The Lost Country, Episode Three

by | Wayne Kyle Spitzer-3

I WAS ABOUT TO POUR out the last canister and fill it with gasoline when Linda yelped from the other side of the station (she’d gotten rex piss all over herself and gone to get paper towels); calling out, terror-stricken, “Chris! Get over here!”

I put down the can and listened: to the dinging of the gas pump as it filled the Cuda’s tank and clicked, finishing; to the soft patter of rain on cycads and palm fronds.

Nothing. No snarling of velociraptors as they closed in on us across the garbage-strewn lot. No titter of Compies as they scurried and stalked through the moist, dank underbrush.

It was the nothing that bothered me.

“What is it?” I said—unfastening my holster, sliding out the Glock. But there was no response.

And then I ‘got over there’—raising the g*n even as I saw the raptors ... lowering it, slowly, when I realized they were dead.

Dead, but standing, sprinting—frozen mid-stride, like Govedare’s horses. Dead and fused with gas pumps so that they constituted something never seen: which was a kind of monument forged in the time-fires of the Flashback, the Spiral Jetty of a bold, new world. Jurassic installation art.

“Jesus,” I said, re-holstering the pistol. I placed a hand on the small of her back. “It’s okay. They—they’ve been dead awhile.”

She stared at them as if in a trance, tears gathering at the corners of her eyes. “You know, it’s funny. All that time spent worrying about nuclear weapons and killer viruses ... climate change, doomsday asteroids. Just so it could end like this—with something nobody could have anticipated.”

She gazed out at the sky beyond the canopy and the dark, tumultuous clouds, and at what we’d dubbed the Blue Borealis, with its queer, shifting patterns and multicolored lights. “Where do you think they are? The millions—the billions—who disappeared?”

She turned and raised her head at me, her pale eyes flicking up and down my face, her full lips close to my own. “Are they in Heaven, you think? Was there—was there a Rapture, like in Left Behind, and we just, we just sort of didn’t make it?”

I felt my blood quicken as I looked down at her, and my groin begin to tighten. “No. No, I don’t think so.” I glanced at the strange lights, like so-called healing crystals hung from a rearview mirror, or diamonds in an LSD trip. “I don’t think we’ll ever know. The important thing is—”

But she was no longer looking at me, having focused instead on something beyond me, something—I turned and followed her gaze but saw only another pump island, beyond which lie the food mart. “What? What is it?”

She stepped around me and approached the island, namely the support column next to it, a white concrete edifice plastered with posters and flyers and other miscellany. “Isn’t that strange ...”

I walked over to the thing and examined it with her. “I guess I’m not seeing it.”

“Sure you are,” she said. “Look closer. Or stand back a little.”

I stood back a little.

“Nope,” I said, and c****d my head. “Just flyers. Just—”

I stared at the largest poster—which depicted a man in an ebony robe playing an electric guitar, which sparked and smoked—its colors as crisp as they were lysergic, its blacks as deep and dark as the pit. PRIMAL CULT, it read, FEATURING FIREHANDS JACK. LIVE AT THE FOUNTAIN EVERY FRIDAY, SATURDAY, AND SUNDAY. JOIN US.

“It’s practically new,” I said. “Like it was hung only yesterday. Today, even.” I reached out and touched its smooth, straight edge. “It’s not even damp.”

That’s when we heard it—Penny’s scream; coming at us from the food mart, riding the moist air to our ears. Stopping abruptly, as though someone had placed a hand over her mouth.

“Your g*n,” I said, but didn’t wait, taking off for the convenience store in a pulse-pounding dash, getting there in time to see a woman lying unconscious even as Penny was loaded into the back of a pickup (which was already moving). Targeting its tires—unsuccessfully—as it backfired and sped into the vespertine dark.

I bolted for the Cuda—passing Linda going the other way—even as the Hemi leapt up with a full-throated roar and its headlights came on, creating cones of rain.

And then I could only watch as the midnight-blue Mopar followed the pickup and its gears ground, causing me to wince. As the two vehicles motored up South Union Avenue and disappeared in the shadow of the moss-covered capitol building, the dome of which loomed, burnt and pitted, like a ghostly green moon.

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