August Ansel - The Attic

“What kind of traps?” said Renna.

“Any sort you can imagine,” he said. “And a bunch you don’t want to. What’s left is to stay on the old logging roads.”

“I’m surprised any are left,” said Arie.

“Not many are,” said Handy. “You can’t even really use the word road—they’re trails now. When you can find them. But cutting straight through the woods?” He shook his head. “That’s tough sledding. A lot of steep climbing, a lot of wet slogs and poison oak.”

“Cold, too,” said Arie. “If it took you two months’ travel during good weather and by yourself, it may take at least three to get back with extra bodies and foul weather coming. May even be snow by that time.”

Curran, who was intently studying the map, got to his feet. Talus rolled her eyes to watch him; her tail thumped the floorboards, but she appeared perfectly content to stay stretched out where she was. “I get that this is your place,” he said, leaning down to thump the God’s Land circle with one big forefinger. “But that’s a long-ass way to go from here.” He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, looking off into the shadowy kitchen. Dark skies had formed at midday, and even with the windows battened the sound of wind cranking up was plain. The tangled brush close to the house scraped the siding like a hundred enthusiastic fingernails. “It seems like the odds are that we could find a suitable place between here and there, something that’s plenty off the radar of Russell and his team of assholes.”

“Your life is your own, Curran,” Arie said. “No one can make the choice for you.”

“You haven’t been out there,” Handy told him.

“I was out there for months.” Curran’s voice sounded pissy and defensive.

“You were here,” Handy said quietly. “It’s not the same. You said yourself that you’re shit with weapons and not much better at hunting. You were ready to settle into the attic for the winter.” He was quiet for a moment, tracing his finger along Renna’s rendition of Highway 101. “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m telling you it’s a bad situation out there. We’re safer together, and you’re safer at the land. We all are.”

“Curran,” Renna said, “it’s not like you’re going to find a Holiday Inn and live happily ever after.” She gave his sleeve a little tug. “Just come.”

“I get it,” said Curran. He squatted by the map again. “I’m not saying I don’t want to go. Where we are now, this whole area is already a target, we all know that. And yeah—my skill set is, uh…” He rocked one hand in a seesawing gesture. “Very pre-plague. I’m going with you in two days, no question. But I want things clear between us. I won’t promise to go all the way.”

“Fair enough,” said Handy.

“And I want to know what the hell God’s Land is,” Curran said. “Every time you say it, I get a little weirded out. No offense, but I…I don’t do God.”

Handy looked at Arie, seemed to be waiting for her to fill the void.

“That’s also fair,” she said, “and not easily explained.” She gazed around the barren room, so changed in every respect—its old life wiped away, its demolition at her hands gone as well. The wind thrashed outside, and the lights of the kerosene lamps flickered so that their shadows rose and fell, faded and sharpened. “God’s Land is the name my father gave the home place. Our father, I should say—Handy’s and mine.” At the sound of Arie’s voice, Talus roused herself from her doze on the floor. She sidled up and laid her chin across Arie’s lap. She stroked the dog’s big head and marveled at the comforting warm weight of it.

“When he was a young man, our father came to believe he was called,” she said.

“Called?” said Curran. “To what?”

“An anointing,” Arie said. “Touched by God with glorious foreknowledge. Unique among men, chosen to create a new work on the earth by the strength of his will and the power of his loins.” When Curran and Renna exchanged a glance, Arie laughed. “Oh, I know how it sounds,” she said. “But those aren’t my words, they’re his—straight from the horse’s mouth. And I heard them repeated so often I could recite them in my sleep. Mack McInnis was touched, all right. Crazy through and through.

“This was when he was barely in his teens, and the idea drove him. His family lived on a patch of dirt in the hills where three generations had grubbed out a subsistence living. There was no expectation that this tall boy with his strange manner would live any way other than how the rest of his clan was doing it—fixing up junk cars, raising hell in town Friday nights, and drinking away the rest of the weekend in front of the television. Meth was an epidemic in those days, and Daddy Mack often claimed that every one of them—all but him—used it on the regular, even his mother. To hear him tell it, there was a lot of bad skin and a distinctly low ratio of teeth to heads in the McInnis family. But his calling saved him from such a low fate.

“I won’t go into the what-all of that delusion, or you’ll still be sitting here and me talking when the sun comes up. Bottom line is, he believed he was chosen and that in the details God was damned specific. He quit school and went to work for two neighbors, doing rough field work and odd jobs. He was a tall, muscular boy. Handsome. All brawn and big ideas. Saved every red cent, and when his folks let on he ought to chip in for room and board, he set himself up in an abandoned shed up the road, a place so nasty you wouldn’t use it to pen a goat. Cut all ties with the family. The day he turned twenty-one, he bought seventy acres outright and set up a tent.

“He chased his calling full bore, which first required building a house and finding a woman. He did both, and in short order. Of course, in reality the ‘woman’ he found was a girl. My mother, Delonda Merrit, was hiking in the redwoods with friends when she ran into Mack. All of fifteen and gullible as hell. Not overburdened with intelligence. Those two were an infernal match. Perfect for each other. She spent most of the next year running away from home—this home we’re sitting in—and getting dragged back by Granny and Pop. Nothing would wise her up, though. She gave birth to her first child three days after her seventeenth birthday—our brother Zach. Oldest of fourteen, if you don’t count two miscarriages and the one who died in the cradle.”

“Fourteen,” echoed Renna.

“Seven boys, seven girls. A perfect mystery of creation, ordained from the foundations of the universe, according to Daddy Mack,” Arie said. “Ancient history, though. I ran off when I was a girl, about the age Mammy Delonda was when she signed on to play queen bee. I came here and lived with Granny and Pops. She used to say I was her chance to finish what she’d started.”

“You still call it God’s Land,” said Curran.

“That’s its name,” said Handy.

“Why did you run away?” said Renna.

Arie caressed Talus’s black snout and scratched behind her ears. “There’s naught else I can add that matters now,” she said. “Handy was the last born, some six years after I left the place. All I know now is what he tells me.”

“The old man lived through it all,” said Handy. “He’s still on the land, and set me out to bring you home.”

“As I said, I have your word for that, and you might have gleaned in our short acquaintance that a man on a mission doesn’t hold much sway around here.”

“You can be persuasive,” he murmured. “May be it runs in the blood.”

“So does being a smartass. What these two need from you, Brother, are the best reasons they should follow you.”

“I trust him,” said Renna. “I’d follow him out of here even if I didn’t. Those…” She stopped, breathing hard. In the clear light of the burning lamps, Arie saw a brilliant flush spreading up her throat and onto her cheeks. “Those people running their little prison camp across the river are nuts, so it really doesn’t matter what God’s Land is like. Not to me. I’m going.”