I passed through a small copse of trees and paused to pick up a few of the branches that cracked beneath my feet. The treetops—some barren and leafless—reached up to the sky like skeletal hands. I ran my palm along the rough bark. When I had gathered a large enough load of wood to last me for a few hours, I selected a grassless patch of soil under a towering oak and began to make a fire.
It was a calculated risk to have this beacon burning in the middle of such a dark night, but I was too cold to rest without fire. I broke twigs into roughly even lengths and made a small bier on which I set larger sticks. I had no paper for kindling, so I crouched low and shielded the lighter from the wind with my body. Finally a few small embers turned into a feeble, dancing flame. I gently blew on the little fire, urging it to spread. Stick by stick, the licking flames crept upward and grew into a warming fire. It came to life like an orb in the haze, starting as a pale yellow and soon changing into a warm orange.
I wondered how many thousands were, at that very moment, walking along in the gray guided by glowing orb posts. Maybe it was better if they never found out. Just let them live out their lives and die thinking they had made the best of it. “No. No!” I said aloud. No. They had been robbed. I had been. If the whole of the last decade and a half could not be returned, at least there was a brighter future if all those in the city could be freed.
It was academic thinking, and I gave myself very slim odds. But even if this night were my last, I was glad for it. I had never cherished the stars and the cold air and the dancing tongues of flame so much as I did now. The air was sweet and the ground felt good under my back. Soil and grass. I had felt nothing but concrete for so long.
I watched embers wheel and swirl in the night air, spiraling up from my fire to join the stars hanging above. For thousands of years, thousands of peoples had looked up to the sky and prayed to the many gods for rain. They burned offerings or let blood or danced, begging rain to fall so that they might live. Now we could throw a switch and fog in an entire city. For millennia, we gathered close around the fire so that we would be warm, that the night would not be so dark. Now our mighty power plants electrified the world, and when one failed, we could always build another.
How horrifying but pure it must have been to live for rain and crouch by flames. There was no design flaw in rain or fire. No meltdown possible. If it rained, crops would grow and you would eat and thrive. If it was dry, you would not eat and you would perish. If the fire went out, you would freeze. As long as it glowed, you would be warm. It was perfect for the sole fact that people had no part in it. You can make fire, but you cannot make fire exist. Fire has always and will always exist whether or not we start it. Rain will fall when it chooses to and cares not if it is upon our fields or far away. We had come much, much too far. Decisions such as these were never meant to be made by man.
The fire burned low, and I added several larger branches. I lit a cigarette off the glowing embers of one of the dying logs. Just before putting the pack back in my pocket, I looked down at it. The white box with the simple block letters reading
CIGARETTES
across the front … Other people all this time had been walking into stores and selecting myriad brands of smokes, and all I had were
CIGARETTES
.
I put the pack away. My fingers brushed against Salk’s pills. I had forgotten all about them. I pulled one out and rolled it around between my fingers. Then I threw it into the fire and dug out the other two. I burned the second, eventually slipping the third and final pill back into my pocket.
Sleep took me gently. No pills. No drinking. Just clean air and the fire burning low. It was the first time I had slept beneath the stars in sixteen years. It was deep and pure. I didn’t even dream.
* * *
I awoke with a start but immediately remembered where I was and all that had happened. It was just before dawn. There were still a few stars in the gray blue sky above me, and a pale golden glow crept ever closer from the east. The fire smoldered and I was cold and stiff, but my head was clear and I felt healthy, vigorous. Alive.
I rose and stretched, my body popping and cracking all over in the chill morning air. With my foot, I dispersed the remnants of the fire as well as I could. Then I set out walking in the soft morning light. I could see the group of hills where I was headed. They looked to be only a few miles farther. I kept my pace brisk, not knowing if I would be quickly apprehended or if I would never be thought of again.
The sun crested the horizon and began its brilliant ascent, warming me as it rose. Gradually the blue fields turned deep green as the light crept across them. Soon I took off my jacket and threw it over one shoulder. I’d covered a lot of ground the night before. It was less than an hour of walking before I stood at the long winding driveway that ran up to Ayers’s house.
I started up the hill, cavalierly walking in the center of the gravel driveway. If anyone had been looking out across the land, I would have been visible all morning. When I drew near the top of the hill where the house sat, I stopped short and leapt behind a large bush. There was a red pickup truck parked next to the house. Someone was home.
After lingering behind the bush and looking for anyone in the windows, the rifle cocked and ready in my hands, I approached the house. There was no cover in the yard, so I moved swiftly until I was pressed against the porch, down on one knee. Crouched low to the ground, I made a slow circuit all the way around the house. The backyard was largely taken up by a garden of fresh vegetables, and I momentarily forgot where I was and went for a planter boasting several ripe tomatoes. My mouth watered, and a memory of Salk flickered through my mind, his pocked face cast downward, moaning in his sorrowing baritone about tomatoes. Hopefully I’d get a chance to have a few later; I had to keep focused now. I eased around a large cylindrical tank—likely for sewage or gas—and slowly raised just my eyes above the porch floor.
There was a long bank of windows across the back of the house and I could see a figure moving within, but the rooms were dark and my eyes were used to the bright sun. Not that it much mattered—I was going in anyway. I continued around the house and then, without pausing a bit, rose to stand fully erect and quietly but casually walked up the front steps and tried the door.
It clicked open. I pushed the door slowly inward and entered the house, gun barrel tracking from side to side with my eyes. It was quiet. I could smell something cooking. I leaned into the living room, where the day before, Kirk had unraveled my world. It was empty. The chairs and pillows sat as we had left them. Moving down the hall toward the kitchen, I realized that the picture frames that had been removed were now all back on the walls. I leaned in toward the photographs, trying to discern which were new in the gloomy light, but then there was a clattering in the kitchen. A woman cursed.
I lowered the rifle and stepped into the warmly lit kitchen. “Hi, Rebecca.” She screamed and leapt up from where she was gathering pots off the floor. Her face turned white, and her gray eyes were wide above flaring nostrils. She was dressed in a T-shirt and shorts. Despite the terror on her face, I couldn’t help but think that she looked amazing. I’d never seen her legs before. Her skin was taut and smooth. Her breasts rose and fell with each rapid breath she drew. She backed away from me, stopping against a cupboard, her palms pressed against its wooden door.
“Tom! You … you’re not…”
“Dead?” I said quietly, slinging the rifle across my shoulder.
She was silent, then looked away and nodded.
“Does that upset you?”
She immediately looked up and right into my eyes. “Of course not! No. I just … I can’t believe it.… I … what happened?”
“I think that’s a better question for you. I need to know from the start. What did happen?”
She slowly slid down the cupboard until she was sitting Indian style on the ground. She ran her hands through her long blond hair and looked up at me, her face heavy with emotion. “I’m so sorry, Tom. About everything. I hated every second of it. I … I don’t know if I can ask you to forgive me.”
I sat down at the kitchen table, laying my weapon across my knees. “Worry about that kind of thing later. I’m hungry. Thirsty. And I need to bathe. Is it safe here?”
“Yes. I mean, it always was. Why, are—? How are you here?”
“They made me come here. Made me put my fingerprints all over the place.” She nodded sadly, knowingly. “On the helicopter ride back to the city, I figured that was it. I was dead. So I brought the chopper down. I lived. No one else did.”
“What? Who?”
“Government assholes. A soldier.”
“Who?” she asked again, imploringly.
“The soldier, I don’t know. Just some poor bastard. There was a scientist named Anthony Kirk calling the shots and a monkey named Callahan.”
“Callahan’s dead?”
“Very.”
For a moment her face was a mask, and I didn’t know what to make of her. She looked away and then gradually her lips twisted up into a bitter smile. “Good. I hope he’s already burning in hell. Goddamn him.”
“So I guess you knew him, huh?”
She looked up at me sharply. “Yes. If I’d ever met him again, I would have killed him myself.”
“What did he do?”
“Callahan is the one who shot my father.”
“Your…” My head reeled and I rose suddenly, setting the rifle down on the table. Her eyes did not follow it, so I turned and walked hurriedly into the hall. I searched around for a light switch and, finding it, bathed the wall of photographs in light. There she was. With him. And Fallon. The happy, smiling Ayers family. It all finally made sense. In some of the pictures of a much younger Becca, there was a beaming, blond-haired woman with the family too. She stepped into the doorway behind me, resting her hands on the frame above her, head tilted to one side.
“Your father … your brother … you.” Rebecca nodded slightly. I pulled one of the pictures off the wall and studied it closely. The two siblings and father smiled brightly out at me from a thickly wooded, sun-dappled forest. “You all look so happy.”
“We were happy.”
“What did your father do, Becca? Why is he dead?”
She let her hands drop from the doorframe and reached out, taking the picture from my hands. Looking down at it, her eyes welling up with tears, she said quietly, “My father made the fog.”
* * *
I bathed, washing every inch of my body over and over again. The cuts and scratches from the crash stung and my ribs throbbed, but it felt divine to clean myself so thoroughly. The bathroom was spacious and finely appointed: cream-colored tiles along the bottom half of the wall and light brown wood paneling covering the rest. A large window above the sink let sunlight pour in, and the whole room was bright and airy. Rebecca had started to tell me about everything in a rush, her voice cracking, her sentences stumbling and jumping. I had stopped her. It was too much to take while tired, caked in another man’s blood, and smelling of sweat and gasoline.
I dried off, looking at myself in a full-length mirror. The sunlight washed over me, softening wrinkles here and scars there. My skin was pale, almost luminous in the natural brightness. The fading bruise on my face was washed out by the sun. I stood there, staring at my naked self. It was as if I was looking at a stranger. Or rather an acquaintance I had not seen in a long, long time.
I left the bathroom and crossed the hall wearing a soft, luxurious towel. In the bedroom Becca had offered me, I found a fresh set of clothing lying on a wide, four-post bed. Blue jeans and a T-shirt, socks and a light gray sweater. I hoped they were Fallon’s and not Ayers’s, but assumed the latter. I knew it would bother her to see me in her father’s clothing.
I dressed slowly, just as I had bathed. The scent of food cooking filled the house.
I padded downstairs as quietly as I could and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen. Rebecca still wore only a plain white T-shirt and gray shorts. Her hair was up in a ponytail. She was frying bacon and scrambling eggs, and there was bread peeking out of a toaster. A good, honest breakfast. She seemed to sense my presence and stiffened slightly, so I entered the kitchen, saying, “It smells amazing.”
“Just bacon and eggs. I wish I had more here but … I don’t.”
“No, this looks perfect. Thank you.” She nodded without turning around.
“There’s coffee. I don’t have cream, but there should be sugar.”
“Black is fine. Can I pour you some too?” I asked, lifting the small coffeepot off its hot plate and pulling two mugs from the shelf behind it. Both the mugs were white and had black rims and bases. Becca looked over her shoulder and whispered yes, her eyes travelling up and down my body. I assumed it was seeing her dad’s clothes on a living man that made her face twist into an unhappy grimace. “Sorry about your eye. I’m sorry I hit you.”
“Oh, that’s— No, it’s fine. I mean, I wish it hadn’t happened and all, but it doesn’t even hurt anymore. If I had a nickel for every … you know…”
She forced a smile and turned back to the stove. I stood in the middle of the kitchen, awkwardly holding both mugs of coffee. Eventually I set hers down on the counter beside her and stepped back again as she nodded her thanks. This felt so pleasantly domestic … like something from an old TV show, almost. The coffee was warm and rich. I took in a breath to speak, but it came out as a sigh.
“I’m gonna go smoke a cigarette, okay? Then maybe after we eat we can talk?”
“Of course,” she said quietly, her shoulders tense. I walked down the main hall and let myself out onto the porch. At first I could hardly see without squinting. It was a brilliant autumn day. The air was crisp, the sky a perfect cerulean blue, and the clouds frozen in dramatic clusters. Slipping off my socks, I walked down the steps onto the soft grass of the yard and lit a smoke. The blades of grass were damp and chill beneath my bare feet. Taking long drags, I wandered around the house slowly, my eyes shifting from treetops to rolling hills to the bright green carpet of grass below me. This was how she had lived for these last fifteen years. How Ayers had. And Kirk and Watley when he wasn’t in his palatial city dwelling. It felt like, on some small scale, feudal Europe.
Keep them in their places.