Морин Макхью - Wastelands - The New Apocalypse

As they watched fourteen elephants silently burn to death, their massive bodies hissing and crackling as flames leapt into the sky above them, James cried.

“There’s only fifty-three left now,” he whispered. “There were almost a hundred in the bond group when we started. They’re just dwindling away.”

“Just like us,” Liyana said, and he shot her a horrified look. “It’s true,” she protested. “When’s the last time you saw a baby elephant?”

Weeks earlier, when Liyana had told the others back at the lodge that she was going to find out what was happening to the elephants, where they were disappearing to, they’d joked that she was off to find the fabled elephants’ graveyard. Half the people there had been part of the Elephant Preservation Project; they knew that was a myth. And yet here she was. The same spot as a month ago, and almost weekly more elephants came, in groups of twos and threes and larger, and caught fire.

The fires burned out, leaving behind nothing but piles of gray ash. On their second time out together, James had noticed that the elephants touched their trunks to the ash before they began singing, each animal in the circle lowering its trunk to each ash pile, then touching the tip of their trunk to their forehead. Remembering the dead.

Now, with the elephants gone, he and Liyana walked down. No, she thought. James walked, Liyana waddled. Twenty-two weeks. Her stomach bulged under her t-shirt like she was trying to shoplift a melon.

They circled the ashes, still steaming in the afternoon heat. Each time they inspected the ashes, and each time gleaned no new information. If this had been before the war, before the great change to the world, they could have brought the ashes to a laboratory, had someone analyze them for bacteria, viruses, some evidence of what could be causing the elephants to combust. Of course, if it were before the change, the elephants wouldn’t be combusting in the first place.

“They come to the same spot every time,” James said. “Does that mean something? With the touching the ashes beforehand? Like how they’ll stand watch over their dead relatives?”

The ashes smelled of char and copper and something almost sweet. The combination made Liyana think of old candy, a caramel that had been forgotten between the seats of a car, left to rot in the sun. Bile rose in her throat and she spit it onto the ground next to the ashes. Spitting directly into the ashes seemed disrespectful. The elephants surely knew that these ashes were the remains of their family members, their friends. Smart animals, they understood death, understood the cycle of growth and decay.

“We’re in the wrong place,” she said.

“What? You think they have more than one spot?”

“No, no.” Liyana shook her head, looking in the direction the elephants had come from. “We’re seeing them die. If we want to know what’s causing this, we need to see them live.”

Her whole life, Liyana rarely cried, and never in front of people. As a little girl, she fell off her bike riding around the neighborhood with some cousins, and as the pain traveled from her bloody knee to her eyes, she swallowed it back, rushed into her house, up to the bathroom, and shut the door behind her before she finally allowed a whimper to escape.

When she lost her first pregnancy, she didn’t cry. She knew it was coming, knew academically that she wouldn’t be the woman to miraculously carry a pregnancy to term when no one else could. But she felt hollow afterward nonetheless, emotionally scooped out like a pumpkin.

That night, she and James lay in bed, turned on their sides, back to back. Liyana couldn’t sleep. She listened to birds calling in the night, insects chirruping in the bush. She tried to clear her head, to think of nothing at all.

The mattress wobbled. A new sound joined those filtering in from outside. Breathy sobs, sniffling. James, her man, lamenting the loss of the baby. Lamenting the loss of his family, his wife and children, the whole world. He shook the bed and gulped air. He snorted and wiped away mucus.

She cried then, holding her body stiff, letting tears flow through ragged controlled breaths. Scalding tears of frustration and sadness and anger. She continued even after James petered out, fell into regular shallow breaths as he fitfully slept. Liyana cried and cried, but she wouldn’t let him see.

The matriarch of the clan huffed and trumpeted and called in distress. Even someone who hadn’t studied elephants, even someone who’d never even seen an elephant until that moment, would know those sounds didn’t portend anything good.

Liyana knew just what the noises meant, and James certainly did, too. She wanted to rush to the elephant, but she knew she couldn’t help it. No one could.

No other elephants were in sight, keeping away from the struggling matriarch out of fear or respect. Maybe sheer fatigued depression. It was the middle of the night, and she pictured them out in the bush, trying to sleep, pretending they couldn’t hear their matriarch’s anguished cries.

The elephant loosed a bellow from deep within and a milky balloon fell from her underside, followed by a rush of blood and amniotic fluid. The broken, half-formed body of a baby elephant came with it.

The matriarch cried anew, reaching down with her trunk to sniff and prod and poke the fetus. But it was premature and deformed, and never had a hope of survival.

Liyana watched the matriarch attempt to lift the body, to place it on its feet, to will it alive. She did some quick math in her head. Twenty-two-month pregnancies, a few months off between. And they wouldn’t even last the full twenty-two months. Seven years had passed since the war had turned the world inside out. How many times had this matriarch miscarried or delivered stillborn fetuses? How many times had she felt life inside her and hoped that this time would be different? Three? More?

The matriarch sat down heavily, and Liyana laid herself on the ground as well, propped on her side, watching the elephant mourn. She felt James’s hand on her shoulder, heard him whisper, “We should go.”

She shook her head. “I have to stay,” she said, and felt a surge of gratitude when James didn’t ask why or insist upon leaving. Instead, he sat down next to her, a hand slowly stroking from her hip to her knee and back. Eventually, the stroking stopped, and she realized he was sleeping. But Liyana stayed awake, sitting with the elephant that didn’t know she was there.

Her name whispered in her ear, a hand jostling her shoulder. With a start, Liyana woke up, and realized James was speaking to her and pointing at the spot where the matriarch had miscarried.

Groggy, Liyana sat up, and it took her a moment to realize the sun had risen and the elephant was gone.

“Where did she go?” she asked. “Did you see her leave?”

James shook his head, but turned. “Tracks show her heading that way.”

“Oh, god.” Liyana got to her feet as quickly as she could, hands on the back of her hips, back cracking and bladder throbbing painfully. “They really are doing it on purpose. We have to help her.”

James didn’t ask how, which was good, because Liyana didn’t know. But he went with her, taking her by the elbow and helping speed her along to the spot where the elephants burned.

The matriarch had been joined by four more elephants, all young females. They’d begun circling the ash pile already, the tips of their trunks dusty and gray-black.

Liyana skidded to a stop, her sneakers gouging into the hard dirt, sending a spray of gravel and sand flying, but the elephants ignored her. James stopped alongside her, letting go of her elbow and putting his hands on his knees to suck deep breaths. She hadn’t imagined she could run at all this pregnant, let alone so fast.