Black Fall

by Andrew Mayne

  “What’s his connection to the Red Chain?” asks Boyer.

  “I don’t think we are supposed to know there’s a connection between them. I think he just wanted a town to disappear, not necessarily a town full of religious zealots. I don’t know. I haven’t figured that part out. Maybe he hasn’t either. He could be improvising, and just leaped at this chance when he had it.”

  I reach a patch of tan dirt with a clump of dying shrubs. Using the tip of my shovel, I dig at the root. It only takes me one push to set the plant free and send it tumbling in the wind, off to become tumbleweed, I guess.

  With more force, I stab the shovel into the ground and throw the dirt aside.

  “Want some help?” asks Cranston, clearly uneasy watching me work.

  “Let the lady do her thing. Equal pay, equal work,” replies Boyer.

  “Spoken like a real feminist,” jokes Nadine.

  He offers her a smile. “I have three daughters, as tough as nails.”

  I make a small hole, large enough to reach my calf. “So the question for you all is: Why do you think Moffat is back there?”

  “On account of the road,” replies Boyer. “I thought we covered that.” I can tell he’s thinking I may be losing it.

  “You mean the paved road that ended in nothing?” I ask.

  “Yes. That would be the one. The only one off the highway for miles.” There’s an edge to his voice. He’s not enjoying my Socratic method.

  I jab the shovel into the ground again. The metal clangs against something solid. I feel a tingle of relief as I realize I might actually be on to something. I hurriedly scrape along the object with the shovel, scooping away more dirt from it until it becomes visible.

  “You sure that is the only road to Moffat?”

  I step back and reveal a small patch of asphalt.

  Boyer squats down and touches the surface of the road like it’s a religious artifact.

  He looks up at me, his face almost white. “Holy shit.”

  I hand him the shovel. “Keep digging, and I think you’ll find a demolished town buried at the end.” I point to a small rise in the landscape, then bend down and yank away another loose shrub, holding it up for them to see. The roots are only an inch or so long. “This brush was planted only for appearances and never had much chance to take hold.”

  Boyer uncovers more road, revealing a white line, then he hands the shovel to Cranston so the deputy can start widening the hole. He wipes his hands on his jeans and then crosses his arms, ready for an explanation.

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “The road back there, the one we thought lead to Moffat? They probably made it a little bit at a time overnight. It wouldn’t take terribly long, maybe a few weeks with the right equipment. They then buried it as the pavement finished cooling.” I place my palm on the asphalt below us. “If I wanted to get rid of a town, I’d use some bulldozers to dig trenches I could push the buildings into. The dirt from those holes got spread out over the road here.”

  “That sounds like a hell of a construction project,” says Boyer, not fully convinced.

  “They could have dug the trenches in advance and then covered the road all in one night. A hundred people, less than a quarter mile? Doable. I think.”

  Boyer nods his head. “That makes sense. I’ll buy it.” He looks in the direction of the buried town. “This road and the other one are only a few hundred feet apart. Easy to miss.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “All this time, we were looking in the wrong place.”

  “You didn’t know someone was actively trying to deceive you. The landscape is pretty similar from the air. Moving any little landmarks would be a cinch. And the GPS is close enough. As long as we kept looking for Moffat in the wrong place, we’d never find it.”

  “Why do it?” asks Cranston, leaning on the shovel.

  “I don’t know. Knowing the Warlock?” I groan. “We’ll probably find an exact copy of this town on the other side of the earth, in the Gobi or some bullshit.”

  “Really?” Nadine blurts out.

  “Maybe. Who knows with him? The sooner we tell people we’ve found Moffat, the more it will deflate his little moment.”

  “Well done.” Boyer tips his hat to me.

  I shake my head. “No. This isn’t the real problem. You asked me why he’d go through all this. That’s not my concern right now. We may have found the town, but we haven’t found the people. One hundred dedicated zealots willing to pull off a stunt like this? They are what scares me. We’ve seen how much damage just a few of them have been able to cause. Our capital is burning, and half the nation is rioting in darkness. Where the hell are the assholes who started this, and what are they up to now?”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Retreat

  I’ve got two dozen deeds spread out over the table in front of me in the RV. Nadine and I are taking turns poring over county records looking for clues as to who or what else may be out here. Through our window we can see the construction crew uncovering what’s left of Moffat.

  On a muted TV over our heads, scenes of fires and rioting play out in major cities. It’s strange. Out here in the desert, it feels a million miles away, hardly connected. But it all ties together. The sooner we can figure out the why and how, the sooner we can stop the anarchy—if it can be stopped.

  The door opens and Nadine and I scurry to keep the dry wind from blowing away the papers. Agent Nesbitt from the Denver office appears. She’s a healthy fortysomething, with short hair and the physique of someone who runs marathons on weekends. To the point and a solid investigator, we are lucky to get her out here in the middle of the crisis.

  “Sorry,” she says, apologizing for the disruption. “We’ve had cadaver dogs all over what we’ve dug up, and they haven’t found a thing. But that could be because any bodies are buried deep, and haven’t decomposed enough yet to smell.”

  “I’m not surprised. Still, we should be trying methane probes and excavating septic systems.” Over her shoulder, I spot a bulldozer pouring dirt back into a hole. “For fuck sake!”

  I barge past Nesbitt, storm out of the RV, and stride across the site to the hard-hat-wearing foreman. “What are you doing?” I shout over the sound of diesel engines.

  “Ask her.” He points behind me to Nesbitt as she comes running out after me.

  “What’s going on? Why are they covering it up?” I demand.

  “I’m sorry. Orders from above. We’re being sent back to Denver. We’re supposed to preserve everything until later.”

  “Until when? This is an active crime scene!”

  Nesbitt nods. “I know. But we’ve got a lot of active crime scenes. The rioting is getting worse. We’re being redeployed.”

  Nadine jogs after me with a defeated look, holding up her phone. “I just got an e-mail. I’m supposed to head back to Virginia.”

  Everything is collapsing around me. “This is bullshit,” I mutter to my feet, taking out my own phone to call Ailes.

  “What the hell?” I blurt into the receiver.

  “Remind me to talk to you about how to address your superiors,” he reprimands me, although not too angrily.

  I catch my breath and remember who I’m talking to. “I’m sorry. But jesus. They’re pulling everyone out of here!”

  “No bodies, Jessica,” he says sympathetically. “There’s nothing to actively investigate.”

  “The ‘no bodies’ part is what scares me. If we found a ditch of a hundred dead people, I could rest easy.”

  This remark earns me aghast looks from the construction foreman and Nesbitt. Nadine knows me well enough to understand what I mean.

  “I know. I know,” says Ailes. “But there’s nothing we can do. Half our field agents have been assigned to provide protective services. The other half are out chasing leads and trying to track down the rest of the members of the Red Chain your driver’s license trick revealed to us.”

  “That was Damian. But this place is a lead. This is t
he lead.”

  “I know you feel that way,” he says patiently. “What have you and Nadine found out so far?”

  I think of the RV table covered in property records and deeds. “Not much . . . yet. But it would make sense if they had some property out here somewhere. A place to keep construction equipment. A place for the other CCA setup.”

  “That thing was ancient. You could do it all from just a laptop now.”

  “Yeah. But—”

  “What?” he asks, waiting for me to make my case.

  Which I can’t.

  “I don’t know.” Everyone’s looking at me, so I turn away and talk lower. “It’s a gut feeling. An instinct. They chose here for a reason.”

  “To be away from everything.”

  “Maybe. But we still don’t know when Heywood first made contact. Hell, he could have been in the Red Chain.”

  “Don’t make this personal, Jessica.”

  “I’m not! Okay, I am. But you can’t pull us out of here,” I plead.

  “Breyer’s orders. We’re spread so thin.”

  I can tell Ailes is agitated by this too, but he has to follow orders.

  “Yeah, but . . .”

  I give up protesting. I can tell which way the tide is going.

  “However, I made a compromise with him.”

  “What was that?”

  “Since he doesn’t think the place is an immediate threat, you can stick around. Although I’m personally uneasy with that.”

  “Then let me keep Nadine,” I ask.

  “I wish I could, but I can’t. It’s not under my control.”

  “Send Gerald or Jennifer!” I beg.

  “They’re busy working on a system to look for software vulnerabilities that could be set off by a CCA two point zero. The floodgate tampering has us very concerned.”

  Their work is too important. I get it. “Fine. Fine.”

  “I can give you two days, then I need you back here. Understood?”

  I scan the desert and watch shimmering heat waves distort the distant Sangre de Cristo Mountains. “Alright.”

  “Jessica, don’t do anything rash.”

  “Me?” I say innocently.

  “Yeah, you.”

  We both know there’s going to be no way to avoid that.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Silverback

  A black Azteca with a white-tipped mane, Silverback trots up the slope as I tightly grip the pommel. Deputy Cranston had said this was his most well trained horse—subtly suggesting that would make it the best one to handle a rusty rider like myself. The last time I spent any serious time on a horse, I was eleven and at a summer riding camp in Los Angeles.

  A dozen other eleven-year-old girls and I would groom our rented horses then take them up the trails through Griffith Park, even trotting within view of the Hollywood sign. While we never got to break loose and run free across open pastures like I’d hoped, slowly riding nose to tail across dusty paths where the sprawling city could vanish for entire minutes at a time was still an exhilarating experience. Riding camp was supposed to be two weeks long, but we had to go to Ohio so Grandfather could perform in the state fair.

  “There will be horses at the fair,” he’d said when he saw the frustrated look on my face after Father told me I’d have to say good-bye to Popper, the old gray nag that had carried me around.

  Grandfather was right, sort of, but it seemed cruel to ride the sad fair ponies that walked circles inside a closed pen while screaming children pulled their ears and kicked their flanks. I’d seen a horse as some kind of symbol of empowerment until then. That just seemed like torture.

  The original plan had been for Deputy Cranston to ride with me as I checked out the surrounding bluffs and arroyos, but it fell apart when he got pulled into providing backup in town when the locals started stealing generators and fights began to break out. He reluctantly left me, but not before lending me one more cherished possession, a pistol grip tactical shotgun.

  I feel slightly absurd atop a horse with my shotgun by my side. Switch my University of Miami baseball cap for a cowboy hat and I’d look like something out of a bad postapocalyptic Western.

  I mapped out a path for Silverback and me to follow. Too spread out to travel to by the gravel roads that link them, horseback seemed like the most efficient method to explore the various parcels of land. Well, actually, a helicopter would be, but there was a fat chance I was going to get one of those out here. If I called Ailes asking for one, I’d have to explain that I was going this far out alone, and he’d lynch me himself.

  Silverback and I ride along the ridge, past the first place I want to inspect. It’s an open quarry where someone has tried to make a go of digging up marble. They mined what they could, then abandoned the site, and the dark blue granite walls go down thirty feet to a chalky brown floor that’s slowly filling up in the desert breeze. An ancient fence lines the edge of the property on the southern face. Half the enclosure is collapsed as erosion has undermined the supports and they’ve given way to fierce winds.

  There’s some rusty equipment and a pile of discarded circular saw blades that trigger flashbacks to my days of being sawed in half. On a tour that took us to Greece, our host gave my family a tour of an ancient marble quarry. It looked a lot like this, even the tools. The only difference was the ancient one was made by human power, not the engines that carved this one.

  Just as I couldn’t at that quarry, I can’t spot any tire tracks or other signs of human habitation here. A wooden shack the color of old newspapers—the lone standing structure—leans at an odd angle, its corners looking as though they’ve been gnawed by giant rodents.

  “You smell anything, boy?” I scratch Silverback behind the ear and he responds with an indifferent blink.

  Whatever, you crazy broad. When do I get to eat?

  I gently nudge him and he trots to the top edge of the quarry. We start our descent down a small canyon onto the next parcel. The deed to the parcel said “mineral exploitation.” The aerial photos showed some covered buildings and a few roads worn into the ground. It takes us about thirty minutes to get there, most of it over a slight upward grade.

  “Sorry, pal,” I mutter to Silverback, feeling guilty.

  He continues to plod along without protest. While I don’t think he’s unhappy like the fair ponies, I get the sense that he too has resigned himself to the fact that his lot in life is to endure selfish mercurial monkeys asking him to go from point to point. I try to stroke his mane reassuringly like I’m throwing tips at a harassed waiter. I’m pretty sure he’d prefer the edible kind of reward.

  The landscape of low brush and the occasional tree bent like some kind of desert bonsai would be more serene if I wasn’t so focused on spotting something that stood out. To be honest, I haven’t quite figured out what I’m looking for.

  The last time I dealt with the Warlock, he had an entire warehouse where he planned and practiced his sick schemes. He’d even marked out a mock-up of Times Square on the floor for one of his more heinous acts. Discovering that was like finding a blueprint.

  This time, with the Red Chain involved, I have no idea what I’m expecting. A giant building labeled: evil lair?

  What Ailes had said—about the CCA dirty tricks system being able to work from a laptop anywhere in the world—got me thinking I might be barking up the wrong tree. The Red Chain folks could be long gone to some criminal island paradise, planning their next phase.

  Their next phase.

  What exactly is the next phase for a death cult that’s already started a global panic? We’ve run through all kinds of scenarios, from dirty bombs to high-profile assassinations.

  Like the things they’ve already done, I suspect it’s something meant to incite a kind of panic: they want to get us to destroy ourselves. Just like the blackouts. We supplied the rioting and the looting. While messing with the floodgates and murdering hundreds of people is certainly vast in scope, I think it may also suggest they
realize that the old CCA tricks won’t work as well on a more modernized infrastructure.

  Of course, that’s discounting what they could do with the help of Heywood. He managed to hack the FBI’s computer system. Technically just the home page, but still, a system more secure than those of many other vital facilities. According to Jennifer and Gerald, there are thousands of vulnerabilities open to a hacker with this kind of capability. Waiting to see what happens next is not an option.

  On the ground, I can see that the buildings in the overhead photos I examined are actually just sheds, where a few trailers and oil drums are shielded from the sun. The tall weeds sprouting around the central yard suggest this place hasn’t had many visitors either. After a few minutes of careful scrutiny, I decide to move on.

  Next on my map is a piece of property listed as being owned by Triple Star Construction. Silverback takes us up a ridge and down a slope, then finds a very narrow trail that leads to the top of the hill. The ground levels off and we reach a flat parcel nestled between two high ridges.

  Weathered water tanks and machine parts I can’t identify are strewn about the lot. This place doesn’t look like it’s had much attention.

  Silverback starts chewing on some grass. I decide he knows better than I do if it’s harmful, and hop off so I can rest my sore ass. I find a rock that overlooks the valley, including where Moffat was. I guess is.

  It’s a great view. The valley floor is an undulating blanket of brown and bronze that grows progressively more wrinkled as it gets closer to the mountains. Slate-colored storm clouds hover in the distance and rain down over distant hills. I sip some water and try to forget the craziness going on in the world.

  Up here, with her loyal steed and full canteen—actually a water bottle—a girl could get by just fine, assuming she doesn’t need to eat, or sleep on anything with a decent thread count.

  I enjoy the breeze and the sound of the horse munching on his high desert salad. As the wind drifts through the dry brush I listen to the crickets chirp. Silverback’s ear twitches and he stares at something off to the side of the hill. He determines that it’s just a normal bush, and returns to his buffet. But my own ears tilt as I notice the noise Silverback picked up. A whirring tone, mechanical.