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It could’ve killed me. Hurt me, at least. I crushed Burkhold’s scorpion and pushed through those boys and out the door covered in bugs and past the guards at the base’s gates, who shouted for me to halt but didn’t stop me as I stalked out into the frigid desert night without a weapon or even a vest.
People had started to become things to me. I felt myself becoming a thing. A thing killing things trying to kill things. There were reports of White Sleeves all through the hills, but I didn’t care and just rambled out through the tarwort and mesquite.
I walked through the night, under the cold indifferent stars, away from what couldn’t be escaped because I carried it inside me. My feet blistered, my legs like sleeves of meat, I shuffled out of a dry canyon between lampblack promontories, my neck so tight I could barely lift my chin to see the lights slicing through the sky.
I watched them come, five lights, a dozen lights; the night hatched with the trails of angels passing. Like a window opened in the cosmos, a bright light whorled above me. I shielded my eyes and tried to discern what was up there. All soldiers had tracking chips implanted under our collarbones, and I told myself maybe the light was just the Military Police come to take me back to camp.
But I knew this was no shuttle, and shuddered feeling I was being prodded like a scorpion in some great tub, God calling down wagers from the darkness beyond the light. I swung my fists, screaming at the light, raging to mark my significance. Then a metallic screeching crackled over the land. Electric jolts through the blades of my back buckled my knees, and blinding phosphorescence engulfed me.
WAKING IN A BOMB CRATER from which I escaped on wings sewn onto me by the cold gray hand of my mother, it was only reasonable to believe I’d died. If this wasn’t death, what had become of me? How had I survived to stir in that cradle of smoke? How were wings adhered to me, and manipulated by impulses of instinct and thought?
I flew with fledgling strokes out over the drab barren desert. I admit that first flight was exhilarating. The sense of freedom. The speed. The dank wind whipped my hair as the ground passed quickly below. In mere minutes, I covered the miles I’d traversed over the long night previous.
My eyes began to water. I averted my face from the pungent air that grew fouler by the moment. I smelled death in the chemical tinge, and flew with abandon to land in a stumbling slide where there used to be gates and towers, but was now a flattened snarl of wire and broken pickets before the bombed-out base.
Brick rubble, barracks blown to ash, the ground was pocked and scorched. Among the ruins, like a fossil of fire, lay a hand untouched to the wrist that tapered to a shorn sleeve like an arm torn off a doll. Another body shrunken and charred beyond recognition on all but one tan field boot. A door lay unburned, discarded from its housing and decorated with scorpions.
I saw it all and saw nothing. Not the humps in the ground. Not the gnarled shapes clutching each other. Not the clod of what looked like grass but was a scalp of hair. Not the mud coating my boots, red mud over everything, mud of fire and blood.
Only the latrine yet stood, flame-striped but erect square center of the base. Smoke like mist curled up through gaps in its blackened floorboards. I peered at my reflection in the bathroom’s cracked mirror. My face shrouded in soot and shadow, the peaks of my folded wings arched over each shoulder.
Death in the air, the silence like an unforgiving father, I slouched back into the doorway. Rags of clouds drifted low in the unstable light, the vaporous tendrils like talons clawing the roof.
“Is this Heaven?” I asked, into the tattered sky.
2
MY SOUL LONGED FOR MY mountain home. An old dirty work coat hung in the latrine’s supply closet. I wore it backward to keep free my wings and used my belt to cinch it closed at my waist. I launched toward the russet glow of the setting sun and held my course toward Mama and Ava Lynn.
My mind reflected a bird’s mind. The sky seemed not foreign. I squinted against the bluster and spitting rain, my coat offering little insulation as I swooped higher, then lower, feeling out the currents for pockets of calm.
As the night fell, I peered over the land, the darkness unbroken save a wire of light to the north. The light remained in my periphery, slowly gaining brightness and mass. Then I saw them, the ground below stirring like an infested carpet, the exodus of hundreds, maybe thousands, scrambling across the lightless land, fleeing toward the southern border.
Only then did I recognize the distant light was a city on fire, what I could only guess was El Paso. At the time, I couldn’t know the breadth of what was happening beyond what I could see. I didn’t know drones had flattened government buildings throughout America. I didn’t know other cities had been bombed, Omaha and Cleveland, Atlanta and Boise and Pittsburgh, as well as most any city whose leadership had openly flouted the Novae Terrae.
Knowing only my scant share, and all the more frightened for Mama and Ava Lynn, I plunged my wings through the air with inspired urgency, driving my flight toward home.
Soon my thighs burned from holding my legs straight. My back muscles cramped, the bones straining inside me, my ribs like twigs bent to snap. The human body wasn’t designed for flight. Wings on a woman do not make her a bird.
I landed in flats of creosote and ocotillo, and walked awhile to unkink myself. Through a copse of mesquite, I pushed to a draw with a little stream at the bottom. I drank from the stream, splashed icy water over my face.
I rested atop my wings in the cottonwoods beside the creek, and stared up into the stars that were bright but for a tiny rectangle of perfect blackness marring the sparkling heavens. A clutch of tiredness tugged at me, but something else, too, an anxiousness like waking from a dream unremembered. I forced myself to rise, filled my belly with water, and staggered again into flight.
* * *
THE WORLD DEVOID OF ELECTRIC LIGHT, the night lands dotted with fires, soon the dawn’s light filtered through the beard of rain, the silver waves sparkling out on the Pacific. This wasn’t the coast as I’d known it. The sea had encroached far inland. I feared it’d happened again, another epochal shift when the earth rearranged itself with complete indifference to the living.
I followed the new shore north, where whole towns were lost under the sea, the water brown from the dredges of soil and littered with refuse and wood scrap. Church steeples rose from the water like derricks, the rooftops of buildings like river barges.
I came upon the Great Fault Gorge, now a wide and white-capped rapid. Beyond the gorge towered a dense wall of fog. I ascended above the wall, the fog like an ocean below me, the peaks of mountains poking through like the knees of bathing giants.
This was the range of home, our mountain the farthest north and west. Soon I saw the weathered gray hut that was the fire tower and banked my descent. I landed on weary legs and fell to slump against the tower’s clapboard walls. The little shack was raised on crumbling concrete pilings and rusted metal stilts. After years of quakes and megastorms, how it still stood I did not know.
In the dreary light, I noted the white of my wings was impure, like chicken feathers speckled with shit. I was tired, my muscles trembling, my mind frazzled, my senses frayed beyond certitude.
The tips of my wings dragged the sodden earth as I left the summit, down through the mist-draped moraine and into the woods. The first sign of the tragedy awaiting below was hearing the galloping of hoofbeats, then seeing Mama’s old silver mare break through the gloom, racing through the pines, fleeing forces not visible.
The horse spooked me into a panicked ramble down a slope so steep I had to hook my arms around the trunks of trees to keep from falling. Tree to tree, I swung like a primate to emerge into the homestead’s high grass meadow.
Our stable was felled in a heap of charred boards. The chicken coop had also been toppled, the rooster perched atop the house’s stone chimney. Mama’s truck sat near the house, along with many other vehicles parked at odd angles down the gravel drive and curving mountain road.
My first thought was that locals had come to the mountain to escape the flooding. Expecting to find them in the house, I raced up the porch’s steps, the front window broken, shards of glass scattered over the stoop, the door blown wide. The weather had taken the house, the front room dripping with shadows and silence.
Back on the porch, my breath caught when I peered past the vehicles and down through the trees where the fog had burned away enough to glimpse the valley swirling with frothing brown water. The flood had encircled the mountain. No homes, no buildings or power poles. Jaynesville and Grace Hill had been swallowed.
I considered the line of vehicles. Where were all the people? I headed into the meadow, the mystery deepening as I noted great crescent-shaped gouges in the land, patches of brown grass, and random items littering the slope—a handbag, an orange slicker, one red sneaker. Then I saw the otter with the starfish in its paws.
I snatched Ava Lynn’s toy off the ground and raced up to the storm shelter. The hatch didn’t lift. It could only be locked from the inside. They must be here, I thought. Energized with new hope, I stomped on the hatch and screamed into the vent pipe for Mama.
At last, the lock’s arm clanked. The hatch raised. Up shot the barrel of a rifle followed by Dewey Chang. Dewey saw me and said my name and sprang from the ladder onto the land, dropping the rifle and rushing as to embrace me, only to draw away when he caught sight of my wings.
By his recoil, I knew I was no ghost. I was alive. This was real. “It’s me,” I said, horrified by how I must look to him, hugging Mr. Otter to my chest and drawing my wings tight behind me.
Dewey gazed at the ground, at the tips of my wings.
“Where’s Mama?” I said.
His eyes lifted up to mine.
“Ava Lynn?”
* * *
IN THE DIM LANTERN GLOW of the shelter, Dewey sat me on a stool and gave me a blanket, which I wrapped around my shoulders and wings. He handed me a sleeve of crackers, set the kettle on the little gas burner. Typically gregarious and talkative when we were alone, Dewey moved about as if trying not to wake a sleeping child.
I demanded he tell me what had happened here. Where were Mama and Ava Lynn? Why were there so many cars in the drive? He sat on a stool, staring at his palms in his lap. He told me that several days ago lights had filled the sky over the ocean. In mere minutes, a steady rain became a storm.
The roads washed out, trapped at the marina, he took one of his employer’s fishing boats and prayed for God to protect him in the bashing surf as he made his way to our mountain in hopes of taking refuge with Mama in the shelter.
“I tied the boat in some trees and made the climb, but there were others already here,” he said. “People from town, screaming and pointing at the sky. There were drones in a circle above the mountain. The storm was all around, but everything was dry inside that circle. It didn’t feel right, so I stayed in the pines.”
Dewey closed his eyes. I asked him what happened next, but he just shook his head.
“Tell me,” I said, stronger.
He opened his eyes. “A shuttle came down the barrel of that storm and landed in the meadow. All these White Sleeve soldiers rushed out with their guns, one man hollering how he needed the girl, where was the girl. Ava Lynn tried to run, but they caught her. The White Sleeves held folks at gunpoint as other soldiers carried her away, kicking and crying.” Dewey sniffled, eyeing Mr. Otter, which I held in my arms. “They put her in some kind of vest. A gold vest and then she just, well…”
“What?” I asked.
“I couldn’t believe my eyes, but it happened. I swear it. She just floated up into the sky. Then I heard your mama screaming. She was screaming and had a rifle and the White Sleeves just, well.” His teeth clenched and his chin swung and when Dewey spoke again it was stuttered by sobbing. “I was running up through the trees so I only heard it. I didn’t have a weapon or nothing and was just running to hide in that old cave we’d always go to as kids.” He lifted his face, and squared his tearing eyes with mine. “I’ve never heard a voice so fierce, Mazzy. Not in my whole life. I hope I never hear anything like it again. Your mama screaming. ‘Shame on you. Shame on you. Give me back my child.’”
* * *
DEWEY REFUSED TO SAY MORE, said he could only show me the rest. I pulled on clean trousers and boots and cut a horse blanket as a shawl to fit over my wings. We left the shelter and hiked up through the cedars where he stopped at the edge of a rocky clearing.
“I put them here,” Dewey said, picking bark from a tree. “Didn’t know what else to do.”
Then I saw them, the oil-stained work jacket, the pink jeans, the feet with one dirty sock and one red sneaker, people from town who should’ve been working in their barns or buying groceries, planning their next camping trip, heads at one end, feet the other, bodies stacked like cordwood.
I studied the faces and tried to tell if I knew them, but with their skulls shattered, eyes emptied of light, and congealed blood painting their cheeks, the brutality had conflated them into a collective dead and stole away their personhood.
Dewey slogged uphill to stand beside a moss-covered slab of granite. Atop the slab lay a human-size parcel wrapped like a gift in a white tarpaulin. Hands in his pockets, he faintly called my name.
Are you hungry?
Are you warm?
IN MY FOURTEENTH YEAR, I attended nine funerals. The megastorms had proved lethal. Death spanned the spectrum of tragic. Odd to admit, but I came to like the funerals. In our civilian lives, we hardly touched one another. But at funerals, people held hands and rubbed backs, patted shoulders and kissed cheeks. As connected to life as I felt at those funerals, there was a grimmer truth to bear. Not just that we all had to die, but that the world does not pause for death.
We were driving home from the funeral of Elezar Arauz, a friend Mama worked with at the glass factory, when an ad for the night rodeo in Haley came on the radio. A local girl was singing before the rodeo. Fireworks after. It seemed utterly deranged that folks ate barbecue and cheered boys riding bulls while Elezar lay in a casket in the cold soundless earth.
It was then I understood that when I died the world would hardly blink. Once home, I slumped off into my bedroom to bury myself under blankets and never come out again. Mama yanked off my covers and said the animals didn’t care about my sorrow and hadn’t been fed. I bolstered myself enough to straggle up into the stable. As I scooped grain to feed our mare, I peered out the stable doors to see Mama across the meadow, weeping while hoeing sweet corn.
* * *
I UNWRAPPED THE PARCEL from the tarpaulin. Eyes of milk, the gray plastic coldness of her cheek and a bullet wound puckering her forehead, the body was a carapace uninhabited by a soul. It was Mama, but not Mama. She’d become the seamstress of wings, just as I’d seen her in the bomb crater.
Had what I’d glimpsed in the crater been a premonition? Or had it been a visitation? A demon of pain, an angel of suffering, what perverse form had Mama taken? What form had I taken?
The world’s potential shifted bleakly inside me. But I didn’t weep. I didn’t tear at my clothes. The wind fierce, my wings wet and heavy down my back, I madly dug a grave.
The rain mixed with the earth and filled the hole with watery slop. I scooped the muck as furiously as my muscles would allow, thinking if I kept digging I’d eventually stab the hard dry clay.
Dewey stayed clear of me, busied with his own troublesome task. Believing it better to not leave the bodies to rot or be devoured by wildlife, he hauled the dead from the woods, said a prayer for each, and heaved them down into the sea.
Soon the wind pitched a howl and the rain slashed with stinging pellets of ice. From the rim of the grave, Dewey pleadingly spoke my name. He reached to grab my arm and make me stop digging and look up at him.
It was the first time he’d touched me since I’d arrived. Eyes pinched against the onslaught of sleet, he begged me to come out of that hole. “We’ll take your mama to the house. We’ll wait out the storm, then bury her proper.”
I leaped from the ditch and slammed the shovel into his chest. “We bury her now,” I shrieked, straddling the grave and spreading wide my wings to block the weather for him to dig.
* * *
DUSK ETCHED THE FRONT ROOM in silver and black, the world feeling as if it was preparing to sleep. I stood swaddled in my feathers, watching rain drip from new-formed cracks in the ceiling. The storm had lessened, but the house’s floor was a mess of puddles, the shelves fallen and Mama’s books in a sodden heap, the old photo of Mama, Ava Lynn, and me damp and rumpled on the glistening wall.
Dewey leaned in the doorway, watching the rain course down the hillside and between the cars in the driveway. He stood away from the door, stepped out onto the stoop.
“Mazzy,” he said back into the house. “Someone’s here.”
I joined Dewey on the porch. A smallish man, completely naked, his muscular body and face streaked with mud, walked gingerly up the gravel road. His wrists were bound with zip cuffs. When he saw us, he moved his hands to cover his crotch.
Shivering, he cried, “Help me. Will you help me?”
* * *
HIS FACE STRUCK ME AS FAMILIAR. I figured he was from town though I couldn’t place him. We took him down into the shelter. Dewey gave him a towel to hold across his lap. While he was sponging himself clean with a bucket of steaming water, his hands still bound, I realized the little man was an actor who grew up in the valley, someone the locals heralded as their celebrity son.
He was grayer now, seemed shrunken, but what threw me was he always wore a patch over one eye while playing Captain Patrick Riot in Rebel Rebel, a VR game from the late twenties about a rogue soldier who fought secret missions against enemies of America, which my fellow soldiers religiously played.
