by Weston Ochse
Veronica guided them to a non-descript but well maintained trailer. Behind it was another trailer of the same size, only this was buried in the sand almost all the way to the roofline. Stairs had been excavated down to the front door. At the top of the stairs was a swinging gate with a sign that read "KEEP OUT." Music came from inside - Gilbert and Getz's The Girl from Ipanema.
"This is it."
"Where are we?" Natasha asked.
"The La-bor-a-tory," Derrick said, in a mock Eastern European accent.
Veronica giggled. "Your brother's funny."
Natasha shook her head. "Please don't encourage him."
"But he's right. The Mad Scientist is down there even as we speak, working on God knows what." She pointed to the door with the small, lit red bulb above it. "See that? It means he's in there working and doesn't want anyone coming in. He says sometimes he's developing pictures and daylight could destroy what he's working on."
"It's so buried you can't even see the windows," Derrick said. "Weird."
"What is he really doing?" Natasha asked.
"Making monsters is my guess." Veronica grinned. "Hell, I don't know. But can you think of anything better to do than find out?"
"How are we gonna see in if there aren't any windows?" Derrick asked.
"Easy. Follow me." Veronica turned and looked at them sharply. "But watch your step. You slip and you might just die." She held their gaze for a moment, then turned and chuckled.
Natasha shook her head. More smack. There were odd moments when Veronica appeared to be some sort of cross between a deadly gangbanger and an insane Pippi Longstocking.
Veronica went to the right of the stairs and walked carefully toward the end of the trailer. She stepped lightly onto the roof and began to take tiny steps along its length.
"What are you doing?" Natasha stage whispered.
Veronica beckoned her to follow. "Trust me," she mouthed. "It's okay."
Derrick moved to go first, but Natasha grabbed him by the back of the collar and hauled him back. Instead she went, creeping across the sand and stepping atop the rusted metal roof of the submerged trailer as if it were made of egg shells. Her brother followed.
They clumped together near the middle of the roof. The black roof tiles were too hot from the sun for them to sit. Even touching it for more than a few seconds became painful. So instead, they squatted. Veronica peeled back a piece of roof tile and rotated it on the nail that held it in place, revealing a hole underneath, the size of a quarter. The music became louder, and might have been loud enough to cover any accidental sound they might make, but Natasha wouldn't put money on it.
Veronica put her eye to the hole and stared into the trailer for a moment. Then she turned to Natasha, "Here, take a look."
Natasha scooted next to Veronica and peered into the hole. At first she thought her vision might be blocked, but then she realized that it was the top of a man's head, bouncing to the beat of the song. Then she began to make out more of the man. His arms were raised as if working on something, but try as she might, she couldn't see what it was. Tools were scattered along the surface of a stainless steel bench.
She felt Derrick tap her shoulder and shrugged him away.
"Come on. It's my turn," he hissed.
She ignored him, instead trying to will the Mad Scientist to move his head so that she could see what he was working on. Here and there she'd get a glimpse of something green, but nothing more. It reminded her of the frogs they'd been forced to dissect in eighth grade science. Most of the girls had cringed and feigned illness when it was their turn, but it hadn't bothered Natasha. She'd always thought frogs were gross and slimy and had no compunctions about cutting them open. As a matter of fact, she'd enjoyed touching their nerves and watching their legs twitch. A part of her worried at how much she'd liked it.
"My turn."
Natasha shushed her brother, then realized too late that the sound had carried into the trailer.
The Mad Scientist's arms stopped working. His head lifted as if he were listening. After a moment, he shook his head and resumed his work, his head bobbing once again to the beat. He reached for what looked like a voltage meter, and when he did so, what he'd been working on was revealed.
She gasped and jerked her head back.
"Finally," Derrick whispered in exasperation.
He knelt and placed both hands on either side of the hole, as he peered inside the trailer.
Natasha stared at roof of the trailer open-mouthed.
"What did you see?" Veronica asked.
Natasha turned to the girl. She couldn't get her mind around the idea, much less her mouth around the words.
Derrick cursed and stood up so quickly he almost lost his balance.
Veronica reached out to help him. "What is it?"
Derrick's eyes were bugged. "He saw me."
Just then they heard the music cut off and the locks rattling inside the door.
Veronica grabbed Natasha's hand. "Come on!"
Derrick hopped off the roof and took off. Veronica pulled Natasha after her. They ran for five minutes until they came to rest within the warm shadows of sump pump #2. All three of them were bent over double, grabbing their knees or waists and gasping.
"What did you see?" Veronica asked.
Natasha thought about the frogs she'd studied at school and how she could make the legs jump and kick. Then she thought about the hand she'd seen on the Mad Scientist's workbench, the drab green fingers jumping and kicking like the legs of the frog. Unless the Mad Scientist had found the dismembered hand of an alien, she had no idea where it'd come from. All she knew was that seeing a body part on that workbench, a human body part, sent shivers down her spine.
Gerald Duphrene and George Silva had played cards every night after the sun had gone down. Whether it was Tonk, Cribbage, Nerts, Gin or Stud Poker, they never failed to play some sort of game. Rarely did they ever exchange a word. They didn't have to.
George had left a deck of cards on the kitchen table after he'd gone back to Kentucky with his wife. There wasn't a note, or any direction, but Gerald had known what to do. So every night after dusk he sat at his table and played solitaire. The game kept George close: when Gerald won, he beat George, and when Gerald lost, George beat him.
The day found Gerald once again at George's old yellow and white trailer. It seemed perfectly reasonable that this was the place he'd decided to trap the monster, and deep down he believed that George would have liked it that way. After all, the old card shark was always telling Gerald that he "wasn't too old to still take it to the enemy."
Gerald turned the battery off on the golf cart and set the emergency brake. It was time.
It had been many years since the Korean War. Then, Gerald had been brave out of necessity. Someone else had forced bravery upon him. It was simple: either be brave or be dead. But now it was his choice. He could leave Bombay Beach and never turn back. But this was his home. This was really all he knew, and he wasn't about to be driven out by the monsters. So if he was going to stand and fight, he had to get used to the monsters.
"Enough thinking," Gerald said out loud. "Now get to the doing."
He stepped up the wooden steps and entered the trailer. The living room was open to the sky, the ceiling looking as if it had been ripped open by a giant hand. He stared at it for a long moment to put off doing what he needed to do, but reluctantly turned his attention to the hall. It extended before him, seeming longer than it should have been.
There was a time he would have taken a hill without a thought. He did it for his country. He did it for his friends. He did it for the spirits of his family. Gerald tried to grasp that feeling again as he put one foot in front of the other and began the long trek down the hall.
The sound of his teeth gritting could be heard over the beating of his heart. He began to notice a smell, like bloated fish and pollution. The closer he got to the room, the stronger the smell became, until it was all he could breathe.
The door had been smashed in and hung on its hinges, the upper half sagging and unsupported by the middle hinge. He focused on the cheap brass door knob, and then pushed the door open a few inches.
He didn't look at it, but he saw it in the reflection of the knob as a big black blur. He could make it out in his peripheral vision. Arms, legs, a head. But still all a blur. If only he could keep it blurry he might not be so scared, for as God was his witness, his mind reeled with fear, as if it was his first day in the Land of the Morning Calm and the Chinese were massing beneath his hill.
Fear had a taste and it tasted like steel. The taste of a bayonet in the rain, or of a rifle shell clenched between the teeth to keep from screaming.
Gerald turned his head and beheld the monster.
Its skin was a universal green, like necrotic skin around an untended wound. A military uniform clung to the monster, torn at the sleeves, across the chest and at the knees. Its feet were bare and had rotted partially away. The monster's arms hung at its side, long, muscular, mottled green, its hands opening and closing. The face was half gone. Cheeks gave away above the jaw, the tip of the nose was gone, an ear was missing. Hair hung in clumps, leaving spots of baldness. The eyes were the only things still intact, but they were changed, replaced by a yellow so incandescent, it was like urine on freshly packed snow.
It lunged at Gerald, and he screamed.
But the monster drew up short as the chain attaching the iron-jawed trap on its leg to the trailer's axle snapped taught. It wheezed loudly in the small room as it pulled against the chain, less than a foot from Gerald's face.
But Gerald kept his eyes shut. He felt his insides shrivel. Something clamped around his heart and constricted it. Urine soaked his pants. He realized that his hooks were trembling on the end of his arms.
He remembered what his old sergeant had told him when he was in Korea. There was a phrase he was told to repeat over and over and it had worked for a time, keeping the fear at bay.
He opened his mouth to speak, but the sandpaper that his lips had become refused to work. He ran a thick tongue over them several times until he was able to speak.
"Fucking gook bastards," he whispered.
He willed his eyes to open just a crack.
The monster leered at him with yellow eyes.
"Fucking gook bastards," he managed to say with a little more conviction.
The monster lunged at the end of the chain but couldn't get any closer.
"Fucking gook bastards!"
Gerald felt the power of the words come back to him. He remembered their entire platoon screaming the phrase over and over as they were attacked on his third night in the country. The mantra had rang out over the valley, even louder than the rifle fire. They hadn't lost a man that night. The power of the words had held them together.
So now, as then, Gerald crowed the words to the ceiling, as if his friends in heaven could hear him. He began to laugh, a strange laugh that he hadn't heard come from his mouth since the war.
And he screamed the mantra. Over and over, the words that had kept him alive so long ago bounced off the snarling face of the green-skinned monster that stared back at him with mad glowing eyes.
"Fucking gook bastards!"
He screamed it again and felt better for it.
Her nose was inches away as she tried to see under the door. But the hallway on the other side was all darkness and shadows. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't pierce the gloom.
Was it gone? Was it still out there?
She'd caught herself several times with her hand on the door knob, prepared to open it. Only at the last second did she recognize the danger, remembering her husband's words after he'd finished the construction.
"Don't open the door no matter what happens," her husband had said. "When the end comes, and it will, you want to be the last one standing, so let the rest of the world fight it out while you wait here inside."
Only one thing kept her from following his instructions - her hunger. It was devastating. It ate at her inside, clawed at her throat and needled into her psyche.
Feed me. Feed me. Feed me.
She hadn't had a thing since yesterday morning.
"Are you there?" she whispered.
No answer.
She turned back towards Trudie, whose gaze remained fixed on the door. The dog had been her danger barometer and still believed that the thing was outside. But could it be wrong? Could the dog merely be as scared as she was?
"Please. Are you there?"
And then she heard it, the slight wheezing sound of the creature.
She tried to peer into the darkness and see where it was, when an eye suddenly appeared before her on the other side of the door. Yellow and unholy, it stared back at her.
Trudie barked, breaking the spell.
Abigail scrambled to her feet and ran back to the bed. She grabbed the pistol with one hand and her dog with the other.
Sooner or later that creature had to go.
Abigail glanced down at her dog as she stroked its downy fur. Hopefully sooner, because she was getting hungry.
"What about a mermaid?" Derrick asked drowsily, still smirking at her story. He lay on the couch, his head pressed into a pillow.
Natasha stared at the snow on the television and tried to ignore the thousandth question Derrick had posed on learning about the hand she'd seen. He'd run the guess gamut from the Hulk to green M&Ms. It was clear that he didn't really believe her, but she knew what she'd seen and the vision still haunted her - the Mad Scientist applying surgical clamps to the tendons of an amputated hand. It occurred to her that Derrick would have more readily believed her if she hadn't said the hand was green. As strange as it was, the idea of a regular dismembered hand was normal compared to the reality of the green one.
"What about the Creature from the Black Lagoon?"
She sighed, took a sip from a coke that had long ago turned warm and flat, then returned the can to the end table. "The hand wasn't webbed," she said flatly.
"Aha!" Derrick pumped his fist. "Now we're getting somewhere."
Natasha shook her head. They'd turned in for the night, lying once again on the leather couches. Her dad had come in late in the afternoon, talked to her and Derrick for a moment, and gone into her grandfather's bedroom. She'd heard him crying. She'd heard it a lot, but it still disturbed her and wasn't something she wanted to hear again.
Later, Maude had come over and made shrimp tacos on the grill. Auntie Lin made fried rice. They'd all sat on the roof patio with a view of the sun's dying rays across the red-hued Salton Sea. Her dad and Maude drank a few beers. Natasha was happy to see that he only had a couple.
They talked a little about the missing Beachy boy, then spent the rest of the conversation talking about Gertie. It seemed that she was prone to going off by herself. Something that had driven Natasha's grandfather crazy when he'd lived with her, but as Maude pointed out, he was also often the reason Gertie left. As of yet, there was still no sign of her, but then again, for increasingly obvious reasons, no one had really looked.
Maude explained to the Olivers how she and Gertie had both dated Lazlo. Maude had met him first and been with him for ten years. When they separated, he'd spent the next ten years with Gertie. During the last five years, both of them had dated him on and off, but at their age, it was nothing like when they were younger.
Maude also emphasized that neither she nor Gertie were the reason Patrick's father had left his mother. That had been a woman truck driver named Emily Ferger, with whom he'd decided to start a new life in El Centro. Within months he'd regretted leaving, but knew that he could never go back; he'd broken a trust that could never be mended. To return would have been "a Band-Aid on cancer": he hadn't wanted to do more harm than he already had done.
Maude explained that she'd always been more independent than Gertie. Maude came from a family of eight children and Gertie had been an only child. She'd needed Lazlo as both a friend and a love
r and was taking his death harder than Maude.
Natasha replayed the conversation in her mind several times. She'd had friends, but she'd never felt as if she couldn't live without them. She'd wondered if there was something wrong with her, because everyone else she knew, Derrick included, seemed to need their friends as if they were extensions of themselves.
But not Natasha. She had an independent streak a mile long. She'd been picked second to last once on the kick ball team and, instead of playing, had walked away. She hadn't needed to play to have a good time. She'd just wanted to be around people, to see them laugh and play and to live vicariously through them. Although she hadn't been able to think about it in those terms back then, she was coming to understand it now.
"What about a man from the moon?" Derrick asked, his voice on the verge of sleep.
"He'd be made of cheese," Natasha said.
"Could be green cheese," he murmured.
"Stinky cheese. You would have smelled it."
Derrick nodded sagely. "We would have. Good point, Watson."
Natasha stared at the television screen for awhile, letting her mind drift. So much had happened. Looking around Bombay Beach, other than Veronica, she didn't think there were any other kids - and the Amish kids didn't count.
"Natasha?"
"Yes, Derrick."
"Why do you think they call static on the television snow?"
"What does it look like to you?"
Derrick considered for a moment, then answered. "An electronic Etch-a-Sketch."
"Do you see shapes?" She felt sleep only moments away.
"Sure. Like clouds."
She was beginning to drift along the current of her dreams when she felt a tug at her arm.
"Natasha, wake up."
She didn't want to leave. Everything tasted like peppermint, even the air. There was a rumble as if a volcano was erupting purple, molten chocolate far away -
