Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  “Here’s the thing,” Sandoval said, and then he lifted his glass and drained it, making us wait. I eyed the scars sneaking out the collar of his shirt. “The AITP was debunked as a hoax twenty years ago. There was never an AITP program to begin with. Anyone remotely involved with this stuff knows that it never got off the ground and was abandoned by ’48. I don’t know who Stanley Brewster is, but he’s more likely your hair stylist—well, not yours, Vaughn, clearly—than he is a four-star general.” He set the glass down. “You’re treating me like I’m stupid, and I don’t appreciate it.”

  Keller was gripping the table with both hands. “Every word you say—every minute you insist on staying here—is increasing the likelihood of getting a 5.56 round through your eye socket. And at some point, you’re the only one who’s responsible for it.”

  I went cold at that, and Keller noticed it and nodded grimly. “See? Brian gets it.”

  Sandoval said, “I thought you were just a poor little fobbit at a data station, Vaughn. Since when does a data analyst threaten US citizens with assassination?”

  This was how quickly the world moved: Keller stood, his chair clattering to the floor, and that poor red-faced fool who’d gotten in my face the last time I was here, obviously a lifer, obviously a regular here, came up to him—he’d clearly been waiting for his shot with us, and looked to be bleakly drunk already—slurring something about Americans and their lack of respect.

  Keller palmed the man’s face and pushed him over a table. Glasses exploded, people scattered, the guy tumbled shoes-up out of sight behind the fallen table. I half-rose from my seat, and Keller walked behind the table and started stomping on the man, his leg pistoning up and down like he was trying to kickstart a chopper. Someone grabbed his shoulder, some kid, and Keller spun around and reached into his jacket. He pulled a pistol from a holster snug against his gut and jammed the barrel in the kid’s face. The kid immediately cowered, ducking down with his hands in the air. Keller hoisted him up by his collar and marched him backward until he was pressed against a wall. He was just some kid in a puffy silver jacket, Adam’s apple bobbing madly. He looked like any poor terrified fool would with a gun against his jaw.

  In perfect Icelandic, Keller said, “Hvað núna, rassgat?” What now, asshole?

  The kid turned his face turned away from the barrel, pressing his head hard against the wall. He blubbered “sorry” in Icelandic and English again and again, eyes cinched shut, spit shiny on his lips.

  Keller took a step back, dropped the gun to his side, saw that the red-faced man had had the temerity to rise up on his hands and knees. Blood fell from the man’s mouth in clots, and Keller stomped over and delivered a punt to his face that I’m sure would have killed him had Keller not been wearing office-guy wingtips. It might have killed him anyway. Someone screamed and the man dropped like he’d been unplugged. Vomit tickled my throat.

  Keller put his handgun back in his holster, smoothed his hair back. He was breathing hard, chest heaving. His shirt had come untucked. The sound of cold Icelandic pop music filled the room but beneath that there was nothing. No one spoke. I could see the injured man’s leg twitching, the heel of his shoe tapping arrhythmically on the floor.

  Keller took the papers and put them back in his jacket. “People,” he said, running a hand down his mouth and then jabbing a finger at us, “have been telling you to leave since day one. It’s time to listen.”

  5

  An hour later we stood in Karla’s empty living room, riddled with nerves and watching television. The eyes of her long-dead ancestors glowered down upon us from their spots on the walls. She’d taken the children to run errands; I assumed finding a severed arm in your yard—whether or not it belonged to someone long dead—did not exactly warm the place up with the notion of familial safety. It was a good thing, too—it saved us from Karla’s inevitable interrogation after seeing our ashen, shit-scared faces after the thing with Keller. We were waiting for Shane, and then we were going to the álagablettur, and then I was leaving.

  An hour of this, I told myself, and then you make your exit. Fobbit or not, Vaughn Keller has informed you that there are people on this island willing to end your life, and what exactly has happened in the past few weeks to make you think he’s lying?

  Sandoval wore a balaclava rolled at the top of his head like a black condom. His NVGs rested on top of that, their lenses bulky and awkward-looking. He kept checking the equipment he had tucked in the many pouches in his jacket—it was a bulky tactical vest, another item he’d had delivered with the cameras—and amid the canned TV laughter and Sandoval’s ceaseless snapping and unsnapping and Velcroing and unVelcroing, I just stood there with my hands in my pockets, feeling emotionally run-through. Gutted and ready beyond words to go home. It was time to admit I needed to take care of the headaches. Time to admit that I didn’t understand what was real and what wasn’t. That things had just gotten away from us.

  It was time to go home, whether Sandoval was right or not.

  “Why are we going into the woods with Shane again?”

  “Because he knows the woods,” Sandoval said. “And he’s got a truck.”

  “You don’t trust us on the bikes out there.”

  Sandoval looked up at me, surprised. “Do you?”

  “No.”

  He went back to battery-checking and level-adjusting.

  I said, “Do you think we’re going to find something out there?”

  “I do. You bet.”

  “Do you believe me now, that I heard someone say my name?”

  He looked up again, and those eyes were clear and sober and all the more terrifying for it. “Yes. Oh yeah.”

  I roved through the channels on the television, knowing it would be on, and it was.

  The lasagna dangled precipitously off the edge of the kitchen table, plate atremble, runnels of grease and cheese sliding to the floor. The son, shirtless, sat at the table, thumbing through a magazine and eating a cookie. He sat hunched over, his gaze glassy, like Sandoval’s got at times. The lasagna’s eyes wobbled and slid, its mouth oozed and sputtered in fear, clots of hamburger and cheese running off now. This was it. The lasagna was about to plunge to its death.

  The boy, shoving the last wedge of cookie into his mouth, wordlessly pushed the plate back onto the table. He turned the page of his magazine.

  The lasagna, safe, trembled and quaked.

  The audience roared with relieved laughter.

  “Seriously,” I said, “what is happening to us?”

  Sandoval battery-checked. Level-adjusted.

  I turned the TV off.

  We heard footsteps on the porch, and Shane came in without knocking. He wore a bright yellow parka that dripped with rain, his hair tied back in a ponytail.

  He scowled at Sandoval. “What are you, a ninja?”

  Sandoval looked down at his vest, nervously unsnapping a pocket. “What are you talking about?”

  “Why are you dressed all in black?”

  “This is just how I dress.”

  “Dude, no, it isn’t. What’s with the ski mask? You look like the bad guy in a Steven Seagal movie.”

  I held up a finger. “I actually technically don’t think Steven Seagal makes movies anymore. I don’t think so, anyway. Maybe in Russia? Didn’t he move to Russia?” Nervous, nervous.

  “You know what I’m talking about.” He told Sandoval to take the balaclava off. “And those NVGs, too.”

  Sandoval said he didn’t think that was going to happen.

  “I’m serious, Mark. It’s dark out there, dude. The goal is to be seen, not to walk around in the middle of the night like a goddamn vampire. You got it?” He pulled a roll of reflective tape out of his pocket and tossed it to me. I fumbled it, and the tape rolled under the coffee table. “Put it on.”

  A test of wills between them, all depende
nt on how much Sandoval wanted to tell Shane—about the álagablettur, Vaughn’s threats, the arm, all of it—and how much he needed safe passage and access to the base.

  He sighed, tossed the NVGs on the couch. “Fine.”

  •

  Something pummeled out of the speakers. It sounded like a mating wyvern listing its dissatisfactions over a car being furiously dismantled in a chop shop.

  “Who’s this?” I asked.

  “Rectal Dismemberment,” Shane said.

  “What kind of music is this?” Sandoval said. “Is this music? This is . . . a social exercise of some kind. A test or something.”

  “This is grindcore,” said Shane.

  “Does Gunnar listen to this?”

  “Gunnar’s ten, dude. I’m a dad, I’m not a lunatic. He listens to the soft stuff.” The road unspooled on each side of us. Sandoval finally complained he couldn’t hear himself think and Shane turned the stereo down. The trees ran in grim black stretches on each side of the road, and I tried to remember what it had been like that first time, riding our bikes back from the base. Had it been this endlessly bleak? Hvíldarland was full of this rough beauty, the whole island barren and windblown, but this part of it was different.

  “We’re gonna do ten minutes out here,” Shane said, his cigarette wagging as he spoke. Smoke dragged itself out of the window. “I don’t want you guys getting lost. We stick together.”

  “Would’ve been easier with the NVGs,” Sandoval muttered.

  “Yeah? How many pairs you have?”

  “Two.”

  “How many of us are in this truck?”

  Sandoval was silent.

  “Exactly,” Shane said. “I’m not walking around out there by myself while you two trip the light fantastic in your little fantasy commando goggles. You got that tape on?”

  “Yeah,” said Sandoval.

  “That reflective tape? You got it on your coats?”

  “Yes, Shane. Christ. Talking to me like a kid, that’s not gonna work for me.”

  “What’s not gonna work is us getting lost out here.”

  “You sound a little nervous,” I said. Sandoval cast a glance my way; we hadn’t told Shane yet about the arm, and I figured he hadn’t heard about it from Karla. I assumed consoling his children would have trumped our little jaunt into the woods.

  I was sitting in the middle of the seat, my knees flush against the dash, and Shane dug an elbow into my side. “Yeah, I’m nervous, Brian. I don’t want to be responsible for the Camping Unicorn Babies when they get turned around communing with nature in the middle of the night.”

  “You think we’re going to find anything?”

  Shane snorted. “You’ll be lucky if your feet touch ground, we’ll be gone so fast. So take your pictures, get your readings”—his voice was rich was sarcasm—“and then I’ll try my luck at getting you in for a quick tour of Camp Carroll, and you can put this whole goddamn unicorn thing behind you. I wouldn’t hold my breath, though.”

  “Doubter,” Sandoval said drily, then turned his face to me. “Another doubter, Brian. You surprised?”

  “Sandoval, I worry about you,” Shane said. “I worry about your brain sometimes.”

  “Your wife contacted me, remember?”

  “To my huge disappointment, believe me.”

  “The video—” said Sandoval, and Shane flung his hand like he was shooing an insect, nearly spearing me in the eye with his smoke.

  “The video? Always about the video! Gunnar could make something like that in ten minutes at school. Everybody knows CGI these days. Please, the video.”

  “Of course,” Sandoval said. “You think it’s fake. Of course you do.” I watched him absently pick at a piece of reflective tape on his sleeve. Were the trees beginning to curl toward the windshield just a little bit? Was I imagining that? That familiar stutter of fear wormed its way into my heart, just a flitter of a thing. I understood then that you really could grow exhausted of anything—even terror.

  “Look,” said Shane, “you got a good deal going on with your books, Mark. It’s a good business model, man. But this shit is not sustainable. There’s no unicorn.” He waved his cigarette at the expanse of forest in front of us. “There’s no haunted woods. No ghosts of dead British grunts.”

  I looked at Sandoval and waited to hear what he was going to say. Anything from Your son found a seventy-five-year-old arm in the mud today, Shane to my personal favorite, Who calls to me out here? A veritable potpourri of insanity could have spilled from his mouth. Instead, he put his hand on the door handle and said, “Pull over.”

  Shane stared at him for a moment and then sighed and pulled into a rutted little clearing laced in deadfall. A branch scraped the roof and I hissed, ducking my head a little. And we sat like that for maybe a minute with the engine cooling, the truck suffused with Sandoval’s martyrdom, my loneliness. Shane’s cigarettes.

  Then Sandoval pushed the passenger door open, his boots squelching in the mud as he jumped down. “Screw it,” he said. “Let’s just wrap this up. Here’s as good a spot as any.”

  Shane rummaged through the toolbox in his truck bed and handed out flashlights. They lit the trees in stark relief. The swaths of tape on our clothes gleamed bone-white when the lights skated across them.

  “Stick close together,” Shane said. “And don’t lose your flashlight. It gets cold as shit out here, and I don’t want to spend the night looking for you.”

  We fanned out in the darkness. You had to, with the trees packed in the way they were. Roots ankle high, snarls of them at your feet. Leg-breakers. Waist-high impasses of brittle, spiky deadfall. I’d look down to step over a knotted whorl of roots and almost get speared in the eye with a branch when I looked back up, and all the while there was that fierce wind. A long stretch of ensnared darkness, these leafless reaching limbs lit in the beam of my flashlight—I was braced by people on both sides, only feet away, and it was still maybe the loneliest place I’d ever been.

  “Ten minutes,” Shane said again, and my heart leapt in my throat for how close his voice was. I scribbled him with the flashlight; he covered his face with a hand.

  “Sorry,” I said, and brought the light down.

  I walked slowly, carefully, worrying my tooth-space with my tongue. My head pulsed, sickly and freezing. For a moment, when my flashlight beam passed over it, I thought I saw a face quickly rearrange itself in the bark of a tree; it became something like a crone or an old man, features twisting, and I nearly fell backward. But I shone the light on it again, ready to run, and it was just a tree, featureless and still. I could hear Sandoval occasionally muttering as he tried to ford his way through the darkness a few feet away.

  I kept expecting to see some other visage speared in my flashlight. Some pale, dead-eyed face leering at me. Button-eyes sloughed in a sheet of desiccation. The stock image culled from every shitty horror movie ever made. Maybe it’d be a dead British infantryman. Face riddled with shrapnel, long-rotted. Missing an arm. Shambling toward me through this dark labyrinth of trees.

  My head was a tuning fork for pain. I felt it in my teeth, my fingertips.

  I stopped, put my hand against a tree and pulled it back; it felt moist, cold. Like skin, I thought wildly, and wiped my hand down my pant leg.

  “Shane? Mark?” My voice was tight, small. If someone walked up and clamped on my windpipe with their pincered fingers, it would feel exactly like this.

  “Guys,” I hissed. “My head feels bad.”

  I stood still, blood loud in my ears. Slowly roving my light through the trees, I waited for the firecracker pop of dead limbs snapping underfoot, the frustrated curses of Shane and Sandoval as they also scraped themselves raw on tree branches. But there was nothing. I looked back, wheeled the light around where I’d come from, and Road Seven was gone. It was gone.

  I stood in a
sea of gnarled trees, alone, in tangles of underbrush swallowed by the night.

  My flashlight flickered twice and winked out.

  The world became a pure dark.

  I started flailing, spearing my palms against branches, this kind of animal keening loosing from my throat. I zombie-stomped forward and the tip of a branch speared me in the cheek, broke skin. I was yelling their names, then just yelling. I pressed my hand against my face, felt the warmth of the blood, and then stood there in the dark, these big heaving breaths racking through my pinched throat. The pain in my head flared suddenly, sent me to my knees. It was so leveling, like a bomb blast, a return to infancy. I wanted my mother. I wanted to be back in my sister’s car with the windows rolled down, the ghost of spring there, the hint of heated tarmac and cut grass. Brooke steering with two fingers, and her looking over at me and smiling. Had that ever even happened?

  I vomited, fell to the ground. I felt the earth against my face, the loam and grit of the woods against my wounded cheek. I saw stars in my periphery, stars that then gathered themselves along the trees, that lit the parchment-skin of the tree trunks near me.

  Eight or ten of them were floating above me.

  The death-lights of those men.

  Chest-high, floating.

  I keened, full of loss, wounded.

  I was a child again, tumored, broken.

  Those poor British dead hovering around me.

  •

  There was the gunfire snap of breaking branches above my head, and I felt hands grip my collar and hoist me up, pull me somewhat back to life. I was weeping. The pain behind my eyes was nearly blinding. “Fuckin dude is heavy,” someone grumbled above me.

  “Shut up,” said someone else. Pure Americana in these voices, not like the two on the road had been.

  The world lightened; they dragged me to the tarmac and dropped me next to the rear wheel of Shane’s truck. I groaned, rolled in the mud. Saw a number of black-clad legs in front of me.