The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  And illuminated there, as clearly as it had been earlier, was the graffiti of those who had been here before. She took a moment to scan the wall as it led farther and farther back into the cave, and she saw that the writing extended as far as the light’s beam could shine.

  She couldn’t take the time to study it now, though. With any luck at all, she would never come back here and never look at it again. She hurried back through the cave toward the entrance. When she got to the place she and Mick had spent the night, she snatched up her own backpack. As she picked it up, she remembered the cell phone inside, the way to contact Dieter and Larry, and they had to be told what had happened, they needed to be warned to get off the bombing range and to some safe ground where she could find them. She was frantic now, hands shaking as she dug through her pack. Finally she found the phone, in an inside pocket. It slipped through her fingers twice as she tried to extract it, but then she finally had it. She shouldered the backpack as she rounded the corner, heading for the light. As the cave’s ceiling lowered she dropped to her hands and knees, crawling through the mouth and into the blistering heat of the day.

  A quick glance around assured her that the soldiers had not found this place yet, though certainly they would have found the campsite last night. They couldn’t be too far from here, though—in the dark and their haste, she and Mick hadn’t done a very good job of concealing their tracks. It didn’t matter now, though—if she could just stay ahead of them long enough to get out, she’d be okay. All she wanted was out, now.

  As she hiked, she scrolled through the speed dial menu and punched the button for Dieter. His phone rang twice, and then a male voice answered it.

  “Hello?”

  But the voice wasn’t Dieter’s, didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to his rather high-pitched German accent. She hit the END button immediately and scrolled again. This time, she saw Mick’s number, and a flash of guilt struck her. She bit it back and scrolled down to where Larry’s name was and pushed the CALL button again. And again, two rings, followed by the same male voice. “Who is this?”

  She hung up and reached around to stuff the phone back into her backpack.

  She had thought she was in trouble before, but now she knew that her worst fears were true, and then some.

  ***

  Lucy sat in the stolen car looking at the house where Kelly Williams lived, according to the address list Ray Dixon’s wife had given her. It was on Lotus Lane, in what passed for the wealthier neighborhood of El Centro, a street of big stucco houses with red tile roofs and fenced back yards. Through many of the fences she’d glimpsed pools.

  She was pretty sure that Kelly Williams was the guy with the curly silver hair, the one who had seemed like the leader of the group that had kidnapped her. She was also sure there was no one at home. She’d been sitting here for twenty minutes and there hadn’t been so much as a flicker of movement in any of the windows. At one point she had walked up to the door and peered in through the full-length window beside it, and inside there was a wrought-iron table with a metal surface piled high with several days’ worth of newspapers, as if someone brought the paper in for him each day. Today’s paper still sat in the yard where it had landed when the paper carrier tossed it. She remembered no wedding band on his finger, or pale line on his darkly tanned skin, so she didn’t think he was married. She didn’t know what a single man would need with a house this size, though. She guessed he just had the money to spend, so why not?

  Lucy suspected that she was extremely conspicuous, sitting in a stolen Altima outside an empty house on a relatively quiet street. The occasional vehicle passed her—a gardener’s pick-up truck, laden with workers and equipment, long-handled rakes turning idly in tubes as it rumbled past; a brown UPS truck, its doors open, driver clad in brown shorts and a short-sleeved shirt and visibly sweating anyway; a Hispanic woman, a maid, Lucy guessed, driving a Mercedes with two blond preschoolers in their safety seats in back. Sooner or later, if she stayed here, she was going to see a police car show up behind her. And she didn’t want that to happen until after she’d done what she needed to do.

  She ate a few of her precious Cheez-its and chased them with some water. Her supplies were getting low, and at some point she’d have to replenish. She had no cash, though; her purse with her wallet and ATM card and checkbook had been left back at the cabin. So she’d have to steal again, or she’d have to go home. Going home would almost certainly entail turning herself in.

  There would come a time for that, she knew. There would be an aftermath to all this, some kind of fallout. She didn’t want to think that far in advance. She didn’t want to think beyond the moment when she found the men who had taken her. She was already pressing her luck, sitting here outside Kelly Williams’s place, and it was obvious that he wasn’t home yet. She cranked the engine and drove away, headed for the next place on her list.

  ***

  Hal Shipp was uncomfortable this close to the Slab. Once, he thought he heard the voices again, whispering their evil thoughts, but it turned out to be simply the susurrus of the wind whistling through creosote. Another time, what he believed was a litany of horrors turned out to be the skritch skritch of a yucca leaf, the point of which inscribed a semi-circle in the sand as the breeze blew it and then ceased, blew and ceased.

  He missed Virginia, he really did. They’d probably been apart fewer than a dozen nights since they’d married, and not being with her was the hardest part of his self-imposed exile from the Slab. Last night, of course, he hadn’t even remembered her, and he thought that the loss of memory was probably a blessing if he had to spend more time away from her. He was just so accustomed to her being there—especially in these last years, since he’d retired, knowing that he could always, with just a few steps, feel the softness of her skin or smell her hair or taste her lips.

  Now, though, she’d been taken over by something, some force outside of herself. That was what Hal believed, anyway, that some malevolent presence had taken over everyone on the Slab, except himself. And he’d been spared only because he had been gifted with the magic, he figured. Somehow Sheriff Butler brought the magic to the surface again, which was both a blessing and a curse.

  Blessing because it gave him strength, and Hal, who had once been strong, was strong no more. He was frail and weak and he knew it, and that was part of what scared him. He relied on Virginia, but if she was no longer in control of her own actions she could turn on him. She could easily knock him down, strangle him, stab him, and there would be nothing he could do to prevent it. Curse, because, if he couldn’t be with her he didn’t want to remember when he had been. He had always known they both would die some day; he wanted to go first, because he knew that she could get along without him better than he without her.

  Memory could be brutal, a dagger to the heart. He remembered the way Timmy’s hand had felt in his on the first day of school, when they had walked into his new classroom and the boy’s trepidation had mingled with excitement, causing his hand to flutter like a small bird’s wings. But Tim was gone now. He remembered the boys he’d gone to college with, and the men he’d served with overseas. They were dead or otherwise absent from his life. He remembered the friends he and Virginia had made in Albuquerque, and then on the Slab. Gone now, gone from his life. As long as whatever it was had control of the people on the Slab, he would not be setting foot there again, would not be seeing those people. Each one of them, each face, each voice, each individual style of laughter, left a hole in him as though a piece had been carved out with a kitchen knife.

  He didn’t realize that he’d started to cry, arms wrapped around himself like a lost little boy, until the sound of Ken Butler’s car interrupted the flow of his thoughts.

  ***

  Once they were headed west on the 10, Kelly fished a cell phone out of one of his pockets and dialed without telling the others who he was calling, or why. Vic thought that Kelly seemed to be retreating into himself, keeping his own counsel. Alm
ost as if he didn’t trust the others.

  That’s good, Kelly, he thought. Don’t trust me because I’ll turn on you in a second.

  Every mile they covered was a mile closer to home, a mile closer to the time he’d say goodbye forever to Kelly and the other guys. It was a mile closer to Cathy, and the new, normal life Vic craved. It meant going back to work, ten at night to six the next morning pushing brooms and waxing floors for a janitorial service, when there was work at all, for just enough money to scrape by rent-free on the Slab.

  Still, he’d take it. It was hard and it was wearying, but it was a life. Kelly Williams only offered death. No bargain there.

  “Hi, Margie?” he heard Kelly say. That was a surprise—Margie was Cam Hensley’s wife. Widow, now, he supposed. “Is Cam there?”

  Kelly was quiet a moment, listening. He turned his head slowly so his passengers could see the wide smile on his face, the smile that contradicted the sincere tone with which he spoke. “You’re kidding! No!” He paused a moment, shaking his head and screwing his face into an exaggerated frown. “No, we had a big fight, the very first night out. Cam got mad and said he was going home. He took his car and left us stranded out there. We haven’t seen him since. You haven’t heard from him at all?”

  Vic had to appreciate Kelly’s cruel brilliance. Cam and his car were both missing in the desert. By tying them together—and distancing Cam from the rest of them—Kelly would deflect suspicion. Sure, their fingerprints would be found in the Navigator, but they’d driven out to their hunting area in it—an area that they’d already picked out, years ago, in case they were ever asked, and which was nowhere near the cabin they’d burned or the bodies they’d buried. The bullet in Cam’s brain had come from Kelly’s precious Desert Eagle, so he’d have to ditch the gun somewhere, but he could do that and get another one down the line.

  “No, I really—I don’t know what to say, Margie. We’ve—well, you know, we’ve been out in the boonies, not in cell phone range or anything. When he never showed up again, we…we just…you know, assumed. That he was home. Yeah.”

  Vic could hear Margie’ voice now, growing louder on the other end of the connection. She was probably crying, probably beginning to panic, now. And still, Kelly kept his cool. Vic was impressed in spite of himself.

  “No, no, totally. I understand. Listen, Marg. We’ll look for him, okay. I mean, we won’t even come home. We’ll just start looking for him, anyplace we can think of. In the meantime, I hate to say it, but maybe you should call the police, okay? Okay? Yeah. What?”

  He was quiet again, listening to another extended monologue. This time, his expression of concern seemed real.

  “I don’t know, Margie. I don’t know what he’s gotten mixed up in. Maybe it’s nothing. I know how it sounds, but who knows? You just keep yourself safe. And thanks for the heads up. As soon as I know anything at all, I’ll let you know, okay? Okay. Bye, Margie.”

  He closed the phone, and after a second’s pause, he said, “Well, shit.”

  “What is it, Kelly?” Terrance asked. Terrance was in the front passenger seat, while Rock and Vic were squeezed into the extended cab’s cramped rear seat.

  “The bitch showed up at Ray’s house,” Kelly replied.

  “Who? Margie?”

  “No, dumbfuck,” Kelly said. “The Dove. The Mexican girl. Dixon’s wife said she smashed her way in, waving a gun around. Made her write out a list of all our addresses.”

  “Which of course Ray would have,” Rock put in. “Fucker’s so anal about everything.”

  “Past tense,” Kelly said. “If she’s still alive—and ahead of us, even—then Ray’s dead.”

  “Shit,” Vic said. This trip had turned into the biggest pile of dogshit he could imagine, and apparently it was still getting worse.

  “So what’s that mean?” Terrance asked. “What do we do? We can’t go look for Cam, we know what happened to him.”

  “Yeah, and now there’s someone to blame it on,” Kelly said. “An angle we can use. Maybe Cam was having an affair with this chick, using our Dove Hunt to hide it from his wife. That’s why he faked getting pissed off at us and left—so he could go meet up with her. Except she turned out to be loony tunes. She offed him, then decided to go after the rest of us.”

  “Hey, I like that,” Rock said. “That’s good.”

  “You think she’s really coming after us all?” Vic asked.

  “I don’t see why she’d want the list if she wasn’t.”

  “But Vic and I, we don’t even have addresses,” Rock said. “No street numbers on the Slab.”

  “That’s right,” Kelly agreed. “That’s why we’ll make our stand at your place. She’s got to come searching for us. We sit tight and wait for her. Then we kill her, in self-defense, and we put the Cam story together for the cops.”

  “Not at my place,” Vic protested. “We’re not endangering Cathy that way.”

  “Rock’s place is better anyway,” Kelly said. “It’s far enough away from the neighbors to limit any collateral damage. Your place, Vic, anyone shot the bitch from there the bullet’d probably kill two or three other people in the bargain.”

  Kelly was right, Vic knew. Rock lived alone, and his trailer was both more isolated and more defensible. And he had to hand it to the bastard—he seemed to have a knack for turning shit into gold. If they could really kill the Dove, after all this, they might have a good chance of being able to pin Cam’s murder on her. Two birds, and all that.

  There was a kind of genius to it, he thought. Sick, but genius just the same.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The ride out was much smoother than the one in had been. Mick wasn’t used to driving on dirt roads and jeep tracks, and the novice’s instinct was to slow down on washboard roads, which only served to maximize the jolt of every little bump. But Penny had driven huge trucks through Kuwaiti deserts, and knew that the way to get over the washboard with a minimum of aggravation was to speed up to the fastest safe speed, which served to even out the road.

  Comfort wasn’t her priority anyway. She was pushing it as fast as she dared, given the regularity with which the old jeep track dropped away in the middle, or rose up, or had big rocks laying across the path, or broke into a sandy wash that made the wheels slip and shimmy. Too fast could be dangerous, but too slow was, well, too slow. She had killed somebody, and that was something you didn’t mess around with.

  She had a hard time even imagining how it had come to that. Certainly when she had felt the oddly familiar, tingling taste in her mouth the other day, she had not anticipated that it would somehow lead to her committing manslaughter, even in self-defense. She remembered the date she’d first experienced it, of course. March fourteenth, in the year of the Gulf War 1991.The ground war that would last for a hundred days had just begun. Penny, assigned as a truck driver to the King Khalid Military City in Saudi Arabia, which everyone just called KKMC, was now behind the wheel of a five-ton truck heading for Iraqi territory via the Euphrates River. “Convoy” was a glorified word for the procession: there were three trucks on the road, two five tonners and a refrigerated truck. The refrigerator was to bring back American bodies in. The group was assigned to bury Iraqi corpses, but in case anything had been captured that needed to be seen back in Saudi, or any POWs needed to be brought back, the cargo capacity of the big trucks would come into play.

  Sand and dust got everywhere, in her teeth and hair, eyes and underpants—a problem throughout her Gulf War experience but even more so when they were driving long distance. Condoms were used less for birth control or disease prevention than for stretching over the muzzle of your M-16 to keep the grit out. Penny’s company on this drive was Sergeant Aaron Tippetts of Athens, Georgia. He outranked her, he’d been in the Army longer than she had, and he hated the very idea of women in the military, much less anywhere near the front lines. So the trip wasn’t her favorite duty.

  When she first started to feel the odd metallic taste on her t
ongue, she thought maybe it was just that she’d opened her mouth to breathe and got dust on it. Then it occurred to her that maybe it was one of the chemical agents the Iraqis were expected to use against the Coalition forces. They’d already been given Cipro and pyridiostigmine bromide pills and some sort of vaccine they were warned not to talk about with anybody—none of which did much to put a person’s mind to rest, she thought. But she mentioned it to Tippetts, who shrugged it off; he hadn’t felt or tasted anything, he said. Her MOPP suit remained tucked away for later use, if necessary.

  As they rolled through Kuwait toward Iraq, Tippetts, sitting in the passenger seat and “navigating,” spotted what he was sure was a shorter route than the one they’d been told to take. Penny was wary of shortcuts, but Tippetts had insisted that it would save them a day of driving time. Four hours later, they reached the reason it wasn’t the officially prescribed route—retreating Iraqi soldiers had left behind a gift in the form of a vast field of land mines. The field had been marked by Allied forces, but with the rush of the ground war on, it hadn’t been cleared. The road was the road, though—to go around the minefield and cross-country could result in the heavy trucks getting caught in the sand, and backtracking to the suggested route would cost most of another day. Penny deferred to Tippetts, who gave the order to drive through.

  That was when it clicked in. She felt a rushing of her blood, as if her veins were suddenly full to overloading, and a sharpening of her senses. It seemed that she could see every grain of sand, every inch of ground, in intricate detail. Somehow it all felt natural to her, not like something she should be concerned about, or even wonder about. Imagination had never been her strong point—even as a child, while Penny had been fine with board games or structured play, she’d never really enjoyed games of pure pretend, house or astronauts or princesses and dragons, because she couldn’t set aside what she knew of the real world and immerse herself in the fantasy. Her pragmatic streak was a mile wide. So when things changed for her—when the magic happened—part of the magic, she decided, was that it was able to convince her without argument or second-guessing that it was genuine and not something to be afraid of, not a manifestation of mental illness or a drug-induced hallucination.