by Keith Rosson
No. Not a stretch at all to imagine that.
They’d ridden long enough for Brian to wonder if the road had actually branched in two, if they had somehow missed a turnoff. It was dusk, and that dread was like a snake slowly coiling around his ribs now. Not cinching, not yet, but not far from it.
And then they crested a rise and saw a sign, and through the last of the trees lay a vast, blackened emptiness. The sign read:
CAMP CARROLL
JTF HVÍLDARLAND
Restricted Area
Authorized Military Personnel Only
Beyond the rusted sign lay charred land. The buildings stood beyond that, bracing the sea and wrapped in fencing. But first, that burned, dead ground dotted with the nubs of cut and charred stumps. The fingertips of buried giants failing to extricate themselves. The slash-burn had been new enough that Brian could still smell the char in his nose. Like the campfires of his youth, really, but different, too. Something rich and bitter to the stink. A burn recent enough that it seemed he should have been able to witness tendrils of smoke rising from the ground.
In front of them were maybe two dozen buildings of simple gray-painted brick and steel siding. Nothing more than two stories high. Some of the buildings were little more than windowless, dark boxes, and all of them were lashed with some array of antennae on their roofs. A line of Humvees were parked against one building. There was a hangar and small airstrip at the far end of the lot, an asphalt field scattered with yellow stencils. Lines of tar where the pavement had buckled and been repaired. A few halogens on rooftops lit the grounds in cold electric light, but there were great pockets of shadow as well.
At the top of the rise, Brian sidled up next to Sandoval. The compound beyond the burn was ringed in razor-wire fencing and a gate. Next to the gate sat a guard’s booth, little more than an upright coffin. It all had an air of desolation about it, the whole place. No soldiers hustling from building to building. There was no gut-thumping rattle of choppers landing or taking off, no planes trundling along the runway. Coupled with the devastation on each side of them and that scorch-burn in his nostrils, the place gave Brian the fucking creeps.
It was going on full dark now.
Sandoval said quietly, “So this is here, just out in the middle of nowhere.”
Brian thought of the vague, half-remembered podcasts Robert and Ellis sometimes listened to: hushed, feverish announcers murmuring about an armada of secret US bases tucked away in distant corners of the globe. Bases used for the detainment and torture of prisoners, the housing of warheads and chemical weapons, biological experiments. The place wasn’t sprawling, but what was he expecting? Towers topped with machine guns? Dudes in hazmat suits clomping around like some kind of shitty sci-fi movie?
Brian said, “Karla called it, though. It’s definitely a military base.”
“Shit yeah, it is.”
The breeze picked up. Ash snaked in gritty skeins across in the road.
Sandoval pushed off down the slope toward the base.
“Wait,” Brian called and then, reluctantly, pushed off after him.
Almost immediately an amplified voice came over the loudspeakers moored along the fence-line. Brian almost toppled in surprise. It sounded like the voice of God: it was everywhere and nowhere: “Stop.” A young, almost boyish voice, insectile with amplification.
Brian’s feet shirred up little clouds of powder as he stopped.
Sandoval kept coasting.
“Stop.”
Slowly, Sandoval’s wheels drew lines in the deepening ash. With sudden, scrotum-tightening panic, Brian saw a soldier lean his torso out of the guard’s booth, the dark, bristling arm of his rifle aimed at them.
“Mark,” Brian called out. “Dude, stop.”
Sandoval peered back at him over his shoulder; Brian saw a wedge of white eye and, there it was, a sneer. He winked and skidded the bike in a little pirouette. It clattered onto its side as Sandoval stood up and faced the base, his palms raised. Jesus.
Sandoval spoke loudly, overenunciating. “We were just hoping to check stuff out. Get a tour.” He took a single tentative step forward. Behind him, Brian gently laid his bike down, put his own hands in the air. His heart was a stone rattling in his throat.
The kid’s rifle didn’t waver at all. “Sir, this is an American military installation.” Without amplification, the kid sounded like he was practically Gunnar’s age.
“I understand that,” Sandoval said, walking toward the guard.
“All non-military personnel need approval from the camp’s Commanding Officer, sir. You are not cleared, sir.” Somehow, even through the fear of having a gun pointed at him, the youth and Americanness in the kid’s voice gave Brian another odd, savage stab of homesickness.
“Well, hey,” said Sandoval, still walking forward, his palms held up, “how about we get your CO out here and talk about it?”
The kid lifted his rifle, leaned back into his booth.
“Brian,” said Sandoval without turning around, “get your ass up here.”
“Stop,” the kid said again, back on the loudspeaker, his voice edged now in something like real panic. Brian thought, I don’t want to die next to a mutant slash-burn, or whatever that is back there. Or shot down by some piss-scared kid firing at me from inside a steel coffin. Tumor or not, I don’t. He raised his arms higher, sweat trickling madly down his sides. He stayed put.
Sandoval was almost to the guard shack when a door slotted open from one of the buildings and a trio of armed men trotted out. All three of them were helmeted, beefed up with gear, clunky with body armor. They ran low to the ground, their gun barrels roving in tight circles before them.
It’s just us, Brian wanted to say, his mouth glued shut with panic. Mark’s detoxing and I’m a dipshit with a brain tumor. Just chill, guys.
At the fence, two of them turned and squatted, kept their rifles poised along the perimeter of the fence line. The third one stood up, his own weapon pointed at the buckled blacktop, his eyes bouncing between Sandoval and Brian and back. Sandoval walked up to the fence. The soldier lifted his chin toward Brian and called out, “Get your ass up here.”
Brian reluctantly walked up next to Sandoval.
“The fuck’re you guys doing here?” the man said through the fence. “No, keep your hands up.”
Sandoval shrugged, put his hands back up. “We just came to check out the base.”
“No. What’re you doing here? In Hvíldarland. You tourists?” He grimaced. “What’s with the bikes?”
“Lieutenant,” said the kid from the guard booth, “these are those guys.”
“What guys?” said the lieutenant. An eddy of ash curled around his boot.
“The American guys. The ones we got the memo about.”
Sandoval’s grin was genuine and ferocious. “You got a memo about us?”
The lieutenant shut his eyes for a second. “Jesus wept, Curtinson.”
Curtinson cursed under his breath and stepped back into the booth. Brian made eye contact with him and the kid lifted his lip in a snarl, embarrassed and pissed.
The lieutenant shouldered his rifle, tapped the other two men on the back. They stood as well. “So you’re the writer guy, dicking around on that farm.”
“That’s us,” Sandoval said cheerfully. “Wow, this is great! Now that we’ve been introduced, can we get a tour? Fifteen minutes. Just real quick. Be great PR for you guys.”
“Nah.” The lieutenant leaned over and closed a nostril with his thumb and blew.
“Look, I’ve got a camera in my bag, you guys can have it until I leave. Or I can take pictures and you can check them before I take off. I’m all about transparency.”
The lieutenant, undoubtedly younger than Brian and beating Sandoval by decades, did the other nostril and let out a tight-lipped little smile. He pulled a tin o
f chewing tobacco from his pocket and thocked it against his leg. “There’s nothing here to tour, sir. We gather weather data. You can look it up on Wikipedia.”
“Well then, what’s the big deal? Right? Hell, give us ten minutes.”
A little less bemused now, he nodded behind them and said, “Sir, that sign you passed is pretty serious. I suggest you guys go back to Kjálkabein or that farm or wherever you’re staying. Be tourists. Get some pickled fish, go to a museum.”
“Come on.”
“I’m informing you now—if I see you here again, I’ll have you detained and arrested.”
“Perfect!” Sandoval cried. “A tour!”
The lieutenant scratched an eyebrow with a thumbnail then kept it there, a pained look on his face. “It could lead to extradition, sir. Being put on the no-fly list. A lot of legal headaches for you. So we’re gonna wait here until you take off on your bikes. The woods can get a little tricky at night, so I’d hurry if I were you. And again, I’m informing you that you’ve been officially warned not to come back.”
Sandoval was already walking backward, his hands thrust in his pockets. Even without seeing his face, Brian could tell he was smirking. “That’s it? You don’t want to know why we’re here in Hvíldarland?”
The lieutenant pocketed a healthy wad of chew inside his lip. “No disrespect, sir, but I don’t give a flying fuck.”
That insouciance of Sandoval’s? That could be so infuriating when you were on the receiving end of it? It was admittedly an amazing thing to watch the guy leer at four armed soldiers who only moments ago had been pointing guns at him. “We’re looking for unicorns,” Sandoval purred, and hoisted his little bicycle up by a tasseled handlebar.
“Lucky you didn’t get your ass sniped,” Curtinson muttered from his booth.
Sandoval called out, “You haven’t seen any unicorns around here, have you, Curtinson? Come on, man. Five minutes and we’ll be out of your hair.”
The lieutenant spat a thread of tobacco juice on the ground. He pointed a gloved finger at the two of them. “Sir, let me be clear: you’ve got a better chance of getting blown by a unicorn than you do of getting in here. Ride safe.”
11
It had thrown him, the studied, measured speed with which the soldiers had poured from the building. Curtinson’s metallic rasp over the loudspeaker. That fear, while guns traced over him. And before that, there’d been the forest itself. The unsettling nearness of it, the discomfiting way he’d felt on the road. Watched and unnerved and fogged with something.
Now they rode back toward the farm. The charred ground again gave way to heavy brush and then thicker forest. They coasted for a while on their tiny bicycles and neither spoke. Eventually—quicker than Brian remembered—the road leveled out and rose again, and trees once more braced them on each side, a wall of blurred darkness. The sky above was a thinned thumb of velveteen dusk. He pedaled and pedaled, breathing hard, his head down, and when he looked up, the leaning limbs of pine trees were suddenly close enough to touch with an outstretched hand. Had they been this close on the way there, the branches? Nearly brushing against his arms like this?
Sandoval was almost indecipherable in the gloom up ahead, visible only for the faint ghost of the white tassels on his handlebars.
They rode, and in increments—almost infinitesimal but not quite—the trees seemed to bend toward them. Brian’s thoughts grew muddied, but the moment that he recognized it—I’m fading here, I think something’s happening—he awakened again as if slapped. He wanted to close his eyes and then open them, as if to catch the trees like you might catch someone sneaking toward you in the night, but he was too afraid. As they rode, there were moments when he had to duck his head away from a leaning branch. Once when he looked up, the night was jeweled with a shocking number of stars, a dark sky ripped open and teeming with them. And then he wobbled again—his balance had been giving him trouble today, and he knew what that was all about, didn’t he?—and a knotty branch seemed to reach forward and skate across his arm in a hot welt of pain. The world hung molasses-slow before him. He felt like he’d been doped somehow.
“Mark—”
“I know,” Sandoval said in the darkness ahead, his voice calm and measured. “Keep going.”
The whir of their spokes, Brian’s own labored breath in his ears. Like when he’d been hit earlier—he was afraid now, but the fear was in another room somewhere. Distant.
He pedaled.
And then, in his ear, someone said his name.
Someone said his name, a chilled exhalation that stirred the hairs on his neck, that ran torrents of gooseflesh up and down his arms. It was breathy, a whisper so sorrowful and barbed with loss. He veered, cried out, and when he craned his neck back to see who’d spoken, of course it was just the winding ribbon of Road Seven in the dark. No one was there. Just the leaning trees twining their branches into the canopy above.
“Mark—”
His thoughts were lacquered and slow. He could hear the gritty contraction and expansion of his lungs in his ears, the febrile hissing of his tires against the road.
I think I’m dying. Stroke. Aneurysm. Something.
Again he heard his own name hushed in his ear. A longing and a sorrow in a single rustling breath. He looked over his shoulder again and saw the woods had enveloped themselves, the trees had devoured each other across the road, root and limb entwined to form a tunnel of pure dark behind him. The night sky had been swallowed. The trees had done this, formed a depthless black that rushed up behind him, in silence. Something malicious, something shed entirely of its sympathy.
Something reaching.
And when he turned back to face the road—his heart thundering, everything still so achingly slow—there was a tree in front of him.
The bark of the tree suddenly so close to his face that he could read its rough-hewn cracks and tributaries as easily as the whorled landscape of his own fingerprints.
The briefest sense, then, of flight, and the inevitable solidity.
•
He seemed destined to return to life with the dark, formless shapes of men standing over him.
“Just stay still,” Sandoval said. “You’re cool.”
But it was too much like the attack, the ambulance, and he quickly sat up. The trees were trees again; they kept their distance, ten, fifteen feet from the road. No snarling crooked limbs. No whispering. The world hung before him as it had before. The gleaming shotgun-scatter of stars he’d seen before were replaced now by a night sky more reasonable, more realistic. He waved his hand in front of his face, red droplets spattering on his palm, and that languid, dream-like quality was gone. The world was the world again. His face hummed, his mouth hot and coppery.
“Ah,” he said, “my mouth hurts really bad.” What came out was slurred and insensible, a weepy drunk’s last bed-laden proclamations before the abyss took him.
“Yeah, you probably shouldn’t talk, Brian. You hit your face again.”
“Ah. Ow.”
“I think you lost a tooth. Wait. Yeah, here it is. You’re bleeding quite a bit, bud. Damn.”
Sandoval reached into his sport coat, and being Mark Sandoval, he had a dark blue square of folded handkerchief ready to go. Even in the weak moonlight Brian could see the monogram in white stitching. He gave Sandoval a look, one readable even through the mess of his face.
Sandoval grinned. “Give me a break. I’ve got a brand to uphold.”
He put the handkerchief to Brian’s mouth, and Brian took it with a shaking hand. “I saw the trees leaning in. Reaching for us.”
“Yeah?” Sandoval said.
“Didn’t you?”
“Just sit here for a minute.”
“There was no moon. The trees covered the moon up. But also the sky exploded. Stars everywhere.”
“Okay.”
; “Someone said my name.”
“Sure.”
“Don’t patronize me,” Brian said.
“I just . . . I didn’t see anything like that, bud.”
“Why’d you say ‘I know,’ then? When we were riding?”
“I thought you were gonna chew my ass about pressing those jarheads to let us in.”
The sudden hole in his mouth: a front tooth, the ones around it wobbly and loose. Blood seeped from his lips as if straight from a tap. The hot animal taste of it threatening to make him sick.
“So you didn’t see anything?”
“I was ahead of you. I heard you crash.”
He took the handkerchief away from his mouth. “Someone said my name. Right in my ear.” His breathing came in ragged hitches.
Sandoval nodded, squeezed his knee. “I’m not saying it didn’t happen.”
The process of rising was a complicated one, a series of levers and pulleys in a body suddenly gone jittery with adrenaline and panic. Finally he was standing and Sandoval wheeled his bike over to him. “Can you ride this thing?”
Brian nodded, and Sandoval gestured at the handkerchief. “Might as well just put that in your mouth, man. You’re still gushing.”
“You didn’t feel the forest, like, closing in?” He looked down and saw the long, laddered scratch from the tree limb going down his arm, pink and stippled with blood. Spatters of blood on his shirtfront, coal-dark in the night. “I looked back, and . . .” He shrugged, unable to convey that sense of closing in, of permanence that he’d seen behind them.
“Nope. But if you say you did, I believe you.” Sandoval’s daredevil grin, those ridiculous white teeth. “I told you we were on the right track, buddy.”
“You’re the only person—ah shit, ouch—only person who could see this as good news.”