I exit the highway onto the road with the old barns. The barns are gone, no doubt cut up for firewood, but the concrete slabs of their foundations remain, like inexplicable basketball courts in the middle of a meadow.
I take the gravel road and we pass a few dozen old farmhouses. My stolen memories tell me nothing about who might have lived here, but they must have vacated when Helena burned. Distantly, I wonder why they bothered to board up their windows. A few are actually barred, and one little cottage has a chain-link fence enclosing its yard. I catch glimpses of equipment that doesn’t look agricultural, but I force my mind to stay on track. We won’t find Abram in any of these houses, placed at standoffish intervals but still vaguely neighborly. The isolation he wants can only be found at the end of a long dirt road. I see several of them branching off from this gravel arterial and sinking back into the forest like the mouths of caves, damp and dark and so forbidding they are their own NO TRESPASSING signs.
Brush and branches have almost closed some of them, so I drop down to second gear, studying each opening carefully. As we approach the place where the memories converge, I begin to worry that the Kelvins’ driveway has overgrown completely in the intervening years, but then I skid to a stop. Julie slides in behind me, and when the dust clears, we are looking at a wide-open highway into the forest. The road has grass, but it’s short. It’s been a couple years since the branches were trimmed—their sawn ends bristle with new growth—but only a couple.
This road has been in use. And at least one person used it today. A single tire track tills a line of dark earth through the grass.
Julie cranks the throttle and shoots past me, kicking up a spray of gravel that becomes a spray of dirt. I chase after her, struggling to keep the bike upright on the uneven terrain, but I don’t have to struggle long. A few hundred feet into the woods, we come to a gate. A heavy steel bar with red and white stripes, the kind that once guarded state parks against the depredations of motor vehicles, as if the Montana Forest Service missed the memo that we gave up on the planet decades ago.
Sprout is kneeling on the edge of the path, trying to get a caterpillar to crawl onto her finger. Her father is sawing at the gate’s lock with a pocket-size hacksaw.
“This wasn’t here before,” he says without pausing or turning around. “Did they come back?”
Julie and I dismount our bikes and approach the gate.
“Is this where they were all those years I was looking for them?” he continues.
“Abram,” Julie says.
He keeps sawing. “Almost there.”
Julie watches him for a moment, trying to calm her breathing. “Abram.”
He finally turns around. He looks from her to me and tosses up his hands in exasperation. “How? How the hell did you know where I was going?”
Julie glances at me. For a moment, I consider telling him. Even though he wasn’t present for most of the memories I took from Perry, I’m certain I have enough from those first five years to convince him of what I once was. Would knowing the plague isn’t invincible loosen his stiff mind? Or simply snap it? The rifle on his back keeps my mouth shut.
“We tracked you,” Julie says.
“Bullshit. Davy Crockett couldn’t track a bike on paved roads.”
“Abram, please,” Julie says, trying to roll past this topic with sheer urgency. “We have maybe the last jet in North America. We have a fucking chariot of the gods that can take us anywhere, and it’s useless without you.”
“I fixed my father’s motorcycles for you. Go start a hippie biker gang. I’m done.” He turns and resumes sawing.
“We already did this, Abram!” Julie takes a few steps toward him. “You agreed to come with us! What’s changed?”
“I agreed on one thing: that Axiom would catch me if I tried to drive here. So I flew here.”
“What is it about this fucking cabin? You can go anywhere in the world and you choose this?” She gestures to the muddy road and the dark, mossy woods around us.
“It has a bomb shelter. There’s a year’s worth of supplies.”
“A year?” Julie laughs incredulously. “And then what? You’re going to hunt rabbits and jerk off in the woods for the rest of your life?”
Abram doesn’t answer. The saw makes a thin ringing like a high violin note.
“Okay, so you’re done with living, fine, but what about Sprout? Are you going to bury her with you?”
“Leave her out of this,” Abram mutters, still sawing.
“She is in this! She’s right here!” Julie turns to Sprout, who is watching the argument with knitted brows while the forgotten caterpillar crawls up her arm. “Sprout. Do you want to live here in the forest with just your dad? Or do you want to make friends and learn things? Maybe build things and invent things? Try to help the world?”
Abram whirls around and throws his hacksaw into the dirt. “Don’t you fucking talk to my daughter. This is my decision.”
“It’s her childhood!” Julie shouts, taking another step toward him. “It’s her life!”
“She’s my daughter, God damn it!”