Pressure (Book 1): Fall

by Thomson, Jeff

  Ignoring yet another of the crude sexual references she was quickly getting used to from the other girl, Maggie said: “Justin, in Salt Lake, told me people there are looking nervous as well.”

  “Ooh! Justin’s a dream. I wouldn’t mind spending a few night watches with him!” Maggie tried to ignore her, but then Suzie added: “Have you seen how big his hands are? You know what that means!”

  She was saved from further crudity by the appearance of Rick Galotta. How ironic, she thought. A man with wandering hands rescuing me from Suzie’s dirty mind.

  “There you are, Jones,” he said, sounding annoyed. “Been looking for you. Come with me,” and so saying it, he turned and walked back around the building and out of sight. She hurried to catch up, slipping twice and almost going ass-over-teakettle in the process.

  9

  Yellowstone National Park

  The four-wheel drive pickup containing Dr. Rick Golatta, Maggie Jones, and the cooler-sized test kit jammed on the floor between Maggie’s slowly-warming feet, bounced hard as it hit a spot of what looked to her like buckled asphalt beneath the snow. Her head, in turn, bounced against the window to her right, sending a Fourth of July celebration of shooting stars dazzling across her eyes.

  “Hang on!” Dr. Galotta shouted, far too late for it to do any good.

  They were headed toward the northern end of Yellowstone Lake to (as Rick had put it) take the monster’s temperature. She knew the actual process would be far more involved. They’d be testing both lake and ground temperature, as well as PH levels, and soil and water levels of Carbon Dioxide, Sulphur, Sulphur Dioxide, Hydrogen Sulphide and several other indicators of what the monster might be doing. Buckled asphalt, however, had not been expected.

  The truck fish-tailed a bit before Rick got it back under control, grinding the gears as he downshifted. She glanced over at him as she rubbed her suddenly sore head. He grinned sheepishly, as if embarrassed for the unmanly crime of not having found the right gear. “Oops,” he apologized, and then yanked the steering wheel to the left to swerve around another gaping pothole. “Job security for the road crew come Spring,” he added, by way of an unrequested explanation.

  She wasn’t buying it, because the pothole hadn’t really been a pothole. It had been a crack. “Those shouldn’t be there, should they?” She asked.

  He didn’t answer right away, didn’t even look at her, which may have been because he was concentrating on the road, but she didn’t think so.

  “No,” he finally said. “They shouldn’t.”

  “What’s going on, Dr. Golatta? Really.”

  Again, he gave her the silent treatment as he negotiated the twists and turns and fresh snow. She waited, staring at him. At last, he shrugged.

  “It could be anything,” he said. “It could be nothing.”

  “But you don’t think so,” she observed. “And neither does the senior staff.”

  He looked as if ready to prevaricate, then gave a deflated sigh and said: “No.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  He glanced at her, then back at the road. “If I were you, I’d be packing to leave.”

  Six

  “Do not try to find out –

  we’re forbidden to know –

  what end the gods have in store

  for me, or for you.”

  Horace

  1

  Medford, Oregon

  Robert “Bobby” Drummond, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC (Ret), age 44, unpacked his bag in his so-called “apartment” at the grandiosely-named Pleasant Value Suites, extended stay hotel, in Medford, Oregon. He was tired. He was hungry. His left shoulder, which had been badly dislocated during a six-hour slice of Hell in Iraq, hurt. But at least he was finally there.

  He’d settled on the name Bobby by a long process of elimination. Robert had always seemed too formal, and once he joined the Corps as an enlisted man, it sounded too much like an officer’s name, and that absolutely would not do. After all, he knew both of his parents. Rob seemed far too pretentious, and Bobby Drummond didn’t have a pretentious bone in his body. Bob suited him for a while, until he discovered that B-O-B also stood for Battery Operated Buddy, and while being associated with something that fit nicely between a woman’s legs had its charms, he ultimately decided a moniker that stood for a cylinder of vibrating plastic capable of replacing a man would not be good. And so Bobby it had become. He was okay with that. It seemed to fit. And there were damned few people with enough guts to give him shit about it more than once.

  His journey to this place had been long and roundabout and filled with the starts and stops of a person at loose ends. The Corps had been his life. That life was over. And he was glad - more or less.

  The less probably should have concerned him, but it didn’t. He’d left as soon as he completed his twenty, rather than sticking it out till they forced him out, because he’d finally and completely gotten sick of it all. Not the Corps itself. No, that had been the purest and best thing in his life. But he’d gotten sick of seeing the country, or at least the fuck-tard bunch of “Support-the-Troops” assholes who ran it, turning their backs on the vets coming back from combat with broken bodies and minds and hearts. That he couldn’t stomach, and in the end, it had been the nail in the coffin of his military career.

  So life had changed. Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. Just words to most people, but he wasn’t most people, and now he was about to embark on his new life as a Medford City Cop.

  His recently old life as a patrol deputy in Los Angeles County had been a pile of shit, if he really thought about it, which he rarely did: crack babies and gangbangers and assholes worth no more than a rabid dog, and gigantic, triple-tandem truckloads full of bureaucratic bullshit. To suggest he was glad to be away from it would be a grand understatement. Now he was here. But in the final analysis, after Iraq, everything was gravy.

  Tomorrow would be his check-in interview with the Chief of Police. And tonight would be . . . what? Food was in order: a really thick steak, medium rare, with a fist-sized baked potato and veggies and beer. Definitely beer. But not too much. Showing up hungover would be a really bad idea. So one. Maybe two. Maybe see what the local micro-brew is like.

  2

  Tonopah, Nevada

  Dani sat in one of ten thousand nondescript, interchangeable “family restaurants” scattered throughout the United States, this one being in the bustling metropolis of Tonopah, Nevada, which was as far as her Nissan had gotten her. The engine light had come on about fifteen miles south, and she prayed to all the deities she hadn’t believed in since childhood that her car would make the distance. It had, pulling into the first repair shop she’d seen right off the highway, where it died with a resounding CLUNK and a hiss of steam. But it had made it there, and for this she was grateful. The alternatives had been stark.

  As was the menu at this restaurant: seven-dollar burgers, salads that were mostly iceberg lettuce and rock-hard croutons, spaghetti consisting of limp noodles and glorified ketchup, some form of fish that may or may not have been fresh last month, and chicken - fried, baked, salad, or “pan-seared,” which meant fried with less oil. She went with baked.

  She hadn’t really been hungry to begin with, and looking at the menu hadn’t improved her appetite. But sitting in her uncomfortable hotel room, looking at - alternately - coverage of all the earthquakes going on, or reruns of the Christmas movies she’d seen far more times than she could count, and all the while, ruminating on her lot in life, with dark and depressing thoughts swirling in her brain, was slowly driving her down the path to madness. Thus, the chicken.

  She glanced at her watch, after placing the order with a bored waitress sporting a really bad dye-job. Her car was probably already fixed, if the mechanic could be believed, and it was going to cost her a bundle, but at least she could resume her journey in the morning.

  Not that it mattered. Nobody eagerly anticipated her arrival in Reno. And as for the people she’d left behind in Vegas . . . ?


  She’d chosen Reno as her destination simply because she’d never been there. Well, that, and the fact that the Great Whore of Babylon hadn’t sunk her claws into the place - yet.

  Madame Clarice Dupree ran the higher-class call girls in L.A., San Diego, Phoenix, and Vegas. If you wanted to play, you had to pay her. Which in and of itself wasn’t anything special. She’d run into people like her in New York, Kansas City, and Atlanta. But in those places, she’d been dealing with the Mob, or Syndicate, or Mafia, or whatever they were calling themselves these days. And they had all been men. Madame Dupree had been another kettle of fish - or chicken. And she was a cold-hearted, vicious bitch.

  A friend of Dani’s (or as much of a friend as she could have, in that transitory business), going by the unlikely name of Pussywillow Smith, had tried to slip by Ms. Dupree and not pay to play. First, it had gotten her beaten. Then it had gotten her killed. Of course, nobody could prove the Whore of Babylon had done the deed (or hired it done), but everybody knew, and it had been public enough to serve as a warning to all the others.

  That, however, was the past. As was everything she’d left behind – even Jake.

  Why couldn’t she put him behind her? After all, he was just a guy; one of far more than she cared to count, thank you very much. What was it about him?

  Something had been there from the day they met. Night, actually, and it had been a good night. He’d taken her to one of the chic new restaurants that were always opening in Vegas, and right from the start, their conversation had been relaxed and easy. He’d been charming, without trying to be, and good-looking, and a gentleman - even going so far as to pull out her chair. But he’d done it in such an offhand, natural way: without ceremony, without drawing attention to the fact that he was being a gentleman, and without the clumsy, supercilious air of someone trying desperately to impress.

  Their conversation had ranged far and wide. But unlike most men, he hadn’t talked about himself - at least not in the typically tedious terms that shouted, “Look what a great guy I am!” He’d told her what he did for a living, not bragging, but marveling that someone actually paid him to do it, and he told where he came from, and the rest of the usual biographical data, but he’d passed it all off as being entirely insignificant, which, of course, it was, as she well knew.

  The past was the past. Looking back, self-reflection, self-aggrandizement - all nothing but self-absorption. And Jake exhibited none of it, even though, as it turned out, he could have, with absolute ease.

  She’d been in awe when she saw what he’d called The Shrine. The leather case had always been closed, so she never did see the actual medal, and he passed it off as if it were nothing. But when she got home early the next morning, she’d Googled his name, and discovered not only the dozens of news articles about him, but a link to the biopic, Ordeal in the Desert. She’d downloaded and watched it, right then and there.

  Hollywood, she knew, had as much to do with reality as dental floss had to do with her Nissan, but certainly some of it must have been true. And what a story! But he had waved the subject away as if shooing a fly.

  Clearly then, it wasn’t something he wanted to talk about, and so she’d made a mental note never to mention it, if and when she saw him again. And she’d known she would. She had also known, somewhere deep down inside, that she wanted to see him again.

  Forget the medal, forget the movie, forget the fact that they must have paid him one Hell of a lot of money for the rights to his story; he was still, by any definition, a really good guy. And she liked him.

  That first night had been a quiet sort of magic. And when the topic of conversation had finally come around to sex, it had come from a wholly unexpected direction: a mutual love of teen-age slasher movies.

  “You know that inevitable scene in every one of those movies,” he had said, “where the kids are making out in the back seat, or wrestling around in a conveniently deserted cabin at camp?”

  “Ah, yes,” she had replied. “The morality tale. Anyone who does drugs or has sex must die. Horribly. With a weed-whacker, or something equally unusual.”

  “That’s the kind of sex I’ve always found most entertaining.”

  “With a weed-whacker?”

  He’d burst out laughing, nearly choking on his drink. “No,” he’d finally said. “I meant the making out part. Necking. Wrestling around, still more or less fully clothed. The heat of it, the anticipation of wonders yet to come, but not there yet. That sense of fun you used to have when you were a teen, before the rush to the main event that seems to happen when you get older. That’s the stuff I like.”

  She remembered gazing at him for moments that seemed like minutes, before saying, “You are a very unusual man.”

  “Nope,” he’d replied. “I just like to have fun. And making out is fun.”

  “All of it’s fun,” she’d said.

  “Yes. It is. So why rush it? Why not let the anticipation and pressure build for a while before leaping straight to bumping uglies?”

  That night, at his place, on his couch, had been one of the most purely entertaining encounters of her life. Not the orgasm (or orgasms, she corrected herself, feeling a tinge of rising heat) which had been great, but the sheer, ribald fun of it. They’d laughed, and wrestled, and fumbled, and kissed for literally hours. And the pressure had built, slowly, deliciously, and when they finally ended up naked in his bed, joined at the hip, as it were, it hadn’t been the usual carnal wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Oh, there had been whamming and bamming, alright, and plenty of it. But it had been a sense of enjoyment, of shared fun, mixed with laughter, rather than lust.

  Remembering, and sensing the tingle that meant she’d be exercising her fingers later, she nearly jumped out of her chair when the waitress returned with the chicken.

  And then the world shook.

  3

  Interstate 80

  East of Salt Lake City, UT

  Charlie came down off the mountain at Echo Pass and into Salt Lake City traffic, cursing the idiots who’d put a city there, right at the bottom. His load being heavy and gravity being what it was, the transition from controlled-descent to vehicular chaos was abrupt, to say the least. Not that it was a particular problem, per se, but it did give him a perfectly good excuse to bitch, which he considered his God-given right as an American, and so he did it, profanely and often.

  He glanced at his electronic logs screen and saw he had just enough time to make it to the truck stop in Tooele. Nice, he thought. Consulting his watch, he confirmed he’d get there early enough to find parking. This was always an issue.

  Federal law dictated he had to shut down at the end of no more than eleven hours of driving. This meant he, along with thousands of other poor dumb bastard drivers, had to find a place to park his seventy-three-foot tractor and trailer every night. No small feat, considering the fact that everything - literally everything - people owned, from the houses they lived in, to the cars they drove, to the clothes they wore, to the food in their bellies and the shoes on their feet, was, in one form or another, at one time or another, delivered by a truck. This meant there were a lot of trucks on the road - all day, every day - and those trucks needed to find a place to shut down. Naturally, of course (Murphy being the bastard that he always was, and his Law being the royal pain in the ass it always was), there were fewer legal parking spots than there were trucks - typical of the unintended consequences of governmental regulation.

  Not that he was one of those myopic dingbats who thought the government should just get the Hell out of people’s lives. He believed they should be restricted in the degree to which they could muck up a perfectly good life, but to eliminate such mucking would be the road to chaos and anarchy. The cargo he was hauling was a perfect example.

  He was scheduled to deliver the load to the Reno Convention Center early in the morning on the day after Christmas. Its contents were destined for the annual gun show. Gun ownership was one those contentious issues that, a): g
ot people’s panties in a bunch whenever it was suggested that maybe a bit of governmental regulation was a good idea; and b): Charlie didn’t really give a rat’s ass about. In his considered opinion, there were essentially three types of people who needed to be regulated: Greedy Bastards, Uncaring Assholes, and Drunken Idiots.

  Greedy Bastards, like the ones who tanked the economy back in 2008, and then forced the American taxpayer to give them protection money in the form of a bailout, lest they tank it even worse, needed to be regulated because, at its core, Capitalism had one major flaw: greed worked. Unchecked greed, much like unchecked anything, led to chaos, economic collapse, and somebody’s mother losing her life savings right as she was about to retire.

  Uncaring Assholes, like the ones who’d built a housing development on top of a toxic waste dump in Love Canal, New Jersey, were, a): just as bad as the Greedy Bastards, and b): needed somebody looking over their shoulders because that shit was just flat-out wrong.

  And finally, Drunken Idiots were the individuals of questionable intellect who most needed regulating. Laws against drunk driving existed because these people were too stupid to know better than to get behind the wheel of a car when they had to squint one eye just to see without double vision. These people (and their non-intoxicated cousins, the Fucking Idiots), were the main reason for gun control laws.

  Charlie, in principle, didn’t care if people owned guns or if they fired guns, as long as they weren’t firing at anyone he cared about. As it happened, he owned and carried one himself, since he was, from time to time, responsible for the security of loads such as the one he was hauling. But he didn’t want the Drunken (or Fucking) Idiot next door to be able to own a bazooka and accidently launch an explosive round through anyone’s wall while they were blissfully and innocently watching reruns of NCIS. Hence, regulation.

  Of course, this didn’t account for the crazy fuckers who shot up schools (or flew airplanes into buildings), but then, crazy couldn’t be regulated, any more than stupid. He’d studied psychology, once upon a time (as well as history and philosophy and a severely misguided foray into digital filmmaking), and while he hadn’t taken it far enough for a degree, he had managed to learn one simple and clear maxim: fucked-up people do fucked-up things. And while that was a good enough explanation, it was not a cure, and remained all-but impossible to regulate.