8
Las Vegas, Nevada
He reopened his eyes and stared out at his empty livingroom. No Insurgents there. His hands were now visibly trembling. He shook them and balled them in and out of fists to try and get it to stop. It didn’t work.
As usual, he wondered at the purely analytical tone of his memories. One of the shrinks had called it diminished affect: the human brain’s capacity to reduce traumatic events to cold facts, devoid of emotion. It had sounded like psycho-babble bullshit to him then, and it sounded the same way now, but according to the shrink, everybody had it, to one degree or another - an evolutionary remnant of the collective unconscious, used as a coping mechanism since time immemorial. Problems occurred when it seeped into everyday emotional life, turning people into Mr. Spock. Live long and prosper.
That hadn’t happened to him, yet; he still retained his outward humanity. But unlike most people, he knew the inhuman darkness lay inside him, somewhere down below the surface. He’d seen it in action. He’d felt its pure joy of carnage. None of the shrinks had been able to touch it. No one had. It only came out in his nightmares.
Fuck this! He flipped open the lacquered box’s lid, with its green, red, and gold dragon, looking as if it were just about to snack on a few tasty babies, and grabbed a pre-rolled joint. Get a grip, Jake, he thought, lighting it and drawing in a big hit. He held it for a few moments, then blew it out in a cloud of smoke. The warm tingle began almost immediately. Find your Happy Place, hug your Inner Child, Spank your Monkey. Do whatever it takes, but DO NOT dwell on this shit. He took another hit and the pressure that had been building behind his eyes began to ease.
So, he’d go to work a little buzzed. Better than the alternative. Think of something else: puppies, organic chemistry, hot chicks in butt-floss bikinis...Rachel.
Danielle, he told himself. Dani. Need to remember to call her Dani.
Last night, he’d cooked dinner for her at his place, something he truly enjoyed doing, but reserved only for the people he liked a lot. And he did like her a lot. Quite a lot, in fact, and unquestionably enough to ignore their arrangement.
He thought about calling her, although a quick look at the clock (not yet five) told him now would not be the time. Maybe he’d ask her to dinner tonight. Mom wouldn’t mind - would in fact probably be quite pleased he had a girl in his life. And he thought they would get along great.
But the abrupt way Dani said goodby, and the expression on her face as she saw him slip the money into her purse . . .
Three
“I have striven not to laugh at human actions,
not to weep at them, nor to hate them,
but to understand them.”
Baruch Spinoza
1
Paradise, Nevada
Danielle (Dani) McGinty, age 32, was a whore. No sense in denying it - at least not to herself. She could dress it up, bestow the title of Escort on what she did for a living, since she’d never had to resort to physically walking the streets (thank God), or maybe Concubine, since she’d been a kept woman a few times over the years. But when it came right down to it - when she stripped away the self-serving rhetoric - she was nothing but a whore, and she knew it.
And whores don’t have boyfriends.
She continued packing clothes into her Luis Vuitton luggage. The bags would clash horribly with the inside of her nine year-old Nissan Maxima, but she would be going in style. And go she must.
What could she have been thinking? Why had she done it? Why had she let her guard down, let the wall she’d spent so long building just fall away? Why had she told him her real name?
Danielle wasn’t the name on her driver’s licence, and it hadn’t been for a very long time. The one that appeared on the latest incarnation was Rachel Adams. At least this one had her natural hair color: a sort of chestnut, sort of brown, sort of blonde conglomeration that somehow worked (most of the time). She’d been blonde before, and straight brunette, and raven, and a redhead, and even a punked-out black and purple, once upon a side trip into new wave style.
The name before Rachel had been Amy Conniger, and before that, Molly Gideon. Somewhere back in the mists there was Michelle Devereaux, and oh Lord, had she ever put on airs for that one! She’d even given herself a mild British accent. But hey, it worked. The Luis Vuitton was proof.
In the end, however, in the final, inescapable analysis, they were all bullshit, just as the stories she’d wrapped around them had been all bullshit, just as the entirety of her adult life (and a not-insignificant chunk of her adolescence) had been pure, unadulterated bullshit. And she had used that to shore up her defenses, to build her wall, to hide who she really was, and what she really was: a whore.
So why had she just tossed it all away?
Was it because he’d given her really good orgasms? No. Couldn’t be. She’d come more times over the years than could easily be calculated by existing technology. And yes, of course, she’d faked it before, at least twice as often, but she hadn’t kept doing what she was doing just because the money was good.
And it had been good. Sometimes it had been great. And sometimes it had been lousy, but that wasn’t the reason. Okay, it wasn’t the only reason.
She liked sex. There! She’d said it! She liked it.
She hadn’t always liked it, any more than she liked all the men she’d been with. Some of them she couldn’t give the tiniest damn about, and at least one of them she outright hated: the Rat Bastard, her stepfather, the man who stole her virginity, her innocence, and the first chunk of her soul. Other people and other events had taken bits and pieces of it over the years, of course, but he had been the first, and as the old Rod Stewart song said: The first cut is the deepest.
And the problem was - the damnable shame of that first time was - that she had liked it. Not what the Rat Bastard had done, or, more to the point, not the fact that he had done it. He was a slimy worm of a pedophile, and if she ever met him in a conveniently dark alley, she would, with great relish, neuter the fucker with a dull and rusty butter knife.
But what he had done, the physical act of it and her physiological reaction to it, had blown her young mind. Through the tears and the shame and the anger over this man she was supposed to have trusted, the man who stole that thing most precious - her innocence - what struck her most profoundly and disturbingly had been the underlying sensation of pleasure. She had enjoyed the tingling feelings coursing through her sixteen year-old body. And, truth be told, those same feelings had been zipping and zapping their way through her central nervous system for about two years before the night he stole her childhood.
She hadn’t flaunted it - oh no! She’d kept it well-hidden because good girls weren’t supposed to like sex. Her mother told her that. Her church told her that. Her teachers told her that. And even though Aimee Godsoe - the girl in her school with the bad reputation, who had actual breasts when she was only thirteen - told her sex was the greatest thing since the invention of the Walkman she had permanently attached to her ears, Dani hadn’t believed her, hadn’t wanted to believe her, because only bad, dirty girls did that sort of thing, and she, by God, was a Good Girl.
And so she’d kept her feelings deep inside, pushed the desires away, tried her hardest to ignore the moist lust she felt almost every day. And she dressed and acted as demurely as a fourteen, fifteen, sixteen year-old good girl was supposed to dress: nothing too tight, too flashy or too revealing. Her body helped. At sixteen, Aimee had larger breasts than Dani still did at thirty-two.
She looked at them in the mirror as she changed from the silk pajama top she’d worn to bed last night, to the tee-shirt she’d be wearing when she got in her car and drove away. Still small and pert and perky, with no ill effects from that old enemy of every woman: gravity. She chuckled to herself at the thought that Aimee’s were probably down to her belly button by now, barring the latest in surgical enhancement.
Yeah, and Aimee was probably married, with two kids and a nice house i
n the suburbs of Chicago, where they grew up. And where was Dani? In Vegas, alone, a whore.
And whores don’t have boyfriends.
2
Paradise, Nevada
She had liked a number of the men over the years, as well as a couple of the women she’d infrequently been called upon to service - one of which had taken her to Paris and bought her the Luis Vuitton. But ultimately, she was only a thing to them; a possession to be held, used, and cast away when the mood struck, or the glow left the relationship, or when she had just become too much of a complication.
She was used to it, though, had gotten used to it, had come to rely on it as a sign of when to move on. And it was a good life, all-in-all. She always had a nice place to live, nice clothes, great luggage. Okay, her car was way past due to be replaced, but that was a small thing, easily rectified. She did what she wanted, when she wanted.
What she did was technically illegal, of course, but it was also the world’s oldest profession for a reason. And maybe the IRS would throw her well-shaped bottom into jail if they knew just how much money she actually made. But they didn’t know, and if she had anything to say about it, they never would know. It was her life, and her body, damn it, and her money. She’d earned that money. The government hadn’t. And just what would the government do with it, anyway? Start another war? Torture some more prisoners? Give more tax breaks to their rich buddies? At least she gave her customers a real fuck, instead of the virtual one the taxpayers got from the government of the people, by the people and for whomever had the deepest pockets.
And if every now and then she had to be with people she didn’t particularly like, well that was just life. And life was good.
Wasn’t it?
If so, why had she done it? Why had she opened a door in her carefully constructed wall? Why had she let Jake inside?
She’d liked other men - liked them just fine, thank you very much. But never enough to even consider dropping her defenses. They were there for a reason, kept her safe, kept her secure, kept her distant. Because that was the real danger: letting anyone get too close. If they got too close, they might get inside, might see the cast iron box into which she’d hidden her heart. And if they got in close enough, they might pick the lock, open that box, see the heart she’d struggled for so long to protect, and shatter it into a million pieces. That she could never allow.
She jammed the last of her fold-able clothes into the suitcase and shut it with a decisive slam, clicking the latches home with firm resolve. Time to go. She picked up the bag, slid her makeup case under the same arm, and tossed the first of three garment bags over her shoulder, and headed for the door.
And then the ground shook.
3
Beneath the Planet Earth
There are somewhere around two hundred thousand earthquakes recorded worldwide every year, which averages out to over five hundred a day. Most are too mild to detect with anything short of a seismometer. Roughly every three days, however, a magnitude 6.0 or greater is recorded somewhere on the planet.
A 6.0 will rattle the pots and pans rather efficiently, knock a few pictures off the wall, and maybe cause some minor to moderate structural damage. A 7.0 is ten times that. An 8.0 is a hundred times that. And an 8.9 is almost one thousand times as destructive.
The Cascadia Subsidence Zone would have rattled plenty of pots and pans the last time it let rip, back in 1700, but there wasn’t anybody there – at least nobody capable of writing home about it. The Natives were there, of course, and they had their oral histories, should anybody have bothered to ask, but somehow, nobody did. Lewis and Clark didn’t get out that way for over a century. Scientists knew there had been one, based on the geological evidence, but it wasn’t until they discovered a Japanese scroll telling of a tsunami hitting the home island that they learned the exact date. Good thing somebody had been taking notes.
The Indian Ocean Tsunami in 2004 that drowned much of the coastal areas in Indonesia, Sumatra, Thailand, and parts of India, was caused by a nine-plus subsidence zone quake so strong it triggered tremors in the San Andreas, nine thousand miles away.
4
Volcano Observatory
Yellowstone National Park
“Hi, Trevor. It’s me,” Maggie said into the phone. She had just called the main office of the Observatory at the University of Utah, in Salt Lake City. Professor Galotta told her to do so - without letting his hands wander over her body in the process. He’d been too busy staring at this, that, or the other report, still not saying a word to her about the significance, as he cross-checked, re-checked, and double-checked whatever it was, scowling and rubbing his face, as if to keep it from falling off.
“Hey, Maggie!” Trevor said on the other end. “What’s up, Gorgeous?” She was about to respond with the question at hand, when he added: “Are you pining away for me? Re-thinking your decision not to go out on that date?”
He (and almost every other guy in every one of her classes, except for three she was pretty sure were gay) asked her out, at one time or another, and she politely declined, using her academic workload as an excuse. It was the same excuse she’d been using for years, and it was mostly true - mostly.
“Listen, could you send us the latest scanning simulation on the magma chamber?” She ignored the flirt.
The magma chamber was a massive pool of molten rock and gas, roughly thirty miles long, nineteen miles wide, and six miles deep, that sat as little as a mile below the surface, although most of it was at three miles. This was Rick’s Monster Under the Ground. Said monster’s “breathing” had caused roughly three feet of uplift since the early part of the Twentieth Century. It receded some in the Eighties and Nineties, as if the beginning of a long exhalation, but that had stopped, as if the creature was now holding its breath.
Seismic studies based on earthquake activity in the region had discovered that the tectonic waves moved faster through rock than through magma, thus allowing them to map out the chamber. It was the latest version of this map she wanted.
“Have him send GPS data on the uplift, as well,” Dr. Galotta barked from the other side of the room. She passed the request along.
“What’s going on, Maggie? Why the sudden interest at . . .” she waited as Trevor apparently checked his watch. “. . . six-oh-two in the morning?”
“We’re rocking and rolling pretty good,” she replied, trying to keep the excitement out of her voice. She wasn’t scared, although her supervisor’s muttering and unexplained sifting of reports was making her more than a little curious. “Dr. Galotta wants it, and ours is not to question why.”
“Is he being a jerk again?”
She glanced at Rick out of the corner of her eye, not wanting it to be too obvious. She needn’t have bothered. He remained absorbed by whatever troubled him.
“No more than usual.” She could hear the clacking of keys on the other end of the phone. She cupped the mouthpiece in her hand and whispered: “I think this has him a little spooked, but he hasn’t said anything.”
“Okay. Simulation is running now. Should have the data to you in about twenty minutes.”
“Thanks, Trevor.”
“You know, Dave Mathews is coming to town, and I–“ he started to say, but she hung up before the poor boy could embarrass himself.
“Twenty minutes,” she reported.
Dr. Galotta just grunted and continued to frown. The Seismograph beeped. Another tremor.
And then the ground started to bounce.
5
Paradise, Nevada
The rumbling stopped as suddenly as it started. Dani took a deep breath to calm her racing heart, and it seemed to work. Convinced her chest wasn’t about to explode, she surveyed the livingroom of the luxury apartment she’d called home for the past eighteen months. Everything looked as it should.
She thought about doing a quick inspection of the entire place, but dismissed the idea. What difference did it make? She was leaving. Shouldering her garment bag
and getting a better grip on the other two, she headed outside.
Car alarms beeped and chirped their annoying, but for all intents and purposes ignored noises. Other than that, the apartment parking lot looked exactly as it had the last time she’d seen it. Nothing had changed.
Just as nothing had changed in her. That’s what Jake had been: a minor tremor on the surface of her existence - interesting, even exciting, but in the end, nothing but a squiggle on the seismograph of life as Danielle McGinty knew it.
Time to go.
What was Jake, anyway? She thought, tossing her bags into the Nissan. Just a guy. Just another man. And okay, she’d liked him - liked him a lot - and had briefly entertained thoughts. But those thoughts were a road to nowhere, and she knew it, had always known it. Rule Number One: Don’t get emotionally involved.
Time to go.
But where was she going? Away, that was the main thing. But away to where? As she locked the car and retraced her steps to retrieve the rest of her luggage, this was the burning question that occupied her mind. She really had no idea, had clearly not thought this through. But she had to do something.
Should I stay or should I go? The song from the Clash rocked along her synapses. If I go there will be trouble. And if I stay it will be double. That pretty much summed up the situation. And it gave her the answer.
Time to go. She grabbed her remaining bags, locked the door and left the apartment without another look back.
Four
“The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
Pressure (Book 1): Fall Page 4
