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BURNING STONES A Novel by Steven Mills
Bought by Sean Wallace, editor at Cosmos Books (an imprint of Wildside Press) in April 2005, Burning Stones is published as a Print-On-Demand trade paperback. Burning Stones is available in Canada (distributed by Ingram Book) through independent bookstores and online at Amazon.ca and Chapters/Indigo, and online in the US (distributed by Baker & Taylor) at Barnes & Noble, Amazon.com, Borders, and Books-A-Million. Also, you can order autographed and personalized copies directly from me. Simply email me at steven@stevenmills.com, tell me how many copies you would like, and I'll weigh them and send you exact quotes on shipping. Also, please provide me with a shipping address, as well as information about how you would like each copy personalized--for you, for someone else, for a special occasion, or just signed. At the moment I am only taking payment by personal cheque or international money order, made out to Steven Mills. I hope to have a PayPal account set up in the near future. For your reading pleasure (and to whet your appetite) I have posted the first four chapters of Burning Stones below. I invite you to email me (steven@stevenmills.com) to let me know what you think. The trade paperback cover looks like this:
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BURNING STONES
Chapter
1 The Perseids meteor shower belonged to Alex Gauthier and his daughter, Gemma. Ever since Gemma was eight years old Alex made sure they were camped out under the stars for at least one night of momentous meteor viewing every August. And he wasn't going to let this year be any goddamn different. He climbed the hill to the dried-up hay field where they'd set up the fire camp. At the top of the hill high above the Slocan River a bench of land spread away from him to the north. Tents and old trucks and all the detritus of a makeshift camp--boards for tables, rounds of wood for chairs, rickety-walled outhouses on the perimeter--were scattered over the dust and dried humps of grass. Dirt and ash buffeted him. This wind, this bastard child of the forest fire that ate up the valley behind him, blew hot and furious, as the fire pulled in fresh oxygen. He shielded his eyes with his arm and rummaged around the camp until he found Mickey Evdikimoff, Winlaw's fire chief, crouching down in the lee of his pickup, drawing in the dust with a screwdriver. Mickey looked up as Alex approached, mopped his face with a shirtsleeve. "We got half-a-dozen new fires, serious fires, last night with the lightning storm," he said as he pointed at several circles he'd drawn on the ground. "If this one here comes up this watershed"--he jabbed at the ground with the screwdriver--"it'll end up behind the firebreak. We'll have to pull back and start all over again." "That's just great," Alex said, annoyance flashing through his fatigue. A week of camping out in an old industrial ambulance with his sleep fractured by nightmares, a week of firefighting, of tending the blisters and burns and heat exhaustion of those able-bodied enough to still firefight had incinerated what little patience Alex had left. He glanced over his shoulder. The valley was narrow, running mostly north-south, and was walled in with steep treed ridges. The skinny valley bottom was mostly wasting river paralleled by a dilapidated two-lane highway and dotted with houses and small farms that sometimes clotted together into communities. Most of the houses had been abandoned. The fire, like a virus that leaps from person to person, household to household, had eaten up the south end of the valley, devouring this barn, then that house, this copse of trees, then flashed up that slope to those houses. Now it was making its way along the mountain slopes on both sides of the river, leaping from tree to tree to tree, all the while hurling smoke into the air and pouring a bone-colored ash down on them as if consecrating their bodies for the hereafter. Alex crouched as if to study Mickey's dirt map. His thighs stabbed with pain in protest. Fighting fires was a young person's game--way too hard on a guy staring down the barrel of fifty--but the dearth of people hadn't left the rest of them much choice. He looked at Mickey. "I say we cut our losses, retreat up the valley and backburn. Fight fire with fire." Mickey grunted. "Backburning's tricky business, Al. Especially with things this dry. Wind turns at the wrong moment..." "Yeah, yeah. I know. I'm just fed up." He licked his lips, tasted ash. "I need to go home, Mick. Promised Gemma I'd be back by now." Mickey didn't even take his eyes off the ground. "You can take my truck. I'm sure Willow'll cover for you." Alex squinted at the fire chief, who normally would have put up at least a half-assed fight. Mickey's gray hair flopped and twisted in the hot wind. "I need someone to go north, anyway," Mickey added, which explained why he hadn't made a fuss. "To New Denver, maybe further. We need a fallback position, somewhere to evacuate to if we can't get this bitch contained. I've already got the folks half-way to Winlaw on twenty-four-hour evacuation notice." "Can't you find someone else?" "I need someone who still has all his smarts, someone who knows what we'll need when the shit hits the fan." "When? Not if?" Mickey coughed, spat into the dust. "Take my brother with you. Get him out of my hair for a while. He's pissing too many people off." "Ah, jeez, Mick, I just want to go home. Spend some time with Gemma. Maybe...." Alex's voice skidded to a standstill. "Christ. All right. Jesus, if it's not one thing, it's another." Mickey shrugged with one shoulder, jutted his jaw in the direction of the fire. "Shit, Al, everybody's getting tired. We all got better things to do, especially with winter coming, but if we don't beat this fire.... We got no choppers, no water bombers, and no RAP attack crew dropping out of the sky at the eleventh hour to save our asses--hell, we barely got enough fuel to keep the equipment we do have running." "We're not going to win this one, are we?" "I don't think so. Not without rain in biblical proportions." Mickey straightened up, pushed his glasses up on his nose. "Keys are in the ignition." He slapped dust off his jeans with a hand. "You'll take Yuri?" Alex nodded even though he wasn't the least bit interested in babysitting Mickey's alcoholic kid brother. Maybe he could find someone else to join them, kind of water down Yuri's personality. It'd probably just be for a few days anyway. He'd barely see Gemma, though. They'd have one night, maybe two, to lie out on the deck in their sleeping bags and watch for tiny stones burning through the atmosphere. Fireworks, she used to call them: the Perseids meteor shower, the burning tears of St. Lawrence. There would probably be too much damn smoke so see anything anyway. Gemma was twenty-one years old already, and it seemed as though her life was flashing before his eyes, arcing brightly across the night sky, too soon gone, only the retinal afterimage of her lingering until that too vanished, filled in with the night's darkness. Alex took a deep breath, straightened with a groan, and climbed into the driver's seat of Mickey's four-door pickup. "Thanks, Mick. I'll grab my stuff then round up Yuri." "Don't stay away too long." After handing Mickey his pack and some locked-open e-scroll maps he let rattle around in the back seat, Alex fired up the motor and headed off between the sundry tents toward the highway. In the rearview mirror he saw Mickey pull something from his shirt pocket and hold it up to his mouth. His Nitro. Alex shook his head. You stubborn ass, he thought, you were having chest pain the whole time you were talking to me, weren't you? He bounced the pickup south along the highway, the frost heaves and potholes rattling the dust and ash off the truck. Spotted knapweed, plantain and dandelion invaded the cracks in the asphalt. A couple of years without maintenance took its toll on a low priority highway like this one. Alex pulled up beside the ambulance, which sat in the driveway of an abandoned farmhouse where the rag-tag fire crews mustered and checked their equipment every morning. Willow was reluctant about being the only paramedic left at the fire, but agreed to hold down the fort until he got back or sent a replacement. Mickey had put Yuri in charge of tool maintenance to keep him away from the other crews so Alex had no trouble finding him out behind the farmhouse overhauling a chainsaw. "But who's going to look after the equipment?" Yuri argued, his face flaring red. Alex was used to Yuri's petulance and self-importance, and tried not to be irritated. Yuri rubbed grease off his hands with a rag. "He just told me to take you with me to New Denver." "That's bullshit, there's way too much to be done here." Alex shrugged noncommittally. "I'm just telling you what he said." "We'll see." "Take his truck," Alex said, and threw him the keys. Yuri gunned the engine and the truck shot away, spewing stones and dust back at Alex. "Asshole," Alex muttered as he turned and headed back to the ambulance. # Yuri drove them north from the fire camp toward Winlaw, pounding the pickup over the disintegrating highway, passing abandoned, weatherworn homes, eerily dark, their dirty blinds rattling in protest through broken windows. Alex sat in the passenger seat, firmly strapped in with the four-point. He'd wanted to scribble in his journal, a beaten-up lined notebook he carried with him everywhere, but the ride was so rough there was no point. "Slow down, for Christ's sake," he said finally. Yuri simply grunted, but eased back on the accelerator anyway. Alex felt himself slowly unclench. Hot air blasted in through the open windows, wicking the life right out of him. "Pack of lucies at two o'clock," Yuri said, pointing through the cracked windshield. Alex stuffed his notebook in his pack. "Slow right down, Yuri," he said. "I want to get a good look." "What for? You seen one, you seen 'em all." Half-a-dozen small brown shapes crouched in a thicket of overgrown raspberries in an abandoned yard by the highway watching the truck with wide eyes. Short legs, body hair, and that particular attitude of the head, sitting on elongated spinal vertebrae, making the face jut forward. Alex pulled a small DV camera out of his pack as Yuri eased the truck to a standstill. The oldest, an end-stage adolescent female, sixteen or seventeen years old, looking to be six or seven months pregnant, stood and sniffed at the air, a large hand hooded over her eyes. She made motions with her other hand and the younger ones crept deeper into the rows of raspberries. Alex panned the camera over the ones disappearing, zooming quickly, looking for telltale clothing, jewelry, scars--anything that might identify them. Four boys, two girls, from five to a dozen years old, all end-stage. He turned the camera back on the adolescent female. She was naked save for a purple fleece jacket, which she wore around her hips like a skirt, sleeves knotted up underneath her round belly. Alex guessed her height at about a meter and a half. Rust-brown hair covered most of her bare chest and arms. Her head-hair, a darker brown, was pulled back into a matted ponytail and tied with a green twist-tie. Dust-brown eyes, closely set. Her nostrils, like two cave openings, flared as she sniffed the smoky air. She bared her teeth and jutted her jaw in the direction of the truck. Alex braced his elbows on the door, shot her carefully. He didn't recognize her, but she wore earrings, small amber studs with silver settings. She backed away, turned and vanished amongst the raspberry canes. "Why do you bother with this bullshit?" Yuri said. "We can't do anything for them. It's better we don't know who they are. When they're that far gone, they're hard to tell apart anyway. And shit, that jacket she was wearing probably isn't even hers. Probably found it in one of the abandoned houses. Just let them be. " Yuri shrugged for effect, then dropped back into his seat as if bored, elbow hanging out the open window. When he got to Winlaw, Alex would download the DV onto the e-scroll at the school, post a close-up in hardcopy with all the other ones on the bulletin board. "Somebody might recognize those earrings," he said, not willing to let it go. "So what if they do," Yuri muttered. "They're as good as dead anyway."
"But her parents
might not be." Alex was unable to keep the snide edge off his voice.
"And maybe they'd like to know she's okay."
He couldn't help but think, Unlike you, Yuri. "If you can call being like that 'okay,'" Yuri shot back. "It's going to happen to all of us, even you, Yuri." "Uh-uh," Yuri said. He pointed an index finger at his temple, pulled an invisible trigger, jerked his head. Alex jumped, his heart stuttering. "Oh, for crying out loud." "If that's what it comes down to, yeah. I'm not turning into a fucking monkey. Bad enough it's happening to my kid; it's not going to happen to me." Alex lolled his head back. "You're not going to shoot yourself, Yuri. Jesus God Almighty." "And you're just going to let yourself turn into one of those?" Yuri said. "So you can run around the woods bare-ass naked and eat goddamn caterpillars and grubs?" "They'll find a cure," Alex said, although he didn't believe it himself, had never believed it. "Bull-fucking-shit they will. They can't even fix the bloody highway. Or make the goddamn phones work. And you still think there's someone sitting in a lab somewhere busily whipping up a cure? And even if they did find a cure, it'd never get to us." Alex panned the camera over the raspberry canes again. One of the brown shapes hadn't moved, wasn't moving. He slipped the camera into his pack and opened the truck door. "What are you doing?" "There's one on the ground. I think it's injured." "Injured?" Alex scrabbled down the bank and up the other side of the dusty ditch. The brown shape still hadn't moved. He couldn't tell from here if it was breathing or not. Yuri came up behind him. "What are you going to kill it with?" "Jesus, Yuri." "Well?" Alex pushed through the prickly overgrown canes until he crouched beside the bloating body. A boy, maybe six years old, naked with thick hair covering his arms and legs, heavy jawed with a prominent brow ridge. There were no signs of trauma. He'd been coughing up rusty looking phlegm just before he'd died. Probably pneumonia, which was no surprise. Sometimes, out of the blue, the alveoli in the lungs would just start to lose their elasticity--pretty common complication. Probably died early that morning. Alex backed out of the raspberry thicket, canes breaking under his boots like hollow bones. They climbed back into the truck. Yuri kicked off the brake and the truck leapt forward. Alex felt suddenly cold despite the furnace air whipping in the open windows. His heart chattered like an automatic weapon. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't escape it: that little brown shape, bloated with death in a row of forgotten raspberry canes, was the future. He cared nothing for his own future, it was Gemma's he feared. #
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Chapter 2 The sky was a jabber of stars. Alex pulled his sleeping bag up over his arms. It was well after midnight and the August night air already had the bite of Fall to it. Gemma lay on her thermarest beside him, with Coyote, her elderly Husky-Shepherd cross, snuggled against her, and her feet--her "hobbit feet" as she called them, the toes long and thin, the tops "disgustingly hairy"--dutifully pointed northeast, the primo direction for optimal meteor viewing. The valleys in the Selkirk Mountains of southeastern British Columbia were long and narrow, however, and therefore not the best venues for meteor viewing, especially if one was hoping to see a lot of Earthgrazers, the especially bright meteors that zipped across the sky just above the horizon. Usually, Alex and Gemma would hike to the top of the ridge behind their house or camp up in the mountains to get a wider view of the sky, but Alex was simply too tired and stiff to bother making the trek. Alex nodded up at the sky. "See," he said, "I told you it would clear up just for us." "The universe doesn't work that way, Dad, in case you haven't noticed." This was the time when there were to be no walls between them: what needed to be said was to be said. That was the deal they'd made when Gemma was eight years old, the summer she'd come to live with him full-time, when his ex-wife's ovarian cancer started to eat her alive. Somehow, in the dark under the sweep of stars, it seemed easier to talk. They'd exchange gossip, Gemma would announce her dreams, her new career paths, and sometimes, at least when she was younger, her latest crushes. He'd try to answer all her questions with as much honesty as he could muster. Why did you and mom get divorced? How come we can't cure cancer yet? Will I get cancer, too, like Mom? Are you going to die? "It's cleared up every single year for us," he insisted. She was shaking her head. "I'm positive we missed one year, Dad, 'cause of rain," she said. "When? I'm positive we haven't missed a single year." "Well, when we hiked to the top of Mt. Lucifer, remember? It rained buckets." He vaguely recalled an onslaught against the tent fly as they half-heartedly discussed whether they'd brave one more day in the sodden, socked-in mountains of Valhalla Provincial Park to maybe catch the tail end of the meteor shower. "Okay, so we missed it once. You're right." "Don't sound so surprised. Of course I'm right." He snorted. He'd been startled at the sight of his daughter this afternoon when she met him at the top of the long gravel driveway to their house. He'd been away only a week, yet her lower jaw seemed larger, squarer, and her brow ridge protruded even further, hooding her eyes, dropping them deeper into her skull, while her upper chest seemed substantially narrower. And he swore that the weakness on her left side was more pronounced. Maybe she'd had another small stroke while he'd been gone and simply hasn't said anything. It had been three months since her last stroke, her third, so it was unlikely she would regain full use of her arm and leg despite regular physiotherapy treatments with Marika. He had struggled to hide his alarm, and she seemed to be doing the same--he knew he'd lost more weight --by grinning at him and throwing herself in his arms while Coyote barked at them. Gemma coughed, startling him. She had picked up a respiratory tract infection--all the smoke hadn't helped--while he'd been away. She'd done the right thing, though, gone over to the elementary school across the river where they'd set up the makeshift hospital, and gotten antibiotics. The amoxicillin seemed to be doing the trick. "Why can't you ever say no, Dad?" she said. "You could barely walk when you got home today you were so tired. And then you hobbled around the house like you were eighty years old. Why can't someone else go?" He didn't have the heart to tell her what Mickey had said, that Alex needed to go because he still had his smarts. Unlike a lot of other people, Mickey had implied. But he was still kicking himself for agreeing. "It's not that I'm complaining about doing all the damn work around here," Gemma said with a toss of her head that he assumed encompassed the house and the garden and the chicken coop, "but I am doing all the damn work around here. And there's a lot to do before winter comes. And besides"--she gave him a sidelong look, her face strangely pale in the starlight--"saying no once in a while wouldn't kill you, you know. It might force someone else to step up and pitch in for a change." They'd had this argument a hundred times before. "I already said I'd go. It'll only be for a few days." She huffed. Irritation flared in him, kindling a sudden, fierce anger. That dismissive huffing sound, like the grunt of a bear finding a garbage can empty, always annoyed him. He clamped his mouth shut, barricading the anger inside. His job, not only as a paramedic but also as the Unit Chief of the ambulance service in Winlaw, took up plenty of his time, and yet everywhere he looked he saw more work that needed to be done, more people who needed help, so it never took much convincing to get him to take on additional responsibilities. As a result he hadn't been keeping up with his end of the duties at home. He knew that. Nor had he been spending the time he should with Gemma. He knew that, too. Lately, though, when he was with Gemma, his emotions seemed too close to the surface, too thinly hidden, like a smoldering hotspot under the duff that could, at any moment, whip up into a fiery maelstrom of grief and despair. It was this fear of losing himself in despair that made him want to wrap his work around himself, made him want to protect himself with busyness, with other people's emergencies and crises, just so that he could be saved from his own. From Gemma's. A third of the people in the valley had died over the past four years. Another third had fled, overwhelmed by loss, by the threat of summer fires, hoping to track down missing loved ones in the cities, searching for non-existent jobs, for medical care beyond the first aid they could be given here, or simply because they couldn't face yet another sodden, gray winter in this skinny rat-tail of a valley. The pool of human resources simply leaked away. And while the Lucy Syndrome chewed up more and more of the people who remained, the forest fires burned up the rest of their resources, human and otherwise. Sweeping thunderstorms, promising rain but delivering only lightning and fire, had filled most of June and July. Made it seem like the whole world was on fire. He turned toward Gemma, who was lying on her back, the stars turning her skin deathly white. Alex tried to scatter the dark fear that smothered his weakening hope. "What do you think of staying at Marika and Bill's while I'm gone?" he said. She rolled onto her side to face him, head propped up on an elbow. "Jeez, Dad, I'm twenty-one. I don't need babysitters." "Well, Marika's coming with me for a break from Darlene, and Bill was saying he could really use a hand. He says Darlene's so strong now he can't really handle her alone. I talked to him down at the school a bit when I got back." "What about the chickens and the fruit trees and the garden? Without me and Coyote here, the bears or the packs will just come on in and strip the place clean." "I get worried about you being here alone so much," he said but regretted it the moment the words were past his teeth. She simply stared at him. He tried a different avenue: "Have the packs been coming around much lately?" "Actually, no." "Maybe they've moved on." "Maybe--until word gets out that no one is living here." She lay back down. "And what about getting ready to evacuate? Who's going to pack things up if I'm not here?" "We can do some of that tomorrow. Mickey said he'd try to give us plenty of warning--if it even comes to that. And besides, you're only going to be a few klicks up the road." She let out a long breath, clearly deciding not to argue. "Poor Darlene," she said instead. Alex was glad of the change in topic. "She still seems healthy enough, Bill says. No complications yet." "Marika says she can hardly talk anymore." The bitterness in her voice chilled him. "You know what I mean." "Yeah." A long, sad breath, like wind through broken trees, escaped her. He guessed at the memory rushing into her mind: Marika and Bill's three-year-old son, Colin, drowning as his lungs filled with fluid, while his heart, irreparably damaged from the Lucy Syndrome's misfiring changes, struggled to fight the preload. They'd buried him a year ago May. (Yuri and Mickey had spent a week earlier that spring clearing a hectare of land beside the original cemetery to make more room.) It just wasn't right. "Seems that Darlene and Bill haven't been getting along too well lately," Alex said, trying to shake the memory out of his head. "He thinks you might be able to deal with her a little better. You know how much she likes you." "Bill's not the most patient guy in the world," Gemma said. "Well, I could ride my bike down to look after the garden. And Coyote could use the exercise, going back and forth." Coyote, hearing her name, rested her head on Gemma's belly. "You could use some exercise, couldn't you, girl?" Gemma said to her. "I can see if the truck will start. You could use that, as long as there's gas in the tank." They were quiet for quite a while, staring up at the sky. "I remember the first time you took me camping," Gemma said, her voice unusually soft. "It was up in Kokanee Glacier Park and we laid in our sleeping bags on that big rock over by the Alpine Club's cabin on Kaslo Lake. I used to call them 'fireworks,' remember?" "Uh-huh." "And you explained to me how they were actually small stones, dust really, the largest ones only as big as marbles from the Swift-Tuttle comet, stones burning up when they hit the atmosphere, making streaks of light. Like fireworks, but without the explosions. I remember being amazed that something as hard as a stone could be burned up by the air." She was silent for a moment. "Tell me the story of St. Lawrence." Alex let the stars smudge into flakes of light as the story seeped into his mind. "Lawrence had been a deacon in the Roman Catholic Church, and he was in charge of the church's property and money. One day he was ordered to give over all the property and money to the Roman Emperor for the upkeep of the armies. 'Give me three days,' he told the Emperor. But in those three days he sold all the property and all the church's gold and silver, and gave all the money he got for it to the people who were poor, or sick, or disabled, to the widows and the orphans, and anyone else in need. The Roman Emperor was so mad when he found out Lawrence had tricked him that he had him killed." In the back of his mind Alex could hear Gemma's eight-year-old voice, tight with incredulity: "He killed him! Just for helping poor people? That's stupid." That summer night seemed like such a very long time ago. "Dad?" Gemma turned toward him in the dark. Two meteorites arced through the sky dead above Alex. "Dad, I don't want to end up like Darlene," she said. "Or like Colin. If I get so that I can't talk anymore, or think anymore--so that I'm not me anymore--I want you to kill me. Okay? Grampa's old gun is still in the basement, and there are bullets for it. I checked." She started to cry a little. "I've thought about this a lot. It'd be quick, right? They say your body's so shocked you don't feel anything really, right?" A low, long pain stretched through him and he pulled her closer. "It won't come to that, missy." She pushed away, as if making a space for her words. "Dad, that's a lie and you know it." Alex reached out to her, stroked her hair, her face. "What if you change your mind?" he said quietly. "What if you decide you don't want to die and you can't tell me?" "What if you can't look after me anymore?" she threw back at him. "What if there are complications and I'm in so much pain, but I can't tell you, or we don't have medicine anymore? What if I start trying to hurt you to run away like the others? You'll have to lock me up, like Darlene--I don't want that, and I don't want to live in the bush like an animal either." She put her hand on his cheek, an intimacy that brought tears to his eyes. "You know it's going to come to that that, don't you?" He kissed her forehead. "Maybe being devolved isn't so bad," he said. "We don't really know what it's like. What if you still like living?" She was quiet for a long time. "What if it's absolutely horrible," she said finally, "and I can't tell you how bad it is?" She took his face in her big hands, as if he were the child. "Dad, I want you to promise me you'll do it." A sob jumped out of her. "I'd rather be dead than live like that," she said. "Promise me." They lay in silence, his arm curled behind her neck, her head on his shoulder. He promised. He could feel her shaking, her whole body rocking lightly, and he knew she was crying. He had promised to kill his own daughter. A wildfire of loss swirled through him, consuming him, while above, across the arch of heaven, stones burned in the air, flaring momentarily, then vanishing, seemingly witnessed in all the world by him alone. #
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Chapter
3 "Let's go, missy!" Alex called out as he lowered Gemma's mountain bike into the back of his small Mitsubishi pick-up. He opened the shed, picked the newest looking of several 12-volt batteries sitting on the floor, and hauled it out to the truck. He rested it on the radiator for a moment, letting the twinge in his back dissipate, before lowering it onto the tray. He slipped the cable clamps over the terminals, tightened the bolts with a small crescent wrench, then slammed the hood shut. At the other end of the truck, he dropped the tailgate and lifted the blue Coleman cooler into the box. "We're taking the truck?" Gemma said, blinking in the sunlight as she stood at the back door, her pack slung over one shoulder. "It might as well be over at Marika and Bill's. You can use it, then, if you want." "I wish you would have told me. I thought we were riding our bikes over. I could have packed a ton more stuff." "We talked about it yesterday, remember?" Alex let his irritation slide. She'd been having problems with recent memory since her last stroke. "Well, you can always just drive it back and get whatever you need." Alex slapped dirt from the battery off his T-shirt. "Coyote!" Gemma called out as she hobbled down the steps. "You look sore today." "Yeah. Stupid legs ache, right in the bones. I feel like an old lady." "You walk like one, too," he said, attempting a grin. "You're one to talk." "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Coyote loped around the side of the shed, ducking her head as she padded over to Gemma. "Good girl. In the truck. Hup." Coyote leapt up onto the tailgate, settled herself in the back beside the cooler. Alex slammed the tailgate shut. "Okay, let's see if it'll start." Gemma swung her pack onto the bike and climbed into the cab. She fumbled with the seatbelt while Alex slid behind the wheel. "You in?" he asked. The seatbelt clicked and she gave him a thumbs-up. Alex turned the key. Nothing. Easing the emergency brake off, he stuck out a leg and pushed. The truck creaked forward, started to roll. Alex slammed his door shut, pulled on his seatbelt. He let the truck pick up a bit of speed then popped the clutch. Tires bit gravel. He popped the clutch again. The motor fired, sputtered, caught. Gemma let out a whoop, and Alex grinned at her as the Mitsubishi shuddered and missed but kept running. He steered down the steep driveway and out onto the paved back road, shifting into third and heading north to Marika and Bill's place, bouncing and banging through the potholes and cracks in the pavement. "Jesus, Dad, slow down," Gemma said, reaching for the handgrip above the door, "or you'll bounce Coyote right out of the back." Alex shifted down to second, stuck his elbow out the window, enjoying the cooler morning air by the river. Smoke hung low in the valley, a sheet of gray-blue haze muffling color, dampening down the sunlight. It seemed to Alex that Gemma's voice sounded muddier, thicker, more throaty than it had a week ago. Maybe he was imagining it. Sometimes the omnipresent smoke in the air made him think everything in his life seemed less sharp, less distinct. He shouldn't be going away. Not now. She was changing, failing. When was he going to learn? It'll only be a few days, he tried to reassure himself. But he could no longer deny that she was sliding closer and closer to the plunge into end-stage. His clinical skills as a paramedic droned the key features of the syndrome through his head against his will: voice degradation; cognitive and memory impairment (but, he argued, that could simply be from the strokes); rapid diminution with concurrent musculoskeletal reformation; immune system suppression (the respiratory tract infection, remember?); pain; and, of course, anger, irritability, depression, mood swings, et cetera. The Lucy virus was devolving her right before his very eyes. But what if the devolving burned out her ability to speak while he was away? What if that infection returned and she developed pneumonia, or complications with her heart, or had another stroke? What if the devolution suddenly crippled her, running amok instead of following its genetically prescribed path? Stop it, he told himself, just stop it. "Dad?" Gemma said, startling him. Had he said something out loud? "Dad, you turn here." Marika and Bill's gravel driveway appeared on the left. He braked hard, cranked the wheel, and bounced the truck up the washboard. In the rearview mirror, Coyote hugged the bottom of the pick-up bed, ears flattened. Snugged in against the hillside, Marika and Bill's cedar-sided house, weathered gray, seemed tired. White paint peeled from the fascia and the window casings. The asphalt shingles curled at the edges, as if pained with arthritis. Knots and bellows of vibrant perennial gardens surrounded the house. Bill's Victorian Cottage garden, on the east side of the house, carried some local fame--once part of the garden tour in the valley every spring. A wide vegetable garden filled most of what had been the lower front lawn, which bordered the road. The poplar trees were gone, replaced by struggling apple and pear trees and two high-efficiency windmills. "What the hell is that?" Gemma said, pointing. "Bill said he'd built Darlene an outdoor play area, something secure, but I wasn't really sure what he meant." The play area, which ran down one side of the house, looked brutish and hard with its steel posts and wire mesh fencing. It even had a wire mesh ceiling. "It looks like a cage in a goddamn zoo." "Well, if it keeps her safe--" "Don't even think about putting me in cage like that. Jesus. What's the world coming to?" Backing in beside Bill's dead Jeep Cherokee, Alex parked with the nose of the Mitsubishi facing downhill. The I ♥ LUCIES bumper sticker on the back of Bill's jeep had faded in the sunlight. Coyote leaped over the tailgate and bounded up to Bill, who was latching the door of the chicken coop. He leaned his rifle against the coop and tousled Coyote's fur, scratching her thick neck. "What's the gun for?" Gemma asked as she climbed out of the truck. Bill looked down at the gun. "A bear has been going through the property the last few days. Mostly looking for compost or garbage. Made a mess of one of the apple trees, though." "You wouldn't shoot it, would you?" He tipped his head, gave Coyote a final scratch. "Not if I don't have to." Alex dropped the tailgate, slid the cooler out onto it. "Some tomatoes and a few other things we'd already picked from the garden--they're just going to go bad while I'm gone." "Sure. No sense wasting them." Bill flipped open the lid, then looked at Alex and grinned, his forehead wrinkling high onto his bald scalp. "Beer doesn't go bad in a few days, Al," he said. "Those in there are the last half-dozen of that batch Mickey and Yuri made up before the fire." "Then we'll have a little celebration when you get back." "You don't need to save them," Alex said as he lifted the cooler and followed Bill to the door. "I'm sure there's plenty more." "I wouldn't hold your breath. That's Yuri we're talking about here." "Gemma?" Alex called over his shoulder. "I brought a bag of books for Marika. They're behind the seat. Could you grab them for me?" He ignored her petulant growl. Bill held the door for him. Alex set the cooler just inside on the concrete floor. "There's been a pack of kids hanging around here the last few days," Bill said, his voice low. "Most of them end-stage, a few mid-stage, but a couple of the older ones are hardly changed at all. Could just be leading the others into a whack of trouble, stealing stuff, wrecking things just for the helluvit. One of the mid-stage kids is Yuri's, and he wasn't exactly a model citizen to begin with." Bill pulled the clip from his rifle. "Man, I hate guns," he said. "You recognize any of the others?" Bill shook his head. "It was near dusk, and the younger ones were getting pretty skittish being out in he open near dark like that, so they were keeping their distance." He led Alex up the stairs to the main floor where Marika was wiping down the kitchen table. "Can I offer you some breakfast, Alex?" she said, tossing the cloth across the kitchen to the sink. "No thanks, we ate." Alex dropped into a chair at the table. The kitchen was tightly cluttered. A heavy wood-fired cookstove sat in front of the north wall, the table was jammed into a bay window that looked south down the valley, while the sink faced east, a bank of wood-frame windows above it, giving a good view of the main vegetable garden, and in the distance, the Slocan River. "Bill," Marika said, "will you see to Darlene? She's been pretty quiet since breakfast, and she's supposed to be getting dressed. She might be needing some help." Bill leaned the rifle in the corner by the door. "She probably went back to sleep. She was up most of the goddamn night 'cause of the pack coming around." Then he took a deep breath, looked from Marika to Alex and back to Marika. "Sure," he said, "I'll check." Bill ducked into the hallway, shoulders hunched forward. Alex met Marika when he'd first arrived in the Slocan Valley thirteen years before. He'd hurt his back lifting a patient on a call and had limped into her walk-in-basement-slash-clinic for physiotherapy because she lived only a half-dozen kilometers north of him. She'd balled her red hair on top of her head to keep it out of her face while she worked on his locked muscles. These days, though, she wore her signature red hair cropped short. Only a few months ago, Darlene, in one of her fits of frustrated rage, had leapt on Marika, pounding her with her long arms, grabbing fistfuls of Marika's hair and wrenching it out of her scalp. Marika drove her back, hitting and slapping her, sending her scuttling to her closet hideout. Alex cut her hair for her in his kitchen, her dark curls skidding across the floor in the breeze from the open sliding-glass doors. Tears slopped onto her T-shirt as she told him about hitting Darlene, something she'd promised herself she'd never, ever, do, and about how she'd actually been afraid, reacting with gut-sickening fear, as if she were being attacked by an animal rather than by her own ten-year-old daughter. Alex had said little as he sheared away her hair, his own heart already whipped raw. "So when is he supposed to be here?" she said. "Around five-thirty, six." He checked his watch. "Any time now." "Darlene's so excited that Gemma's coming for a few days." She fussed at the stove. "Are you sure I can't fix you up some breakfast? You need some meat on that bone rack of yours." "Unless you're offering a cheeseburger and fries with a kick-ass chocolate milkshake, I've had all the breakfast I can take, thanks." She scowled at him. "Who pissed in your cornflakes this morning?" Outside the bay window a flock of cedar waxwings rushed out of the birch tree as if on a mission. The green of the conifer trees on the property due south was already muted by smoke. Out the windows over the sink, the sun peeked over the ridge to the east, glowing like a single ember in the sheet-metal sky. Marika settled into the chair across the table from Alex. "Thanks for dragging me along," she said. "It'll be nice to get away." Alex shrugged. "Hey, it's you doing me the favor." "How come you're the one going, anyway? It's not like you don't have enough to do already." "It's the curse of not be able to say no." "Why doesn't June go? It's not like she'd be missed." "I need somebody to hold down the fort here." "That's a pile of crap. You should be delegating this out." "So, who pissed in your cornflakes this morning?" he said with a grin. "Smart ass." She rubbed a hand through her hair. "But you know what I mean. You only have so much time, Alex. You know that." The corners of her mouth tightened, and Alex knew Marika would cry if she kept talking. It seemed that everyone's grief smoldered just below the surface these days. The basement door crashed open. "Sorry!" Gemma called up the stairs. Marika sniffed, leaned back in her chair and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Excited hooting erupted from Darlene's bedroom down the hall, followed by delighted wall thumping and what sounded like Darlene jumping on her bed. Marika ran her hand through her hair again and sighed. "Thanks for taking in Gemma," Alex said quietly. "I really was getting worried about her staying alone at the house with me gone so much." "Hey, she'll be a big help. Darlene loves her to death. And at least Gemma can handle her. That means a lot to me. And to Bill." Alex gave her a wry grin. "Yeah, that extra strength comes in handy sometimes." The pounding and howling stopped suddenly. Bill's voice murmured down the hall. Excited hooting erupted once again. Gemma lurched into the kitchen, her pack on one shoulder and the cloth bag of books clutched in her good hand. She dropped her pack at the top of the stairs. "Hey, Marika," she said. Marika got up and hugged her. "You want some tea?" Gemma shook her head. "Nah. I'm fine." She shifted her weight from foot to foot, muscles bulging in her bowed legs. "I'm going to go see Darlene," she said to Alex. "I'll see you when you get back." Alex, his throat suddenly tight and small, stood and wrapped Gemma in his arms. She'd shrunk so much these past few months that her head rested against his chest. He stroked her hair. "I love you, missy," he whispered, and as he held her he wondered what it would be like to never hug his daughter again, to never talk with her, to never lay on the deck with her under the stars watching 'fireworks.' Gemma squeezed him and let go. Alex scrubbed at his eyes. You're getting all mushy and sentimental in your old age, Gemma had said to him some time back, and he didn't know if it was because he was pushing fifty, or because life had changed so much in the past four years that he simply couldn't hide how attached he was to what he still had. "You can put your stuff in Colin's room, hon," Marika said to Gemma. Gemma picked up her pack and headed down the hallway. Alex sat back down in the chair, his throat tight and tense. "Fire situation's not looking good," he said finally as he cleared his throat. "Yeah, Bill told me. We've already made up our list of stuff we'll take if we're evacuated. Bill's going to do some packing while I'm gone. Any news from New Denver?" He wiped at his eyes again as he shook his head. "June says nobody has come down the valley the last ten days, which seems strange after the steady stream of folks moving through here since the snow melted." "Probably got their own fire troubles." "Man, I hope not." The rumble of a diesel motor invaded the kitchen. Alex could see Mickey's truck bouncing up the road, Yuri at the wheel. "I don't know what Willow sees in that guy," Marika said. "His charming personality?" "So, when are you going to get yourself a little honey to shack up with?" she said, an old joke between them. With a grunt that Alex thought encapsulated a decent enough response, he pushed himself up out of his chair and headed toward the stairs. "You could at least find someone just to boink once every blue moon," she said. "Just for the helluvit." A horn sounded below the kitchen east-facing windows. "Mind your own business, girl," he said as he creaked his way down the stairs, his thighs still aching, his lower back annoyingly stiff. "Be there in a minute," Marika said, "just want to say goodbye." Outside Mickey's pickup growled like an old dog. Yuri waved at him from the driver's seat. Alex retrieved his pack from his truck and threw it amongst all the cargo in the back of Mickey's pickup--extra diesel and a stack of solar panels and clamps, with a few truck parts and a toolbox; a chainsaw and its accoutrements; shovels, axes, maddocks and a single piss-can in case they ran into some hotspots; a basket stretcher and jump kit; several boxes jammed with odds and ends June thought they might be able to trade for things she needed for the hospital, including half a dozen cases of Mickey and Yuri's homemade beer and a case of elderberry wine. "Hey, old man!" Alex looked back and up to see Gemma waving to him from the barred window in Darlene's bedroom. He waved and blew her a kiss. She blew him a kiss back. Alex grabbed it out of the air and held on. # |
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Chapter 4 The truck bumped north, crawling over the neglected pavement in second gear. Potholes pitted the road like craters from small artillery fire. Marika had convinced Yuri to let her drive--some bullshit story, Alex was sure, about getting carsick in the back seat--and so Yuri rode shotgun and Alex got stuck in the back seat. Marika and Yuri argued the whole way to Slocan, mostly about why the government had gone belly up. Marika was pretty damn certain that the IMF's recall of a chunk of Canada's debt did it, which was nothing short of outright shit-and-abuse because the Americans believed the asshole who released the Lucy virus had come into the US from Canada. Yuri, on the other hand, believed it wasn't that complicated. He said that there just weren't enough people left to run the government properly, like when you run a business, you need a minimum number of workers or nothing gets done. So what if the IMF wants its money back? There's no one around to even write the bastards a cheque. Finally, when it seemed that Marika was more stubborn than Yuri had anticipated, Yuri pulled his leather baseball cap low over his eyes and settled in for nap. "Wake me when we get there," he said, crossing his arms over a T-shirt permanently stained with grease and motor oil. Yuri worked for Mickey whenever Mickey needed him at the garage next to the Mini-Mart, which wasn't much these days since the fuel trucks stopped coming up the valley just after the first snowfall last winter. And then the mudslide this spring south of Lebhado Flats cut off any local highway traffic for almost a month while the community worked at building a road over the slide. These days Yuri mostly helped with whatever repair work the volunteer fire department needed doing. It seemed to Alex that Mickey just tried to keep Yuri busy. And out of trouble. Yuri had been a regular customer for the ambulance service in Winlaw for several years after he lost his job when the pulp mill in Castlegar closed down. Pissed to the gills, he drove his pickup truck down a bank avoiding a deer, then climbed back up to the highway and lay on the side of the road until someone found him. Six months later he fell seven meters off an unfinished balcony in an unfamiliar house when he got up to take a piss after a party. Then he killed a thirteen-year-old boy after drinking all night with some friends. Alex attended that call, arriving on the scene to find that Yuri had hit two kids walking on the shoulder of the highway. One had been thrown twenty meters: he was dead at the scene, lying face-up with massive, open head injuries. (Alex remembered the ice-shiver of sickness he felt laying the yellow emergency blanket over the boy's pale face). The second boy suffered two broken femurs and a damaged spleen, and although he lived, he was never the same kid. As for Mickey, he just shrugged the whole thing off, seemingly content to be needed by Yuri. He fixed up one of his kids' rooms for him when Yuri got out of prison after serving his time for killing the boy--Mickey's wife had left him and their five-bedroom bungalow, taking the kids and the dog, years earlier. Yuri had been sober for four or five years, but Alex had heard rumors this past winter that he'd started up again with Mickey's homemade beer and wine. With Yuri napping in the front seat Marika seemed content to crawl the truck along in silence. Alex scratched the date in his notebook. 13 August 2020. He owned a meter-high stack of these blue-lined spiral-bound notebooks. He could easily have used his e-scroll, but he liked the carnal experience of scratching pen on paper, filling line after line, with no delete function. He didn't want to be able to delete his words, to take them back with the touch of a finger. He filled those notebooks with the detritus of his life: long descriptions of daily life with Gemma, sticky snarls of confusion, rants and rages, to-do lists, quotes from books he'd read, long ramblings about ugly ambulance calls that had kept him awake at night, facts he didn't want to forget. He kept a journal almost compulsively, as if doing so could somehow save him, sorting through the understory of his life, naming the dark green bits, the flowery parts, the dirt and the shit. The notebook had become his confidant, and his release. And his access to the past, to when life was normal, the way it was supposed to be; his access to Gemma as a normal ten-year-old, the two of them canoeing on Slocan Lake to look at the petroglyphs; as a twelve-year-old charging down the driveway on her mountain bike; as a fourteen-year-old, bent over the kitchen table studying for a science test. Lucy, Alex scrawled in his notebook. LucyLucyLucy. That one word, that name, had filled countless lines over the past few years. Because of that word life was no longer normal. Gemma was no longer normal. He knew in which notebook he'd written the explanation; in his mind's eye he could see the page, he's reread it so many times, his messy scrawl in blue pen: Lucy: the small brown remains that paleoanthropologists Don Johanson and Tom Gray howled at and hugged each other over in the heat of the Ethiopian sun in 1974. A partial skeleton, named Lucy over beer and music--"Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"--a female hominid who (not 'that,' but 'who') died 3.5 million years ago. Australopithecus afarensis. Lucy. Or, Hadar collection acquisition number: AL 288-1. The script was branded into his memory. LucyLucyLucyLucyLucyLucyLucyLucyLucy.
Gemma isn't a
lucy, she's a person, Alex wrote. We
are people; we are not our disease. Devolving won't change that. He tugged on an ear, let out a long slow breath.
And yet, when I
think of the ones who are end-stage and lost, like those I got on DV, like
the dead boy in the raspberry canes, thinking of them as "lucies"
makes it easier somehow to make-believe that Gemma is never going to become
one of them. They're too
different, too other--'different' doesn't mean non-human, though....Besides,
we'll all become lucies, sooner than later, or die getting there.
"Planet of the lucies," that's all that'll be left: a
diaspora of variously devolving hominids, maybe to re-evolve so that
millions of years from now we'll once again dominate the earth--and maybe do
it a little smarter, I hope. Or maybe we'll just devolve all the way back into the
four-legged Ramapithecus, or, maybe we won't even stop there, maybe
we'll just keep on devolving all the way back to Eozostrodon, that
nocturnal mouse-sized critter which shared the planet with the dinosaurs. I
can almost feel my nose twitching in anticipation.
Or maybe--and more likely--the whole lot of us will die off before the devolving finishes its course. I just hope that Gemma rethinks-- "Ah, crap," Marika said. & |