State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (34 page)

It eventually becomes comforting to look back and see the wolf stalking along behind me, to wonder when it might make another move on me, to guess if I’ll have energy or willpower enough even to resist it. Together we follow the river up to higher country where the trees thin and the water runs clear. I carve a crude spear and hunt quick trout in pools of ice cold glacier melt, making sure to always leave enough behind for my new friend. But not too much. I’ve got to keep him hungry for me when my time comes.

Several days into the mountains, we’re passing a strand of evergreens in the twilight when I look back and see the wolf not five meters behind me, trotting along as if we were partners on this strange journey to nowhere. Then there’s a flash of yellow. A cougar leaps from the trees and seizes the wolf’s neck in its jaws and drags it into the shadows without as much as a single whimper or growl. I stand for a long time and watch the trail where the wolf had been.

“Take me, you coward!” I yell. “Come back and take me!”

That night I sleep again in the dark without a fire.

A week later the people begin to come.

I’m in a gulch descending the high country when Red steps from behind a boulder and falls in beside me. It’s a long time before he says anything, and even then he only says, “Isn’t this some kind of afternoon.” He says it as if he expects no reply. I’m not sure I’d even know what to say to him if he did, so we just walk together quietly. When I notice he’s no longer beside me, I turn and see him standing on the trail with his hand raised to say farewell. I raise mine, then turn and keep walking. When I look back again, he’s gone.

The next day I walk without stopping and continue on into a forest. By nightfall I come upon a fire at the edge of a dark glade. Jimmy is sitting there with Junior on his lap, stroking his fur. I sit down across from them but neither appears to have noticed me. Jimmy’s face is unmarked by fire, and I wonder if they aren’t perhaps ghosts, or conjured visions of my own imagining. But I can feel the warmth of the fire and smell its smoke. The big dipper eventually rises over the glade, and so much time passes that I’m not quite sure what to say. When I do finally speak, all I can think of is to repeat Red’s words.

“Isn’t this some kind of afternoon.”

But Junior and Jimmy are already asleep.

No trace of the fire remains when I wake. I leave the glade behind and wander into the woods. Without the river to guide me, I choose my course by whim and change it as often as new paths appear to my crazed mind out of the maze of trees. It occurs to me that I haven’t eaten in a long time, but for some reason I’m no longer hungry. I come upon a fallen log covered with butterflies. When they lift away in a blue cloud, I see that it’s no log at all but a skinned bear, all wrinkled, gray, and rotting, its long claws tucked against its chest as if in some strange gesture of shyness over being seen there naked on the forest floor. I step over it, and the butterflies settle again, adorning the carcass in a beautiful death-coat of blue.

The butterflies make me think of my father’s pipe. I reach to my neck to feel for it before I remember giving it to Jimmy the day I left with my mother—my mother, my mother, my mother. No sooner does my mind turn to my mother and I’m sure I see her ahead of me on the trail, but she dodges out of sight behind a tree. I run and look, but she isn’t there. Then I spot her again farther on. I spend the day walking in circles and looking behind trees. When it’s too dark to continue, I sit where I am and whistle in the cold night, trying to remember childhood tunes. Soon others are whistling with me. When I stop they stop too. Then I laugh and they laugh with me. I find the whole thing so funny that I roll on the ground in a riot of laughter and clutch at my belly because it hurts so good. Eventually, we all fall quiet and sleep, but I know they’re there just the same.

After days of walking I come across a stream, drop to my knees and drink until I can drink no more. Then I stand with all that cold water swinging in my gut and follow the stream out of the forest. I’m accompanied now by a small army of silent friends. When I come out onto the promontory that overlooks the valley, I know then that this is where my journey ends. Here in the valley of Jimmy’s dreams.

Hemmed in by mountains, the valley is wide, lush, and green. The stream I’ve been following cuts down in a tiny waterfall and crosses to join a silver river that winds through rolling hills of grass, wildflowers, and groves of oak and evergreen trees. It’s about as beautiful a place as ever I’ve seen. I would be happy to post up here and rest for eternity.

By sunset I’m sitting on a hill next to a sprawling oak with my feet stretched out before me. A perfect picture of the river and the sun is framed in the western edge of the valley beyond a distant field of wheat waving in the breeze. I sleep there for a day, maybe two. I wake in the afternoon, surprised to still be alive. I see Hannah down bathing in the river, and it startles me. But when she turns I see that it’s not Hannah at all, but her mother, Mrs. Radcliffe. I remember her warning me about the drawbacks of the serum and a long life of boredom, loneliness, and pain. Here I am at just sixteen, and I already know what she meant.

I get up and walk down to the river, but I seem to move in slow motion. By the time I get there, she’s gone. I kneel at the bank and drink. After only a sip, I’m full. I pry a large, flat-edged stone from the riverbank and take it back to the hill and use it to dig my own grave. It’s shallow but it will do.

When the grave is finished, I gather wood and build up a fire at the base of the hill. Then I sort through my belongings, setting aside my mother’s reading slate and Jimmy’s strike-a-light. Everything else I pile onto the fire and watch burn. Next, I strip naked and pile on my own threadbare and filthy furs. A black and acrid smoke rises from the fire, as if the hell I’ve been through had somehow clung to my clothes and is now finally being released. I look down at my naked and wasted frame—my ribs, my hips, my scar. I remember my former self, ages ago now it seems, living underground in Holocene II and desperate to become a man. I laugh at the boy for his naiveté, but I love him now just the same. I think he’d be glad to know that he made a difference, that he had friends, that he loved and was loved, and that he finally got to rest beneath the stars he so desperately dreamed to see.

I walk back up the hill, each new step a struggle, each one past a relief, and lie down naked in the shallow grave and claw as much of the dirt over me as I can. The soil is cool, fresh, and rich. Then I clutch my mother’s reading slate and Jimmy’s strike-a-light to my half-buried chest. I close my eyes and dream. I dream, and I dream, and I dream.

“Aubrey, wake up!”

Bill looks down on me, his face framed by blue sky. I know I’ve gone wherever souls go when the body dies.

As he works to unbury me, he talks.

“Why am I always digging you out of something?” he asks. “If it isn’t sand, it’s dirt.”

“But I don’t want rec time to be over,” I say, my voice sounding faraway.

He props my head up in his hand and holds a canteen to my lips. My tongue is swollen, and the cold water runs from the corners of my mouth and chills my neck.

“Did Red bury me again?” I ask, coughing.

He shakes his head. “Red isn’t here.”

“But Red’s dead, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” he replies, looking sad, “he is.”

“Then why isn’t he here on the other side?”

“Because you’re not dead.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because I’m not dead either.”

“I don’t understand,” I say.

He smiles. “That’s alright. You don’t have to understand anything right now. Just relax. You’re okay. Do you think you can get up, or do I need to carry you?”

“I’m comfortable right here.”

“Well, that’s too bad,” he says, “because Jimmy would love to see you.”

“Did you say Jimmy?” I ask, rising on my elbows.

Everything suddenly comes into sharp focus—the valley, the river—but I look around and see no trace of Jimmy.

I lie back. “You’re just another trick. Leave me alone.”

“Okay, then,” Bill says. “I guess I get to carry you.”

The next thing I know, his strong arms are lifting me from the ground, and I’m slung like a sack over his shoulder. My teeth clack as my chin bounces against his back. I watch his heels rise and fall as he walks me down the hill. Then he slumps me in a seat, covers me with a thermal blanket, and buckles me in. Now I’m looking out past the landing gear of a drone. I reach and grab his arm to stop him as he climbs in beside me.

“My reading slate and my strike-a-light.”

“I’ve got them right here,” he says, setting them in my lap. “Now hold on to them tight; the ride’s going to be a bit bumpy getting out of here.”

I jostle and bounce in the seat as the drone runs along the lumpy ground, following the river west, and finally picking up speed and lifting off just in time to keep from plunging into the water where the river banks a hard left. The ride goes smooth and easy now, and the drone climbs into the sky. I turn and look back on the shrinking valley—the golden wheat, the green hills, the wildflowers. The sunlight reflects off the river, giving it the appearance of liquid gold pouring out from the clean mountains and winding its way through God’s country toward the sea.

I know I can’t trust my mind right now, but I swear I see Mrs. Radcliffe, Red, my father, and my mother and all the others standing beside the river, waving goodbye to me.

“Where’s Jimmy?” I ask.

“He’s out looking for you,” Bill says. “We’ve all been out looking for you.”

“Are you taking me to him now? I want to see Jimmy.”

“Of course, you do,” he says. “And he wants to see you.” He hands me a meal bar. “Here, you better try to eat a little.”

My fingers won’t seem to work. I struggle with the wrapper until Bill takes it away and opens it for me. I manage to choke down half of it before I start to feel sick and give up. Then Bill passes me a canteen. My senses begin to return. I see that we’re in a drone like the one Radcliffe took Hannah and me in to tour the park. I look out the glass bubble at the coastline passing below, and I realize we’re heading south.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“I’m taking you back,” he says. “We’ve got a camp set up at the temple. You remember the temple, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I say, “we left you there to die.”

“I made you leave,” he replies. “And besides, you sent the Chief back to look for me. I’ll never forget that. I told you that you were a good man, Aubrey.”

“But my mother said she didn’t find you.”

“She didn’t,” he says. “Jimmy told me all about it.”

“Will you please fill me in on what’s going on?” I ask.

“Do you want to hear this now, or would you rather rest?”

“No, tell me. Please.”

As the mountains, the Pacific, and the golden coastline slide by beneath my window, Bill pilots the drone and tells me all about his adventures.

“It nearly killed me, but I eventually found the spot where Gridboy dropped us off. I was too late though, of course. They had already filled it in. I knew my only hope was if Jillian could somehow open it again, so I stayed nearby and made camp. Turns out I had learned a lot from watching you and Jimmy.”

“Did you finally eat meat then?” I ask.

He nods. “And a lot of other things I thought I’d never eat too. But you were right; the meat wasn’t half bad.”

“I ate worms,” I say. “Did you eat worms?”

“Oh, I’ve got you beat there. I chased vultures away from a big dead cat and lived for two days on the maggots I picked out of its rotting flesh. But let me get back to my story. Months went by. The weather got hotter and wetter. I got pretty good at living there alone in the jungle, but I began to think I’d die there. I spent a lot of time talking with Roger.”

“He survived too?”

“No,” Bill says, with a sad shake of his head. “But I talked to him anyway.”

“I know what you mean,” I say.

“Well,” he continues, “then one day I heard my name being called. I thought I’d lost my mind for real. But it was Jillian. Gridboy had brought her and few others in a subterrene. They were out in the jungle searching for me.”

“How’d she know to go looking?”

“Your mother had been in contact with Jillian up until that failed attempt on the Foundation. Beth got caught, of course, but she never did give up Jillian. So when the Foundation just disappeared from the grid sometime later, Jillian guessed that you all had managed something, but she wasn’t sure what. She brought a few others into her confidence and led a small group to come south to look for me and some answers.”

“What did you do once they found you?”

“I hugged Jillian and then ate everything in her pack. Then we went back to Holocene II. Engineering was working on a few drones for the Foundation, and Jillian had them modified to carry passengers. Then she had the tunnelrats deliver one to the jungle. They laid us out a runway with the subterrene, and we went to China looking for you.”

“But I wasn’t there.”

“No, but Jimmy was. And he told us what you and your mother had gone to do. He told us about the bomb. Then we knew for sure what had happened to the Foundation. You did it, Aubrey. You and your mother set us all free.”

“Maybe,” I say, “but my mother left me in the end.”

“I knew she would,” he says. “That’s why we’ve all been out looking for you.”

“How did you know she’d leave me behind?”

“Because of the E-M-P.”

“The what?”

“Electromagnetic pulse. Nuclear explosions like that send out powerful magnetic fields that destroy, or at least interrupt, electrical systems. That drone would have fallen out of the sky as soon as the blast occurred. There was no way to outrun it. Your mother knew that, so I knew she’d leave you behind to deliver it herself. And I was right, because here you are.”

Any lingering anger I had for my mother abandoning me that morning vanishes. My heart opens and my eyes well up with tears. I try to hold them back, but it’s no use. They just come and come and come. Bill pretends to be interested in something out his window, looking away to let me cry.