The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  He went home and started packing.

  ***

  As annoying as she frequently found Mick—and that was annoying indeed—Penny couldn’t help being a little glad that he’d thrown the plan out and joined her in the bombing range. The theory was that, with a big chunk of America’s warplanes in or on their way to the Afghanistan, no one would waste ammunition by dropping bombs in the range tonight. But that was just theory, and theory sometimes had an unpleasant way of disproving itself. By tomorrow, the pilots would know there were people on the range, and any bombing activity would cease until they were found and removed. But for tonight there was always the possibility that she had made camp right on top of an intended target area. And if she was going to be blown up, she thought, some company might not be a bad thing. Even Mick’s.

  They didn’t dare risk an actual fire, and Penny turned down Mick’s repeated suggestions that they huddle together for warmth when the night turned cool. So instead they sat up for a while wrapped in their own sleeping bags, talking under an enormous canopy of stars.

  “They don’t give a damn about Christ’s admonishment to turn the other cheek,” Mick said, repeating his theme for the evening. “They just want to go all Old Testament on someone’s ass, and I don’t think they really care who.”

  “I don’t agree with it,” Penny countered. “But you can sort of understand the impulse.”

  “To kill?”

  “To try to persuade other would-be terrorists that they can’t get away with it.”

  “But they were willing to die in the first place,” Mick argued. “So how does killing them teach them a lesson?”

  “Like I said, I don’t agree with it.”

  “I know, Penny,” Mick said, his tone softening. “You wouldn’t be here if you did. Days like this I just feel like I’m arguing with the whole world. Like I’m the only one who sees the light and everyone else is ready to spill blood just to have something to do with their hands.”

  “And you’re a voice crying in the wilderness?”

  Mick laughed, craning his neck to survey the empty dark around them. “Literally,” he said.

  “Listen, Mick, no offense, but I’m kind of glad we’re out here where there’s no talk radio and no cable news. Do you think we can just be silent for a while, maybe get some sleep?”

  “Sure,” Mick agreed. “Sure, that’s a good idea. Plenty of time to talk tomorrow, right?”

  She didn’t answer, because it sounded like he’d already forgotten his promise to leave after they were set up. She didn’t want to get into another argument, though. What she really did want was silence. She wanted to commune with the wilderness, to be at peace with the velvet touch of night and the eternal flow of the natural world around her.

  Ten minutes later she heard Mick’s steady breathing and knew he was asleep. She stretched out and shut her own eyes, happy to join him in that.

  ***

  True to their word, her captors had given Lucy a bottle of water and taken off her gag long enough for her to drink it, though they’d made it clear they weren’t going to engage in conversation and would answer no questions. Then two of them had escorted her, weapons in hand, to an ancient outhouse down a short trail away from the cabin, where her hands had been uncuffed so that she could clean herself when she was finished. She had stayed in there longer than they’d wanted, exulting in finally being able to move her arms again. Finally, they had pounded on the walls, threatening to come in after her, and she had emerged. They’d cuffed her again, hands still behind her back, and they’d all gone back into the cabin.

  At bedtime, she was allowed to choose whether to be face up or face down. She chose down—feeling slightly more vulnerable but at the same time not wanting to have to look at her captors. Her cuffs were removed again and she was bound, arms extended, legs spread, to four D-rings bolted to the floor, so her limbs made a big X in the center of the living room. If there had been any uncertainty as to the fate that awaited her with these men, this arrangement erased it. She’d be a prisoner, a slave to their pleasures. Then, most likely, dead, since she couldn’t imagine that they’d let her walk away after they’d finished with her.

  The men took shifts guarding her, beginning with the guy in the muscle shirt, who sat in the curly guy’s chair, rifle across his legs. If anyone had asked her, she’d have sworn that it would be impossible to sleep in such circumstances. But that turned out not to be the case. Sleep was a mercy, a blessing, taking her out of her situation and back into a world where things made sense, where people didn’t snatch others off the street and call them doves. She felt it coming, felt her mind begin to drift in unexpected directions, and welcomed it.

  ***

  Harold found that he didn’t sleep much these days, a fact that filled Virginia with dread. She kept the trailer door locked at night, in case he forgot where he was and wandered off, he figured. Of course, he’d also have to forget how to open a locked door from the inside, and so far, though his memory was often bad, it hadn’t become that bad.

  Still, he didn’t want to frighten her, so most nights—most nights that he remembered, anyway—he simply sat up late watching old movies or sitcoms on TV. They had a VCR and solar panels and had all the power they needed for simple things, and he hadn’t lost the ability to change channels.

  For some reason that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, tonight he very much wanted to watch a war movie. One of those classics about World War II. He didn’t care from what era, or what part of the war it dealt with—Midway would be fine, as would Tora, Tora, Tora or In Harm’s Way or The Bridge at Remagen or The Guns of Navarone. He wanted to see the camaraderie of men in combat, and preferably those fighting for what he considered a noble cause.

  He loved Virginia more than he could ever express, not being very handy with words. She was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and his fifty-three years of marriage to her had been satisfying in so many ways he couldn’t begin to enumerate them. But she was all he had, now, and that was a lot of weight to put on one person’s shoulders.

  Somewhere out there in the desert—surely at the cabin, now, sleeping off the night’s drunk—were the last men he’d faced combat with. Combat of a different kind, for a cause that was anything but noble. But still, they were men and they had carried arms together. They shared secrets and they shared history and they had placed their lives in one another’s hands, and not a one of them had betrayed that trust.

  Harold knew why he couldn’t be with them—who would trust a man with a gun who couldn’t even remember his own name half the time? Knowing the reason didn’t mean he didn’t miss it, though. He tried to remind himself that it was wrong, inhuman, what they had done together for so many years. That was not, he thought, the kind of man he was. His was the “Greatest Generation,” they were saying now, people who had willingly risked everything to go to a foreign land and fight for justice. People like that wouldn’t—couldn’t—do the things he had done. There was some kind of gap, an empty spot, in his brain or his heart or his soul, to let him willingly go along with such acts.

  That, he decided, was the real reason he couldn’t sleep at night. Not just that he had gotten old and required less sleep, not even that his most strenuous physical activity these days was walking out to a lawn chair and lifting a glass of lemonade to his lips. It was the memory of the things he had done coming back to haunt him. His brain tried to shield him from it by shutting down, by turning off the memory banks, but that was only so effective. There were nights that it worked, but there were too many others, when it failed to protect him from the memory of his own crimes.

  He snatched up the remote and pointed it at the TV, jamming his finger down on the CHANNEL button again and again, trying to find something, anything, that would shut off the torture his memory inflicted on him. Nothing worked, and he knew this would be a long, difficult night.

  Chapter Seven

  Penny and Dieter and Larry had made a big deal
of synchronizing the new digital alarm watches they’d purchased in San Diego before driving into the desert. When it beeped her awake in the morning, an hour before sunrise, she knew that Dieter and Larry were also waking up at their own campsites. She shook Mick awake—he had been expected to be encamped in a motel, so he didn’t get one of the spiffy watches—and started a pot of coffee. While the water boiled she went off into the desert to fulfill her toilet needs, and when she got back he was up and preparing breakfast for them both.

  They ate quickly and headed out to get their first task accomplished before the sun came up. Using satellite photos they’d purchased on the web, they had identified what looked like reasonably flat, bare spots in three different areas in the mountains. Penny and Mick hiked quickly to the one nearest their camp. The aerial view had been fairly accurate, it turned out. To be exactly the blank slate they wanted they’d had to clear away some stray rocks, but for the most part, it was a wide stretch of brown earth with no plants, flat as a city street.

  “This is perfect,” Mick said.

  “Not perfect, but close enough,” Penny replied.

  “Close enough.” They set to work.

  Within thirty minutes they were done. With light-colored rocks, to show against the brown dirt, they had spelled out NO MORE BOMBS in letters big enough to be seen from hundreds, maybe thousands of feet up. Dieter would be writing WAGE PEACE, while Larry’s slogan was WAR NO MORE. This kind of stone art, geoglyphs or intaglios, was actually very traditional in this part of the world, with a string of images, maybe thousands of years old, still visible from the air from Blythe all the way down to the Yuha desert near the Mexican border.

  Every day until they were caught, they would either change their messages slightly or make new marks upon the land, so that fly-overs would reveal that there was still someone alive within the Impact Area. Their continued presence would ensure that the bombs wouldn’t fall. At least, that was the theory.

  As they walked back to camp, Penny touched Mick’s arm. “Hey, I’m sorry I shut you down last night when you wanted to talk, Mick.”

  He looked at her and smiled. “No problem,” he said. “I’m getting kind of used to it.”

  She didn’t know exactly how to respond to that—it was true, but not something she wanted to get into just now. Instead, she veered in a slightly different direction, focusing it on herself in a desperate attempt to keep him from thinking there might ever be a them. “It’s just something I do, you know? I kind of keep people at a distance, I guess. Keep walls up.”

  “You have to let them down sometime, Pen.”

  “That’s what they tell me. I guess I just haven’t found my time yet.”

  “Have you tried?”

  “Now and again,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s a defense mechanism, or what. I just don’t seem to be comfortable letting people get too close.”

  Penny began to wish she’d initiated this conversation last night, in the dark. She kept her head down, picking out a path in the early morning light. But she felt the heat of his gaze on her, studying her.

  “Maybe you should give it another shot, Penny. You might find that you like it.”

  “I…I don’t know,” she said. “I like sex. I like physical contact. I like having people to talk to…except when I don’t. I know it doesn’t make sense.”

  “Not a lot,” Mick agreed.

  “And it’s not that I don’t want a relationship,” she went on. “But even if I’d found the right guy, which I haven’t, that takes a lot of…you know, time and energy. And I’ve just been too busy for that.” Which is true, she thought. But maybe a bit of a dodge all the same. And I don’t think I could get much more pointed without cutting his throat.

  “So,” Penny said, changing the subject completely. Another wall, another defense. When it gets too personal, step aside. “So, you think this will work? Really?”

  They had all agreed that it would—they wouldn’t have come if they didn’t think there was a reason to be out here, she knew. But thinking that on the floor of someone’s Connecticut Avenue apartment and thinking it on the ground in the middle of a live bombing range were two very different things.

  “No,” Mick said. His honesty surprised her, but that was often the case with Mick. “Do I think it’ll end war for all time? Absolutely not. Do I think it’ll at least make them stop bombing one of the most beautiful spots in the American West? Maybe, at least for a little while. Maybe we’ll get enough publicity to make people pay attention to the Chocolates. Chances are if you went more than fifty miles in any direction you’d have a hard time finding anyone who had ever heard of this place. If we can capture some eyeballs, then the battle’s half done, right?”

  “I suppose.”

  “We want a world at peace,” Mick went on. “A world where the military doesn’t need bombs—better yet, a world where we don’t need a military. But that’s not going to happen any time soon, especially now. Especially with Bush and his friends firing up the war machine again. That just makes our job that much harder to do—but also, that much more vital. If we can get people to think about peace—to consider the idea that peace is a viable alternative—then we’ve done more than we could have hoped for.

  “So I guess that’s the answer, Pen. Will this do what we want it to? Not a chance. But can it do things we haven’t even dared to consider? Absolutely it can. That’s why we’re here, why you and Larry and Dieter are risking having your heads blown off.”

  “And you, now,” Penny pointed out.

  Mick shrugged. “I guess so.”

  She stopped and smiled. There had been a time when she might have given him a hug at that moment. But not anymore. Now it would just confuse him, make him hope for things that weren’t going to happen. She kept her hands, somewhat uncomfortably, at her sides. He wasn’t the man for her but that didn’t mean he wasn’t—disregarding his awkward social skills—a good man.

  “Thanks, Mick,” she said, meaning it.

  ***

  Ken knew that crime scene investigators could discover amazing things from careful examination of a scene where a crime had taken place or evidence had been abandoned. But he was no trained forensic technician, and the fire pit at the Slab was hardly pristine. It had burned the night before, as it did every night. It stank now, like old ash and burnt garbage and urine, as if the locals pissed on it at night to put it out. Likely they did, once they’d tucked away a few beers.

  Oddly, the metallic taste remained in his mouth, and nothing that had happened the day before seemed to fit the previous pattern the magic had established. He’d never had it last more than a day, but it seemed to be hanging on. He wished it could do something about the smell of the ashes before him.

  Carrie Provost stood nearby, watching him work. He sifted through the ash with a screened tray, much like panning for gold. Anything he found big enough not to fall through the screen went into one of a series of plastic evidence bags. So far mostly what he’d found were charred beer cans, melted lumps of plastic, nails and screws, and one pair of pliers. He’d also come across two unknown chunks of something that might have been bone fragments. Of course, they could have been from a steak as easily as from a person.

  “You think you’re going to find a fingerprint or somethin’ in there, Kenneth?” Carrie asked. “Because most people, they won’t touch that with their hands. When it’s not hot it’s filthy, if you know what I mean. All that dirt and muck and ash. People put their hands in there, they leave fingerprints all right—on everything they touch for the rest of the day.”

  “Then it ought to be pretty easy to find out who put that skull in, right, Carrie? I just follow the prints around the Slab.”

  “I don’t think that’ll—ohh, you’re teasin’ me, ain’t you, Ken?”

  “I’m teasing you, Carrie. Tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’ll find much in here of value to anyone, especially me. But I have to look.”

  “I did the right thing, didn�
��t I? Calling you when I found it?”

  “You did the right thing, Carrie.”

  “And you don’t think it was me, do you?”

  “I don’t think so, Carrie. I’m pretty sure if you’d put it in the fire pit, you’d have let someone else dig it out.”

  “That’s the way I see it. Unless of course I was trying to fool you into thinkin’ that.”

  “Well, you might have a point there,” Ken said, shaking his tray. A rock stayed in it, so he picked the rock up with tongs and dropped it into yet another plastic bag, which he carefully sealed. With a permanent marker he wrote the day’s date, the location, and “rock” on the bag’s label. It suddenly occurred to him that there were probably firefighters and rescue workers performing this exact same process in Manhattan—sifting through the ash, looking for body parts. Except the Carrie Provosts they had to deal with were mothers and brothers and spouses, driven half-mad by tension and fear and hope. Goddamnit, Ken thought as tears welled in his eyes. He couldn’t even wipe his own face with his hands, encased as they were in latex gloves caked thick with ash and muck from the pit.

  “You okay, Sheriff?” Carrie asked. Her concern sounded real and he didn’t bother to correct her nomenclature.

  “Yeah, just got some grit in my eye.”

  By the time he’d finished—“finished” being a relative term, which in this case meant that he had sifted as much crap as he was going to and was pretty sure he hadn’t found anything at all helpful—a small crowd had gathered to watch. He recognized Clyde Wills, a tattoo artist whose body was his own best calling card, old Hal and Virginia Shipp, Maryjane Peters, who lived with a loser named Darren Cook, Jaye and Jim Gretsch, and there were a couple of others who he couldn’t place. Peeling the gloves off his sweaty hands, he dropped them into a larger plastic bag and loaded up the evidence bags into it, then rose and turned to face the spectators.

  “I’m here to investigate a possible crime,” he said. “A human skull was found in this fire pit. Do any of you know anything about how it came to be there?”