The Warrenton-Astoria Highway reaches across the bay. It is passable but crumbling in sections, the steel caging within visible like bones peeking out of a melting snowdrift. The sisters park and unload the drums and roll them down the bridge and situate them at ten-foot intervals. They are made from a thick plastic that has aged gray. This matches the color of the bridge, camouflages the barrels, makes them appear like short pillars. Their fuses are made from fabric, glue, and oxidizing agents decanted from old weed killer. The sisters run a long web of them that wind together into one thick rope.
They drive the pickup back down the road and next to a tumbledown building and throw clumps of moss on it along with a few sticks. Then they hike back to the bay wearing backpacks and carrying rifles. They lead the thick coil of fuse into the woods and park themselves on a log with a clear view of the bridge. They unzip their backpacks and withdraw binoculars and oil and rags and books and dried fish and berries and nuts and canteens of water. They eat. They wait.
Across the bay, the city of Astoria. A vast hive. Some fifty thousand live there. Chimney smoke dirties the air. If it was night, its hills would glow with lamplight.
Six hours pass. Seagulls screech. Waves lap. Wind hushes. The rain comes steadily here, rarely pausing for more than an hour. And the ocean breathes its salt into the air. Even the buttons on their jackets and jeans rust. So they take good care of their rifles, breaking them apart now to wipe down everything, the receiver, the barrel, the magazine, and then they dampen a rag with oil and wipe the parts down again and fit it all back together. They reload. They lever a round. They set the safety. They lay the rifles beside them in easy reach.
They read in shifts, one of them turning pages while the other peers through binoculars. Then, from across the bay, a caravan starts across the bridge. It is a long train of cows harnessed to empty wheeled cages. Metal clanks. Hooves clop. Leather and rope creak. Their approach will take a good five minutes.
The sisters have paced out the fuse and calculated how quickly it will burn down. One of the sisters holds up a hand, as if to say, Steady, steady, steady, while the other readies her matches. Then the hand drops, chopping the air. One match sparks and dies in the wind. Another splinters in half. The third one sputters out against the fuse. The fourth catches.
A long, spitting snake works its way toward the bridge, sizzling its way through underbrush, around trees, across gravel, splitting up and following the ten threads, rising into the barrels. The caravan is nearly upon them and the sisters can see the man at the front of the column standing up in his carriage, pulling back on his reins. But it is too late.
The sisters see the explosion before they hear it. An overlapping series of bright orange flashes surrounded by black roiling smoke run through with chunks of concrete and animal. The bridge drops and rises and expands all at once. The sound thumps the sisters, makes the trees around them shake and drop their leaves. The water in the bay dimples with the debris hailing down.
The sisters remove their hands from their ears. They do not smile or raise their fists in celebration. They simply watch with composed but satisfied expressions as a burning man crawls a few paces and goes still, as smoke stains the air, as a forty-foot section of the bridge collapses into the bay and sends a wave rolling to the shore.
Then they collect their things and zip their backpacks and shoulder their rifles and hold hands when they hike back to their pickup.
Chapter 42
LEWIS MARCHES steadily west through a world laced and spired with ice. The wind never stops and the snow lashes his eyes and scrapes them red. He lost his hair to the lightning. It grew back as white and bristled as the hoarfrost along the riverbanks.
When he first left the Sanctuary, he wondered more than once what the hell he was doing. He buried that question long ago, but it has been replaced by another. How the hell is he going to do it? If he is to survive, if he is to traverse this unforgiving place and avoid threats human and animal and elemental, if he is to arrive in a wondrous American landscape, a new Eden, he will be more than a long way geographically from his old self in St. Louis. He will be a new person entirely. This drives him through the snow. The green promise of a better place, the whispered promise of a better self in the voice of Aran Burr.
Lewis wishes he could simply sweep a hand and knock a hundred pounds of snow this way, another hundred pounds that way, as if he were the wind itself. But whatever powers he possesses are limited, accidental, uncontrolled, as if he were a toddler finding his legs or forming his mouth around a word for the first time. He does not understand what he can do, only yearn and puzzle over whatever happy accidents he produces.
Colter and Gawea hike beside him. They wear snowshoes. Their pants stiffen and fringe white and beneath them their legs feel separate, leaden and thudding with every step, so that sometimes they feel they are clopping along on their hipbones. They do not complain. They do not speak at all.
As far as he can remember, the last time he said anything might have been back in Bismarck, when he told the doctor to rest, and once rested, to watch after Clark. “She’s not well. She’s going to need you.”
He kneeled next to the doctor’s cot. She had lost a lot of blood, grown anemic. But she had stubbornly risen back to health, just as Lewis had risen from the smoldering crater in the parking lot, weakened but determined. The silver hair spiraled around her head like roots without purchase. She fumbled for his hand and found it and squeezed it. Her voice came out as if through a filter of sand. “I wasn’t so sure before, but I’m certain of it now. You’re the best of men.”
“Most would call me horrible, I think.”
“It’s the world that’s horrible. But you’ll finish what we started?”
“Yes.”
She ran a thumb along the ridgeline of his knuckles as if imagining the landscape he must yet navigate. “You’re carrying everyone’s dreams with you.”
Lewis was never one to smile, but he smiled for her then. “We’ll see each other down the trail.”