Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  Praise for Road Seven

  “A wonderful book—funny, strange, perpetually surprising, aglow with insight and fierce compassion. Keith Rosson is one of my favorite writers; I’d follow him through the haunted woods any day.”

  —Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

  “When was the last time I had this much fun reading a novel? Keith Rosson is a mixologist of fiction, and Road Seven, with its cryptozoology, Icelandic mysticism, science fiction-ey conspiracy-laden horror, is his craft cocktail. With the forward momentum of a T.C. Boyle novel but a vision wholly his own, Rosson emerges as one of fiction’s most exciting voices with a novel unlike any I’ve read.”

  —John McNally, author of The Fear of Everything and The Book of Ralph

  “With his unique, preternatural skills, Keith Rosson is back with Road Seven. Deeply dimensional characters struggle at their wits’ end with the emotional truths of their utterly flawed, conflicted, hapless selves. Dialogue vibrates with subtext in vividly imagined scenes described in always surprising, always apt words. He achieves the goal of so many writers: a style all his own that signifies in all the ways—from the subtlest touches to quick jabs, gut punches, and spin kicks that will floor you.”

  —Roy Freirich, author of Deprivation and Winged Creatures

  “A well wrought speculative tale that is quirky and creepy by turn . . . the blend of genres, from science fiction to cosmic horror, is masterfully executed. Readers will be riveted by this clever, unsettling adventure.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A magical journey through the wilds of rural Iceland and into a kaleidoscopic terrain filled with secretly active military bases and muddied body parts that sully what began as an innocent expedition into the supernatural . . . An engrossing and creative story of the wonders of the unknown.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Cross-genre elements—including personalized, existential horror; noir threats; and the unsettling unknown—result in a disconcerting adventure whose dark humor prevails. Darkly comic and brimming with flawed characters, Road Seven examines the price of knowledge as the unknown becomes horrific.”

  —Foreword Reviews

  Also by Keith Rosson

  The Mercy of the Tide

  Smoke City

  ROAD SEVEN. Copyright © 2020 by Keith Rosson.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For information, contact Meerkat Press at info@meerkatpress.com.

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-29-3 (Paperback)

  ISBN-13 978-1-946154-30-9 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020938573

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Keith Rosson

  Book design by Tricia Reeks

  Printed in the United States of America

  Published in the United States of America by

  Meerkat Press, LLC, Atlanta, Georgia

  www.meerkatpress.com

  To Robin,

  for the belief,

  and the joy,

  and the last song

  on that one record

  Contents

  1

  napalm grays.....3

  2

  how in the hell do they grow pumpkins in hvíldarland?.....51

  3

  just perhaps maybe the slightest monkey.....125

  4

  ghosts of the álagablettur.....175

  5

  petitions.....221

  6

  monsters americana.....231

  7

  quiet enough, and then loud enough.....253

  1

  napalm grays

  “I became used to gazing between the staggered limbs of trees, at looking beyond the branches and needles, at finding the shapes inside the shapes. That’s where I knew I would find the creature, find the unknown, find whatever mysteries it held: there, between the trees, ensnared in the hidden spaces of the world.”

  —Mark Sandoval, Seen Through the Trees

  1

  It was a help wanted ad from a monster hunter.

  The monster hunter, really, if such a term could ever be said out loud without at least a little wince, a self-conscious roll of the eyes. Its arrival came via a forwarded link from Ellis, who in the subject line wrote: Aren’t you into this guy?

  It was a spring evening and Brian sat in his room, enveloped in the encroaching night, cradled in his usual pain. A few moths flitted in mortal combat against his window screen, and Brian had the napalm grays going on, had that deep and familiar knife-throb in the skull. The Headache That Lived Forever. Still, Ellis’s line made him smile. Brian heard him downstairs in the kitchen yelling to Robert over the music, cupboard doors slamming closed. They were making drinks—pregame warmups, Ellis called them—before the three of them went out to get stupid, or what passed for stupid these days. Brian was already thinking of ways to bail—his head, when it got like this, in this kind of slow, heated roil, like a halo of barbs being cinched tighter and tighter, alcohol was no good for it.

  Down the hall in the bathroom, he dropped a trio of aspirin into his palm and chewed them while he gazed at his face in the mirror. Three would maybe take the edge off, turn the headache from a sharp blade scraping along the bowl of his skull to a dull one. That was about it; you could grow used to anything. He leaned close and gazed at the galaxy of burst blood vessels in one eye.

  Back in his room, bass-heavy nü metal ghosting through the floorboards, Robert bellowed laughter in response to something Ellis said. Brian sat back down, looked at the screen of his laptop. His bare feet on the wood floor, the occasional draft from the window fluttering the curtains. The moths outside, insistent and hopeful. Here was spring in Portland: the scent of cut grass, the blat of a car alarm, the creak of a shifting, old, many-roomed house. Ellis’s place he’d inherited from his parents; Brian had been his roommate since they were undergrads.

  His desk was choked with stacks of accordion folders, mugs of pens. Outdated anthro journals he kept telling himself he’d read someday. He clicked on the link Ellis had sent, and it took him to a cryptozoology website, and not one of the good ones. Not one of the ones that Brian sometimes cruised (with only the slightest tinge of embarrassment), ones that tended to mirror or replicate the “reputable” sciences. No, this one, menandmonsterz.com, had all the trappings of the technologically inept and socially unhinged: woefully pixilated photos, a dizzying array of fonts stacked and butting up against each other. There was a link, holy shit, to a Myspace page. What If Leprechauns, one headline blared in what was almost certainly Papyrus font, Were Really Pre-Stone Age Hominids!?! This, alongside a fan-art illustration of the Lucky Charms leprechaun leering and holding a stone ax in each hand. Beneath that, a banner ad for hair regeneration. The type of site, honestly, that made antiviral software programmers rich.

  And yet, the next part snagged him:

  The Long Way Home author, alien abductee, famed cryptozoologist, and renowned cultural anthropologist Mark Sandoval is on the hunt for a research assistant. And maybe it’s YOU!

  He snorted at the “cultural anthropologist” part and scrolled down past the iconic cover of The Long Way Home, Sandoval’s memo
ir about his alien abduction (the image was a tiny human figure enveloped in a cone of light from some unseen but brilliant overhanging light source, the same image they’d used for the movie) and then past Sandoval’s Hollywood-quality headshot. It continued:

  Mark Sandoval is looking for a research assistant to accompany him on a site visit outside of the US. Position is confidential and time-sensitive. Terms and compensation commensurate with experience. Visit marksandoval.com to apply.

  “Brian!” Ellis bellowed from downstairs. “Get your pregame drink on, dear heart! Let’s do this shit!”

  “We’re making the most terrible drinks we can,” warbled Robert.

  Brian typed in the address to Sandoval’s website, and it was a much nicer affair. Professional, clean, and surprisingly understated, considering the man claimed to have at one time literally traded punches with a chupacabra. And there was the ad—the same exact information, with a Click to Apply button at the bottom. Vague as hell. Had the air of haste to it, something quickly cobbled together. But he clicked on it, scratched his chin with his thumbnail. Pressed three fingers against his eyelid, felt the sick, familiar throb in the hidden meat behind his eye. He quickly typed in the various fields—name, email address, phone number—and confirmed that he did indeed have a valid passport. Then he uploaded his CV, which he had at the ready because this, of course, was not remotely the first time Brian Schutt had dicked around with the notion of ditching everything in regard to his future. No, this was not the first time at all.

  To be fair, it was admittedly a decent resume for a thirty-year-old who was still doggy-paddling through his academic career, who had yet to submit his dissertation—that obnoxious, convoluted, soul-shattering paperweight that it was. As cowardly as he felt when he thought about it, and as one-dimensional and chickenshit as that stasis made him feel, he really was close to being done. And he’d worked on two published papers that he’d been given credit on and had gone on a number of digs with his professor, Dr. Don Whitmer (all of them in the States, true, save for the one on the shore of Iceland’s Lake Holmavatn, hence the passport) and Whitmer was most certainly no slouch in the anthropology world, so hey. There was that. Academic doggy-paddling aside, he really didn’t look too bad on paper. Though what the hell a guy like Mark Sandoval was actually looking for in a research assistant was anyone’s guess. Imperviousness to silver bullets? Telepathy? Acting experience?

  Someone clomped up the steps and knocked on his open door. Then Ellis was leaning in the doorway, holding something muddy and dark in a wineglass. Scowling, he took in the state of Brian’s room. The unmade bed, the balled up socks on the floor. Dirty clothes lay in drifts, piled against the molding like windblown garbage. Papers were literally spilling out of the drawers of his desk.

  “It smells like you jerked off and then died in here,” he said.

  “You’re a charmer.”

  “And then jerked off again.”

  Brian’s dissertation sat on top of his dresser, a mess of paper stacked three, four inches tall. On top of it rested an old Vietnam-era pineapple grenade long since robbed of its charge. Something he’d bought himself last year as a joke. Supposedly. When the irony of not finishing the thing yet had actually seemed a little ironic, and not weighted and terrible.

  Ellis offered him the wineglass and Brian said, “I don’t know, man. My head’s killing me.”

  Ellis frowned. “Drink it.”

  As if he were psychic or the room was bugged, Robert yelled, “Drink it!” from downstairs, drawing out the last word until it ended in a series of yips and howls.

  Brian took a sip, smacked his lips. Took another drink. Squinted up at Ellis. And then it hit him. “Jesus. What’s in this?”

  Ellis ticked them off with his fingers. “Coke, whiskey, vodka. Instant coffee, cocoa.”

  “Ah, God. Barf.”

  “Oh! Nutritional yeast. Some cherry liqueur Robert got from a work party two Christmases ago. Onion powder.”

  “Ellis, no.”

  “We’re pregaming, remember? Robert calls it an Arkansas Dust Cloud, but if I told you why, you’d probably throw up for real.” His face brightened when he saw what was on Brian’s laptop. “Hey, you went to the thing! The website.”

  Brian was a little embarrassed. “Yeah. I’m applying.”

  “You are? I was just kidding! I just thought you liked that movie. You’re actually applying?” Ellis got louder the more he drank, more bombastic, and Brian assumed by the way he slapped his hand against his chest in shock that this probably wasn’t his first Dust Cloud.

  “Yeah. I mean, why not?”

  “Because you live here,” Ellis said, sitting down on Brian’s bed and taking the wineglass from him. He drank a third of it and didn’t flinch. A rind of dark flakes clung to the inside of the glass. “You live here, young man, and you’re the only person I could ever cohabitate with and not ultimately throat punch to death.”

  “Besides Robert,” Brian offered.

  “Psssh,” Ellis said, waving a hand. “Neither of us are in any rush there, believe me.”

  “Well, it says it’s a site visit, so it’s not like I’d be gone long anyway.”

  Ellis nodded, swirled the contents of the wineglass. “Seriously though, this room. Fetid does not begin to describe it.”

  “Listen, you mind if I finish this?” Brian said, pointing at his computer.

  “Drink the fucking thing,” Robert yelled from downstairs.

  “He thinks he’s too good for it,” Ellis yelled back.

  Sometimes, when Brian laughed and his headache was particularly bad, he saw white stars populate the corners of his vision. It happened now, and he winced a little and said, “Just let me finish this and we can head out.”

  Ellis had a moment of concern—they’d lived together long enough. He knew what one of Brian’s bad nights looked like. “I’m just kidding you—if you need to stay in, don’t worry about it.”

  “No, I’ll just finish this. I’m good.”

  “That is so funny,” Ellis said, standing up and smoothing his shirt. “Robert sent that to me as a joke. You’re really applying?” He walked out, made as if to slam Brian’s bedroom door and then, grinning, gently closed it instead.

  There really wasn’t much else to do. Under the Availability field he typed in “Immediately.” The last field threw him for a minute. He sat there, tapping out a little rhythm on the lip of his desk. Bass throbbed downstairs, a new song, dance music that made wavering ripples among the various mugs of coffee sitting on his desk.

  Why does cryptozoology interest you?

  Blessed with the casual honesty afforded those who didn’t really give much of a shit one way or the other, he typed, “Because I want to believe in the unknown. In the idea of something beyond, something atypical. Even if I know there’s nothing out there in the dark, nothing under the bed, I still wish the possibility was there.”

  •

  They cabbed to a bar underneath the Morrison Bridge. As Ellis and Robert chatted with the driver, Brian thumbed through his phone. It was the usual confluence of the brutal and the mundane: A pop star wore a midriff-revealing top to showcase her new baby bump. A girl in a Seattle middle school accidentally shot herself in the thigh with the handgun she’d smuggled to class in her backpack. White nationalists convened on a small town in Alabama for a “Whites Only Commerce Day,” urging business owners to turn away people of color. Bedlam and violence ensued, leaving one dead. A bubonic plague outbreak in China, five confirmed cases. In a small town in Idaho, a dog saved a child’s cat from a tree. There was a video clip of the dog scaling the tree and picking the mewling cat up by the scruff of its neck. Brian watched, numbed.

  Get me, he thought, the hell out of here.

  •

  The place was called Drill. It was dark and hangar-like, its long walls festooned with repurposed sla
ts of rusted steel spattered with useless rivets. A glossy cement floor. Dim and crowded, it stood next door to a French-fusion restaurant called the White Bird, and on the opposite side was a rundown, cobwebbed CPA office, some last remnant of old Portland hanging on like some vestigial tail. Their bartender had a handlebar mustache and a tattoo of a sparrow on his throat. Ellis’s drink came with a charred pinecone snared into the lip of the glass, and the price of their three drinks combined equaled more than what Brian spent on groceries in a week.

  A homeless encampment was clustered around the bridge column outside their window, a small satellite city of shopping carts and tarps and battered tents ringed around it. He saw the occasional flutter of flashlights or cell phone screens casting wan illuminations on the pavement. Here, he thought, was capitalism distilled: the old Portland had been vanquished, decimated, and in this bar was the new city rising from the ashes, a recalcitrant phoenix that flexed its wings and built code and drove hybrids and staunchly ignored the poor. A wealthy, tech-savvy phoenix that shat neck tattoos and charred artisanal pinecones. He felt momentarily buoyed by self-righteousness, and then he remembered where he was and what he was doing—slowly flagellating his way around a PhD and drinking a twelve-dollar IPA that someone else had bought for him—and felt indescribably old instead.