State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (12 page)

“Okay,” he says, “as soon as we open that hatch, we’ve got to get out of this thing fast. Gridboy here isn’t too fond of the open air, as you can imagine, and he’s got to get back to his post before he’s missed. We all owe him a huge thank you.”

I step up and shake Gridboy’s huge hand, thanking him. Now that I know his name, he seems less like a thing and more like a friend. He smiles and bobs his head as if it were nothing. Jimmy steps up next and hands Gridboy his game ball.

“I want you to have it,” he says, as Gridboy looks around for something to trade. “Jus’ dun’ drop it somewhere.”

Gridboy nods, making a show of placing the ball carefully in his pouch. Then he pats Jimmy on the shoulder and nearly knocks him over. Our goodbyes said, he returns to the controls and prepares to reverse the subterrene back the way we came. Bill grabs the lever for the hatch and takes a deep breath.

“You know what, Aubrey?” he says, pausing with his hand on the open lever. “After all those years lifeguarding on that fake beach, this will be the first real sky I’ve seen. I can’t wait.”

He smiles and opens the hatch.

As soon as he releases the lever, the hatch is yanked open and slammed against the exterior of the subterrene with a metal boom that sounds like an explosion. Bill’s face goes blank as something dark tries to force its way into the opening.

Then Roger begins to scream.

Hurricane winds, driving rain, and lashing leaves.

That’s what greets all four of our faces as we cram them into the hatch opening and look out of the subterrene.

It appears as if we’ve broken ground halfway up a lush hill. Once we clear the windblown foliage from the open hatch, we’re looking down into the nearly pitch black night. Then a streak of lightning illuminates the scene, and I see a vast jungle spreading out beneath us, its thrashing canopy swaying back and forth in the wild wind, as if warning us to go away before it retreats back into darkness again.

Bill pulls us back inside the subterrene for a huddle.

“We have to go now,” he says. “We can’t stay here and hold up Gridboy any longer, or they’ll find us out for sure.”

The brief exposure to cold wind and rain must have sobered Jimmy, because he takes charge and lays out a plan.

“I saw a way down the hill to our left,” he says. “We can go single file, usin’ the lightnin’ for sight. Once we hit the tree cover, we can make a shelter and ride out the storm.”

“Sounds good to me,” I say.

Roger tries to shake his head no, but Bill shoulders his pack and shoves him ahead, out into the wind. I’m the last one out. I turn to close the hatch, but Gridboy has already shut it. I watch as the subterrene’s shadow reverses out of sight, swallowed by the lush hill. By the time the next lightning flash comes, not only is the subterrene gone, but the windblown hill has already covered up the tunnel from which it had come.

The wind is too wicked to talk at all, so we follow Jimmy down the hill in stops and starts, navigating by lightning. A flash lights the jungle ahead, and Jimmy leads us ten or twenty meters. Then we stop and wait for another. I’m soaked in seconds. We lurch on in the dark like this for a long time, and when we reach the bottom of the hill and find cover in the trees, Roger is crying. I couldn’t hear him out in the wind, but protected now by the trees, his sobbing carries above the sound of the crashing canopy above. When lightning flashes again, I see him sitting on the ground with his face buried in his hands. Bill attempts to comfort him while Jimmy and I hunt up blown down branches and fronds and begin to fashion a makeshift shelter for the night.

It takes us an hour of steady work, but we weave a lean-to shelter against the gnarled base of a large tree. The four of us huddle inside it to wait out the storm. Roger’s sobbing has turned to just a whimper, and I hear Bill’s voice occasionally soothing him. Jimmy and I lean into one another for warmth, our shoulders touching, our heads resting on our knees.

Eventually, the wind above lulls us all to sleep.

When Jimmy nudges me awake, the first thing I notice is the steam. I can see beyond the branches of our shelter that the green jungle lies dappled in golden sunlight, and a shimmering veil of steam rises off the jungle floor. I rise from the shelter and find Bill already up and sitting with his back against a tree, eating a meal ration and looking around as if gladdened by the endless hues of green surrounding us. Roger is standing several meters away, turning slow circles with his head leaned back and his mouth open, as if in some kind of trance, or perhaps angling to catch one of the droplets of water dripping from the canopy of leaves. I remember how it was for me the first time I saw the forest. Watching them reminds me how beautiful everything is.

“I told you it wasn’t all a wasteland up here,” I say.

“It’s beautiful,” Roger mumbles, still turning his circles.

“Like nothing I’ve ever imagined,” Bill says.

“I can’t see the sky through all the trees,” Roger adds.

“Well, there aren’t this many trees everywhere,” I tell him. “You’ll see. But right now you both sound like you might have been sipping Gridboy’s milk. Could you tell us what’s next?”

“We hike it east to the coast,” Bill says. “Your ride will be waiting there.”

“Jimmy might be able to sight us east by the sun.”

Bill smiles and reaches into his zipsuit pocket, producing a compass, which seems somewhat odd since we have no need for directions down in Holocene II.

“We might be rushed and unprepared,” he says. “But I’ve been waiting for years to use my compass. My dad made this.”

Then Roger drops his gaze from the canopy, looks past me, and screams. I spin around and see Jimmy holding a meter-long snake, the head pinched in his strong fingers. The snake writhes as it hangs from his hand.

“I caught us breakfast,” he says.

“Ugh,” Bill says, shaking his head and chewing the last of his ration bar. “No way am I eating that thing.”

“I remember that feeling too,” I say. “But you’ll change your tune about what you will and will not eat if we run out of rations. Hunger is a powerful thing.”

“I think I’d rather starve,” Roger replies.

“Maybe we should skip the snake roast, Jimmy,” I suggest. “We should probably get moving.”

Jimmy shrugs and tosses the lucky snake on the ground. Roger watches as its tail disappears into a bush.

“Is that where you found that thing?” Roger asks. “I’m not getting anywhere near a bush if you did.”

“Oh, they’s ever-where,” Jimmy answers. “I got that one out of the tree jus’ above our shelter.”

Roger looks like he might cry again he’s so frightened, but Bill tosses him a ration bar, closes up his pack, and stands.

“Time to get moving,” he says.

We make slow progress through the thick jungle, using Bill’s compass and doing our best to keep moving east. The problem is that we can’t sight a straight line because we have to constantly go around thick trees, or gnarly bushes, or tangles of hanging vines. And it’s uncomfortably hot too. Sweat drips down and stings my eyes; sweat soaks my zipsuit through. The others are all drenched as well. Jimmy and I try not to drink much, knowing that our water rations will run low. I’m worried that Roger and Bill will get sick if they drink unsterilized water. In fact, I worry that Roger may already be sick, because he keeps swatting at bugs the rest of us can’t see and mumbling to himself about snakes and how he wishes he were back underground.

The day wears on, with most of us too weary to even talk, and by late afternoon the trees thin, and the jungle opens into a parkland of palms dotted everywhere with strange puddles of blue water. As we get closer to them, I notice that they’re deep pools and not puddles at all.

“What do you think caused them?” I ask.

“Maybe meteors,” Bill suggests.

“Or maybe they’re old dinosaur footprints,” Roger says.

“Dinosaurs?” Bill laughs. “That’s ridiculous.”

Roger huffs. “Not any more ridiculous than meteors.”

Jimmy gets on his knees, leans down, and scoops up a handful of water and smells it. It must smell okay, because then he drinks it. I notice that the pool edges are limestone, and I wonder if we’re not walking over some ancient aquifer exposed by countless sinkholes. The thought makes me nervous.

“Maybe we should move to higher ground over there on the left,” I suggest.

Come late afternoon, we make camp on a small rise that overlooks the pools, resting with our backs against a limestone outcropping and sipping our water rations.

“We better make a shelter,” Jimmy says.

“Why?” Bill asks, obviously tired. “There’s no rain.”

“There will be tonight.”

“How do you know?” Roger asks.

“Because it rained last night,” Jimmy says.

“That’s just silly,” Roger replies. “I might have spent my entire life underground, but I know just because it rains one night doesn’t mean it’ll rain on another.”

“Is that so?” Jimmy asks. “I s’pose you could say the same thin’ about the sun. But it came up this mornin’, and I’m bettin’ it will rise tomorrow too.”

Roger and Bill begrudgingly agree to collect firewood while Jimmy and I construct the shelter in the lee of the limestone overhang, weaving branches and fronds into the vines that cover the rock. I don’t think Roger wanders far or does much searching, though, because he returns an hour later with two pathetic branches and a lone piece of bark. Fortunately, Bill has a better haul, and within minutes we have a small fire going. We all sit down, exhausted, to enjoy it.

Turns out Jimmy has been filling his pockets with small lizards that he’s snatched and brained along the way, and he spears them on sticks and roasts them in the fire. They sizzle and pop, shrinking until they’re not much more than gnarled kabobs of skin and soft bone. They have a nice crunch. They actually taste pretty good. Roger and Bill elect to pass on the protein, eating algaecrisps instead. I remember my first time eating meat too. They’ll get over it.

After we’ve all eaten and drunk our fill, we sit with our backs against the warm limestone and watch as the setting sun casts the sky shades of orange, the likes of which I’ve never seen. The high clouds collect the light, and the countless pools below reflect them back. This creates the illusion of another sky beneath us, seen through windows bored into the slab of earth on which we sit, so that up is down and down is up. It gives me an unsettling feeling of hurling through space, which, of course, we are. For some reason the idea of it makes me think of the professor and his lecture on the submarine about subatomic particles and shooting stars.

The fire burns down, the orange sky fades, and some kind animal begins to call out in the darkening jungle.

“So,” Bill says, breaking our long silence, “is it always this unfriendly and this beautiful up here all in the same day?”

“I had the same feeling when I first came out,” I reply. “I remember how gorgeous and wild everything felt. Like it had been painted from my dreams or something. I would have been okay if I could have just sat and looked at it. But I was in it, you know? And it nearly killed me. Jimmy here saved my life. That’s the only reason I’m here. Isn’t it, Jimmy?”

Jimmy turns over a coal with one of his lizard sticks.

“You saved my life too,” he says. “Couple times now.”

“I don’t like a place where people have to be saved all the time,” Roger says. “It isn’t civilized.”

“And you think Eden’s civilized?” I ask.

“No,” he answers, “I didn’t say that. I just think there are advantages to living underground, and I’m not sure we should be throwing all that away.”

“What about you, Bill?” I ask. “Do you feel the same?”

“No way,” Bill says. “I’m all for us getting out and living free. Look at all this. It’s paradise. We’re lucky we all haven’t turned into tunnelrats, we’ve been underground so long.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you where tunnelrats came from in the first place,” I say, thinking of it now that he’s brought them up. “And why does Hannah have control of them?”

“I think they were bred in the basements even before the Foundation,” Bill says. “Some kind of experiment in the deep labs. I heard they have to drug the babies or else they kill one another in the womb. At least that’s what Beth says.”

“Who’s Beth?”

“Mrs. Hightower. Her first name’s Beth. She says that the babies are born addicted. The Foundation controls them by doling out fentanyl in their milk.”

“That stuff’s no joke,” Jimmy says. “My hands are still a little numb.”

Something woos and barks from nearby trees.

“What was that?” Roger asks, his voice quaking with fear.

“Probably one of your dinosaurs whose footprints we saw earlier today,” Bill jokes.

“Very funny,” Roger says. “Should we build the fire up?”

“Why?” Jimmy asks. “You hungry? I might have another lizard here somewhere, if you want it.”

Roger just leans back and twiddles his thumbs. I know it’s his nervous habit, but I don’t see how it could help, because it causes me anxiety just to watch him do it.