Hole in the Sky Page 3

  I ignored her, but she knew I’d read her signing. Harryette had taught herself sign language from books, just after she’d woken up from her coma and found out that she couldn’t talk. Whatever part of the brain that turned sounds into words had been fried. People who got the Flu mostly died. But not always, and the ones who survived were always kind of strange. Harryette could still read and write, but she couldn’t speak or understand spoken words.

  She’d taught me and Uncle to sign. I was better at it than Uncle.

  The Flu had changed her in other ways, too. Back when we lived in Phoenix, Harryette had been a cheerful seventh grader who talked constantly. She was always busy with her school work or her singing lessons or designing clothes that she would sew herself. She’d wanted to be an actress and a singer. She had been my best friend, even though she was almost four years older than me. Then the Flu came to town. One day everything was okay—and three weeks later everybody we knew was dead.

  Our parents saw what was happening before most people. They kept us quarantined. When things got really bad in Phoenix—dead people everywhere—we headed north in the Land Cruiser. The plan was for us to stay with my uncle in Tusayan, a small town just south of the Grand Canyon. Dad said the farther we got from the big cities, the safer we’d be. I don’t remember a lot of my life before we came to live with Uncle, but I’ll never forget that drive. The freeways were clogged with crashed and abandoned cars. A few miles outside Phoenix some men tried to run us off the road, but we got away from them in the Land Cruiser. After that, we stayed on the little, twisty roads. Every small town we came to was a ghost town.

  We were driving through a place called Williams when Harryette started to clear her throat and cough. We stopped and Mom took me to an empty house and gave me a bunch of food and water and told me not to come out until she came back for me. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I stayed in that house waiting for Mom and Dad to come back. I think I was in there a week. Finally, I went out to look for them.

  I walked around that town for hours. Except for a small herd of pronghorns grazing on somebody’s front lawn, I saw nothing alive. I returned to the empty house.

  The next day, I went out again. I was walking down the main street when I saw this bald kid sitting in front of a house eating a box of cookies. I went over and asked him if he had seen my mom and dad. The kid just looked at me with this weird expression and all of a sudden I recognized my sister, only with no hair. I said her name, but she wouldn’t answer me. She just kept staring at me with blank eyes. She hadn’t said a word but, somehow, I had known in that moment that our parents were dead.

  After that, everything changed. The old Harryette had disappeared. All the new Harryette wanted to do was read books. When Uncle drove to Flagstaff to scavenge gasoline and supplies, he would bring back stacks of books from the bookstores. Harryette read them all. She would read anything. The new Harryette, the one watching me fish, didn’t sing or talk anymore. She was a Survivor, but the Flu had killed something inside her.

  I felt a tug on my line. I jerked back on the rod to set the hook, then started reeling in. I could tell it wasn’t a big fish, and when I pulled it up onto shore I’d caught a sucker about six inches long. Waste of a good scorpion. I threw the fish back and went looking for another scorpion.

  Harryette had found a patch of shade beneath a mesquite tree. She scraped a depression in the sand in front of a granite boulder and settled into it.

  Angrily, I signed at her to go away. She signed, You are going to be on kitchen duty for a month.

  The most irritating thing about my sister was that she was almost always right.

  The sun was almost straight overhead and the temperature had climbed into the eighties by the time I caught my first trout. Harryette clapped and smiled. I couldn’t help but grin back at her. After that I caught one almost every time I threw my line in the water. It was harder finding the scorpions than catching the fish, but I soon had six brightly colored rainbow trout, more than enough for dinner.

  Harryette asked me how I was going to keep the fish fresh during the long climb back to the rim. I’d been wondering that myself, but I figured if I wrapped them in fresh leaves and grass and put them in my T-shirt and soaked it with cold river water, they’d be fine. We’d be back on the rim in four or five hours. Cecil could make good time when he had a meal waiting for him. I looked back at the tamarisk where I’d left him.

  Cecil was gone.

  Cecil’s tracks led downstream, clear arcs impressed in the soft sand. I was furious with Cecil for taking off, and even madder at myself for not tying him better. Harryette and I followed the tracks for an hour before losing them on a stretch of bare rock.

  You are in trouble, Harryette signed. Her mule wouldn’t be able to carry both of us, and it would take me a good eight hours to climb to the rim on foot.

  “We’re gonna find him,” I said.

  Harryette cocked her head. I signed to her to head back upstream, in case we’d missed him. I would continue to follow the river west.

  Not safe, she signed. Stay together.

  I shook my head and started walking again. I’d stay in the canyon the rest of my life before I’d tell Uncle I’d lost a mule. Harryette hesitated, then shrugged and walked back the way we had come.

  After another hour of searching, I again found the marks of Cecil’s shod hooves. That stupid mule could really move. At that point the walls of the gorge came right up to the river, and I had to climb a slope of broken rocks. I couldn’t see Cecil’s tracks on the rock, but it was the only way he could have gone. I finally found a sheep trail with more of Cecil’s tracks. For some reason he had stopped and trampled a small area, breaking rocks and scuffing the earth as if something had startled him. Just as I was wondering what had happened, I heard a buzzing noise that tingled my skin from the back of my neck all the way to my toes. Without moving my legs, I searched the ground around my feet, my heart pounding.

  There, less than a yard away, a coiled rattler, dusky pink with rust-colored markings, its tail a vibrating blur. Holding back the urge to run, I slowly moved one leg in the opposite direction, planted my foot, then followed it with the other one. The snake continued to buzz. I took another step—six feet away now, I began to relax. Rattlers can’t strike beyond their body length, and this one was only about three feet long, but I kept my eye on it until I was a good twenty feet away. A rattlesnake bite was always bad, but to get bit down here in the gorge would be deadlier than a dose of the Flu.

  Cecil’s encounter with the snake had turned him around. His tracks were now facing back upstream. Watching every step—every stick and rock looked like a snake to me now—I followed the tracks up over a saddle and back down into the Garden Creek drainage, into the shadow of the Tonto Platform a thousand feet above me. It was getting late. Even if I found Cecil now, we wouldn’t make it home before dark.

  Crossing Garden Creek led me back to the lower stretches of Bright Angel Trail, two miles from the bridge. Several sets of mule tracks cluttered the trail. I couldn’t tell whether Cecil had headed up or down. I decided to head back down. If Cecil had decided to head for the rim I wouldn’t be able to catch him. Besides, I’d left my fish—and my sister—back at the river.

  Darkness falls quickly in the canyon. Once the sun hits the rim, the shadows deepen, the temperature drops, and the sky turns to a deep indigo, like new blue jeans. Within minutes I was having trouble seeing. I picked my way carefully down the trail, still thinking about snakes. I stumbled several times on loose rocks and, at one point, skidded down a short slope on my butt. I had reached the river and was nearing the suspension bridge when I heard something between a chuckle and a snort—the sound a mule might make. Was it Cecil or Frosty? I stopped and listened, then heard the muted sound of hooves on sand, straight ahead. I continued forward, walking silently. The sun was gone, the moon had not yet risen, and the sky had turned from blue to dark slate. As I came around a grove of mesquite
trees I saw Cecil standing beside the trail and, beside him, a human shape. For an instant I thought it was Harryette, but then I saw long, dark hair.

  I said, “Hello?”

  The figure turned toward me. I glimpsed wide eyes, smooth cheeks, the flash of white teeth.

  “You found my mule,” I said.

  The figure stepped off the trail and melted into the dusk. My heart was pounding even harder than it had when I’d seen the rattlesnake. Rattlesnakes were dangerous, but they were a known danger.

  Phantoms were something else entirely.

  I found Harryette sitting on the sand spit by the rapids. She had started a small fire, and was roasting a trout on the end of a stick. The smell hit me right in the belly. I hadn’t eaten in hours. I tied Cecil next to Frosty, doing a better job with the knots this time, and joined Harryette at the fire.

  You found him.

  I nodded.

  Hungry?

  Yes.

  She handed me a second sharpened stick. I skewered a gutted trout and propped it up near the fire. We sat listening to the skin crackle and spit. Globs of trout fat fell into the fire, little firebombs making the flames dance higher.

  I saw the Phantom, I signed.

  Harryette shook her head. You are a pain. Uncle is going to kill you.

  I saw it, really. If it wasn’t a ghost, it was a person. A girl.

  You were seeing things. Nobody lives in the canyon anymore.

  Then it had to be the Phantom.

  I’m not listening to you.

  Why not? You believe in the Kinka. The Kinka, according to stories we had heard from travelers, were a band of marauding Survivors. It was said that wherever they appeared, they left behind only death.

  The Kinka are real.

  In your dreams, maybe.

  Harryette shrugged. I could tell she was mad at me, but there was nothing I could do about it. We ate our fish without talking. It tasted great, even without salt. By the time we finished, the full moon had appeared over the rim.

  We filled our water bags, loaded up the mules, and headed back up the trail by the light of the moon. We rode in silence, trusting Cecil and Frosty to stay on the trail. It reminded me of the trip Harryette and I had made after our parents had died. We had walked all the way from Williams to the canyon—eighty miles without talking. There had been no point in trying. Harryette had lost her speech, and nothing I said made sense to her. A gulf wider than the Grand Canyon had opened between us. Later, even though we learned to speak in sign language, it was never the same. Harryette had one foot in some other world, a private place she permitted no one to enter. Not even me.

  We reached the rim at sunrise. Uncle stood waiting at the trailhead, exhausted and worried. I braced myself for the lecture of a lifetime, but all he did was take a long, hard look at the both of us, then turn and walk away. I walked the mules to their corral, fed and watered them, then staggered up to my room. I was too tired to worry about Uncle, or about anything else. I don’t even remember falling into bed.

  EMORY

  SOMETHING TICKLED MY NOSE: I snorted and flailed, moving from dreams into grogginess. I rolled onto my side, squeezing my eyes shut against the light. As I began to slip back into sleep’s soft embrace, the tickling returned, this time way up inside my nostril. I slapped at my face with a leaden arm, hit myself in the nose hard enough to send a shock of pain across my cheeks. Someone laughed. I opened my eyes and sat up.

  The room was bright with afternoon light. Tim Gordon stood above me, grinning, holding a long blade of grass between his thumb and forefinger.

  “I got it up there a good three inches,” he said.

  I threw my pillow at him. He just laughed and let it bounce off his chest.

  When I thought about Tim, I always thought about him just like that—laughing and grinning, long blond hair falling over his face, green eyes jumping.

  He said, “Your unc says he’s gonna beat you bloody and feed you to the coyotes.”

  “I don’t care what he does.” Uncle made a lot of threats, but he never actually hurt me. The lecture would be bad enough. I swung my legs over the edge of the bed. I was still wearing the same clothes I’d rode up in, reeking of mules and sweat.

  “Harryette said you almost lost a mule.”

  “It was all her fault”

  “That’s not what she says. She says she had to follow you to the river to keep you out of trouble.”

  I looked away. The one thing I didn’t like about Tim was the way he acted around my sister. He wouldn’t come out and admit it, but he had a huge crush on Harryette.

  “She told me you thought you saw a ghost.”

  I stood up. “I gotta get cleaned up.”

  “Well, hurry up. Your unc sent me to get you. We got a problem we gotta talk about. They’re down in the lobby.”

  Uncle and Hap were sitting in the big leather chairs near the fireplace, looking at a map and talking quietly. Emory stood off to the side, beneath Bullwinkle’s head, big brown hands clasped over his belt buckle, naked face slack, earth-colored eyes half-lidded. Yellow teeth showed between rubbery lips. He was so tall that it looked as if Bullwinkle was about to give his bald head a lick.

  I couldn’t tell if he was listening to Uncle and Hap, or just lost in his own little world. Every few seconds he would make a smacking sound with his thick lips. One time I heard Hap say Emory was smart like a mule. I think he meant the big Survivor was smarter than he looked. I wondered what he’d been like before the Flu. I wondered what he’d lost.

  Harryette, curled up on the sofa, had her nose in a book, probably something Tim had brought her. Tim was practically illiterate, but he knew she liked to read, and he always brought her books. He was sitting on the floor with his back to the fire, watching her. It was pathetic. Harryette was four years older than Tim. As far as she was concerned he was just a squirrelly kid. The whole thing made me sick.

  Uncle and Hap stopped talking and looked at me. Hap grinned, his sun-blasted features crinkling. He said, “Hello there, young man!”

  “Hi, Hap.”

  “Hear you did some fishing!”

  I shrugged. Uncle’s face was blank.

  Hap said, “And here I thought it was just my kid knew how to get his self in trouble.” He looked at Tim, who was trying to hide a huge grin.

  I said, “If Tim was with me we’d probably still be down there.”

  Nobody thought that was funny. Oh well. I sat down on the sofa next to Harryette, not because I particularly wanted to sit next to her, but to keep Tim from doing it.

  “So, what’s going on?” I asked.

  Hap and Uncle looked at each other. Hap’s smile disappeared.

  He said, “Chandler and I were just talking about that.” Chandler was Uncle’s real name, but Hap was the only one who ever used it. “You notice anything about the river when you were down there?”

  “It’s pretty low.”

  “I bet it’s damn near bone dry. You know those folks up there in Page?”

  I nodded. Page was a town at the foot of Lake Powell, eighty miles upstream. I didn’t know them personally, but last I’d heard there were about thirty people still living there in a fenced compound. It was a regular stop on Hap’s trading route.

  “Well,” Hap said, “we were just up that way, and they’re all dead. Every last one of ’em.”

  I felt the news like a kick in the gut.

  “The Flu?” I asked.

  Hap nodded. We all sat silently for a few seconds. This was bad news, but nothing we hadn’t heard before. There’d been an outbreak down in Sedona the year before, and one in Winslow. There were still some people alive in Sedona, but Winslow had turned into another ghost town. The people in Page had been lucky for years. They had kept their little town fenced off and were notoriously unfriendly to travelers but, as Uncle drilled into us, no matter how careful you are, the Flu can still get you. It can come with a traveling stranger, or a stray dog, or a migrating duck.


  Hap said, “We camped out at Bitter Springs for four days after we found them, just to make sure none of us had caught the bug.”

  Uncle said, “Tell them about the dam.”

  Hap cleared his throat and shifted in his chair. “We’re a little worried about that.”

  The Glen Canyon Dam, just a few miles from Page, had been built back in the late 1900s to generate electricity. The water that backed up behind it formed Lake Powell. Of course, the dam wasn’t making much electricity anymore. Who would use it?

  Uncle said, “We’re a lot worried about that.”

  Hap nodded. “Ever since the Flu hit, the folks in Page have been working the dam, opening up the valve gates to control the level of the lake. Now that they’re gone, there’s nobody up there keeping an eye on things. The lake’s pretty high. I figure they got sick while the gates were closed. That’s why the river’s so dry. The only water we’re seeing here is coming off the Little Colorado River and a few of the creeks. But Lake Powell, behind the dam, is rising. It’ll be coming over the top pretty soon.”

  Harryette made a series of signs. Hap looked to me to translate.

  “She wants to know why that’s a problem. The Hoover Dam has been overflowing for three years.”

  “The Hoover was made for that,” Uncle said. “It was built with a sloping base that lets the water sort of slide down it. That thing will hold for a hundred years. But the Glen Canyon Dam wasn’t designed to handle an overflow. You’ve seen little waterfalls in creek beds, right? You know how it gets kinda hollowed out behind the waterfall? That’s what will happen up there. A few months—maybe weeks—the base of the dam will be undercut and the whole thing will give way. It might happen even sooner. A big storm system could do it, or a little earthquake. All nine hundred trillion gallons of water in Lake Powell dumped into the canyon at once. There’ll be a wall of water a thousand feet high. Rip the guts right out of the canyon.”

  Harryette signed, There’s nobody down there. Why are you so worried?

  Uncle read her, then signed back clumsily, It will rip the ecosystem right out of the canyon. And the water will keep going. Out loud, he said, “It’s like dominoes.”