by Joseph Fink
“You make that money for us?” said Keisha.
“Yeah, Chanterelle, I made that money.”
“Then let’s go to bed. I got so sleepy waiting up for you.”
And as Alice fell asleep with her wife’s arm over her, she knew she could never quit. Not because she was afraid. But because Thistle threatened every innocent person in the country, and she had to fight them. She had to fight them so people like Keisha could stay up yawning and give their wives sleepy kisses as they came through the door. She would do it to protect Keisha and everyone like her.
There was no time to coordinate. They could only start running. Keisha took off for the walls that she couldn’t see, hoping that reaching them would guide her to the door. She felt a hand grab at her, the musty smell of Thistle, but she pulled away. Behind her, footsteps, but she couldn’t tell if it was Alice following her or Thistle. The whoops and gurgling laughs came from every side, and so she concentrated only on forward motion.
A hard blow to her face. She stumbled backward and put her fists up to protect herself. When no second attack came, she realized that she had run into the wall. She unclenched her hands and put them on the concrete that had almost broken her nose. The door they came in should be to her right. She started running again, one hand on the wall to guide her.
“Alice,” she shouted. There was no response except the howling of Thistle Men in the dark. “Alice,” she shouted again, hoping that her wife would follow her voice, knowing that the monsters would follow it too.
She had no idea how long the building was, and so no idea how long she would run until she reached a door. She didn’t reach a door. Instead her feet hit something solid and she sprawled forward onto cold metal. A staircase along the wall.
“Huaaagh,” said a Thistle Man, looming out of the shadow toward her. “Huaaagh ha hahahoo.” Keisha didn’t have a decision, only an imperative. She ran up the stairs and found herself on a bridge over the pools. Along the wall were the mouths of the tunnel slides, perfect black Os. She thought about the slides as an escape, but the claustrophobic darkness she would have to crawl down made her entire body clench and she kept running, until she heard “Keisha!” from the room below.
Looking down, the room wasn’t nearly as dark as it had been from within it. The evening sun still shone through the cracks in the boards over the windows. Why had it been so dark before? With this light, Keisha could clearly see Alice, stumbling blindly along the bottom of an empty swimming pool. Men lined the sides, cheering and swaying. One by one they jumped in, feet pointed as though breaking water only they could see. Some stuck the landing and others collapsed like sacks of hamburger, but even the ones who had fallen rolled themselves slowly to their feet and advanced toward Alice.
Keisha turned toward the staircase at the end of the hallway but knew she wouldn’t even make it to the top of the stairs before they got to Alice. There was no hesitation in what she did next, although there was a great surge of panic. She dove headfirst into the slide leading to the pool Alice was in and started pulling herself down it. The slide was so narrow that she felt her shoulders might get stuck. Why would they ever make a slide so narrow? Or maybe it only seemed narrow in her panic. The walls of the slide tightened around her like a corset and she couldn’t breathe. She concentrated on putting one sweat-slick hand in front of the other and pulling herself forward. Her chest burned as it slid on the dry plastic, but she scrambled and wiggled through, until Alice’s screams were a few feet away.
“Keisha, oh god, Keisha,” Alice screamed, and Keisha was on her way. She pulled and pulled and pulled. She took the energy of her panic and directed it into her hands, every inch an inch closer to her wife.
Then she was out, crawling awkwardly onto the bottom of the pool. She found that now that she knew the darkness wasn’t real, it no longer existed for her. She could clearly see the pool, and the Thistle Men seething along it, and Alice caught helpless in the middle. Keisha barreled forward and took blind Alice’s hand. Alice screamed and punched her.
“Ow, it’s me, it’s Keisha, Jesus.”
“Oh god, I thought you were dead. I thought we both were. I thought—”
“Shut up and run.”
They did. A Thistle Man cackled and blocked their way and Keisha drove into him shoulder first. He swung like a door opening and staggered into the base of the slide. Hands and arms in their way, and Keisha put her head down and ran through them. There was the exit. A Thistle Man in front of it, his head lolling loose like it had become detached from his spine, his arms out in a waiting embrace. Keisha pushed Alice away from her, still holding on to her hand, until their arms were outstretched between them, and they clotheslined the Thistle Man, whose slack head snapped back and pulled his body with it. Then they were outside, where the sun was still up and their truck parked right where they left it.
They ran all the way to the truck and were hurrying to get inside when they realized no one was chasing them. The door to the water park hung open. The dim interior was visible, and there was no sign of anyone in or near the building. Every Thistle Man had vanished.
“I saved your life, Alice,” said Keisha. Her face was hot, and she had so much anger she didn’t know what to do with it. “I want you to think about that. The next time you justify to yourself that you left and made me think you were dead because you wanted to protect me. The next time you find that excuse making the smallest appearance in your brain. You think about this. I don’t need your protection. I never did. I’m not helpless. I’m not weak. I have anxiety sometimes and so you thought you needed to make decisions for me? Well, fuck you. That’s what I think of your excuses. Fuck you. Never tell me about what you thought was right ever again.”
She started the truck. She got them the fuck out of Wisconsin.
46
“And that’s where they found the baby,” said Lucy, her eyes shifting right to see how Alice was taking it. “Or at least what was left of her.”
“Jesus,” said Alice.
“Nope, not even he could save them.”
They were quiet for a long time.
“That’s horrible, but I can’t do it,” said Alice. “I can’t.”
“You could kill her if you don’t.”
“Anything could kill her. Only one person can love her.”
Lucy kept bringing reports of families of employees, targeted by Thistle. Held hostage in exchange for information or sabotage. Or sometimes just slaughtered, fed to Thistle’s hunger. The message was clear. Keisha was Alice’s family. And her employment was putting Keisha in danger.
None of these stories were true, exactly, but Lucy justified this to herself by thinking that Keisha could well be in danger. Anyone could be. Certainly this was a dangerous job. Lucy couldn’t have Alice bolting when she found out the truth about their war with Thistle, and there was no way to keep her from doing that while she still had her bond with Keisha. If Alice bolted, Bay and Creek would kill her and probably Keisha, too, and so maybe Lucy wasn’t even lying, exactly. Keisha really was in danger. This was all part of a good cause. Lucy found that she had been justifying more and more to herself, and the more she had to do this, the more convinced she became of the righteousness of her cause. After all, she was a good person, and she wouldn’t be working on the side of evil.
“I’m not leaving her,” said Alice with finality. “I’m leaving the job.” This was far from the last time she had said that.
“You know that won’t work.” Lucy sighed. “Thistle will think that it’s a ruse. They’ll think you’re still working for us. And you won’t even have the inside information from us to give you a heads-up. If it’s just the two of you, without connections, without reinforcements, how long do you think you’d last against Thistle?”
“I don’t know. I only know I’m never leaving her.”
Lucy nodded slowly, making it clear the subject wasn’t closed. “Ok, forget it. Let’s go over the mission.”
“Surveill
ance,” groaned Alice. She rolled her eyes.
“That’s right, it’s a sit-on-our-ass mission. They aren’t sure of the Thistle movements in the area, and they want to be.”
“So we look but don’t touch. Try to get a feel for what Thistle is doing in somewhere this remote.”
“Got it in one.”
“Of course I did, I’m very good at this,” said Alice.
The whole foray was somehow even more boring than feared. They didn’t see any Thistle movement at all. At what point of watching nothing does one move from surveillance to stasis? Alice thought they were toeing that line.
“They’re wasting us here,” she said.
“Personally I agree. But who knows? Maybe something interesting will finally happen.”
That night Thistle came. Alice didn’t even have time to see them. It was Lucy’s watch and she dragged Alice to the car, her face tight and afraid. Alice tried to remember the last time she had seen Lucy afraid and she couldn’t. Even when they had first met, and it had seemed that Lucy was about to die, even then she didn’t look like this.
“I’ve never seen so many of them at once,” hissed Lucy as she fumbled the car into motion. “They have the road into here cut off, we’ll have to try to drive deeper.”
The asphalt turned to dirt and wound its way up a few low foothills before settling into a valley where a grid of dirt roads had no structures on them, laid out for people and industry that never came. Theirs was the only tire tread Alice could see on the road. Lucy stopped the car and lit a cigarette. They waited, but no one was following them.
“We can’t try to leave on our own,” she said. “We’ll have to wait for extraction.”
Alice checked her cell. “No reception.”
“Shit,” said Lucy. She had driven out here three weeks earlier and double-checked every cell network to make sure none of them reached this spot.
“Alright,” Alice said. “They better hurry. Keisha’s expecting me home in two days and I’m not disappointing her.”
The two days passed. Then another week. No one came for them. Lucy would drive back the way they had come in and return shaking her head, trembling a little in one hand. For someone like Lucy to react that strongly, what she had seen must have truly been terrifying.
“Not a chance,” said Lucy.
“Where the hell is Bay and Creek?”
“I don’t know.” Lucy shook her head. “I don’t fucking know.”
Bay and Creek didn’t come. Three weeks. Alice tried and failed to not think what Keisha must be going through.
“We have to risk it,” said Alice.
“You think this’ll be better for her if you die?”
No, of course not. So they waited. Another week and Lucy came back frantic.
“The way is clear. I don’t know how long. We have to go.”
They went. The engine overheating, low on gas, but they made it to a safe house. Alice took out her phone. Lucy put a hand on it.
“What are you doing?” said Alice.
“Think about this. What are you going to say to her?”
“I don’t know. She needs to know I’m alive.”
“That’s right. She thinks you’re dead. She’ll have a lot of questions. So where have you been? What happened to you?”
“I don’t fucking know. I’ll figure it out.”
She started to dial and Lucy knocked the phone out of her hand. Alice punched her before she even knew what she was doing. She started to apologize, and then didn’t.
“What are you going to tell her?” wheezed Lucy from the floor. “You need to have this straight in your head before you call.”
Alice picked up the phone and stood with it in her hand for a long time. “Think about it,” said Lucy. “Maybe this was fate. You couldn’t disconnect. You couldn’t do it even to keep her safe. But now it’s already happened. And what could you even say to explain it? Let her think you are dead. Do this work. Win this war. Make it safe for everyone like us. And then, you can come back to her and tell her the truth.”
Alice screamed. She dropped the phone and screamed. Lucy let her. But Alice didn’t call Keisha that night. Or the next night. She sobbed. Lucy went outside and smoked every time Alice started crying. Alice wasn’t sure whether this was to give her space or because Lucy was annoyed by it. Eventually it became too late to do anything. At this point, Keisha would definitely think she was dead. And in a way, she felt that she was. She wasn’t a person anymore. She was a Bay and Creek solider. This war had taken the relationship that made her human from her. All she had left was to win that war.
Still, she couldn’t ever convince herself that she was as hollow as she wanted to be in order to bear what she had done. Through sleepless nights, she would think of ways to let Keisha know she was alive. And then a Thistle murder, brutal, outside of St. Cloud, Minnesota. April snow on the ground. All of the news vans, telling the grisly story to the world. And like a volunteer in a hypnotist show, who acts as though under a spell but is really doing what they want to do the entire time, Alice stepped behind the reporter and looked directly at the camera.
47
A stakeout is an exciting way to describe falling asleep in a parked vehicle. Alice had nodded off an hour before, and Keisha was on her way. But she kept thinking about the exit from this life. A time in which she wouldn’t have to live this way anymore. And that ember of hope kept her from slipping completely into much-needed sleep. Instead she watched the grain elevator. It was wooden with gables and a few frosted-over windows, looking like a movie haunted house that had stretched upward past the scale of human existence. There had been no movement that day, or the day before. But they were sure that this was an entrance to a Bay and Creek facility, and so they had set up behind a line of trees between two nearby fields and they had watched it with a camera. They needed more evidence, more information to help Tamara fill in the gaps.
It was just as Keisha had given up, decided she could afford to take a little nap, maybe an hour or so, that a car pulled up to the grain elevator. Four men got out. All were wearing tactical vests, black caps pulled down to their eyebrows, machine guns on their backs. She slapped Alice’s shoulder. “It’s torn!” Alice cried as she woke up.
“What?” said Keisha.
“I don’t remember. Something in a dream.”
“No one cares about anyone else’s dreams. We have something.”
The men did a cursory sweep of the area, but it was a rural region, a hundred miles from anything that could be labeled with the word city. They weren’t expecting to find anyone, and so they didn’t. Then they filed into the grain elevator. Keisha and Alice sat in silence for thirty or forty minutes. Neither of them moved even to check the time. It felt like they were close to something, and moving even an inch might ruin it. The men returned from inside. In the center of their group, occasionally shoved along by one of the men in the back, was a frail man in an undershirt. He had a cloth bag pulled over his head. He was barefoot. They put the man in the car and drove away without checking the area at all. They were confident in their secrecy. Keisha and Alice gave it another couple minutes without moving or speaking, then Alice leaned back in her seat and sighed.
“I think we were right. Bay and Creek brig. That seems worth reporting on, right?”
Keisha checked the camera. “I hope so,” she said.
As they drove to the next spot, she flipped back on the CB radio. She turned the volume off, as she always did. She had listened enough in her life.
“This constant road trip has done something to me. It’s changed time. Used to be an hour-and-a-half drive felt like a while, the kind of drive you’d need to gear up for, the kind that would make you dull and listless with the length of it. Now four or five hours move by with a real pep to them. I’ve learned that all it takes is sitting and existing. Do that long enough, and anything will be over.”
She glanced at Alice. She thought about their time apart. Sit long enough, a
nd anything will be over.
“Being good at long-distance travel means turning yourself as much as possible into cargo. The more you can become like a cardboard box, the better you are at withstanding the miles. A cardboard box doesn’t need to pee. A cardboard box doesn’t need to stretch its legs. A cardboard box merely sits and is transported. And that is how a person becomes good at long road trips. They sit and are transported. They take the world as it comes. A road trip is often seen as an exercise in freedom, but the effect it has on a person is a placating stillness.”
Keisha put the mic back, flipped the radio off.
A week later, in a Starbucks in Pasadena. Tamara was cautiously excited by the footage. “I’ll tell you,” she said, over a cup of coffee she had ordered and then did not touch. “Something like this is easy to stage, and so on its own, not much of anything at all. But everything you’ve been giving me, it’s been checking out.”
“It’ll all check out,” said Keisha.
“Well,” said Tamara. “I’ll have to be extra careful with all this. A story like this out there, I’ll need to be surer than I have been about anything. But stuff like this”—she held up the memory card and a smile pushed its way out through journalistic reserve—“shit, it helps. This helps a lot.”
They had stopped bombing. Now they only documented. The goal was no longer to slow down or sabotage, but to blow the whole crooked deal open, and that couldn’t happen piecemeal, that had to happen all at once. They filmed Bay and Creek sites, and when they didn’t have a site to target, they cruised the abandoned places of the country. Once they knew what to look for in a Bay and Creek location, it was surprisingly easy to find them through educated guesswork. They would set up on an old amusement park based on nothing but a feeling, and sure enough half a day later would spot a dusty sedan, a midlevel model from five or six years ago, and out would come people who definitely were not there to explore an old amusement park. Twice they even got footage of a Thistle Man. They were careful then, feeling that Thistle were much more likely to notice being watched than Bay and Creek operatives. The horror of the Thistle Men didn’t quite come through on the video, but still there it was, documented proof of their existence.