The Long Detour

The east road died in front of us, and I mean that with no figure in it at all.

I was half a mile from the Flagg crossroads, walking the shoulder with maybe two hundred other people, when the highway ahead filled with sound as a glass fills with water. It came over the pass from the east, the refugees' side, a long grinding wail, and the column stopped as one animal, and then the animal turned, all of us at once, because over the pass came one of the walkers, striding down the slope of the world with the sun on its hood, and behind it, in the wide sweep of its turning, the heat ray walked ahead of it like a torch touched to a field.

There is no accounting of that morning that does not sound invented. The ray moved along the highway in a straight line, and the highway, which had held four thousand cars in two lanes, became a line of burning wax. I saw it from the elevation of the crossroads, which was my salvation: I was uphill, north of the road, and the ray does not like going uphill, we learned its geometry by funerals. It took the overpass and the gas station and the northbound on-ramp and it did not take the tavern or the church, and the difference between those two facts is the whole of my life since.

The walker came down to the crossroads and stopped among the abandoned cars. And then it did the thing that turned the column from terror into something older than terror. It began to pick them up.

Cars. One at a time, in those braided lens-arms, with a delicacy that had a horrifying patience in it, the walker lifted the cars of the east road, turned them, looked into them, and set them down. Sometimes it set them down reversed. Sometimes it stacked them. I watched it examine a school bus for the length of ninety heartbeats, and then set the bus on its wheels in the middle of the junction, gently, exactly on the yellow lines, and my mind, which had so far survived by not making pictures, made this one: it was tidying. It was a being from a world of long patience arranging the wreckage of our afternoon, and it did not know, or did not care, that some of what it arranged had been people, and the sound that went up from the column at that sight was a single moan, one moan, made by four hundred throats.

I went north into the hills. Everyone went somewhere; the hills took me.

For six days I was in the high country with a drifting nation of refugees, and the high country is why any of us is alive, and I will honor it by writing what the high country was like. Cold nights. Cattle grids. Springs that the old-timers among us knew by name. Radios, always radios, and the radios told the story of the wider war in fragments. The air force had struck the pits with everything it had, and the pits, being machines, had mostly been empty, the cylinders guarded by something under the ground that no bomb yet moved.

A device had been tried in the mountains, something atomic, and the walkers near it had stood outside the blast radius for an hour and then walked through the fire when it cooled. There was a witness of it in our camp, a herder's son of twenty come down from the pass country with his eyes bandaged in his own shirt, blinded by the flash, and he spoke of it once, by the fire, to nobody in particular: the mountains lit up twice, and then the wind came through with no heat in it. A general said on the radio, and I wrote it down because it was the first true sentence of the war: We are fighting the hulls of their ships with the skins of our drums.

On the fifth day the jets came over the divide in a diamond of four, low, and from the smoke of the western sky rose one of their flying machines. It was like a shrike, a small horizontal thing that hung and slid and was among the jets before the eye could vote, and the ray from it, a ray thin as a wire, touched two of the four, and the other two turned east with smoke behind them, and the shrike rose back into the murk with the unhurried elegance of a fish into deep water. I heard men beside me on the ridge say the words you would expect, God, no, run, my girls, one old sheepherder saying the names of his dogs over and over like a rosary, and I said nothing. What do you say? We had been the species that owned the sky for a hundred years. The sky had been repossessed in ninety seconds, on a clear morning, in front of witnesses.

That night the wind carried the smell of the black smoke up the valleys, and the leaders of the camp made the decision that saved the remnant of us: up and over the divide, east, away from the river, away from everything. And there my road ended, because I would not go with them east.

I am not going to dress up why. Nora was east, and Danner was east, and so east I went, and over the divide, and down into the burned eastern valleys, and there, on the eighth day of the war, on a black ribbon of state highway with the weeds coming up through the cracks of the world, I learned what the radio had been saying behind the static for two days, the words that turned me around: the city had fallen, the river country was a carpet, and the walkers had been seen on the eastern pass roads too. The ring was closed. The places I could go were the places they already were.

So I turned west again, into the occupied country, a man walking backward out of a dream, and I did it on purpose, which is the part I will never explain to my own satisfaction. The east was clean and starving and hunted. The west was the enemy's parlor. And I could not shake the thought, half superstition, half arithmetic, that the only place left with news of anything was down by the river, where the enemy was thickest, because whatever the walkers were doing, they were doing it in the direction of St. Anselm, and where they were not, nothing human remained to know anything.

I came down to the Mica at Two Rivers on the eleventh day, counting as the radio counted, from the night the walkers rose, in the dark, following the railroad, and I will tell you what the occupied country is like, because the histories skip it, they go from the battles to the dying and leave out the middle, and the middle is where I lived. The middle is quiet. The middle is a town with its people gone and its store doors open and the cash registers full, because no one came to rob, because there was no one left to sell to, because the robbers had gone east with everyone else. The middle is a dog on a chain, dead of its chain. The middle is the red weed up over the fence wires with the fence rusting through them, a sound in the river at night like a slow crowd breathing, and the streets silver with their slime, and the only lights in the world are the hood-lights of the walkers out on the flats, moving in their patient orbit, and the sound of them walking, that groan of metal, far off, regular, like the town's heart has been replaced with something that keeps a different time.

At Two Rivers I found one lit window. I make no excuse for what I did next, which was walk up to it and knock, because the alternative was the riverbank and the slime and the breathing dark, and a man can only be a stone for so long. The window was the vestry of the Methodist church, and the man who opened the door to me was gauging my soul by lamplight before I had finished knocking, and his name was Lonnie Voss, and he was, he told me, the pastor of two flocks, one of which had fled, and one of which, he said, with a terrible paternity, God had seen fit to leave in his care, meaning himself. I was too far gone to do anything but be gathered.