Immobility

“I’m going to put you on my shoulders now,” said Qanik. “So as to have my hands free. All right?”

“All right,” said Horkai. And without another word, Qanik swung him around and dropped him there. Pain shot briefly up through his back but was quickly gone. His spine no longer pulsed with each step. He reached back to feel the cut, had difficulty locating it.

What am I exactly? he wondered.

A city bus had crashed decades before into a small building set off the road. The road was still curving ever so slightly. Suddenly it rose a little steeper, curving the other way, skirting around a hill. Houses sparser, a little more spread out now, a little more rural, the road devolving into a simple two-lane highway. An old split-rail fence, somehow in better shape than the stone walls had been. The road winding more now, moving slowly through clumps of long-dead trees, little more than stumps.

Past a small road with a sign scrubbed down to bare metal but upon which someone had written something, relatively recently, in black paint. The dust covering it made it illegible. Qatik left their side and hurried toward it, wiping the dust away with his black glove.

GLACIER LN, it read, the letters thick and clumsy.

“That first letter is a G,” said Qatik.

“What does it say?” Qanik asked, and Horkai read the sign aloud.

“We’re getting closer,” claimed Qanik from below him.

They kept on, Qatik rejoining them. A few hundred feet farther along, on the other side of the road, another smaller road split off. There was no metal sign, but someone had put up a wooden post, nailing a placard on it. OLD WASATCH BULLEVARD, it read, the last word misspelled.

“Who is doing it?” asked Horkai, gesturing at the sign.

“The ones we’re going to see,” said Qatik. “They’re reclaiming.”

“Why?” asked Horkai.

Beside him, Qatik shrugged.

They continued on, the houses even sparser now. They were well into the foothills. Each road they crossed now was carefully labeled, and some minor repair work had been done as well, the road cleared of the larger debris, the largest cracks in the surface filled with dirt and stones. A mile or two more and the houses were gone altogether, the road running along the side of a hill, sloping away to the other side. There were places now where the road was washed out, completely collapsed, and they had to either climb up the hill and through the dust and back down again or clamber down and around. But even here there were signs of someone at work, little hints of a living presence.

An old rest area, rusty metal rail still in place, the building itself having fallen off its foundations to spill into the parking lot. A sudden unbroken run of telephone poles, most snapped off partway down but a few still relatively intact. And then a few more houses, these almost unpleasantly big, at least if their rubble was any indication. Perhaps condos rather than individual houses, impossible now to say. A triangular sign with a silhouette of an animal—a deer, perhaps—crudely painted on it. The corrugated end of an old drainage ditch pipe, now full of blackish ooze, the mountains close enough now that he could see cracks and fissures in the rock face. How long have we been walking? How much time has gone by? He looked up to see the sun already well behind them, well on its way to setting.

The road dead-ended into another road, with two metal signs at the end of it. On one, someone had painted in black tar an arrow pointing left and the words S. SASQUATCH BULL. On the other, an arrow pointing right and reading LL COTTONWD CNY. The two mules consulted, their faceplates close together, gesturing back and forth, and finally went to the right. There was a parking lot, several destroyed cars still in it, and then nothing: only mountains edging down almost to the road, fragments of dead trees, a broken and gravel-edged road.

About two hundred yards along they came to a bare wire, strung at waist height across the road. The mules, seeing it, slowed and then stopped.

“What do you think it is?” asked Horkai.

“A wire,” said Qatik simply.

“No,” said Horkai. “What is it for?”

Qatik just shrugged.

They got closer. The wire, they saw, hadn’t been there long. It was freshly greased and very thin, a slight amber sheen to it.

“Maybe a trigger,” said Qanik. “A trip wire.”

“A trigger for what?” asked Horkai. “And who would be stupid enough to trip it?”

“I don’t know,” said Qanik. “During the day nobody would trip it. But at night…”

They followed it off the side of the road, careful not to touch it, found that it had been tied to a metal post that had been pounded into the ground. They followed it back in the other direction. There the end of it fed into the lid of a metal box, its outer surface covered with solar panels.

They circled around the box, crossed to the other side of the wire. There seemed no reason to worry about the wire anymore—they’d crossed it and thus it no longer existed. But the mules stayed where they were, examining the wire from the other side, nearly touching it.

Horkai patted Qanik’s head. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”

But Qanik shook his head. “We need to set it off,” he said. “We need to know what it does.”

“That’s a stupid idea,” said Horkai.

“This is part of our purpose,” said Qatik. “This is what we do.”

* * *

HIVES, THOUGHT HORKAI, lying on the ground a dozen yards away from the mules, watching them squatting by the wire, searching through the backpacks for something. Mules. Burdens. Purposes. None of it really made sense: different sets of ideas, different regimes of knowledge that should compete and contrast with one another but which instead had been used by Rasmus to create a sense of community, a sense of duty. Was it only Rasmus or did it go further than that? Was Rasmus a manipulator or was he just as caught in the trap himself?

And now here he was, paralyzed from the waist down, lying in the middle of a canyon road, waiting for something to happen to kill his mules and leave him isolated and stranded.

They’d closed their backpacks again, threw them behind them, toward Horkai. They were speaking to each other, standing very close, one wildly gesticulating and the other holding still, his arms crossed over his chest. They were far enough away that Horkai couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then the one that had been gesticulating stalked off the road. A moment later he was back, carrying a large flat piece of shale, as big as Horkai’s chest.

Both mules took a few steps back; then the mule with the rock lifted it over his head and hurled it. It caught the wire and instantly snapped it, the ends whipping away.

Horkai, already braced for an explosion, closed his eyes, but no explosion came. Instead, what came was a voice.

“Welcome!” the voice said. “Welcome, brothers! If you have made it this far, perhaps this is an indication that conditions are sufficiently ameliorated for the human species to now survive. We are glad you can survive! But your own personal survival is only the first step. We have been waiting for you, waiting to receive you to let you know what you can do next to help your species.

“But first a little bit about us. We are here for you. We are here to protect you. We love you, just as God loves you, and we will fight to allow you to survive. God has chosen us to stand attendant to you and to guide you in once again founding civilization. We have waited long for you and you, too, have…”

The message continued on, but a mule had already rushed toward him, scooped him up off the ground, and placed him on his shoulders. They moved down the road, even faster than usual this time. The sound of the voice was quickly lost behind them.

“What’s wrong?” asked Horkai.

“It is a trap,” said Qatik, from beside him.

“It didn’t sound like a trap,” said Horkai. “It sounded like a message.”

“Traps never seem like traps,” Qatik said.

“They said they want to help us.”

“No,” said Qanik. “Qatik is right. This is a trap. They are not friendly.”

“How do you know?”