The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “Where is Marian Mursult?” she asked again, shouting, but didn’t wait for their answers. She went down the hallway toward the back rooms, the bedroom, Nestor’s bedroom where she had slipped from her clothes and slept so many nights. Wooden gun racks, rifles and machine guns. “Fuck me,” said Moss, recognizing the German antiques, the stock of the Eagle’s Nest. “Damn, no, no . . .” Circling back to the living room, she checked the two and found them still facedown on the carpet. She found the basement door just off the kitchen and climbed downstairs, aware Miss Ashleigh wasn’t cuffed, aware the woman could fetch any one of those Nazi guns and ambush her while she was down here or as she came back upstairs.

  “Marian?” Moss called out. “Marian, I’m a police officer. Are you down here? Let me know if you’re down here. Say something, please.”

  A dank basement, the stink of bleach. A metal weight-bearing column near a central floor drain. Browned rags and bloodstains on the concrete floor, stains on the cinder-block walls. There were gags, restraints. Moss pictured the girl tied to the metal column, hands bound behind her back. Brown stains in the utility sink doused with bleach. Marian had been tied up here, brutalized . . .

  Rumbling across the ceiling. Moss heard them run, Ashleigh and the man, Harrier. Fuck, she thought, pointing her gun at the ceiling, contemplating shooting up through the floorboards, maybe hitting the bottoms of their feet or passing up through their groins for a kill shot, but she wasn’t justified. She lowered the gun toward the stairs to shoot if she saw their legs descending but heard the slap of the side screen door and knew they’d sprinted from the house. She took a breath, knowing she was making mistakes. She climbed the stairs to the kitchen, alert—but there was no one.

  Moss followed outside, where the barn floodlight blazed the darkness white. Miss Ashleigh and Harrier must have run this way, she thought, must have tripped the light. Maybe they’d gone into the barn or to the far side of the Winnebago. The Winnebago looked like it was a fixture of this place, weeds grown up around it. As Moss crossed the lawn, the Winnebago’s door opened and a man stepped outside—blue jeans and old combat boots, an olive-drab shirt unbuttoned, exposing his chest. A huge man with tawny hair cut into a ratty mullet. Cobb, she realized—twenty years younger than when she had first seen the man, when she had grappled with him in the orchard and slit his throat. Charles Cobb, she was sure of it. He held a tallboy beer and took massive swigs, looking out over the fields—he hadn’t seen her, didn’t know she was here, she realized, not yet. Wherever Miss Ashleigh and her man had run off to, it wasn’t to the Winnebago.

  “Federal agent,” Moss said, sighting her weapon to the center of Cobb’s mass, thinking, If he moves, I can kill this fucker twice. “Get down on the ground. On your fucking knees. Now. Now.”

  Cobb flinched at her voice—she’d surprised him. He set his beer can on the step of the Winnebago and raised his hands in surrender but didn’t go to his knees. This man has walked on an alien world, she thought. This man has seen his friends flayed and spread in the air. Sirens on 151, Moss noticed, distant blue lights. Brock must have called the Buckhannon PD, figured she would come here alone.

  “Do you have a warrant to be here, Officer?” asked Cobb, his voice measured if not calm. His voice unnerved her, and she felt the moment slipping from her, an intuition that she wasn’t in control.

  “On your knees,” said Moss. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  “You’re a cripple,” he said. The barn light timed out. Pitch-black. Cobb ran—she heard him, taking off around the far side of the Winnebago. She heard him crashing through the field beyond and knew there was no way she could chase him down, no way she could outrun him through the tall grass. Everyone was escaping—she felt like they were melting from her.

  The dark was pierced by the firelight of muzzle flashes, automatic-weapon fire. Bullets zipped overhead and chewed into the mud several feet behind her. The darkness had saved her; whoever was shooting couldn’t see her, didn’t know where she was, and she dropped to the grass, a second volley whining past. She saw the muzzle flash from the Winnebago window, trained her weapon on the flash. She took a shot. A second shot. A third.

  Sirens pulled in to the driveway, blue waves against the barn and Winnebago, a half dozen vehicles at least, more arriving. Another round of fire chewed into the cars, shattered windshields.

  “Shannon?” she heard—Nestor exiting one of the cars. She turned her gun on him, aimed at his chest, an easy shot from this distance, felt herself apply pressure to the trigger.

  “It’s me,” he said. He knelt behind the open driver’s-side door of his car, an FBI vest, his sidearm pulled.

  Moss’s vision had tunneled, focused on his gun. This is his house. This will be his house.

  “Shannon, it’s me—it’s Nestor. Lower your weapon, please.”

  The world rushed to her. He was still just a young man, still FBI. “One person, on foot through those fields,” she said. “Two more at large, might still be on the premises. One in handcuffs. The shooter’s in the Winnebago.”

  Racket of automatic fire. Return fire from the police—they filled the Winnebago with hundreds of rounds. Nestor emptied his clip, but another volley of fire roared from the Winnebago. Bullets shattered his windshield and door, pumped into Nestor’s chest. He spun to the grass, yelling. Moss emptied her gun at the Winnebago. Reloaded. Shot again. Someone shouted—the gunman inside the Winnebago was hit. Nestor was alive. He made it back to his knees, the sleeve of his shirt ripped and soiled with blood.

  “Vest,” said Nestor. “I’m all right. I’ve got a vest—”

  Relief, seeing Nestor safe. Other officers, men in uniform, fanned out across the lawn—a squad from Buckhannon, along with state police. Nestor advanced on the Winnebago, gun in his left hand, his right arm hanging. Moss followed. Nestor crept up alongside, yanked open the door. Moss saw blood. She climbed the step into the Winnebago. Blood spattered the floor, the kitchenette. Nestor followed inside, moving past the kitchenette to the sleeping cabin. The side of the Winnebago had been perforated with bullets, and light from the barn streamed in through the holes. The gunman had collapsed onto the foam bed, shirtless, bloody. A tattoo on his chest, a golden eagle, wings outspread. Jared Bietak, she realized. Blood gurgled from the man’s mouth and sucked from the wounds in his chest as he tried to breathe.

  “Apply pressure,” said Moss. She found a blanket and pressed it to the man’s chest, but she knew he would die. The man coughed out a gulp of blood. Too slippery—she wiped the blood off Bietak’s chest with the blanket and tried to reapply pressure but felt his body go still.

  “We need to check the barn,” said Moss, giving up on him. “Marian’s here, or was here.”

  The barn doors were padlocked and chained. One of the state officers pulled bolt cutters from his trunk, snapped the chain, slid open the doors. Enough light from the floodlights to see a lemon-yellow Ryder truck—rusted out years from now, abandoned in the field, the turning point on our walks together. Nestor followed into the barn, said, “What is all this?” Someone found the lights, revealing a series of tubes that ran the length of the rafters, illuminating stainless-steel drums and plastic barrels, glass equipment, flasks and beakers. The place looked like a methamphetamine lab.

  “Everybody out,” said Nestor. “Move.”

  “No, I need bolt cutters,” said Moss.

  She cut the lock on the Ryder’s rear doors, swung them open, and a wave of rot rolled over her. She fought her rising vomit but heard a county cop retch. A heap of bodies had wasted away in the back of the Ryder truck, their eyes covered in weeping sores, their skin burned—their flesh raw and red where it was still flesh, their mouths nearly sealed shut by blisters and screaming red wounds.

  “Oh, God,” said Moss. “My God, my God—”

  She saw the girl. Moss started to climb into the truck, but Nestor grabbed her shoulders, held her back.

  “Get off me,” she said.
/>   “Chemicals,” said Nestor. “You can’t breathe this.”

  The girl was in the heap. Her head was so thoroughly burned that she had lost all but a few clumps of her raven hair. Her teeth were exposed through gashes in her cheeks. Only a few white patches of her body had the soft smoothness of a young girl’s body, the rest wrinkled and ridged with scar tissue and wounds, covered in so many maggots it looked as if someone had dumped rice over her. Marian. Marian. Marian.

  “Find a blanket,” Moss cried to Nestor. “We need an ambulance, please. Please call an ambulance.”

  “This place is a gas chamber,” said Nestor. “Get outside.”

  She buried her head into his chest and wept and let him lead her from the barn. The lawn was alive with siren light, the hectic business of police flooding the scene, but a hush had descended over the rumors of what was inside.

  “The dead outnumber the living,” Nestor said. “My father used to say. But my father told me about the new bodies we all receive at the end of days, bodies robed in light. What a glorious thought, to be reborn in God. The dead will receive new bodies.”

  Moss separated from him. No one should see her being coddled, not here—she didn’t want these officers to see the only woman on scene being coddled by a man. Moss wiped her eyes.

  “Do you believe in the resurrection of the body?” Nestor asked. “For that child’s sake, please believe.”

  Moss imagined the entire history of the dead beneath the soil climbing up to claim the Grace of God and receive new bodies made of light. She imagined the corpses in the Ryder truck receiving bodies unfettered by pain. Sirens and the sound of engines, two trucks pulled in to the field. New bodies made of light—naïve hopefulness, the dreams of children. She was touched on the hand, and she found Brock’s brown eyes, eyes that had seen pain before but that still broke with sorrow, eyes that still longed for some kind of peace.

  TWO

  Another crime scene had twinned within her.

  Cricketwood Court with her past, this house in Buckhannon with her future. A false future, she told herself.

  I failed her. The failure was real, the finality of Marian’s death was leaden, suffocating.

  Too late to save her, I was too late.

  She tarried on the front porch, alone, the expansive lawn a lake of darkness. Do you believe in the resurrection of the body? Nestor had asked. Across the shadowy lawn shone the garish interior of an ambulance. Moss watched as EMTs tended to Nestor. His right bicep had been torn in the firefight, the bullet passed through. They removed his shirt, revealed bruising across his sternum, purple welts where bullets had struck his vest, lumps swollen red at the edges. He would be taken to St. Joseph’s, examined for internal bleeding.

  Nestor, why would you live here? Of all places.

  She studied his face in the ambulance light as he laughed with the paramedic who checked his bandages—so much younger now. This wasn’t the same man she had known, this was only a shade of him, younger even than she was. And he was innocent now, innocent of whatever threads would one day stitch him to this place. She had confronted Nestor in the moments following their discovery of Marian—out near the pear tree, she’d asked if he knew this house, but no, Nestor had never been here, he’d never been to Buckhannon before.

  But you would have known about Marian then, Moss thought, when we were together. All their nights together here, he would have known that Marian’s blood was in the soil. Ill at her memories of him, humiliated. He had been beautiful then, their brief life together, serene, but it had come to this: six corpses in a Ryder truck.

  Nestor’s ambulance pulled from the property, and she watched its sirens spark red, recede. A trick she’d learned as a child: someone had told her she would never fold a sheet of paper more than eleven times, no matter how large the sheet. She’d tried wispy leaves of newsprint, giant rectangles, folding, but never past eleven, the last folds minuscule and difficult, the paper compressed into a small brick. The seams of her life were folding in on themselves, Nestor’s house and the house where Marian had died, Courtney’s house and the house where Marian’s family had died, her emotions roiling and overwhelming, so she envisioned her life as those sheets of paper folding, as large as white sails folding, until her emotions compressed into a small brick without folds, diamond-hard in her heart.

  A tense several hours followed the discovery of the mass killing, the forensic technicians and investigators anxious for access to the crime scene, the state and county medical examiners instructed to remain on hand and wait. There had been some initial confusion over what chemicals were inside the barn, stored in plastic drums, some questions, too, about the purpose of the lab equipment, so Brock had cleared the area as a precaution. On Brock’s call Governor Underwood requested the assistance of the nearest bomb squad, the West Virginia Army National Guard’s 753rd Ordnance Company. Lockdown while guardsmen in padded armor worked the barn, their line of swamp-green trucks edging 151, idling engines, diesel fumes.

  The house was accessible, the basement taped off, the stains marked. Miss Ashleigh owned this place, purchased ten years ago. She had lived here while prisoners languished in the basement. Had she fed them, kept them clean? Moss recognized Miss Ashleigh’s touches throughout the place: varicolored glass decorating the windowsills, the dinner plates in the sink—Moss had used those plates years from now. The painting of the dead Christ was an oddity. Agents cataloged the Nazi artifacts in the bedroom—firearms, bayonets, service patches, flags in glass cases. In the future Nestor had told her these guns were his father’s—a lie. The service patches reminded her of what she might find here, in a house where Jared Bietak and Charles Cobb spent time, and so she opened closets and drawers, sifted through boxes she found beneath the bed, hoping to find evidence of Libra, a flight patch or the album of photographs she’d seen in the house at the orchard. She came up with old shoes and costume jewelry, bills, receipts, medical records. There was nothing.

  Dawn broke. Fog hung knee-level over the grass, the surrounding landscape looked flooded with watery milk. A search-and-rescue team had arrived from Charleston, the handler of a cadaver dog swept through the property, out in the side yard, where the ground was furrowed with mounds and would one day be covered with wildflowers. A clamor of emergency when the dog stood immobile, staring. Men with shovels, eventually a backhoe, uncovered the remains of twenty-two people, their skin liquefied with lye. They had been killed in the Ryder truck, they had been buried beneath the mounds in the yard. Brock found Moss watching the dig. He wore his exhaustion openly, just like the first time she’d seen him, at the house on Cricketwood, crossing steel risers over blood—he was washed out, his eyes weary, but he wasn’t a broken man, not like the version Moss had known in the future. Brock was the center here, the calm. The forensic techs and Buckhannon cops and the National Guard in their bulky green seemed to swirl around him like ghosts in the early-morning vapor.

  “Shannon, you stuck your finger in a hornet’s nest,” he said.

  “Did they finish with the barn? What is it?”

  “Chemical weapons,” said Brock. “No, they haven’t finished. They’ll be at this all day. Blasting caps, C-4. And the chemicals.”

  “What are we talking about, Brock?”

  “Sarin, mustard gas, all in small batches. Ricin. They found Ebola,” said Brock. “Our guess is they were making small doses of various agents, testing their lethality in that truck, the Ryder truck. Maybe testing dispersal methods to see what would reliably deliver a lethal dose.”

  “Testing on a seventeen-year-old girl,” said Moss. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Copycatting the Japanese subway cult from a couple years back,” said Brock. “In the production of sarin at least. We have people coming in who worked with Tokyo during that investigation. They want to take a look at what we’ve found.”

  Sarin released in the Tokyo subway system, Moss remembered images on the news. The sarin had been liquid, stored in plastic bags the cult
ists had tossed to the subway floor and punctured with umbrella tips, gas seeping into the air.

  “I’m taking a team with me out to the Blackwater, where we found the cairns,” said Brock. “I’ll bring the K9 unit with me, the cadaver dog, search a wider area. I’ll need to know how you knew about this place, Shannon. I’ll need everything you know.”

  “I want to help you,” said Moss. Towers of stones marking the wilderness. She’d thought the cairns marked the location of Marian’s body, where she had been dumped—but Marian was here. What did the cairns mark? Other victims? Six in the Ryder, three at Cricketwood, Fleece in the mirrored room and Mursult at the Blackwater . . . bodies in the side-yard mounds, a swelling atrocity like discovering a rush of worms in a dead dog’s heart. “I’ll tell you what I can, but I’m still catching up with all this.”

  “Come with me. I want your take on something.”

  A haunted image, the Winnebago emerging from the milky mist. She remembered where she had recognized the Winnebago; she had noticed it at Miss Ashleigh’s, dust-caked in the orchard barn. “Three hundred rounds, a conservative guess,” said Brock, guiding her inside. The Winnebago’s entire wall was shredded where the barrage of bullets had pierced it. “He was only hit four times. You can ID him?”

  “Yeah, I can,” said Moss, approaching the corpse in the sleeping cabin through the galley kitchenette. “His name’s Jared Bietak.”

  “One of yours?”

  “Navy,” she said. “NSC, just like Mursult.” Bietak’s body was a waxy presence, cooling, not yet cold. Nicole had once confessed that Jared Bietak’s tattoo had impressed her; to Moss it looked like the logo of a Pontiac firebird. There was another tattoo, script: NOVUS ORDO SECLORUM, a new order of the ages. Moss thought of the days of the dying earth, when pyramids would wander for water, but she thought, too, of this age, of the paranoiacs who believed in the imminence of the New World Order, a world government as enslavers of mankind. Two bullet wounds on his chest, another through his neck, she couldn’t find the fourth. Jared Bietak’s blood filled the foam bed cushion. His eyes were half closed. The West Virginia state medical examiner would perform a forensic autopsy on him, and Moss wondered if they would find evidence of the thyroid cancer that would have otherwise taken his life. “Jared Bietak is Nicole Onyongo’s husband.”