American Elsewhere

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  She’s not getting anywhere near that fucking thing, she decides. If she does she’s sure to die of cancer in a week or something. It was stupid of her to even get this close.

  Mona decides she needs to forget about it. She turns around and starts back to the road. The mesa isn’t too far ahead now. Less than an hour’s walk, probably, and the more distance she puts between her and that thing—whatever it is, and whatever it does—the better.

  She walks at a brisk pace, eager to get away from the white column, but when she’s about thirty feet past it her nose and eyes start watering. She pauses to sneeze, then continues, but it gets even worse. It’s as if she’s having an allergic reaction: every lining and every tissue in her skull has just swollen up like a balloon. Coughing, she staggers back down the hill and sits down on a stone to recover.

  The attack fades. Mona rubs at her throat, wondering what the hell that was. She’s never had an allergic reaction to anything in her life. What could have caused it now?

  She takes a sip of water, then stands and makes for the road again. But right at about the same spot on the hill, her eyes burn and she starts sneezing over and over again, awful, painful sneezes that make her throat burn.

  “Fuck!” gasps Mona. She falls to her hands and knees and crawls back down the hillside. Again, once she’s moved several feet the attack fades.

  She contemplates her situation as she catches her breath. She glances up at the white column, which is still implacably blinking its weird purple light. The more she looks at it, the more she doesn’t trust it.

  “You’re doing this, aren’t you, you son of a bitch,” she says to it.

  The column just keeps blinking. Mona glares at it, then looks back toward the mesa.

  It doesn’t want me to get over there, she thinks. It’s a very stupid thing to think, she knows that, but she also feels certain that it’s right. Someone put this thing here as a deterrent. Maybe they didn’t want anyone getting to this side of the mesa. And if they were able to make a piece of machinery affect people in such a way… well. What else is around the mesa? It makes Mona wonder if she really wants to go farther.

  “Hell yes, I do,” she says angrily. She stands, glances at the white column, and grasps the pink straps of her backpack so it’s pulled tight against her back. Then she bends low, flexes her knees, and breaks off at a dead sprint.

  At first she thinks she’s made it. She’s going so damn fast that it feels like she’s already passed that invisible line. But then the attack hits her like a freight train, a lightning bolt, a ten-ton weight hurtling down out of the sky, and suddenly she’s stumbling forward like a drunk, sneezing uncontrollably, her vision blurring and her cheeks wet with tears.

  Goddamn it, no, she thinks. No, I am not going to be beat by some fucking white stick on a hill.

  She digs in her heels and starts trotting forward again.

  About six steps out there’s a loud, sharp pop, like a lightbulb burning out, and Mona collapses, sure the thing just fried her like a Tesla coil. But the attack immediately stops. The burning sensation recedes from her eyes, nose, and throat, and she sits up, taking deep, slow breaths. She sees that her skin is red and blotchy, like she’s just been swimming in bleach. Hopefully that will go away soon.

  She must have pushed through whatever barrier the thing maintains. She looks back at the white column. “Fucker,” she says, and she’s about to get back up when she does a double take.

  There’s a hill about two or three hundred yards past the column, and she could swear she just saw another violet light on that one, too.

  She reaches into her backpack, takes out her binoculars, and looks.

  She’s not wrong: there is a second column standing on that distant hill. And unless the binoculars are lying to her, there’s a third column, just barely a hair of white, standing on a hill far beyond that one. The three of them all form a line extending from just before the mesa and partway around the valley, silently blinking their purple lights in unison.

  “Like a fence,” says Mona. She puts down her binoculars and looks at the column closest to her. “Like an electric fence, or a wall.”

  This begs the question: what is it meant to be fencing out?

  She turns this question over, and looks back down the slopes to the small green valley below. She can see a few roofs from here, and the black, charred memorial tree in the park.

  Maybe the columns aren’t meant to fence anything out. Maybe they’re meant to fence something in.

  Mona stands and starts walking back toward the mesa. Things no longer feel quite so distorted to her. Though the desert is still a striking place, it is not so surreal or disorienting. She wonders if the white columns project more than just an invisible barrier. Perhaps they are regulating something, like a water filter in an aquarium, and though she can’t see the effects of that regulation she can sense it somewhere in the back of her head.

  She is almost sure of one thing, though: whoever put the columns there didn’t do it with people in mind. Otherwise she’s positive she wouldn’t have been able to get through. They must be meant for something else.

  Maybe there’s a reason people never leave or come to Wink, she thinks. This troubles her deeply. Because she did not experience any barrier when she first entered this valley. That means that either there are no columns and no barrier on the other side—which she thinks unlikely—or she was allowed in. As if she’d been expected.

  She absently glances up as she considers this disturbing thought, but stops dead in her tracks. She stares at the sky, then shields her eyes with her hand to better see.

  “No way,” she says. “No fucking way.”

  Five minutes ago, the pale face of the morning moon was its usual dusky pink. That was on the other side of the white columns, she remembers, inside whatever field it is those machines are putting out.

  On this side, sure, the moon is still in the same place, hanging just above the tip of the mesa. But it’s returned to its normal white color. There’s not a trace of pink in it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Dee Johannes may not know what the hell he is doing, but he is determined to look good while doing it. As he sets out on his curious errand, which is the first of two for today, he’s sporting his freshly-ironed Larry Mahan paisley pearl-snap shirt, a pair of extra-starched Wrangler retro jeans that he’s got hiked up real high so they don’t sag around his ass, and of course his ostrich-skin Luccheses, which he buffed and polished to a fine shine last night. He’s been polishing them every night since he came to work at the Roadhouse, because goddamn is there a lot of dust out here in the desert, and you can’t even walk to your car without your boots turning a pale gray. He’s not sure how all the cowboys stay so good-looking in the movies when the country is so openly hostile to sartorial maintenance. There isn’t even a dry cleaner for miles.

  Of course, these items are just accessories to the real centerpieces of his look: the nickel-plated Desert Eagle riding in the front of his belt, and the Mossberg 4x4 bolt-action .30-06 hunting rifle slung over his shoulder. The Eagle he got off of a man he and Zimmerman pummeled half to death in the parking lot of the Roadhouse last winter; the Mossberg was a meticulously researched online purchase that he had to get shipped to a post office one town over for him to pick up. He has, of course, polished both of these before beginning on this outing, and he’s very pleased with how they gleam in the dawn sun.

  Though Dee has a lot of possessions, many of them deeply treasured—his HDTV, his Bowflex, and his Ford F-150 King Ranch pickup, for example—none of them is closer to his heart than the Mossberg. For the Mossberg, in Dee’s mind, is the definitive, undeniable emblem of manhood, his holy token of vigor and virility; he is convinced that merely holding the Mossberg bestows upon him a sort of animal, savage charisma, like just touching its walnut stock (with matte blue finish) to his shoulder (which he has done sometimes in front of his full-length mirror, occasionally shirtless and occasionally a little more
) causes him to exude a primal musk that will send nearby men packing and will cause any women who happen to look upon him to be filled with an almost evangelical, foaming-at-the-mouth arousal.

  Dee’s experiments with using his firearm as an aphrodisiac have yielded, sadly, pretty mixed results, since a) There isn’t a place nearby with available women where he can just casually walk around with an enormous, high-caliber hunting rifle, and b) Most of the good-looking girls are at the Roadhouse, where you don’t need the Mossberg to get laid, but around fifty to a hundred dollars or a couple of ounces of blow. And besides, Dee’s already had all of them anyways. (Also, Bolan gets mad as hell when Dee brings the Mossberg into the bar. He says it upsets the room.) This is not to say, though, that Dee has not considered using the Mossberg in some sort of kinky role-playing game with one of the downstairs girls at the Roadhouse, perhaps slowly strutting into the room, wearing nothing but oil, his cowboy hat, and a pair of aviators, with the Mossberg jutting out proudly from his hands like he’s stalking a beast in the jungle, and the girl would be on the bed cooing in pleased surprise as he enters her chamber, or whatever it is she’s supposed to do. He almost went through with it once, but all the girls there are gossips and he knows if word got out he’d never live it down. So unfortunately the Mossberg remains relegated to a mere prop in Dee’s fantasies, and though most people would find the idea of a naked man standing in front of a bathroom mirror with a hunting rifle in one hand and his lubed, erect dick in the other to be pretty sad, for Dee Johannes it’s actually getting to be a little routine.

  Dee tries to forget these fantasies as he strides to his truck with the rifle slung over his shoulder. In the light of day they seem a little silly. Before he climbs into his truck, he reaches into his pocket to check the list Bolan gave him. There are two locations written on it:

  313 Madison—creek behind it in the backyard

  The lab—not sure

  “Aw, goddamn,” says Dee. He sighs, pushes his hat back, and scratches his head. There is no place he hates more than the lab. He wishes he’d read the list before accepting this duty from Bolan. But it would have gone to him anyways. Dee is the only one strong enough and with a powerful-enough truck to transport the items he’s been sent to procure.

  But it’s okay. He likes riding his truck all over this rugged country. And though he is aware that the denizens of Wink are dangerous—as was proven when he accompanied Zimmerman, Norris, and Mitchell to that house not too long ago—Dee is confident there’s nothing in Wink he can’t handle. The logic that results in this conclusion can be kind of fuzzy in places, but essentially it boils down to the fact that if a man has a large enough vehicle and a large enough gun, there isn’t much he can’t do.

  Granted, Dee hasn’t actually ever shot anyone with the Mossberg. He also has not ever actually hunted with the Mossberg. He did shoot several trees and targets with it when he first got it in the mail, but this tends to make the gun pretty dirty, and Dee finds cleaning it incredibly tedious. So since then it’s been mostly dry-firing for Dee, which can’t be that different from the real thing because the fundamentals remain the same: you are still pointing your gun at a target, still pulling the trigger, etc. And dry-firing has yielded another nice bonus: he’s hardly gone through any of the expensive ammunition he bought with the rifle, so there are still boxes and boxes of it sitting on the floor of his truck cab.

  When Dee pulls up to 313 Madison—a small, neat adobe home on the outskirts of Wink—he is still riding high on swagger. He considers walking up to the front door with the Mossberg slung over his back, but remembers that Zimmerman always says that’s overkill. (Zimmerman, like Bolan, considers the Mossberg to be both totally absurd and superfluous.) He reluctantly yields to his mental Zimmerman, and leaves the Mossberg sitting on the floor of his cab. But he does lift up his shirt and make sure the Desert Eagle is still in the right spot.

  As he walks up the front steps, the swagger returns. He raps on the frame of the screen door with a feeling of genuine authority, and pastes a big smile across his face when he hears the footsteps coming to the door.

  The dead bolt slowly turns. Then there’s a snap, and the door opens just enough for one small, watery, terrified eye to stare out at him.

  “Morning, uh—” Dee cannot confirm the gender of the person on the other side of the door. He struggles before saying, “Morning! I was wondering if it’d be possible for me to check the creek out behind your house? My wallet fell in it last night—got up to some high jinks, I’m afraid—and it got plumb washed away. Won’t be a moment, and I’m terribly sorry to intrude.”

  The watery eye continues staring at him. Then it bobs up and down in what might be a nod, and the door slams shut. There’s another snap as the dead bolt slides home again.

  “Sheesh,” says Dee. “So much for hospitality.” He hops off the front porch and heads to his pickup. He looks back at the house. After confirming that there’s no one in the windows, he discreetly takes a small spade and a tough piece of canvas from the bed of his truck and hotfoots it around back.

  Christ, he thinks. Everyone in this burg has gone nuts after what they did on the mesa. It was just one guy, too. Seems like Bolan has Zimmerman kill a guy every other month, and no one freaks out about it, or at least not like this. But then, the people Zimmerman kills are usually people everyone expects to die: druggies, lowlifes, small-time enforcers, etc.

  He remembers what he’s come here for as he approaches the creek. He realizes now that his story about the wallet was a dumb one: the creek is completely dry. That doesn’t matter, though, not now. He hops down into the creek bed, takes off his sunglasses, and looks around.

  Here’s the hard part: Dee never has any idea where his quarry could be. Conceivably, it could be anywhere. It’s in the fucking ground, after all, and there’s plenty of ground around here. And it can vary in size…

  He shuts his eyes, counts to ten, and opens them. Nothing. He shuts them again, counts to twenty, opens them, and sees…

  There is the very subtle suggestion of an unnatural bend in one part of the creek. Like the running waters get pulled to one side, rubbing up against the earth. If you didn’t know to look for it, you’d never see it; but once you did, you wouldn’t be able to stop seeing it.

  Dee walks to the bend in the creek, reaches into a pocket, and takes out a nickel. (He prefers nickels because not only do they have more copper than pennies, they’re also easier to see.) He holds it out straight in front of him between two fingers, and lets it drop.

  Theoretically, it should fall straight to the ground. But it doesn’t: about halfway down it swoops away from Dee, just very slightly, as if the wind is pushing it. But there isn’t any wind in the creek bed.

  He steps back, shuts one eye, holds his arm out, and sticks up his thumb like an artist taking stock of a painting. He estimates the direction in which the nickel was headed, and lines it up with the wall of the creek bed.

  “Bingo,” he says, and starts to hack away at the creek bed wall with the spade.

  It doesn’t take long until he hears a high-pitched, metallic ping as his spade bites into the earth. He wriggles the blade of the spade back and forth, spilling more earth onto the ground. Then the wall of the creek bed gives and something small tumbles out.

  The object is small, but the thud it makes when it hits the creek bed is not. It strikes the ground so hard Dee feels it in the soles of his feet.

  He winces. He is not looking forward to getting this son of a bitch back to the truck.

  He kneels and brushes the soil off the object. Underneath the pile of earth is a small block of what looks like a very dark, worn metal. It’s not more than four inches wide on any side, yet there is something about this block—perhaps the way it pulls your gaze, even if you’re not looking anywhere near it—that would give any onlooker the impression of profound heaviness. Perhaps you would even begin to wonder if this small cube of metal has resulted in the odd slope in the neighboring
yards, which all appear to funnel toward this point, once you really think about it.

  Because Dee spends most of his nonwork, non-fucking time getting his pump on with his Bowflex and free weights, he’s the only one in Bolan’s crew who’s in the sort of physical condition to carry this little item. (Maybe. Or maybe they just want to give him the shit jobs, he thinks.) He starts by laying the sheet of tough canvas out next to the cube. Then he pulls a pair of thick gloves out of his pocket and puts them on. These gloves were a little tough to get out here: they’re made for handling blocks of dry ice, because the cube of metal is very cold. He can see condensation forming on it even now. He’s seen others lose layers and layers of skin to the damn things before, so he’s cautious.

  Dee squats, sets his legs (because you always lift with your legs, not your back), and starts to tip the little block over. It’s always surprisingly hard: this is not a material that ever wants to move. And the size of the cube is never an indication of the weight: there was one that was hardly bigger than a quarter that was a huge pain in the ass to move.

  Dee successfully gets the block tipped over onto the heavy canvas. He looks around at the creek bed and finds the shallowest spot. Then he folds the canvas patch up over the cube, knots it in his hands, and starts dragging it over.

  He was right: it is a goddamn headache to get this thing out of the creek. It digs a four-inch trench as Dee hauls it, and it tears the shit out of the creek walls and the grass up top once he finally gets it over. Every time, he waits for an ache to blossom in his loins, because he’s sure this work will give him a hernia someday, but so far he’s been golden, and hopefully today won’t be the day.

  It takes him the better part of twenty minutes to move the cube fifty yards. The worst part—which is always the worst part—is when he has to pick it up in a dead squat and place it in the truck bed. He asked Bolan to get him one of those hydraulic lifts—maybe the kind for getting handicapped people on buses, or something—but his boss’s response was not positive, to say the least.