Where had all the people gone? they had wondered. Was it possible that entire armies, populations, had truly been atomized by geocatastrophic waves? Or had they gone forever subterranean, like Joan and Leone?
When the fuel began to deteriorate and run out, it became absurd to try to replenish it. It became absurd to maintain the old travel routes.
Finally it became absurd even to believe these rumors of roving bands of survivors. It was as if humans had devolved, like the earth’s erosion, crumbling and sliding and disappearing back into soil and rock and dry riverbed. Or maybe back to their breathable blue past . . . into ocean and salt and molecules.
Joan shakes her head and focuses on the map in her hands.
Find and obliterate the Skyline.
Confiscate munitions.
Blow what’s left.
Get out.
Joan looks up. If supplies are coming and going down this Skyline, it is imperative to destroy it. If anything else—an attack—comes down, we are nowhere near prepared.
Joan starts collecting what she can of the ammunition. Leone matches her every move. As they work, the child’s song weaves through her skull. Moon, are you nothing more than a ball?
Then a crack splits the air around them. Joan claps her hands over her ears and drops low to the ground, faster than an animal. Leone crouches under the table and puts her head between her knees. The sky lights up with red, green, and blue light. More magnificently than any aurora. The ground rumbles beneath them.
Leone immediately positions and fires into the surrounding terrain in short, controlled bursts. But her firepower disappears into the night.
“Fuck,” Joan yells into the sound and light. Another ear-splitting crack shatters the air around them. Even louder than the first. Her head pounds. Nausea. She feels something warm near her ear. Everywhere, a blast of sound and light.
Staggering like a drunk from the pain of the sound, Joan spots Leone gathering up as many of the maps as she can and jamming them into her backpack and waistband.
“Let’s not wait around to see who’s coming to dinner,” Leone yells, making for the boulders they hid behind earlier.
Joan grips the PG-29 in her hand. A Skyline is ripping open. Right in front of them. If she doesn’t find it and hit it, they are dead. She positions the warhead at the head of the RPG, then squats down on the ground and shoves the PG-29 down the shaft and secures it. Her brain is a bowling alley. She smells her own blood. There isn’t much time. She hoists the RPG up and squares the shoulder brace. She grips the trigger. She looks through the night sight scope. Blue and green crosshairs illuminate her vision. She aims at the sky in the direction of the light and sound, but it is like aiming at a fucking aurora. She closes her eyes. Concentrate.
Find it. Find the sound.
The blue light at her head flutters alive. A faint hum—a single low note—weaves through her skull.
She turns to face the sky and opens her eyes to adjust the trajectory on the scope, allowing it to help focus her energy. Then she closes her eyes again and hums a long steady note until it matches the tone in her skull, she keeps humming it until she feels part of the matter of things. Finally she drops the weapon gracefully to the ground. The weapon and scope merely help her to focus.
Her shoulders shoot back, as if from recoil, but she holds her ground. When the force that shoots out of her whole body hits the empty night air, an invisible Skyline produces a dazzling, fire-white line from earth to heaven, a jagged tear in the moment of things accompanied by a dizzying explosion. The air around them, as far as they can imagine, detonates with sound.
Bull’s-eye.
Joan eyes the black bruise of night. Long wretched fingers of white and blue tracers stream out from the blast line in all directions. An opera of chaos lights up the night. Joan can smell the fierce burning—the shorting-out of currents. She is momentarily deaf.
“Fuck you,” she screams at the sky and its drama. One less entrance and exit, shitheads.
As the light and sound show begin to wane, Joan breathes heavy. She looks around at the munitions site. The dead men, the artillery and RPGs, the pack of corpse girls buried in the dirt. And Leone.
Leone steps close to Joan and reaches up to wipe the blood from Joan’s ear, then sucks her own fingers. “Well, you taste alive,” she says, barely audible.
Joan smiles. Smoke dissipates. Light or sound no longer surrounds them. Finally she hears only Leone breathing. They need to get back to the caves.
Leone picks up a second RPG and rocket to take with them. Joan turns to follow, her RPG back silently on her shoulder. Leone says nothing. They walk side by side. Dirt kicks up at their feet. Joan looks over at Leone’s jaw. Somehow the square of it, the way she clenches her teeth, soothes her.
Chapter Fourteen
“Any idea what the fuck that was?”
Joan’s throat hurts from Leone’s voice. It has an edge to it, like shale—when did that happen? When they were fifteen, hiking the mountains of Vietnam, didn’t they sing songs—children’s songs, half in French, half in Vietnamese—and laugh, throwing their heads back in the torrents of rain? Who are they now, every muscle in their legs taut and extended to make the long trek back to the cave, two dead men behind them? Leone with the square shoulders and heavy stomp of Achilles. Her tattooed head. Her eyes a shape between a French father and a Vietnamese mother. Her relentlessly present jaw.
Joan holds her hand out in front of her—the scars and aches, the flicker of blue light near her temple a part of her very consciousness and physical being—are these the bodies of women?
Leone was right: energy, particularly lethal energy, didn’t used to come down Skylines. In the early years, Skylines had been visible: sophisticated tethers through which all manner of things—food, water, weapons, oil, coal, gas—could be transported between Earth’s surface and the platforms. They used to be easy to attack, an efficient way to cut off supply lines. As war raged on and unmanned drones replaced most of the CIEL’s fighting forces, further modifications were made, and now all the Skylines were invisible to the naked eye. The only way to take a Skyline out now: wait for the brain-splitting sound. The light show in the thermosphere. Act fast or be blown to bits.
Joan stares skyward. This was more like a bomb delivery. Almost as if they were targeted and attacked. If that’s true, then something is changing. Something bad.
Joan looks up. Soon dawn will turn the graying night into morning, a pale orange color, purpling at the horizons like an inverted flame. “Whoever or whatever it is, it isn’t friendly.” She keys her sight to the ground, the surrounding landscape. It will take more than the dawn of morning to get home.
“Nothing coming down those lines is friendly,” Leone says, switching her RPG to her other shoulder.
As child warriors, Joan and Leone hiked this terrain with half a garrison, in the years when war was the worst thing that could happen to people. Until the belly of the earth herself had screamed.
In her mind’s eye, Joan remembers what an astonishing jungle trek it used to be to get to the Son Doong Cave. Starting at the headquarters of a coca factory, you would climb the mountains steadily in a northeastern direction, winding around hillfaces until you reached a virgin forest. From there, the floor of the forest grew up and over you, its vines and roots and sharp stones growing in size. Next you macheted your way through thick green tangle just to find the barely-there trail.
She remembers the green, so green you could smell it, could feel the trees’ humidity all over your skin.
Joan stares at her feet, trudging the distance. Puffs of dust kick up. She coughs. The ground is cracked and lunar now. Chalky and dirt white. The climbs still took you up and down, but the missing forests, vines, great prehistoric plants and roots and rocks—barely anything remained of that world.
Joan rubs the place at her head where the blue light lives. At eleven, her mother took her to several neurological specialists; each had advised surgery an
d removal of whatever was causing the blue light. A tumor? Shrapnel? None had any idea of the origin of the light, or what it was, or how it had entered the head of a girl. Joan herself had told no one about touching the tree—and had revealed only the sparest of details about how song and a thunderous bolt of energy had thrown her head back and her arms out; how there had been no pain, but something far beyond pain, some ecstatic state in intimate resolve with the forest around her. How a song of the earth’s death and resurrection filled her head. Something about humanity returning to matter.
One doctor suggested psychiatric experts, recommended a Swedish clinic specializing in child trauma and delusional states—for mustn’t it be true that she’d done this thing to herself? Or let someone do it to her, some psychopathic adult who had brainwashed the poor child and injected something unknown into her skull?
As they near the cave, Joan smells the wet. Wet life that exists only underground. The light between her ear and eye flicker. She sees an azure blue in her periphery when the light is active. And hears the low humming.
When they reach the cave’s mouth, Joan holds her hand up to signal that she will enter first. As always. The cave opens up from the earth in a yawn. Joan toes her feet into footholds carefully etched into the walls of the shaft. She lodges her foot into the first recess and plants her hand against the wall, feeling around with her thumb until she finds a small hole. She sticks her thumb in the hole and disables a thousand tiny poisoned darts ready to pierce anything coming unannounced down the shaft, sixty-five meters deep. She looks briefly up at Leone.
“You’re so retro,” Leone jokes. “All black leather and metal. Still badass after all these years.”
Joan hadn’t considered clothing in a long time. Clothing: a melding of metal and neoprene, fatigues patched together with combat scraps, layers of woven or laminated fibers from old dead wars.
“No one’s visited who isn’t friendly,” Joan says, smiling up at Leone, blood—perhaps hers, perhaps that of a dead soldier, perhaps both—paints her skin near her ear. Itching.
“I told you, nothing Skyward is good,” Leone answers, following her down like a savvy animal.
Briefly, Joan eyes Leone’s body. They’ve grown so close to the land and what is left of it, so accustomed to subterranean life, that she sometimes wonders if they are evolving into a new species, like the thousands they come across underground all over the world. But the shape of Leone’s ass, the slimness of her waist, her breasts and biceps and shoulders and hands as strong as starfish, still say woman in ways Joan refuses to feel all the way through.
Midway down the shaft, water and mud and lichen slicken the walls. Working her way through each foothold and thumb-hole, Joan carves a clear path for them both. At the bottom, she leaps with a thud to the ground. Leone follows. The air immediately takes on its own environment. Cool air trade winds with hot and humid air in pockets and swells. The smell of dirt and rock and shit pungent as peat.
The entryway to home: 5.6 kilometers of passages and a chamber measuring 100 by 240 meters. Joan runs her fingers through her coarse black hair, her hand getting stuck just behind her neck in the thick, forested tangle. Christ. She’ll have to do something about that. But then, why? Even the word—hair—she hasn’t thought of it in years.
This cave is a mouth, a throat, a gullet—and Joan alone knows the perfect passage down, tuning in to the earth’s pulse and rhythm. The floor of the cave falls downward and is everywhere covered with large blocks of stone formations piled in odd order. Joan puts her hand on a stalactite that has nearly completed its journey; a slime of mudwater and regurgitated seeds oozes beneath her fingers. Water, dripping for eons from the roof, creates hundreds of stalactites that slowly point their way toward the ground.
Leone’s voice ricochets around the cave. “Ah, the perfume of shit and slime.”
The revenge of life. Joan’s thighs ache.
They make for the lowest point of the initial cave’s two-hundred-meter vertical range, a sump just to the right of the entrance. When Joan first found this sump—a pit collecting undesirable liquids from the cave’s walls—she modified it into a filtration basin to manage surface runoff water and recharge underground aquifers. Clean water. Irrigation for plants and fungi. A mini ecological weather system.
They drink heartily, Leone on the far side of the water.
“I can’t stay long,” Leone shouts from across the chamber. “We don’t have a lot of time to get the rest of that crap. I’ll need to get to the Humvee at B-Forty by nightfall. I dunno who those clowns were, but eventually upstairs they’ll figure out they’re dead—and that a line’s been compromised . . .” Her voice trails off into the depths of the cave as she walks away.
They’d mapped out zones of hidden weaponry, ammunitions, even vehicles—terrain vehicles like Hummers and tanks and motorcycles—but fuel was nearly nonexistent, and biofuel took years to home-brew. More and more, what was the point?
Once, they’d found a graveyard of airplanes, abandoned like giant whale carcasses, FedEx stenciled on their rotting sides. In their travels they’d located five stealth fighters, seventeen Black Hawk helicopters, and four jets: one American, one Russian, one French, and one Saudi. There was even a Japanese World War II fighter jet they’d found in museum rubble. The stories of kamikazes still enthralled Joan; they displayed a form of self-sacrifice devoid of ego that Western nations had never understood. They’d hidden the fuel from the planes and jets near Ryusendo Cave, one of the three great limestone caves in Japan, its caverns and tunnels more than five thousand meters in length, fresh water forming underground lakes up to 120 meters deep, long-eared rabbit bats thriving overhead, the water so emerald-green and transparent it felt like swimming inside a gem.
But what was the point of the machinery? Dead and useless.
Here, beyond their little cave’s entryway, stretched five miles of underground life thriving beyond imagination. Former geographies and nation-borders had overlooked the place—a biodiversity so rich and secret it was nearly its own world. A jungle, a river, a lake; countless old and new species of plant and animal life; even some things in between that Joan was still studying. Fields of algae as large as foothills. Stalagmites as tall as old-growth redwoods. A whole verdant underworld defying the decay of the world above it. There were times Joan half expected a mammal to emerge from its waters, blinking and dripping, the new species taking its first steps onto land.
They’d made a life here. No. Life made itself here. They merely coexisted.
Joan squats underground at the water’s edge and runs her hand through its cool wet. Then a great draft of warm air, accompanied by the sound of a low engine’s hum, builds around her. Louder. Vibrating her sternum. But it is not a machine’s noise nearing.
Diablotin. French for “little devil,” since their loud cries are likened to the sounds of tortured men.
Oilbirds.
A perfect babble of harsh cries fills the space, the beating of their wings like rushing wind. Then in great patterns thinning into lines they disappear into the cave ledges and crevasses where their nests are lodged.
She admires them. Oilbirds were outcasts from other species, alone with their gifts. They are the only nocturnal bird that uses echolocation to navigate, like the bats down the deeper throat of the cave. In fact you could not prod a single oilbird to leave the cave during daylight. They made their lives—chose their world order. Surely an evolutionary process, but to Joan, it was more an act of perfect imagination. They reminded her of her own warrior-child self. The hawk-like predator that ate only fruit. The birds made nests of shit. She identified with them.
Even before the atrocities, the oilbirds had withstood genocide, as they were hunted and exterminated as a resource. Years ago, she knew, the walls of this cave had been lined with long bamboo poles, each with a torch on one side and a sharp iron hook, like a fishhook, on the other. The hook was designed to fish the young oilbirds from their nests. Some sixty young co
uld be tumbled out into what had previously been a great hot spring and immediately drowned this way. Once dead, they could be “picked.”
Young oilbirds, when just beginning to feather out, weighed double the weight of adults. Everything about the child birds outdid their makers.
In her mind she watches them struggle and flap, useless in the scalding water.
Tears run down her cheeks as she thinks of it, the young oilbirds, drowning in the heated waters of the earth’s gut. She weeps for her parents, unable to survive catastrophic geologic events; she weeps for everyone who died on the planet’s surface; she weeps for the dead men she’s so recently killed. She weeps for who Leone was at fourteen, her body still girlward.
Then she notices a young oilbird lying dead in the hot spring not twenty feet from her. Perhaps it fell. Perhaps her thoughts created an action.
She scoops up the oilbird from the water and lays it on the ground. She squats down and pulls her knife from her calf holster. She slits open the bird’s belly and starts pulling the skin from the fat. She hums a childhood song in French about how birds flew away in the sun. Still crying.
She sets about picking the young bird, a process that involves removing the viscera so that the fatty birds can be cooked in various ways—some for food, some for oil to cook, some for oil for lighting.
She hears Leone approaching from far away. After preparing the bird, they will eat, perhaps sleep, and part.
She touches her chest and makes a promise to use every part of the young bird: its bones and feathers and meat and fat, its beak and claws, its blood and brains and sinewy muscle tissue. Spear points and modified thread and eating utensils and paint and salve and tiny sharpened sticks, useful for filling improvised bombs.
She promises to deliver back to the bird a world whose life originated from the hot and cold underground places, almost human-less.