Summer of the Apocalypse

Chapter Eleven EARTH DANCING

Don’t get up,” said Teach.

Campfire light flashed rhythmically against the bluff’s tan wall of stone where a swath of black marked the smoke trails of previous fires. Eric rested his back on his still rolled sleeping bag. The rest of the party sat equidistant from the fire, their faces yellow in the light; the back of their heads lost in the shadows.

“’Scuse me?” said Eric. His stomach bulged pleasantly from dinner, a savory squirrel stew, and he felt tired and lazy. The night was so warm he thought he might just go to sleep as he was, without unrolling the bag, like Dodge and Rabbit.

Teach put his hand out to Eric, motioning him to stay still. “A rare privilege. Earth dancers.” He pointed beyond the fire behind Eric. The other men looked past him, holding their dinner plates still, as if frozen.

“Move slowly,” said Teach.

Eric dropped a shoulder and turned. At first, blinded by the firelight, he saw nothing, then white shapes resolved themselves from the blackness. Men. They were clearly men, naked and painted white, dancing at the edge of the clearing.

Teach said, “Have you seen them before?”

The dancers, perhaps fifteen or so of them, bent low, brushing their hands against the ground, then jumped for the stars, throwing their hands wide open. Other than the crackle of flame, Eric heard nothing, but the dancers bounced in rhythm, all of them low, then they burst up, as if on cue, hanging in their outstretched poses, a mountain ballet.

“No,” he whispered. He remembered the white figures in Phil’s videos, the ones driving him crazy with fear. “Maybe,” he added. “Who are they?”

One of them broke toward the fire, running, hands low and open, Forty feet away, he put his arms out like wings and veered away, rising from his crouch as if he could fly. One after another, others followed his lead, some coming as close as a dozen feet before curving back to the dark.

“First men,” said Teach.

When they ran particularly close, Eric could see that the white was a powder, like chalk, some places smeared thickly enough to crack at the elbows and knees, and almost worn off in other places. Their hair was thick with it.

“My boys think they’re spirits, or ghosts. Their momma’s scared them with stories of Earth Dancers, and now they believe them to be supernatural.”

Someone hissed, “We’re not babies anymore, Teach.” But the voice sounded awestruck. Teach continued, “Feral men. I think they’re the children of the children of the children. No, don’t speak to them. They’ll run. When the plague moved on, some of the survivors were little kids, four, five, six years old. They must have been horribly afraid, their parents dead, the dogs going wild, so they hid in the city.”

Eric hadn’t thought of that before. The plague killed ninety-nine percent. In the weeks after, when only the survivors were left, one out of a hundred of everyone still lived. One out of a hundred of his school mates. That would mean twelve of them. One out of a hundred criminals. In prisons, behind the bars with the rest of the dead, waiting for guards who would never come to let them out. Were there a hundred people in iron lungs in Denver? Maybe. How long did the person in the iron lung survive, unable to move, maybe only able to see part of the room in the mirror mounted over his or her face, seeing a nurse slumped over her desk? And, of course, the children wandering in the empty shopping centers. He didn’t know why he pictured them in shopping centers. Where would a five-year-old go? One out of a hundred of them went somewhere. One out of a hundred two-year-olds couldn’t reach the doorknob, or couldn’t turn it.

The image made Eric ill. He rubbed his eyes. The ground was real. It pressed hard against his knees. The slick fabric of the sleeping bag was real. The dancers, leaping unbelievably in the mountain air, beneath a million needle stars, were real. Bad memories shouldn’t be real.

One of the dancers charged the fire, stopped at the invisible boundary, and instead of running away, began to wave his hands in the air in front of him, as if to capture the flames. Eric started, almost falling off his sleeping bag. This dancer was a woman, young one, maybe fourteen or fifteen, naked like the others. The chalk was almost gone from her lower legs, brushed off by grass Eric guessed, and her strong, dark skin rippled with the intensity of her movement as she swayed. She stared directly at Eric. She knows me, he thought.

Teach said, “They must have grown up like animals, isolated, maybe even forgetting their language, until, eventually, they met up. None of them trusting anyone who was not like themselves, avoiding the adults who might have taken them in. Angry, perhaps, at the adults who were their parents who had died and left them alone.”

Another dancer joined the first, close enough to the fire that Eric could see the lines in their faces where the chalk had crinkled and fallen away from the corners of their mouths and eyes.

“And after a few years, these kids had kids, and then their kids had kids, each generation farther and farther from the Gone Time until what they are is what you see, true natives of the land.” Five of the dancers gyrated in a line in front of Eric now, another one a woman. Eric thought they were scrawny, all muscle, limbs as lithe as coyotes. The first woman continued to lock her eyes on Eric, as if trying by force of will to get inside his head. The rest continued running and jumping, weaving patterns, sometimes touching each other in passing, a hand on a shoulder or the top of a head. The eyes were unnerving, the feeling that the woman knew him. Eric said, “How do they live? They must freeze at night this high in the mountains.”

A log popped in the fire sending an ember onto Eric’s arm. He flinched, and it sizzled for a second, but he didn’t want to knock it off, sure the sudden movement would end the boisterous ritual.

“Mostly they stick to the mine shafts. Mountains here are full of them, or natural caves. Pure hunters, too. Don’t believe they raise a thing. If they can run it down, they eat it.” Teach’s voice stayed low and even, almost as if he were chanting. The dancers either didn’t hear it or ignored the sound. “My guess is their homes are deep where the cold can’t get them. They store food for the winter and don’t come out. Sometimes the boys’ll kill an elk or deer, dress it and leave it hanging in the woods. It disappears. Bear might have got it or the Earth Dancers. Don’t matter much to them. I’ve never seen smoke from fires they might make, so I guess they don’t use it, which might explain what we’re watching now.”

Another voice from the fire said, “I dream about them Teach. Women Earth Dancers, like that one.” The two women, both tightly muscled, small-breasted, narrow-hipped, moved sinuously in the firelight. The voice continued, “They’re, you know, those kinds of dreams.” Someone else chuckled.

The voice snapped, “You never had a wild Earth Woman dream?” Whoever laughed didn’t reply. “I have a dream like that and I figure whatever I do the next day is sort of… I don’t know… blessed.” The wind shifted. The tops of pines creaked as they leaned slightly in the new direction. The dancers stopped, looked about as if aware of some danger. None of them said anything; he saw no gesture, but all except one woman turned and fled across the road and into the forest. Eric thought of fish in an aquarium, changing directions at the same time with no visible way of communicating. The woman watched the others leave, then she crouched, her knees wide apart, arms between her legs, hair covering her face. She smoothed the dirt at her feet, concentrating, unaware, it seemed, of the crowd of men staring at her from the fire. Eric could see them from the corners of his eyes, all intent on the young woman powdered in white.

She traced a figure in the dirt with her finger, shrugged her shoulders, looked at Eric like a portrait artist, smoothed the figure out again and retraced it. Eric shifted position—his back was cramping—and the woman glanced up, like a bird, half rising from her crouch. Her eyes, reflecting fire light, met Eric’s and he shook his head, no. Please, he thought, please don’t go. There was something inspiring and beautiful in her, some primal element that made her seem more tree and stone than human. He couldn’t place it. Scratches covered her legs; her hair was matted and tangled, but the line of her arms and legs, the strength in her thighs. In this position, her muscles bulged, and Eric decided “scrawny” was a wrong word to apply to her. Hard was better. He remembered women who worked out in the Gone Time—he’d had a poster of some on the wall of his room when he was fifteen—aerobic instructors with smooth, rounded muscles, tanned skin, beautiful hair. They were… buffed. The Earth Dancer’s musculature looked efficient, not showy, pure animal. He imagined her grandparents or great-grandparents in the Gone Time, driving to work, probably in a Volvo, stopping for breakfast at—what was that place?— McDonalds, having an Egg McMuffin and drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup. Eric remembered a friend of his in school talking about a schoolmate of theirs, a pathetic, fat girl who waddled down the hall, the butt of jokes. He cringed at the memory. Undoubtedly both of them were dead now, gone in the plague. Old friends and bad jokes all lost. His friend had said, “She’s built for comfort, not for speed.” The Earth Dancer looked built for speed, like she could take on a mountain lion.

Teach whispered, “We find signs of them in the woods: cairns of stones arranged in circles, and animal bones carefully stacked.”

“How many of them are there?”

The woman sidled around, looking at whatever she was drawing on the ground from a different angle. Teach said, “The land can only support so many carnivores. A hundred and twelve people live in Highwater. I’d guess their tribe might be half that size.”

She stood, hands resting on her thighs, and waved her hand at Eric, a beckoning. He looked behind himself at the fire and the men around it, then back at the woman. She waved again. He pointed his hand to his chest. “Me,” he mouthed. She waved a third time, more emphatically.

“She wants you to follow her,” said Teach. “I wouldn’t.”

“God,” someone said. “It’s a summoning. It’s like a deer asking you to dinner.”

“More like a dream.”

“I wish she’d ask me,” said someone else wistfully.

She walked a few steps away and motioned to Eric again.

Eric faced Teach. He felt a swelling in his chest. The woman, he thought, for a moment there was like Leda, intent and focused. “I’m going,” he said. He thought, What am I doing? But she stood, her hand outstretched to him, and everything felt right. Her dancing, the ceremony to moon light and night, the nakedness and vulnerability of it all, felt right, mystical. He would go with her and he would be safe.

“They must know you,” said Teach. “Maybe they watched us following you, or maybe they’ve always known you. They’ve never tried to communicate with us.” He sounded a little jealous. Eric brushed dirt from his pants and walked into the darkness. A few strides into the clearing he looked back. Teach and his boys stared after him. A couple waved. He turned and followed the woman. For the first few hundred yards, walking was easy. The Earth Dancer stayed ten feet in front of him on a faint trail that started on the other side of the old highway. A bright moon provided enough light to see his step although he couldn’t tell if shadows on the ground were holes or safe places to set his feet. Then the trail grew steep, and the woman, her skin the color of moon, used her hands to brace herself as she climbed.

Sandy soil and rip rap skittered beneath Eric’s shoes, and he grabbed tree roots, weeds, and rocky outcrops to keep from slipping. “Where are we going, young lady?” She shook her head impatiently and kept moving up. The trail was steep, and several times Eric got close enough to smell her. He wrinkled his noise. She was rank, but it wasn’t really an unclean smell, he decided. She smelled like… deep caves, moist and warm and close, and like crushed leaves. Aggressively female too.

The trail quit climbing. They’d reached a high ridge that sloped away to either side. In the valley to Eric’s right, the fire flickered through the intervening trees, and the highway shone like a pale ribbon. Now that his eyes had fully adjusted, he walked as confidently as he would in full daylight. Ahead, the rest of the Earth Dancers waited, squatting by the sides of the trail. They gazed at Eric as he passed, faces white and neutral, eyes aglitter with the moon. None looked over thirty. He wondered if their life-spans were short, like medieval man. Did they have any kind of doctoring, or had that disappeared too? “Do any of you…” The sound of his voice breaking the silence startled him. “… speak?” Far away, a coyote yipped and a host of others joined in. No Earth Dancer replied. Eric said, “I’m feeling over-dressed for this party.” One of the men walked beside him, casting quick glances from the corner of his eye. Eric felt like he was being measured in some way. He sighed. “Lots of nights I’ve kicked my clothes off too.” And he had. Since his house was a couple of miles from his nearest neighbor, on hot summer nights he would sit on his porch and watch the stars slip behind the mountains one by one. A wink and they were gone, and after he’d sat long enough, he’d feel a part of the revolution of the Earth, a speck on a plate, tilting, tilting ever up. After hours on the porch, he had no illusion that the stars moved, and he wondered how anyone could have ever believed that they revolved around us.

Ahead, a mountain swallowed the ridge, and the trail turned right, becoming a narrow shelf road. He kicked a rock over the edge and it bounced and clattered for seconds, starting a half a dozen other rocks on their way before reaching the tree line. The woman led the way, then Eric, then the rest of the party. He started whistling the theme music to The Bridge Over the River Kwai to hear the sound. The woman peeked over her shoulder. He launched into a second chorus, and another whistler joined him. Eric grinned. In a moment, they were all whistling, and he laughed at the image of it: a hard, wild naked woman powdered in white, followed by an old man from another time, followed by the rest of the tribe, all whistling a tune from a one-hundred-year-old movie about a war that only he knew anything about. After a third time through, he stopped, and they walked in silence again. A hand patted him on the back. The man behind Eric ducked his head when Eric looked at him, but he thought he saw a smile. At the next turn in the trail, the woman stopped and Eric nearly ran into her. She stepped to a rock wall that blocked the trail and slapped her hand sharply on it three times. A rope ladder tumbled from above. When she reached the top, she waved him up and he followed clumsily, having a hard time finding the loose rungs with his feet as the ladder twisted. Swinging from one side to the other, he banged his hip twice. The rope felt ragged and homemade. He wondered what they used to make it. Another Earth Dancer, this one an unpowdered blonde woman, seven or eight months pregnant, held a torch that instantly ruined his night vision. Eric thought, Ah, they do use fire. She handed the leader a torch, lit it for her, and they waited for the rest of the Dancers to join them. The flickering light showed the entrance to a mine. Huge, rough beams framed the entrance, and beyond them, bright sparkles reflected the light back to him.

The pregnant woman led.

What is this? Eric thought. The mine’s walls and ceiling were pure gold. He inspected closer, but the torch moved several paces farther away, and the bright color faded to gray. Down the shaft, golden light bathed the two torch bearers, while the rest of the Dancers waited for Eric to continue. He touched the wall, and something small and flat fell into his hand. He hurried to catch up. A turn brought them into a large room that smelled moist and human. Other torches sputtered from niches in the walls, revealing the home of the Earth Dancers. Piles of skins dotted the floor, and Eric thought at first that this was a storage room until he spotted eyes looking at him from each pile. Here the walls were golden too. Eric took down a torch and held the flame next to the piece he’d taken from the shaft. One side was white with a dark stripe along its length. He flipped it over. It was a Visa Gold card. He walked around the room. Thousands of Gold cards covered the rock, each held with a tiny bit of something gummy. It might even be gum, he thought, but where would they get so many cards? He checked the back of the Visa he held. The signature read, Mason Withers, which matched the embossing on the front. He checked others; they were all embossed and signed. “God,” he said, “what a horrible job collecting them must have been.” The Earth Dancers watched him. “Someone was very persistent,” he added, holding up the card.

The woman, who he now thought of as his Earth Dancer, pulled on his shirt sleeve and tugged him toward a shaft at the back of the room where the rest of the Earth Dancers had gathered. “Okay, I’m coming.” He pulled away to stick the cards he held back in place.

Light green covered the walls in the new shaft. He checked. “American Express,” he said to her. “Don’t leave home without it.”

Pure white reflected the light in the small room the shaft led to. Eric chuckled. Sears cards, of course. In the middle of the room stood a large grandfather clock. Earth Dancers formed a semi-circle around it and sat on the stone floor. The woman lit two torches on the wall, then placed her torch in an empty niche. She knelt in front of the clock and pressed her forehead to the floor. How out of place the clock looks, Eric thought. A beautiful piece of work, though. Its mirrored oak finish and polished brass fittings called to his mind paneled drawing rooms. No, smoking rooms, where massive, overstuffed leather chairs held proper gentleman who smoked pipes and read from gilt-edged books. “Your drink, sir,” the butler would say, and in the background, the grandfather clock ticked majestically, calling out the hour with measured chimes.

All of the naked Earth Dancers leaned toward the clock until their foreheads pressed against the floor. This is a cathedral! I’m in a place of worship. Why have they brought me here?

After a minute where no one moved, the woman, barely raising her head, crawled to the base of the clock and opened the glass front that covered the weights and pendulum. Blindly she groped in the cavity until she touched the pendulum, then she pushed it so if began moving back and forth. Each swing grew shorter, and the clock didn’t tick. She pushed it again, looking at Eric this time.

“It’s just a clock,” he said. His face flushed, and he felt embarrassed for their posture. He pictured their wild leaps at the moon, their wonderful patterns of dance. They belonged. They were scary and primitive and feral, but they seemed proud. He was the one that was out of place, in his clothes, in his remembrances. “It’s just an old, dead clock from a world that never existed.” He spat the words. Anger filled him too. They hadn’t chosen him from the camp because there was a special connection. They didn’t know him from anyone else. He was just the oldest, the most likely to know how to fix the clock. The closest human to their parents’ age.

She kept her head on the floor. The pendulum stopped. Eric’s] head sagged. He felt tired. It’s late, he thought, and I should be asleep. Voice thick with irony, he asked, “Does anyone know the time?” Her eyes pleaded with him to help, and again she reminded him of Leda whose eyes were so expressive, and he said, “I’m sorry.” He didn’t know exactly why he was apologizing, but he knew he should. “You’re not responsible for your gods. I mean, they’re not your fault. You’ve been sold a bill of goods by moms and dads who didn’t even know what they were doing.”

He thought, at least this god, if that is what it is, when it works is visible. At least this god is dependable and regular. This god keeps good time, and a god could do a lot worse than that. He stepped into the circle, and, not knowing what to do, bowed a little before peering into the clock. The woman crawled out of his way.

“Have you tried pulling on the weights?” Bottoms of three acorn patterned, brass weights barely showed at the top of the case. “Of course you have.” But he pulled one to the bottom anyway. When he let go, it rattled back to the top.

“I had a pendulum clock once,” he said. “Here, give me a torch.” No one moved. He got one himself and held it so it cast light inside. This is tricky work, he thought. When the flame approached the clock close enough to see the works, it also scorched his cheek. He didn’t want to singe the wood, so he put the torch back, reached inside and worked by touch. As he hoped, just like his clock at home, the main weight pulley screw was loose so that the gear on the back of it wasn’t engaging anymore. Awkwardly reaching both hands inside, he pushed the pulley wheel against the gears, then tightened the screw by hand. This time when he pulled the weight down, it stayed.

“Here goes,” he said and pushed the pendulum. The ticking echoed loudly in the small chamber. Dawn light doused the last and brightest stars as Eric and the Earth Dancer climbed down the steep path into Coal Creek Canyon. “It’s been a pleasure,” he said, “being able to help you.” She reached the bottom and waited for him. During the hike back, she stayed much closer than she had on the way to their home. In the morning light, she seemed much smaller than she had in her moon-lit costume, and though she seemed no less animal-like, she was less threatening. Her smell at close quarters was almost overpowering, pure mountain creature.

Eric found himself staring at her as she walked in front of him across the highway, the muscles in her back and butt contracting pleasantly at each stride, and even though she was narrow-hipped, she still had a slight side to side sway.

“Stop it, Eric,” he said. “She’s young enough to be your great-granddaughter.” Then to her, he said, “You know, some of the young men I’m traveling with have dreams about you. Maybe you ought to not be such a stranger.” She didn’t even look back. He’d been talking to her the whole walk. No one in camp appeared to be awake yet. Fifty yards from the sleeping men, she stopped, facing Eric. He thought he might have a few dreams about her himself. “I’d invite you for breakfast, but I think you need a coat.”

Impassive, she looked at him, and he could tell now, peering through the white powder that covered her face, that her eyes were brown. He wanted to shake her hand, or hug her, but he was sure she would run away, and now he didn’t want this odd meeting to end. “You’ll have to fix the clock yourself the next time,” he said.

The woman reached out and held his wrist. Shocked, Eric flinched but didn’t pull away. She pressed his hand against his chest, then pulled it to her breast, holding it palm flat to her. She said, slowly and distinctly in a low, throaty voice, another reminder of Leda, “Don’t tell them where we live.” Then she let go and ran across the road. Eric stood for a long time watching the last place he’d seen the Earth Dancer. Finally he walked into the camp, trying to decide what he could tell them of the night. Before he bent over to shake Teach awake, he realized he could still feel the shape of her breast in his hand.

After a breakfast of strong herb tea and hard bread, where Eric told the party almost nothing of his evening, Teach pulled him aside.

“You got some secrets last night, that’s obvious, but maybe you can tell me something about this.” He took Eric to a spot outside the camp where a blanket lay on the ground. “We covered it up so the wind wouldn’t get at it.”

He pulled the blanket away. “It’s what the Earth Dancer woman was drawing in the dirt before you went with her. Does it mean anything to you?”

Eric rubbed his throat, and an almost religious ecstasy filled him. The world is a magical stage, he thought; she did choose me. She knew who I was. The drawing, sketched in the dirt she had smoothed so carefully, was a noose.