The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (9 page)

CHAPTER 16
Horror in the Cove

I race down the bluff to the water’s edge.

By the time I arrive, pieces of wood and parts of bodies are already washing ashore. I wade into the gory surf and sift through the floating debris, desperate to find Jimmy. A corpse that looks like Jimmy’s floats up beside me, face down. I turn it over, and his father’s head lolls on his half-severed neck, his staring eyes milky and lifeless, glazed with death. The bottom half of his body is gone. I turn and retch in the water.

More bodies, more blood.

A sudden wave surges past me, an oar smashes me in the head, and I nearly drown and join the rest of them floating there all dead. I cough up saltwater and shake off the blow.

I’m sloshing back to shore when I see what’s left of the whale floating several yards farther out. She’s cut in half, and white blubber spills like curdled milk from her amputated body. Her entrails float out red and purple and bloated among the wreckage in the bloody surf.

I see movement in the tangled guts.

Yes—there. An arm wrapped around a hunk of blubber.

Diving in without hesitating, I swim to the floating whale, cautious of its bulk being tossed in the waves. I paddle through the mess, kicking intestines free from my feet, pushing a chunk of blood-soaked baleen away from my face. When I seize the arm and turn him over, Jimmy stares up at me, blurry-eyed but alive. I wrap my arms around him and kick with everything I have toward shore, making slow progress through the corpse-littered surf. We pass another man also alive and moaning, but unrecognizable with half his face and all of his shoulder gone. He won’t make it, and even if he might, I can’t save them both.

In shallow water, I get my feet beneath me and drag Jimmy onto the sand and flop down, spent and exhausted with him in my lap. He’s breathing. Barely, but breathing. His cut forehead is bleeding, his leg is worse. A nasty gash in his thigh spreads open, his flesh filleted from the bone. I need to get him back to the cove, back to his mother and her healing hands.

I try pulling him along the shore, but his feet drag in the sand, stretching the thigh wound open, blood pulsing out with every heartbeat. I yank a piece of rope free from the wreckage and tie it around his thigh above the wound. I stand him up, hoist him off the ground, and with a new adrenaline-fueled strength, I stagger off with him draped and dangling over my shoulder as I lurch up the shore toward the cove.

The cove is awash with blood—

More blood and more bodies.

I stand stunned, Jimmy still on my shoulder, and watch as the gentle tide washes its crimson waves up onto the shore, the blood-soaked sand deep red as they retreat, fading as the water drains, only to have another bloody wave darken it again.

The women and the children are scattered, pieces of them everywhere—floating in the water, washed up on shore, lying outside of tents in bloody patches of soil. The shot-up tents are collapsed, a few with the bodies still inside, red-splotched and humped like some pale and bloated beasts bleeding out in the sun. Then I remember the drones flying overhead. Drones like the one on the train that was bringing me up from Holocene II. Drones designed on Level 3, built on Level 4. Drones that we ship to the Foundation on Level 1. Not exploration drones like I was told, but drones that murder women and children.

I carry Jimmy across the cove, stepping around the bodies, and take him into the cool dark shade of the cave and lean him against the wall. His bleeding has slowed, so has his pulse.

I tear through wrecked tents, ignoring the corpses there, frantic to find the sewing kit Jimmy’s mother used to mend our clothes. When I find it, my frenzied pace fades, and I carry the small wooden box back to the cave, out held like an offering, in no hurry to do what I know I need to do.

Kneeling beside Jimmy, I open the box. The curved-bone needle sits on a pile of sinewy thread, its ivory surface polished as smooth as soap from years of use. Jimmy fades in and out of consciousness while I stitch his wound, and several times nearly so do I. His thigh is cut through skin, fat, muscle—all the way down to yellow bone. I know it should be stitched in several layers, but he’s bleeding, and I’m scared, and it’s all I can do to squeeze the wound closed and thrust the needle deep, hooking it out the other side and cinching it tight, then tying it off every quarter inch the long length of the gruesome gash. Three more shallow stitches close the cut in his forehead.

When I finish, Jimmy is passed out, either from blood loss or from pain. He lies slumped against the cave wall with his leg in a pool of blood, already swelling against my crude sutures. He looks so helpless and so young, like an exhausted boy tired from a long day in the sun. I kiss him on the forehead.

I start a fire and boil water in the salvaged cook pot, using it to clean his wound as best I can. Next, I gather bedding and make him a place farther inside the cave, close enough to the opening for fresh air to circulate, far enough away to stay in the shade. I slide him to it, careful of the new stitches, and lay him down and elevate his leg.

Then I sit in the mouth of the cave and watch the sun set on the blood-red waters painting horror in the cove.

CHAPTER 17
The Funeral Pyre

Sunrise.

Same as any other day.

Except I know I’ll have to gather the bodies.

I clean Jimmy’s wound, the dried blood wiping clear and revealing angry flesh swelling badly now against the stitches. He wakes, wincing with pain. I make him drink water and choke down some stew. He doesn’t say anything, he doesn’t have to. He just points to the bluff where we cremated Uncle John.

There’s no way I can carry them up to the bluff by myself, so I settle on a spot between the beach and the cave, just above the high-tide line.

I start with the nearest bodies.

Cutting a piece of tent free, I use it to drag them to the spot and I lay them out on the sand. I scoop them in pieces onto the tent skin and pull them to the pile and dump them there. Others are intact but with gaping wounds and things never meant to see the light of day hanging out. The children are the worst. Their small faces frozen, twisted with confusion, their tiny hands clenched in agony. Their little limbs are already stiff with rigor and unbending as wood. Most are drained of blood and waxy cold even in the sun. Others are beginning to bloat and look as though they might pop if poked with a point.

My stomach coils up; I vomit several times.

“They’re just seals,” I mumble. “Just dead seals.”

I keep telling myself that as I work. Just seals or sharks or fish—anything but the people I’ve grown to love.

There is one small blessing in that I can’t find Jimmy’s mother. Or if I do, she’s so unrecognizable as to allow me to pretend she made it safe away. But I know she didn’t.

I move next out of the cove and south down the beach. The tide has come in and gone out again and the shoreline is scattered with body parts and debris the entire length of a mile. I wear the tent skin through and have to fetch another. I chase ravens away from the corpses, their bloody beaks pulled up, their evil heads cocked in confusion as I drag their lunch away. I find a torso and turn it and a dozen small crabs covered in slime scurry away. Farther down, I find what’s left of the whale washed ashore in an enormous gray and stinking hulk already torn apart by things in the night and being slowly returned to the sea from which it came.

By the time I’ve gathered all I can find or am willing to see, the bodies and pieces of bodies line nearly half the cove, and I’ve become numb to the horror of it, moving mechanical-like as if it were just some dirty job I’m meant to do.

Next I gather wood.

I know it will take hours and lots of heat to render all this flesh into ash and I labor fast and frantic, dragging great pieces of dry driftwood and broken branches into a tall pile that looks already like so many bleached bones. I drag over the log that I sat on with Jimmy’s mother, and I cry for five minutes straight while I tug and pull and roll it end over end toward the growing pile. I add bedding to the stack. Tent skins, brush-brooms—anything that might help the fire burn.

With the funeral pyre complete, I begin stacking the bodies on, layering pieces in, leaving room for the fire to breath. The work is messy and hard, the bodies slippery and smooth, the hunks of flesh surprisingly heavy with the weight of death.

I finish and stand back and look.

The pyre is three meters across and two meters deep, the bloated limbs and heads poking out from the stack. I begin to sob uncontrollably, stomping around camp, snatching personal effects off the ground and adding them to the pile. Necklaces, clothing, children’s toys. A little seashell comb. An apron that belonged to Jimmy’s mother. Then I use Jimmy’s strike-a-light and start several small fires around the base.

Exhausted and drained and covered in blood and sweat, I turn and see Jimmy propped up in the cave watching me, and he’s crying, too. We sit inside the cave with arms around one another and watch it burn.

It starts slow, but as the sky darkens, the fire spreads. It works its way up the pyre in little advances and short runs of flame and soon flesh begins to sizzle and fat begins to burn. By the time the sky is fully dark, the pyre is completely engulfed and burning so bright and hot that we shield our eyes and sweat rises on our brows and we scoot farther into the cave to escape the heat. Three, five, maybe ten meters the flames rise lashing into the night, and the cove is lit on all sides with an eerie glow of flame and shadow. The dark water is unusually calm and a second fire burns on its mirror-like surface, stretching to the cove mouth and out into the open ocean. The fire hisses and pops, and caves in on itself as it burns. I watch shadows and outlines of bodies fall together in sweet embrace as their flesh evaporates and drifts away like departing smoke-colored souls turning a slow and final dance high into the night.

Jimmy leans into me and I caress his hair.

I sit with him sleeping in my arms and watch the fire burn down, casting its flickering orange ghosts onto the cove walls. I think about my people down in Holocene II loading up into train cars at thirty-five and heading off to Eden, and I wonder what they do with the bodies there. Burn them, bury them, grind them up to fertilize our food? I wouldn’t be surprised. Nothing seems impossible now in this new nightmare world.

Jimmy’s eyes open, blink away tears, shutter, then close again. My eyes droop, and fight though I do, they close, too.

CHAPTER 18
The Storm Passes

Black smoke.

Burnt flesh.

The fire is smoldering when morning breaks on the cove. Jimmy is smoldering, too. He’s hot to touch and dripping with sweat, and when I pull the makeshift bandage away to look at his wound, it’s bright-red and puffy with yellow pus leaking from between the stiches.

I drag him farther into the cool shade of the cave. I fetch clear water from the stream and kick up hot coals at the edge of the fire and set the water to boil. The fire is horror to look at, the bodies not completely burned. The charred, eternal grins of fleshless faces smile at me from the ashes.

I spend a solid hour cleaning Jimmy’s wound. Then I make him drink what water’s left. He’s hardly conscious, and I worry about water leaking into his lungs, but his throat moves and I assume he’s swallowing. I collect the few remaining shreds of prized cotton clothing, tear them in strips and dress Jimmy’s leg. Then I drape damp cloths over his burning forehead. It’s clear he has an infection, and it’s clear he’s going to die. He needs medicine, and he needs it now.

I search the collapsed remains of the supply tent, but find nothing except some herbs and pouches of dried roots. I have no idea what they are or how to use them, and I doubt they’d help even if I did. What he needs are antibiotics. I rouse Jimmy to ask if they have any, but he just stares at me, delirious, as if he can’t understand my words. Then it occurs to me that he’s never even heard of antibiotics, doesn’t know they exist.

My mind races for a solution.

“Think, Aubrey, think.”

I’m back in Holocene II now, sitting in my testing seat, the questions coming fast. Twenty-first century medicine—I have to know this, I have to. Then an image pops into my head: the melon field. In my mind I’m there again, and I see the cracked and rotten melons I passed over, melons covered in furry mold.

It takes me all morning to find the field again, but when I do I scour the patch, ignoring the ripe and almost ripe, picking only the rotten melons and gathering them in Jimmy’s netted sack. I sling the sack over my shoulder and run with it back to the cove where I find Jimmy freezing and covered in sweat.

I swaddle him in furs and heat more water, boiling dried fish into a brine and making him drink it. Then I set up my lab and go to work. I lay a square of tent skin just inside the cave where the sun will hit it but the wind won’t. Then I shave mold off the rotten melons with Uncle John’s knife and spread it out on the skin to dry, piling the scraped melons in a shady nook and sprinkling them with water, hoping they’ll mold again.

By afternoon the mold is dry. I shave it loose and fold it in the skin, setting the skin against a rock and pounding it with a stone. I pour half the powdered mold into boiling water, being careful not to let it blow away, and when the tea cools, I feed it to Jimmy. It smells awful, but he swallows it down. I make a paste with the remaining mold, drain the puss from his wound, clean it, and smear the paste on. I can’t be sure there are even any active antibiotics in the mold I’m using, and even if there are, it won’t be very concentrated. But it’s the only hope I have and I cling to it all night as Jimmy moans with fever.

In the morning, the melons are molded over again, but it’s not enough. I race back to the patch and pick another sack full and carry them back and repeat the process.

Days pass like this. Scraping melons, drying mold. Making broth and making paste. I create an assembly line in the mouth of the cave. Five sheets of drying mold, melons piled high in the shade. I make Jimmy a bed from furs and wash him twice a day, turning him every few hours so he doesn’t develop sores. I feed him nothing but fish brine and mold. His tongue turns green. He stinks of spoiled bedding and sweat. I fashion him a diaper from found clothing, changing it several times a day and washing it in the surf.

I can’t stand the bony faces grinning at us from the ashes so I pile the fire with fresh fuel and burn it again. I add to the fire all night, the crackling flames my only companion, and in the morning I scoop sand over the few bones that remain.

On the fifth morning, Jimmy’s fever finally breaks. He’s still not talking, but he seems more alert, sipping brine on his own and even trying to refuse my mold tea.

That night the storm comes ...

At dusk, dark clouds gather offshore and rain drops like black fingers on the horizon, white combers rising on the surf. A cold wind races in from the sea and rips howling through the cove. The tide comes on fast, swells of seawater funneling into the cove, waves stretching high onto shore. In the pitch dark of night, the water comes crashing into the cave, and I drag Jimmy back to the farthest wall to keep dry. Outside, the tempest rages on in the dark, and I huddle beneath the skins with Jimmy as we’re blasted with cold spray, and for the first time in my life I pray. I pray to anything that might listen to deliver us from this bloody hell. I pray for the storm to stop, for Jimmy to be better, for all of this to be just a nightmare from which we’ll wake. And as if in mocking answer, the storm intensifies, the waves surging, heaving logs into the cave where they crash against the walls, the bang and clatter jolting me where I sit, peering over the skins, the cold sea-spray stinging my face.

During a break in the barrage, an enormous bird flutters into the cave and perches a mere meter from where we huddle. Its magnificent silhouette is visible only when a retreating wave reflects a tiny bit of starlight into the cave, and when it spreads its huge wings to shake them dry, they stretch out in front of me and I can smell the musty odor of its plumage.

“You leave us alone, we’ll leave you alone,” I say.

Jimmy stirs in my lap. The bird turns its shadow head away as if agreeing to my terms, and together we watch the storm.

Come morning, the bird is gone. No feather, no print—nothing to mark its ever having been. I check on Jimmy in my lap. He’s sleeping. Not delirious with fever, not passed out with fatigue, but really sleeping, his face relaxed and even content in the low gray light. I slide from beneath him, get up and stretch. Then I step to the cave entrance and look out.

It’s gone.

They’re gone.

Everything is gone.

The storm waters have retreated, taking everything with them. The fire, the ashes, the bones. The tents and cookware. The blood. Everything. No boats, no men, no mothers—no children laughing in the surf. There is no evidence left of our life here. No record of the horror that happened. The cove is as pristine and new as if the Earth itself were called out of the storm and created just last night.

The beach is clean and smooth, the wet sand undisturbed, glistening like a blank canvas waiting for some new life to make its mark. The giant sea turtles rise again on gentle waves, silent witnesses, their sad, unblinking eyes staring out from ancient and leathery heads, their beaked mouths open as they feed.