Макс Брукс - Devolution - A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre

Then I smelled it. Just a quick whiff in the breeze. Rotten, like eggs and old garbage. It brought back a memory from last night’s meeting, when the group was breaking up. Carmen had complained about a horrible smell, a trace of sulfur when they’d opened the window. Reinhardt explained it away as gas emissions from the volcano. He’s probably right. That’s what I thought as the smell wafted away.

Then the howl, faint, distant. Not a wolf, or, at least, not like the wolves I’ve heard in movies. I know what coyotes sound like and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t one of them. I’m still not sure it was an animal. It could have been the wind shifting through these tall trees, or some trick echo across the mountains. What do I know about what sound does up here? The howl faded into a trio of short, deep grunts, the last one sounding just a little bit louder, or closer, than the others. I didn’t move, holding my breath, listening for another sound. Any sound. The whole forest seemed to go still.

Then I felt eyes on me.

I know you’d say it was all in my head, and I can’t think of any reason to argue. Standing there, all alone, under that eerie, smoky sky with a guilty head full of apocalyptic musings. But I’ve had that feeling before, on the playground or when Mom judged my outfits from across the room. That intuition is how I met Dan, freshman year, through the crowd and the music. I just knew. I felt. I looked up and there he was.

I didn’t see anyone this time. Even when I turned back to the house. I didn’t run. I’m proud of that. I just walked slowly, purposefully, and the feeling was gone halfway home. And now all I feel is embarrassed. I can’t believe I freaked out for no reason, that I let imaginary monsters pollute my happy place. I feel ridiculous, sitting at the kitchen table, looking out the back door, hearing Dan snore blissfully upstairs. The wind’s kicked up, the sound of the trees is so soothing. Maybe I should go back out there, finish my walk on a high note.

Nope. Just tried. Legs like oatmeal. Mmmm, oatmeal. I just finished an instant pack. Half, actually. Enough to quiet my stomach.

I can feel the irritation coming on. Dieting angst. I’m still not 100 percent sure that I should be torturing myself with Mostar’s batshit “rationing.” Even if she’s right about being cut off. How long can we possibly expect it to last?

I really need to sleep. Crawl in bed next to Dan. With earplugs. And maybe half an Ativan. A good night’s, day’s, rest. Give the world a chance to get itself together. And if it hasn’t, at least I can get myself together with a nice evening stroll in the woods.

From my interview with Senior Ranger Josephine Schell.

I call it a “Massoud Moment,” connecting the dots only after it’s too late. I got the name from Ahmad Shah Massoud. He was this Afghan guerrilla leader who fought the Russians and then the Taliban. I don’t expect you’ve ever heard of him. I didn’t until the day he died. I’d just gotten into New York. It was a late flight, like one or two in the morning? The cabdriver at JFK was listening to the BBC World Service. They were talking about how Massoud had just been assassinated by terrorists pretending to be journalists. I wasn’t paying much attention and I think I might have even asked the driver to switch stations. I mean, c’mon, I was just starting my vacation. I’d never been to New York, my friends were waiting. We had Producers tickets.

That was September 9, 2001, and I only learned later that killing Massoud was the opening act of the World Trade Center attack. I couldn’t have known that at the time. Nobody would’ve expected me to connect the dots. Still, I think about that moment a lot, about connecting the dots. I’ve thought a lot about it since….

She glances up at the map.

We found these bones. Pieces of them. Smashed fragments, like someone’d gone crazy with a hammer. You could tell they were deer, hooves, a few teeth, patches of fur. There wasn’t much left. No meat. Licked clean. Same with the leaves. Just enough residue to tell they’d been splashed with blood. I remember seeing this rock, big…

She holds out her hands in the size and shape of a soccer ball.

…with blood, marrow, bits of brain on one side. And it was reasonably fresh, a few hours maybe? But I didn’t stop to check. We didn’t have time. Remember this was Day Three after the eruption. None of us had slept, all those missing people… that’s why, looking back, I didn’t think much of the tracks. I probably wrote them off as ours, everybody just tramping sloppily through, nobody paying attention to anything except getting where we needed to be.

It wasn’t until after we’d discovered Greenloop—shit, it wasn’t until after I’d read her journal… that entry about discovering the remains? That was when I started asking around. And some of the other rangers, guardsmen, a few civilian volunteers, they had this “oh yeah, right” moment. And when I began to map and time-stamp everyone’s recollections…

She stretches an arm to the map, touching a collection of small, black pins I hadn’t noticed before.

That’s the first discovery, Day One.

She touches the next pin.

Day Two.

Again.

Day Three. My team.

She continues to move her fingers down the pins, drawing a clear, straight path toward Greenloop.

The “Massoud Moment,” connecting the dots.

Ash. Falling from the sky. Big, lazy flakes. On the houses, the driveway, the windshield of my car. That’s where I am now, writing all this down, listening to the radio.

I should be sleeping. That’s what Mostar’s doing. The garden’s done. Dirt and compost from Mostar’s bin, all mixed together. Dan even came up with an irrigation system. He’s connected both our garden hoses to the garage sink, snaked it in curly waves across the entire garden, poked holes every few inches, and tied off the end with packing tape. He calls it a “drip line.” All on his own, no prompting.

And he’s moved on, again, to his new job of figuring out how the house works. “One thing at a time.” He’s asleep now, I think, but after finishing the garden he got right to work syncing his iPad to every system of the house’s CPU, learning how everything operates, losing himself in kilowatts and British thermal units. No prodding from us, no rest. More work in a few hours than I’ve seen him do in years. Who is this man?

Mostar’s moved on too. She plans to pick, slice, and dry all the fruit from our trees. Plums, pears, apples. Even the sour little crabapples on her tree that I never would have touched before this. “Every calorie counts.” She would have started this morning but it has to be, in her words, “after dark, so no one sees me.”

And my new job. I’m the gardener. I’m supposed to care for and keep an eye on all the seeds we planted. Not that we planted that many.

I picked through every item in both our houses and all I could come up with were some Chinese peas and a couple of sweet potatoes. I’m not sure if those have the same nutritional value as “the real thing”—Mostar-speak for conventional potatoes. “Better than nothing.” So sure, despite her utter lack of knowledge on how to plant any of it. Cut up the yams to plant the eyes, which Dan seems to remember from a sci-fi book he read recently, or plant them whole? Which we did. And what about the peas? Soak them first? Wrap them in a wet paper towel, which I vaguely remember from kindergarten, or just stick them in well-watered ground, which we did.