State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (31 page)

The climb down into the hangar is even harder than I had imagined it might be. As I help Jimmy off the ladder, the look on his face tells me this is just as hard for him too. When Gazan and the boy come down and see the drone, they shy away and crouch against the wall like frightened horses. But we all reassure them, and they eventually step forward and walk around it in awe, touching the smooth metal with their fingers as if reading something there by braille My mother loads the supplies given to us by the sisters into the carrier, seals it shut again, and gives the drone one last inspection.

“Did you program the flight? I ask her.

“We’re flying manually,” she says. “I don’t have longitude and latitude for the mountain, but even if I did, the bombing destroyed my computer and my satellite link.” Then she nods to Gazan and the boy. “You better say your goodbyes, Son; I want to seal the hangar entrance before we leave.”

Gazan shakes my hand at the ladder, then pumps his fist in the air, making a warrior call that seems to me to say, “Go get the bastards.” The boy reaches for my neck, pulls me down to him, and smells my hair. Then he kisses the top of my head. With our goodbyes now said, my mother leads them up the ladder to say goodbye herself, leaving me alone with Jimmy.

“Shoot,” Jimmy says, looking away from me. “I forgot to bring you my pee bottle.”

“My mom thought of everything,” I reply. “She’s got one for each of us in our cockpits, along with food and water.”

“I’d be curious to see how she uses it,” he says.

“Uses what?”

“Her pee bottle.”

“Yeah,” I say, laughing. “I hadn’t thought about it, but I guess we’ve got it easier than she does when it comes to that.”

Jimmy looks at me then, lays a hand on my shoulder, and says, “I’m real proud of you, Aubrey.”

“You are?”

He nods. “I ain’t real good at sayin’ stuff sometimes, but I remember when I first seen you there passed out on the shore. You was so young. Like a little kid that I wanted to take care of. But now you’re a man, Aubrey. A good one. And I look up to you. I used to feel like I needed to protect you. Not no more, though. Now I feel like I need you to protect me.”

I swallow the emotions that are coming up. “Me protect you? That’s silly. You’re the strong one between us.”

He smiles a knowing grin and shakes his head. “There’s sometin’ else too,” he says. “You remember when you come up on me again later? When I’s huntin’ them pigeons, and you wouldn’t let me alone. You remember that?”

“Yeah, I remember. I followed you all the way back and you talked your dad into letting me stay that night.”

“Well,” he continues, “I lied to you about somethin’ then. I wanna make it right now and tell you before you go.”

“What did you lie to me about?”

“I lied about jus’ runnin’ into you there.”

“You did?”

“Yeah. I came back jus’ to find you.”

“I knew it,” I say.

“You did not.”

“Well, I hoped you had, anyway.”

We stand looking at one another, something important remaining yet to be said between us, but neither of us knowing exactly what or exactly how to say it. Then my mother climbs down the hatch, and the moment is gone.

“Aubrey,” she says, “you had better go and relieve yourself once more before we leave. It’s a long flight.”

“I’m fine, Mom. Jimmy and I were actually just trying to figure out how you plan to use your bottle.”

“I hope not to,” she says, “but you’d be surprised what a lady can do in a pinch. Have you two said your goodbyes now? It’s time we got this bent-up bucket of bolts in the air so we can see if it even flies anymore.”

“How’s it gonna take off without no wheels?” Jimmy asks.

She shrugs and says, “With a prayer and a hope, I guess.”

Then she climbs into the front cockpit and motions with her eyes to the open hatch, letting me know that it’s time to see Jimmy out. I walk him to the ladder. I want to hug him, but I feel funny now with my mother watching, so I only shake his hand. He just smiles at me and nods. Then he climbs up the ladder and closes the hatch. It locks. I trudge back to the drone with my head hung and climb in.

My mother turns to address me before closing her cockpit. “You should go hug him goodbye, Son.”

“You think so?”

She smiles and nods.

I leap out of the drone, climb the ladder, and punch in the code. Jimmy is already standing on the wall with Gazan and the boy, their backs to me as they look over the mountainside, waiting to see us take off. I run to Jimmy and tap him on the shoulder. He spins around and sees me. He smiles so hugely that the bandage partially pulls free from his burned cheek. I wrap my arms around him and hug him tight. By the time we finally pull away from one another, we’re both crying. I strip my father’s pipe over my head and press it into his hand.

“You hold onto this for me, okay? I’ll come back for it.”

Jimmy looks at the pipe in his palm and nods. Then he wipes a tear away with his other hand and waves me away.

“Go on,” he says, “get out of here. These two jokers won’t let me go back for lunch until we see you off, and I’m gettin’ hungrier than a bear come spring.”

I know he’s full of crap and that he wouldn’t miss watching me leave for the world. And I love him for it. I stop once at the hatch and look back. Jimmy smiles and holds up the pipe, as if to say he’ll keep it safe until I return. Then I climb down the ladder and seal the hatch.

I know my mother sees my crying eyes, but she doesn’t say anything. She just waits for me to climb into the drone, then she nods and pulls down her canopy. I take in one long breath of fresh, cool air and close mine too. Then the big door opens and with a wild screech, the drone skids and slides along the runway. It plunges out from the mountainside, almost falls down the slope nose first because we don’t have enough speed, but catches itself just in time and powers up, lifting off into the clear blue afternoon.

My mother circles and does one flyby.

Gazan and the boy stand on the wall and wave goodbye.

Jimmy stands beside them with his head down, looking at my pipe in his hand. I know he doesn’t want me to see that he’s still crying. I crane my neck, hoping that he’ll look up and make eye contact with me one final time. But the last image I see is the top of his bowed head shrinking away with the wall.

We fly east as the planet spins.

Speeding sundown behind us, speeding sunup ahead.

When the great Pacific meets the shores of America, we’re flying in the perfect pink light of a spectacular new dawn. I know we’re passing over terrain that Jimmy and I once crossed on foot. From such a height it’s strange to imagine us toiling away down there with no clue where we were going. But then I guess everything is clearer once you look at it from a distance.

The mountains are socked in beneath a ceiling of clouds, making it impossible for us to locate the crater and land. My mother turns to me through the glass and shakes her head—a silent apology before cutting north and continuing on. I know we can’t risk setting down anywhere with our makeshift landing gear ski, but my entire body is screaming to get out of this cramped cockpit. I pass the time looking out the window at the scenery below us—mountains and valleys, rivers and lakes, and eventually, a never-ending vista of evergreen trees.

It’s all so beautiful, I can’t help but wonder just who Dr. Radcliffe thought would enjoy it once people were extinct. There must be a better way, I think—some solution to the over-consumption, some plan for humans to live within their means, some boundaries to preserve the natural environment. But then I wonder just how different my mother and I are, planning to drop yet another nuclear bomb. We have good reason to, of course. But doesn’t everyone believe their reasons to be just as valid, just as true? Part of me thinks that what we’re doing is wrong. But then I close my eyes and picture Jimmy’s burnt face, his slaughtered family, Red’s missing brain. And if those images weren’t enough, I picture the Isle of Man erased from existence, and the Motars killed in their camp. Finally, I picture my father strapped in that killing-room chair. Then the last bit of doubt about using the bomb is smothered and gone.

It’s late afternoon and our third pass around before the clouds clear from the mountains. As we circle the summit that Jimmy and I crossed, I can see from up here that, although it’s the tallest mountain, its glacier really was the only way for us to traverse the range. My mother turns and points to the crater. I give her a thumbs up. She passes over the summit several times, eying the crater’s oval bowl for the best landing angle. Seen from above, it looks much smaller than I remember it being. It occurs to me that our ski has no brake.

I’m still wondering what will stop us after landing when my mother banks left and descends toward the crater. The drone bounces once when we touch down, then goes sliding across the crater on its ski. Rather than slowing, though, it feels as though we’re picking up speed. I expect my mother to full-throttle us in an attempt to abort the landing and take off again. But no—instead she reverses the engines. The drone bucks, vibrates, and finally goes into a spin that has me seeing nothing but the crater rim and blue sky swirling by outside my window again and again. I’m certain that we’ll launch off the other side of the crater and tumble down the mountain to our deaths. But then the spinning slows, the drone comes to a stop, and I sit still in the cockpit and wait for the world itself to stop turning.

The cockpit canopies lift. Cold air rushes into the cabin and fills my lungs. My mother climbs down out of her seat and stands on the crater, holding onto the drone’s wing for support, laughing hysterically. It occurs to me that she didn’t expect to survive the landing herself.

I’ve been crammed in the cockpit so long that I have to hold onto the drone for a minute myself when I climb out. I look around at the crater and get my bearings.

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s smaller than I remember.”

“Maybe you’re just bigger,” she says.

“Yeah, maybe so. I think I fell in over there. By the edge,” I say pointing. “And then that side is where I climbed out.”

“Well,” she says, her smoky breath rising into the cold air, “let’s not waste any more daylight then.”

We open the carrier, remove our ropes, and drape them over our shoulders. Then we walk across the crater to the edge.

“I think this is a
randkluft
you fell into,” my mother says.

“A what?”

“It’s a German name for the place where a glacier—or in this case the crater ice—pulls away from the rock.”

“How do you know that?” I ask.

“I read it,” she replies. When I look at her questioningly, she adds, “Hey, you might have everything in your reading slate memorized too by the time you’re three hundred years old.”

“Did you read anywhere why there might be a lake beneath the crater?”

“No,” she says. “But that’s not hard to guess.”

“Then tell me,” I say.

“Okay,” she puts her hands on her hips and looks around. “I would assume that the snow probably piles up pretty thick every winter and weighs itself down into new layers of ice on the crater here. At the same time some geothermal heat source melts the ice from underneath. So, new ice on top, melted ice beneath, there’s your secret lake and the reason for this missile melting out from the roof of it.”

“Why the gap then?” I ask. “Why not just ice on water?”

“Good question. But remember, water is denser than ice.”

“I know that. Otherwise an iceberg wouldn’t float.”

“Exactly. Which means as the ice melts into the denser water below, it leaves behind a gap, which was fortunate for you when you fell in.”

“And fortunate for us now,” I add.

“That remains to be seen,” she says, taking her rope off her shoulder. “Let’s tie off to that horn-shaped outcropping there and lower down.”

My mother descends into the crack first while I watch. It’s not a straight drop; more of a steep slope. She can actually walk herself backwards into it while feeding the rope around her waist. I know she’s at the bottom when the rope goes slack.

A few seconds later, I hear her shout, “Holy hell!”

I wrap the rope around my own waist and back down after her. When my feet touch down flat, I let loose the rope and turn around. My mother is standing on the shore of the lake with her eyes locked on the missile and her mouth agape. The mountain and the crater might be smaller, but the missile is just as large as I remember it being.

“It’s big, isn’t it?”

She nods yes. “It will certainly leave behind no trace of the Foundation if this works. The only question is, will we be able to get the warhead down?”

I look around. The lake shore is wider than it was before, probably because it’s spring and not summer, but the missile still hovers several meters out from shore, its equally evil twin looking back from the mirror surface of the black water.

“Could we get a rope around the warhead?” I ask.

“We’re going to need to get every rope we have and the cable around it too,” she says. “The big problem is how to get it to the shore here so we can pulley it up to the crater surface and the drone.”