“Yes. I remember everything.”
Pause.
“Does it… bother you… to remember what’s gone?”
“No,” said Natalie. General Watt.
“Why?”
Pause.
“Because I still have hope that things can get better.”
The Old Man listened.
“I have hope that you will come and set us free from this place. I have hope that one day every good thing that was lost will return again. I have hope, and there is no room inside my hope for the past.”
“Oh,” said the Old Man and realized that his days, his story, this journey, were not just about him and his granddaughter who was his most precious and best friend. Or even the Boy they’d found alongside the road who seemed hollow and fading from a worn and thin world. This journey was about someone else. Someone who needed help. Someone who has only hope in the poverty of what remains.
“Every day is the chance that tomorrow might be better,” said General Watt.
Natalie.
Chapter 19
Piles of volcanic rock rise to the height of small mountains as the tank crests the barren desert plateau. Below them, the entire world seems to slope downward to some unseen terminus that must surely await them.
Now we must fall to the bottom of the earth. This thin highway will pass through the military base once called China Lake and then we must follow that until we come to a small road the map has marked the 190.
And then… Death Valley.
The Boy liked to ride atop the tank, holding on to the main gun, watching the far horizon.
The wind catches his hair, pulling it, tossing it.
The gray-and-white feather with the broken spine flutters in the breeze.
The Old Man watched the Boy from the hatch as they bumped along the descent into the lowest parts of the desert.
That morning, as they’d loaded the tank, the Old Man had stopped the Boy, who seemed familiar with what must be done when breaking camp. Moving on.
He has probably done this every morning of his life.
“We’re going far to the east.”
He waited for the Boy to ask him why. When he didn’t, the Old Man continued.
“I can’t leave you here, there is too little to survive on and to salvage. But later today we should come to an old military base.”
The Boy waited.
Whether this pleased or displeased the Boy, the Old Man could not tell.
“We can leave you there, if you like?”
The Boy nodded and returned to helping load their things back onto the tank.
The Boy tapped the spare fuel drums and all of them heard an empty
“Where will we get fuel today, Poppa?” his granddaughter asked.
“Ahead of us there’s supposed to be an underground storage tank near a long runway. When we get there, I’m told we’ll be able to load the tank up with rocket ship fuel.”
Will we, my friend?
General Watt, Natalie, said so. Shuttle fuel. Left over from the last shuttle flights. Stored in case there might ever be a need for it again. Stored with fuel stabilizers in an underground, airtight storage tank where they had hidden the fuel once those shuttles had landed after circling the earth.
“Though shuttle fuel is not listed as a reliable fuel source for the M-1 Abrams Main Battle Tank,” General Watt, Natalie, had told him last night, “reviewing its specifications and requirements, I fail to see why this fuel source will not suffice.”
“If it is all we have, then it will have to do,” said the Old Man during their deep-of-the-night conversation, when he could not sleep.
“Yes,” agreed Natalie. “It may increase the engine temperature though, and that should be a concern worth noting.”
“Runs a little hot, eh?” said the Old Man, laughing for no reason he could think of at the time.
Maybe I was relieved there would at least be something to use for fuel. If not, it would be a very long walk back home or even just to the bunker.
“Yes,” Natalie had said.
Now, turning along a wide curve underneath dusty gray granite rock, the high desert town of China Lake lies buried beneath wild growth turned brown and yellow. Hints of collapsed buildings occasionally peek out from beneath the rampant tangle of wild desert shrub and thorn.
The base is on the far side of the town.
“Continue down this freeway,” he told his granddaughter. “We should be able to see the control tower from the road. If we reach the remains of an overpass, we’ve gone too far.”
“Okay, Poppa!”
The people came stumbling out of the tangle of undergrowth, some lumbering, some crawling, others dragging themselves free of the riot of briers, thorns, and wild cactus.
The Boy saw them first and pointed. The Old Man followed the gaze and finger.
They were misshapen.
Withered limbs.
Missing limbs.
They wore rags.
They held up their bony and scratched arms. If they had them.
Their mouths were open.
Some held up tiny, milky-eyed blind children, as if offering, as if pleading, as if begging.
The shape of their ribs was revealed through sagging skin above potbellies distended by starvation.
Tears ran down their cheeks.
The Old Man recoiled in horror.
The desert freaks fell away behind the slow progress of the tank, which easily outpaced their shambling and weakened lurch toward the machine.
The Old Man watched them fall to the ground in defeat.
They’re starving.
There wasn’t a weapon, a stick, or a rock among them.
Just hands, pleading. Claws begging.
The Old Man looked at the Boy.
“They’re starving,” he shouted above the engine’s scream.
And after a moment the Boy nodded in agreement.
The Old Man watched one of the crazed and starving desert people, a thin and bony gaunt man, the frontrunner of them all, kneeling, pounding the dry ground in frustration with a tiny claw-hand as puffs of dry dust erupted in his face. A woman with a child knelt down beside the Gaunt Man. Comforting him. Comforting her broken man who’d tried his best to catch their tank that he might beg for help as the starving child wailed from her back.
They’re just people.
They’re just people, and they’re starving to death.
