by Keith Rosson
And I did. And she listened. Both of us surprised each other, I think. I told her about the unicorn video and the destroyed room at the Hotel Magnificence, how almost immediately our arrival had ignited some strange factions that wanted us gone. I told her about the whispering voice in my ear after coming back from the base, how the trees seemed to lean toward us. Of Sandoval’s strange and growing allure to the forest around the farm, the way the woods seemed to snare him. I told her about the two men in the car on the road, and then the ones who buried a hatchet in Sandoval’s arm. I told her about Vaughn Keller and the way he’d pressed that pistol against the boy’s eye in the bar.
Listing it like that, a litany, it sounded crazy.
It sounded, really, like one of Sandoval’s books.
“I probably should have left a while back,” I said a little bashfully, and Brooke grinned at me for the first time since I could remember, the first time in years. She laughed and ran a finger under her eye.
“Well,” she said, “if I wasn’t unbelievably pissed at you, I’d almost be impressed. You certainly broke out of your rut. You idiot.”
And with a great, ugly, embarrassing rush, I started loosing these heaving sobs. My big sister, so much smaller than me, wrapped her arms around me and held me as I put my chin on the top of her head and gasped in sputtering, half-decipherable wails. I felt like I had been walking through the dark by myself for so long.
•
Sometime later I stepped out onto the porch, feeling lighter than I’d felt since the whole thing began.
“Mark?” I called out. “Mark, you out here?”
But there was just the rain falling from the eaves, just the sense that we had finally passed some point we couldn’t return from. Sandoval had made his choices. Was still making them.
I walked back inside.
•
Brooke helped me pack. I insisted on organizing Sandoval’s stuff as well. She muttered under her breath the entire time, shoving clothes into my pack, grabbing various field notebooks and throwing them into my messenger bag. We were in the dining room, separating random pieces of my life from Sandoval’s, when she came across his notebook on the glass-topped table.
“That’s not mine,” I said. “That’s Mark’s.”
She ignored me, flipped the pages; I saw blurs of blue ink, black ink. Tightly capped and crested penmanship. I recognized it as the handwriting from the ruined Monsters Americana manuscript, Sandoval a creature of habit. Brooke thumbed another page, frowning.
“Brooke, that’s not mine. And it’s sure as heck not yours.”
Something had changed between us, a softening of our resentments or blockades. But that didn’t mean Brooke was suddenly a puritan. She leveled a no-bullshit gaze my way. “You got diagnosed with a brain tumor and then flew across the country without telling your family. Yes or no.”
“Brooke.”
“Yes or no, dick.”
“Yes,” I said. Here was our family’s love—somewhere between a caress and an elbow to the throat.
She turned back to the notebook. “Finish packing.”
“I’m worried about Mark.”
She didn’t look up. “Don’t ever worry about Mark again. Mark is on his own.”
•
I was in the living room, reaching behind the couch and grabbing one of the Sharpied band shirts I’d drawn with Gunnar and Liza. (My made-up band name was called the Relentless Percolators, and our logo featured a coffeepot with a bunch of fire pouring out of the top. I felt a fierce pang when I saw it.) Karla walked downstairs and I stood up. We stayed there awkwardly—everything had changed now, irrevocably—and looked out at the flat expanse of night beyond the windows. She held a mug of tea to her stomach like some kind of shield. “I feel like I’m responsible,” she said. “I brought you here.”
“You thought the video was real,” I said. “Mark thought it was real.”
“I still think it’s real,” she said, almost pleadingly.
“Okay.”
She started to raise the cup, then brought it back down. “I’m worried about him. This . . . we should be out there. He’s hurt. None of this should have happened.”
I thought of turning the television on. Knowing what I’d see. On one channel or another. Knowing that something here was aligned against us. Trying to tell us something. Insisting upon it.
Karla tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. “Should we call the police?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
“Do you think he’s safe?” Karla said.
“No,” I said. “But I don’t know what to do about it.”
•
I was separating Sandoval’s notes and papers from my own various logs and notations on the glass-topped table. We’d both kept copious and detailed notes about the locales and operational hours of the cameras, especially once our second order had come in. I was parsing through them, putting all the paperwork in their respective piles, still willing Sandoval to walk back through the door, when Brooke came into the dining room and said we’d be leaving in twenty minutes.
“What about Mark?”
Brooke shrugged. “He’s a killer.”
“We don’t know that.”
She pushed a stack of my notes aside and dropped the notebook she’d taken on the table. With some of her old venom returned, she said, “Read this, Brian.” She opened the cover. “Starting here.”
“It’s not mine.”
“Read it. Please.”
And I did, and learned a great number of things about Mark Sandoval that I never wanted to know. About what happened in Portland, and that memorial I saw underneath the bridge outside of Drill, and a lawyer named Tad Hemphill. I learned where Sandoval’s scars had really come from.
This was what he’d been writing while he was here?
This half-assed confession?
And then something exploded outside.
Earth and stone rained against the front of the house—the big front window buckled into a maelstrom of glass shards and upstairs the children screamed, and we all ran, all of us, outside into the rain.
2
The truck bed sloshed with blood.
We sped along the curves of the álagablettur and the blood ran in drifts when we turned or slowed. It warmed my knees where I knelt above Sandoval and pressed a towel to the broken cave of his chest. Brooke was across from me; her tourniquet was drawn tight around the shattered stub of his left arm. I could hear the clicking sounds he made as he tried to pull air through the engines of his lungs. The fabric of his pant leg was keeping his left leg attached to the rest of his body. I had tied another woefully inept tourniquet there from a bungee cord found behind Shane’s seat. One of Sandoval’s eyes gleamed among a shrapnel-wetted face. Beneath me, his body thrummed like a tuning fork. His remaining hand flailed against my leg and when I grabbed it, he squeezed with a surprising strength.
Overhead, a low-hanging limb raked the back of my jacket. The álagablettur, serpentine, ever reaching.
It hadn’t been a difficult choice. Shane—with a calmness I could never match, even if we somehow did this again a dozen times—said, “He’ll bleed out long before we make it to Kjálkabein. There’s a combat hospital at the Camp.” And that was it. Karla and the kids, terrified and weeping, stayed back; I’d never see them again. We’d lifted Sandoval’s ruined body into the truck bed. The crater, not even that large, really, was halfway between the house and the trees, a spot we’d walked hundreds of times. Metal shards pocked the front of the house like tossed darts. It smelled animalistic out there while we loaded him up, profane. Guts and shit and death.
Now we slalomed and curved along that terrible road and blood poured from Sandoval’s insides. A tree branch broke against the driver’s side window with a sound like gunfire and Brooke screamed. S
plinters peppered my temple, just missing my eye. “Get down,” I said, and Brooke hunched down. More branches snarled the top of the cab and Sandoval’s mouth worked like he’d eaten something bitter. Blood ran into his ears. His grip didn’t lessen in mine.
I saw wickers of flame through the windshield, scattered jewels of it spied through the trees ahead of us.
We finally cleared the álagablettur and I resisted the urge to shake my fist, to scream something in triumph as the trees fell back and the night opened up around us. And then we entered hell.
•
No, not hell, but a hellscape.
The soldiers were burning the woods back.
We drove past a dozen men in flame-retardant suits standing in a phalanx with flamethrowers; a sea of embers glowed on the charred ground; shrunken trees lay curled behind the men like blackened ribcages. Ash hung heavy in the air, red sparks whirling in the vacuum of night, batting at the windshield and then winking out. An ember fell on my sleeve and Brooke slapped it away, her eyes huge and terrified. They poured flames against the trees.
The forest groaned, retreated. We passed a second line of men in fire gear who advanced on the still-remaining trees, went at them with axes and chainsaws. The sound the álagablettur made at this, at the burning, the ax-strikes: it was like a scream that lived in your teeth, in the curvature of your skull. I smelled the greasy, gagging stink of wood smoke and diesel. My head flared suddenly, brutally, and I nearly passed out, almost falling on top of Sandoval. Brooke grabbed me by the shoulders, screamed something I couldn’t hear. Her face was twisted and crone-like in the firelight. She pushed me upright, Sandoval’s ruined body between us. An aneurysm felt inevitable. I’d be grateful for it. And then we passed the burning and the feeling—all of it, the pain, the animal-like roar inside my head—evaporated in seconds.
We passed the fire-makers in their suits, and Shane’s headlights painted things lunar and strange, some photo sent back from a planetary rover. Everything was blackened and cratered, desolate. Beneath the smoke-stink was the burnt-wire stench of Sandoval’s blood. As we approached the base, the searchlights dutifully sprang to life from their places on the fence line.
Shane braked hard in front of the gate, the snarl of rubber on tarmac. The side of Brooke’s head smacked against the rear window. I watched her turn and vomit over the side of the truck.
A voice from the loudspeaker: “You need to leave. This is a military facility.”
Shane screamed out his window, “We have a critically injured man here.”
“You’re not authorized. You must turn back.”
“This is a United States citizen,” he screamed. As if that could magically change the trajectory of any of this.
Sandoval suddenly flexed beneath us, his entire body going rigid, a pained Errrrrrrrrrr purling from deep in his throat.
This is when he dies, I thought.
He turned and looked at me. He was an animal then, surprised and hurt and dying. He worked his mouth but no sound came out, a fresh torrent of blood wetting his cheek and running into his ear. That one glittering eye roved over me. It was a wonder that he was still alive at all.
“Just hang in,” I said stupidly. His grip loosened and tightened again.
And then I looked over the hood of the truck and saw the front gate opening with a rattle.
And there was Keller standing in the headlights.
He wore a dark jacket, slacks, a black tie against a black shirt. Keller in his work clothes. A death-angel. That bloated face, like an alcoholic undertaker. He walked backward, motioning us in with one hand like someone helping a U-Haul driver park in a tough spot.
Soldiers bearing stretchers erupted from a building, flanked by others bristling with guns.
Shane pulled the truck through the gate and Keller caught my eye and smiled. Ice ratcheted through my blood. From his hip, Keller pointed a finger at me like a pistol. He winked.
•
Sandoval was taken away on a stretcher. His remaining arm hung down and his fingertips scraped the ground until one of the soldiers lifted it and put it at his side. They took him into one of the low, boxy, windowless buildings, one as indiscriminate as any other. A soldier directed Shane to park his truck beside one of the hangars. I sat there in the bloody bed and chanced a look back. Beyond the gate I could still see the strange red glow of the men burning the álagablettur atop the hill, the tongues of fire leaping from the flamethrowers.
Keller walked over to us, his tie flapping over his shoulder, hands in his pockets. Wattles rolling over the collar of his shirt. He looked deathly in the cold incandescence of the searchlights. A true harbinger.
We hadn’t saved the arm, I realized. Sandoval’s arm was still sitting there in the churned mud in front of Karla Hauksdóttir’s house.
We’d taken one, we’d left one.
“Let’s go downstairs,” Keller said.
•
Some of the buildings were punctuated here and there with small windows. All had steel doors, yellow stencils on them. CROSS-CO-1. LAB-ACCESS-4. Authorized Personnel Only signs everywhere, every door with a keypad. Keller took the lead. The sea mist was close enough to kiss our faces. The sound of the ocean was loud. The three of us were flanked by a handful of men with rifles. It was clear we were being escorted.
Brooke, wide-eyed, a swath of Sandoval’s blood down one cheek, tried to say something to Keller. He looked back at her over his shoulder and frowned. “We’ll talk inside, ma’am.”
In front of one of the buildings a soldier thumbed the keypad and the door clicked. Keller pulled it open and then held out a hand for us to enter. He patted me on the shoulder as I passed.
It felt like the hallway of an office, a place you’d spend a day at a training seminar. Bland and functional. Ceiling tiles, buzzing fluorescents, office doors with no windows. The hallway was featureless and a tight fit; our escorts hemmed us in on all sides. “We’ve got a plane to catch,” Brooke said, and no one responded. We turned a corner, the soldier thumbed open another door and we followed Keller down a flight of steel-mesh stairs. This led us to yet another door with a blank black square for a keypad. Stenciled Clearance Level 7Only.
Someone had put a handwritten sticky note on it that said Stay smart! Meat’s meat! There was a little smiley face at the bottom.
Keller saw me looking and clapped a heavy hand on my shoulder again. “More shall be revealed,” he said. “More and more and more, Brian.”
He was having a good time with all of this. He was having a blast.
“Where’s Sandoval?” I said. No one answered. Shane looked over at me, and I could see the same thing on his face that I felt striding up my own spine: a panic trying to be contained.
“You gentlemen can go,” Keller said over his shoulder, and our escorts, all of them, turned without a word, the sound of their boots reverberating up the stairs. Keller turned and placed his palm on the dark keypad.
•
I’d expected something else: walls of weeping rock inset with panels of blinking lights, the jittering overhead lights of a horror movie, a villain’s lair from an old comic book. But it was more of the same: the doorway opened to a hallway, with regular office-style doors lining each side, a few of them with windows. A pair of heavy steel doors bracketed the hall at each end. But there wasn’t another soul among us, or in the offices that I could see. Beyond the faint hum of the overhead lights, the place was tomb-silent.
Keller led us to a windowed office and once more entered a code on a keypad. Inside, there was a conference table lined with chairs, a corkboard studded with nothing but pushpins. White walls. He urged us all to have a seat. “Anyone want coffee, tea? Water?”
We were standing there in some Office Max version of an underground military bunker, a place scoured of ownership or identification. I was doused in another man’s blood, listening to thi
s. Brooke took one of the chairs and pushed it against the wall. She sat down and crossed her legs, lifted her chin.
“Vaughn,” Shane said, his voice shaky, “thank you, man. Guy would’ve bled out if we tried to drive to the city. Thank you.”
“Yeah,” Keller said, “good thing you brought him here, buddy. Really good thing. When’s the last time you were downstairs?”
Shane grinned, but it was more like an admission of fear, almost childlike. “Been a while.”
Keller nodded. “That’s about what I thought.” At the doorway, he turned. “Just so you know—you’re all in a restricted military facility. Shane knows this. I’m gonna need you all to sign NDAs, okay? Whatever you see on the base, you’ll be legally bound to stay quiet. Everyone cool with that?”
Brooke said, “We have a flight to Reykjavík that we need to catch.”
He bit his lip and pointed a finger at her.
“You, I’m trying to place.”
“I’m his sister. I’m the one you sent to come and pick him up.”
He brightened. “Oh! You made it! That was fast. Great.” He scratched his nose and said, “Well listen, Brian’s sister. Here’s the thing. You’re going to want to stop operating under the assumption that I—any of us here, really, in the entire building, but especially me—care remotely about your plans.” He keyed open the door. “You’re on my dime now, darling.”
Keller’s figure through the window became a warped caricature of himself, and then he was gone and it was just the three of us.
•