by Roxie Noir
She’d thought she might be having heart palpitations, and prayed that he hadn’t noticed how sweaty her palms were on the steering wheel. Inside, she was practically shaking with nerves, remembering the look in his gold-brown eyes.
I don’t even know whether to be pleased or angry, she thought. I finally find the one super-hot guy in town, and it’s when I’ve only got three or four more days here.
The truck jolted over a pothole as she picked up speed, and she made an involuntary oof noise, hitting the brakes.
“So much for driving like a local,” she muttered to herself.
She had her GPS mounted to the dashboard, but it wasn’t much to look at: just one line stretching off into the desert with a red dot at the far end, the site where she was supposed to be testing dirt mercury levels after Quarcom had sunk a few preliminary holes.
Not for the first time, she felt bad about her job. It wasn’t the work itself that she disliked — far from it. She’d always been a big dork who liked getting dirty and playing in the mud, so hiking for miles to collect dirt and rock suited her pretty well. Plus, she actually liked the lab work, the puzzle of figuring out how to get the information that she wanted from what she had, and then trying to put it all together into a bigger picture.
It was Quarcom she wasn’t quite sure about. She told herself that someone was going to do her job, whether it was her or not, and that she was actually helping the world by making sure that Quarcom didn’t do too much harm to the environment.
The thing was, it still felt like a lot of harm sometimes. On her last job, in Canada, she’d watched as they razed mountaintops and flooded a river in the far north, all to mine toxic metals so that people the world over could have cell phones. Sure, someone was going to do her job, but did it have to be her?
She went over another bump in the road, lurching around, and the seatbelt across her chest dug in uncomfortably. Jules made a face and tried to rearrange the thing so that it didn’t dig quite so much into her boobs, but she knew a losing battle when she saw one. It didn’t help that the truck had clearly been made with someone about eight inches taller than her in mind, not to mention that the truck’s ideal owner didn’t have breasts.
I should have taken the USGS job, she thought, and not for the first time. After college, she’d figuratively hit gold and gotten two job offers — especially amazing, since most of the other kids she knew were moving back in with their parents and working at fast food joints, utterly unable to find any kind of work in their fields.
The United States Geological Survey job had sounded interesting, and it could have led to more research and fieldwork, maybe even influencing environmental policy.
The job with Quarcom had sounded interesting, too, despite her reservations.
It had also paid fifty percent more than the USGS job.
She’d taken a night to think it over, staying in her parents’ little house in the mountains of West Virginia, a couple of hours from Morgantown, where she’d gone to school.
That night, after dinner there’d been a knock on the door, and her mom had answered it as her dad washed the dishes.
“Hi, Mrs. McCade,” said a vaguely familiar voice. Jules had gotten up from the kitchen table and stepped to one side to get a look at the guy at the door.
“Do you have ten dollars I could borrow?” he asked with a slight lisp.
Jules gasped when she saw who it was: Bobby Hale. They’d gone to high school together. She’d been wildly uncool, but he’d been the quarterback of the football team, dated the head cheerleader, the whole nine yards.
Now, he was skinny, his hair dull, his eyes sunken in. He was missing at least half of his teeth, and the remaining ones were turning gray in his mouth.
“Bobby, you know I don’t truck with that,” Jules’s mom said, her voice stern.
“Please, Mrs. McCade, they turned the electricity off again so we ain’t got no way to cook...” he said, his voice trailing off.
“I’m sorry, Bobby,” her mother said firmly.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Bobby muttered, and then turned and walked away.
When her mom turned, Jules could see the tears just starting in her eyes.
“Was that Bobby Hale?” Jules whispered.
Her mom just nodded.
“There was an accident in the mine and he hurt his back pretty good, so he can’t work no more. Collects disability, and the doctors put him on pain pills. He found his own way to meth.”
Jules covered her mouth with her hand, and her mother fixed her with a steely look.
“There but for the grace of God goes you,” she said, her mouth a hard line. “If your father had ever gotten hurt like that, we’d be right where Bobby is, and don’t you forget it.”
The next morning, Jules had accepted the job with Quarcom. She put nearly half of every paycheck into a savings account, and the rest went to food, rent, and her student loans.
In the truck, Jules could see the red dot coming up on her GPS, even though there was still nothing that she could see out the windshield, no matter how hard she squinted.
Could be wrong, she thought. I used latitude and longitude, though. Ought to be something out here.
Suddenly, almost out of nowhere, there was a tent and a table. Jules drove up next to it and stopped the truck, just looking at it.
As the dust cleared, she could just make out a brown, sluggish river in the distance. The river was downhill from where she was, and sharp, jagged steppes marked the distance between where she parked and the ugly water.
Wait, she thought. Is this really the mine site?
If this is the mine site, the tailings are going straight into that river, she thought, digging again through her glove box for a map.
The Elk River, she read. Are there really elk out here?
It didn’t seem likely, but she had other things to worry about.
I’m in the wrong place, she thought. This can’t be it.
With a sigh, she grabbed the big canvas bag from the space behind her driver’s seat and hauled it to the table under the tent, then grabbed a couple of big, sturdy rocks to hold down the corners of the map that she spread out.
She’d been right: the mine wasn’t going to be where she was standing.
It was going to be on the mesa over to her right, maybe a half mile away.
Technically, the mine was going to destroy the mesa. Jules frowned, looking over the documentation, but her eyes weren’t deceiving her.
According to what was in front of her, mountaintop removal mining had been performed successfully on a mesa somewhere in the Australian Outback. Afterward, the mesa had been half as big as its initial size, and it looked more like a pile of rubble than a geological feature.
Jules’s heart sank.
This is awful, she thought. I can’t do this. It’ll destroy the mesa, and maybe worse, everything they dig up is going straight into that river.
For a moment, she wondered how they had even gotten this far, but she didn’t have to wonder for long. Quarcom was a billion-dollar company, and they had lobbyists all over both Washington, D.C. and the Utah state house in Salt Lake City.
Looking at it from that angle, Jules was a little surprised that they hadn’t razed an entire mesa before.
Don’t worry, she thought. There’s no way that they’ll get to go through with this. You’ll run the tests, and point out that this is anything but legal, and they’ll have to mine somewhere else.
Hopefully somewhere that won’t essentially destroy an entire area.
She didn’t have high hopes about that part of it, though, and even as she tried to make herself feel better, she couldn’t help but worry.
In particular, one face kept on coming back to mind.
Seth.
Jules closed her eyes and tried to get him out of her brain — she was trying to focus on large-sale environmental destruction, after all — but it wasn’t much use.
If they were going to essentially des
troy the river and the mesa in Obsidian, what might they do to the people? What was going to happen to the wild, rugged desert where they lived?
She saw his gold eyes again, his unkempt hair splashing around his face as he’d leaned back in the seat of her pickup truck as she’d tried not to stare. There had been a spot of sweat, slowly spreading down from the neck of his shirt, and she’d felt helpless to not watch it as it stuck to him, the ripples of his soft t-shirt barely hiding the hard, sculpted physique below.
For fuck’s sake, he’d even had dimples, and something about the way he looked at her made Jules want to lick the sweat off of his neck, feel his muscles beneath her hands...
DO YOUR JOB, she thought furiously at herself, stuffing the map back into her bag and getting out a small shovel and plastic ziploc bags for samples. Then she slung the bag over her shoulder, pushed her large hat firmly onto her head, and set out for the terraces between herself and the river.
Chapter Three
Seth
It was just past twilight when Brad dropped Seth off at the big ranch house. Seth waved as Brad drove away, his lights shining onto the road, then fading into the distance. Overhead, the stars were just starting to come out, the rest of the sky turning from indigo to black.
Along the horizon, the mountains and mesas of southern Utah were black, hulking shapes. The biggest was Copper Mesa, not far beyond the ranch house where Seth had grown up and still lived. In theory, it belonged to him and his brothers, since his great-great-great-great grandfather had come west from Missouri and claimed the land as his own. In 1871, there hadn’t been much more required.
That hadn’t stopped rumors from spreading, particularly when Hiram Admas — the great-great-great-great-grandfather in question — had gotten an excellent harvest in his first year, at a time when crops were failing all over Southern Utah. The locals had whispered that it was a deal with the devil or worse.
One woman had even claimed that she’d witnessed Hiram turn into an eagle and fly away. It was ridiculous, obviously, but the people of Obsidian hadn’t stopped whispering about the Admas family since.
Seth knew he should probably just move. Just about anywhere else would have better job prospects, not to mention dating prospects, and he could start over fresh, somewhere that no one looked at him funny.
Maybe not dating prospects, he thought, grinning in the dark, thinking of a certain red-haired geologist. In his pocket, he ran his fingers over the piece of paper with her phone number on it. He couldn’t wait to call it and talk to her again, not to mention see her again.
At last, he walked up to the front door and pushed it open, his steps creaking over the old wood. The house wasn’t in the best of repair — in fact, it practically bled money — but it was his home, and every time he walked in, he felt a little better.
“That you?” called a voice from the dining room.
“I’m a burglar,” called back Seth. “Give me all your stuff.”
“Take it,” his brother called back. “If you can lift our TV outta here, it’s yours.”
Seth smiled, flicking on light switches as he walked down the hall and to the dining room where his youngest brother sat, schoolwork spread everywhere.
“How’s the mystery government project going?” Zach asked, writing something down on a sheet of paper, then leaning back and looking at his older brother.
“It’s moving along,” said Seth. “We got the frozen alien bodies today, so we’re locking those in the bunker tomorrow.”
Zach snorted, rubbing his eyes.
“What is it again, really?”
“Some kind of electrical bunker for the hydro equipment they’re putting in across the Elk,” Seth answered.
“I like the aliens answer,” said Zach.
“You got class tonight?” Seth asked.
Zach was in his second semester at Southern Utah Community College, two hours away in Blanding, Utah, studying pre-engineering.
“Nope, tomorrow night,” he said, lifting his arms over his head and stretching. “Tonight I gotta finish these problem sets, then I’m up early tomorrow to open the store.”
Zach ran the bakery section of Obsidian’s single, tiny grocery store. He had to be there by five every morning, and between that, homework, and classes, Seth was amazed that his little brother ever slept.
Of course, once he got his degree and was making triple was Seth made, he’d be laughing all the way to the bank, but he had at least a year of community college left before he could even transfer out to a four-year college.
Seth knew he’d miss his little brother when he left. Their corner of Utah didn’t have any four-year colleges, so he’d have to move away from home, though if Zach was worried about being the only twenty seven year old in the junior class, he didn’t say anything.
“Is there anything for dinner?” asked Seth, his stomach rumbling. He’d eaten his lunch, two peanut butter sandwiches, an apple, and a bag of chips, hours and hours ago.
“That meatloaf I made last night,” said Zach. “And I think there’s peas in the freezer, though you gotta check.”
Then he looked at his brother’s face closely for a long moment.
“What are you so happy about?” Zach asked, his eyes narrowing.
Seth shrugged, but he couldn’t help grinning.
“You get a raise?”
“Nope.”
“Somebody bring donuts into work today?”
“Nope.”
Zach just shook his head.
“Well, shit, man, I’m out of guesses — wait, did you meet a girl?”
Seth couldn’t help his pleased smile.
“Where?” asked Zach. “Is she new? Is she eighty?”
“Yes and no,” said Seth. “She gave me a ride to work today, and she’s a geologist working on a mining project out in the desert.”
Then he squeezed his eyes shut, making a face.
“The truck broke down again, by the way,” he said.
“Fuck,” muttered Zach. “If you need the car, I can probably walk to work tomorrow, but I gotta use it to get to school.”
“Brad said he’d drive me,” Seth said.
“So, this girl got a name?”
“Juliana,” Seth said. Her name felt like honey on his lips, sweet and viscous. “Jules for short.”
“She sounds cute.”
“She is. I got her number and said I’d show her all the good times that Obsidian has to offer.”
Zach laughed at that.
“All two of them?” he asked.
“I’ll work with what we’ve got,” Seth said. “Not that I have a choice.”
He walked into the kitchen and pulled the meatloaf from the fridge, then got the peas out of the freezer.
“You want some?” he called to Zach in the next room.
“I’ll have some later, I gotta finish this,” Zach called back.
Seth loaded meatloaf and peas onto a plate and put the whole thing into the ancient microwave. It was so old that it had a dial on it instead of buttons, and he cranked it to four minutes. Even that probably wasn’t going to be long enough, but he was always a little nervous that the thing was going to catch fire.
As the microwave hummed, Seth let his mind wander. It wandered mostly back to Jules, and he spent the minutes thinking about undoing the buttons on her shirt one by one, revealing the pale, freckled skin below, her curves soft in his hands. She looked like she’d taste of vanilla and cinnamon, and probably make little sighing noises when he kissed her neck...
The microwave beeped and Seth pulled his plate out, sticking his fingers into the middle of the pile of green peas. Still cold. He put the plate back in and cranked the dial again.
Then he had a different thought about Jules: she’d said she was in town to work on a mining project, but Seth didn’t know about any mining project that was going on. In a town the size of Obsidian, word tended to get out if someone painted their house a new shade of white, so it was pretty strange
that he hadn’t heard a thing about something big like that.
Unless it’s like Tinville, he thought, and then his stomach dropped.
Tinville had been a couple of hours away, in south central Utah, and until some company called Quarcom had rolled in, it had pretty much been just like Obsidian. That was, at least according to the guy that Seth worked with who’d moved to Obsidian after the mine took over Tinville.
Quarcom had opened an enormous mine there — a mountaintop removal strip mine. Before it, Tinville had been remote but beautiful, tucked in between sets of jagged red mountains, the kind of unearthly beauty that didn’t even look real. After the mine, the river had been poisoned, the air choked with dust, and the mountains around the town were ugly and pitted. Most of the townspeople either worked for the mine or had to move away.
Worst, his coworker had said, no one had known about the mine until about a week before it opened. Quarcom found every loophole it could in the environmental regulations. When the people protested that they hadn’t been informed of anything, a very smug man in a suit had told them that there had been an announcement in the classified section of the Salt Lake Tribune, which was technically the biggest media outlet in the area. It didn’t matter that no one in town got the paper because Salt Lake City was a six-hour drive away.
The microwave beeped again, and this time when Seth stuck his finger into the peas, he nearly burned himself and pulled his hand away, sucking air in through his teeth. Then he sat at the table in the kitchen, the uncomfortable, rickety chair digging into his back, and ate his dinner while he worried about a mine coming to Obsidian.
After he washed his plate and fork, something occurred to him, and he walked into the dining room where Zach’s schoolwork was spread out, his head bent over it studiously. Seth felt bad for interrupting, but did it anyway.
“When was the last time you checked the mail?” Seth asked.
Zach blinked a couple of times, then looked sheepish.