Chapter One
They had come to the lake and the village that afternoon. They were on foot and it was the first real town they’d seen. Like the general store at Four Corners and the farm two miles north, it was burned to the ground. The houses, mostly wood, had left masonry hearths for monuments, and stone chimneys, and concrete slabs, and blackened stem walls. So close to the water, and the water table so high, few of the houses had basements; those were pits filling with water like abandoned quarries.
Of an entire town, only four dead, blackened bodies curled in the ruins. Where was everyone else?
They had moved up and down what once were streets, and they shouted, as if they might call them in like elk to a bugle. Nothing. Wind. The veering of the swallows who circled very high and silent and flashed violet-green when the sun broke through. Not much sun left: in scudding cloud, it was less than an hour off the ridge.
They came to the western edge of what once was a main street and stood against the dark woods. From there they could survey the mostly leveled ruin spilling downslope toward the lake. It was odd: Every vehicle they’d come across was a burned husk, but the docks of the marina still stood, and the boats tied there. A scattering of day sailer sloops rocked at their moorings. Rocked in an evening wind that brought the smells of lakewater and char. Jess had lifted the strapped binoculars to his eyes. Any living soul would be there in one of the boats, wouldn’t they? Crouched in some cockpit, huddled below in a V-berth as cramped as a coffin. They would be there with two days’ worth of canned food and a lake-full of water to drink, wondering if they were lucky or not to survive.
“What the hell,” Storey had said.
Jess shook in his fleece jacket as if he were cold. He lowered the binocs. “It’s like some war.”
“Jesus, Jess, it is a war.” Storey was ashen. He held his rifle unslung in his left hand and his cell phone in his right. “I can’t reach Lena. No reception. None.”
Jess knew. He had thought he might find some news on his phone, but there was nothing. They had had nothing for six days.
“I’ve gotta get home,” Storey said again, mostly to himself. It had become a mantra.
“Yeah, sure.” But neither knew how. South wasn’t working. Unless they walked and waded. It might come to that.
“We’ll hike up to Randall tomorrow. Right?” Jess said. “See if we can rent a car or something. Then maybe try heading straight west to Quebec. Then down.” They were in the middle of northern Maine. There were a few small towns and nothing else but lakes, woods, ridges, logging roads. It was maybe 75 miles west to Quebec as the crow flies, and much longer by gravel road. Straight to New Hampshire was about 150 miles southwest, but there was no way to go straight. The coast was just as far.
Storey stared hard at his oldest friend. “Rent a car,” he repeated.
“Maybe it’s local.” As soon as Jess said it he knew it was lame. Local. All summer the entire state had been convulsed with secession mania. It had pitted the populous coast against the sparse inland, the islands against the ports, islands against each other, Down East against Portland. County against county and town against town. And old Mainers against those From Away. What it really did, Jess thought, was stress any old fault lines and stir up simmering resentments. There had been calls for a vote in the state Legislature, a few riots, a shooting in Bath. But no one expected it to come to full-bore civil strife. They had discussed the risk while planning the trip and decided that what was happening in Maine was no worse than the stirrings of revolt in Idaho and the failed secession vote in Texas the year before. These were fringe minorities, vocal and passionate, but not a real threat. Also, they would be deep in the wilds of north-central Maine: the only time they’d see a soul was if they drove into some outpost convenience store for groceries and gas. And he’d needed this—Jess had. They’d been meeting for this hunt in the woods of different states for a dozen years now, and after the toughest year, Jess needed the return with his oldest friend to something known and worn and loved. To smells he knew, and ridges, and brooks; to the rhythms of camp and the hunt in which he could lose himself; to tradition.
So, this afternoon, as they stood above the burned town and surveyed the wreckage, they had not been able to countenance what they saw. Storey had rubbed his eyes with the back of the hand that held the phone. His cheek was wet. He shoved the phone into his pants pocket, shouldered the rifle, and sighted down to the lake.
“We need food,” he had said finally. It was true: at midday they had eaten the last of the freeze-dried dinners they’d packed for a week of hunting. “There’s gotta be some provisions on those boats.”
“Gotta be.” Jess lifted the binocs again and scanned the far shore of the bay. Where there must have been houses before, there were clearings, flagpoles, the pillars of other chimneys like gaudy headstones. “Camp here at the edge of the woods and go down tomorrow?” he had said.
“Okay. We should stay in cover. From now on.” Storey lowered the rifle. Lately, he liked to scan with the scope. One less step, in case. He looked at the lowering clouds. Probably coming rain. Among the swallows, below them, three nighthawks wheeled and fed. They were larger, just as agile, and they darted and swooped with a blinking of wing bars and a quiet muttering of staggered peeps. Someone was acting as if the world were normal, Storey thought.
They turned and walked into the trees.
Jess had gathered wood, the fallen limbs of spruce and white birch. He did not bother to muffle the sound as he broke the longer branches. They could see where the attack had swept out of the town—ash and mud and what must have been blood like oil stains on the county road that continued on north around the shore. How many, who knew. They were gone. A few warm embers in the ruin, and so probably just hours old.
He and Storey had a better map now, a water-stained gazetteer they had found fluttering outside the burned shell of a Bronco as they approached. No corpse, but the strewn contents of a rucksack littering down the two-lane highway—broken flashlight, a Gore-Tex rain jacket, packet of peppered jerky—as if the driver had been apprehended in flight. The Zippo Jess was using now had been lying in the road. Maybe they took them, survivors or bodies, took them all. The thought occurred to Jess as he crushed two handfuls of desiccated spruce twigs and lit them with the lighter. Why not the boats? It was as if they had had no time. Collect as many inhabitants as possible and move on. No time to row or swim out. But why not the boats along the dock? Bumping against their fenders, untouched? Maybe they had night vision, a thermal scope; maybe they could see no one was out there hiding. If they did have infrared, then camping back in the trees would offer little cover. Probably not. If they’d had night vision, he and Storey would be dead by now. Dead at thirty-seven.
The map showed the next town, Randall, nearly five miles up the lake. Ten-minute drive. Twenty. Given the state of the cooling wreckage and the seeming direction of travel, the attackers were there by now, there and gone. No column of smoke to the north, but that meant nothing. Jess shivered. If tomorrow the two of them decided to go that way, he had an idea of what they’d find.
Jess had set two palms on the duff either side of the scraped dirt and blew gently on the lit nest of twigs and watched the small yellow flame climb into the crumpled lace of dried spruce and find the small sticks above. He watched the flames adhere and propagate and run along the lengths of tinder and flutter orange to blue. He reached behind him and broke larger branches and laid them over and let the fire grow big enough to warm them. Storey could maybe read his mind: Jess heard his steps behind, and Storey said, “I’ll go down to the boats on the dock. No risk now.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve been cold in the summer bag, and someone will have sleeping bags or blankets. And maybe better dinner than mac and cheese.”
Jess said no word but nodded once; he did not turn and he heard Storey move off.
He had poured a two-quart water bottle into a pot and set it to straddle two rocks, and he took a stout stick and scraped embers and flaming wood between them. He built up the rest of the fire, and when he heard Storey’s steps behind him again he stood stiffly.
“Hey.” Storey’s voice ragged. “Hey—” The word cracked. Rustle as he set down two rolled nylon department-store sleeping bags. Jess turned. Storey’s face was strange, as in the face of a stranger. “I found someone. In the water.”
“Alive?”
Head shake.
“What?”
“I pulled her out of the shallows. She had a rock in her shirt. Tucked into the belly. Water maybe four feet deep.”
“So?”
“She could’ve shaken it loose anytime. She drowned herself.”
Jess blinked at his friend. “Maybe—maybe someone threw her in.”
“No.” That simple. When Storey knew something he knew it.
Jess had made the mac and cheese. There were two nested stainless-steel pots, and in the smaller he heated water, and he gave Storey a cup of Lipton with brown sugar. Some things had not changed much since their first outing, when they were kids. What had changed was the tempo of the music. They had both slowed, Jess more than Storey. It was less a physical ebbing—the expected scars and injuries and stiffness—less about bones and more about the heart. Jess thought that life’s mounting losses had slowed him. The loss of a wife the year before. The dog, Bell, he’d inherited from Jan. Jan Jan Jan. All gone into the dark.
They sat on a log Jess had dragged over and ate the noodles and two cans of Pringles and some chocolate bars Storey had found on the boats. A mouse had already sampled the chocolate, and they broke off the gnawed ends. There would be more food; they’d go down and look tomorrow.
They had strung up a tarp, as they had since their first hunting trip. They did not bother to build up the sides with brush for a windbreak because the breeze off the lake was light and with the extra bags as blankets they would be plenty warm. They let the fire burn down. Jess was the last one up and he did not bother to douse it.
They were woken by rain. Rain drumming the tarp, and rolling thunder, and flashes of distant lightning making brief calligraphy of the interlaced spruce boughs. The tarp was taut and big enough and they were dry.
Jess felt Storey bump against him as he shifted in his bag, and he murmured, “That is lightning, right?”
“Damn if I know,” Storey said. “That next town is five miles off and north. The flashes seem to be over the lake. Further off.”
“Yeah.” Jess rolled onto his back and moved the jacket he used as a pillow up onto the pack behind his head and bolstered himself. “You wanna try that village up the shore? Randall?”
Storey hadn’t heard him. He had found his cell phone in the dark, and Jess saw it glow and then extinguish. “Nothing, right?” Jess said.
“No.” The rain pattered and sifted on the tarp. He couldn’t see his friend’s face, and he didn’t want to.
“Maybe, when we get up there, there’ll be something. Maybe there’s a tower.”
Storey didn’t answer. Well. He had two daughters and a wife back in Vermont. He, Jess, had no one. It was a little over a year since Jan had left, and their dog, Bell, had died two months later. Collapsed on her walk. Only seven and with no known health conditions—Jess figured she’d died from a broken heart. Did dogs do that? Some nights he had willed himself to go the same way; no luck.
This trip was Jess’s favorite annual ritual. Together, they often hunted the mountains of Vermont and Colorado, but this year, against great odds, they both drew nonresident moose tags in Maine, and so decided to hunt the earliest season in the big empty wilderness of north-central Maine, south of Mount Katahdin and east of Moosehead Lake. The famed and populous coast was more than a hundred miles away. You could drive a gravel road for hours and never see another soul but maybe the glimpsed face and wave of a truck driver, a log truck passing too fast and throwing stones against your windshield. The country was rolling wooded hills mostly, with spines of steeper ridges, and the valleys whispered with brooks and rivers that spilled into lakes and bogs. A country to get lost in.
They had hunted at the first camp for five days. They’d crossed sign—tracks, beds, scat—but not as much as in years past, and they’d come upon moose—cows with calves—but not as many. Neither even saw a bull. So they’d decided to shift the hunt to a boggier watershed to the south. They drove. When they found the bridge over the little river severed, they had parked in the shade and stood on the broken abutment. They blinked in the brightness and the heat—a sultry, humid, late-September afternoon. Storey had hopped out on a twisted girder and crouched. He placed one hand on the sunwarmed steel and ran his fingers over it. He looked up at Jess.
“Blown,” he said.
“What?”
“The bridge was blown. Like blown up.” Storey would know: he had been a dedicated rock climber in college, and in the summers he had worked on a road crew, blasting loose rock off of highway cliffs.
“Like dynamite?”
“Or C-4. Boom. Remember The Bridge on the River Kwai?”
“Who would do that?”
Storey shrugged. “Maybe it was condemned and they didn’t wanna risk anyone using it.”
“That’s crazy.”
They had turned the SUV around. They had planned to gas up in Branch and they were low on fuel. But they had no choice, and they backtracked to the next Forest Service road to the west and turned south again. It was a forty-mile detour. The woods were starting to turn, and the low sun came through them and lit them to amber. It was like driving through honey. Again they had come to a river—this one larger—and again the bridge was out. Not out, but deliberately destroyed. There was no cell service. They had topos of only the districts they would hunt and they had the gazetteer and a gas-station road map. They opened the map on the hood of the 4Runner. The closest town was back to the north, on the west side of the big lake. Fifty-seven miles, give or take. What might be a hamlet with a gas pump was about forty miles away on the same road. They had gotten about halfway when the engine revved and died. Out of gas. So they locked the Toyota and shouldered their hunting packs and took up their rifles and walked. They only had an hour and a half of daylight on that first day of hiking. On the afternoon of the second, they wondered aloud why they hadn’t seen another logging truck, or the vehicles of other hunters. Jess began to carry a stone in his gut he recognized as dread. On the morning of the third, they passed a green sign that said “Four Corners, Population 9.” His first thought was: How often do they change that sign? Doesn’t anyone go away to college or retire to Arizona? But then they smelled a black stench like the inside of a woodstove and they came around the forested bend to the burned remains of seven buildings. Four Corners, Population 0.
They had walked on the verge of the roads then, where they could duck into the woods if they needed to. They walked with a round chambered in their rifles, which they usually never did. They kept their cell phones on airplane mode to conserve battery, but when they stopped to take a drink in the shade of some brook, one or the other turned his phone’s receiver on and scanned for a cell signal. Nothing. Out here they didn’t expect any, but it cost nothing to try. They both had water-filter straws and the hills were threaded everywhere with streams, so thirst was never an issue. Once, at midday, they trotted down to the bank of a black-water pond and stripped and swam. The water was ice cold, but neither whooped. They clambered out through horsetail and dried in the breeze and let the sun smooth the goose bumps on their arms, and on any other day they would have hooted and grinned.
On the afternoon of the third day of walking, they came to a meadow maybe two miles wide. The road went right through the middle. Jess set his pack down and walked away to scout the edge along the treeline.
When he came back he said, “Ton of blowdown. And blackberry bramble. Tough walking. Very.”
“Okay. I guess we’ll take the road.”
Neither felt good about being in the open for half an hour. They both unslung their rifles and they opened the breeches and checked again for the rounds there. Storey had a Model 70 Winchester .30-06, bolt action; Jess his father’s .308 lever-action Savage 99. Both were scoped and both men were very good shots. Jess had always made clean kills; he could not remember when he had wounded an animal. Neither spoke, and they crossed the meadow without incident.
That night, they had pushed through the dense alders at the edge of a swamp and made a small fire and cooked one of the two remaining backpack meals. “Gallo Pinto, Costa Rican Rice and Beans,” it said on the pouch. Jess said the name seemed pompous. “What makes it Costa Rican?” he said.
Storey shrugged.
“And as if that was somehow better? Or more hip? Where does this stuff come from, anyway?” He tilted the packet in the slant light. “Figures.”
“Where?” Storey turned. Jess thought he looked for a second a little less like a zombie. He had noticed that every time Storey had checked his phone and found no news or way to connect with his family his eyes seemed a little duller.
“Golden, Colorado.”
“No kidding?” Storey’s eyes actually sparked. “That’s your backyard, isn’t it? Coors and gallo pinto.” Storey knew it was his backyard; he had visited Jess in Denver at least a dozen times. The last time they’d hunted elk over in Paonia, they’d celebrated the end of the week at the Silver Dollar Hotel, in Golden.
“Yep.”
“So you’d probably call rice and beans gallo pinto, too, if you could get away with it.”
“I do it all the time.”
Storey’s smile fluttered and stuck. Jess felt such relief to see it. And they ate the second-to-last supper with gusto. While they were eating, Jess said:
“Do you think this is some militia thing?”
“You mean about the stupid secession?”
“Some people clearly don’t think it’s so stupid.”
“What would they be doing way up here? Don’t they have better bridges to take out?”
Storey added a couple of sticks to the fire. Jess refilled the pot with water and nestled it into the coals for tea. “It’s weird. Do they want to keep moose from moving south—the moose and the loggers? And what’s the point of burning down some crossroads general store? Except to keep you and me from getting gas?”
No point. But neither slept well, and the next day they walked into the town by the lake. What was once a town.