State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (22 page)

“Valor?”

“That’s what I named him. I thought on it all day. My pa said eagles is fearless. I think that’s what valor means, don’t it?”

“It does and it’s a good name.”

“Maybe you could come out and help me tomorrow,” he suggests. “Watchin’ and waitin’ won’t hurry her back.”

“Thanks, but I’m going to stay around here just in case.”

She doesn’t come home the next day.

Or the next day after that either.

I sit my vigil in the tower, watching the sky and trying not to think of all the things that might have happened to her and to Bill. Jimmy takes breaks from training Valor to deliver me hot soup, but he no longer tells me she’ll be coming back; he mostly just sits quietly and watches the window with me.

On the afternoon of my third day watching, the ninth day since my mother left, I spot the drone. I rush to the window for a better view, uncertain if I can trust my eyes after all this time of waiting and hoping. But sure enough, the sun glints on its wings as it approaches from the east against a clear, blue winter sky. I’m leaving the window to run down to the hangar to meet her when something catches my eye and stops me. As the drone turns for its final approach, I see the Park Service crest on its nose. That can’t be; my mother had sanded it off of hers. Then I notice that there are no cockpit covers on this drone either. Before I can react, the drone launches a missile.

At first, I think it’s coming for me. But it passes by the watchtower and explodes against the mountain beneath the wall, just missing the concealed hangar door. The fireball fades, and dislodged rocks go tumbling down the mountainside.

As the drone flies by, no doubt intending to come around and try again, I race down the watchtower stairs and out onto the wall. I run full speed to the shelter and slam the door closed behind me. I’m down the ladder three rungs at a time and nearly on the hangar floor before the motion sensor lights even come on. I grab the rocket launcher.

As I head for the ladder again, a voice in my head says, “There’s no time, Aubrey, and if the drone destroys our runway, there won’t be any way for your mother to land.”

Instead of climbing the ladder, I slap the emergency door open button on the wall. The door slides away from the end of the runway, and daylight washes the tunnel. Adrenalin takes over, and I bolt toward the opening, carrying the rocket cradled in my arms. I get to the edge and stand there, looking out from inside the mountain at nothing but blue sky. Then the drone rises into view, heading straight toward me, so close already that I can see the red tips of missiles inside their tubes.

I raise the rocket launcher to my shoulder, aim, and fire.

The rocket leaves the tube with enough force to blow me back a meter or two. I land on my rear and slide several more meters on the smooth runway. Just as I come to rest, a massive fireball appears in the sky outside the opening, and then a shockwave slams into my chest. I toss the empty launch tube aside, get up, and walk back to the door.

What’s left of the drone lies in a twisted heap of smoking metal several hundred meters below me where the mountain levels off. I stand and stare down on it for a long time. The next thing I know, Jimmy is standing next to me.

After a while, he says, “That wasn’t ...”

“No,” I say, “it wasn’t her.”

It takes us nearly an hour to hike down to the wreckage. When we get there it turns out to hardly have been worth the time. We search for weapons or anything salvageable, but very little remains other than scrap. Jimmy collects several pieces of metal that he thinks might be useful for one thing or another, and we carry them back up to the shelter.

Ours is a quiet supper. Even Jimmy’s eagle seems to sense the depressed mood, sitting quietly on its perch, only moving to snatch the occasional piece of meat Jimmy tosses its way.

“It’s not a good sign, Jimmy,” I finally admit, since neither of us has talked about what’s happened.

“Whaddya mean?” he asks.

“I mean for my mother coming back.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Because Hannah and the professor obviously know we’re here. And they must have been manually controlling that drone from the Foundation. They’re programmed to target people, and that thing was trying to destroy our runway.”

Jimmy sighs and pushes his bowl of stew away.

“Or,” he says, “It could tell us your mom at least ain’t been hurt by them yet.”

“How so?”

“They was tryin’ to destroy the runway, right?”

I nod and Jimmy continues.

“Well, if they knew that your mom was hurt or somethin’ worse, then they wouldn’t have bothered. So it’s a good sign.”

Jimmy’s insight is small comfort, but I carry it to bed with me like my last hope on Earth. I lie in my hammock and imagine a thousand scenarios that might have held my mother up. Maybe trouble with the drone. Or maybe she found Bill, but he wasn’t fit for travel, and she’s nursing to him. Or what if she had some other errand to run that she hadn’t told me about? This last thought jolts me awake with the realization about just how little I know about my mother and her plans. I know she wanted to rescue me, but she must have had some longer term plan to take over the Foundation from Hannah. There’s no way we could live forever on the run from the Park Service.

I quietly get up, but the lights snap on anyway and give me away. Jimmy rolls over in his hammock and covers his eyes with his forearm. The eagle cracks one yellow eye and follows me with it to my mother’s workstation. I sit down and turn on the monitor. Her last sent message is open on the screen:

Leaving tonight to search for Bill. Should be back within one week. If you don’t hear from me by day zero, go ahead with the mission on your own. May history be on our side. Signed, your affectionate Chief.

There’s an unopened reply message beneath it, but when I try to scroll down to open it, the computer locks and calls up a password screen. Great. I’m locked out. Wanting to commit it to memory, I repeat the message I just read: “If you don’t hear from me by day zero, go ahead with the mission on your own.”

What mission? I wonder. And who was she writing to? She also said she should be back in one week, and tomorrow will be the tenth day since she’s been gone. Now I’m even more confused and even more depressed than before. I’m tempted to wake Jimmy, just to have someone to talk to, but he’s sound asleep in his hammock. I tiptoe up to his eagle and look at its solemn face. It stares back at me as if it understands everything in the world but has for some secret reason decided to care nothing about any of it. Perhaps it’s wiser than we are, after all.

Fatigue hits me like an aftershock from the day’s wild events. I return to my hammock and fall asleep before the lights can even turn themselves off.

I dream she’s home and then the dream is real.

Jumping from my hammock, I nearly trip and break my neck on my way down to the hangar. Sure enough, the door is just closing out the gray light of dawn, and the drone is parked on the runway beneath the LED tunnel lights, with ice crystals still sparkling on its wings. The cockpit glass is fogged so that I can’t see inside. I impatiently lift it open.

“Oh, God, Mother.”

She’s slumped in the seat with her eyes closed. Her skin is pale, and her hair is soaked with sweat. Her breathing is labored and shallow.

I turn and scream, “Jimmy! Help me, Jimmy!”

Jimmy is by my side in a flash, and we lift her from the cockpit and lay her on the floor. As soon as she’s out, I realize how bad it is. Her right leg is swollen to twice its normal size, hemmed in and horribly misshapen by the stitching of her zipsuit. Jimmy runs for a knife while I try to wake her up. But she won’t speak to me or even open her eyes. Jimmy returns and carefully cuts the material away from her leg. He peels it back, revealing the blackened and swollen flesh. Her skin has cracked near the calf, and a gaping wound leaks yellow puss.

“What the hell happened?”

“Snakebite,” Jimmy says. “I seen it before.”

“Then you know what to do, right? You have to know, if you’ve seen this before. What do we do, Jimmy?”

He looks gravely at her leg and shakes his head. “I dunno. My mom always had snakeroot, but I wouldn’t know how to find it or if there’s even any around here.”

“We have to try, Jimmy. We have to do something.”

“Okay,” he says. “I’ll go. Make her comfortable. And get some liquids in her.”

Her head is in my lap when I hear the door slam above.

“You’re going to be okay, Mom,” I tell her, even though she doesn’t appear to hear me. “We plan to fix you up.”

I climb the ladder and drag her bed over and toss it down into the hangar along with her blankets. When I have her on the bed, I hold her head up and squeeze drips of water into her mouth from a wet towel. Her eyelashes flicker as if she wants to open them, but soon she’s gone again. I go back upstairs and search everywhere for a first aid kit but can’t find one. Instead, I boil water and a cloth and then I carry the hot pot carefully down the ladder and spend a solid hour cleaning her wound. Dark tendrils spread out and run up her thigh from the bite, and the way her calf has split open and blackened reminds me of Jimmy’s brush with death in the cove. I have to keep reminding myself that this is the result of venom, and that I can’t be sure yet that it’s even infected.

I hear the door above open, then close. Jimmy comes down the ladder followed by a woman bundled in furs. She kneels and takes my mother’s wounded leg in her weathered hands and looks at it closely. Then she opens a bag and pulls out a plump, live bird, resembling pictures I’ve seen of doves. She produces a tiny knife from among her clothing and slits the dove’s belly open and presses it to my mother’s leg, wound to wound. The dove doesn’t make a sound; it just rests in the woman’s hand with a trickle of its own blood now running down my mother’s swollen calf. It twists its small head on its rubbery neck to look at each of us in turn. A minute later it begins to convulse. Two minutes later, it’s dead.

The woman turns and says something to Jimmy in a language I can’t understand. When Jimmy hold up his hands, confused, she picks the towel up and motions as if tearing it into strips. Jimmy nods, climbs the ladder, and disappears. I want to ask her if my mother will be okay, but I know we don’t speak one another’s language, and the woman has hardly even acknowledged that I’m here.

Casting the dead dove aside, she opens a deerskin pouch, pulls out a gnarled root, bites off a chunk and chews it. She holds the root out to me, signaling that I should do the same. We sit together, chewing over my sick mother, our jaws frantically working the tough root. The texture is pulpy, and it swells in my mouth like dough. The woman spits the chewed root into her hand and then holds her hand beneath my mouth for me to spit mine. Then she mashes the chewed root into my mother’s open wound. I wince, imagining her pain. Fortunately, she’s so out of it she doesn’t make a sound.

Jimmy comes down, carrying strips of cloth that he’s torn from the clothes we discarded when we made our kilts. He hands them to the woman, and she wraps the leg and ties it off. Then she takes another small bite of root, chews it, and wraps it in one of the cloths, making a small ball. She dips this chewed root ball into the pot of water. Then she holds my mother’s head upright with one strong hand and puts the dripping cloth into her mouth. She massages my mother’s neck, coaxing her to swallow. Then she dips the root again and repeats the process.

When the woman is finished, she lays my mother’s head back. Then she hands me the cloth and the leftover root and signals that we should continue to feed her the juice.

“How often?” I ask.

When she looks at me blankly, I point to the root in my hand and then to my mother’s mouth. The woman points and arcs her finger, signaling the sun moving across the sky. Then she holds up four fingers. I take this to mean four times a day.

“Thank you,” I say, bowing.

She lays a hand on my mother’s forehead as if blessing her, then she gathers up her pouch and rises to leave. She picks up the dead dove, slips it back into her sack, and climbs the ladder. Jimmy follows her up, I presume to say goodbye. I stay by my mother’s side.

It’s three days before she’s well enough to speak.

I’m sleeping beside her on the floor, or at least trying to sleep, when she mumbles my name. I sit up and trigger the lights. Her fever has broken, and for the first time since she returned there’s no sweat on her brow.

“Mom, are you okay?”

She opens her eyes. They seem to look at nothing. Then her pupils slowly dilate, she focuses on me, and smiles.

“Oh, Aubrey.”

I reach down and caress her cheek. “Mom, I love you.”

“I love you too, Son,” she says.

Then she closes her eyes again and sleeps.

In the morning she tells me she’s hungry. Jimmy says it’s a great sign, and he makes her a pot of broth. She drinks it all and asks for more. Later, after the calories have restored her energy, she wants to see her leg. I pull her bed against the wall and prop her up. Then I remove the bandage for her. She sees the blackened flesh and turns away.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” I say. “It’s not infected, and Jimmy says other than nasty scarring you should be okay.”

“I never was much for shaving and showing off my legs anyway,” she jokes. Then she caresses my cheek and adds, “Thanks for looking after me so well.”

“We had help from the wild people.”

“You did?”

“Yeah, Jimmy went and found them. He said he’d seen their camp when he was out hunting. It probably saved your life, but certainly your leg.”

“That’s twice now,” she says. “We’ll have to find a way to thank them. And Jimmy too.”

“What happened out there, Mom?”

“I tried, Son. I really tried to find him.”

“Did you see any sign of him at all?”

“It was stormy a lot, and it rained almost every night. I’d sleep under the drone’s wing to stay dry and then fly again at first light. I was out of rations but I decided to give it one last day. That’s when I saw the smoke.”