John Adams - Wastelands - Stories of the Apocalipse

We found Dave outside on the deck overlooking the Snake River, a shotgun in his hand and a mess of feathers and blood smeared across the snow. I could see bird seed among the feathers; evidently Dave had scattered a handful and waited for something to come for it. That something had been hardly bigger than a mouse by the looks of its remains.

"Kind of small for dinner, isn’t it?" I asked, reaching out with the poker and flipping the tiny bird body over so I could see its underside.

"It’s an experiment," Dave said. I was glad to see he was carefully pointing the shotgun away from everyone. "According to Jesus, not even a sparrow can fall without God noticing. I figured that would be pretty easy to test."

Jody had come up beside me and was examining the bird. "It would be if you’d managed to shoot a sparrow," she said. "This is a chickadee."

Dave blushed when we all laughed, but he said, "It’s not the species; it’s the concept."

"Whatever, it doesn’t seem to be working."

"Maybe you should have tied a message to its foot first," I said.

Keung laughed. "You’re supposed to use a pigeon for that."

"It’s not funny," Dave snapped. He took a deep breath, then said, "I am trying to attract the attention of God. If you think it’s funny or useless, I’m sorry, but I think it’s important and I’m going to try everything I can until I get the job done."

"What’s next?" Gwen asked him. "Sacrificing sheep? Rebuilding the Ark of the

Covenant?"

"Whatever is necessary," Dave said.

I felt myself shivering, and when it didn’t stop I suddenly realized all of us but Dave were out there without our coats.

"Come on," I said to Jody. "Let’s get inside before we catch our death."

We left the next morning for Yellowstone Park. The rest of the crew split up for other parts of the globe, but Jody and I decided as long as we were that close we might as well visit the biggest tourist attraction in the world. We found a hover car that still ran and whose diagnostics told us it would continue to run for another few hundred hours, tossed our personal belongings in the back, and flew low up the Snake River valley past Jackson Lake and into the park. We ignored the loading ramps and the rail cars that had ferried tourists through for the last fifty years, blowing right past the sign proclaiming it a federal crime to drive a private vehicle within the park’s borders.

The forest seemed endless. We flew along the old roadbed down among the trees so we could see more of it, including the animals the park was famous for. In parts of the world where the human population had been denser, the ecosystem was still out of whack from our sudden disappearance, but Yellowstone had already reached a balance without us before the Second Coming. We watched moose and elk and buffalo plodding along like great hoofed snowploughs, and we even caught a glimpse of a wolf drinking out of a stream near Old Faithful.

The geysers were probably the same as always, too, but with just the two of us standing there on the snow-covered boardwalk in front of Old Faithful it seemed to me that we must be watching its best eruption ever. Steam and boiling water shot up over a hundred feet in the air, and the ground shook with the force of its eruption.

"You know," Jody said as it subsided, "I just realized how silly it is to come here right now."

"Silly how?" I asked.

"If Dave succeeds in reaching God, we might have all of eternity to watch this sort of thing in action."

I looked out at the steaming mound of reddish rock, then at the brilliant white snowfield and green forest beyond it. "You talking about the pretty parts, or the hot parts?"

"Who knows?"

Yeah, who knew? I’d lived a perfectly moral life, by agnostic standards, but who could tell if that would be good enough for God? For that matter, who knew whether Heaven or Hell really existed, even now? So Jesus had come and taken everyone away; he could have hauled them to Andromeda for all we knew.

All the same, I wondered if we were wise for leaving Dave free to pursue God. The crew had talked about it before we’d gone our separate ways, but none of us knew what else we could do about him. He wouldn’t rest until he’d tried everything he could think of, and none of us wanted to attempt confining him to prevent it. I suppose after the prayer meeting and the chickadee incident none of us really believed he would succeed, which was why we weren’t more concerned about it. We were all hoping he’d give it up after a while and become the normal-if somewhat obsessive-friend and crewmember we’d all learned to live with.

We realized we’d made a mistake when Gwen got a call from him a few days later. She had formally renounced her title as captain and flown to Hawaii, but she was still acting as our coordinator. Dave had called to find out where the rest of us were, and when she’d asked him why, he would only tell her to warn us away from Cheyenne, Wyoming, or any place downwind of it.

"Downwind?" I asked when Gwen called us to relay his message. "What the hell is he trying this time?" *

Jody and I were in the car again, headed north toward Mammoth hot springs. A ghost of Gwen’s face peered at us through the phone’s heads-up windshield display. "He wouldn’t tell me," she replied. "He just said to keep everyone away from the American Midwest for a while."

"I bet he’s going to blow up a nuclear bomb," Jody said. "Cheyenne’s one of the Air Force bases where they stored them."

"A nuclear bomb?" asked Gwen. "What does that have to do with God?"

I laughed. "Maybe he thinks we just need to knock loud enough to be heard."

"Yeah, but where’s the door?" Jody asked. "Certainly not in Cheyenne. I’ve been there; it’s a dirty little government town out on the prairie."

My smile faded. "If physical location matters at all, I’d guess the Grand Teton,

"He wouldn’t nuke the Tetons, would he?" Jody asked, horrified at the thought.

"I don’t know," Gwen said. "Probably not for his first shot, at least. He’ll probably just lob one into Nebraska or somewhere. But if that doesn’t work, then he might."

We’d been passing through a long straight notch cut in an ocean of lodge pole pine; I let off the throttle and the hover car slid to a stop, snow billowing up all around it. "We’re still in Yellowstone," I told Gwen, "but we could get to Cheyenne in-what, four hours? Five?" We’d been dawdling along on ground-effect until now, but we could fly as high as we liked if we had to.

"I don’t know if that’s a good idea or not," Gwen said. "I don’t like the idea of you two heading toward a nuclear explosion."

"I don’t exactly like it either," I said, "but I’m even less happy about the idea of him blowing up an entire mountain range just to get God’s attention."

"And screwing up the ecosystem just as it’s starting to straighten out again," Jody put in.

Snow had quit swirling around us. The car’s fans had blown it all away. I tilted the joystick to the side until the car pivoted halfway around, then pulled upward on it and shoved it forward again. The car rose up above the trees and began accelerating southeast.

I said, "Cheyenne itself should be safe enough. That’s where Dave will be, after all. Do you think we should call and let him know we’re coming, or should we try to catch him off guard?"

"He’ll just hide if we tell him we’re coming," Jody said.

"But he might not blow the bomb if we make him think you’re near the blast zone," Gwen said.

"Might not?" I asked. "Just how far around the bend do you figure he’s gone?"

"Maybe not at all," Gwen said. "I don’t know. This is a very emotionally charged issue for all of us. I doubt if any of us are behaving entirely rationally, but how can we tell if we are or we aren’t? We’re on completely new ground here."