devices. Across the graded meadow he comes to a pair of trailers, too far from the action for the blasts to reach. Their walls are his best available canvas. He takes two cans of spray paint from his coat pockets and steps up to the cleaner of the trailers’ wall. In letters filled with all the care his hand can compose, he writes:
CONTROL KILLS CONNECTION HEALS
He steps back to appraise the germ of the only thing he knows for certain. With a large felt marker, he adorns the block caps in stems and twigs, until the letters seem to be sprouting back from apocalypse. They look like Egyptian hieroglyphs, or the dancing figures of an op-art bestiary. Below these two lines he adds the trailing hope:
COME HOME OR DIE
Back at the detonation site, wrestling the tubs into place, Adam and Doug mistime their movements. Fuel slops onto the hem of Adam’s jacket and down his black denims. Stinking of petrochemicals, he squeezes his fists until his soaked gloves drip. His grip is shot from so much lifting. He looks up at the peaked roof of the construction office and thinks, What the hell am I doing? The clarity of recent weeks, the sudden waking from sleepwalk, his certainty that the world has been stolen and the atmosphere trashed for the shortest of short-term gains, the sense that he must do all he can to fight for the living world’s most wondrous creatures: all these abandon Adam, and he’s left in the insanity of denying the bedrock of human existence. Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.
ON THE SIDE of the other trailer, Watchman paints words in an alphabet wild and vivid. Verse springs up and flows over the empty white:
For you have five trees in Paradise
which do not change,
either in summer or in winter,
and their leaves do not fall.
He who knows them
shall not taste of death.
He steps back, his throat tightening, a little surprised by what has come out of him, this prayer he needs so badly to send out to no one who will understand it. Then: whump, and he’s hit in the back by a concussion wave. Heat blows outward on the air, long before there should be anything like an explosion. Watchman turns to see a ball of orange leap up in a quick, simulated sunrise. His legs pitch forward, and he’s running toward the blaze.
Another figure cuts in on the edge of his sight. Douglas, his hobbled run, one leg stiff, a dotted rhythm. They reach the burning at the same time. Then, Douglas, shout-whispering, “Fuck no. Fuck no!” He’s on his knees, mewling at what has happened. Two figures lie on the ground. One of them starts to move as Nick closes in, and not the one Nick needs to be moving.
Adam pulls his shoulders off the ground. His head periscopes in all directions. A veil of blood trickles down his face. “Oh,” he says. “Oh!”
Douglas steadies him. Nick swoops down to lift Olivia. She’s lying on her back, her face to the stars. Her eyes are open. All around them, the air turns orange. “Livvy?” His voice is horrible. The thick, slurring burr of it, worse for her than the blast. “Can you hear me?”
A bubble forms on her lips. Then the word, “Nnn.”
Something seeps from her side, down by her waist. The front of her black shirt glistens in the dark. He lifts it and cries out, rushing it back down. A hushed wail comes out of him. Then he’s a monster of competence again. The injured woman looks at him in terror. He shuts himself up and blanks his face. Goes through all the motions of every possible aid. The air starts to flicker. Two figures cowl over them. Douglas and Adam. “Is she . . . ?”
Something in the words hits Olivia. She tries to raise her head. Nick gentles her down. “I’m,” she says. Her eyes close again.
Everything scalds. Douglas spins around in tight circles, his hands pressed against his skull. Clipped sounds come out of him. “Shit, shit, shit, shit . . .”
“We have to move her,” Adam says.
Nick blocks his advance. “We can’t!”
“We have to. The flames.”
Their clumsy scuffle is over before it starts. Adam takes the woman under her arms and drags her across the stony ground. Sounds percolate up her throat.