Free The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy by Ryan Winfield

gourd and a leather pouch containing nuts and dried fruits and salty red flakes of meat that I’m assuming to be smoked fish.
    I wonder where I am? I open the door to look out and pull back just in time to keep from falling to my death—
    The cave door opens to a narrow ledge fifty meters above a treacherous span of shore where waves heave high, lashing themselves against jagged rocks.
    I retreat back into the cave and sit, wondering what to do, wondering if the women will return. I watch a beam of sun poke through the smoke-hole and pool on the floor. It rises up the far wall, then moves onto the ceiling before disappearing. No one comes. I drink from the gourd and nibble on nuts. Late in the night, I crawl back to the inner room and sleep.
    When I wake all is as before—the beam of light again on the floor, the cave quiet and empty. I slip on my shoes, sling the canteen over my shoulder, and step out from the cave.
    The narrow ledge, steep switchbacks.
    I flatten myself against the cliff and inch my way, sliding my feet and trying not to look down.
    When I scramble over the lip, the sound of crashing waves fades, and I scan the barren plateau for any sign of the people. In the quiet sunlight, I realize how totally alone I am, and just how ill-equipped my lesson slate reading made me for surviving here. Across the plateau, snowcapped mountains loom in the distance, reminding me of the trip down from that train crash.
    I’m not going back that way, so I guess it’s either north or south. Deciding to leave it to chance, I pick up a broken stick and toss it twirling into the air, committing myself to setting off in whatever direction its broken end indicates. I’m disappointed when it lands pointing north. I remember Dorian loading me into the train at the Transfer Station and saying that Eden was north. “Sweet, sweet north,” he said. I’m not sure what’s going on, but until I get some answers, Eden or Holocene II are the last places I want to go right now.
    I kick the stick off the cliff edge and watch it tumble and bounce, landing in the surf a hundred meters below.
    Then I set off walking south.
    I walk the day into dusk, exhaustion and darkness catching up with me just as I come upon an enormous burned out fire. Kicking over black coals, the white clumps of ash, I uncover a blackened jaw bone—molars, a wisdom tooth still attached.
    Too creeped out to eat anything, too tired to move away, I lie down within spitting distance of the fire and sleep beneath the stars with my head on a tuft of prairie grass.
    I’m cold and bug bitten when I wake.
    The food these mystery people left for me touches parts of my tongue never reached by our rations down in Holocene II. The fish is very salty—at least I hope it’s fish—and the dried fruit is chewy and sweet. I finish my breakfast, wash it down with water from my canteen, and I set off again, walking until I come to a red-rock caldera dropping like a bowl in the plateau.
    The caldera is alive with color. Tufts of green shrubs, fields of purple wildflowers, a distant lake reflecting the blue sky, its shore ringed by oak trees. Despite my fear of getting sick again, I need to fill my canteen. Finding a natural path, I descend.
    The caldera floor is full of life. Not just flowers, but animal life, too. Grasshoppers leap in front of me, their clicking wings carrying them off above the flowers. A snake slithers from my path, freezing me in my tracks. Lizards sunning themselves on rocks, independent eyes rolling in their sockets, following me out of sight. Then, without warning, the ground darkens and a wild smell wafts down on a warm, fluttering breeze. I look up; the entire sky above the caldera is blacked out by a billion birds. They move like a living sky, flying wing to wing, flying belly to back, stirring the humid air as they spill together and roll with an aquatic rhythm, moving on without break for what seems like half an hour as I stand watching in awe.
    When