The Ninth Metal

by Benjamin Percy

  She clicks on the flashlight and checks the ground around the vehicle, but it’s hard-packed and thick with weeds and so doesn’t give her much back. She peers into a few of the concrete pipes and finds nothing but spider webs and a possum that shows its needle-y teeth in a hiss.

  She climbs into the driver’s seat and pulls the radio off its hook, but something stops her from keying it. The memory of Sheriff Barnes patting her shoulder condescendingly. The memory of Hank dismissing her concerns and theories. “We’re the good guys,” he said. “Don’t you forget that.” And maybe there was a strain to his smile when he looked at her.

  She doesn’t know what she’s dealing with here, but she does know that if she reports it, she’ll be questioned and thanked and immediately shoved aside. So she hangs up the radio and reaches for the dash cam and slides the memory card out of it. She’ll review the footage before making the call. Collect as much data as possible so that she has some ownership of the case. That’s what this is. A case. She’s working her first real case.

  The radio squawks and she lets out a shriek and then covers her mouth with her hand as if someone might hear. Pam is the woman working dispatch, and her voice comes through like gravel. “Please respond,” she says. “Reports of a fire at the Frontier compound. All available units please respond.”

  It is then Stacie realizes, as she steps from the cruiser and looks to the east, that what she believed to be the coming dawn is in fact another kind of flame.

  12

  * * *

  John digs through his bedroom closet and changes into a black hoodie and a black cap. In the basement, his sister has stored everything else he needs. Latex gloves. Surgical booties to pull over his shoes. He wonders how many others she’s brought here and carted off in darkness. With a knife, he cuts the ropes that bind the man to the chair, and the body slumps to the floor.

  He locates a roll of duct tape. He tears open a box of black garbage bags and removes one and holds it up to assess its size, then pulls out two more. He notices a bulge in the man’s back pocket. His sister has already destroyed the cell phone—the pieces of it are sharded across the floor—but this is his wallet. John digs it out and flips it open and pauses at the name on the license: Dan Swanson.

  He snaps shut the wallet and the word jumps out of his throat: “No.” He opens the wallet again, hoping he misread the name. “No, no, no.”

  John wasn’t even supposed to be here. He ignored the RSVP for the wedding. He didn’t answer the phone calls or the e-mails or the texts. In them Talia’s tone varied from pleading to raging to loving. I can’t get married without my baby bro there, she wrote. Maybe she meant that. But she also wanted to win. To break him. That’s what she’s always done. When they were kids, she once sat on his chest and tickled him until he couldn’t breathe and threw up all over himself. When they were teenagers, she held down his hand and hit it with a ball-peen hammer when he borrowed her car and brought it back with a scratch razed across the door. Is he really surprised that she has charged him with disposing of the body of his ex-girlfriend’s husband? No.

  He calls Talia again, but her phone goes directly to voicemail. He severs the connection without leaving a message. He checks the time. Four hours until dawn. There is nothing to do but finish the job.

  John’s father has a ten-car garage he keeps full. He’s a Cadillac man but also owns a Bentley and a new model of Tesla—the Quicksilver—that features an omnimetal battery. John surveys the gleaming fleet before snapping off the lights and closing the door and hiking over to the pole barn, where he finds his old Bronco parked among the snowmobiles and motorcycles and ATVs and Jet Skis and boats. His fingers make lines in the dust of the hood. The engine whines at first, but with a few hard cranks, it turns over with a growl.

  Into the rear he loads the body, now cocooned in garbage bags and banded with duct tape. And drives off into the dark.

  Northfall was founded in the late 1800s when iron ore was discovered in the Manitou Range. Though there are some underground mines, the iron ore deposits are shallow, so open pit mining was the standard. During World War I and World War II, at the height of production, some of the smaller pits merged into a larger footprint a mile wide and four hundred feet deep as hundreds of millions of tons of high-grade ore were delivered by train from the Iron Range to Duluth and then shipped across Superior to be processed at steel mills. Nearly all of the high-grade iron ore has been mined from Minnesota, and though the low-grade deposits are still processed into taconite pellets, demand is low. This combined with environmental regulations resulted in a slow, decades-long economic collapse. One Northfall News headline about unemployment in the region read “Rock Bottom. Literally.”

  The cratered remains of those mines scab the landscape up here, and John drives to one of them now. A pit lake called the Witch’s Sink with steep crumbly rockfaces surrounding it. One of the most contaminated lakes in the Iron Range, bottomed by acidic water no one would ever fish from or swim in, the color of a penny in a puddle. He used to party here as a teenager and chuck bottles into the void. And it was said that a bevy of swans that had once landed here perished seconds later, their white carcasses floating and pinwheeling on the water.

  He carries the body to a cliff side and wraps it in two coils of transport chain and padlocks the links together. This at least doubles Swanson’s weight, and John strains to shove him over the edge. The clinking and skidding gives way to a hush when the body rolls off into nothingness. John gets down and lies there, breathing heavily, listening. The rippling flap of plastic grows fainter and fainter, and then, finally, he hears what sounds like the crunch of a beer can as it strikes the water below.

  He rolls over and takes in the expanse of stars overhead. That’s where all this trouble originated from, and he can’t help but feel like it’s a net hanging over him that will descend at any moment. He spots one constellation he knows, the Big Dipper, but he never learned the names of any of the rest. He wishes he had. He wishes a lot of things were different.

  He should drive home. He should bleach the basement and shower up and pack his bag and leave and never come back. But instead he drives to an old neighborhood on the south side of town, close enough to the tracks you can feel the rumble of every train’s passage. He didn’t keep the license from Swanson’s wallet, but he kept the photo. Of Jenna and the boy tucked into her lap.

  The street is oak-lined; the houses are bungalows with chain-link fences collaring small patches of yard. He circles the block four times before parking across the street and killing the engine. The windows are dark, but the porch light is on, as if she’s hoping Dan might still make his way home.

  He pulls out the photo and angles it toward the street lamp. There is a dark dot on its corner and when he rubs it with his thumb, it smears. Blood. He tucks it into his breast pocket.

  It takes him a while to notice the sirens—so many of them crying in the night—and at first he believes they are coming for him.

  13

  * * *

  A few years ago, when Victoria was going over plans for the new house with the contractor, she told him to include a library. “A library?” he said over the phone. “That’s really not great for resale. Kind of a waste of a bedroom, to be honest. Can’t you just put in bookshelves and a few comfy chairs?”

  No. In the same way that some insisted on a formal dining room, she wanted a proper library. In the blueprints, there was a bedroom adjacent to the living room, and that would do very nicely, although she would have preferred a broad, open doorway that felt like an invitation. Built-in shelves, floor to ceiling, would wrap the room. It might be an antiquated notion, but it was necessary if she and her husband were going to feel at all at home in this place, this town that didn’t seem to know what it was, tourist destination or mining camp.

  “With the Department of Defense footing the bill for all this,” the contractor said, “kind of curious what it is you’re going to be doing up here.”

>   “I’m not allowed to say, I’m afraid. Now for the shelving, I’d prefer maple. Oak is too grainy, in my opinion. A darker stain would be my preference.”

  Her science books, of course, filled a full wall. But for pleasure she preferred poetry and historical novels, while Wade obsessively read any sturdy volume of nonfiction about wars and presidents. The Father’s Day display at every bookstore seemed designed especially for him.

  Evenings back in Nebraska, they would settle into their chairs and, in their individual shafts of lamplight, escape into phantom worlds. It was a way of being separate but together. That’s how their relationship seemed to always work. They had taught at the same university, but not in the same department or at the same level. They lived in the same house, but he preferred to spend his time puttering in the kitchen and the garden while she finished the newspaper at the dining room table or fired off e-mails in her office. They slept in the same bed, but if he ever asked, “What happened at work today?,” she couldn’t really say. She’d fluff her pillow, turn away from him, and pretend to fall asleep.

  There are no bookstores in Northfall, only spinner racks featuring paperback thrillers and romance novels at the pharmacy and grocery store, so she and Wade order everything online. Now, in the library, on her chair, sits a padded parcel. She ordered it the other day after realizing her shelves were absent of anything a teenage boy might find interesting. She searched for recommendations on Goodreads and finally settled on a title that felt right for a boy in the Northwoods.

  She tears open the packaging and pulls out Hatchet by Gary Paulsen. She slips the book into her purse—and an hour later, at the gates of the DOD facility, the guard takes it out and riffles through the pages and swabs the cover for chemical residue and then shrugs and gives it back and waves her through.

  She can’t leave the job. Not only because she signed a five-year contract that no lawyer would have ever approved—one that listed fifty different ways she could end up in prison for breaching the agreement—but because of the boy, Hawkin. If it wasn’t her running the experiments, it would be someone else. By staying, she might be sickening herself, but she was protecting him.

  When she’d first signed on to work at the DOD, she was given a classified dossier labeled Patient Zero. In it, she learned that a National Guard unit had discovered Hawkin. The crew wore gamma-radiation suits and carried Geiger counters. They felt like astronauts, one of them said in the report. Astronauts exploring another planet. They were part of the initial quarantine. A perimeter was established in the Arrowhead, and the crew’s task was to survey the blast sites and assess the risk the alien matter might pose and guide any survivors to the ad hoc medical facility set up on the high-school football field. They reported finding a deer with silvered antlers so heavy that it dragged its head and raked the ground. They reported seeing a man in pajamas lying in bed without a head, his pillow replaced by a blackened hole from the meteor that smashed through his ceiling. And they reported investigating an old gray barn inside of which an electrical storm seemed to blaze. Blue light burst through the slats in the boards and the holes in the sunken roof—and then went dark. When the men creaked open the doors, they discovered a boy lying on the hay-strewn floor. He was naked and hairless. He breathed rapidly. His eyes were scrunched shut as if he were in terrible pain. He did not respond when they called out to him. There was an ozone-y stink to the air. When one of the men reached out and touched the boy, he blinked open his eyes and sat up and screamed. The soldiers reported a wheeling, blinding light—one that seemed to spring from the boy’s very pores—and a forceful concussion that knocked them off their feet. The boy curled up in a ball then, sobbing. He would not answer their questions; he said nothing but “Help. Help. Help.” They had been ordered to radio in any notable discoveries. They did so now, and a half an hour later an evac unit arrived and shuttled the boy away. Not to the medical facility on the football field but to a Homeland Security outpost consisting of several tents, trailers, mobile labs, and containment units hauled by semis. The boy hasn’t seen the sun since.

  In the lab, as the lights flicker on, Victoria powers on the comm and leans in to the mic and says, “Hawkin? I brought you a book.”

  His head lifts from his cot, but he doesn’t get up, not until she presses the cover flat against the glass and says it again: “I brought you a book, and I think you’ll really like it.”

  He digs some crust out of the corner of his eye and stretches his jaw into a yawn before sitting upright and hopping off the cot and padding toward her.

  “Good morning,” she says and he says, “Morning,” and then, “Is it a comic book?”

  “No. Sorry. I don’t have any of those.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Adventure. Survival. A boy about your age.”

  “I can have it?” He reaches out a hand to the glass barrier, tracing the shape of the book with his fingertip.

  “Not right away, but maybe eventually. I’m kind of breaking the rules right now, to be honest. I thought I’d read it to you. How does that sound? Does that sound good?”

  It’s not a smile, but half his mouth hikes up. “Yeah.”

  “It will be a reward. For later. After we’re done with our work.”

  “Okay,” he says. His eyes eagerly follow the book as she sets it on the desk so that he can see the watercolor cover. “The boy, he looks unhappy,” he says of the dark-haired boy featured there.

  “I’d say he looks determined.”

  “Maybe.”

  Victoria readies his breakfast and fits it through the slot. While he eats, she fills out the morning’s log sheet. Then a buzz comes from the door. She lifts her pen and looks up. The security light goes from red to green. The locks slide heavily from their slots. The handle turns and the door opens and a man stands in the slice of light and says, “Professor Lennon. Lovely to see you.”

  “Oh,” she says, setting down her pen, a word left unfinished. “I didn’t know you were coming.”

  This is Dr. Thaddeus Gunn, the project supervisor responsible for her hiring. She isn’t sure what his exact title is, though at different times he has referred to himself as an auditor and a rogue agent and a floating executive. He is a short, bald, fastidious man with a brown mustache. He wears three-piece suits perfectly tailored to his body, which is more torso than arms and legs. He believes in pockets and has many more than customary sewn into his jacket and vest and pants. He is regularly pulling something out of a pocket, an apple or a watch on a chain. Depending on the direction he turns his head, his wire-rimmed glasses magnify or shrink his slitty, pouched eyes. His cufflinks are made out of stony iron meteor debris. He told her he bought them from a dealer years ago. Supposedly, in 1994 in New Orleans, the meteor had fallen through the roof of a house, crashed through the attic floor, the third floor, and the second floor, and finally scorched and cratered the ground floor. “I like how every time I put on my cufflinks,” he’d said when he first hired her, “I feel as though I am both in this world and part of another. The same can be said about the work we’re doing.”

  He steps fully into the room now and says, “Do you know what I always make a habit of ? When I’m traveling? No matter where I go, no matter how much work I have to do, I explore at least one new thing. In York, Pennsylvania, it was the Weightlifting Hall of Fame. In Seattle, it was the Underground Tour. And here? In northern Minnesota? I don’t really have a choice, do I? It’s the lakes. The lakes are positively begging to be explored. Every time I come here, I visit a new one.”

  She stands and runs a hand along her lab coat as if to smooth the wrinkles from it. “Did you get in last night?”

  “I did. And, wasting no time, I drove out into the woods this very morning. Right at dawn. To a place called Heart Lake. Which is named—as you might guess—after its valentine shape.” He goes to the desk and unbuttons his suit coat and occupies the chair she sat in only a moment ago. His hands he lays neatly on his thighs. “I was
hiking a path that ringed the lake when I saw the most extraordinary thing. A hawk dropped out of the sky and pulled a fish out of the water. Not ten feet away from me. I’m not sure if it was a sharp-shinned hawk or a Cooper’s hawk—they look so similar and it all happened so fast—but ever since then, I’ve felt like my whole body is humming. People always marvel over the beauty of nature when it’s still. Admiring a sunset or a mountain range, say. But it’s nature in action that’s truly something to behold. Don’t you think?”

  “Sure.”

  Gunn finally looks at the boy then, and his smile grows a bit wider. Hawkin is unpeeling the wrapper from a muffin and licking the crumbs off his fingers while watching them. “So. How are things?”

  “Have you seen the data?”

  “I have seen the data,” he says and his eyes seem to warp and ripple as he settles his gaze back on her. “He remains uninjured.”

  “Yes and no.”

  “What does that mean, yes and no? That doesn’t seem to mean anything.”

  “This is taking a severe mental toll on him and ​—”

  “Let’s concentrate on the numbers, please. You’re a hard-data girl, not a psychiatrist.”

  “Please don’t call me a girl. And please don’t undermine my authority.”

  “Hard-data lady? Is that better?”

  She can’t stop herself from sighing. “With the higher-caliber weapons, he says . . . it feels like mosquitoes.”

  “Mosquitoes?”

  “Burning. Itching.”

  “And how long does the sensation last?”

  “A few minutes.”

  “Your answer should have been yes, then. Yes, he remains uninjured. Which begs the question, why are you progressing so slowly?”