Or sails across the ocean and back again.
Yes. That is an even better way to think of it.
By evening the city is dead. And in the silent years that follow, the brush grows. It covers everything. It pulls everything down into the dirt for someone to find at some far later date when we who lived through those days aren’t even a memory in the mind of the oldest of them. Then they will find what we left behind.
If humanity survives, my friend.
Yes, there is that also.
If a fire happens, then everything is so much faster.
And the bone chimes?
Unseen people who live near here or pass by. They have put those chimes up as some sort of marker to warn others away from what has been poisoned.
Stay away.
Bones.
Death.
Soft notes in a gentle breeze.
The Old Man watched for satellites beneath the stars above.
He thought of Natalie.
General Watt.
I wonder what her story of salvage is.
Chapter 43
In the badlands, they crossed alongside pink canyons of stacked rock and through stunted forests twisting away beyond Santa Fe.
They began to find the bodies.
The first was a woman, her corpse bloated and lying in a ditch alongside the road.
The Boy exited the tank and searched the road and its sides.
When he returned he said, “Hard to tell, but less than a week. There was a fishhook in her lip but she didn’t die from that.”
He pointed to the center of the road.
“They were all chained together up there. She must have died along the march. Then they unhooked her and threw her over there.”
“Should we bury her, Poppa?”
You know we will find more of them as we go, my friend.
“No. We have to hurry now.”
To what? To overtake the slavers, and then what? Or do you mean the bunker and again, then what, my friend?
Project Einstein, whatever it does.
Whatever it does, indeed.
THERE WERE MORE bodies rotting in the merciless sun. They passed them and the Old Man wondered if any one of them was Ted.
The canyons and forest gave way to a wide plain of rolling grass and slight hills that swept away toward the hazy north.
When they stopped in the middle of the plain, the Old Man could hear insects buzzing in the long grass. In every direction, the tall grass ran off toward the horizon, its undefinable edges disappearing into a screen of summer haze and thick humidity. As if the wide plain simply fell off the edges of the earth.
At noonday, they rested in the small ledge of shade alongside the tank, drinking warm water and not eating. The Old Man asked the Boy if there was something they might hunt to eat.
The Boy stood and scanned the indeterminate horizon.
‘We have no idea what’s out there, any of us,’ thought the Old Man. ‘No idea.’
“It looks like horse country,” said the Old Man hopefully.
Whether it was horse country or not, the Boy didn’t bother to respond.
In time they mounted the tank and continued along the road as it cut like a straight line into the hazy north.
I cannot believe we’ve come this far. It feels like we’re in a strange land at the top of the world. A land I never knew existed. Or maybe it is like an ocean. Like a sea of grass so high up.
That’s because you spent so many years in the desert, my friend. You thought the whole world had become desert.
I thought often of the sea. Every time I read the book, I thought of the sea and the big fish.
Later, they passed more bodies.
At dusk, they pulled off to the side of the road. All around them, the plain continued to stretch off into a hazy pink nothingness where there was no mountain, or forest, or city, or even an end to things. An unseen orchestra of bugs clicked and buzzed heavily through their symphony well into the twilight and falling dark.
Down the road, dark barns crumbled beside a lazy stream about which oaks clustered greedily along the banks. The occasional wooden post showed where fences must have once claimed the place.
The Boy wandered off in the dusk and the Old Man hoped he would come back with something for them to eat.
His granddaughter gathered sticks for their fire.
She must be hungry too, but she has said nothing. She is good that way.
I am grateful to have them both. I would be too tired to hunt and make a fire after driving the tank all day.
The Old Man lay on the ground and closed his eyes.
IN THE DREAM he is slipping.
The voice, the familiar voice keeps asking him the same question. That same question it has always been asking.
Can you let go?
He is in the gravel pit south of the village this time.
The forbidden pit.
The gravel pit where Big Pedro died.
The Old Man climbs across the shifting gravel hill to reach Big Pedro, which is really how it happened. How Big Pedro died.
But I am dreaming. So it cannot happen again.
Yet the Old Man can taste the long untouched dust of the pile shifting beneath him, threatening to slide him right down to the bottom. And at the bottom of the pile is the pit’s edge. And below the edge is the fall into the pool of dirty water where Big Pedro will fall and die because the fall is very great and the pool is shallow.
Which is how it happened.
But this is a dream.
So you say.
But you taste the dust and it is very hot like it was that day when you had been trying to salvage the material off the conveyor belt and part of it had given way and Big Pedro went down onto the gravel pile that had not been touched in so many years. Now it is shifting, and as Big Pedro tries to climb out it shifts, pulling him each time closer to the pit’s edge.
Toward the fall.
Toward the shallow pool of dirty water.
Just as it happened.
