by J. C. Geiger
They drove toward the mountains. The ThunderChicken fought the pavement grade, squealing—
EeehehehheheeeeEEEEEEEEEE!
“Turn up the radio,” Thomas said.
The radio had the spins. Nothing. Landscape stacked around them. Spires of rocks, dimpled like thick-stemmed mushrooms. Narrow canyons vanished into clefts of stone.
Numbers looped on the radio.
Then stopped. Dial frozen at 1550 AM.
“Got something,” Griff said.
“What?” Thomas said, slowing.
Thomas stomped the brakes. They lurched forward.
“Great,” the voice boomed in the car’s speakers. “Stop right there. We’ll come get you.”
“Get a reading,” Thomas said, scrambling for the headset.
Laughter in the background.
“We’ll come running!” Another voice. More than one!
“Here we come! Here, here we come!” voices sang.
The signal cut loose, running the loops.
“That’s a bit haunting,” Griff said.
“Damn it!” Thomas threw the headphones. They clattered against the windshield.
“I guess we wait,” Charity said. She smiled. “This just got fun.”
“Wait?” Thomas said. “No, no, no. You don’t wait for someone in the desert. That’s like going to the basement in a horror movie. Who knows what kind of people these are?”
“Well,” Griff said. “I’m assuming they’re the ones we came here to find.”
“Oh my god, Tripp,” Thomas said. “Really? You want to hang out and let the target identify us? Haven’t you learned anything?”
He reached into the backseat. Grabbed his backpack. The rat carrier.
“What’s happening?” Charity asked.
“Protocol,” Thomas said. He shouldered open his door. Got out. Slammed it shut.
“Where’s he going?” Charity asked.
“Carrying a pet rat,” Griff said. “Talking about protocol.”
Thomas made a signal with his hands. The number four. A plunging fist.
“What are we doing?”
“We’re supposed to hide,” Griff said. He looked back at her. “How do you feel about camouflage?”
FIFTY-FIVE
THE SCRUB, THICK IN THE VALLEY, SOAKED UP THE MOONLIGHT and cast deep pockets of shadow. They tucked themselves into a thick, spiny hedge behind a gray boulder. Thomas scanned the perimeter with a thermal monocular. The Thunderbird sat like a polished blue robin’s egg that had dropped from its nest.
“See anything?” Griff asked Thomas.
“Snakes and despair,” Thomas said. “Nothing but snakes and despair.”
“Hilarious,” Charity said from nowhere.
“Geez! I forgot you were there,” he said. “You’re so good at being still.”
“Church is all waiting,” she said, still nearly invisible. “Can I?”
She sat up and looked through the monocular.
“Oh look,” she said.
“You see someone?” Thomas asked.
She pointed to a spot in the distance, on the ground. Movement. Griff sharpened the focus on his own eyepiece. A small white creature stared back with pink eyes.
Leapt toward him.
“Yikes!” Griff said.
“Like tarantulas,” Charity said.
“Kangaroo rats,” Thomas said. “They’re everywhere.”
Headlight pricked the distance.
“Them,” Thomas said. “Target confirmed.”
Far away. The white blots looked painted on the still glass of night.
Gradually, the headlights gathered the roar of distant engines, multiplied to four. Swelled to terrible brightness and became vehicles. Griff’s hands shook, breath ticklish in his chest. A small, unmarked buggy. The other, a jeep. About half a dozen people.
Thomas withdrew his Bug Detector.
“No phones,” Thomas whispered.
The group looked rougher than Griff had imagined. Dusty and pierced. A brown-skinned woman in leather with long braids piled up on her head. A man—also brown-skinned, probably ten years older, had countless facial piercings, a long ragged coat. He cocked a foot on a small boulder, like a pirate. One small white guy with close-shorn hair. A Black man with camo pants. Others.
“Should we say something?” Charity asked.
Thomas mashed his finger to his lips. Shook his head.
“Hello, friends!” the pirate man said, his voice as booming and textured as an opera singer’s. “Come out, come out, wherever you are!”
Charity mimed saying hello.
“Ooooowwowowowwwww!”
The small guy howled.
The group surrounded their vehicle. Conferred and laughed. At one point, they all hopped up and down together, arms around each other’s shoulders, singing—
Where did you go, draw me a map, where did you go!
“That’s the Band,” Griff said.
“That’s not the Band,” Thomas hissed.
“I mean the music,” Griff said. “It’s the Band’s music.”
“I have a bad feeling,” Thomas said.
Charity stared at Thomas, like she was reading something in his eyes.
“So what do we do?” Griff asked.
“We wait,” Thomas said. “Then we follow them. Oh my god. Look. They’re going through our car!”
Someone with a long, heavy rope. The small guy howled again.
OWOWOWOWWWOoooooowwwwww!!!
They huddled around the jeep and the ThunderChicken. Arms around one another. Swaying. Humming too soft to hear.
“Thomas,” she said.
When they broke apart, the ThunderChicken was tied to the jeep.
“Thomas,” Charity said. “Why are we hiding? They are taking the car.”
Engines roared. Door clapped shut.
The cars drove away. Pinprick taillights. Gone. Just the three of them. Together and breathing. Getting colder. Griff and Charity stared at Thomas.
“Okay,” Thomas said. “I think we’re safe. We can start walking.”
“Safe?” Charity said. “They just took our gear. All our food. Our car.”
“My car,” Thomas said. “Yeah. Why would they do that? Right?”
“Why would we hide from the people we were trying to find?” Charity asked.
“My gut told me,” Thomas said to Griff. “I don’t know. Something was off.”
“Off,” Charity said.
“They looked rough.”
“Rough?!” Charity said. “Thomas. They were singing our songs! Sing-ing! A band of violent, singing criminals? What was this? A Broadway Musical Situation?”
“They just didn’t look like the type—”
“Ah!” Charity said “Not the type. You mean piercings. Long coats.”
Thomas looked at Griff. And Griff looked at Charity.
“You mean not white enough,” Charity said.
They stood in silence.
“They just didn’t look like—I’m not saying, like, it’s just, the Band sounded like—”
“A white band?” Charity said. “Tell me what a white band sounds like?”
“I just expected—”
“White,” she said.
“Yeah! Fine!” Thomas said. “They looked rough, and also, they were not white. Except for maybe one who might’ve been a baby wolf. I wasn’t trying to—”
“Where are you with this?” Charity asked Griff.
“Me?”
“Just look at you! Two white guys in camo. The living profile of every mass shooter in America terrified of the singing brown people. It’s just unbelievable.”
Something hot prickled in Griff’s gut.
“Then why didn’t you say something?” he asked.
The words, when they hit the air, grew blades and landed wrong. She stared back at him.
“I trusted you! Because this is what you do!” She grabbed his camo vest, shook it. “For a split second, all the wa
y out here, I forgot about racism.”
She sighed.
“Well, I’m doing my best,” Thomas said.
“Great,” Charity said. “Because it’s always such a relief when white people are doing their best.”
“Oh, so now we’re the white people,” Thomas said.
“You’ve always been the white people!” Charity said.
She walked away, took a long loop back toward them. Stopped herself.
“You know—” she started. “All the way out here.”
She walked toward the mountains. The same direction they’d dragged the car. Thomas looked at the map.
“She’s going the right way,” he said.
They followed Charity.
FIFTY-SIX
WHEN THEY CAUGHT UP, THEY DIDN’T SAY MUCH.
Charity’s reaction had jabbed at something bone-deep. Griff had pictured the group white, like most of his town. Like most people he knew. And he’d been afraid like Thomas, probably for the same reasons. Griff had thought he’d be better, but somehow the poison had gotten into his deep tissues. Just breathing the air. Like cadmium in the lungs.
The Specific Absorption Rate of Clade City racism.
“Charity,” he told her. “I’m sorry.”
He placed the small words into the new space between them. To say I’m sorry was to toss two hopeful coins in the well and wish for forgiveness. Quiet lingered. Scratchy footfalls. Breathing. They should’ve been thrilled. The mood was prickly.
They walked toward an impassibly steep mountainside and eventually dead-ended at a wide, flat face of stone. A narrow fissure penetrated the rock’s interior. Inside, the light changed from silver to blue to black.
“What now, survivors?” Charity asked.
They scanned the maps again. Thomas was fairly certain—
“I think it’s through here.”
He pointed to the crack. Barely big enough for a person. Thomas set down the rat carrier, then stripped off his backpack, put a flashlight in his teeth.
“What are you doing?” Charity asked.
“I’m going first,” Thomas said. “Penance for latent racism and transgressions unbecoming of a redneck.”
“Seriously?” Charity asked.
“Yes,” Thomas said. He crammed himself into the narrow crevasse.
Griff went next. He hoisted the green backpack over his head. Five steps in, rock nipped at both shoulders, so he twisted sideways. Thomas shuffled inward. Upward. Griff drew a breath and coughed out powder. Talcum.
His arms wobbled, holding his pack. He walked duck-footed.
The density of the rock was palpable. Air stacked heavy around them. Above, the wedge of navy sky shrank to a ribbon. Floss.
“Can you breathe?” Charity whispered.
“Kind of,” he whispered.
Tighter. He could no longer turn his head to see her. The rock would scrape his nose flat. When he inhaled, the stone resisted his expanding ribs.
“Thomas?” Griff asked.
Breath condensed to a curl in front of him, bumped stone and swirled. Thomas shoved himself around a corner. Griff’s knees wobbled.
“You okay?” Charity asked.
Griff tried to turn. Stuck. Backpack, pinched in the rocks. Couldn’t move.
A sneeze could crack a rib.
“Where are you?” Thomas asked, voice hollow.
He reached around the elbow of the corridor, found Griff’s hand. Griff exhaled and buckled his body around the corner. Scraping his cheeks. Ahead, Thomas wiggled and kicked through a hole in the stone—out!
His moonstruck face. His jaw hung open.
Thomas wiped his cheeks. He was crying.
“Thomas?”
He stared ahead.
“Thomas!”
“Let the air out of your lungs. Don’t breathe.”
Griff exhaled. His heart fluttered.
No air. Little razor blades of panic, slashing his lungs. This was how it was to drown.
Thomas jerked him out to his chest. Griff exhaled, kicked, ground his way out into the light and lay heaving on the slab. Sucking air. Oxygen didn’t stick. His breath had scampered into the desert like a lost white rabbit and he had to catch it. Behind him, Charity escaped the stone.
“My god,” she said.
Griff recovered and stood on wobbly legs. What they’d found was impossible.
A man-made tower. At its tip, a blinking green light.
And below it, all around it—Thomas exhaled:
“Atlantis.”
FIFTY-SEVEN
ATLANTIS.
A hidden city. Encircled by a jagged ring of mountains, a vast plateau spread out before them like a flat-bottomed bowl. On the plateau stood two towers—one near, one far. Between the towers, a smattering of tents, vehicles, various high-ground encampments.
More thrilling still, what lay below.
Carved deep into the desert floor—a full story or two beneath the high camps, a series of broad habitable canyons. Accessible by ladders and ramps, channels that looked carved by industrious, human-sized ants. Wide as city streets in some places, narrow as alleys in others. Lit, ramshackle structures flashed like jewels inlaid in stone channels. The paths branched through the expansive landscape like the roots of a wild tree, recessed walkways glowing for miles, stretching dreamily toward the pall of mountains like a flickering fuse.
Movement. People down there.
“It’s a whole other world,” Charity said.
“Is this all for the Band?” Thomas asked. “Where do they play?”
The stage could be anywhere.
“Where to?” Thomas asked.
“That giant blinking tower seems like a logical choice,” Griff said.
They walked. With proximity, the structures in the subterranean walkways gained details. Kitchens, yurts, lean-tos. Handmade and strung with lights, colorful flags, carvings. Some thatched and primitive, others filigreed and ornamented like medieval art that had tumbled off the dirigible of a time-traveling pirate. Together, the tapestries, lights, and makeshift structures came together with the bright and balanced incoherence of a patchwork quilt.
They stepped into the moon-shadow space beneath the tower. The structure looked as if it had rocket-shipped to Death Valley from the nineteenth century and taken a few whacks from each decade. Crooked eaves, slanted windows. A wooden-slat rope ladder stretched from the ground to a green spot in the tower’s belly. A door?
Above, a low hum of voices.
Griff grabbed the first wooden rung. Warm. Like it had drunk a million desert suns.
“You’re going up?” Thomas asked.
The ladder made him want to climb.
Griff watched his hands move rung over rung. The air cooled. With each step, the ladder swayed farther. Another moment—What am I doing? Griff stopped. Above, a flash of eyeballs. Bright white. The eyes had been painted on the trapdoor. Small, stenciled letters read: BELLY OF THE BEAST. Griff took a deep, full breath. The air! It smelled like an old leather suitcase. Like skin, after a full day in the sun. He’d never smelled anything like it.
Griff knocked on the trapdoor.
Below, Thomas and Charity looked very small, as if viewed through a telescope. The trapdoor’s hinges screeched.
breeeeechecheeee
A square of light washed over him. A face eclipsed the glow.
Light danced on eyebrow hooks, nose barbs. The pirate man. He smiled silver-capped teeth and spoke with a honeyed voice:
“The Thunderbirds have arrived!” he said. “Welcome home.”
The man grabbed Griff’s hand and vacuumed him up into the room.
“Rumblefish!” he said. His name?
Dozens of them inside, talking and singing in little clusters, they clapped and stomped and laughed and howled—
Oooooowoowowoowowow!!!!
“Welcome home!”
They were thrilled to see him. So many faces, white and dark black and brown and sunburned, but what
he would remember were the eyes, mostly, shot through with light and clarity—the unclouded, singular possession of joy you find once in every hundred good dreams. No fist bumps, or elbow taps, a full embrace to go along with each name—
Alea, Moondog, Malachi, Stitch, Semele—
Another explosion of joy as Charity entered. Then Thomas. Then a full song. No one started the song. It just started, and it sounded like the Band:
Turning over rock and stone,
Out here we know we’re not alone,
We seek we find,
Out here remind,
That the sometimes are still worth looking for
Was this the Band? Guitars, banjos, tom-toms adorned the walls. Monitors, too. Powerful broadcast equipment attended by an older couple—maybe their grandparents’ age.
“Drinks!” Rumblefish said. “We must drink. How serious do you like them?”
“I’m a serious man,” Thomas said.
They were introduced to Stitch—messy-haired, broad-shouldered. Her patchwork coat interlocked like pieces from a thousand ragged tapestries, eyes blazing with confidence.
“C’mere,” she said, voice like a teacher. “Allow me to show you our selection of wild juices, tonics, and teas, such as this chocolate maté, which will blow your goddamn mind, rum optional—”
They were given drinks. Little Punch for Griff and Big Punch for Thomas and tea for Charity and before he could give thanks, another hand on his arm—no shyness about touching—a warm hand guiding him away. A guy his age, Black, with a leather vest, torn jeans. Single earring shaped like a UFO.
“Malachi,” he said. “I took your drone down. I’m on security.”
He flashed Griff a black fabric wristband.
“I’m Griff. Nice shot on the drone. What did you use? EMP?”
“Naw,” Malachi said. “Not this time. Went with a rifle mount. Drone defense.”
“You run on 1575?”
“You know it,” Malachi said. He smiled. “You could be helpful.”
“Yeah?”
“You should talk to Marilyn and the Mole,” Malachi said, pointing to the older couple. “They help run the crews and do sound for the shows.”
“For the Band?” Griff said.
“You did come for the music, then,” Malachi said.