"Evacuate the hide! Fall out and take that fucking rock, gentlemen!" Storch did his best imitation of the Chief, punctuated it with a grenade from the M203 launcher mounted under his rifle. The grenade skipped off the top of the rock, soared up in a lazy arc and dropped on top of the remaining Bedouins just as the fuse burnt up. The dull crump, the sharp screams awakened them to who they were.
A bullet, or a piece of shrapnel from his own grenade ripped through his right hand. He ducked down and examined it for a full second, waiting for the pain to come. He was still watching it, could still almost feel his thumb there, when the green fog spilled into his spiderhole. Hands knotted in his plastic hood and hauled him out of the hole.
They were climbing out of the holes, but too late, the fog closed over them, and their suits were sloughing off of them and their skins burned, and the tendrils of gas worked their way into their sinuses, and they were holding their breath…
And the wind whipped the green gas to ribbons and scattered it away from them, scoured their wounds with pure, stinging sand. The wash of a helicopter just above their heads, voices in their ears, and sleep, and Sgt. Storch was already beginning to forget what really happened…
1
July 4, 1999.
It rained on the Fourth of July in Death Valley. Great black clouds tore themselves apart in the livid blue noon sky, punishing curtains of gunmetal rain that the Bad Mood Guy swore would be full of frogs and octopi.
"Is it over?" the Bad Mood Guy woke up and wanted to know. His shrill voice vibrated the weatherbeaten porch beneath their feet. "Did it happen?"
"No. We're still here. Go back to sleep," Storch told him.
"Fucking gyp."
"Moody's got a point. Nostradamus said the world's going to end today," Ely Buggs said. He quoted, "'The year 1999, seven months. From the sky will come a great King of Terror—
—To bring back to life the great King of the Mongols, before and after Mars to reign by good Luck,'" Hiram Hansen finished. "Bullshit. He only said it would start to end. Anyway, Nostradamus was just a courtier-spy for the Merovingian dynasty—"
"Hugenot," interrupted Bad Mood Guy.
"All his prophecies were either coded reports on the royal family's private business, or attempts to influence same. Edgar Cayce said we've got a good five hundred years yet. And he was an American."
"Cayce predicted in his sleep. He was dreaming. Nostradamus predicted wide awake. Stared into the sun. He saw the day coming. Nostradamus and five bucks says it goes down on the Fourth."
Zane Ezekiel Storch moved to swat a fly dancing a tarantella on his scalp, gave up. It would drown in sweat soon, anyway. "Both full of shit. Don't want to hear any more apocalyptic bullshit on my porch."
"Two kinds of people 'round here these days, young Zane: them as're afraid the world's gonna end and them as're afraid it won't," Hansen said. "This ain't no place for an honest man with his head on straight anymore." The coroner/taxidermist/librarian fumbled out his tobacco pouch, a tanned baby gila monster with a zipper in its belly, dumped out a pinch of his rust-red blend. Rolled a cheroot.
"Tellin' ya, if it was gonna happen, it should've by now. Fucking gyp," the Bad Mood Guy growled from under the porch. The Bad Mood Guy had sacrificed two hundred dollars and his satellite dish to the Field Marshal's Armageddon Betting Pool—and eaten two sheets of acid to forget about it.
They sat on the porch of Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply, watching the old man they called Pop Sickle as he weighed and pinched at foil pouches of freeze-dried astronaut ice cream on aisle three like they were cantaloupes. Pop Sickle never talked, and Storch nurtured a supernatural dread of what he might say if he ever did. An albino giant with a beluga whale's torso and pipestem limbs, Pop Sickle had horrible weeping lesions and gigantic bruises on nearly every exposed inch of moonstone skin. Circulation so bad you could hear whatever he used for blood sloshing inside when he moved. He was hairless but for a tumbleweed goatee of fiber-optic polar bear hair. He wore a spelunker's helmet, ski goggles and a nylon and rubber spring wetsuit, but even on a hundred and six degree high summer day like today, he didn't—or couldn't—sweat. But even so, Pop Sickle lived up to his name. He melted.
"Shit, Hi. It ain't just here," Ely picked up the lost conversational thread. "The artificial threshold we've set up in the Millennium is nothing more than an appointed time for us to clean out our collective unconscious. Millennial psychosis is a timed anxiety release, throughout history. The problem is, the nuts who really expected the big one to come down get really fucked up when they're denied the cathartic vindication of their psychoses. Case in point the Bad Mood Guy down there."
Storch knew who Ely Buggs was really talking about, but he let it lie. Pissed about Harley Pettigrew, his store manager, two hours AWOL; pissed at his cashier running down his old man. Pilgrims came to Thermopylae in the heart of Death Valley to burn their insanity away, or gave it free rein to thrive in a boundless wilderness of blank canvases on which to paint their fantastic, paranoid mindscapes. In one way or another, they were all pilgrims.
Ely Buggs, smiling, always smiling into the sun, smiling and waving, cooking up apocalyptic prophecies, posing for satellite photos, wants to believe he's blowing some National Reconnaissance Office spotter's mind. Ely was obsessive-compulsively driven to kick people in the brains. He had been much sought-after as a computer programmer, but collected SSI because he couldn't pass someone who wasn't looking where they were going without assaulting them. Always said that when people surrender their personal safety to a painted crosswalk or the defensive driving of others, it is incumbent on their fellows to shock them back to their senses. He hitchhiked into town one morning eight months ago, and immediately signed on. To Storch's one question job interview: "Why are you here?" Ely Buggs answered, "To get away from the powerlines. They play hell with your DNA." The first and only time he jumped on his boss, Storch broke three of his fingers and his wrist with one twist of his bad hand. He apologized, got a field splint from aisle five and went back to work. Buggs was a good cashier.
"Judas git home, he's doing it again!"
Pop Sickle doffed his helmet and commenced to scratching at his bald pate. The wound flaked and slobbered clear plasma tears into his helmet. The albino's scalp glittered like the bowels of a geode, adorned with crystalline keloid scars; his bare skull shining through the bloodless sores. He swam in flooded uranium mines, reservoirs tainted with mercury and illegally dumped DDT. He glowed in the dark, made the geiger counters go batshit on aisle nine. He paid cash.
Storch cocked an ear, heard an engine, civilian RV wheels chewing gravel. The RV hove into view and came to rest in front of his store, a gargantuan refrigerated biosphere on wheels. With it, an ambitious tourist could colonize Venus. The cabin door popped open with an audible hiss and a middle-aged couple climbed out. Banana Republic togs, urban cowboy boots, no sunburns. The man had a video camera on his shoulder. Tourists. Plastic in high impulse-buy gear.
"Buggs, behind the counter. Hi, don't you scare 'em off, or you can start paying rent for that bench. And go wash yourself, you're making everything stink like fucking formaldehyde." Storch felt the headache coming on.
Buggs behind the counter, Storch eyeing the tourists as they ogled the wares. City-slicker types video-sightseeing, insurance against Deliverance-style yokels, snaps from the fringe for the folks back home. They poked around the surplus goods, Storch thankful he took down his father's exhibit of SS regalia, wishing Harley was here to handle these idiots so he could get back to work. The Army taught him to obey orders and like it, but not to look like he enjoyed sucking up. The tourists, conspicuously not bargaining or asking questions, not trying on doughboy helmets or gas masks: just swiveling, scoping through the camera for the folks at home. Sidling up to him, needling the local yokel suddenly the main attraction. He recoiled from the greedy camera in his face.
"So, are you folks survivalists?"
"Everybody's a survivalist, mister.
We just cater to those who take their survival seriously." His father's words, sounding stupid from his mouth. "Death Valley is a harsh place. You may or may not've noticed, in your RV, out there. It takes a lot to stay alive here. We sell most of it."
"There a lot of militia groups around here?"
Question hinky from a tourist. Storch smelled fuzz. "None that I know of. We get a lot of hermits. People who just want to be left alone."
"Death Valley is the last refuge of the true individualist," Buggs chimed in.
The camera homed in on Pop Sickle as he approached the checkout. The old mutant jumped back like a bushman afraid the infernal device would steal his soul.
"Mister, I'm gonna have to ask you to turn that thing off."
The tourist-wife stepped in front of the camera, did a bizarre little wave. "I think we've seen everything we came to see. Mother?" Too late, Storch spotted the kinky wire jacked into the camera running up the tourist's polo shirtsleeve, the plastic dong sticking out of the back of the camera. Antenna?
The doors blasted open, black Kevlar-suited berserkers stormed Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply. "Down, get down!" guns in faces, jackboots on ribs.
The end of Zane Storch's world had come.
Storch and Buggs grabbed for sky, but Pop Sickle let out an eerie bleat and made for the back door. Phut Phut Phut: three shots in the old morlock deflating him like a boiler bag half-full of rancid clam sauce. An armed and armored stormtrooper braced Storch like an invitation to dance, all his hand-to-hand training jamming common sense, he can take the guy and feed him his rifle, but eight more like him? And the tourists have automatics, and Buggs down behind the register to appease the fucker on the counter, Storch's last glimpse of his cashier a bloody gash from a rifle barrel on his forehead.
Where the hell is Harley? Did he know this was going down? Was he an informant? Informant on what? Harley and Hiram talked his dad down out of the hills before I got here, hated the government like poison, and anyway, what would there be to inform on? Storch didn't even sell half the shit you could buy at any gun show, let alone anything the ATF would want. He never did business with militia or cult groups, and knew of nobody in the area who was making or selling drugs. Did they just come for Pop Sickle? Storch saw the crumpled body for the first time, a trickle of something like scorched motor oil reaching out from the corpse to where he lay. He jerked up, came back down hard under a jackboot in his ear.
"Stay down! Close your eyes!"
From behind the counter: "So, are we gonna be on the teevee?" The countertop-commando jumping down on Buggs with both feet. Screams, silence.
"Are you Sergeant First Class Zane Ezekiel Storch, retired, acting proprietor of this establishment?" Mr. Tourist leaning down in his face. Cold, freezer-burn breath.
"You've gotta know I am. Let me up. I'm not gonna hurt anybody." Boot off his head, sitting up, rubbing his temples. Ten guns and a camera still in his face, Mrs. Tourist zooming in on his government-issue welts. "Who the hell are you people? You got a warrant to serve?"
"They're from Majestic, Zane! They know Pop Sickle's a saucer-man." Buggs begging to be kicked again. The commando obliged.
"Stop kicking him, goddamit!" The abuse stopped.
"Will you cooperate?" Mr. Tourist playing Good Cop.
"You ATF?" Storch asked.
"We'll ask the questions. Where is Harley Pettigrew, your stock manager?"
"You oughta know," Storch muttered.
"Elaborate." Mrs. Tourist leaned into his face so he could see his defeated image in stereo in her enormous sunglasses.
"You know who we are, you scoped out our place. You bust in, kill one of my customers and beat the shit out of my cashier inside of sixty clicks, and no due process. We're law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, and I'm a fucking vet! You tell me where my manager is, and what the fuck you're doing here!"
Mr. Tourist waved off the stormtroopers: "Search." Six of them fanned out, stomping down the aisles and sweeping his inventory off the shelves. "Mr. Storch, you can help things along by showing us where the cache is."
"What, the safe? This is a stick-up?"
"No, the weapons cache."
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
"Don't lie, Mr. Storch."
Mrs. Tourist, watching him through the camera, seeing more than was there. "He's telling the truth. So far as he knows." A polygraph-camera?
"Did Harley Pettigrew have the run of the store after hours?"
"Of course he does. He closes five nights a week! But he wouldn't hide anything from me."
From the back: "Jackpot."
Hands hoisted Storch to his feet, guns in his back herded him to the corner where Hiram Hansen did his taxidermy. Rearing prairie dogs, striking rattlesnakes, rampant gila monsters. In Hi's loving hands, the gentlest of Nature's creatures looked rabid, which led many to speculate on whether they were really dead when Hi stuffed them. Formaldehyde made Storch go into convulsions, so Hansen used a special preparation of herbs from a mail-order catalog that claimed to be the same process used on the Pharaohs.
A big section of the floor pried out to reveal a beam-reinforced hole, four feet deep, dug out of the sand beneath. Filled to the brim with gray shrink-wrapped bricks, propane tanks with BABY MILK PLANT and something in Arabic stenciled on them, and guns, guns, guns: Heckler-Koches, Enfields with grenade-launchers, Barrett sniper-rifles, Uzis, Cobrays, Kalashnikovs, AKMs, Spas auto-shotguns. Ammunition: NATO 7.62, 9mm, AK tracer, armor-piercing and anti-personnel rounds, shotgun shells, grenades. A black-market armory under his dad's store, under his nose.
"Assault weapons and ordnance stolen from an ATF impound armory in Idaho; high explosives from Hong Kong and Libya; VX gas from Iraq. Can you account for any of this, Mr. Storch?"
The phone rang, splitting the silence like a fat man's pants. Storch looked at Mr. Tourist.
Storch's handler gripped his neck and steered him into his office. "Answer it. Just be yourself."
Storch picked up the phone at his desk. "Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply Store. Harley?"
"Zane. Zane, I'm sorry, partner."
"Where did all that shit come from, Harley? Who are these fucking guys? They shot Pop Sickle in cold blood and beat the shit out of Buggs, and there's a Jesusfuckingchrist huge stash of terrorist ordnance under the store. Why didn't you come in to work today?"
"Zane, I didn't mean for you to get involved. I just had to do something. The future of our race is at stake. I just couldn't just sit by, while those Radiant Dawn freaks pissed in our genepool. Shit, they're listening, ain't they? Well, now hear this, you pricks. Zane didn't know a fucking thing about the weapons and shit under his store. I take sole responsibility."
"Harley, who were you holding that shit for?"
"Don't try to do their job for them, boy. I don't expect you to understand, but I'm sorry I let you down, and I'm sorry I let your father down, and…shit, I'm just sorry about the whole fucking thing." A fat pause, then, "Zane, some people are going to try to contact you soon. Don't…"
"Don't what, Harley?"
"I'm sorry, Zane." BLAM. The gunshot peaking out the phone so Storch barely noticed the second shot before the line went dead.
Mr. Tourist standing in the doorway. "We believe you, son."
Outside, two hours later. Storch and Buggs back on the porch, holding ice to their battered heads. At least there were no TV cameras to immortalize their disgrace.
Mr. Tourist debriefed the Sheriff's Deputy, who seemed eager to cooperate. He'd been not nearly so solicitous with Storch, who gathered they'd told him nothing, because the deputy gave out even less to him. Sheriff Twombley himself would've come and might've made a difference, the Deputy allowed, but he was laid up with a case of hemorrhoids, and wouldn't get off the cushioned seat behind his desk in Furnace Creek. An ambulance had come and gone with Pop Sickle's body. Hansen's library truck was gone.
Buggs munched a sandwich and Storch smoked his first ciga
rette in eight years. It fed fresh fuel to his migraine, but it steadied his nerves.
"Did you know that soon all American beef-cattle will be living on a diet consisting almost entirely of their own manure?"
"Buggs, shut up. I don't want to hear any more of your bullshit Earth Day schemes today. That's the most fucking disgusting one yet."
"No, really, boss, it's a good thing, because as the human population rises, it consumes and converts more and more of the earth's organic resources into people. Cattle eat a lot of grass, and we eat a lot of cattle. So, if we close the system by feeding cows their own nutrient-enriched shit, we'd stabilize population growth and save the remaining natural biomass from being turned into more people. Think of the possibilities if we just eliminated the middleman and ate our own shit? We owe it to future generations to adapt to the idea. You want a bite of my sandwich?"
"I'm going home. Buggs, take the rest of the year off."
From under the porch, the Bad Mood Guy snarled, "I told you the world was going to end today.
2
It was the kind of day that makes one glad to be working in the ER. Death had seemingly taken the Fourth of July off, at least in Bishop, and one could almost feel content that something, for the moment, was right in the world. With dusk, however, would come the fireworks, and the earnest, patriotic consumption of alcohol. Four staffers were due to come on duty in about an hour, and if the peace kept up until then, Stella Orozco would be able to go home before the casualty parade got started.
Stella sipped from a steaming mug of herbal tea at the reception desk and watched the sunset through the smoked glass of the outer doors. Rosalinde and Terry, the other nurse and orderly on duty, were playing cribbage in the breakroom. Ruth Fisher and Jean Velazquez, the other two nurses, and Dr. Balsam, the attending physician, were taking their dinner break in the cafeteria. Dr. Quon, the intern, had gone up to Radiology with a scared eight-year old who'd broken his elbow falling out of a tree.
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