by Ben Adams
The journal rested on the ground near John’s car, dropped by Colonel Hollister at some point, an ancient text awaiting discovery. And his gun. Several of the pictures were scattered next to it. John ran over, scooped them up. He shook dirt from the photos before putting them in the journal, then picked up the gun.
When John rose, Colonel Hollister stood between him and the Winnebago. Colonel Hollister still held his gun, but it was lowered. He looked tired, angry, like the fan of a second-place team. John walked to the RV, and as he passed Colonel Hollister, the defeated officer clutched John’s arm.
“This isn’t over,” he whispered. “You think running will save you. I will find you.”
John jerked his arm free, took a few steps toward the Winnebago.
“Your mother has her women’s group on Tuesday,” Colonel Hollister said.
“What did you say?” John said, spinning around.
“They’re getting ready for their annual fund raiser.”
“You touch my mother…” John gripped and re-gripped the gun in his hand.
“I believe they’re doing a flower show this year.”
“You son of a bitch,” he said, pointing the gun at Colonel Hollister.
The side of Colonel Hollister’s mouth rose slightly. He tossed his gun on the ground. It landed against a small grass cluster, growing shrewdly between cracks in the earth.
John stepped closer to him, held the gun inches from Colonel Hollister’s chest.
“There’s only one way you can stop me,” Colonel Hollister said, his arms outstretched, surrendering. “Only one way for this to end.”
Colonel Hollister would never stop coming after him, never leave him or his family alone. He would track John to Denver, ambush him leaving work, or when he was in one of the city’s dark and lonely corners, photographing a client’s wayward husband dressed like Rudolph at a Santa-themed orgy. Or he’d go to John’s home some night while his mother was alone, force his way in like he had at the hotel, and John would return to find his mother tied up, or worse. Rooftop, he’d fight back. But it’d be a short fight. His mom, Rooftop, everyone he’d ever cared about, they were all in danger. Unless John stopped Colonel Hollister here. Now.
John flipped the safety and moved his finger to the trigger. He took a deep breath. It would be easy. He could do this. It would be just like when Rooftop took him to the shooting range, firing at a silhouetted paper man. His finger twitched, then steadied. He squinted. But he didn’t shoot.
A sudden tickle in his mind, like a hand had reached across the car rubble and stupefied soldiers and was massaging a sensitive part of his brain. He shook his head like he’d eaten ice cream too quickly, but the tingling lingered and evolved into a voice with all the stumbling pauses, added syllables, and slow drawl of the Deep South.
Leadbelly.
John glanced over to the RV. Leadbelly’s mouth didn’t move, but he still spoke, like a ventriloquist without a miniature companion. It was John’s first experience with telepathy and he found it invasive and a little creepy, like Leadbelly was watching him shower.
Leadbelly transferred information about Sagittarian technology into John’s brain. Not everything, but just enough to make John lower the gun and look at it like it was an obsolete weapon.
“This is why I will always win,” Colonel Hollister said. “You don’t have what it takes.”
“You don’t really understand what’s happened here, do you?” John said.
“You can try to run, but I will find you. I will find your family. Every last one of them.”
“You just got your ass handed to you by a bunch of Elvis impersonators in flying Winnebagos.”
“I will firebomb that little town.”
“And they didn’t even fire a shot.”
“Turn the trailer parks into mass graves.”
“So, here’s what’s going to happen. You’re going to leave us alone.”
“I will nuke the whole desert. Turn the sky purple. Wherever you’re trying to hide.”
“Me, my family, Leadbelly, everyone else in the journal. You’re going to head back to Los Alamos and leave us alone.”
“You think anyone will be able to tell the difference between the desert and a nuclear wasteland? I will find you, whatever it takes.”
John motioned to Leadbelly.
One of the RVs, an old, two-tone Dodge Travco, descended, floated behind one of the Hummers. Three aluminum beams covered the square grill. The beams lowered and rested against the front bumper. A metal tube extended from the square and began to spin and glow.
A black circle formed in front of the Travco. It was twenty-four inches of nothingness, empty of light and matter and everything else that filled the universe. Wind rushed into the emptiness and the Hummer was sucked across the earth toward it. The end narrowed and stretched like dark green taffy, and it began to spiral into the void. The vehicle twisted and spun as it was drained away. And when it’d been sucked into the hole, the only thing that remained was the stretches of dragged dirt marking the failure of three tons of engine and armor against time-consuming gravity.
The darkness was pulled back into the metal tube, the tube retracted into the RV, the grill rose, and light and sound and life returned, replacing the emptiness.
“Was that…”
“A particle accelerator,” John said. “Every RV has one.”
“A sustainable black hole? That would require…”
“A shitload of energy. Now you know what you’re up against. Anything you launch, send, try to detonate, will get sucked into oblivion.”
“What are you proposing?” Colonel Hollister squinted.
“A truce. You stay away from us, we stay away from you.”
“Usually these types of pacts work when both sides have some sort of deterrent, something keeping the other side from breaking it. What assurances do I have that you won’t destroy us?” Colonel Hollister smirked like he had something more devastating than the breach of an event horizon.
“You have my word.”
“The word of an Abernathy. Worthless. I have a better idea. You keep your black holes locked away. In exchange, I keep your father.”
“My father?” John stepped back, almost stumbling over a rock.
“We have him in a cryonic deep-freeze at our Los Alamos facility.”
For most of his life, John had lived with the narrative that his father ran out on them, leaving his mother at the foot of the mountains to raise a son. It was a common story, a young father not ready for responsibility. A son who grew up unable to cope with the conflicting emotions that came from having someone who was supposed to love and protect him leave without even hearing a sobbing five-year-old’s appeal. As much as he believed this version of the past, there was a place in John that always knew his father didn’t abandon him. He’d buried it in his dreams, those nocturnal moments when his father visited and endured the coldness of a teenager who only knew how to deal with his frustrations by turning inward, obsessing over puzzles. But his father didn’t just live in his dreams. Apparently, he’d been in Los Alamos most of John’s life, frozen. John peered into Colonel Hollister’s mind and knew he was telling the truth.
His father is in a tube, the ice-frosted glass, his blue face preserved by the cryonic chemical bath and Sagittarian DNA. Machines are monitoring the fluids and gases keeping him close to death. The facility’s layout unfolds in reverse, the room, the hallway, elevator, stairs, lobby, the security guard everyone calls ‘Bobby J’, the sign on the glass door reading ‘Wayland Accounting’, the nondescript Ford Tauruses in Parking Lot A of a corporate complex called ‘Aspen Meadows’. Colonel Hollister is going through various levels of security, thumb print, retinal scan, voice recognition, Cape Canaveral trivia, swiping scan cards, entering key codes, and John was sure those security measures would change and the passwords he’d just seen Colonel Hollister use were useless.
Snapshots of the search and capture of his father, the Air For
ce giving up hunting body doubles and switching their focus to Archibald Abernathy’s descendants. Colonel Hollister is in Philadelphia, watching some of John’s distant cousins repair water heaters and steal tools from the homes they are working in. He is in New Mexico, sitting in a Jeep, reading carbon copied excerpts from Archibald’s journal. There is purple ink on his hand and he takes out a handkerchief and wipes it, but the paper is smudged. He is in Colorado, watching a film of John’s dad rushing from a burning building with an elderly woman wrapped in a wool blanket. His arms and face are burned. The camera is handheld and palsied and when it zooms in on John’s father’s arm to record it quickly healing, the camera jerks and has to find him again, reframing him. His dad looks around and runs off screen. His father is leaving work and Colonel Hollister approaches him with three men. Threats are made and John’s father agrees to go with them, offering himself in exchange for the lives of his wife. And son.
It happened quickly, decades were viewed in the time it took for a single electrical impulse to fire across the hemisphere of his brain. And John was back in his own mind.
If Colonel Hollister noticed John watching a montage of his memories, he didn’t show it. He stared at John with an arrogant grin, the same grin he had when he approached John’s father and took away whatever options he might have had at a future with his family, with his son. John understood that his father had to leave, sacrifice himself for John and his mother, creating the unintended consequence that, for the past eighteen years, John had been angry at the wrong person.
“This is all your fault,” John said. “Everything we’ve gone through, my mom and me, all because…Goddamnit! This is all your fault!”
“So, is it a deal? You have your black holes and I have your father.”
A few wild flowers grew among some rocks and shell casings, their thin and stringy stalks, their small bulbs hiding vibrant colors. They survived the boot and tire treads and arid climate and were beginning to open. Flowers in half bloom, providing a glimpse of beauty amid the desolation. They seemed out of place, but belonged there, having made an evolutionary bargain necessary for survival.
“And we leave each other alone,” John said.
“We leave each other alone.”
John knew Colonel Hollister had spent his life hunting extraterrestrials, and to have come this close, seeing them descend from the sky in rickety and rusted RVs, the perfect disguise, he wouldn’t stop now. And John’s father, all this time, locked away, frozen, visiting John in dreams, only to receive cold anger. John couldn’t stop either.
They didn’t shake hands. They just stared at each other for a minute, each man plotting, scheming, knowing the other was doing the same.
John ran to the Winnebago and jumped in. As they lifted skyward, John stood in the open door, watching the world shrink. Colonel Hollister stood in the middle of the vehicles, watching them rise. Off to the side, unaffected by the flying Winnebago, a man smoked. The faint glow of tobacco embers offered little light, but John saw the nose, mouth, chin of Rex Grant. He took a few more drags, then threw the cigarette on the ground and crushed it. He stepped deeper into the darkness between the vehicles. Disappeared.
They had been telling stories about Elvis for an hour and now it was the driver Ricky Handjive’s turn. He was a body double like Leadbelly, and told them a story about Elvis in Hawaii. Elvis is drunk, naked, chasing a mongoose with a handgun while eating a turkey leg, or maybe the mongoose is chasing Elvis. Handjive didn’t really remember.
“Can you believe that sonuvabitch?” Sheriff Masters asked, laughing as Handjive acted out the story’s climax, where a drunk, naked, gun-toting Elvis straddled a palm tree.
John sat at the kitchen table, staring out the window. He wasn’t interested in ancient stories of a drunken pop star. He was thinking about something more recent.
“Did you know Hollister had my dad?” he asked Leadbelly, who was seated across from him.
“No way, man,” Leadbelly said.
“I thought you were all connected or something.”
“He musta closed himself off from us before Hollister put him in the deep freeze.”
“You can do that?” John asked, surprised. He set Archibald’s journal on the gold-flecked, white Formica table. It seemed incomplete, like an introductory textbook.
“Man, you’re gonna learn there’s a lot we can do.”
The kitchen table seat cushions’ coarse fibers, a plaid of interwoven greens, browns, and oranges, scratched against John’s jeans as he slid across it.
The blinds on the window were up. They passed over a highway. The headlights of the few cars beneath them were the only lights, and John barely saw the surface, the thin road, the near-dead earth. The Winnebago veered away from the road and the world outside John’s window became obscured by height and darkness.
“Where are we going,” he asked, hoping Leadbelly was fulfilling his promise and taking him to Rosa, but he was doubtful. “And I don’t want any of your mysterious shit.”
“Mysterious shit?” Leadbelly smirked. He waved his arms at John like he was conjuring spirits. “John Abernathy, you have been whisked away, man. Into the great beyond,” he said, sounding like a spooky fortune teller delivering the tagline from Elvis and the Groovy Ghost. John knocked Leadbelly’s hands away. Leadbelly stuck them back up, waving in hokey eeriness. “Co-starring Ann-Margret.”
“Ann-Margret?” Handjive spun. “Man, I gave her a Tijuana Toilet Seat.”
The taillights of Winnebagos, Coachmens, and Holiday Ramblers glowed red in the black sky. A Chevy with a Coleman Camper on their right. A green glow radiated from underneath each vehicle.
“Whew,” the sheriff said from the passenger seat. “Would you look at that?” He leaned over the dash, gawking at a vintage trailer above them, the kind found on highways sixty years ago. A chrome bullet cutting through the flesh of a country.
“I know what you mean, man,” Handjive said, patting the dash. “It’s a combination of a diesel engine and good-old Sagittarian know-how.”
“Where are we going?” John asked again.
“Someplace where we can be safe, man,” Leadbelly said. “Just trust me.”
John lifted his knees up, wrapped his arms around them, turned away from his sparkling relative, and tried to see past the reflection of their ship’s interior in the window and into the void beyond, but all he saw was the image of his own face, the lines creasing his forehead, the bags behind his glasses, the fatigue of an epiphany, and he turned and stretched out across the kitchen table’s bench seat, his back to the window and the Rockies, indiscernible from this distance and altitude. Even if they were visible, he couldn’t look at them. They reminded him of Denver, his life there, and about how, even if he did return, he’d have to tell his mom about the journal, the Sagittarians, his father. How was he going to tell her his dad was alive? and frozen in a lab in New Mexico?
This isn’t easy for me, you know. John didn’t say this. He thought it. It was not an internal thought, meant for introspection. He directed it at Leadbelly.
I know, man, Leadbelly thought back.
My life was supposed to be art and creation. Me and my mom. Now I’m an alien fugitive, related to an Elvis impersonator.
Man, I told them I’d make a good role-model. Leadbelly smiled at this thought.
Where did you get those pictures of me? John slid the stack of photos across the table. They were fanned out, each blade a shard of the past twenty-three years.
I’ve been watching you.
What are we talking here, lurking in the bushes, or video camera in the changing room?
Not like that, man. I was looking out for you.
And my dad, my grandpa? did you take those pictures, too?
Your grandpa, yeah, but not your dad. I was in Vegas when he was born, man.
Why look out for us?
We’re family, man. We look out for each other. That’s what we do. Leadbelly reached across the table a
nd put his hand on John’s forearm.
The only person you look out for is yourself. John wrenched his arm away.
Leadebelly brushed some dust onto the floor, his pinkie ring scraping the table.
Someone told you to take those pictures. John tapped the journal. Did Jonathon Deerfoot order Rosa to sleep with me?
Jonathon Deerfoot’s dead. Leadbelly’s thoughts and emotions blended and John felt his sorrow. Man, he died forty years ago. Someone else’s calling the shots now.
You’re just a giant piece of sequined ambiguity, aren’t you?
What can you do, man? Leadbelly shrugged his shoulders.
I have a few ideas. John gripped the table with both hands, stared intensely at Leadbelly.
He thrust his mind into Leadbelly’s, searching for answers, but hit a wall and was jolted back into his body like he’d been caught by the seatbelt and the driver suddenly slammed on the brakes.
Telepathy, man, Leadbelly thought, laughing inside John’s head. I knew what you were going to try the minute you thought it. Gave me time to get my psychic defenses up. Good for you for trying, man. Don’t worry. You’ll learn how to do that stuff, too.
John rubbed his head with the palms of both hands.
“Who’s worried?” he said.
The ground glowed in the distance. It started out small, like a beacon, but as they got closer, they saw it wasn’t a solitary light, but a series of lights on a grid.
“We’re coming in for a landing, boys,” Handjive said.
Out the front window, the other RVs gently glided to the surface, landing beside hundreds of small boxes lined up side by side. Spaces, like roads, separated some of the boxes, while others were almost on top of each other.
As they got closer, the details on the boxes started coming into focus. Metal, plastic, fiberglass. Colored stripes adorned white backgrounds. Solid colors, blue, green, or silver, covered others. Entrances were sheltered by awnings, Christmas lights stapled to them. Some were just plain.
