Departure(20)
I wait, forcing her to answer.
“It does.”
“In my depressed state, I’ll be unable to take on any leadership duties. As you noted previously, this camp would be in chaos without me. That could lead to a loss of life.”
Sabrina’s eyes move to Harper and back to me, and I can almost see the wheels turning in that biological computer she calls a brain. “Noted,” she says.
Outside, I pass guns to the other three team leaders. They’ll alter their vectors forty-five degrees today, heading northeast, southeast, and southwest, respectively. Mike, Bob, and I will follow Mike’s eastward path back to the glass-and-steel structure, our pace quicker today. Our goal is to reach it before noon.
“Use the guns only if you’re threatened by hostile animals—save your ammunition for absolute emergencies. If you don’t find help, on your way back tomorrow look out for big game to shoot—deer, moose, cows, whatever you come across. Run back to the camp and get people to help you lug anything you kill back. You all know the situation. I’m not going to give you a speech. The truth is, if we don’t come back with help or food tomorrow, we’re looking at casualties in the following days. The elderly and weaker passengers are going to starve, and there are people in desperate need of medical supplies. Either we succeed, or people die. That’s it. Good luck.”
The group breaks up, and Mike, Bob, and I set out through the dense green forest and frosted fields. The tall grass thaws with the rising sun, soaking my pants below the knee as we go. It’s cold, but the pace keeps me warm. I try not to think about Harper.
We stop every hour to activate our cell phones and snap photos, but we never get any service or see anything significant. It’s like Mike said: hills, fields, and forest as far as we can see, both with the naked eye and with the binoculars Bob found in a carry-on bag yesterday.
Finally we get to the ridge from where Mike took the photograph, and spot the octagonal glass structure. It looks about ten miles away, and the hike to it confirms that. We don’t even stop for lunch. To Bob’s credit, he keeps up, though he’s panting a lot harder than Mike or me and looking drained. I could swear he’s aging by the hour, but I don’t think he’d miss this for anything.
About halfway to the octagonal structure, at one of our hourly stops, I look around through the binoculars and spot something else: a stone farmhouse to the south, maybe another ten miles away. I make a note of its position—if the glass structure is a bust, it will be our next stop. I study the house for a few minutes, searching for signs of life, but there’s no movement. It looks abandoned to me.
It’s later than I had hoped, midafternoon, when we finally get to the glass structure, which is much bigger than it looked from the ridge. It’s at least fifty feet high and maybe three hundred feet across. The glass walls are frosted bluish white, and the frame appears to be made of aluminum.
There’s no pathway, dirt, paved or otherwise leading to or from it. Very odd.
The three of us walk the perimeter, looking for a door. Halfway around, I hear the sound of a seal breaking. A panel rises from the ground toward the ceiling, a frosted glass curtain revealing a spectacle I can barely believe.
The three of us stand there, our eyes wide.
I know this place. I’ve been here only once in my life, but that day is easily one of my most vivid childhood memories.
I was eight then, and for the entire week before I visited this place, I counted down the days and hours. It wasn’t the destination that excited me. It was the chance to take a trip with my father. He was the US ambassador to the United Kingdom at that time, and we didn’t spend a lot of time together. That day, though, I felt very close to him.
To the other kids on the tour, this prehistoric monument was just a bunch of rocks in a field. Stonehenge was boring to them. To my father, though, it was not only history but inspiration, the symbol of an ideal. Nearly five thousand years ago, its builders had sweated, bled, and sacrificed to preserve their culture and their vision for future generations. That these mysterious people had erected Stonehenge and some part of it still remained to inspire and inform us, however cryptically, spoke to my father. It was how he saw his own career as a diplomat, I realized that day. He was building his own Stonehenge—America, and specifically its foreign relationships—to help pass down his vision of a better human society, a global one, with freedom and equality at its center. It wasn’t that he didn’t like me or spending time with me, he just thought his work was more important.
Stonehenge, age eight: that’s when I gained a perspective on my relationship with my father that spared me a lot of anguish throughout my childhood. It was a revelation for me, something to hold on to when I found myself wondering why he was never around, why other kids’ fathers took so much more interest in them.
But that revelation pales in comparison to the one that confronts me today. Twenty-eight years ago this was a crumbling ruin, chipped away by time and vandals, half the pillars gone, some lying on the ground. But the Stonehenge that towers before me now is no ruin. It looks like it was finished yesterday.
12
I am a boiling bag of meat. Meat soup inside a fragile skin shell.
The fever is consuming me. I’ve had the flu, and my mum had pneumonia three winters ago. This is neither. This is bad. I’m sick, and scared.