Liminal States

by Zack Parsons

  Gardener, when he wasn’t moaning deliriously, told me why that wasn’t a bright idea. Bishop controlled the Pool and everything around it, he said. For those fifteen years I’d been doing his heavy work, Bishop and Shiftman and others had been turning Spark and the Pool into an industrial and military facility.

  The war had granted them the special authority. Roosevelt had helped, and so had New Mexico’s Governor DeWitt. It was all of it off the map, in a part of New Mexico officially known as White Sands Air and Missile Base. Lots of atomic-bomb checks paid for rail lines and paved roads in the middle of the desert, and Spark had become their secret place. The training ground of Westward.

  “It’s me,” said Gardener. “I’m there. We’re there ... in Spark. The others ... work for Bishop now.”

  Gardener’s duplicates were covering things up and serving as Bishop’s enforcers in Spark. They were the ones who had battered through the barricade to poor Beau Reynolds as we spoke on the telephone. I asked him what they might have done to Reynolds. How do you muzzle a man who can’t be killed?

  “Zeroed,” said Gardener. “The Center.” I asked him to explain what that meant, but he had lapsed into unconsciousness and could not be roused.

  We were in the badlands of Arizona, sun boiling the desert, wind roaring through the open windows, when Gardener finally came awake again. He was nearly gone. His face was sunken and his lips cracked. The blood was dried all over him. I rolled the windows up so that I could hear what he was trying to say. I asked him about Operation Westward, but he wasn’t answering.

  “You have to kill her,” he groaned. “If she ... if she can’t be saved. Kill her. Don’t ... let it happen to her ... promise ... promise me... .”

  “I promise,” I said. “I will kill her if I can’t save her.”

  He was gone. Broadcasting to the Pool, to a newly made body, to become entrapped in Bishop’s industrial complex. I stopped and buried the body in the desert. My lungs were aching, and the intense heat tired me after only a few minutes of digging, so he was buried in a shallow grave that would probably not keep out the scavengers. A single stone marked the location of the body. Already the wind was blowing dust across the trackless hardpan and covering the outline of the hole.

  I bypassed Phoenix and Tucson. I drove through unmade lands where the sun did not shine, it scoured, a flamethrower intent on cleaning us out of the bunkers. In the dirty heights of the Santa Catalina Mountains I bought gasoline and something to drink. The boy running the gas pump complimented the road-worn Cadillac. He asked me if I needed a doctor.

  “Shotgun,” I said.

  “Not here,” said the attendant. “Try up in San Manuel.”

  No time. The longer I drove, the more the world receded. It passed along with rocks and leaning fence posts and disappeared into a single point in the Cadillac’s rearview mirror. The horizon devoured the sordid, branching, endlessly recursive course of my 109 years. The wars and the betrayals and everything I’d lost, even my ancestral history spanning the darkness, over and over again, all stripped away by the desert heat.

  I imagined there wasn’t even a civilization to return to, only the cloud of dust behind the rattling Cadillac, swallowing up the road and erasing it like an Apache dragging a cottonwood bough behind his horse. The future was all that remained. As far as could be seen, that future was desert, baking and breaking clay beneath a pathless blue sky.

  Here was New Mexico. The shape and colors of the mountains told me that much. My maps were obsolete and did not record the name of the road I was traveling. The useless black X I’d drawn in pen was no longer intersected by the vital world. There were always new maps. New ways to approach the mountains that never moved but could disappear if a highway turned in the wrong direction.

  The dark shapes of distant mountains were born from nothing, hands lifting beneath a magician’s cloth, heaving the bright desert into blue-black shadow shapes. The Red Lines and, more distant, the Oscuras. The music on the radio began to fade into static. After a few moments of crackling, a woman’s voice resolved through the static reading a message. She spoke in a monotone.

  “You are entering a United States Air Force restricted area. Turn back now.”

  The message repeated on an endless loop on every channel. I shut off the radio.

  In the distance a condor took flight from the folded mountain rocks, soaring high above them, turning, defying the crush of the heat. Its huge wings were visible as a wheeling black line in the sky. It turned and flew directly toward me, toward my car, as if sallying forth to challenge me.

  I reckoned it the biggest bird I’d ever seen. As big as that great golden eagle on Kyushu. It had a strange shape to its wings, as though it might be injured. I strained to see it more clearly, my vision going gray at the edges from the sickness. At that moment there was a loud explosion, and the car pulled violently into the oncoming lane. I resisted the urge to brake hard and smoothly guided the shuddering vehicle to the side of the road.

  The cooking asphalt was soft beneath my shoes. The left rear tire was blown out, deflated tatters hanging from the rim, strips of whitewall drooping to the tarry black road. There was a trail of rubber scraps behind me. From the southeast, from the Tularosa Basin and Alamogordo and the White Sands Air Force base, came the steady drone of aircraft engines.

  I stopped at the car’s trunk, the spare tire leaned against my leg, the iron in my hand, and I observed in solemn awe as a pair of barrel-bodied fighter planes roared up from the basin. Some updated version of the familiar P-47 Thunderbolt. They passed overhead close enough for me to feel the beat of their props. They were in steep climbs, trying to gain altitude for some maneuver. I scanned the sky and realized they were rising toward the condor bird. They were turning, trying to get above it now.

  The bird seemed to ignore them and swoop lower, still coming straight toward the road. Straight toward me. I realized this was unusual but could do nothing but watch, unable to move or look away as it grew larger and larger. The fighters passed it, and there was a black puff of smoke from each, and seconds later I heard the familiar chatter of .50-caliber guns. Black feathers or pieces fell from the bird, and it spiraled down toward the desert. The fighters began a wide circle to come around again.

  The bird regained its senses only a few hundred feet above ground. It spread its wings and resumed its course, drifting lower and lower with each passing moment. The planes were coming around again, many miles behind it.

  Almost too late, I realized it was coming for me again. I kicked the spare tire away and began running down the road. I could hear it. No engine, but a drumming, as if a deck of cards the size of a house was being shuffled. I glanced back, and my stomach lurched.

  I recognized the cruciform shape of it, black on black, with flecks of glimmering red. It was the grasshopper idol come to life. I’d seen a glimpse of it while I was tied to a chair at Ian Bendwool’s and had not even realized what it was. Now here it was in the light of horrible day, a massive insect, like a black locust with plump thorax and beating wings that glittered with iridescent red. Compound eyes bulged atop the armored shovel of its head, and arthropod mouth hinged open, drooling black as it came.

  Was this creature from the Pool? Come from the other side as Beau Reynolds had said? Was this the beast, the demon insect, the keeper of that accursed place?

  It seemed as though it might strike me down, or swoop and pick me up with the long hook-clawed legs dangling below it. It fell. It landed with great violence atop the roof of the Cadillac. It crushed the car’s body and exploded the three remaining tires. Broken glass and shrapnel of auto body rained down on the roadway and raised puffs of dust in the surrounding desert. The car slewed sideways across both lanes. A hail of the glass beat against me and bounced from my shoulders and filled the indented crown and brim of my fedora.

  The creature was still alive, trying to lift up, its legs flopping and spraying black liquid. It collapsed again atop the car with a screech o
f bending metal. I reached for my gun, but that was long gone. Somewhere underneath half a ton of Cadillac and however many tons of giant grasshopper.

  I approached the stricken animal with great caution. This was a thing from my nightmare, alive and in the flesh for me to study. One more death was certainly worth the risk, but I’d rather not end up in the clutches of whatever new order reigned in the valley. The creature was still alive. I could hear the labored hissing of its lungs, spiracles venting, black blood spitting from its injured mouth.

  The tessellated dome of one eye was punctured in two places by bullets, and more wounds stitched up its back. It lifted its head as I approached, languidly, like a sick horse. Articulated mandibles hung loosely. It was drooling such a quantity of the black liquid from its mouth that it overflowed the roof of the car and slopped and hissed down onto the pavement. There was no question it was looking at me.

  The banded plumpness of its thorax arched up from the car, behind the armor of its folded wings. I stopped moving toward it. There was no stinger visible. Between the flexing segments were narrow bands of red and white. Long, stiff bristles covered its back. The wings were injured but began to thrum and beat against the bristles.

  “Chiii chiiii chiiiii!” was the shrill sound of the vibrating bristles.

  The creature cocked its head. I could hear the approaching buzz of the aircraft.

  “Chiii chiiii chiiiii!”

  “What in the hell,” I said.

  “W-warren,” the creature’s wings beat. “Warren. Warren Groves. Help. Help.”

  It began repeating this last, horrible, thrumming word again and again. Each time it finished the chirping syllable, it beat its broken legs against the car, as if for emphasis.

  “Help? What can I do? What the hell are you?”

  “Help!” it thrummed again and beat its broken legs against the car.

  The sound of the aircraft engines pitched up and grew very loud. One of the planes was screaming down on me. I could see the winking lights of its guns firing. I had time to turn as the roadway exploded into flying stones and ricocheting bullets. I didn’t look back. I ran as fast as I could across the road and leaped into the dust. I could hear the splintering, tearing meat sound and the steady hammer-rain against the car’s body. I kept my face in the dirt until the shooting stopped and the planes roared by very low overhead.

  Flames sprayed from the gas tank and spread quickly through the car’s compressed interior. The locust creature atop the car was unmoving. Its body began to give off a greenish-black smoke that smelled like lobster innards. The juicier parts of its shell began to pop, chitin splitting along joints, flaking gray meat bursting from the split carapace. The black fluid on the roadway began to steam and sizzle.

  I dusted myself off and set my hat onto my head. The foul smoke was growing thicker, the heat more intense, and I knew any effort to save the car would be wasted. More planes were roaring into the sky. Four fighters. Six. The shadow of a big four-engine bomber raced across the scene, momentarily darkening my upturned face.

  A convoy of vehicles was emerging from a ramp up from the basin. There were black jeeps and olive-drab jeeps and big white trucks that I assumed were ambulances. They were coming on fast, but the convoy was still miles distant.

  I was panicked by the sudden, lurching realignment of my foundational reality. Hard to make sense of what was happening around me. To reach the Pool I would have to evade the military—if that was what these people were—and cross the White Sands on foot. Spark was much nearer. I could see the buildings atop the looming slopes of Red Stem. The hills favored concealment in that direction.

  I took one last look up at the planes weaving over the burning car, a last glance at the convoy approaching from the distance, and I ran.

  Spark, the quaint town still lingering atop Red Stem when I’d passed through in ’34, was gone. In its place were streets with sidewalks and row upon row of houses that reflected recent heights of suburban planning. All empty. The once-merry rows of houses and shops were sand-swept, a small park was desiccated, the playground equipment bleached almost white, the roads scoured of markings and cracked by the heat. No one had lived in this place, let alone maintained it, for months.

  Somewhere, down a distant side street, a door banged open and closed at the whim of the wind. It was accompanied by the dissonant clinking of wind chimes. Advertisements for Lewis Licorice Sweets and Ogilvy Oil and other products under the Bishop umbrella suggested a company town, one that had never achieved its aim.

  I followed the main street, keeping as much as possible to the shaded areas of the downtown. Tire tracks through the accumulated dust on this main road at least suggested recent activity. These tracks were numerous and large, indicating a mixture of vehicles but predominately trucks.

  A huge structure stood where once Gideon Long’s foundry had overlooked Spark. This was the terminus of the main street. It resembled an immense school or hospital. Perhaps a prison. I walked closer and saw it was surrounded by multiple layers of concertina wire sandwiching dead zones.

  The gate to this structure was designed in a manner similar to Bishop’s Chatholm estate. Woven vines of black iron spelled out simply CENTER. The gate was left open, and no one appeared to man the nearby tower constructed from wood. Nevertheless, I approached cautiously, expecting to be challenged by a guard. None appeared. There was only the wind howling over the unkempt grounds and the distant banging of that door. That emptiness unnerved me most of all.

  As I made my way up the road to the concrete fortress, I recalled something Gardener said before he died. He said Beau Reynolds was “Zeroed,” and he mentioned “The Center.” Something about the way he’d said “Zeroed” gave me the heebie-jeebies. It was the way a normal person might spit out the word “murdered.”

  The Center stretched nearly to the edge of the mountain. Its institutional design of imposing concrete was embellished with black iron and recessed windows that seemed too narrow and high to be of any use. The main doors opened into a lobby stripped of its fixtures and its meaning. A floor map showing the locations within the building was covered in black paint.

  I wandered the halls, searching the still and gloomy building for any signs of life. I passed warily between the squares of golden light cast through the windows. There were no electric lights turned on, although a glowing exit sign indicated there was still electricity. I came upon doors every few dozen feet, and some bore inscriptions that, presumably, had once described their purpose.

  There was Trunk Theory, Trunk Plotting, Trunk Recovery, Autogenic Rehearsal, Implosion Depth Psychology, Aggressor Denial, Trans-Horizon Navigation, Electro Communication, Rhizopod Reproduction, Return String Determination, NonLinear Circulation, Peristaltic Trunk Conduits, and my personal favorite, Universal Meat Origins.

  Some of the words were familiar to me, but other than frequent use of the word Trunk, there wasn’t much to help me discern an overall purpose, and the offices were empty. Some were carpeted and bore indentations where desks and large machines had once sat, but that was as close as I came to finding evidence of the contents.

  I passed windows facing an exterior motor pool, and there were a few jeeps parked beneath corrugated shelters. I tried to place the view to the outside of the building so that I might return to that spot and, hopefully, get one of the jeeps started.

  I came across a cafeteria stifling and heavy with the smell of old food. The eating area was very large, and all the chairs had been piled in a heap reaching up to the ceiling. The longest of the walls was decorated with a stylized mural of identical men standing in a line. Each had the same blond hair and strong jaw, and each was facing west, looking to a glowing horizon full of promise. The men were differentiated by the clothes they wore. One was a soldier, another a laborer, another a doctor, and the man in the foreground wore a padded white uniform and a stylized pilot’s helmet over his head.

  On the third floor I discovered a row of ten rooms, their door
s close together, and each with PILOT stenciled on the door in gold lettering. Inside, the rooms were small and carpeted, and indentations in the carpeting suggested chairs and desks. Some walls bore the marks of framed photographs and holes from hanging nails, but the pictures were long gone. In the last room in the series I discovered a large wad of paper. I unraveled it and flattened it on the floor. CONGRATULATIONS, TOM! was spelled out in three-inch letters.

  I was growing delirious from walking in the hot, unventilated building. I repeatedly passed several minutes shuffling from room to room without any idea of where I was going or what I was seeing. The stripped sameness of the halls and rooms was disorienting.

  I came to heavy double doors of the sort used in hospitals to join wings or outbuildings. The doors were painted red, and there was a square of adhesive plastic, possibly a sign of some sort, that was defaced and illegible. There was no handle or bar to push open the doors, but I discovered a flat, metal button on the wall.

  I pressed it. The doors swung open toward me, slowly and silently, sweeping all the way to the walls and revealing the large chamber beyond. It was much colder than the rest of the building, rising three stories and illuminated by light falling in dusty shafts through the yellow-tinted sunroof.

  In the room’s center, transfixed by the light so that its metal fixtures were golden, was an apparatus that was one part cockpit and one part cross-section of a bathysphere. Ten feet in diameter, its hull was covered with thick, golden paint, and the exposed interior revealed heavy reinforcing joints and lever-operated controls. The entire apparatus was suspended several feet above the floor by an industrial gantry. Stairs reached up to the cockpit to allow someone to climb inside.

  The room was hollow, and my footsteps echoed as I approached the contraption. Up close the details of its construction became clear. Instruments including swivel-mounted “cameras” made from wood were controlled from the chair. Levers were labeled with words printed on pieces of tape. HATCH RELEASE, CAMERA I RELEASE, PILOT CAMERA RELEASE, TILT, ROLL, BRAKE. Scratched sockets in the wall of the spherical apparatus suggested gauges that had been pried out with a screwdriver.