Darwinia

Something had stirred Finch to a fresh alertness. He stared past layered furs into the brutal night. “This isn’t the miracle I wanted,” he whispered. “Do you understand that, Mr. Law?”

Guilford was cold through and through. He found it hard to make himself concentrate. “I understand very little of this, Dr. Finch.”

“Isn’t that what you thought of me, you and Sullivan? Preston Finch, the fanatic, looking for evidence of divine intervention, like those people who claim to have found pieces of the Ark or the One True Cross?”

Finch sounded old as the night wind. “I’m sorry if you got that impression.”

“I’m not insulted. Maybe it’s true. Call it hubris. Sin of pride. I didn’t think things through. If nature and the divine are no longer separate then there might also be dark miracles. That awful city. The man whose bones unbroke themselves.”

And tunnels in the earth, and my twin in a tattered Army uniform, and demons straining at incarnation. No: not that. Let it all be illusion, Guilford thought. Fatigue and malnutrition and cold and fear.

Finch coughed into his hand, a wrenching sound. “It’s a new world,” he said.

No denying it. “We need to get some sleep, Dr. Finch.”

“Dark forces and light. They’re at our shoulders.” He shook his head sadly. “I never wanted that.”

“I know.”

A pause. “I’m sorry you lost your photographs, Mr. Law.”

“Thank you for saying so.”

He closed his eyes.

They traveled each day, a little distance, not far.

They followed game trails, rocky riverbeds, snowless patches beneath the mosque and sage-pine trees, places they wouldn’t leave obvious tracks. Periodically, the frontiersman left Guilford to supervise Finch while he went hunting with his Bowie knife. Often there was snake meat, and the moth-hawk roosts were a common last resort. But for many months there had been no vegetables save a few hard-scavenged roots or tough green mosque-tree spines boiled in water. Guilford’s teeth had loosened, and his vision was not as acute as it once had been. Finch, who had lost his glasses in the first attack, was nearly blind.

Days passed. Spring was not far off, by the calendar, but the skies remained dark, the wind cold and piercing. Guilford grew accustomed to the aching of his joints, the constant pain at every hinge in his body.

He wondered if the Bodensee had frozen. Whether he would see it again.

He kept his tattered journal inside his furs; it had never left his possession. The remaining blank pages were few, but he recorded occasional brief notes to Caroline.

He knew his strength was failing. His bad leg had begun to pain him daily, and as for Finch — he looked like something dragged out of an insect midden.

Temperatures rose for three days, followed by a cold spring rain. The season was welcome, the mud and wind were not. Even the fur snakes had grown moody and gaunt, foraging in the muck for last year’s ground cover. One of the animals had gone blind in one eye, a cataract that turned the pupil gauzy and pale.

Fresh storms came towering from the west. Tom Compton scouted out a rockfall that provided some natural shelter, a granite crawl space open on two sides. The floor was sand, littered with animal droppings. Guilford blocked up both entrances with sticks and furs and tethered the snakes outside to act as an alarm. But if the little cavern had once been occupied, its tenant showed no sign of returning.

A torrent of cold rain locked them into the sheltered space. Tom hollowed out a fire pit under the stones’ natural chimney. He had taken to humming ridiculous, sentimental old Mauve Decade tunes — “Golden Slippers,” “Marbl’d Halls,” and such. No lyrics, just raw basso melodies. The effect was less like song and more like an aboriginal chant, mournful and strange.

The rain storm rattled on, easing periodically but never stopping. Runnels of water coursed down the stone. Guilford scratched out a trench to conduct moisture to the lower opening of the cave. They began to ration their food. Everyday we stay here, Guilford thought, we’re a little weaker; every day the Rhine is a little more distant. He supposed there was some neat equation, some equivalency of pain and time, not working in their favor.

He dreamed less often of the Army picket, though the picket was still a regular fixture of his nights, concerned, imploring, and unwelcome. He dreamed of his father, whose doggedness and sense of order had conducted him to an early grave.

No judgment implied, Guilford thought. What brings a man to this desolate tag-end of the Earth, if not a ferocious single-mindedness?

Maybe the same single-mindedness would carry him back to Caroline and Lily.