“Abigail Browning,” Becca said.
“Oh, our local UFOlogist,” Jillian said. “You know she’s been making her living these last few years providing historical tours of Lake Waloon?”
How could Becca have missed that? So Abigail Browning had a stake in keeping the alien story alive. And what could be better than a tale of alien massacre?
Hell, that would even give her a measure of revenge against Jack Conyers, showing that the story of racial unity in Hope was really just a myth.
“Just wondering,” Becca said, trying to make light of it.
“Well, we all are. From what I can tell, these are very old bones—if they are bones as we know them. The material is something else, and it’s hollow.”
“But they looked human.”
“So do a lot of things. Mammalian bones tend to look alike. I’ve had new trainees mistake cat spines and rib cages for human babies.”
Becca swallowed. “What about the smell?”
“Well, that’s the odd part,” Jillian said. “It’s coming from the—whatever they are—bones.”
“Huh?”
Jillian shrugged. “Let me show you.”
She grabbed an evidence bag from a table beside her desk. Inside was what looked to Becca to be an adult human rib bone. It even had the proper curvature.
“Break it,” Jillian said.
“Isn’t this destroying evidence?”
“Of what? Alien massacre? Just break it.”
Becca grabbed a pair of medical gloves from the box beside Jillian’s desk, then opened the evidence bag. She took out the rib bone and immediately felt a sense of wrongness. It was too squishy. Even bones that had been in damp ground for a long period of time never felt like this—almost like a rubber chew toy that had been well loved.
Becca turned it over in her fingers, feeling a gag reflex and swallowing hard against it.
Jillian nodded. “Kinda gross, huh?”
Becca didn’t answer. Instead, she grabbed both ends of the bone and bent.
If it had been made of rubber—even old rubber—the bone should’ve bent with her hands. But it didn’t bend. It snapped, and a waft of rot filled Becca’s nose, almost as if she had put her face in the middle of a decaying corpse.
“Jesus Christ,” she said, dropping both pieces into the evidence bag. “You could’ve warned me.”
The gag reflex had gotten worse. Her eyes watered and she resisted the urge to wipe at them. She’d learned that lesson long ago, when she’d been a rookie: Don’t touch your own skin after touching a corpse.
But that wasn’t a corpse. It wasn’t even a real bone, at least not of a kind she was familiar with.
“C’mon.” Jillian took the sealed evidence bag from her and led Becca to the back room where cleaning solutions and the sharp-scented nostril-clearing substance that Jillian preferred waited.
Becca inhaled the substance, feeling her nose clear as if she’d sniffed smelling salts, and then she grabbed a clean washcloth, wiped her face, and leaned against a metal filing cabinet.
“So what the hell is it?” she asked.
“I wish I knew. I’m going to be calling not just the state, but some anthropologists to see if they’ve seen anything like it.”
“Then why did you tell me my job got easier?”
“Because,” Jillian said, “there’s no recent body. There aren’t even old bodies. There’s a mystery, yes, but it’s an archaeological one. There’s probably some plant or root or something that does this, and maybe it’s extinct or something, which is why we’re not familiar with it.”
“You mean like that death plant?” Becca asked.
“The corpse flower?” Jillian nodded. “I forgot about that. I’ll look it up online. Maybe it used to grow around here.”
Becca’s fingers tingled. The bone—or whatever it was—had felt alive, but the way that plant roots did. She could believe that Chase had discovered the remains of a very old plant much more easily than believing that an alien massacre happened in Hope.
“You want to tell Chase,” Jillian asked, “or should I?”
Becca felt her breath catch. Chase’s dream project was still on. It would still happen.
One day, the End of the World would become the premiere resort in Eastern Oregon.
“He’s not going to be able to work for a while. If they think this thing is unusual, they’ll do some excavation,” Jillian said. “But it’s not like a major dig, and it’s not a crime scene. He should be thrilled.”
Becca smiled in spite of her stinging nose. “Thrilled probably isn’t the word I’d use. But he’ll be relieved, once he’s past the immediate inconvenience.”
Jillian crossed her arms, looking amused. “So am I telling him?”
“No,” Becca said, “I will.”
THEN
The train passed it.
Jess Taylor hadn’t warned her.
But there was a big hand-carved sign saying, FUTURE HOME OF THE END OF THE WORLD RESORT. And there was a finished building right at the edge, with the word Hotel on it. And a big brown patch where somebody had dug a hole and then covered it up.
Her mommy was in there.
She went to the edge of the platform and stared at it until it got tiny in the distance.
And then she remembered: Her daddy, days before he left, telling Momma—
If anything happens, we go to the End of the World. We burrow into the walls or slide against the frames. We become other. We hibernate until our own people return.
She never learned how. Grown ones could do it. And they could coax their children into it, but no child could do it on her own.
She’d only seen the shimmers a few times, back when she was really little, in the ship before it crashed. Lots and lots of her people, people she didn’t see until Daddy woke them, shimmered in the back compartment.
Sometimes they’d have dreams and you’d see their ghostly selves, wandering through the ship. She got scared by that, but Momma said it was normal. It was a way to check how time was passing, and when it was safe to wake up.
She didn’t see any shimmers as she passed the End of the World.
She didn’t see anyone she knew. It was quiet and empty and lonely.
Her people were really and truly gone, and now she was the only one left to wait for the others. The ones who were supposed to rescue them.
If they ever came.
NOW
Becca and Chase stood at the End of the World, staring at the hole dug into the floor of the natatorium. It was early evening, little more than twenty-four hours since Chase called Becca to the scene.
The area was quiet—as quiet as the desert got. A high-pitched whine that came from a bug Becca could not identify came from just outside the broken wall. The wind rustled a tarp that covered some of the wood Chase had bought, and not too far away a bird peeped, probably as it hunted the whining bugs.
The sounds of workers waiting for instructions, the low buzz-growl of her radio unit, the crunch of vans on gravel were in the recent past. Right now, it was just her, Chase, and the plantlike bonelike things half buried in the ground.
The smell wasn’t as bad as it had been the day before. The bonelike things weren’t freshly broken. The scent was fading, just like the smell of a dead body faded to an annoyance when the body was removed from the scene.
She and Chase stood side by side in the patch of sunlight that filtered through the hole in the natatorium wall. She had brought him down here to tell him the news, and when she finished, he didn’t say a word.
He swallowed once, stared at the ground, and then closed his eyes. His entire body trembled. She thought he was going to cry.
Then he took a deep breath, pushed his hard hat back, and frowned. “No one died.”
“That’s right,” Becca said.
“And these aren’t bodies.”
Not human ones anyway, she almost said, but then felt the joke was in poor taste. For all she knew, Chase cou
ld have talked to Mrs. Browning, too. He might have heard the alien rumors as well.
“Jillian thinks they’re the remains of plants.”
“Thinks?” Chase asked.
Becca shrugged. “All she knows is that they’re not bone, not from humans or from animals. And they’re the source of the smell.”
“Weird,” Chase said.
“You won’t be able to work in the nat for a while,” Becca said. “People are coming from U of O and OSU’s science and archaeological departments to see what they can learn. Jillian thinks they might contact the Smithsonian or someplace like that. She made a ballpark estimate of eight months, but it could be more than that. It could be less.”
Chase nodded. He still wasn’t looking at her. “I can finish the hotel, though.”
“The hotel, the golf course, the houses, you can do all of it.”
“Golf courses,” he reminded her.
“Golf courses,” she said.
They stood in silence for a moment longer. Chase had his head bowed, as if he were looking at a grave.
Then he asked, “They’ll clear this away?”
“Probably,” Becca said. “Or you might have to find a way to build over it. You certainly don’t want one of those things to break while guests are using the pool.”
He shuddered, then nodded. He took off his hard hat and twisted it between his hands.
“Mrs. Browning says you’re keeping the walls of the hotel,” Becca said.
He looked at her sideways. “You spoke to Abigail?”
Becca nodded. “You know she used to babysit me, way back when.”
“That’s what she said. She also said I should give you time.”
Becca felt her cheeks flush. That old woman meddled. “For what?”
He shrugged and looked away. “I still love you, Becca.”
She wondered if that was manipulation. Or if it was just truth. Had she always mistaken truth for manipulation, and manipulation for truth?
Had she thrown away the most important thing in her life because she hadn’t recognized it, because she hadn’t been prepared for it, because nothing in her life taught her how to understand it?
She had had set ideas on the way that men were, on the ways they treated their wives, on the way they lived their lives.
We all have prejudices, her therapist had once told her, early in their sessions. The key is recognizing them, and going around them. Because if we don% we never see what’s in front of us.
Becca looked at the plantlike things. She had initially seen bone because of the smell, but they weren’t bone. They just looked like bone. They were harmless and old and a curiosity, but not evidence of a horrible past.
She had misunderstood. Chase had misunderstood. And the End of the World had nearly died once again.
“You really love this place, don’t you?” she said to Chase. “It’s the first place I recognized Hope’s potential,” he said. “It just took me fifteen years to get enough money and clout to bring my dream to reality.”
“And this almost ruined it. What would you have done if Mrs. Browning had been right? If this was the site of a massacre?” He put his hard hat on, then gave her a rueful look. “She told you that? About the aliens? Is that why you asked about the walls?” “If there are alien ghosts, then you’ll have some troubles when the End of the World opens.”
“If there are alien ghosts, I’ll get a lot of free publicity from the Sci-Fi Channel and the Travel Channel.”
This time, she understood his tone. For all its lightness, it had some tension. He had thought about this. “It worried you, didn’t it, when you dug this up?”
He nodded.
“Did you think she might be telling the truth?”
“Her version of it,” he said. “Weren’t you the one who told me that rumors hid real events? Maybe something bad had happened in Hope, and people made up the other story to cover it up.”
“Not that anyone thought of aliens in 1908,” Becca said.
He grinned, and slipped an arm around her. “Ever practical, aren’t you, Becca?”
“Not ever,” she said. Not during the drive from Mrs. Browning’s to the coroner’s office. Not when she remembered how that wall felt, squishy against her back.
“You never told me,” she said. “Are you keeping the walls?” “Why do you care?” he asked.
“They bother me,” she said.
He looked at her. “You saw the alien ghosts.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t see anything. I just got scared as a teenager, is all.”
He pulled her close. She didn’t move away.
“Sometimes in old buildings,” he said, “I feel like I can touch the past.”
He wasn’t looking at the ground anymore. He was looking past the sunlight, into the desert itself.
“That’s what you think that is?” Becca asked. “The past?”
“Or something,” he said. “A bit of memory. A slice of time. Who knows? I always try to preserve that part of the old buildings, though.”
“Why?” Becca asked.
“Because otherwise they’re not worth saving. They’re just wood or brick or marble. Ingredients. Buildings are living things, just like people.”
She’d never heard mystical talk from him. Maybe she’d never listened.
“It’s not about the money?” she asked.
“Becca, if it were about the money, I’d build cookie-cutter developments all over Hope and make millions.” He shook his head. “It’s about finding the surprises, whatever they might be. Good or bad.”
“Or both,” Becca said, moving some dirt at the edge of the hole.
“Or both,” he said. “Sometimes I like both.”
“Me, too,” she said. Then she studied him.
They were good together, but sometimes they were bad. She felt that longing for speed-dial, then wondered if therapists were good and bad—good for some people, bad for others.
Maybe she should just trust herself.
She slid her hand into his.
He looked at her, surprised.
They stayed at the End of the World until the sun set—and waited for answers that might never ever come.
THEN
The train had stopped in Hope for a long time before Jess Taylor found her. Her hand had molded to the railing near the door, and she couldn’t remember how to set it free.
Besides, no one had unlocked the door for her. Apparently they thought it would be funny for her to climb over the edge to get off the train.
When he saw her, stuck there, her arm ending not in a hand but in a railing that went around the back of the train, he didn’t say anything. Instead, he came up beside her. He hugged her, and she leaned into him.
He’d never hugged her before.
Then he set his own arm right next to hers, placing his hand right next to the place hers should be. And he watched as she shifted, slowly—fingers were so hard—and his body shielded hers from the platform, and all those other people meeting their families.
When she finished, and her arm fell at her side—complete with a perfectly formed hand—he said, very softly, “They locked you out here, huh?”
She nodded and felt tears for the second time that day.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t think they’d do that to a child.”
And she thought of the End of the World, and all the children—the older children who had been her friends—and how they hadn’t been locked out, they’d been killed and he’d helped bury them to keep his job, and she wondered how he could say something like that.
But she kept quiet. She was learning it was best to keep quiet sometimes.
“From now on,” he was saying softly—she almost couldn’t hear him over the engine, clanging as it cooled—“everyone’ll think you’re my niece from Mississippi. Try to talk like I do, and don’t answer a lot of questions about back home. All right?”
“All right.” She already knew this anyway. He’d told her
before they went to Brothers.
“If we do this right,” he said, pulling her close, “no one will ever know.”
She swallowed, just like he did when he was nervous. No one would ever know. About her, about her family, about her people. No one would understand that for a while, her people waited and hoped.
Maybe she’d live to see the rescue ship come.
She wondered if she would recognize it.
She wondered if she would care.
Jess Taylor took her little bag with one hand, and with the other he took her newly made hand.
“Chin up, Sarah,” he said, using the name she would hear from now on. In time, it would become her, just like the two arms and two legs and the permanent form and the dark skin would become her. Her self. Her identity.
She straightened her shoulders like he had taught her. She held her head high.
And then, clinging to Jess Taylor for support, she took her final steps away from the world she’d always known.
She took her first real steps into Hope.
DARK HEAVEN by Gregory Benford
The body was bloated and puckered. The man looked to be in his thirties maybe, but with the bulging face and goggle eyes it was hard to tell. His pants and shirt were gone so he was down to his skivvies. They were grimy on the mud beach.
That wasn’t unusual at all. Often the gulf currents pulled the clothes off. Inquisitive fish or sharks came to visit, and indeed there was a chunk out of the left calf and thigh. Someone had come for a snack. Along the chest and belly were long raised red marks, and that was odd. McKenna hadn’t seen anything like that before.
McKenna looked around, but the muddy beach and stands of reeds held nothing of interest. As the first homicide detective there it was his case, and they were spread so thin he got no backup beyond a few uniforms. Those were mostly just standing around. The photo/video guy was just finishing with his systematic sweep of the area.
The body didn’t smell. It had been in the salt water at least a day, the Medical Examiner had said, judging from the swelling. McKenna listened to the drone of the ME’s summary as he circled around the body, his boots scrunching on the beach.
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