Midnight Lamp

by Gwyneth Jones

  They crossed the Inyo range very early, and hit a dirt road that bisected the next valley as the sun rose. They were now within ten or fifteen miles of the ghost town (paper maps varied, and there was no entry on the Rat’s gazetteer). They were deploying conceal, using the ‘beaten-up farm truck’ (the Rugrat had a little repertoire of fun, secret characters). With an incongruously shiny horse-trailer, but that was probably normal enough. They worried that the mask feature would fail, the way it did in Carlsbad, but they couldn’t drive the AI car naked through this paradoxical landscape, where anything could be hidden and there was nowhere to hide. Sagebrush, grey mudstone washes, red boulders and parched grass shaded into crumpled foothills on either side of the trail; the scoured, unearthly peaks of the White Mountains stood in the north. They saw no other vehicles. Nothing moved but the white-rumped flicker of pronghorn taking flight: jack rabbits, birds of prey and piñon jays, and one pallid, trotting fox-like creature. Pockmarked metal signs announced surreal attractions, most of them far away in more famous parts of the Great Basin. It was as if someone had tried and failed to launch a tourist industry on a hot version of Mars. Painted rocks, bubbling mud, hot springs. No battles, no burials, no sermons in stone.

  They identified the unmarked turn-off by landmarks and headed east until the town appeared like a mirage above the foothills: a Martian maquette, a cluster of alien right-angles, with a glint or two of glass. Ax drew up and tapped the dash. A pocked sign, tiny in the distance, sprang into focus through the windshield glass. LAVOISIER. They stared, heart-shaken, at the place where she was. There seemed to be earthworks: a rampart and a ditch around the camp, classic style?

  ‘I can feel us pushing our luck,’ muttered Ax.

  He turned the Rat around. They drove on, to the auto dump, at the end of a vagrant spur of the paved but disintegrating 168, where they’d decided they would leave the horses. A lopsided white caravan stood derelict among the wrecks. They led the animals out, let them stretch their legs, put them back in the aircon trailbox, and disguised the box with a grimy shroud of black plastic borrowed from a heap of engine blocks. ‘We need a third man,’ said Ax, depressed that Stu’s horses might die of heatstroke if things went wrong. The dump had been reccommended as covert roadside parking, but it could be days before Stu came looking.

  ‘Or a platoon,’ agreed Sage. ‘Too bad. We’ll have to make do.’

  The Rugrat became a mirror for the sagebrush. They headed uphill, the paradoxical emptiness swallowed them.

  Lavoisier had been founded in the eighteen fifties, named by a French émigré after the scientist Lavoisier, father of modern Chemistry, who had lost his head in the Revolution. Manufacturing bath salts, and conceived as a healthful resort above the heat of the valley floor, it had become prosperous, lawless, amazingly violent; and faded into decline. In the late twentieth century it’d been revived as a New Age spiritual centre of some kind, but those settlers’d had to quit because the water supply had become too alkaline. The no-knickers Goths and death wish geeks had been in possession for about five years, according to the Merediths. They tanked their water in. They had no land fit for pasture or cultivation, and the guidebooks and ranger info nowadays warned tourists to stay away: but there must be money coming in from somewhere. Maybe some of them had city jobs, and commuted. Nobody local went near the place.

  At five in the afternoon they were in a waterless arroyo on the other side of a fold of the Panamints from Lavoisier, dressed for the heat in desert shades of grey and tan; carrying their packs. It was very hot. One of those signs memorialised a boulder as big as a car, rammed into a crevase high in the wall by the flashflood of 2003. They stood and looked up at this gravity-defying feat.

  ‘I’m in a constant state of déjà vu,’ said Ax. ‘I knew this landscape before I was six, on tv screens, cinema screens, videogames. It’s not supposed to be real, and here I am. Fuck, actual rocks look familiar. I think this ravine must have featured in an episode of Star Wars. Or several episodes of Star Wars.’

  ‘If you say so. I always thought those sets were plastic.’

  ‘You must have been a terribly cynical little boy.’

  They were alone in the once and future world, naked warriors obeying an oracle. Maybe the people who left the petroglyphs would have understood. ‘The first warning we’ll get,’ said Ax gloomily, ‘is when our own digital devices are zapped.’

  ‘We have til Friday.’

  ‘We don’t know that. Fuck, better just go for it.’

  About a hundred metres further on they reached the Hole in the Wall: a balcony of red stone, the undercurve weather-carved into the blurred resemblance of drapery and garlands of flowers. They climbed the steps into an open-fronted cave, where worn tables and chairs stood in the dusk. A counter along one side of the cave held a meagre display of handwoven baskets and polished fossils; a tray of glossy, delicate animal skulls. Behind it a fat man read a paperback book by the light of a solar-cell lamp. He had a shotgun on the counter. They sat at a table, chugged their own water and ate dried fruit and jerky. The fat bloke came over, frowning, leaving his gun behind.

  ‘Hi. Anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Was this really a notorious outlaw hideout?’ asked Sage.

  ‘Naw, not really. There are Holes in Walls all over, this one is just a place. Are you guys hiking? This is very bad country for hiking, in the summer time.’

  ‘Backpacking,’ said Ax. ‘Do you have a bathroom?’

  ‘Uuuh, yeah. Through to the rear of the cavern, and on your right.’

  ‘He doesn’t like to sully the environment,’ explained Sage, as his companion headed into the gloom, taking his pack with him.

  ‘Oh, I agree. The desert isn’t a toilet.’

  Ax went through the cavern, glancing into shadows, listening intently; finding no unwelcome company. He reached a green painted door set in rock, with a stencilled inscription, UNISEX TOILET. The passage ended at another, similar door in a larger opening that had been filled with brickwork. He tested the mortar: if they had to get the wall down, it didn’t look like a problem. But the lock was easy to force. He passed through, onto a tongue of stone like a jetty over a dark lake: looming darkness above, a drop on either side and ahead. There must be an easy way down, but he could make out the dim shapes of boulders, so he just went over the edge, landing as quietly as possible. There was a concrete deck, a bed, furniture, a troglodyte living space.

  ‘Hey?’ A young, male voice. A figure rose, ‘What’s going on?’

  The cave dweller was not wearing nightsight goggles, but he must have a socket gadget because it was fucking dark down here. Ax walked up and dealt him a hard, focused crack to the side of his head. The kid gasped, his handgun went flying. Ax got a line around his throat, which he soon had attached to kid’s hands, and the hands lashed behind his back. He took his captive up to the front, where Sage was in a similar position with the fat bloke. ‘I got his phone,’ said Sage. ‘He has nothing internal, did you check yours?’

  ‘What are you doing here?,’ gargled the kid, ‘Who are you?’

  The fat bloke said nothing. Sage, the skull mask livid, jumped at the boy, grabbed his teeshirt and snarled, ‘Guess-!’

  ‘I aaarn’t see ooo-!’

  ‘He can’t see. I smacked his head, his eyesocket gizmo has crashed.’ They sat the boy by his partner. ‘All you need to know,’ said Ax. ‘Is that we’re here for Fiorinda. She’s in Lavoisier, you’re going to tell us where to find her, and anything else you can offer.’

  ‘We don’t have anything to do with those crazed hippies.’

  ‘Bollocks. You’re guarding their back door.’

  ‘How many of them up there?’ asked Sage. Stu and Ludmilla had estimated maybe a hundred, maybe more, and whole families including children.

  The fat bloke sweated and stared defiance. ‘Fifty, a thousand, it doesn’t matter. You won’t take them. She’s not a prisoner, she’s sacred.’

  ‘They keep the wit
ch-queen in the church,’ wailed the boy. ‘Let me go!’

  ‘He’s lying. No one keeps her. She’ll kill you.’

  ‘Shit, we have a pair of unreliable witnesses, Sage. They’re just going to contradict each other, pointlessly. What shall we do with them?’

  ‘Lets lock them in the toilet.’

  They were foiled in locking the toilet, there was no means to do so from the outside, but they dumped their captives in there, trussed like chickens. The kid was terrified, the fat bloke ominously proud and calm. Sage had scanned eye-socket boy’s face and found his button dislodged, giving him nothing but grief: they decided not to excavate it. From the fat bloke they took a bunch of old-style keys (nothing electronic, nothing digital), which opened a door at the back of the troglodyte deck, revealing a pitch black opening, about three metres by three. It was a lava tube, useful secret exit in Lavoisier’s heyday; later a tourist attraction. It had been closed to tourists for a long time. They assembled the rifles, donned field headsets, rearranged some other kit, pulled down nightsight on the headset screens; and set off. Shortly, Ax turned to scan the tunnel behind them. Since they left the Rugrat, they’d had the persistent conviction that they were not alone. Someone or something walked with them, just out of sight.

  ‘Extra man’s a good sign,’ Sage comforted him. ‘As superstition has it. You called him up, you know, back at the auto dump.’

  ‘I could do without that, Sage.’

  The tube was about two miles long. Near the upper end the Lavoisiens had fitted it with an obstacle course for incoming traffic. They beat the place where the floor slid back from a trough of eye-stinging caustic by fly-walking along the wall above it, chipping holds in the smooth walls. They dodged the spike trap, jumped a chasm, but had to move very fast to roll under a barbed portcullis that came shooting down from the roof as they hit the other side. Luckily they hadn’t been planning to leave by this route, because now there was no way back.

  ‘What fun they had,’ remarked Sage. ‘Fucking Peter Pan features—’

  ‘Maybe they’ve been maligned. Maybe they’re just playful happy hippies.’

  They pushed back their screens, because natural light was seeping into the dark. Sage stopped, putting out a hand to halt Ax. Ahead of them a glistening greasy band had been painted all around the tube, walls and floor and roof. In the centre of the floor, on this band, lay a bundle no bigger than a child’s hand.

  ‘Stay back.’

  Sage picked the thing up, and tore it into fragments.

  ‘I thought only Fee could do that,’ said Ax, uneasily.

  ‘She’s not here. You can go by, don’t touch any of it, I’ll be a moment.’

  Ax hunkered down near the entrance and checked the situation outdoors. Normal vision told him there was nothing moving, a readout found no e/m in range: but none of the detectors for warm bodies, movement or emissions were working too well, the air temperature was too high. The buildings were still a couple of hundred metres away, protected by the outer defences. The break in the earthworks where the road came in would be heavily guarded. He spotted a gun emplacement. A glint in a window opening, where an upper storey showed over the ramparts: that’s a sniper. Sage appeared, and crouched with his back to the wall, head tipped back, eyes closed. He looked sick, and very pale.

  ‘Was that real?’

  ‘Yeah… Quite a kick. There was something in the way, Ax.’

  ‘Are you going to be okay? Anything I can do?’

  ‘If I start acting strangely, shoot me.’ Sage laughed, opened his eyes and wiped his hands on his combats. ‘I tripped an alarm. What’s the damage?’

  ‘Nothing moving, and don’t worry about it. The surprise is what we’re going to do to the fuckers, not the fact that we turned up. I can see one sniper indoors, and a gun emplacement in the earthworks, probably part of a ring.’

  Sage took out a health pack, and reviewed it for restoratives that would not have dire and swift effect on his liver. It came down to glucose tablets, ah well. The original psychotropic… He split a pack, and handed half to Ax. ‘We don’t have to worry about fixed guns, we’re not claiming the hilltop for Colin Powell.’

  ‘Nor snipers, ‘cept for getting past them. One good thing about an armed camp, they have to hold the perimeter, which cuts the loose numbers down.’

  ‘Fucking wish we knew the loose numbers.’

  ‘Fifty, sixty. There’s unlikely to be more combatants than that, max, in a community of a hundred. Say at least one gunhole in each quadrant, with two gunners. Say at least one sniper. Minimum of twelve tied up there, and the perimeter must be patrolled, that’s got to be another dozen. Leaving thirty or so in the bunker area, for us to deal with.’

  ‘Hahaha. Estimates are always helpful.’

  ‘You have to start somewhere.’

  Some will pick up a weapon, some won’t… You keep telling yourself there have been different times, when it was unimaginable that you would have a gun in your hands, and they can return; but it gets harder to believe.

  ‘I used to tell myself I was trying to preserve civilised life for her.’

  ‘It was always fucked up, temporary and partial, Ax. We were just shocked when the guns and horrors came knocking on our nice little door.’

  They thought of the little girl, living alone with her cold mother and her crazy gran, devouring the library of twentieth century liberal culture, no idea that her demon father existed. No conception of the world they would all inherit.

  ‘We need a vantage point,’ said Ax. ‘I favour the saloon. On the plan we have it’s two storeys, and has, or had, a cupola on the roof. Shall we check that out?’

  ‘I’m good,’ said Sage. ‘Let’s go.’

  They dropped into the ditch, and scaled the ramparts. Down the other side, still not a sign of life, and a sprint, bent double, to the wooden buildings, ragged remains of a little Las Vegas of the gold rush. The splintered grey sidewalks had hitching rails, the streets had never seen asphalt, but the drab, derelict houses were fairly modern. They went into one: and found a well-preserved room with tables and chairs. Kabbalistic-type signs covered one wall, a stack of paper on a table had been used for drawing exercises: fair and poor copies of the wall chart.

  ‘Looks like this is part of the the occult terrorist training college. Shit, militant crystal swingers will rule the world.’

  ‘Not if they’re trying to create the Fat Boy… D’you recognise anything?’

  ‘Nope. Gibberish to me.’ Sage frowned. ‘But you never know. I don’t think we should stare at it too long. Where d’you think they all are?’

  ‘I have a feeling—’

  Ax’s déjà vu was growing, everything was superimposed, as was the sense of that third man, who was out in the street, on point, well, fact is there should be someone out there. He was about to say he thought Lavoisier had wind of the coming raid, when instead he knew that he had to spin around. He fired a split second before the man whose shadow had moved into his light.

  The Lavoisien was young, white, with yellow-brown dreadlocks, a fresh face, open eyes. Out in the street there were four more of them, clutching rifles and running to the sound of riflefire, without any precaution. They were raked with bullets, three of them dropped. One of them bounced off a wall, belted for cover and started firing back. ‘Damn’, said Ax, dropped on one knee and took aim with more care: white face, black teeshirt, spiky hair, looks like a woman. But he didn’t fire. Someone was already behind her, and the goth-girl tumbled.

  It could have been a trick of the light, could be she was hit before, and took her time falling over. Sage and Ax maybe both decided not to ask, did you see that? In this situation you don’t think, if you can help it.

  ‘Five down,’ said Ax, cold-bloodedly.

  ‘Let’s get on,’ breathed Sage. ‘Long way to go.’

  The saloon was on Main Street, which had broken asphalt and even a street sign. They reached it without further incident, and the cupola was stil
l up on the roof. There had been a big fire in Lavoisier around the turn of the century, when the last New Age settlers were still hanging on. The saloon’s cavernous bar was a blackened shell, the stairway to the first floor gallery was gone, but the structure that remained looked sound enough. They found a smaller flight of stairs and reached their objective: a dusty little octagonal room, windows on every side, most of the glass gone. Sage shucked his pack, set up and initialised the airborne cam and its guidance system. Ax got low and peered out, assessing the steep, shingled roof, which seemed solid. An escape route. Lavoisier was a grid of battered houses, gappy roofs: rows and sidewalks quickly giving up, long gaps between buildings in the outer sectors. Vehicles in a pound, a water tanker—

  ‘Can you see the church?’

  ‘Yeah. Right in the centre.’

  The church was Spanish Mission-style, a dingy pink-washed shoe box in a little square, a squat campanile tower at one end, dark lancets along the sides. With binoculars he could see the beam in the open sided belfry where the bell had hung. No rope or bell there now. Beyond the church, outside the earthworks a hillside graveyard, with thickly sown markers, a few crooked trees. It was the quiet side of town, the defences looked less developed. He couldn’t see the Rat. Fucking thing’s going to turn back into a pumpkin, though, he thought. At the worst moment: I know it. There were barricades around the church square. Movement on the perimeter, patrols looking antsy, ah well, can’t be helped. No non-combatants. Not a one, and nobody lives in those houses.

  His mouth was dry, and his heart was thumping. Adrenalin’s a miracle drug for bursts of action, but hell for the spaces inbetween. Soon we’ll know.

  ‘I know where they are, Sage. They’re underground.’

  ‘Fuck. Of course they are.’

  ‘Let’s hope the eye-socket kid was telling the truth. If she’s in an underground warren for which we don’t have a map, the difficulty of this increases.’