Shock Warning

by Michael Walsh

  “Real stinky, I hope!” shouted Rory, Hope’s son and younger child. “Gross-out stinky! Barf-in-your-socks stinky! Girl gross-out stinky!”

  Rory was sitting in the backseat, between his sister and Jade, still getting used to the idea that, horrors, he might have yet another sister in his future. Two against one was by his standards a fair fight on the playground, but the backseat of a car was an entirely different proposition. You couldn’t hit a girl, not if you were a real man. Not if you were like his dead father, or like Danny, who had lost his wife in that terrorist attack in Los Angeles, or like the weird guy who had saved him from the bomb back in Edwardsville, Illinois, where they used to live before his dad got killed and his mom met Danny and . . .

  “Okay, hold your noses, kids!” shouted Danny. “Here comes Cowschwitz.”

  Hope bit her tongue even as she held her nose. Everybody knew the term “Cowschwitz” was incredibly un-PC, even as most Californians who drove up and down I-5 between L.A. to San Francisco used it.

  There would be cows as far as the eye could see on both sides of the freeway, that Rory knew. Cows for miles. Nothing but cows, mooing, lowing, farting, sending vast plumes of methane into the atmosphere, killing the ozone, destroying the climate, and alerting the aliens on Mars, or the Mother Ship or the planets orbiting Alpha Centauri or Betelgeuse to our malevolent presence. Nothing good could come out of Cowschwitz, thought Rory, except maybe some milk and some really good steaks.

  The girls squealed. Rory expected shrieks from Emma, his real sister, but Jade, Danny’s daughter and only child, was an altogether mysterious creature. She was four years younger than Emma, but she seemed older, wiser, more mature. Maybe that was because she had lost her mother and she was an only, whereas he and Emma had lost their dad, but at least they had each other. And their mom . . .

  “Here we go!” said Danny, gunning it.

  Instinctively, Rory threw his arms around his sister, Emma.

  “Any moment now,” said Hope, getting into the spirit of things. Rory glanced at his mother just as she tossed a smile at Danny. There was definitely something going on with those two....

  Jade clutched his hand. “Ready, Rory?” she asked. He nodded, then made like a deep-sea diver and held his nose as he went under.

  “Pee-you!” shouted the kids, almost in unison.

  Emma was the first to see it. She said nothing, but only let out a small gasp, as if the gap between expectation and reality were something that might be papered over in the next quarter mile. Rory, however, had long ago learned to interpret his sister’s gasps—

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Look,” she said, pointing. And whispering.

  At first, Rory only saw the vast expanse of the Central Valley in all its uncinematic nonsplendor. Miles and miles of nothing, flatlands, with invisible mountains to the east of them and to the west of them, and a vast ocean not far away.

  Then Rory saw it—

  A dead cow.

  One, at first. And then two. And then ten. And then at least a hundred.

  Dead, all dead.

  “Mommy!” screamed Emma. “Make it stop. Make them go away!!”

  The car hurtled northward at more than seventy-five miles an hour. The CHP never stopped anybody on this stretch of I-5. But still the dead cows would not stop. They kept on coming, in serried ranks collapsed in homage to a bovine Morpheus, lying on their sides as if sleeping, but their bellies already bloated with death, some of them already burst open, their guts spilling out, the stench rising....

  “Oh, my God,” said Hope. “What . . . ?”

  “I don’t know,” said Danny, already punching the keys of his secure iPhone. As per the agreed-upon code with Fort Meade, he hit a pound key in the middle of his home phone number, then a series of rotating digits depending on the day of the week minus four, which he knew would send the message directly over a secure channel to the one man who could possibly answer his question. To the one man whom he needed to alert, right now, before the situation got even further out of hand. To a man he’d never met, but whom he trusted beyond all others.

  There was an overpass, just ahead. As they approached—

  “Look!” shouted Rory. “Over there—people!”

  Danny slammed on the brakes, screeching and skidding. A small group of people was clustered to one side of the overpass. He could see candles flickering as they huddled around something, looked at something—something that, to judge from their gazes, was on the concrete wall of one of the bridge’s struts.

  The car slowed and rolled to a stop. “Stay inside,” Danny commanded, but it was Hope who relayed the order and gave it parental authority.

  “Nobody move,” she said. “Let Danny handle it.”

  He got out of the car, ready for anything.

  A group of Mexicans, farmworkers, was huddled together, their faces illuminated, flickering in the light of scores of candles, all eyes turned toward an object on the wall . . . muttering to themselves in Spanish. No, not muttering—praying.

  Dios te salve, María, llena eres de gracia, el Señor es contigo. Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres, y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros, pecadores, ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte. Amen

  And then he saw it. “Jesús, Maria,” he gasped

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Los Angeles—the La Brea Tar Pits

  The woolly mammoth’s eyes were wide with fear, pleading with him to stretch out and pluck the ten-thousandpound animal from the muck.

  Fat chance: The great beast stood twelve feet tall at the shoulder, with a pair of enormous tusks that could shishkebab an elephant. But, trapped in the seductive, bubbling asphalt, the dumb thing had no place to go but down. Look where ignorance, greed, and hunger got you.

  “You’re in the soup now, buddy,” muttered the man known as Devlin. “Guess that makes two of us.”

  He wiped the sweat from his eyes and glanced around the grounds of what was technically called Hancock Park, although no Angeleno ever called it that. To everybody but foreign tourists reading a map, it was the La Brea Tar Pits, and always would be.

  “Where are you?”

  He was trying to spot the woman—Jacinta, she called herself, like the flower. Hyacinth. No Last Name. Nobody had a last name anymore. Or if they did, they never used it.

  Just him. Devlin. Even though that wasn’t his real name, it was good enough. It would have to be. It had been good enough most of his life.

  It was always fun trying to match a voice with a face. The pretty ones always turned out to be ugly, and once in a while vice versa. The young, old. The hot, not.

  As he scanned the crowd, Devlin could see the towers of Park La Brea across Sixth Street, feel the eternal traffic of Wilshire Boulevard at his back as his gaze roamed across the reeking expanse of major urban America’s only open oil field. “Miracle Mile” if you wanted to go retro-civic-boosterish. He dabbed his brow with a pocket square and replaced his hat on his head. No place like the tar pits in October, if you liked heat. Good thing his suit could breathe, even if he couldn’t.

  It was the usual collection of tourists in shorts, baseball caps, and flip-flops. Devlin shuddered, as he often did in the presence of boobus Americanus in his colorful native costume. You could chart the decline of America strictly by the togs. Beachwear for all occasions. Earringed men and tattooed women. Ten-year-old girls tarted up like hookers and twelve-year-old boys duded out as gangstas. And more butt cracks than a plumbers’ convention.

  In this muck, the mammoth had plenty of company.

  Devlin looked at the time on his cell phone display: oneten in the pyem. In the old days he would have looked at his watch, but who needed watches anymore when you had instant, time-zone-sensitive, satellite-calibrated time on demand?

  For the tenth time he read the signage in front of the sculpted monster: MAMMUTHUS COLUMBI. That was the dying creature’s scientific name. It sounded
like the kind of thing any kid with a halfway-decent command of pig latin could make up. Any kid in his day, that was; how many kids today spoke pig latin? Mammuthus my utt-bus . . .

  One-eleven.

  Should he light a cigarette? Only social renegades, rich people, undocumented aliens, and teenage girls smoked in L.A. anymore. Would a carelessly tossed match, caught just so by a breeze, ignite not only the tar pits but the entire latent Wilshire Boulevard oil fields, setting off a chain reaction from the still-functioning oil derrick on the grounds of Beverly Hills High School to La Cienega and Stocker Street, blowing all of central Los Angeles to kingdom come? It might be fun to find out.

  One-twelve.

  He never used to smoke until . . . until.

  He lit up.

  One-thirteen.

  “Señor Harris?” Harris was the name he was using for this assignment. Like all his aliases, it was a name of a Jimmy Cagney character from one of his old movies, in this case, Blonde Crazy.

  It was nice to be right, for a change. Skin: light brown. Age: somewhere between thirty and ninety. Height: five feet in heels on a footstool. Weight: don’t ask, don’t tell. Ethnicity: illegal-American.

  Devlin turned his attention from the doomed behemoth to the small, supplicant woman. She was dressed all in black and wore an Angels baseball cap to ward off the broiling sun. “Jacinta?”

  Jacinta thrust a dog-eared manila folder at him, as if that were reply enough.

  “We have to know the truth.”

  A girl in low-rider jeans crossed his field of vision, her lower-back tattoo as visible as a circling buzzard in the desert. Wings of some kind, splayed across her small. No doubt her boyfriend enjoyed the view. Devlin wondered how the lad’s replacement, a decade down the line, was going to feel about the anonymous Venice Boardwalk artist’s handiwork when it was three times life size and fading even faster than the lady’s desirability.

  Pay attention. “We?”

  “About what’s happening. The padre—”

  His secure PDA buzzed. In a time of iPhones, Androids, BlackBerrys, and everything else, he still reflexively called whichever device he was using at the moment his PDA. Personal digital assistant. It made him feel like he had a friend in this world, even if he didn’t. “Excuse me for a moment, sister,” he said, glancing down at the display.

  Danny, although he never would call him that. His most trusted personal nondigital assistant, and yet they had never met face-to-face and had never exchanged any personal details. And yet he was, at this moment, the man whom Devlin felt closest to in the world. Still, it was not a secure location to answer.

  He pressed the IGNORE button, although with this particular caller, the call would be sent to a special voice mail that would be turned immediately into a text message and displayed. “You were saying?”

  “Padre Gonsalves. He wants to see you. About this.” She opened the folder and out tumbled a set of Polaroids, caked with powdery debris.

  “Mira,” she said. A command. He mira-ed.

  The blazing midday L.A. sun wasn’t helping. It glinted off the folder right back into his eyes; that was the downside of no clouds, ever, except when there were plenty of them. Living in Los Angeles for the past few months, Devlin more easily understood the parable of Paradise from the book of Genesis: feast or famine, my way or the highway. It never rained in California, but man did it ever pour.

  He shifted position to catch the tentative shade of a palm tree. As he did, he came once again face-to-face with the statue of the dying Mammuthus, perpetually frozen in the awful realization that its next bite was also going to be its last meal. If it could think that far ahead.

  The first picture: not as expected—

  A smudge of white light. A starburst against the backdrop of an infinite, threatening darkness. His mind raced, freeassociating as it always did when absorbing new information. Talk about Genesis: Let there be light. But was this the beginning, or the final flameout?

  He caught himself. It was the overexposure of an aperture, the misfire of an amateur accidentally aiming a camera at the noonday California sun, although for what reason he couldn’t guess. He was Rorschaching even before he had to.

  “The door? You see it?”

  He saw no such thing. Tijuana in a fair-weather cumulus; Megan Fox in a rain-threatening cumulonimbus. You saw what you wanted to see. And what you almost always saw was yourself. He moved on.

  Variations on the Theme of the Smudge: blurs, splotches, gradually clearing. Moving from solar apogee toward the horizon. Dusty mountains, dustier deserts. Lancaster. Or worse, Barstow. Or worst, Needles. Middle of the Mojave. The most forlorn, desolate place on God’s sometimes-green earth.

  He kept leafing. More sky, more mountains. Some people. Then more people: huge crowds. Mostly Hispanic, by the look of them. A prizefight, a cockfight, a bullfight?

  Ten pictures down so far nothing to see. It reminded him of television.

  Then something—flowers. Desert plants, two feet high, with dull green stems and brilliant hungry yellow flowers that soaked up the sun as if it belonged exclusively to them alone.

  “Marigolds,” said Jacinta.

  “So?”

  “Her flowers.” She motioned for him to keep looking.

  The next one was a little different. Fairly well-registered, it showed the desert sky, the distant mountain range, and the desert floor.

  “Mira.” Jacinta, urging him, pointing at something. Her expectant expression was irresistible.

  Devlin took a deep breath. In New York or Washington, you never had to be alone if you didn’t want to, because there were always plenty of intimate strangers around. But in L.A., alone was the default mode; the whole town was one big party you weren’t invited to. It was the only city in America, Devlin thought, where you could be truly, blissfully all by yourself.

  If he hurried he could still catch lunch at Tom Bergin’s over on Fairfax and bang back a couple of cold Smithwicks while he pondered how he was going to kill his evening before heading back to his place in Echo Park alone. He hadn’t had anyone there since she was there, hadn’t had anyone period. Because while she might have betrayed him, he would never betray her.

  What was the first rule of a confidential op? Keep your cover story 99.9 percent true. And what was the second? Never trust anybody, never fall in love with anybody. He had broken all those rules, and now he was paying the price—in heartache and career ruination. Whether he would pay the ultimate price remained to be seen.

  Maryam . . . where are you?

  “Excuse me, señor?” asked Jacinta.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Please continue.”

  Who sent her? It might have been Seelye, trying to steer him some business since his disgrace. It might have been President Tyler, torturing him, or playing him; he used to think Tyler, running desperately for reelection now against a formidable female candidate who was leading him by double digits in the polls, was a blithering idiot, but the way he had played them all over the past two years had revealed the hand of the master.

  Or it could be Emanuel Skorzeny. For his money, Door Number 3 was always where pure evil dwelled, and at this point he saw no reason to reassess his experience.

  “Mira,” insisted Jacinta, shaking the Polaroid photo at him.

  What looked like a rainbow was circling the sun. A rainbow in the desert, where the temperature was at least one hundred and twenty degrees, and the humidity near zero. A place where there hadn’t been any rain since the dinosaurs.

  “You don’t believe.” A pudgy finger punched the Polaroid. “Look again. Closely.”

  And then he saw what she was talking about: a white, vertical rectangle blazing against the darkness. It might have been Kubrick’s famous black monolith from 2001, bleached out. A reverse image, like the Shroud of Turin, unnoticed until somebody had the bright idea to take a photo of it.

  This is what she was looking at. This is what she wanted him to see.

  “T
he doorway. You see now.”

  One more photo to go. As he looked, he shot a last glance at the condemned mammoth, still beseeching him to do something. But sometimes you just had to embrace the suck.

  Lucky thirteen:

  At first glance, it was nothing but a big white splotch, vaguely pear-shaped. It could be anything, including what it no doubt was, a photographic irregularity. Involuntarily, he looked up at the sky, but even through the polarized sunglasses, the only thing he could see was the endless Los Angeles blue. Not a cloud, not a shadow.

  All right, embrace the suck:

  If you half-closed your eyes, you could barely, just barely, convince yourself you were looking at—

  “You see?”

  He squinted and looked again.

  Devlin took off his shades, blew on them, wiped them off with a handkerchief. This was beyond crazy, the kind of thing Mexican women saw in moldy tortillas or on the side of freeway overpasses. Crudely faked by a gangbanger with Photoshop and fobbed off on a bunch of superstitious campesinos.

  He could see it. “When?” he asked.

  “On the thirteenth of every month.”

  “Where?”

  “In the desert. Near California City.”

  He didn’t want to have to ask his next question, but as long as he was taking the job, it was his job to ask. “What do you want me to do?”

  She shook her head. “Not me. El padre . . .”

  “What does the padre want me to do?’

  She looked at him as if he were simple: “He wants you to follow her.”

  “Her?”

  Jacinta slipped the pictures back into the folder without answering. As she did, Devlin got a look at what he had assumed was simply schmutz inside the folder. Pale, pink . . .

  She caught him looking. “Rose petals,” she said, reaching inside and handing him one. “From the desert.”