Summer of the Apocalypse

Chapter Nine THE FLATS

Our fourth morning, Eric thought, and we’re still in good spirits. Dodge led, dashing from side to side to pick flowers, Indian Paint Brush and Rocky Mountain Bee Plants. Rabbit hung back and whistled tunelessly. Eric strode up the highway, pleased by the hardness in his leg muscles that a few days of activity had given him. He did a skip step. Highway 93 roller-coasted generally uphill north out of Golden in front of him along the foothills to Boulder. Eric compared the landscape to what they had passed through before; this was the first that had not been a part of the suburbs. Ruins of shopping malls, subdivisions and shopettes dominated the ten miles west from the Platte River, and the fifteen miles north to Golden. But here, he hiked through real country. Clean of brick walls, concrete foundations, or houses in varied states of decay, the grasses dropped away from the road through a gentle valley to lap against a scrub pine shoreline at the foothills a mile away.

He rubbed his sun-warmed right cheek. Four days of stubble scratched his palm. He felt poetic. Perfect weather, he thought.

Sun rises… like a great red whale.

Mid-afternoon: cloudless, arching blue

storm builds on mountain

cool breeze wipes the day.

He shook his head at that last part. Weather poems, he thought, are never as good as the weather. That bit about a red whale, though, that’s nice.

He remembered last night’s sunset. The clouds broke and bands of color flowed from the west, first yellow, then orange and red, then indigo and violet. What a spectacle! As he hiked, he found himself thinking about dust in the atmosphere. The dawn and evening displays this year reminded him of the first few years after… plague, when the sun rose and set in sullen glory, which he attributed to ashes from fires in cities filled with the dead.

By midmorning, Eric’s legs that he’d been so proud of burned with fatigue. He bit his lip and struggled not to limp. He envied the boys’ energy to run back and forth across the road in front of him, showing each other things they had found: a length of PVC pipe, a glass telephone line insulator, a rusted hammer head without a handle. They’re as fresh as the first day, he thought.

Pain rose for another half hour, each step driving spears into his hips and calves. Small fires embered behind his knee caps. Head down, he watched his foot placement. A flat step hurt less, but any roll to either side flared new pains. I’m just plain old, he thought. Old and out of gas. The phrase made him smile. Dodge used it occasionally, so did Troy. Neither knew what it meant. Several expressions came to him: “Run it up the flag pole and see who salutes.” “Give me a ring.” “Drop me a line.” “That does not compute.” He said aloud, “Put the pedal to the metal boys.” Dodge looked back at him. Eric shook his head. “Nothing, son. just a thought.”

He concentrated on walking. Heat radiated off the buckled and fractured asphalt, and the weeds that grew with such enthusiasm a few miles earlier, looked dispirited. Everything about the landscape now seemed beaten down and tired. By the road, large parcels of caked and cracked ground were free of grasses altogether. He imagined how the dust must kick up here on windy days. Only bushes, laurels and what his dad used to call greasewood, thrived. He struggled with why the look of the land would change so drastically in just a couple of hours of walking, but his legs’ pains messed up his concentration. Step, step, step, he thought; even the sky has lost its color. It pressed down like a slab of gray slate, and the sun pulsed in its midst, its edges fuzzy. He kept his eyes down, watching his feet. Dust covered the road. Little puffs marked each footfall. Dodge’s small sneakers left perfect imprints and made Eric think of black and white photographs from the moon, where he supposed the astronauts’ footprints still existed around the pile of unrusting equipment they’d left behind.

He bumped into Dodge, who had stopped. I’ll never get momentum again, he thought, and almost snapped at the boy until he looked up and saw what was in their way. Three wooden poles jutted from the asphalt, and impaled on their tops at eye height, animal skulls. Suddenly grateful for the rest, Eric fingered one, a cow skull, bleached and toothless. A fringe of bone pieces dangled on short strings threaded through holes bored in the back of the skull. He stuck a finger through an eye socket and wiggled it for Dodge mid Rabbit to see. The bone fragments clattered against each other.

“Don’t,” said Rabbit. “It belongs to somebody.”

Eric wiped his hand on his shirt. Totems, he thought. Every hundred yards in both directions, other poles held their bones to the sky. An uninterrupted line stretched east across the plain into the city, and to the west the line vanished into the pines. “We have to go this way,” he said, and shivered when he stepped across the boundary the totems drew across the road.

Somber now, Dodge stayed close to Eric, whose leg pains had been replaced by a loose, empty feeling. Eric feared he might fall any moment. Rabbit quit whistling and walked next to the side of the road like a coyote ready to bolt. The grasses, what few patches there were, hissed in a hot breeze that didn’t dry the sweat on Eric’s forehead, and he caught himself weaving as he walked.

The bones, he thought, mean something to someone. Something primitive. He imagined how wind must moan through the bone holes in the bone heads, how lonely it would be to walk upon them if he’d been by himself. He looked back. Heat waves shimmered off the road, and the skulls in the distance wavered and danced. Eric stumbled.

A hand grasped Eric’s wrist, steadying him. Dodge’s eyes met his, and Eric could see the worry. “I’m okay,” said Eric, but Dodge held firmly, and Eric let him support some of his weight. Dodge’s fine-boned fingers reminded Eric of Troy at two, walking along the river. Troy loved to throw rocks in the water, and they’d spent hours making splashes. Dodge’s clasp on his wrist brought the memory back like it was all new again, and Eric’s eyes’ watered.

“Maybe we should camp early today, Grandfather,” said Dodge. Rabbit looked back at them and nodded.

Eric didn’t argue, and let himself be led to a shaded spot part way up a hill above the road. Cottonwoods will keep the sun off my head, he thought, and after a lunch that seemed bland and a little nauseating, he laid back, enduring his legs’ throbbing. Dodge gathered leaves to spread under their sleeping bags. Eric pressed the heels of his hands into the tops of his thighs, rolling the muscle down to his knees. He bit back a cry. How can so little muscle hurt so much?

Closing his eyes and pushing hard, he started the massage. again. Then he felt hands on his. Rabbit bent over him, his long hair obscuring his scars, and rubbed Eric’s legs. His strong hand kneaded the calf muscles, pressing them against the bones hard enough to hurt. He winced, and Rabbit let up a bit. Such a strange boy, Eric thought. So quiet, so distant, and he does this for me. Eric rested his hand on Rabbit’s shoulder. The boy didn’t look up, but he didn’t shrug the hand away either. After a few minutes Eric relaxed; the pain subsided to waves of comfort, and not soon after, he fell asleep. Something punched him, and Eric roused himself from a dream of a cop car appearing at the crests of hills, then disappearing until it was just a dot that blended into the burning town at the end of the road.

“We’re not alone,” whispered Dodge.

Blue-gray predawn shadows colored the bushes and cotton-woods. Dodge huddled against him. “I’m scared,” he said.

“What is it?” Eric said as he groped in his backpack for the slingshot. He sat up and looked around. Only the faintest blush of light of the horizon told him it was other than night. The trees stood starkly in their shadows. The grasses were a wash of gray.

Dodge pointed. “Can’t you see them?”

A gust rustled the cottonwoods. Eric shivered. At the edge of where a cooking fire would cast light if it were lit, sitting or crouching in the grasses, a dozen still figures surrounded their camp site.

“Are they men?” asked Dodge.

Eric squinted, tried to use the dim light to discern more of the watchers’ features. “Yes,” he said. “Who are you?” Eric called. Leaves brushed together, muttering in the wind. The figures didn’t answer. After a moment Eric said, “Go away. You’re frightening the boy.”

One figure stood. He carried a staff or a long, unstrung bow. Darkness hid his face and the kind of clothes he wore, but Eric saw a flicker of light in his eyes when he turned and walked into the shadows. The other watchers faded into the landscape. Eric blinked. The visitors had made no sounds.

“Where’s Rabbit?” Eric asked. A flat sleeping bag marked where the boy had slept. Eric scrambled from his bag, ignoring the stiffness in his legs, over to Rabbit’s spot. Where is he? He dashed a few steps away from camp. As far as he could see, black, blue and gray shapes formed the landscape. To the west, the foothills and mountains behind them loomed like tidal waves on the horizon. Below their camp, the two-lane highway cut through hip-high weeds. “Where’d he go?”

Dodge said, “A noise woke me.” Now that the dark figures were gone, he seemed more self assured.

“Maybe what I heard was Rabbit. I didn’t see anything. Then the men came.” Eric placed his hands into the small of his back and pushed. He worried that the men had taken Rabbit, but he said, keeping his voice calm, “We won’t find him until it’s lighter. Let’s eat, then we can look.” As they finished their breakfast of dried fruits and beef jerky, the sky lightened and the wind died down. A couple of hundred yards away, on the crest of the hill overlooking their camp, Eric saw the group that had surrounded them, sitting. They too appeared to be eating. Watching them closely for hostile movement, Eric put on his backpack and prepared to track Rabbit. From the dew-cleared path of grass leading from his sleeping bag, it was clear that he had headed north, parallel to the highway, but as soon as Eric and Dodge broke camp, the group on the hill stood and walked down toward them.

“Stay close,” said Eric. He kept himself between Dodge and the strangers. The men drifted toward them like a mist. In the dawn light, they moved… deliberately. He could think of no better word. Each watched where he was stepping, missing twigs or patches of dry leaves, like deer crossing a meadow. They wore leather skirts— their bare legs were sun browned—and what looked like homespun-wool shirts. Moccasins. No socks. Each carried a bow, a spear or a staff. Several were weighted with heavy, leather water bags. He guessed they were in their twenties except for the one leading, who might be forty or fifty. A broad-chested man with a weathered face and light blue eyes above a gray-flecked beard, he planted himself in front of Eric. The others spread out in a semi-circle. He raised an empty hand to Eric and Dodge. “I’m sorry, old one, but you can’t go farther on this road.” The voice rumbled.

“Where’s the boy?” demanded Eric. His own firm voice surprised him. The smallest and weakest of the men out-weighed him by at least thirty pounds.They seemed like cave men, hard and rangy and animal like.

Gray Beard looked puzzled. He gestured at his men. “We have no boys here.” The deepness of his voice impressed Eric. The man spoke from the bottom of a well.

“Our boy,” said Eric. “Where is he?”

Gray Beard glanced around, then signaled one of his party. “Skylar, you had the watch. Where is the other one?”

A man carrying a heavy water bag looked embarrassed and shrugged his shoulders.

“Find him,” ordered Gray Beard. Skylar dropped the bag and circled the camp. He found the trail Eric had noticed earlier and pointed north.

“He’s gone into the Flats,” said Skylar.

Gray Beard threw his staff on the ground and stamped his foot. “After him, all of you!” The men melted into the underbrush, and Gray Beard, Eric and Dodge were left to contemplate the rising sun. The rush of men hurrying off, the strangely dressed man standing next to him, and the mystery of Rabbit’s whereabouts confused Eric. He took a step to follow Rabbit’s trail, but Dodge tugged on his arm. “We’re supposed to stay here, I think,” he whispered.

Gray Beard picked up his staff, inspecting it for cracks. “The Flats,” he said. “One job to do, and I ruin it.” He turned to Eric. “The boy won’t go far, do you think? He’ll come back on his own?” Concern creased his features. Eric thought his posture was odd— forced and uncomfortable—as if he expected Eric to scold him.

Gray Beard twisted both hands slowly on the staff. “Damn.”

Eric said, “What is this about the Flats? Do you mean Rocky Flats?” Rocky Flats were a few miles to the north and east, he remembered. They used to make triggers for nuclear weapons there.

“The Flats,” he said. “We just call them the Flats.” Gray Beard bent and rubbed his hand over the fabric of Eric’s sleeping bag. “You’re jackals,” he said, “but that won’t keep you safe.” Eric remembered Rabbit’s story about the little girl who called him a jackal. “What do you mean, safe?” The man smiled at him, a strained smile but an honest-seeming one that softened his face and crinkled long laugh lines from the corners of his eyes. Eric felt less threatened by him, although still frightened for Rabbit. Whatever was happening, this man was scared.

Gray Beard said, “I don’t believe the stories, but some of the others do, that Jackals are protected from the spirits in the Flats.”

“Spirits?”

The man leaned on his staff and looked past Eric to where the others had headed in their pursuit of Rabbit. “Spirits. Gods perhaps. But my parents told me the Flats were always evil, that even in the Gone Times people feared it. Not because of spirits though. Plutonium contamination.” He pronounced “plutonium contamination” a syllable at a time, as if they were foreign words. Eric wondered if he had any idea what they meant. The man continued, “Animals don’t go into the Flats. People who are stupid enough to go in get sick. Some die.”

What a strange superstition, Eric thought. “So you patrol the border, to keep people out?” Gray Beard shrugged his shoulders. “Foolish people come and go as they please until an animal eats them or they fall off cliffs. Nobody patrols the boundary. If they ignore a clear warning, who can help them?

We have been following you since you sang with the wolves.” He paused, embarrassed-looking, as if he were waiting for Eric to laugh at him. “Some of the men think you are a spirit, a manitou. Wolves carry power. To sing with them is a rare gift.”

Dodge stiffened beside when Gray Beard mentioned following them. “Bugbears, Grandpa. They’re the Bugbears.”

Eric put a hand on Dodge’s shoulder and pulled him close. “I know.” After being trailed the entire trip (and why?), after listening to Phil’s fears, actually meeting them seemed anticlimactic. They’re just men in badly made clothes, and what do they want with us?

Too many mysteries here, he thought, but he didn’t let his confusion show on his face. He remembered the first night he left Littleton—it seemed long ago, now—and howling with the wolves in the middle of the night. Their long, sturdy shadows milled around the base of the rock he slept on, and they made harmonies to the sky.

Gray Beard said, “It’s a small thing, really, I told them, but the young men see the world differently. Lots of ways you could’ve acted around the wolves, and maybe we’d have stopped you from going into the Flats anyway. No one has come so far from the Jackals in years, and you’re old—we don’t see many old ones away from their homes—but of all the things you could’ve done, you sang, so we’ve been watching. We wouldn’t want you to come this far, then have plutonium get you.” He glanced north into the brush. Eric looked too. Surely the man’s fear of Rocky Flats was unjustified, but he realized he knew nothing about how plutonium was stored. All he remembered was the incredible toxicity of the element. A millionth of a grain, less than a dust mote, on your skin would kill. When the plague hit, was the facility safely shut down? Were they even still working with plutonium? He shivered. Dodge handed Eric a coat. “You should wrap up, Grandpa,” he said. Clouds glowed on the horizon. Sunrise was a few minutes away. “How far north would be unsafe?” asked Eric as he pushed his hand into a sleeve.

Gray Beard shrugged. “A mile or two maybe. Who knows what plutonium will do? We don’t trespass.” He turned, concerned again. “It will kill him if he gets too far. I’ve seen men who’ve tried to cross. They…” He paused. “Their deaths are… ugly.” He stopped as if contemplating a bad memory. “He won’t get too far. A town boy. My men will find him soon.”

Eric thought about the way Rabbit could move in the underbrush, his preternatural speed and sense of self preservation. “Not if he doesn’t want them to,” Eric said.

A half hour after the sun rose, one of the men dashed into the campsite. Gray Beard still stood, leaning on his staff. Eric and Dodge had rewrapped themselves in the sleeping bags. Eric had been guessing at what Rabbit had done. When he heard (or sensed?) the approach of the strangers, he must have awakened, realized there were too many to stand up to, and fled. He must have figured that he could do more good if he were free than if the men captured him. But why did he go north? He wouldn’t leave us, would he, and try to reach Boulder on his own?

The man said, “He lost us, Teach. Got off the soft ground. Skylar split the group, though. He can’t stay gone long.” Gray Beard nodded an acknowledgment, and the man ran back into the brush. Gray Beard shook his head. “Boy must be as fast as blue blazes.” Eric pulled the sleeping bag off his shoulders. It was a climbing expedition bag, and too warm for the summer. “He called you Teach. Is that your name?”

Gray Beard squatted and faced him, the sun flush on his face. “It’s what I do. Teacher. Teach. It’s a good name. You’re Eric. Littleton’s oldest resident. The last of the Gone Time survivors.” Eric started at his own name. Teach said, “We’ve heard you talking. That one,” he pointed to Dodge, “is your grandson, Dodge. The other is Rabbit.”

“But who are you? Where are your people? Why were you following me in the first place?” A different man ran into the camp. Teach looked up at him. “Skylar picked up the boy’s trail and we followed it for a while, but he doubled back. Then we figured out he lead us in a big figure eight. The little demon has us going in circles.”

Teach thought for a second, then said, “Ignore the trail. Tell Skylar to spread the men out and come back toward this camp. Better poke a stick into every hole or pile of leaves. The boy knows what he’s doing.” He turned back to Eric and Dodge. “I’ve told you who I am.” He scratched a figure in the dirt at his feet, a circle, then smoothed the image away. “We live upstream.” He nodded toward the mountains, now drenched with light, the high peaks of the continental divide still white and glistening with snow. Eric didn’t know what to ask next, but there was something alien about Teach, not just his clothes, but his demeanor, something wildly awake about him. When he wasn’t speaking, he listened, not just to Eric, but to the air. He rested his head on the breeze. His nostrils flared, like a blink, a couple of times a minute. He didn’t behave like someone who spent time indoors a lot. It would be hard to sneak past this man at night.

Teach tilted his head to the side, then stood. The man he’d called Skylar stepped through the bushes and approached Teach. “We cornered him,” said Skylar, “but he got away. The boy’s a devil, Teach. I say we let him go and the Flats can have him.” A large purple knot swelled below the young man’s left eye. He touched it gingerly with his fingertips. “He’s good with rocks too. Jackson caught one in the knee, and I think we’ll have to carry him home.”

Teach said, “He’s not going north, then?”

Skylar spit. “Bah! He’s gaming with us. He stuck his tongue at me before he threw the rock.” Teach laughed. “How’d you let that happen? You were a sharp little rock thrower yourself once.” Skylar scowled at him, then stalked out of camp.

“They won’t catch him, I think,” said Eric, “unless he thinks Dodge and I are safe.”

“Good,” Teach said, “if that means he’s not heading into the Flats.” They waited for an hour. Three times men came to report no progress. Eric and Dodge packed their sleeping bags. Dodge didn’t seem to be afraid for Rabbit or of Teach, and Eric found himself more relaxed around the man, even though he wasn’t sure if he was a friend, an odd stranger or their captor. Finally Eric said, “You followed us for days secretly. Now that you’ve come out in the open, what’s your plan?”

Teach said, “Today, the wind is my plan.” He added, “Getting off the flats.” He scuffed the dirt at his feet.

“And maybe asking you to talk to my students about the Gone Time around a campfire. They love ghost stories. Or you could tell them about singing with wolves.”

Teach cocked his head to the side, listening. In the distance, a bird chirped. A bit closer, another answered. That’s like no bird I’ve heard, thought Eric. Sounded like nut-hatches, sort of. From the hill above them, a third chirp drifted down. Ah, he thought, not birds at all. Men. He listened intently. After a few minutes he knew approximately where all of Teach’s men were, and Rabbit probably knew too. If they kept chirping, they’d never catch him.

Eric touched Dodge’s shoulder. Leaning against his backpack, the boy was almost asleep. “Dodge, can you do a meadowlark for me?” He nodded, pursed his lips and blew. The first try came out airy. The top note of a meadowlark’s call is high and hard to hit. He tried again, and the call trilled down perfectly.

“That’s good, boy,” said Teach. “Meadowlark’s a tough one.” From the middle of a bush fifteen feet away, a meadowlark answered. The bush shook, and Rabbit rose from the center of it like a wood sprite, twigs and leaves caught in his hair, a goose egg-sized rock clasped in each hand.

Teach didn’t even look particularly surprised. He sighed, put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Within a couple of minutes all of the men returned. The last one limped in, supported by two others, his knee darkly swollen. “I was looking the wrong direction,” he said cheerfully. “I figure I can walk on it. Might have to go slow, though. Heck of a throw from thirty yards.” He gave Rabbit a thumbs up.

“My parents destroyed the old Coal Creek Canyon Road from the highway to the canyon itself,” said Teach. Eric walked behind him; Dodge and Rabbit followed. Spread to either side, the rest of the men hiked, sometimes in sight, other times hidden behind thick stands of scrub oak. We can’t be leaving much of a trail, observed Eric.

Teach continued, “They told me they blocked all the ways into the mountains. Some they blew up, like the Boulder Creek Road. Knocked down half a canyon. The Peak to Peak Highway to Black Hawk and Central City they cut the bridges. But this one, they obliterated. Earth movers, my dad told me. He and a handful of others dug it up, spread the asphalt and replanted. He called it a ‘deconstruction project’ or ‘highway beautification.’” Teach’s thick, bare calves flexed as he stepped onto a deadfall branch and pushed himself over. Unscarred foothills rose before them, and the land looked clean and untouched. If there had been a highway here fifty years ago, they did a darned good job hiding it, Eric thought. Eric puffed. Legs, achy and weak, protested at the pace, and they’d generally been climbing since they’d walked into what looked like an open field to the west of Colorado 93. “Must have been afraid of people coming,” he said, finally. “Somebody got the tunnel on U.S. 6 west out of Denver the summer I was there.”

Teach looked back over his shoulder. “U.S. 6?”

Eric rested, pressing his hand deep into his side, thought a second, then said, “Clear Creek Canyon Road.”

“Oh, yes.” Teach stopped. “Here, let me handle that.” He took Eric’s pack. A broad sweat patch on Eric’s back cooled quickly, and as soon as they started again he felt like Teach had subtracted years, not pounds. Teach said, “Couldn’t do anything about the maps, Dad told me, but a line on paper doesn’t mean much if you can’t find the road it belongs to.”

Eric tried to reconstruct a map of Colorado. He had a good head for geography. The Coal Creek Canyon Road led to… to…Golden Gate Canyon State Park, he thought. And above that, a couple of little towns. He couldn’t remember their names, but he didn’t think the road cut north soon. Every step took them farther from Boulder. If we could just go straight, we’re probably not ten miles away. He looked north, past the hills, to Boulder and its library, if it still existed. “How far do we have to go?” he asked.

“We might make Pinecliffe today.” Teach looked back again, obviously gauging Eric’s fitness. “Maybe not. Then it’s another day and a half to Highwater.”

Eric couldn’t place the name. “Highwater?”

It was Teach’s turn to think a second. “Nederland in the Gone Times. That’s where we live. It isn’t safe to cut any closer to the Flats than that, and there isn’t a good trail anyway.” Nederland, Eric recalled, was an old mining town twenty or thirty miles into the mountains and not too far from the Continental Divide. A big difference between twenty and thirty when you’re walking, he thought. A granite boulder blocked their path. Eric drug his hand across its rough face as they walked around, but another one the same size stood next to the first. A wall of boulders choked the mouth of the narrow canyon they were about to enter. “Your dad did all this?” Eric asked. He thought, what an immense project!

“Persistent man,” said Teach as he ducked into a narrow passage. The rest of the men had vanished. There must be many entrances, thought Eric. Dodge and Rabbit pushed into the corridor behind him. Rock framed a narrow band of sky. Dust kicked up in the passage scratched Eric’s eyes, and he rubbed his wrist across his nose to keep from sneezing. Then they broke into the open on the other side and Eric could see the extent of Teach’s father’s work. From side to side boulders choked the skinny opening of the steep valley. A man on foot would have no trouble getting through, but Eric doubted that one could lead a pack animal through the jumble, and a car, of course, would be stopped. Coal Creek, a three-foot wide ripple, tumbled down beside the two-lane asphalt road and dove under a pair of the boulders. Dodge walked to the creek’s edge and knelt to take a drink. In a move frighteningly fast for a man his size, Teach reached him and grabbed his wrist. For an instant the tabula was frozen, the hulking, leather-clad savage bent over the slight child. Eric’s breath seized in his chest.

“Don’t, son,” Teach said. “Not till we’re at Highwater.” He released Dodge and turned to Eric and Rabbit. “Let me see your canteens.” After sniffing them disdainfully, he dumped the water on the ground.

“You’ll drink from our supplies till I tell you different.”

Friend or foe? thought Eric. The ribbon of asphalt wound up the valley. The group walked single file now, Teach in the lead, then Eric, the boys, and the rest of Teach’s men, his students as Teach had called them. Students of what? What does Teach, teach? Not too far ahead, maybe a mile, the bush-covered hills gave way to more rugged mountains, and Eric could see that granite, canyon walls swallowed the road and Coal Creek.

Dodge pressed close behind Eric and whispered, “They’re Bugbears, Grandpa. I was just thirsty. He’s mean.” Dodge sounded more angry than frightened. Eric reached back and patted him on the arm. They rounded another corner. Here the old road builders had calved away a portion of a landscape to make way for the road. The bed cut deep through a hill, leaving almost vertical walls on either side. The clean cut revealed layers of different colored rocks. A million years an inch, thought Eric, and when mankind is done, we’ll be no thicker than a coat of paint on top of all of it. He walked close to one wall and saw that the road builders had cut into a seep. A line of dampness oozed at about head height and stretched the length of the cut. He reached to touch it, then drew his hand back. The seep looked unhealthy. Instead of clear water, it was red, and it thickly stained the rocks below. He stopped walking. For fifty feet in front of him, the red moisture coated the rocks, and he smelled something from it, coppery and foul. Coal Creek, only a couple of feet wide here, and fast, rushed by the base of the cut. Red leeched into the stream. Tendrils of it eddied in little pools, then vanished in the water that snatched it downstream.

In the length of creek from the boulders to here, not a thread of algae waved in the current, and, he realized, he’d seen no minnows, water striders or tadpoles, and not a single bird near the stream. He thought of the poem he’d made up that morning, where he’d compared the sun to a red whale surfacing on the horizon, but now he thought of the Earth as the whale, and somehow it was cut, and here it was wounded. Layers of rock scraped away like skin.

As if reading his mind, Teach stepped beside Eric and gazed at the red slime that slid down the crusty rocks into the tiny stream. “The land bleeds,” said Teach.