Burial (24 page)

He and Deke were looking for over eighty head of cattle that had strayed through a broken fence on the Peterson ranch, and had now been scattered wide across the Yampa river valley. Usually strays kept close together, but the winds and the lightning must have frightened these cattle into running every which way. So far they had only found twenty-three of them. The remainder seemed to have vanished across the plateau without trace.

Deke had been punching cattle for the Petersons for over twenty-five years. He was a thin, leathery-skinned man
with very little hair, which he grew as long as he could and combed meticulously sideways over his sun-freckled scalp. He wore faded denims that were soft with wear, and the same pair of orange-tinted sunglasses that he had been issued by the Army in 1967. He was a man of long practical experience, monastic ways, and almost no sense of humour whatever, except for that grim, dry bunkhouse wit for which cattlemen had been celebrated for more than a hundred years.

Willard was a natural helicopter pilot. Deke had once remarked that he must have been born with a collective lever instead of a penis. That was about as close as Deke ever got to admitting that he admired Willard's flying skill. Willard was only two years younger than Deke but he looked about half his age, podgy and boyish, with a jet-black quiff that was higher and greasier than anyone else's in Moffat County. He wore a drip-dry khaki shirt and drip-dry khaki pants, and his pockets were always arrayed with different-colour ballpens.

He had almost completed his 180-degree turn to the east when Deke touched his shoulder again. ‘Look there, Willard, you see something moving?'

Willard kept his left pedal depressed so that the helicopter continued its turn and circled right around.

‘Just there,' Deke pointed.

Struggling to keep the Jetranger steady, Willard followed the sloping plateau towards the river. Something
was
moving down there, and it wasn't just the wind blowing through the sage. Something heavy and wide was ploughing its way slowly through the brush, leaving a track of broken vegetation behind it. Deke took off his sunglasses and saw that, whatever it was, it had already covered more than a mile-and-a-half, possibly more, because the beginnings of the track were obscured behind a low range of hills.

The north-west squall abruptly dropped — as abruptly as
if a huge door had been slammed shut — but then another door was flung open and they were hit by a squall from due west. The helicopter bucked and dived and spun around on its centre of gravity.

‘Jesus Christ,' Deke swore, snatching for the grabhandle.

Willard juggled with levers and pedals, trying to bring the Jetranger level again. The engine ground and growled and sang out of key.

‘Have you got this fucking thing under control or what?' Deke demanded.

Willard sniffed, and coughed. ‘Okay so far,' he said, tautly, glancing at his instruments.

The helicopter swayed pendulum-like from side to side as Willard followed the track towards the river. He had to make constant adjustments to the tail-rotor to compensate for the unexpected chopping and changing of the wind. There were sudden down-draughts, too, immediately followed by fierce, unmanageable gusts from behind and below. Willard had never experienced anything like it.

Up above them, the clouds were the colour of skinned beef, black and bloody, and growing darker all the time. They reminded Deke of the time when they had put out a grassfire by shooting and skinning a bull, and then dragging its bleeding carcass backward and forward through the flames. Rain began to patter against the Jetranger's windshield, and Willard switched on the wipers.

‘There's the highway,' Deke remarked, pointing to the dim grey line of Highway 40 beyond the river. ‘We'll be hitting Maybelline as soon as makes no difference. We can put down there if you druther — wait till this blows itself out.'

The helicopter bounced and moaned and whinnied like a kicked horse. Deke was thrown from one side of his seat to the other, and knocked his earphone against the doorframe.

‘What the hell are you trying to do?' Deke yelled. ‘I thought you said you had this thing under control!'

‘It's all right, it's all right, I can handle it,' Willard reassured him.

‘Well, I put on a clean pair of shorts this morning and I want them to stay that way,' Deke told him.

‘Don't worry about it,' said Willard. ‘I've been flying these bastards since sixty-six, when they first brought them out, and only one of my passengers ever shit himself, and he was only three months old.'

They had almost reached the Yampa River. It was all but dried up this time of year, and right here, close to Maybelline, it meandered in wide, idle loops of tan-coloured mud, thinly overgrown with needle-grass. Deke could see the shallow water gleaming as bloody-black as the sky, and criss-crossed with ripples from the changing wind.

Off to his right, through the scattering rain, he could still make out the slowly moving object that was dragging a track through the sagebrush. The track must have been thirty or forty feet wide, maybe wider, so whatever was causing it must be
huge
, wider than a combine-harvester. Deke could glimpse something brown and white, but even when Willard angled the helicopter over it, he still couldn't understand what it was.

His brain simply couldn't make any sense of it. It was a tangle of shapes and objects, a jigsaw of colours and textures. He saw things that slid and things that jiggled. He saw things that glistened and things that shone. He saw fur and bone and flesh and lots of blood.

‘What the fuck?' he asked himself.

It was animal, it had hair and hide and legs and eyes, but what kind of animal was it? There was no animal as wide as this; no animal that dragged itself along the ground, leaving a forty-foot track in the sagebrush. He could make out a head, but the head was only as big as a cow's head. He could see scores of legs, but they were all sticking out at different angles, and some of them were obviously broken.

‘Jesus H. Christ,' whispered Willard. Willard had flown
Hueys in Vietnam. Willard had seen grey-faced boys slip-sliding into body-bags and Marines caught by booby-trapped mines. Willard had seen women and children caught by Vulcan fire. It's extraordinary what six thousand rounds a minute can do to the human body.

Willard knew what happened when several living bodies were violently dismembered — what kind of impossible anatomical puzzles you ended up with. Heads here, legs there, guts over yonder, and bucketfuls of what the corpsmen used to call goop. Goop looked like pale pink semolina, almost appetizing, but in fact it was soft human tissues emulsified by blast.

What he saw below them on this rainy, squally day wasn't human, but it was just as terrible. It was a raft of dead cattle, all of the twenty-seven strays they had been searching for. They had been hideously torn to pieces, and mixed up together, and yet somehow they were still dragging their way through the sagebrush.

Deke whispered, ‘This is a nightmare. This is a fucking nightmare.'

Willard circled round, trying to keep the Jetranger stable. The gusts were even more ferocious, over the cattle, and one down-draught was so strong that Willard felt as if the helicopter were being deliberately pressed towards the ground by a giant hand.

‘Deke — we're going to have to call it a day!' he shouted. ‘These squalls are going to bring us down if we don't!'

Deke stared at him, his eyes almost mad with alarm. ‘But they're
moving
! They're dead, they're all chopped up, but they're
moving
! For Christ's sake, Willard, how can they
move
?'

‘Freak weather conditions, who knows?' said Willard. ‘Maybe the river-bed's caving in.'

Deke pressed his helmet against the window, looking down at the grisly piebald shambles that was sliding its way westward.

‘This is a nightmare,' he repeated.

Willard circled the animals once more. Their mutilated bodies had emerged from the sagebrush, and were now heaving themselves across a flat grey mudbank beside the river. They left behind them a sickening trail of blood and legs and udders and pieces of ripped-apart hide.

Turning his head, Deke said, ‘Let's head for Maybelline. That way we can catch up with them on foot.'

‘You're the boss,' Willard replied.

He lifted the helicopter off to starboard, fighting a sudden burst of contradictory crosswinds. The clouds were blacker than ever, and lightning crackled all around the helicopter in fine fiery curtains.

‘Are you okay?' Deke asked Willard. ‘Listen — if you want to ditch this thing, you can ditch it any time that you want to. I'll bear witness for you. There aint no helicopter on God's earth that's worth losing your life for.'

‘It's okay, it's okay,' Willard told him, as they flew low and crabwise across the Yampa River. ‘I think I'm beginning to get the hang of these damn squalls. They jump from one side of the compass to the other, then up, then down.'

All the same, the Jetranger dipped and danced so wildly as they crossed to the opposite side of the river that Deke was sure they were going to fly straight into the ground. He kept having mental flashes of TV news pictures of helicopter crashes. All he could think of was bodies, still strapped in their seats, and a framework of twisted, insubstantial wreckage.

‘Only about a mile!' Willard told him. ‘Maybelline's just beyond the ridge!'

The helicopter skimmed the sagebrush, less than fifty feet above the ground. Lightning showered all around them, and sparks were flung from their rotors like Catherine-wheels. They saw grassfires burning all across the dark horizon, and the helicopter's ventilation system took in the aromatic smell of charring balsam-root.

‘Never saw a damn storm like this before, never,' said Deke.

It was then that Willard leaned forward in his seat and peered ahead of them into the gloom.

‘Do you see what I see?' he asked.

Deke peered, too, and then shook his head. ‘In this rain, I can't see squat.'

‘No Maybelline,' said Willard.

‘What? What do you mean?'

‘Look for yourself! No Maybelline! There's supposed to be a town there, aint that right? Right there, right on the bend. Maybelline, Moffat County, population four hundred and nineteen. So where is it?'

‘We missed it, must have overshot.'

‘What the hell do you mean, overshot? There's the highway and there's the river and Maybelline's supposed to be
there
.' Willard jabbed his finger directly in front of them.

‘Jesus,' said Deke, in awe, looking around at the clouds, as if he expected to see houses and barns whirling above their heads. ‘You don't think that —? Not a whole
town
!'

‘It's gone,' said Willard. ‘Frank's gas station and Charlie Butcher's stables and the church and everything! There was houses there! Four houses, maybe five!' As they flew in closer to the town centre, however, they began to come across traces of what had happened. The highway was littered with windblown debris, pieces of broken automobile, chairs, couches, display stands, tires, baby buggies.

They saw a dead horse and two dead dogs: then they saw their first human victims. A woman lying face down with her flowery dress immodestly dragged up. A man with no head, just a neck like a bloodied drainpipe.

Even in the storm they could see that all of this debris was gradually moving; at the same gradual but relentless speed as the dead cattle had been moving.

Lightning crackled, and the helicopter skittered disobediently
sideways, with sparks jumping and spitting down the windshield, and falling from the landing-skids. One of the instruments abruptly fused, and the smell of burning balsam-root was sharply mixed with the smell of burning plastic.

‘I'm going to try to bring her down!' Willard yelled. The engine screamed and they heard an ear-splitting screeching noise like gears shearing.

Deke was about to say something, but couldn't. He was clinging onto the grab-handle so tight that he bent it.

The Jetranger stuttered and bounced into the centre of Maybelline less than thirty feet above the highway. The town square was a slowly-creeping forest of furniture and abandoned automobiles and bashed-in iceboxes, with flying newspapers everywhere. Willard turned desperately from left to right, continually nudging back the collective lever to give himself a few feet of height.

‘Look for someplace clear to land!' he shouted.

Deke strained his eyes in the darkness. A sheet of wet newspaper flapped against the window beside him, and for a moment he couldn't see anything at all; but then the wind plucked the newpaper away again.

There!' he said. ‘There!'

About a hundred feet ahead of them a small open space appeared. It was strewn with papers and broken glass, but it was free from tumbling automobiles and furniture. Willard steered the helicopter unevenly toward it, fighting for power now as well as control. The engine was coughing, suddenly racing and then coughing again, and it was all he could do to keep them in the air.

They had almost reached the landing-space when Deke grabbed at his arm again. ‘
Look
,' he said. ‘For Christ's sake —
look
!'

Only twenty or thirty feet further ahead, on the edge of what had once been Maybelline's small public park, the very airwas stained as black as ink. It looked as if the ground had
opened up, because everything that had been sliding along the roadway — fencing, sheds, trucks, road-signs,
everything
— was disappearing into this blackness like vegetable peelings down an endlessly-grinding sink-disposal unit.

As their Jetranger lurched and dipped above the landing-space, Deke and Willard saw the half-collapsed wreckage of an entire family house slide across the road and vanish into the ground, its walls splintering, its windows shattering, its chimney collapsing into its roof. Lightning spat all around it as it was finally lost from sight, followed by a cascade of torn-up railings and a battered Winnebago Chieftain and a hurrying collection of cans and bottles and crates.