Read Online The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy by Ryan Winfield - Free Book Online
Authors: Ryan Winfield
Ads: Link
that I make quick progress.
Safe on the other side, I lower myself onto the slope and climb down, gripping the rock with my bare feet, ignoring the pain in my hands as I stick them into cracks or grab onto roots, searching for suitable handholds. Halfway down, something tickles my neck. I reach up and cut off the caterpillar’s escape.
“Making a run for it, were you?”
He coils up again in my palm.
I look up at the water plunging over the falls. One wrong step crossing, and I would have been cut to pieces by rocks on my way down. And I’m still not safely passed.
Dropping the caterpillar back into my pocket, I climb on without looking down—down past pools of leaping salmon, down past the cool spray on my face, down until the rumbling water is thundering in my ears, down until my feet land on solid ground. I stand on the lower bank and look back up at the falls.
“We did it,” I say, peeking into my pocket, not really sure why I’m talking to a caterpillar. “We did it, little fella.”
I sit on a boulder at the riverbank and rest in the afternoon sun. Stretching out my tired legs, I dip my bare feet in an eddy of cool water swirling past. And I feel really, really good.
Night comes on fast
The darkness begins behind me and stretches toward the shrinking light ahead, bringing with it cold gusts of wind racing upriver and chilling me to the bone. I’m starving. Not hungry like I’ve been in Holocene II, but famished to the point of pain. It’s as if the soft ache I’ve always carried in my guts has spread to every cell of my body. My stomach, my limbs, my tongue—even my eyes are hungry, if that’s possible.
I search the dark riverbank for shelter. Finding a tall and sturdy thicket, I crawl beneath it until I come to a hollow that will hold me and there I sit protected from the wind, plucking the thorns and sucking the scratches on my skin.
Exhaustion overcomes hunger and I lie back and pray to science that the dense shrubs will protect me as I curl up on the soft ground and fall fast asleep ...
I dream I’m in the testing center again and everyone’s heads are bent over their desks. I’m sitting, staring, not understanding any questions. Mrs. Hightower appears before me and asks if there’s a problem. I jump up and turn my desk over, racing to the bin of lesson slates and I smash them one by one against the wall.
“Lies!” I shout, “Lies!”
Then someone knocks me down. I feel a knee on my neck, another on my back. I’m suffocating and screaming but my scream is muffled by the bodies piling on, and I’m crushed and buried beneath Mrs. Hightower and the entire class and five miles of rock and dirt and lies.
It’s freezing when I wake, shivering and wet with sweat.
In my delirium I drift off again, back to that wrecked train car, and everything since then seems only a dream. But the cold and lumpy ground presses hard into my sore back, making sleep impossible, my dream morphing into a waking nightmare as I roll onto my side and puke into the brush.
“Ah, man, am I ever sick.”
It’s mostly just water, really. An acid spume of river water filled with whatever vile microbes are multiplying like mad and leeching on my intestines. I unzip my jumpsuit, pull it down, and vacate the foreign intruders from the other end, too. When I zip it up, I notice a moist lump in my pocket and reach in and find a black and orange mush of hairy guts.
“I’m sorry, little fella. I really am.”
Leaving the crushed caterpillar behind with the contents of my stomach, I crawl from the thicket into the cold dawn.
The ground is damp, the air crisp, the pink sky pulling a fog up from the river’s surface. Appearing from the fog, at first no more than an apparition seen through the misty gray, an eagle glides upriver, its flapless wings spread from nearly shore to shore, talons tucked and ready, pale head swiveling silent and pendulum-like less than a meter above the water. I watch as it passes me by, so
Safe on the other side, I lower myself onto the slope and climb down, gripping the rock with my bare feet, ignoring the pain in my hands as I stick them into cracks or grab onto roots, searching for suitable handholds. Halfway down, something tickles my neck. I reach up and cut off the caterpillar’s escape.
“Making a run for it, were you?”
He coils up again in my palm.
I look up at the water plunging over the falls. One wrong step crossing, and I would have been cut to pieces by rocks on my way down. And I’m still not safely passed.
Dropping the caterpillar back into my pocket, I climb on without looking down—down past pools of leaping salmon, down past the cool spray on my face, down until the rumbling water is thundering in my ears, down until my feet land on solid ground. I stand on the lower bank and look back up at the falls.
“We did it,” I say, peeking into my pocket, not really sure why I’m talking to a caterpillar. “We did it, little fella.”
I sit on a boulder at the riverbank and rest in the afternoon sun. Stretching out my tired legs, I dip my bare feet in an eddy of cool water swirling past. And I feel really, really good.
Night comes on fast
The darkness begins behind me and stretches toward the shrinking light ahead, bringing with it cold gusts of wind racing upriver and chilling me to the bone. I’m starving. Not hungry like I’ve been in Holocene II, but famished to the point of pain. It’s as if the soft ache I’ve always carried in my guts has spread to every cell of my body. My stomach, my limbs, my tongue—even my eyes are hungry, if that’s possible.
I search the dark riverbank for shelter. Finding a tall and sturdy thicket, I crawl beneath it until I come to a hollow that will hold me and there I sit protected from the wind, plucking the thorns and sucking the scratches on my skin.
Exhaustion overcomes hunger and I lie back and pray to science that the dense shrubs will protect me as I curl up on the soft ground and fall fast asleep ...
I dream I’m in the testing center again and everyone’s heads are bent over their desks. I’m sitting, staring, not understanding any questions. Mrs. Hightower appears before me and asks if there’s a problem. I jump up and turn my desk over, racing to the bin of lesson slates and I smash them one by one against the wall.
“Lies!” I shout, “Lies!”
Then someone knocks me down. I feel a knee on my neck, another on my back. I’m suffocating and screaming but my scream is muffled by the bodies piling on, and I’m crushed and buried beneath Mrs. Hightower and the entire class and five miles of rock and dirt and lies.
It’s freezing when I wake, shivering and wet with sweat.
In my delirium I drift off again, back to that wrecked train car, and everything since then seems only a dream. But the cold and lumpy ground presses hard into my sore back, making sleep impossible, my dream morphing into a waking nightmare as I roll onto my side and puke into the brush.
“Ah, man, am I ever sick.”
It’s mostly just water, really. An acid spume of river water filled with whatever vile microbes are multiplying like mad and leeching on my intestines. I unzip my jumpsuit, pull it down, and vacate the foreign intruders from the other end, too. When I zip it up, I notice a moist lump in my pocket and reach in and find a black and orange mush of hairy guts.
“I’m sorry, little fella. I really am.”
Leaving the crushed caterpillar behind with the contents of my stomach, I crawl from the thicket into the cold dawn.
The ground is damp, the air crisp, the pink sky pulling a fog up from the river’s surface. Appearing from the fog, at first no more than an apparition seen through the misty gray, an eagle glides upriver, its flapless wings spread from nearly shore to shore, talons tucked and ready, pale head swiveling silent and pendulum-like less than a meter above the water. I watch as it passes me by, so
Similar Books
