Road Seven

by Keith Rosson

  Shane sat in the corner of the room, his elbows on his knees. Brooke kept trying the keypad, kept visoring her eyes against the window with her hand, trying to look down the hallway.

  I sat at the table, my hands laced over the white blankness of it. Trying to think.

  “Hey,” Brooke yelled suddenly, slapping the glass; a soldier was walking by, his rifle slung over his shoulder. Eyes zeroed straight ahead. He was followed by two men in white coats as they consulted some kind of digital pad. None of them looked up, or even flinched.

  Shane said my name.

  He looked up at me, a cigarette hanging from his lips. He lit it with a flourish and his hand trembled around the lighter. He let out a plume of smoke. He pulled his ponytail into a hank at his shoulder and let it go.

  “It was me,” he said quietly.

  Brooke turned from the window.

  “What was you?” I said.

  He frowned, stared at the floor. “The video.”

  Three people frozen in a room. Drifting cigarette smoke the only movement.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “No. I made the video. I made it.” He glanced at Brooke and then at me, fast, before his eyes fell to the floor again. “It was a thing I did for Karla. It was like a love note, right? It just . . .” He let out a shaky, pained little laugh. “It was a pony. I just grabbed a white pony from a field off the road. He walked right up the ramp into the trailer. Then I parked by the rocks and led him up the driveway, around the far side of the greenhouses, away from the house. Tricked him out with a fake horn I made. There’s all kinds of wild horses out there. Even miniature ones.” He sniffed, ran a hand under his nose. “And then I let him go.”

  “Jesus,” I said.

  “I thought Karla would recognize that it was me, you know? That it was totally something I’d do. I let him loose and then I picked him up a few hours later. I knew she hung out on the porch and snuck a few cigarettes after the kids went to bed.” Staring down hard at his own cigarettes between his fingers, he said, “I didn’t think she’d film it.”

  He took a long drag. “It was just a thing that I did for her, you know? I thought she’d call me and I’d be all, ‘Yeah, that was me. I love you. I love the kids.’ You know? And I sure as shit didn’t think she’d film it and send it to you guys.”

  “We’re downstairs, Shane. Vaughn brought us downstairs. Why?”

  He blew smoke, stared at the wall. Ashed his smoke on the floor. Couldn’t look at us. “I don’t know.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I don’t know, Brian.” He cocked a leg on his knee, his boot going mad. And then, in a rush, “I just worked the roof, okay? Up top, surface-level shit. Did my enlistment, got out, met Karla. I never came down here. Vaughn’s a good guy, the kids know him, all that. He takes care of all his guys, looks out for us.”

  Brooke said, “What are you talking about? What’s the roof?”

  “I manned the gate, worked Supply or Comms or in the motor pool. I was one of the hazmats that toasted the woods back every five days. ‘Giving the wolf a haircut,’ we called it. I just did surface work.”

  “Are you saying . . . What are you saying?”

  “Camp Carroll, it’s not just data. Not just satellites.”

  “No shit,” Brooke said.

  “That’s just the grift. The cover. We’re downstairs now. Grunts that work the roof, up there, they’re regular guys. They don’t come downstairs.”

  Quietly, Brooke said, “So who comes downstairs, Shane?”

  He shrugged, dropped his smoke to the floor and rubbed it out with his bootheel. He wouldn’t look at us, but he said, “I don’t know, man. But whoever works down here, stays down here.”

  •

  Keller walked in and pointed a finger at me in a Come on gesture. It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. He’d taken his jacket off and rolled up his sleeves. I could see a fine dusting of dandruff on the shoulders of his black shirt.

  “You I need to talk to,” he said.

  “We’re leaving,” Brooke said. She stood up from her chair against the wall. I was surprised when Keller sighed and stepped aside, putting his hands in his pockets and dropping his big shaggy head as she stepped into the hallway.

  “If I’m not with you,” Keller said, “you’ll be dead by the time you hit one of those doors. There are measures in place.”

  “Then take us out of here.”

  He raised his head, frowning and smiling at me. “Jesus, I thought you were the dumb one.”

  “You’re having fun with this,” I said.

  “Oh, that is far from the truth, believe me. I’m actually very pissed right now, Brian. Very. You and Mark Sandoval have thrown a serious monkey wrench in my program and I’m scrambling like a beast to clean up your mess. I’m not happy.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Who, Sandoval? In the infirmary. We’ve got a trauma team taking care of him.”

  “He’s not dead?”

  Keller shrugged, wattles puffing out of his collar. “Not yet. Now, Brian? May we?” He bent at the waist, extended an arm toward the door.

  “We’re not getting separated,” Brooke said. “We’re staying together.”

  A little laugh, mostly silent, and Vaughn pushed back that gray lock of hair from his forehead. “Again, Brian’s sister, I cannot reiterate strongly enough just how much I don’t give a shit about the way you want things to happen. You had your chance to take him”—and here Vaughn pointed at me—“and leave, and escape consequences, and you spent the whole night dicking around at that farmhouse instead.”

  Brooke sneered, stepping back into the room. “We got a little sidetracked by someone stepping on a bomb in the front yard.”

  Shane said, “Vaughn—” and Keller sprang toward him with surprising speed, a big man in motion. He made as if he was going to slap him and instead pointed a blunt finger in Shane’s face. “You. You have fucked everything up. Irrevocably. I hope you understand that. You have brought this whole flimsy house down. Flowers would have sufficed, right?” His wide-eyed, maddened face pinwheeled between Brooke and I, seeking agreement. “Dinner out somewhere! A trip to Reykjavik for a fucking spa day! Something. But you, you had to woo your ex-wife with a goddamn unicorn. Jesus Christ. I’ve kept you and your family at arm’s length from this for a goddamn decade. And you undo it all with a fake horn on a horse’s head, Shane. Good God.” He made as if he was going to slap Shane and then he balled his hand into a fist and laid it on his chest instead.

  Then he turned to me, eyes glittering with that ebullient rage that I had mistaken for good humor when I first met him. “Now. Let us sally forth, young man. The night draws near.”

  •

  We went through a steel door, and another, and I soon lost my orientation. Maybe that was the point. All the halls looked the same: the occasional soldier or bland civilian ignoring us, innumerable doorways with keypads, windows that looked into desolate offices or uninhabited common areas. Everyone we passed had the same supplicating, downward stares. When I lagged behind, Keller would cast an annoyed glance over his shoulder and I sped up.

  We finally stopped at a door—L-L3 stenciled on this one—and he placed his hand over the black square. It opened and we started down another flight of steps, the walls cement here, more steel-mesh stairs, a turn and another flight. Deep down in the ground. We had to be well below sea level by now, or close to it, and then we came to a door.

  This was the last door, I knew.

  All doors were crafted with a single intention, but this door? This door was a dull matte steel and featureless save for the bulged rivets lining each edge. You could drive the cab of a semi into this door and walk away frustrated. Keller thumbed the intercom next to it.

  Immediately, a brisk, chilled voice came from the speaker. “Unit clearance.”


  Keller leaned forward. “Fool’s gold.”

  “Asset clearance.”

  “Bury me standing.”

  Internal locks clicked and tumbled. The door slid open, silent as some ghost.

  Chillier down here, the chuff of recycled air being pushed through the place. The men and women in white lab coats walked in pairs, in threes, guys in ties with their shirtsleeves rolled up. Someone pushed a cart of boxed equipment past us. Here, troops in body armor stood in pairs, their weapons hanging off their chests like weird appendages. The disorienting part: it still had the hushed quality of a library.

  Keller led me down another hall, and we entered a large, open room flanked on one side by a glassed-in enclosure inset into the wall. The glass was smoke-black. A steel floor and a tall ceiling capped with rows of halogens, a few closed bay doors off to one side. More lab coats walking by, maybe a half-dozen clusters of armed men down here.

  The place was suffused with a sense of wrongness, that jarring sense of someone running a glass shard along your nerves. Everything was snared to a focal point on that black sheet of glass set into the wall. My head suddenly pulsed, and I turned my face to hide the wince from Keller and heard a few other people cough, a sound that popcorned throughout the room.

  When he led me to a room on the opposite side of that big enclosure, opposite the glass, I was eager for it. Keller turned the lights on, and when we stepped inside and he shut the door behind us, that sense of ache and wrongness diminished a little. Four white walls, a white table. A window that looked out onto the bigger room. A half-dozen metal folding chairs.

  Keller took a seat across from me and folded his red hands over the table.

  I lifted my chin at the black-glassed enclosure. “What is that?”

  Raising a hand, Keller said, “Hold on a second.”

  Some anonymous lab coat knocked and opened the door. Mustache, glasses. An earpiece. He looked like a cross between a biologist and a stage manager. He handed Keller a folder and left. Keller started thumbing through it, tossing pieces of paper in front of me.

  My CT scans.

  Copies from Sandoval’s notebook.

  Copies from his typewritten Monsters Americana manuscript, pre-bathtub wetting, with the inked margin notes intact.

  A blown-up image of my father’s driver’s license.

  A grainy newspaper ad for the bar where Brooke worked.

  A photo of the doorway of 341-B in Sunny Meadows.

  By the time he shut the folder and pushed a transparent piece of plastic the size of a notecard toward me, I understood everything.

  “You run the show,” I said.

  He steepled his hands in front of his face. “I run the show. Peel the backing off that piece of plastic. Lick your thumb and press it on there.”

  I had nothing to bargain with but the annoyance of my continued heartbeat. If I lived, I was a witness.

  “And it’s all interconnected,” I said. “Right? The woods, those dead British soldiers, this base. The way Sandoval . . . drifted away the longer he stayed here. Somehow it all fits.”

  “You’re asking questions when you should be peeling the plastic off of that sheet there and licking your thumb and pressing down on it.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  Wearily, he said, “You don’t need a lawyer, Brian.”

  “That’s a picture of my father’s license? My mom’s apartment? I want a lawyer.”

  “Hear me out,” Keller said, and scrubbed his chin with the back of his hand.

  “How did you get Sandoval’s notebook?”

  “What, his big confession? Those are just scans. We’ve got a guy on Karla’s harvest crew that freelances for us sometimes. He just walked into her house on his lunch break while Sandoval was out cavorting with the spirit world. Snapped some photos.” Keller grinned. “It’s a trip, right? Did you read it?”

  “I read it,” I said.

  “It’s crazy. That hit and run? The whole alien abduction thing being fake? How he just holed in up DC after a bad trip all those years ago? No mother ship at all, no little gray men. Just some PCP at a rest stop. Having his body-mod girlfriend starve him and scar him up in DC over the course of a few weeks? And then making up the whole ‘I was abducted by aliens’ angle? Wrangling it into a brand. He played that symphonically when you think about it. They made a blockbuster out of that guy’s bullshit.” He leaned back in his chair, tapped out a rhythm on the table. “But that’s the thing about guilt; it takes a certain kind of guy to just slough it off, keep it buried. Most people can’t do it. Sandoval couldn’t do it.”

  “You’re using the past tense,” I said.

  “I am.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “He’s way dead, Brian.” He let out one of those phlegmy, lung-rattling laughs. “He didn’t have an arm or a leg! I mean, you saw him. Guy stepped on a bomb, for God’s sake.”

  I nodded. “Did you put it there?”

  Keller reared back in his seat. “The bomb?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did I . . . Let me see if I get this right. Did I put a World War II anti-tank round in the Hauksdóttir’s front yard so that a drunken grifter could blow himself up and bring down a metric ton of unwanted scrutiny on my project? That’s what you’re asking?”

  I kept silent.

  “So that I could take a guy like you downstairs, Brian? So I could sweat a pissant like you, and threaten the life of everyone you love? That’s what you’re asking me?”

  I was still fitting Sandoval’s death inside me, trying to find room among everything else that had happened.

  “Come on,” Keller said. “Use your head. I never wanted you assholes here in the first place. I’ve been trying to get you to leave since day one. Done a remarkably shitty job at it, admittedly, and that’s on me. But no, I did not plant a bomb in Karla’s front yard.”

  “Who trashed Sandoval’s room?”

  “Viktor. Him and his nephew. I wanted someone”—and here he shuffled his hands around in front of him—“off-base. Plausible deniability. And they worked cheap. Orvar’s a little thug, man. I was hoping that was all it would take to get you to go.”

  “And the guys in the woods. The guys that slapped me around in the car.”

  Keller grinned big. “Ah, all my guys. You just weren’t taking the hint. I do want you to understand that if I hadn’t told them to go easy on you out there, you wouldn’t have walked out of those woods alive.”

  I thought, One of us didn’t, you asshole.

  “Anyway,” he said, and tapped that sheet of plastic with a blunt fingernail. “Peel the coating, lick your thumb, press down.”

  “You’re getting my, what? DNA?”

  “See, you’re getting smarter.”

  “I want a lawyer,” I said again.

  Keller chuckled and shook his head. “All you have is me. I’m all you get.”

  “Why do you burn the woods back around the base?”

  He shrugged a shoulder. “The truth? Because they need to be burned back.”

  “What is happening here, Vaughn? What lives in the woods?”

  And here he gazed up at the ceiling. Closed his eyes and inhaled: the look of a man on a beach somewhere. “Brian, it’s something . . . You can’t fit your head around it, my man. I mean, we’ve got one, we’ve had one for years, and we’re still not sure what we have. It’s a heck of a tough question, I’ll be honest.”

  “So Sandoval just stepped on a piece of old ordnance.”

  “I guess so.”

  I put my hands in my lap. “He triggered an explosive after walking in a spot that people have been walking on for seventy years.”

  Keller scratched an eyebrow with his thumb. “Brian, we’re running out of time here. Do you know anything about chemical fuses? Delayed time
rs? You familiar with rust accumulation on detonators? You familiar with how any of that shit works? The world’s a volatile place. Someone fires a gun up into the air ten thousand times. Ten thousand times it falls back to earth, no big deal. Bullet lands in a pond. Lands in a field. But the time after that? Ten thousand and one? The bullet rises and then drops into someone’s brainpan and kills him. Right? People break their necks getting out bed.”

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “No.”

  I held up my hands, pushed back from the table. “I can wait.” If I lived, I was a witness. That’s all I had.

  Some heat was creeping into his cheeks. “It doesn’t work like that, Brian. We’re on a schedule.”

  “That’s the only way this is going to work.” I shrugged, looked out the window.

  “I know you feel like you’re doing what you need to do.” Keller tucked his chin into his collar, spent some time examining his tie. “Like you’re being brave. But things are going to change in just a minute, Brian. In a way that’s going to haunt you. I don’t say that lightly. I mean it. It will haunt you. You will feel remorse, and guilt, and ownership. So the best thing you can do right now, for yourself and everyone else, is peel that paper off and lick your fucking thumb and press it down right there. I could have one of these guys walk in and put a round through your eyeball, but I don’t want to do that.”

  He wore the impassive, crag-like face of a loveless deity. A blown-out, blood-rimed, heartless gaze. There was no pity there. Whatever animus it was that powered Keller—greed, power, loyalty—I could touch nothing inside him.

  I peeled the coating off, licked my thumb, pressed it to the plastic.

  I left a pale whorl of evidence of myself there, a few miniscule flakes of Sandoval’s blood embedded in it.

  “Thank you! Progress!” Keller took the plastic by the edges, put it in the folder. He pushed the pen and a new sheaf of papers across the table. “That’s a nondisclosure agreement. A boilerplate form acknowledging that you’ll keep quiet about what you’ve seen here today.”