Humans are stubborn, I guess.
“When you fall in love with a place, you can't leave it. And nothing, not a storm, or a war, or catastrophe is going to change your mind. Your home is your home.”
Yeah, I say, until it melts you.
I notice as we get closer to the mountain that the clouds are almost glowing above and around the volcano. “What is that?”
“The clouds are lit by the fires in the crater. And the clouds are almost always looming above. The top of the mountain is normally covered in snow, but . . . ” he squints, “well, that's odd. There doesn't appear to be much snow.”
As we get nearer and nearer, I realize just how tall and enormous this mountain really is. Mr. Green sees my eyes widening, “They once said that this mountain was unclimbable. It's nearly six-thousand meters high.”
And as we approach the small house, more of a collection of boards and pieces of corrugated tin, I notice the emptiness of this area. It's quiet and almost baren. This place, the whole mountain and volcano and all of it, it could be a giant cemetery. Indeed, it probably is.
We come to a stop and Mr. Green radios over to the other Hummer , “Let's do the same thing we did at Seniorita Alonzo's house. That seemed to produce results.”
We all get out of the vehicles, steeping down and walking towards the shabby grey house. It looks like, where the wooden boards are, they've painted and painted and painted. And the planks are so warped and bent that I think the wood itself rotted away long ago. All that's probably keeping this thing from collapse is the many layers of enduring paint.
There is an emptiness to all of this that I can almost taste. A palpable sorrow that is sewn into every blade of waving grass. The wind is coming from impossible directions hitting us from more than one angle. And I hear a dog barking somewhere off in the distance as if it's hungry.
The door to the house shudders as the warm wind races by our faces, and a short, hunched man hobbles out towards us, raising his free arm. An old cane supports his stagger. The guy has a full head of white hair, and his face is more wrinkled than one of those pug dogs.
His thick white eyebrows are like walls to hide dark brown eyes that look defeated even as he tries to smile and be polite. I'm no doctor, but I know he's hurting. I want to give the guy some Tylenol 3 just to make me feel better.
“Hola, comó esta usted?” Mr. Green says. “Señior Machado. Soy Señior Green, y estamos aqui para hablar sobre su hijo. Estamos con el World Peace Brigade .”
Hello, how are you? Mr. Machado. I'm Mr. Green, and we're here to speak with you about your son. We're with the World Peace Brigade .
“Hector me dicho que tu venias,” Señior Machado grinded out between coughs. “Pero, no es lo que tu piensas.”
Hector told me you were coming. But, it's not what you think.
Mr. Green briefly looked over to us, his face uncomprehending. “No entiendo . . . ”
“Ne he perdido mi hijo,” Señior Machado said softly, his voice scratchy and rough.
Mr. Green turns to us, “He says he didn't lose his son.”
But Hector said . . .
Señior Machado continued, “El ha encontrado algo muy curioso. Pero, no puedo confiar en nadie.”
“Says his son found something very curious, but he couldn't trust anyone else,” Mr. Green translates.
Tell him to show us.
Mr. Green nods, turning to Señior Machado, “Enseña nos, por favor.”
“Mi hijo los llevara.”
My son will take you.
I can say, now, that up until that point, I've never seen anything that bothered me quite like what we were about to see.
69
Cotopaxi Mountain, Ecuador.
7 minutes later . . .
A young boy, Carlos, Señior Machado's youngest son, is pointing us in the direction of the strange place that he found while playing around the side of the mountain. Señior Machado assured us that he never contacted the policia because he was worried about what they might say about him and his family.
Their house, and the property they live on, might not be legally theirs. And they didn't want to find themselves on the street begging for money. Before they lost their livestock, they were doing quite well, but the animals started disappearing a few months back. He no longer had the money coming in from the markets in Latacunga, and Hector had been sending food and money to them until this mess gets sorted out.
We make our way over and around large bumpy knots in the ground. Without the Hummers , this would only be possible on foot. And as dark as it is, there's no way we'd ever find this place without a guide.
After a couple minutes of hemorrhoid battering we find ourselves at a thick wall of impassable trees. We stop the vehicle and Carlos jumps out about as quick as we can get the door open.
He's having the time of his life.
We're hunting the end of humanity.
Ms. Josephine has been playing with him the whole time we've been driving, and as he gets out he reaches for her hand. “Venga, venga!”
“Okay, sweetie,” she says as she climbs down.
We follow Carlos tugging on Ms. Josephine's hand, leading us into the trees. We all have super bright flash lights, and the darkness is instantly illuminated to look like shades of gray. This is eerily familiar to when I was in the attic of the haunted house in Flower Mound.
This area is oddly different than the surrounding environment. These trees are thicker, and taller. The bushes and brush around here seem to sponge up all the excess light that our Hummer's halogen flood lights were providing.
The deeper we went, I started to get those creepy-crawly feelings again. There wasn't a sound. No birds. No frogs. No crickets or other insects. This place was devoid of life other than the dense foliage. The farther we went, the more surreal it all became.
We continued, trailing behind Carlos and Ms. Josephine for another couple of minutes. I don't know how far we were, maybe half a mile, maybe less, but all of the sudden there was a clearing in the trees. And then I got this feeling like I'd been here before. Like I've seen all this.
The thick trees.
The unnatural silence and solitude.
This is hauntingly similar to the place where I come to drown myself when I'm crossing over to the Land of Sorrows. The same grass. The same pine smell. I don't even think they have pine trees in Ecuador. But I can smell it, clear as if I'm sniffing one of Ricky's scented car deodorizers.
Ms. Josephine, I say delicately. I think I've been here before.
But she doesn't answer. She and Carlos have stopped at the edge of some invisible boundary.
“Mira, mira!” Carlos says excitedly.
We all make our way to their sides, the whitish-blue sabres of our flashlights crossing back and forth. And then I see what Carlos is talking about.
This is my lake.
Only . . . it's not.
It is a place to cross over.
Only . . . we're not supposed to be here.
None of us speak. Not a single word. This is a mistake. This can't really be what it looks like. This is a syntax error. An illegal function of this place. A line of code that needs to be rewritten on God's computer.
“What in the hell is this?” Mr. Green says as he squints, visibly shaken. And this is a guy that's seen more than his share of horror. His hands drop down to his holster and I hear several clicks as he and the rest of our minders prepare for something violent.
70
Cotopaxi Mountain, Ecuador.
Nighttime . . .
Where the water that would drown me should be, there's cracked and dry dirt, black soil, and bits of ash. Right at the place where I would be submerged in dark warm water, there is a decomposing cow, his ribs just starting to show through his torn and dehydrated body.
Where I would be swimming around looking for light, there are bodies. Everywhere bodies.
Half eaten.
Half neglected.
Strangely ignor
ed.
There are birds and rats and sheep and goats. There are horses and donkeys and dogs. This place is like the worst kind of pet cemetery you can imagine, times three.
All of the bodies have been put here after something extreme. But they all chose to come here. I don't know why I know this, but I do. This is a dry lake full of death and dismembered bodies. And nothing, I mean absolutely nothing, is alive.
There isn't a bug or a rat or a snake to be seen. No fastidious ants carrying off pieces of flesh ten times their body weight. No flies laying their larve. No worms slinking slimely around on their bellies.
Here, the chain of evolution is broken. Or at least, on hold.
Whatever killed these animals, it found some way of marking this place. In the same way that my tattoos ward off evil when I'm in Deadside, some invisible mark has been made warding off life. We're the only living entities around. And I'm not so sure how long that's going to last.
“What is this?” Ricky says, slowly, his words thick as oil, floating just in front of us.
None of us, not a one, wants to cross the boundary at the edge of the dry pond. We just stand there, some of us with our mouths hanging open. Others nervously unbuttoning the catch on their holsters . . . as if bullets would help anything.
Little Carlos is gazing into the body farm as if it's just some interesting rock formation. As if all of this could be natural. One of those things he'll understand when he's older, wiser.
Ms. Josephine, she's on the verge of tears, I think. See, she experiences places like this differently than the rest of us. With her, the experience is much more whole. More colorful. Every smell is amplified. Every flavor enhanced. Vivid cubed.
This is not Death Lite. No, this is a double-steroid-espresso shot of the macabre.
This slowly decaying dry bed of death, it's warm. Too warm.
Does anyone feel that? I ask.
“Es muy caliente!” Little Carlos says gleefully.
Ms. Josephine holds the boy close to her side, keeping him from accidentally crossing the barrier that we all feel. “Where are all da carrion eaters?”
Ricky bends down, staring at the bright white circle his flashlight illuminates. “That's an interesting question. There's nothing. Where are all the bugs? There should be an entire ecosystem surviving off of these corpses. Even in the dirt . . . nothing.”
I have this feeling we need to leave this place, quickly. There's something else around here, and it isn't us. I don't know exactly where it's hiding, or when it's coming back. But the answers are somewhere between nearby and soon .
“Mr. Green,” I say very clearly. “I would like you to take everyone back to the vehicles. They need to get checked-in to whatever hotel we'll be staying at, and they need to stay there until first light.”
I hear the voices of protest, but I continue, “ . . . I will need either you or Juan to stay here with me, tonight. I'll need the night-thermal goggles, and a sufficient supply of suitable weaponry.”
Mr. Green snaps some orders to Juan, and they begin gathering everyone. He turns to me, “Juan will stay with you. I have to stay with Mr. Chamberlain's son.” Then he raises his voice, “Ricky, Ms. Josephine, let's get this young lad out of here before we end up a part of this museum of death.”
Ricky doesn't understand, “Dude, Jack, I'll stay with you on this—”
No, Ricky. I have to do this one on my own. Besides, probably nothing is going to happen. I just need time to walk around this place. Feel it out. It's a Deadside thing.
I put my hand on his shoulder as he starts to argue, but he quickly realizes the futility. “Fine, dude. But we're out here first thing in the morning. And we'll be monitoring you all night.”
Fair enough.
Ms. Josephine comes up to me with Little Carlos playing around her legs, “You know what your up against, child. You need to listen to dis place. Let it tell you a story. It's on a different frequency dan I 'ear. Maybe you can see da silence dat I'm feelin'. What 'appened 'ere is only da beginnin' of somethin'. You be real careful dat you ain't da next step.”
I hug her and whisper to her, “They're coming back . . . you don't have much time.”
She nods, looking down at Little Carlos. “Alright, let's go back and get some dinner.”
“Este lugar,” Juan says in the background, “ . . . esta maldecido.”
This place is cursed.
23 seconds later . . .
And with that they fade into the darkness from where we came. I'm alone now, completely alone. So I just sit down on the edge of the place where I die. I'm waiting for the heat to overwhelm me.
It's hot to the touch, the loose soil. And as yucky as this sounds, I kind of enjoy the tranquility of this dying place. There are no voices. No cars or trucks or horns or lights or yelling people, or any of the things that disappear into the background of our minds each and every day of our lives. None of the things that our brains have to filter out and ignore.
No . . . here, everything is being assimilated. Each and every tiny nuance is being fed into the system and interpreted by the many millions of sensors that evolution has endowed us with after millions of years of struggle and mutation. All of those fateful accidents that left us a bit more capable in our environments.
Every small piece of sensitivity or memory or feeling that we acquired while running from animals that wanted to eat us. With every child there is a new hope. A better version of you.
Faster, stronger, quicker.
Right now, I am in a transient evolutionary spot. Maybe I have evolved past the old me. But then, maybe I lost whatever gifts I originally possessed. Am I greater than human, or held back because of my inhumanity? Am I a more efficient machine after my memory was erased and my emotional slate cleaned? Or, perhaps, did I loose the perfect combination of substance and being when the lights went out?
It's all for this. Everything comes to this place, at this moment. So I stand on the edge of this lifeless decomposing place of my worst nightmares and I wait for something . . . anything to push me just one fraction of an inch. Because then, there's no turning back. It's over, you see. No matter what happens, now, I'll forever be changed by what follows.
Even if what follows is silence.
This place is just another one of my many tattoos. It's now burnt into my soul as deep as any scar or bit of ink-filled skin. When I cross to the Land of Sorrows, this is where I'll have to cross. From now on, I'll drown in the choked death of this hot, stagnant place.
I feel something trying to push me forward, into the dead pool. It could be the wind, or my shifting balance . . . but it's definitely something.
As I lean forward, half holding my breath for safety, I hear Juan, “No cruces, Yack. No cruces.”
Don't cross, Jack. Don't cross.
What he doesn't seem to notices is, I already have.
71
Pool of the Dead, Cotopaxi Mountain.
A forever second later . . .
“I've already crossed, Juan.”
I look back and notice he's got two duffel bags and one of those MP-5 sub-machine guns strapped to his shoulder. 30 rounds, 3 seconds. I hope that will be fast enough.
Esta bien, Juan, I tell him. Let me look around. Cover me.
He nods, setting the bags down and pulling out a pair of goggles for himself. I've got my own set, stuck in my left eye. For a moment I feel like throwing-up, this nausea sweeping over me, but then it's gone and I can see .
My left eye—my death-vision—it sees the glow again. This place is anything but dead. It's alive with purple and violet and green color, as if tons of glow-sticks have been broken and poured inside the cadavers of each and every dead animal.
I walk closer to this decomposing cow and I notice some bright green spots near the throat, and I kneel down. I see what looks like teeth marks. These bites are small, maybe the size of a child, maybe smaller, though. And different.
I can't tell what made these marks.
Maybe a biologist could tell you. But not me.
This all fits together, I just don't know how. I'm missing something. A key to the cipher. A code breaker. I just need one bit to put all the ones and zeroes in order so that they make sense.
I wish I was smarter. I've seen hundreds of hours of Discovery Channel . Shouldn't that be enough?
Animal Planet, National Geographic, Nova .
Yes.
Yes.
And yes.
I see another glowing spot on the inside, upper part of the cows leg. And then another, and another. Something fed off of these animals in the way that somebody was feeding off of the children.
Different mouths to feed, but everybody's thirsty.
I go to a smaller animal—a goat, I think. Same thing, bite marks on the insides of the legs, as well as some nibbles near the throat. The children didn't have bruising on their necks. Only the inner arms and legs. As I inspect each animal I whisper my findings into my small Motorola radio. I know that everyone is listening, pondering, imagining.
But they're quiet, letting me do what I do.
I'm seeing the Deadside echoes of what I think is the evidence of the escaped Evils. These are my footprints . But why right here? Why in this place on the side of a mountain that will surely erupt and cover it in molten lava and super-heated ash, killing and burying everything in a fiery instant?
This place, as I go from animal to animal, I get the feeling this isn't so much a cemetery as it is a pantry. Ricky and I, at the loft, we have a pantry that's full of cookies and Doritos and Campbell's Thick and Chunky soups. Maybe this place is like our pantry? This might just be the place where they leave their snacks for later.
We keep our pantry door closed to keep out the rodents and bugs.
They mark their pantry with invisible Evil that the bugs and birds and curious living creatures will find impenetrable. I hate to go all nerd and use the term force-field , but I can't think of any better a description.
Animal after animal, body after body, I see the same marks. Until I find a dog . . . and on the dog there's no neck wound. This is what Ricky would call an anomaly. I need to pay attention to my location.
See Jack Hunt (See Jack Die) Page 28