Empire Of Salt

by Weston Ochse

  Auntie Lin slammed a plate of pancakes in front of him. He stared at them. Normally he'd dive in, especially with boysenberry syrup and butter, teasing his eyes and nose with the luscious look and taste, representing everything he loved about breakfast. But his stomach gurgled at the very idea.

  Sam Hopkins slapped him on the back and plopped down on the stool beside him.

  "That was some hell of a time, wasn't it?"

  Patrick nodded as parts of it came back to him. Kristov had promised to guard them and escort each of them home last night. Patrick had an image of the mad Elvis impersonator holding a shotgun in the crux of his shoulder, leading a group of them to the safety of their trailers, a velvet-clad pied piper of drunken fools, singing Suspicious Minds like it was a military cadence.

  "Yeah. Hell of a time," Patrick mumbled. He sipped a glass of water. It seemed to be the only thing he could keep down.

  Auntie Lin approached with a menu, but stopped when Hopkins said, "I'll have what he's having."

  Patrick shoved it over. "Here. Take it. Not hungry."

  Hopkins gave him a surprised look, then eagerly dug in. "Thanks, man."

  Whatever, thought Patrick.

  He knew he was a miserable sight. Patrick pushed out of the restaurant and was assaulted by the bright light of the desert day. He took eight steps, staggered against the wall and puked beneath the mural of spaceships doing battle with aliens.

  Boy, was his Auntie Lin pissed.

  Derrick couldn't wait to get away. Not only was working in a restaurant the lamest thing he'd ever done, it seemed as if his dad had gone off the deep end. The irony that his dad was acting like the man they'd all laughed at the first day here wasn't lost on him.

  Somehow Natasha had managed to slip out earlier. She'd left when he was in the back, elbow deep in scalding dish water.

  He shoved open the back door and headed towards the beach. He knew he should probably go home and check on his father, but that was the last thing he wanted to do. He'd seen his father drunk too many times to count; in fact, he'd hoped that the trip might give them all a new start. Everyone at Derrick's school knew about his father and he was tired of seeing the sympathetic looks in their eyes. Now it seemed as if he'd have to face the same looks when he started high school in the fall.

  The heat beat down from a hard orange sun. It was definitely hotter than it had been earlier. Flies were the only thing that moved.

  He started picking up rocks and throwing them at the birds. When he tired of this, he found a long metal rod and poked at the detritus in the polluted tide. After about half a mile, he turned around, this time concentrating on the beach, poking at odd mounds of sand. He wasn't looking for anything in particular, just something to take his mind off his present situation.

  When he'd almost drawn even with the restaurant he found a mound that offered resistance when prodded. He bent and uncovered a vinyl-bound diary.

  On the inside front cover was his grandfather's name, but that was the beginning and end to what he could read. There was writing in it, but it was complete gibberish, for more than a hundred pages. It looked as if it was written in code, but who would write anything in code unless they were a secret agent or something?

  If only there were other boys around. He could show it to a friend and together they would have figured it out. Like back in Philadelphia when he and his friends had unraveled the mystery surrounding the homeless man named Jimmy Ten Hats who always wore ten hats on his head at the same time. No one knew why he did such a thing, until the boys figured out that those had been the occupations the man had had during his former life. The first hat was that of a porter on a train, and the last one was a hard hat from the same plant his father had worked at.

  Derrick shoved the book in his back pocket and continued searching along the shoreline. He found a few interesting pieces of metal, and a patch of scaly skin from some kind of dead fish, but his mind kept being drawn back to the book. What kind of code was it? And who would be smart enough to decipher it?

  It was mid-afternoon and Patrick sat on the floor of what used to be his father's closet. The kids had boxed everything up and now he was going through them. He had the pacifier in his mouth as he leafed through a shoebox full of greeting cards.

  Bobby Gentry's Ode to Billy Joe played on the stereo. It had been one of his favorites when he was a kid and he remembered that he and his father had sung it over and over on the way to the Monongahela River to fish for trout; he remembered the words like it was yesterday. He and his father had been the only fishermen on the river that day, and had caught a dozen fish in the rain. It had been the last time that he and his father had ever gone anywhere together. A week later the man had taken off.

  The shoebox was filled to bursting and as he looked, he realized that all of the cards in the box had been meant for him... but they'd never been sent. It didn't even look like his father had intended to send them, so their presence was curious. Why would someone buy cards for someone and never send them? Patrick found himself sucking on the pacifier and wondering what his father had wanted all these years. Had he felt trapped here? Had he been too embarrassed to come home?

  There must have been a hundred cards in the box. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, Easter cards, Hallowe'en cards with pictures of ghosts and goblins. They were in chronological order and, as he looked at each one - each bearing a scrawled, simple Dad - Patrick thought about what he'd been doing each day.

  For some of the days, like his sixteenth birthday, Patrick knew exactly what he had been doing. His mother had bought him an old Dodge Duster. It was all rust and fiberglass molding, but he hadn't cared. A boy's first car is one of the most special things in the universe, right up there with his first taste of pizza, his first time with a woman, and the feeling a man has when he realizes he is a father.

  Patrick let the pacifier drop from his mouth as he grabbed the bottle of Old Crow from the floor and took a deep swig. He laughed at his own sentimentality. If having a kid was so damned important, why had his father left?

  He started to jam the cards back in the box. Twice he dropped them, scattering them across his father's old shoes. The cards had been a tight fit in the box when he'd found them, and now that he had them splayed across the floor, he couldn't figure out how to get them all back inside.

  Finally Patrick gave up and shoved the cards that wouldn't fit down his shirt, and lurched to his feet, the box pressed to his chest with one hand and the bottle in the other. He steadied himself, then left the trailer as the record reset and started playing Ode to Billy Joe all over again.

  Gerald parked his golf cart in the shade of sump pump #2, raised his binoculars to his eyes and peered through them, watching the front of the desalination plant at the other end of the quay. Things had been sideways there for a long time. He tried to remember when it was that he first knew something was wrong. He figured it was sometime during the 1970s. They'd had a busload of hippies descend on them then, staying an entire summer until their spirits were smashed by the oppressive heat and the constant rot.

  That was also when he first noticed the nature of the vehicles and people going in and out of the compound. He'd returned from the war an insomniac, lying awake in bed, unconsciously listening for the sounds of Chinese soldiers crawling up on his position.

  So it was that he noticed the military vehicles coming and going from the plant in the wee hours of the morning, soldiers driving the trucks and manning the gates. Why did a desalination plant require soldiers to function properly?

  The answer was that it didn't, which meant that something else was going on.

  Over the years Gerald had been gathering more and more information. He was surreptitious in his spying, careful that he didn't put himself in a position to be seen or captured.

  In recent years that had been more difficult. Five years ago he'd spied the first camera. Since then he'd counted over a dozen. At first he'd believed them put in place by the man known as Colonel Hopk
ins - sometimes Sam Hopkins the Ecologist - but Gerald soon rejected that idea. Someone else had put the cameras in place. Far too many were pointed towards the plant, as if someone else was keeping track of the events as they transpired. If the government was concerned about the town's people and their proximity to the operation, Gerald believed that the cameras would be pointed at them. How better to keep track of the locals than to monitor them 24/7? But that wasn't the case. He still hadn't discovered who put up the cameras, but he had it narrowed down to a few individuals.

  Still, it had been a long time since Gerald had cared what other people thought... a very long time. Once upon a time he'd thought of himself as a good Samaritan, someone whose job it was to help the community; that was until his hooks, and the looks they received from those he'd once thought to call friends.

  Sure there were those like George and Paula, but friends like them were few and far between. Most of the people in Bombay Beach had taken one look at his hooks and viewed him with disgust and horror - never mind that he lost them in defense of a patriotic ideal that they only thought about during holidays, when fireworks and BBQs were their only expressions of solidarity.

  Yet despite this treatment, he still cared for Bombay Beach. But it was the place, not the people, that had found a way into his heart. He still dreamed of a day it would be like it had been when he'd first arrived. He remembered how beautiful the water was and how pristine the trailers looked in perfect rows, with perfect lawns and perfect paint.

  So he'd continue to do what he could to protect the town. And if the citizens benefited from his benevolence then bully for them. As his wife had once told him, they're lucky that they have someone like you looking out for them, even if they don't know it.

  Gerald slid the binoculars back in the case, snapped it shut and made sure it wouldn't slide around on the seat. He put the cart in gear and headed back up Isle of Palms Avenue, looking for a chicken salad sandwich.

  "So what do I do with it?" Derrick asked. He was out of breath and excited as he sat on the floor of Veronica's room. The girls had been talking on the bed when he'd burst into the room but, after a moment of outrage at his intrusion, now seemed nearly as excited as he was.

  The book was open on the bed between the girls as they delicately turned the pages. Here and there were letters that randomly made a word in the middle of a sentence, but other than that, the pages were indecipherable.

  "Can you decode it?" Derrick prodded.

  Veronica glanced towards him and grinned.

  "What does that mean?" he asked. "Is that a yes?"

  "No, it's just a smile to tell you how cool you are for finding this." She beamed her lipstick-smile at him for a moment more, then returned her gaze to the book.

  Derrick's face burned with embarrassment. He tried not to notice Veronica's knee-high white socks, red and black checkered mini-skirt, and tight white halter-top. To hide his awkwardness he sought out images on the wall. Something ugly and normal. A picture of Richard Nixon calmed him enough to regain his dignity.

  "Look at this. See how the margins are even on the right and uneven on the left?" Natasha said.

  Derrick tore himself away from the wall and scooted over to where he could see. He was all too aware of how close he was to Veronica. Her knees were pulled up just on the other side of the book, and when she leaned over, he could smell her shampoo. He looked down at the book and saw that his sister was right. The words had been written as if the writer had started on the right hand side of the page.

  "I hadn't noticed." Veronica turned several pages, then flipped from back to front. "They're all like that."

  Derrick liked the way her freckles danced when she scrunched her nose. "All of them?"

  She nodded and glanced his way, warming his heart, then resumed examining the book.

  "You know," Natasha began, "I think that Grandpa Laz wrote it backwards."

  This brought Derrick out of his trance. His grandfather had written the book backwards? If there was anything more cool, he didn't know what it was.

  "The code must have meant that he didn't want anyone to read it."

  "I can see that," Natasha agreed. "And he wrote it backwards as a double code."

  A double code. That was more cool. Derrick grinned.

  "But what does it say?" Veronica shifted her feet under her to get a better vantage point.

  "I've done codes before," Derrick said. "Simple things in school, like substitution codes. You know, like the Caesar cipher, where an 'A' is really an 'M,' and a 'B' is really an 'N' and so forth."

  "Could it be that?"

  "I tried that on the way over here." Derrick said. "Didn't work. I've also seen codes where lists of numbers refer to letters of the alphabet, only not always in their natural order."

  "I don't see any numbers," Veronica said.

  "Me neither. I was just thinking out loud. Maybe I should sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and see if I can figure it out. The trick is to look for the most commonly occurring words, such as 'the' and 'a' It's also important to find double letters, like two 'L's or two 'P's. Once you can find those, then you can figure out the alphabet." His eyes got wide as he peered at the page.

  "What is it?" Natasha asked.

  "It could be an Atbash cipher."

  Natasha and Veronica looked at each other, then back at Derrick.

  "What's an Atbash cipher?" Natasha asked.

  "It's another substitution cipher, but the last letter of the alphabet is really the first letter and things run in reverse. So 'Z' is 'A' and 'Y' is 'B' and so on."

  "Was Atbash a person?"

  Derrick glanced at Veronica. "I don't know, maybe."

  "How do you know all of this stuff?" Veronica seemed to look at him for the first time. Really look at him.

  Derrick felt himself starting to blush and looked again at Nixon. "I read it in a book somewhere. I don't remember."

  "You read all of that in books?"

  Now it was Derrick's turn to look at Veronica. He realized that she was an ex-gangbanger from Los Angeles and probably hadn't grown up in a home where Sundays could be whiled away reading a book. He almost said something sarcastic, but instead he just nodded. "Sure. No telling what I've read that may be useful." He examined the first page closely and eventually shook his head. "Nah. Not an Atbash. Too bad, really. It would have been the easiest thing."

  "Yeah, too bad," Veronica echoed.

  "Hey," Natasha said, getting everyone's attention. "Do you think Grandpa Laz knew what was going on in Bombay Beach and wrote about it in this book?"

  The three of them gazed at the book with new respect. If it did have the secrets to what was going on here, then they could finally see if the locals were right about it being a government conspiracy. That there was a book lent credence to that idea. After all, why would their grandpa go to so much effort just to write about ordinary stuff? Codes such as these weren't meant for normal diaries. They were meant to keep secrets.

  Than a thought occurred to Derrick. Was it possible that his grandfather was killed because of this book?

  He glanced wide-eyed at Natasha, who shared his expression. She'd evidently thought the same thing.

  The scratching had gone on for hours. Abigail stood in the doorway to the bathroom, her hand shaking as she held the pistol. It was impossibly heavy, but she was terrified to lay it down. It was the only thing that could save her if the creature burst through, so she had to hold it. She couldn't afford to put it down for even a moment.

  Trudie lay beneath the window. She hadn't moved for hours. She was barely breathing, yellow bile staining the fur around her mouth. The chocolate had hurt her more than Abigail had anticipated. All she'd wanted to do was feed her poor Trudie, take away the edge of hunger for a bit.

  Abigail had known that dogs were allergic to the candy, but she'd had no idea the allergy was this severe. That she blamed herself was an understatement. She looked in the mirror and saw a dog killer.

&nb
sp; So as she stood holding the pistol to protect herself, other uses for the weapon came to mind, ideas creeping in under her determination to survive. If she made it through this crazy episode, would she be able to live with the knowledge that she'd killed her own dog? Would she be able to live with that truth?

  That there was nothing she could do made her want to scream. What was this creature to hold her trapped in her own home? If it wasn't for this thing clawing through her floor this never would have happened.

  She thought again of Trudie begging her over and over, whining, starving, entreating her for just one small morsel to eat. Abigail had given the dog one piece, then another - only two pieces really. Maybe three.

  Abigail was so caught up in her miserable reverie that she almost missed the fact that the scratching had stopped. She glanced over her shoulder at Trudie who still lay beneath the window. The door to the room was still locked, the deadbolt secure. She could see a bulge beneath the mauve carpet where the creature had been working at the floor beside the toilet.

  Then a hand burst through. Mottled-green skin tipped with hard gray nails tore at the carpet, ripping pieces away as the hole opened larger. Soon an entire arm wedged through, the hole widening quickly as a shoulder pushed through behind it.

  Abigail brought the pistol up and held it with two hands. She aimed down the barrel like her husband had told her to and pulled the trigger.

  The gun jumped. The explosion seemed impossibly loud in the small space. The back of the toilet exploded, sending shards of white porcelain and water raining across the room.

  The creature continued undeterred.

  She fired again, this time taking out the toilet bowl. Water sprayed from the pipes, drenching the opposite wall.

  Still the creature came. It pushed its head through, hands tearing at the carpet and wood to enlarge the hole.

  She fired again.

  Part of the creature's lower jaw disappeared in a mist blood and bone.

  But it wasn't even slowed.

  She had to run.