The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  He had turned his back and America had slipped away, everyone he’d known gone, leaving behind only strangers in American skins. And nothing would ever be the same as it had been, and if these changes were for the better he couldn’t see it. People hated, people distrusted, people accused. Good people died and evil ones prospered. Foolish to long for the days you could leave your doors unlocked, foolish to remember when people could leave their keys in the car, when people could let their kids walk to school, when people knew who lived next door. He was a foolish old man now, not as old as Hal but closing in, and anyway Hal wouldn’t have to live to see the next turns, which was just as well, Ken thought, because he had stopped believing things would turn for the better. You couldn’t affect things on any significant level, he believed, because only a few people could do that, and they did so in service of only one thing, only money. Not even money, he realized, just bits of information that stood for money. Flashes of data streaming along wires controlled everything, from the colors of cars you could buy to the shoes on your feet to the quality of the air and water.

  All a man could do was to get up in the morning and go about his day, do the best job he could, try not to hurt anybody, maybe help someone if he could, and go back to bed. The rest of it was in someone else’s hands.

  Ken hiked through the dark, because that was what it took to do the job.

  Chapter Twenty

  They slept for a few hours, Kelly and Rock and Terrance and Vic, slept because they had to, because after a day on the move and all the things they’d gone through, Cam’s death and the apparent escape of their Dove, they’d been too exhausted to continue. Ray hadn’t made it back to the cabin, and the later it got the less likely it seemed that he would. They’d been less than an hour away from him when they’d heard the gunfire. If he’d hit her, he could have caught up before they made it back, since they were hauling Cam much of the way and he was on his own. If not, he should still have reached the cabin by now.

  Kelly was awake first. He had a gift, a totally reliable internal clock, and could wake himself at any hour he chose. Vic started when he felt Kelly’s toe nudge his ribs. He rolled over and looked up at Kelly, already dressed and moving on to wake Rock. A lantern glowed on the counter that separated the kitchen area from the rest of the room, throwing Kelly’s shadow across the walls as he stepped among the sleeping men like a fairy tale ogre’s. Vic glanced at his watch. A little past four. It had been well past dark by the time they’d stumbled in, dropping onto unrolled sleeping bags in the main room. They’d had less than five hours of sleep.

  “Up and at ‘em, ladies,” Kelly said. His ultimate insult, Vic thought, realizing for the first time the extent to which Kelly truly disliked women. He’d never married and rarely seemed to date. He was definitely heterosexual, but when he talked of women he’d been with, they were usually whores or tramps or sluts. Hispanic, usually. Vic understood suddenly, laying there on a sleeping bag in a room with three men he’d once considered friends, that they were all just here to enable Kelly’s addiction. He got off on mistreating and abusing brown-skinned, black-haired women. Somehow he’d convinced the rest of them that there was not only nothing wrong with that, but that it was an experience to be shared. Cherished.

  He felt ashamed that he’d never reached this conclusion before. It had been years. Years. He’d been coming on these Dove Hunts almost as long as he’d been married. With the horrible clarity of four a.m. he understood that he’d never met a woman as sexy as Cathy, his own wife. Even more than a little overweight, with hair the color of dirty straw and an unpretty face that nevertheless beamed like spring sunshine when she looked at him, none of the Doves over the years could do for him what Cathy did. Girls who took whatever they could hand out and begged for more, girls who accepted their treatment with blank expressions and slack bodies, girls who fought and bit and kicked, giving all the men bruises they’d have to hide from wives and loved ones—none even compared to the way Vic felt when Cathy happily, greedily took him in her mouth or stroked him hard and then guided him into her waiting heat.

  He pushed back the flap of the sleeping bag he’d slept in that night. This was it, then, he decided. No more Dove Hunts for him. He’d see this one through until they all got home—with all that had happened, there was no getting around that, now—but then he was done. Without another glance at the others, he went outside to piss.

  When he returned, Kelly shot a narrow-eyed, angry glance at him and pointedly looked at his watch. “Two minutes gone, Vic,” he said. “You’ve got eight minutes to pack whatever you can carry on a double-time hike.

  Kelly’s backpack, stuffed to the brim, already leaned against the kitchen counter. Rock and Terrance were busily cramming personal belongings and food items from the coolers into theirs. Vic didn’t reply, just found his own backpack and began to fill it.

  When the eight minutes had passed—it felt like less—Kelly whistled as if he were hailing a Manhattan taxi. “Time’s up, gentlemen,” he said. “Let’s move out.”

  Terrance and Rock were pretty much packed up by that point, and both men rose and shouldered their packs. But Vic wasn’t quite finished—he was trying to pack his things in some kind of reasonable fashion so he could carry the thing on Kelly’s forced march. Kelly was apparently serious about his deadline, though. He squirted fuel from a can of charcoal lighter fluid, which Terrance had brought along with a portable Weber grill, toward Vic, a finger of it sketching up the side of his backpack. “Move it out, Bradford,” Kelly commanded.

  Vic hoisted his pack off the floor. “Okay, geez,” he said. Kelly looked away from him and continued squirting the fluid around the room’s outside walls, then played it over a pile he’d made of propane cans for the stove and lanterns. “Having a cookout, Kelly?” Vic asked.

  “We’re not coming back here.” Kelly said. He went around the corner, squirting into the other room, and called back after him. “You want to leave a bunch of fingerprints and DNA evidence around, by my guest. But I plan to make it as hard as I can for anyone to know who’s been here.”

  Vic looked at Terrance, who shrugged, and Rock, whose sleepy face was as impassive as if he hadn’t heard at all. “Makes sense,” Terrance said.

  Vic didn’t answer. It made sense. It made as much sense as any of it. Kelly wasn’t turned on by fucking these Hispanic girls, he was turned on by the knowledge that he was going to kill them. That had been his whole motivation from the start. He’d wanted to share it because that’s what he was used to, sex and death in the company of men. Now the premeditated way he went about his clean-up process proved that he’d had an escape plan from the beginning, too. He had known from the beginning that there would be a last time, at least for this killing ground, and he’d made sure there would be a way to erase the clues.

  Back in the main room, Kelly set the now-empty lighter fluid can down on the pile of propane tanks and pulled a box of matches from his pocket. He picked up his backpack, slipping his shoulders through the straps, and looked at the other guys. “Better get going,” he said. “I don’t know how long it’s going to take to get to the propane, but when it does it’s going to blow.” He was, Vic noted, smiling as he said it.

  Vic followed the other two outside. It was still full dark, stars glittering in the cold reaches of space. “Where to?” Terrance asked.

  Rock simply pointed down the dirt track they had driven in on. “Home,” he said.

  “It’s the fastest way to civilization,” Vic said. “And the easiest to hike.”

  “What about Kelly?”

  “He’ll catch up, Terrance,” Vic said. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  Penny and Mick spent the first part of the night sitting with their backs against the dry, cool cave wall. She dozed a few times, falling into a sleep deep enough to dream once, but her dreams made no sense: full of crazy images of half-naked people carrying torches, their faces wracked with fear, speaking a language she couldn’t even begi
n to comprehend.

  They had found the cave just where she had thought it would be, and flicked on flashlights only long enough to ascertain that it wasn’t home to bobcats or any other predator big enough to cause them harm. The mouth was only about three feet across, but they could see that it widened rapidly inside. With a fallen ocotillo wand they whisked away the spider webs and they made their way around the first bend, so that no cursory glance by soldiers would reveal their presence. That was as far as they wanted to explore in the dead of night, so they had taken their positions, scooping out reasonably comfortable seats from the sand but remaining semi-upright instead of stretching out in case a quick escape farther into the cave became necessary.

  In the twilight space between waking and sleeping, Penny saw, or thought she saw, something glowing deeper inside the cave. She was on her feet before she really came to full consciousness. By then, she decided, she was already committed so she felt for her flashlight—she’d left it on top of her backpack next to where she’d sat—and, finding it, started down the cave, her empty left hand waving about before her to keep spider webs or stray bats out of her way.

  The roof of the cave was higher than she could reach now, and without turning on her light, which she didn’t want to do, she couldn’t see it. The walls were far enough apart that she couldn’t touch both at once. The cave took another bend, to the left this time, and she followed it. So far there had been no side-tunnels, so even though she had left Mick snoring away where they’d both slept, she knew she couldn’t lose him. Anyway, she thought, it’s surprising this thing is so deep—almost more like a mineshaft than a simple cave. But there was nothing man-made about it, as far as she could see.

  Of course, the farther into it she went, the less she could see. She considered switching on her flashlight but didn’t, for no reason that she could articulate. By scraping her fingertips along the walls, she followed the cave’s path as it led her away from Mick and toward—well, she didn’t know what. Not-Mick. Something that glowed.

  Rounding yet another curve, she finally found them. Mushrooms, glowing with their own internal phosphorescence like little gaslights. Not tiny, though—the heads of some of them were plate-sized or bigger. Their stems and heads were mostly white, which was what glowed, dotted with darker spots. She was no botanist but she thought that mushrooms were out of place in the desert to begin with—didn’t they like moist climates?

  But then she remembered something she’d read about while researching dry-climate flora, as part of her preparation for this trip. She hadn’t paid much attention because it was about a place in Oregon—eastern Oregon, on the dry side of that state, where the Cascades held off the coast’s traditionally high rainfall. A mushroom had been found there that had been determined to be the largest single living organism in the world. She couldn’t remember the exact dimensions now—something like the size of sixteen hundred football fields, three and a half miles long, three feet thick, living mostly underground except where it sprouted up mushrooms above the surface. DNA testing had shown that all these mushrooms were part of the same massive fungus. It killed trees as it grew underground, poisoning their roots and cutting them off from needed nutrients in the soil.

  The previous record-holder for biggest single organism had also been a mushroom—in Washington, she thought. But this Oregon one dwarfed even that. It turned out that dry climates were useful for this kind of growth, because the aridity prevented a lot of competition.

  So maybe a mushroom in a dry California desert wasn’t so unusual, after all. The fact that these glowed like deep-sea fish was strange, though, no getting around that.

  She bent closer to look at them, but Penny had never been a fan of mushrooms under any circumstances, and this freakish variety wasn’t about to change that. She had seen what she’d come down here for, though. It was time she headed back. If Mick woke up and she was gone, the poor baby would freak.

  But before she turned around, she decided to click on her light for a moment, just to see what else was here.

  In the circle of light she cast on the wall, she saw writing. Years’ worth—centuries, even. Some of the languages were immediately apparent—English, German, French, Russian maybe. Others were not. Some, she wasn’t sure were even human languages. She saw seemingly random jumbles of marks that had presumably meant something to someone, once, but probably couldn’t be translated now without a new Rosetta Stone.

  The expected markings were there, and mostly on the top layers, evidence of relatively recent visitations: EMMETT LOVES JUNITA, RHM + RMD 4-EVER, I LUV RANDY, JACK WAS HERE 11/17/86. On what seemed to be the next level down she began to see earlier dates, a 1901 and an 1892 among them. Disturbingly, threaded through all this, in such a way that she couldn’t quite make out the chronology of the graffiti, was a more sinister series of quotes. KILL EDDY was one, and SLIC HER OPEN AND WATCH HER BLEED and ALL MEXES MUST DIE and more, words it sickened her to read. And under and over and between all the rest of it someone had written what appeared to be a treatise, in small, cramped handwriting that went on for what would have been the equivalent of pages and pages. Penny sat on the cave’s sandy floor and played the light over the wall, trying to make it out.

  “The Evil that results is shurely the work of Man and Devil but not God because God is the Creator who made the Heavens Above and the evil is of the Hell Below, tempting, taunting, leading Mankind to shure and definate Ruine. Whores and temtresses and dark women are inside the Evil and from the Evil. Men who worship not at the Lord’s feet and fear not the Lord’s wrathe are from the Evil and of the Evil. The only way out for these Lost Souls from the Evil is Deathe only in Deathe will they be guided toward the Light and the true path and the true way that God intended for them. Deathe is not an Ending but a passage through to a better life in servitude of the Lord’s Will. Deathe is a gift bestowed upon the Evil, a reflexion of the Lord’s Mercy Deathe blood flows on the sands and streetes and skin is cut open parted heads removed entrails spilt wicked Flesh seared with righteous fire bubbles the smell the stenk of Deathe is strong—”

  “What are you doing?”

  Penny jumped and dropped the flashlight, startled out of her near-stupor by the sound of Mick’s voice behind her. She hadn’t heard him approach, so enthralled was she by the horrific text she pieced together through all the other markings on the cave wall. She snatched the flashlight, still beaming, from the floor and aimed it behind her. Mick leaned against the opposite wall, holding one of the big mushrooms in his hands and picking it apart bit by bit, like a kid playing “loves me, loves me not” with a daisy, dropping the shreds on the cave floor.

  “Jesus, you nearly gave me a heart attack,” Penny said. Hyperbole, sure, but her heart was indeed pounding in her chest and she couldn’t quite catch her breath. “Why did you sneak up on me like that?”

  “I didn’t,” Mick replied. “I just walked down here, making as much noise as I ever make, I guess. You were just so engrossed in whatever you were doing there, I guess you didn’t hear me.”

  “I was reading,” she tried to explain. “All this freaky graffiti on the wall.”

  “Reading?” Mick echoed. “What graffiti?”

  Penny turned the flashlight’s beam away from him and toward the wall she’d been examining before.

  It was blank, solid rock—a few scrapes and chinks from the occasional explorer’s passing the only sign that humans had ever been here.

  ***

  The busy chittering of small birds woke Lucy up in the morning. Sunlight angled in through the car’s windshield but hadn’t reached her yet, curled up as she was in the back seat. She felt behind her head for the door handle and opened it, then fell out into the still-cool morning air. Every muscle in her body seemed to have its own individual ache or pain; she felt like she’d been dragged behind the Altima last night, instead of driving it.

  She hadn’t wanted to sleep this late, but figured maybe it was better than fighting exhaustion all d
ay. She had a lot to take care of before she could sleep again. Opening the front passenger door, she found a couple of mini-donuts, some napkins, and a bottle of the water that she’d taken the night before. She ate the donuts walking, stretching her thigh and calf muscles. Then she found a dense bush and squatted behind it to pee, wiping herself with one of the napkins. After fastening her jeans again, she broke the seal on the water bottle and guzzled it. When it was nearly gone she fingerbrushed her teeth and used the last little bit of water to rinse and spit.

  Her morning ablutions done, she climbed back behind the wheel and keyed the stolen car to life. She made her way back to the freeway, a little busier at this time of the day than it had been the night before, and drove it for about twenty minutes, until she found the exit for the 111. There she headed south, through the wealthy communities of Palm Springs and Palm Desert, and farther down, through Indio. At Mecca, worried that she might be recognized, she tried to keep her face down as much as possible, looking at the road through the tops of her eyes. Still she stayed on the road, leaving Riverside County and entering Imperial. She knew nobody down here, so she relaxed a little.