Read State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy for Free Online

even true.”
    She turns to me. “Why aren’t you two ready to go?”
    “I think I need a haircut before I go down.”
    “Yes,” she says, looking me over, “you most certainly do. And you both need to put on zipsuits too. The professor’s sleeping off a shock, but you can use one of his from the submarine for Jimmy. When you’re all set, meet me back here.”
    As the tunnelrat leads us down to the prep room for Eden, I have to keep reassuring myself that I’m only going for a haircut. There’s a mirrored window in front of the chair and I watch in it as our tunnelrat chaperone stands behind us with its arms crossed, and Jimmy passes the clippers over my head. In just a few minutes, my hair is piled on the floor. I run my hand over my scalp and feel the bristly stubble.
    “How come I don’t look as good as you do without hair?”
    “Shit,” Jimmy says, “prob’ly ’cause you didn’t look as good as I did with it.”
    “Oh, shut up,” I say, trying to contain a laugh. “I think it’s because my head isn’t shaped as well as yours.”
    “Well, that makes sense,” he says. “You’ve got to have all kinds of nooks and crevices to keep all them crazy ideas in.”
    I take one last look at my pile of hair on the floor.
    “Let’s go get changed into our suits, I guess.”
    The tunnelrat shadows Jimmy and me to the submarine, but when it tries to follow us up the ladder, I block its ascent. “Where are we going to run to inside a submarine, stupid?”
    It grunts and points a white finger at its red eye, saying, “See see. You you.”
    “Yeah, yeah,” I say. “We see you too. Wait out here.”
    It feels strange being back inside the cramped submarine, as if we’d returned from our journey to the Isle of Man a decade ago rather than a day. I remember Jimmy running up and down the passageway, exercising Junior with some rabbit fur on a string. I remember making meals on the stove. I remember crashing the submarine and swimming out to the island of pig people.
    I open my bunkroom drawer to collect my reading slate, but quickly remember that I had given it to Bree when we left the island. When I think of her being evaporated with all those other people, an awesome anger rises inside me, an anger that could drive me to murder. But murder who? Murder Hannah, murder the professor, murder them all, maybe.
    Breathe, Aubrey, breathe. You’re not like them.
    I slide open the other drawer and pull out my Holocene II zipsuit. I remember wearing it when we went down to get the mastercode, and again when we started our journey for the Isle of Man, because my shirt was wet from drying Junior. I strip off Finn’s clothes, fold them neatly, and place them in the drawer. But I can’t seem to put the zipsuit on. I look at myself in the mirror. My head is shaved, my eyes tired. Just go down and get this over with, I tell myself. Go sell the people of Holocene II and buy Jimmy and Red and yourself your freedom. But what if Hannah doesn’t keep her end of the deal? I ask myself. What if she betrays us again?
    “Aubrey,” Jimmy says. “You okay, buddy?”
    I snap out of my thoughts and realize I’m standing naked in front of the tiny mirror, with my hands touching my chest and the Park Service symbol that Finn carved there. The scabs are mostly gone now, leaving wide, red scars.
    “Does it hurt?” Jimmy asks.
    “Only when I see it,” I say.
    He nods, a look of painful understanding on his face. And if anyone could understand, I guess it would be him. My need to cover up the enemy’s emblem on my chest overcomes my trepidation over donning a zipsuit again, and I step into the legs, slip into the sleeves, and zip it up to my neck. Then I look in the mirror. Jimmy stands beside me. He’s already changed into one of the professor’s zipsuits, and with our shaved heads and matching outfits, we look like a couple of brothers heading off to war. Then again, maybe we are.
    “I guess now you get to see where I grew