She studied the note for a long time, stunned by it, by the sudden closeness of that other life—her real life? her previous life?—which appeared like a child darting out between parked cars and into traffic.
The exploration party had been gone a week when Celia Frode returned on foot, splattered in mud from head to toe. She was alone.
Celia said that beyond Dooling Correctional, in the direction of the little neighboring town of Maylock, the roads had become impassable; every tree they cleared from the highway only got them a few yards before they came to the next one. It was easier to leave the golf carts and hike.
There was no one in Maylock when they got there, and no sign of recent life. The buildings and houses were like the ones in Dooling—overgrown, in states of greater and lesser disrepair, a few burned by fires—and the road above Dorr’s Hollow Stream, which was now a swollen river with sunken cars for shoals, had collapsed. Probably they should have turned around then, Celia conceded. They’d scavenged useful supplies from the grocery store and other businesses in Maylock. But they got to talking about the movie theater in the small town of Eagle that was another ten miles off, and how great it would be for the kids if they came back with a film projector. Magda had assured them that their big generator would be up to such tasks.
“They still had that new Star Wars movie playing there,” Celia said, and added, wryly, “You know, Sheriff, the one where the girl’s the hero.”
Lila didn’t correct the “Sheriff.” It had turned out to be remarkably difficult to quit being a cop. “Go on, Celia.”
The exploring party crossed the Dorr’s Hollow Stream at a bridge that was still intact, and picked up a mountain road called Lion Head Way that seemed to offer a shortcut to Eagle. The map they’d been using—borrowed from the remains of the Dooling Public Library—showed an old, unnamed coal company road curling off near the top of the mountain. The company road could take them to the interstate, and from there the going would be easy. But the map turned out to be outdated. Lion Head Way now dead-ended at a plateau, where stood that dreary place of male incarceration called Lion Head Prison. The company road they had been hoping to find had been plowed under during the construction of the prison.
Because it was late in the day, rather than attempt to backtrack the narrow, broken decline off the mountain in the dark, they had decided to camp at the prison, and start fresh in the morning.
Lila was all too familiar with Lion Head Prison; it was the maximum security facility where she had anticipated the Griner brothers would spend the next twenty-five or so years.
Janice Coates, also present for Celia’s retelling, had a brief verdict on the prison. “That place. Nasty.”
The Head, as it was called by the men imprisoned there, had been in the media a great deal before Aurora, a rare story of successful land reclamation on the site of a mountaintop removal. After Ulysses Energy Solutions finished deforesting and blasting away the top of the mountain to mine the coal beneath, it “restored” the land by pulling debris up and flattening it out. The oft-promoted idea was that, instead of viewing the mountaintops as “destroyed,” the public ought to see them as having been “opened up.” Newly flattened land was newly buildable land. Although the majority of the state’s population supported the coal industry, few failed to recognize this for the bunkum it was. These wonderfully useful new plateaus were generally situated in the middle of nowhere and often came attended by impoundments of slurry waste or chemical containment ponds, which were not the sort of neighbors anyone wanted.
But a prison was uniquely suitable for backwoods reclamation. And no one had been particularly concerned about the possible environmental dangers that its residents might face. That was how Lion Head Mountain had become the setting for Lion Head Maximum Security Prison.
The prison gate, Celia said, had been open, and the front doors, too. She, Millie, Nell Seeger, and the others had gone in. Most of the exploration party from Our Place consisted of recently released prison inmates and personnel, and they were curious about how the other half had lived. All things being equal, it was pretty comfortable. As much as it reeked from being shut up, and although there were some fissures in the floors and walls, it was dry; and the gear in every cell looked new. “Some déjà vu,” conceded Celia, “but kind of funny, too, you know.”
Their last night had been calm. In the morning, Celia had trekked down the mountain a ways, searching for a trail that might cut off some of the hike and save them having to go all the way down the longer, circuitous route to Eagle. To Celia’s surprise, she’d received a call on her toy walkie-talkie.
“Celia! We think we see someone!” It was Nell.
“What?” Celia had replied. “Say again?”
“We’re inside! Inside the prison! The windows at the end of their version of Broadway are all fogged, but there’s a woman in one of the solitary confinement cells! She’s lying under a yellow blanket! It looks like she’s moving! Millie’s trying to find a way to get the door to release without the power so—” That’s where the transmission ended.
A vast rumble in the earth startled Celia. She held out her hands, trying to balance. The toy walkie flew out of her hand and shattered on the ground.
Returning to the top of the road, lungs burning and legs shaking, Celia went through the prison gate. Powder sifted through the air like snow; she had to cover her mouth to keep from choking. What she saw was hard to process, and even harder to accept. The terrain was shattered, heaved up in clefts as if in the aftermath of an earthquake. Displaced dirt hung in the air. Celia stumbled to her knees several times, eyes slitted almost shut, reaching for anything solid. Gradually, the rectangular shape of the Lion Head intake unit, two stories high, emerged, and then nothing else. There was no more land behind the intake unit, and no more prison. The plateau had crumbled and given way. The new max security facility had gone down the back of the mountain like a great stone child down a slide. Intake was now no more than a film prop, all front and no back.
Celia didn’t dare go all the way to the edge to look down, but she glimpsed a few pieces of wreckage far below: massive cement blocks jumbled at the foot, amid a swamp of dust particles.
“So I came back by myself,” said Celia, “as fast as I could.”
She inhaled and scratched a clean place in the mud on her cheek. The listeners, a dozen women who had hurried to their meeting place at the Shopwell when word spread that she was back, were silent. The others weren’t going to return.
“I recall reading that there was some controversy about the fill under that overgrown jailhouse,” said Janice. “Something about how the ground was too soft for the weight. People saying the coal company cut corners when they were packing it down. State engineers were looking into it…”
Celia let her breath go, a long sigh, and continued absently. “Nell and I always kept it casual. I didn’t expect it to last outside of prison.” She sniffed—just once. “So I probably shouldn’t feel so blue, but there it is: I feel blue as hell.”
There was silence. Then Lila said, “I need to go there.”
Tiffany Jones said, “Want company?”
What they were doing was foolish, Coates said.
“Fucking foolish, Lila. To go off and play around in an avalanche.” She had walked with Lila and Tiffany Jones as far as Ball’s Hill Road. The two expeditionaries were leading a pair of horses.