing and cackling and doing barrel rolls. More meat to them.

  “That all that was inside?” Rindi asked me.

  I nodded.

  “Somebody died,” a voice said.

  Max swung around, the Nissan before him, and clicked the safety off. I tracked the voice. On the trail, where it came into Kaditali Station from the south, was a big man on skis. A dog about twice the size of our dogs pulled the man, with a toboggan sled between the man and the dog. The man had coarse black hair, a wide face, sharp cheekbones: Eskimo, I guessed. He wore heavy ski boots, olive drab wool pants, and a white anorak. The anorak had a ruff of wolverine around the hood. Around his waist was strapped a big sidearm, looked like a Subaru by the plastic holder.

  “Somebody died,” the Eskimo said again. He pointed up at the ravens.

  “Yeah, somebody died,” Rindi said. She pointed at the stack of bodies.

  The Eskimo slipped out of his skis, undid a rope from around his waist, and walked over to the bodies. The dog lay down. The Eskimo lifted a corner of the tarp and looked at the body of the guard. He took his right glove off, wiggled a finger around in one of the wounds, rolled the body over, stuck his hand in the hole in the guard’s back.

  “Large caliber bullet,” he said. “Maybe a .50 inch.” He wiped his bloody finger in the snow, walked over to the dead dogs, the overturned sleds. He righted one sled, got on it, rocked the handlebar back and forth. It was a heavy freight sled, toboggan style, plastic bottom with runners attached right to the plastic. The sled was reinforced with steel tubing.

  “God Weird sled,” he said.

  “Who did this?” Rindi asked. “You came from the south? Did you see anyone?”

  The Eskimo nodded. “Four teams from God Weird. Devil’s Club.” He pointed at a thorny stalk of dried flowers growing at the edge of the marsh. “Like the plant.”

  “Devil’s Club?” I asked. “Who are they?”

  He grinned. “Not nice people.”

  “Who are you?” Rindi asked.

  “Me?” the Eskimo said. “I’m Nivakti.”

  * * *

  Nivakti was just another trader like us, on his way to Ship Creek to make his fortune, he told us. He
was from Tikeraq, a village up on the Arctic coast. He said he had gone south after the Zap happened and he had been working his way back home since. He had a backpack full of carved ivory. “When I went south it was just tusks,” he said. “Had a lot of time on my hands.”

  We piled snow on the bodies and dragged the dead dogs out on the frozen marsh. Max’s wheel dog died, saving us from having to shoot it. We put his dog with the other bodies. Come spring someone could give them a proper burial. The lodge took an hour to burn to the ground; it left a big puddle in the snow as it died.

  There was a small cabin behind the lodge. No one home. Of course no one was home. On a dresser inside was a picture of Sherry and a man, probably the one at the front door of the lodge with his hands cut off. We ate their food and drank their whiskey and built a fire in their stove. There was a pie cooling in the mud room and we ate that, too.

  “Who is this Devil’s Club?” I asked Max.

  “Nasty suckers,” he said. “They’re like the storm troopers of the God Weirders. They believe that to conquer the devil they must eat the devil. So when they find what they think is evil . . .” He raised his fork.

  “They eat it?” I asked.

  Max nodded. “That’s probably why they cut out the heart of the child.”

  I stared down at my piece of pie, then looked up at the wall opposite me. Sherry and her husband had rifles and shotguns hung on pegs on the wall. Hanging from one peg was a green thermos.

  “I don’t think that’s why they cut out the heart of the child,” I said. I got up, took the thermos down, turned it over. At the base of the thermos was a small slot. “These folks had a nuke.”

  Nivakti smiled. “Ah, yes, one of those. We had one in our village.”

  I looked at him, stared. “Huh? You had a knapsack nuke?”

  He shrugged. “We didn’t call it that. But before the War That Stopped Television—the Zap War, you white folks say—these army people came in and gave our village one of those nuclear weapons.”