by John Shirley
He could be screaming for air right now.
Feeling tears burning to escape, Cal pulled a mask on, shouting to the coasties, “I’m going down—be good if you send a man down—”
“Send a man down to what?” came a voice from the water.
Cal leaned over the railing. There was Dad’s pale face against the dark water, looking up at him, his mask pulled onto the top of his head.
“What the hell, Dad! You know how long you were down?”
“So it was a few minutes extra, so what. I know how to conserve air after all these years.”
Cal looked at his watch. More like five minutes extra, he thought. Damn, his old man had mad skills.
But five minutes without air? That wasn’t really possible, was it?
Suddenly Dad was there, vaulting over the railing onto the deck like a young man despite the weight of his tank, the cold water, and the exertion.
Cal remembered that you looked for signs of strange behavior in a diver who had been down too long. He might have a mild form of oxygen deprivation—dementia or something. But Dad was already over at the winch, throwing levers so it’d slowly start taking up the slack.
The Air Force officer came alongside in a launch from the Coast Guard boat. “The boat there, Major Stanner coming aboard.”
More laboriously than Cal’s dad, Stanner climbed up the ladder and swung himself onto the deck. “You’re starting your equipment already?”
Dad nodded. “It’s ready to go. The support structures happen to’ve fallen in a configuration that shouldn’t cause any problems. I haven’t started the real lifting yet—if you don’t think it’s ready to come up. But I was able to clear the sand away. It should be solidly grappled.”
Stanner raised his eyebrows. “You cleared all that sand away? From what we could make out, it’s half buried down there.”
Dad turned to look blankly at Stanner. “Maybe the sand was loosened by the impact. It’s quite clear now along the upper half of the hull. But the S.N.G. module looks to be cracked. I expect its contents have been destroyed.”
Cal looked back and forth between his dad and Stanner. The major’s face seemed to go stony, all of a sudden.
“What’d you call it?” Stanner asked.
Just a flicker of hesitation from Dad. “I said satellite module. Why?”
“I thought you said something else.” Stanner looked at him again. Cal’s dad gazed unflinchingly back.
Shit, the old man could be chilled steel when he needed to.
Finally Stanner glanced at his watch, looked at the cable slicing down into the water, and said, “We’ve got a small navy vessel coming to take it aboard, be here any minute, so we’d better have it ready. I don’t want it out in the—” He broke off, glancing at the shore. Then he turned to Cal’s dad and said, “Okay. Let’s hope you know what you’re doing. Hoist away.”
Waylon thought he might be crouching on an anthill. He pictured the ants looking for a good spot to start burrowing under his testicles. He scratched and shifted on the hummock.
The grassy hummock—hey, I’m on a grassy knoll, dude!—was on the hillside in the thicket of fur and oak trees overlooking the old restaurant and the smashed dock. He stood up, to let his blood circulate, shifting his weight from foot to foot, watching the navy vessel—what was it, a PT boat?—hauling ass toward San Francisco Bay, with that big metal thing they claimed was a satellite tied down under a tarp on its aft deck. It might’ve been a satellite. He hadn’t been able to see it very well.
Probably was. Which was disappointing.
He shifted around on the hummock. Scratched one knee against the other. Was something crawling up his legs? Ants? Something else? Hadn’t Adair said all kinds of nasty shit lived in this woods?
He left the hummock and climbed up on a nearby tree stump. Probably get termites up his pants, too.
He had to hunker down and peer between the trees to watch the boat. He made out three boats. The coastguardsmen were following the Navy boat, some kind of escort. The trawler that had winched up the Unknown Artifact, as Waylon thought of it, was tooling off in a different direction, piloted by that older kid, Adair’s brother. Her dad—he thought it was her dad, though he was a ways off and Waylon had seen him only one other time—was walking toward his truck.
Waylon wished he had binoculars. He thought he’d seen ordinary English-language lettering on the side of the thing when it was hauled up, but he was too far away to be sure. Well, it was under a tarp now anyway.
He was getting cold and damp and wanted to check his pants to see if he had any unauthorized visitors of his own.
He sighed. Time to go home. He tended to put off going home because Mom’s anxiety attacks were back big-time, and if it wasn’t the anxiety attacks, she was plastered, and it made him feel like shit when she was drunk.
He heard a persistent rattling. It went lower in frequency, became more distinct, a thudding—and then he saw it coming.
It was a single light, approaching low over the trees. The tree-tops tossed about as it came.
“Oh, shit. The black chopper.”
The same one. He could see the markings on it, D-23.
And as he said the black chopper, a searchlight switched on, making a thin column of harsh blue shine down into the trees. A doe, with ears like a mule’s, ran from the questing blob of light.
The chopper changed direction, coming right toward him, its searchlight probing.
“Fuck this,” Waylon muttered, and started off through waist-high ferns, the trees seeming to run toward him as he skidded along the slope.
He fell, sliding on his ass through blackberry vines, feeling them burn across his skin. The chopper boomed overhead, the trees surging in its wind, leaves caught up in its private dust devil, spinning into his eyes.
He stopped hard against a mossy-slick pine tree, goose-egging his shin on it. “Shit!” he hissed, and ducked behind the tree as the searchlight swept over the bole where he’d been a moment before, and passed on. The chopper carried its wind and restlessly probing searchlight with it, back into the farther reaches of the night sky.
Heart thudding, tasting metal but feeling a certain elation, Waylon started down the hillside, skidding toward the road. His leg ached, his face stung with blackberry thorns, and he had a long walk home. Maybe his mom’d be asleep when he got there.
Suddenly he stopped, aware of hunched, stealthy movement in the shadows of the slope below him.
That deer he’d seen, probably. But he kept still and watched. After a moment, he made out two pale faces peering up toward him, catching moon and starlight where it dappled through foliage. No more of them was visible.
They were about seventy feet away from him, but he thought he knew who it was. Two of those marines who’d come to replace the cops. He had seen them earlier, from the brush close by the road.
Now they seemed to raise their heads and sniff the air, to listen like animals. It almost looked as if they were down on all fours, but they couldn’t be; it must be that they were leaning their hands on a steep part of the hillside.
They were climbing up toward him.
They came on, seeming almost to glide effortlessly up the hillside. They were so quiet, so stealthy, it was like they were on some kind of combat training exercise, creeping up on the enemy camp. And it was like they were moving in tandem—he moves and I move, he moves and I move —fast as lizards up the hill.
This thing has me freaked out. I’m imagining shit, Waylon decided. They were just climbing the regular way, looking for him because someone had seen him, and they were worried he’d spotted their crashed UFO—or whatever it was.
But suppose they caught him. Would they have to liquidate him, to keep the cover-up secure?
I’m just being paranoid. It was just a satellite, and they don’t want the bad publicity. They just want to scare me o f, like the guards at Area 51 with their threats.
But even as he thought all this, he climbed back
up the hillside, through the trees, and then started down again, diagonally this time. Moving laterally away from the two men. He’d seen a path on the far side of the dock, along the edge of the water, probably used by fishermen—Chinese and Latino guys who fished in every bay he’d ever seen, no matter how polluted the water was.
He reached the road and sprinted for the rocky path, made it, and ran past little poplar trees and big juniper bushes, threading between boulders and chunks of concrete left here to provide a tide break.
He paused a couple of times to see if he was being followed.
Maybe. Something was rustling back there. The doe stepped into the moonlight, then bounded off. He waited and didn’t see the soldiers. He moved on.
Fifteen minutes later, Waylon found himself rounding a small point that stuck out into a little inlet. On the other side, not even a quarter mile away, was a brightly lit marina thronged with sail-boats. Beside the docks was a steak and fish restaurant.
He followed the curve of a gravelly beach to the marina. As he passed below the surf-and-turf place, he heard people on the restaurant’s deck, which extended over the water under strings of twinkling lightbulbs, talking and drinking as they waited for a table. Someone was speculating about what was supposed to have crashed into the bay.
“I heard it was a small plane,” a woman said.
He almost felt like telling them—telling someone—what he had seen, telling them about the chopper and the unnatural soldiers who’d harried him through the brush.
But he was too tired to be laughed at.
He trudged up a boat ramp to the road, stuck out his thumb, and got a ride back to Quiebra with some drunk college students who made fun of the bramble welts on his face.
Thinking to himself, Of course they were after you, dude. Ever since the terrorists flew those planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the fucking military’s been even more paranoid, ready to nail anybody who sni fs around. If that wasn’t a crashed UFO, it was probably a spy satellite. Some sort of top secret shit. What did you expect? The Shadow Government will track your ass down if you get in its way.
When Waylon got home to the condo, his mom was asleep on the couch, snoring loudly, with the TV on but the sound off. The Shopping Channel. She liked to look at the chintzy things they hawked, but she never bought anything. Her long curly bottle-blond hair was straggling over her open mouth. Wine coolers were lined up on the coffee table, and cigarette butts were spilling out of the ashtrays.
She was still wearing the dark blue dress suit she wore for her paralegal job; she was about forty pounds overweight, and spilling out of it. He pulled her shoes off and drew her long wool coat over her like a blanket.
Then he turned off the TV and went to take a shower.
November 24, midmorning
Lacey Cummings stood on her porch, looking at the eight-foot-high bird-of-paradise plant that nodded in the smoggy breeze like some otherworldly bird. She looked at the sky, blue overhead and gray-brown above the eastern horizon. Then she looked at her packed bags on the doormat and thought, Am I ready to go or not? Have I got everything?
She was on the front porch of her rented L.A. bungalow, waiting for the cab—thinking it was crazy to take a cab in L.A. If you weren’t part of the limo set, you bought a car. But she had sold her car; she was going to the train station, for the Coast Starlight to Berkeley.
She wondered if she should call Roger. But since when were you obligated to tell your ex-husband where you were moving? She’d kept his surname because she liked the sound of it better, but she barely stayed in touch. Still, it bothered her not to tell him she was moving out of town. Not that he’d really give a damn. He was more interested in hearing from his agent about his new spec script.
She decided she just wanted to go. To Quiebra, of all places: to see sister Suze and niece Adair and nephew Cal and just forget her life here. So she took out her cell phone, put her finger on the button, about to switch it off—and of course that’s when it rang.
She sighed. Hesitated—and answered. “Herrrre’s Lacey,” she said into the cell phone.
“Lacey, you still in town?” It was Chuck Fong, her editor at the L.A. Times.
“Can’t talk, Chuck, gotta catch a train to Berkeley.”
“Come on, you can give me a minute. We’re talking about your career here, Lacey. You’ve been with us eight years, and I’ve always backed you up. One time, one time only, I couldn’t do it and—”
“Chuck, my mind’s made up. I just—”
Naturally the yellow cab chose that moment to show up. A bearded guy in a turban looked at her from the driver’s seat, and she waved. He got out to help her with the bags.
“Lacey, claiming our publisher is in league with death squads? What did you expect? Come on, that was extreme and unreasonable.”
“I didn’t say he was in league with them, I said he was covering up the activities of death squads in Colombia, because he’s backing the right-wing agenda down there. Get the Colombian oil, no matter who gets hurt. And why? Because he’s also on the board of a major oil company, and the newspaper was bought by a multinational, and because he’s got ties to the—”
“Do you know how paranoid you sound? In these times we have to be tough. You’ve got to be supportive of antiterrorism efforts.”
“I support the war against terror. I don’t support death squads. You wouldn’t run my column about death squads, you were censoring me, so I’m taking my toys and going home. I’m sick of L.A. I need to get away.”
“I can’t guarantee you’ll be able to come back.”
“Is that another way of saying, ‘You’ll never work in this town again’? I’ll tell you what, Chuck. If you tell me you’ll run my column as written, I’ll take my bags out of the cab that’s waiting for me over here.”
A crackle—she thought she’d lost the connection. But then he said, “I can’t do that. He won’t let me.”
“Then I’ll send you a card from the Bay Area.”
“Lacey—”
Another call was coming in, and she broke the connection to Chuck and took the call waiting as she picked up the remaining bag and walked over to the cab. “Lacey here.” She put the bag in the trunk.
“Lacey? It’s Suze.”
“Calling to tell me not to come? You Bay Area types don’t want the sleazy Angelenos up there?”
“I’m calling to make sure you’re coming. Thanksgiving plans, for one thing. The kids are stoked.”
Lacey got into the backseat of the cab, turned the cell phone away long enough to tell the driver, “Union Station.” She shut the door and said, “Suze, I’m coming unless you don’t want me to.”
“Of course I want you to!”
The cab started away. Lacey looked through the back window at her little house, the palm tree, the bird-of-paradise plant. Jerve, the little kid who lived next door, was skating up and down the sidewalk on his silvery scooter. “Then I’m coming. I’m in the cab on the way to the train station.”
“I wish you were coming on the plane. It’s faster.”
“I don’t take them unless I have to. What’s the hurry? I mean, are you okay?”
“Yes, I just . . . I’m a little scared, I guess.”
Lacey rocked back in her seat. It wasn’t like her strong, athletic, independent older sister to admit being scared. “Go on.”
“It sounds so stupid. It’s Nick. I just—he’s so distant and . . . I don’t know.”
“Since when has he been Mr. Warmth?”
“I know—especially when he gets depressed. But he’s been doing pretty good. I had to sort of push him to take a job recently. You know how he gets in that defeatist mind-set.”
The cab drove up the on-ramp and slid onto the freeway. “Yeah, I remember Nick’s ‘why bother, it won’t work.’ But that’s nothing new.”
“It’s . . . just that he goes off to work but he’s really secretive about it. Doesn’t even take his gear. I thought
he was having an affair, but . . . Then this morning he said something weird. I mean, I came into the kitchen and he was standing at the sink and he didn’t hear me, I guess, and it was like he was talking to the air. He said, um—what was it? He said something about a ‘conversion.’ But he didn’t seem to be talking about religion.”
“Um, he smoking pot again?”
“No. I don’t think so. It’s like—like he’s really gone into some odd kind of . . . fugue state.”
“You think he could have given up his meds, and not told you? People don’t like to talk about it when they go off antidepressants— or on them either. He could be having a kind of withdrawal from medication.”
“You know what, I thought maybe he hadn’t been taking his meds. You’re probably right. I’m going to see if I can get him to start again. See how you make me feel better? I need you around here to straighten me out when I get crazy.”
Lacey smiled. “Whoa, you must be worried, admitting I might know something you don’t. I’m coming, ‘Sister Act.’ ”
Suze laughed at the allusion to the time they’d dressed up like twin nuns for a Halloween party.
“Okay, we’ll be there. Call us if the train’s delayed.”
“I will. Bye.”
Lacey switched the cell phone off, looked out at Los Angeles. A boulevard unreeled below the elevated freeway like film from a canister, and she wondered if she could really let L.A. go.
She thought she probably could. Her life was taking a sharp turn, and the cab was taking the exit for the train station.
November 24, 11:30 P.M.
Larry’s dad had gone to a Civil War reenactment planning session after work, calling to tell Larry to heat up a frozen pizza and do his homework. But Larry Gunderston had been playing this particular computer game for three and a half hours, with pizza crusts still littering his desk. His back ached in the desk chair; his fingers had stiffened up. But whenever his Jedi character broke through to another level—killing a great many of the enemy to get there—the feeling that came seemed to suck him onward like a slipstream.