(“Here it comes,” Skinner said in the living room.)
There it came, a round ripping through his chest plate, which put the kibosh on the velocity enough so that it lodged in his trunk without splattering out his back. Then another one to the leg, a kind of afterthought. He plunged into a pool of blood where all sound disappeared.
In Carl’s memory he dragged Skinner by the leg down the hall, unloading at other newmans lurching out of dorm rooms. The memory fritzed out a second, flipped perspectives, then Skinner had a close-up view of a busted iPod, its mysterious guts revealed. Rounds whanged off metal, the elevator doors. His eyes fluttered and in the living room one hundred years later Carl squeezed his hand so hard it went numb. Here we go.
Skinner trudged in tattered fatigues across the mesa, the vista meticulously hi-res down to individual grains of sand. His peeling skin and the rasp in his throat seemed to imply he’d been out here for weeks. Up ahead, far enough away that he could pinch the whole scene between forefinger and thumb, was some kind of encampment. It was near twilight, the sky awash in pollution. A wall of furnace-intensity wind. Closer still, through eyes squinty and dry, he made out a refrigerator standing inexplicably amid the desolation. And piles of things nearby, a human form bent before a meager fire. Some guy? Some weird guy with long hair and a beard, near-naked in these punishing elements? It seemed improbable, but it was true. The old man didn’t look up until Skinner was standing, bewildered, a few feet away. The man gestured for him to sit on an old bald tire. Nearby a full-length mirror reflected the sun back across the horizon. There was a pile of kids’ stuffed animals and a pile of books. Skinner tried to speak. The man waved his hand as if to tell him not to bother, then rose and opened the fridge. Wisps of cold vapor rolled out and Skinner almost cried to see it stocked full of food.
“BREWSKI?” the old man said.
Skinner nodded, tears beading at the edges of his eyes. The old man cranked the cap off a bottle of Pyramid Hefeweizen and handed it to him. Skinner trembled as the cold beer foamed in his mouth. He sucked it down so fast some came back up. The old man handed him another, then offered a sandwich. Skinner ate, moaning through his full mouth.
“Who are you?” Skinner asked finally, burping.
“I AM THE LAST DUDE,” the old man said.
“What is this place?”
“THIS IS THE END OF THE ROAD.”
“How did I get here?”
“I CALLED YOU HERE.”
“Why?”
“YOU MUST FUCK.”
“Huh?”
“REPRODUCE,” the Last Dude said. “NOW SCRAM.”
A murder of crows materialized and lifted Skinner into the sky. The old man’s encampment grew smaller beneath his dangling feet as the temperature dropped and wind scraped out the insides of his ears. As he rose sunward the desert floor widened like a spreading stain. Far below, methodically piled stones spelled what appeared to be an unfinished message to the heavens:
Here the memory faltered into a blue screen then snapped back to full resolution with the sound of a helicopter. Skinner looked around trying to find it, seeing only the digitized gray fatigues of his company colleagues, realizing before he passed out again that he was in a chopper, there was a mask pumping oxygen at his face, and the world below smelled of death.
Wood smoke curled around evergreens. Chiho followed Hiroko up the muddy path to this place of astonishment, a whole college campus suspended in the trees. Through the mist the Douglas firs appeared to wear skirts; these were circular houses built around their trunks, linked by a network of rope and cable bridges. There were hundreds of tree houses of various circumferences and elevations, whole multistory platforms held aloft in the triangulations of trunks, students traveling from one class to another by rope swing and zipline. Hiroko showed Chiho to a rickety elevator and they rose into the canopy where curious squirrels and robins perched, coming to rest on a platform that seemed to float on a pillow of fog. In this creaking, crescent-shaped, wind-swayed structure was a lecture hall where several tiers of benches faced inward toward a lectern. A couple dozen students had already gathered, notebooks ready, sipping chai, bringing the low murmur of chatter to a close as Hiroko took her place behind the microphone. Chiho found a spot in the back row.
“Let’s get settled, everyone. Today I’d like to talk about Malaspina, the Roving Glacier of Death. I’ll take questions afterward. Stragglers, please take your seats. In the early years of the FUS, with polar ice rapidly retreating, as great famines and genocides swept continents, one meteorological oddity perplexed the world’s climate scientists. While glaciers melted, exposing mummies and mastodons, one glacier appeared to not only not shrink but, in fact, grow larger.”
Hiroko pulled down a pre-FUS world map, demarcated by long-obliterated political boundaries, and tapped Alaska with her pointer.
“Here, in the southeast portion of what was then the state of Alaska, the Malaspina glacier appeared to be reversing a decades-long process of melting. At one time the glacier was forty miles across, twenty-eight miles long, and some six hundred meters thick, with an area of fifteen hundred square miles. During the early FUS, while other glaciers melted, it appeared to grow by 0.3 percent daily during its peak growth. This caught the attention of the Climate Crisis Control Center, or C4, who initially viewed it as an opportunity to establish a polar bear refuge. As you know, the retreat of arctic sea ice led to alarming polar bear drownings and cannibalism. The C4, who fed rescued polar bears with air-dropped loads of fish compacted into frozen bales, studied the air currents around the glacier and the geology of the region but nothing could explain why it continued to grow. By all measures it should have been melting. Soon it grew to subsume a small nearby village, which was heralded as a promising sign. If it were to melt, you see, Malaspina alone would have contributed half an inch to the level of rising seawater.
“Various climatologists including Dr. Stephen McDonough-Hughes at the University of Alaska Anchorage and Drs. Fran and Regina Kroll of Oxford’s Climate Response Committee believed that the secret to reversing this warming trend may have been contained within or around Malaspina. It seemed that the growing glacier in southeast Alaska might be cause for hope and optimism about the future of the climate.
“Then, on April 14 of FUS 17, the glacier began to move, with its polar bears, breaking free of the mainland and slipping into the ocean. It appeared to be making a beeline for Anchorage, provoking a mass exodus, with Anchorage residents fleeing for other parts of Alaska and Canada. The glacier destroyed city blocks, following a somewhat counterintuitive trajectory. Rather than remaining at sea level, it managed to defy physics and climb to higher elevations. When the airdrops of frozen blocks of fish stopped, some of the polar bears started climbing off the ice to feed on the animal carcasses left in the glacier’s wake.
“After eradicating Anchorage, Malaspina moved on to various population centers of Canada. Reducing Prince Rupert and Whitehorse to mud, it continued on a more or less straight path to Edmonton.
“By now, sympathy for the plight of the polar bears had largely disappeared from public discourse. Instead of beautiful mammals deserving of our preservation efforts, they came to be known as a marauding horde of beasts surfing a climatic anomaly that was laying waste to Canada.
“Several theories emerged to explain the origin and sheer persistence of the glacier. Many suggested the mass of ice possessed an intelligence. It was easy to personify, as it appeared to be deliberately targeting concentrations of human civilization. As it approached Saskatoon, Canadians stood on top of buildings and bridges with bullhorns, loudly and profusely apologizing for warming the planet. But the glacier would not be placated. With its polar bears roaring, the great sheet of ice scraped skyscrapers off the face of the earth, ground power plants and apartment buildings and sports stadiums under its heels, and left behind a trench filled with strange artifacts from cities it had flattened. It picked up an entire Shoppers Drug Mart in Winnipeg, with shoppers and employees still inside. They rode atop the glacier for weeks, barricaded inside the store, fending off polar bear attacks and eating large quantities of snack food before the whole store slipped into Thunder Bay.