The Slab

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

She rose and trailed Ken and Hal out of the RV. “There’s a jet coming,” he said as soon as they were outside. He didn’t know why but somehow it felt like what he had in mind would work better under the open sky. There were stars overhead but the smoke had grown so thick it blotted out most of them. And the jet, of course, wouldn’t be apparent until it was too late.

  “What kind of a jet?” Penny asked.

  “I don’t know,” Ken said. “Military. From the Marine base in Yuma, I guess. But they’re not gunning for the Impact Area. They’re coming for the Slab.”

  “You know this how?” Hal asked him.

  “I just feel it,” Ken admitted. “It’s not much to go on.”

  “It’s good enough for me,” Hal said. He reached out and took one of Ken’s hands. “I think we should all feel it.”

  “Yeah,” Ken agreed. “That’s what I was thinking.” He took Penny’s hand in his left, and saw her clasp Hal’s with her own left.

  Touching either one of them, the magic was intensified, an almost physical sensation of hyper-intense power and energy and awareness. But standing together in a ring, each touching the others, that feeling was magnified exponentially. The world fell away.

  And they stood together, completely revealed to one another in a way none of them had ever known.

  Ken knew that Penny was premenstrual, starting to feel swollen and uncomfortable. He knew what she’d been doing on the gunnery range; knew of her relatively recent but passionate commitment to environmentalism; knew of her Gulf War experiences; knew everyone she’d ever slept with or flirted with; knew who her best friend had been in the third grade. And he knew just as much about Hal—he was suddenly aware of the Dove Hunts and Hal’s part in them, and who else had been involved; of the full extent of Hal’s dementia; of Hal’s postwar ambitions that had not been realized; and of his gradual acceptance of his lot—what Virginia called, when they argued, his giving up on his own life. And he knew that Hal had become convinced that she was right, that he had gone beyond resigning himself to the fact that he would never achieve the things he wanted, but he couldn’t bring himself to come around to her way of thinking, which was that success needn’t be measured in financial terms. He and Virginia had a close, precious bond. They had raised a son, dead now, but a loving child in life. They had shared the decades. That should have been enough—Hal knew it should—but he couldn’t make it be. He couldn’t make himself not feel like a failure because he’d never held the big executive job or made the big killing he’d wanted.

  For their part, he knew that he was just as wide open to them as they were to him, and through their eyes he could see himself—the widower who had moved to the middle of nowhere rather than stay put and face his ghosts, the shy man who didn’t like to meet new people and would as soon stay inside his house with a book as go into the world, the angry man who knew that Billy Cobb had murdered Mindy Sesno and knew that Billy Cobb had made love to Mindy Sesno but didn’t know which fact enraged him more.

  None of it made him like himself very much. But there was something he saw, reflected through Penny and Hal, some core of admiration for him that surprised Ken. They knew his innermost secrets, but they liked and respected him anyway. He was, they felt, a man who lived up to his promises, who worked hard to do the right thing, who didn’t shirk from duty or decisions, who tried his best to tell the truth. He guessed he had always known those things about himself too, but was surprised at the weight other people ascribed to them. For his own part, he had a hard time looking past the elation he’d felt at having Billy’s throat in his hands, just a few minutes ago.

  “We need to look beyond us,” Ken said, finally realizing that they could spend a lifetime standing here gazing into each other’s hearts and minds, but that he’d gathered them for a reason. He supposed speech was probably unnecessary, but still felt more comfortable speaking out loud than somehow mentally projecting his thoughts. He felt, rather than heard, the assent of the other two.

  Far above the Slab, still at some distance but gaining ground rapidly, was a Marine Corps jet with two men inside it. Ken, Penny, and Hal reached for the aircraft, with their minds, and touched the minds of the two Marines aboard. But those minds were foul and confused, dark holes where human thoughts should be, tangled knots of tendrils and ganglions and sparking synapses instead of functioning brains. Ken felt himself recoil from the contact.

  “We don’t need them anyhow,” Hal said. His meaning was clear to Ken. The men in the jet were just tools, carrying out a task. There were ways to prevent their goal from being achieved that didn’t involve dealing with them, and Ken thought they were probably beyond human reasoning anyway. He wasn’t entirely sure what Hal had in mind, though…which meant that Hal wasn’t either.

  “Seat of the pants,” Penny said. Shorthand, but good enough.

  “Right,” Hal agreed.

  No further words passed between them. They hadn’t let go of one another’s hands, and they wouldn’t. The jet was almost overhead and there was no time for hesitation or debate. They concentrated, the three of them, on doing something that not only had none of them ever done, but something they’d never even conceived of.

  They had no way to know if it would work.

  Or could work.

  The air crackled with something like electricity. The noise of the Slab, the running gun battle, the screams and shouts, the din of big motors, was all gone. They could hear nothing over the electrical static in their ears, as if the blue glow that surrounded them somehow muffled the rest of the world.

  When they saw the blue glow, Ken/Penny/Hal realized, for the first time, that they might succeed.

  As they gripped one another’s hands and focused on the blue glow, it grew. From their position it ballooned outward, as big as a trailer. A building. A single slab. Its shape was plainly dome-like, now, getting wider than it was high, but still growing in every direction.

  And growing.

  Enveloping the whole Slab, finally, before it was done. Because, while they didn’t know why, they knew that the Slab had to be protected. And the jet meant to do the Slab harm. Not the aircraft itself, and not the people in it, and not even, really, the one who had ordered them to do this, but the force behind that one, they understood. That power—Ken wasn’t even sure it could be called an entity, but maybe—wanted a bomb to fall on the Slab, wanted the concrete to be turned to rubble and the blood of hundreds to spill down the hole it made.

  But the blue glow turned into a blue dome and the blue dome covered the Slab, from the concrete guard station to the most distant shack, and everyone who was on the Slab, shooting or hiding or writhing in pain, was contained within the dome. And still it grew, blossoming into the sky like a fast-growing agave or the overnight shoot of a mushroom. And still the Hornet came, its pilots sightless, no longer in control of their own senses, performing the motions that were expected of them.

  Over the Slab, they released the GBU-12.

  But the blue glow pressed up against the bottom of the jet, holding the bomb against it, holding the Hornet in place above the Slab. The airplane’s engines strained, to no avail.

  The bomb detonated.

  No matter where they were on the Slab, no matter what they were doing, everyone heard the explosion, and they looked up to see what resembled a massive skyrocket. Streaks of flame and burning steel shot out from the Hornet, sliding down the outer skin of the blue dome in every direction. Within the dome, though, they couldn’t feel the heat or the concussive wave the blast generated. They lowered guns, they crawled out from underneath trailers, they stepped outside and stared at the sky, at the glowing blue shield, at the fiery yellow and red tracings dripping down its transparent surface like molten lightning.

  Without conscious thought, the three broke the contact necessary to maintain the glowing dome and it winked from existence as if it had never been there. But where the bits of flaming wreckage had come to rest, fires caught in the tinder-dry brush at the edges of t
he Slab, smoke rising into the dark sky from a couple dozen new spots in addition to the fires that already burned. After a few glorious moments of silence, the gunfire continued.

  “That was cool,” Penny said, a broad smile on her face. She laughed. “Really cool.”

  “Yeah,” Ken agreed. “But we’re not done yet.”

  “Not even close,” Hal said. “They’re shooting each other again.”

  “I know,” Penny said. “But hey, you remember what I said before? About us making love? Umm, never mind. I just don’t see it getting any better than that.”

  She’s right, Ken thought. That’s what it was like. He had felt a closeness with these two that he hadn’t had since Shannon had died. It was like making love, like having someone there all the time who knew your moods and your mind. Who knew but didn’t judge, only accepted. And when the two of you were together, moving together, inside each other, well, there was, he had thought, no other feeling like it in the world.

  Now he knew that he’d been wrong. He could have that feeling, without sex, without romance, just by reaching out and touching these two people again.

  And how easy it would be to do that instead of taking care of what needed doing.

  “Let’s go,” he said. “We’ve got to cover some ground.”

  They all knew, he was sure, what their destination was. The place from which all this madness stemmed.

  They had to trespass again, on the aerial gunnery range.

  They had to get back into that cave.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  It took Billy a few minutes, after Ken stopped strangling him and ran off, to gather the strength to stand up. Ken would be coming back to finish what he’d started, he figured. And if it wasn’t tonight, it would be some other day. He had no idea how Ken knew it was him, but he did and that was really what mattered. Billy needed to get himself gone, and he needed to do it fast.

  But there was no way he was going to try to go out through the roaring gun battle that he could hear taking place between him and where he’d left the Crown Vic. He’d already been shot at, beaten up, and choked tonight, and whatever that explosion in the sky had been, he wanted nothing to do with. The whole point of leaving was to avoid more physical damage, not to tempt it. Instead, he figured he’d just get off the Slab at the closest possible point and work his way cross-country to the car, dodging, he hoped, the worst of the flying lead.

  Rubbing the raw flesh of his neck, he hurried around a couple of homes, keeping well clear of the one from which he’d been fired on earlier. When he came around the last one, though, he saw a wall of flames encircling the Slab, this portion of it, at least. The flames were only five or six feet deep and maybe that high, but from where he stood, he couldn’t see any breaks in the wall big enough to slip through. And walking through fire didn’t fit in at all well with the whole damage-avoidance idea. He swore. Sometimes it seemed like the whole world was conspiring against a man, he thought. Figuring he’d just have to find another way out, Billy Cobb turned and headed back into the Slab, for what he hoped would be the last time.

  ***

  They ran straight toward Ken’s Bronco, even though that route took them right through the worst of the gunfire. Somehow, though, they knew they had nothing to fear from that—anything powerful enough to hurt them on this particular night would be much more dangerous than mere bullets. Ken was surprised at the pace that Hal kept up, but realized that they were all drawing strength from the magic. He should have been exhausted too, for that matter, and Penny, as far as he could tell, had been going nonstop for hours. By rights they all ought to have been dead on their feet.

  Around them as they dashed across the Slab, they saw residents using their own homes as bunkers, firing around corners or from beneath shelters made of tires, lawn furniture, and stones. Muzzle flashes lit the night periodically, while flames from the burning desert beyond lent a hellish illumination to the scene. The men working for Haynes fired back from the cover of their armored machines.

  But even as they heard the gunfire and the metallic clanking of spent cartridges hitting the concrete and saw the bursts of flame and the bodies littering the earth, they were removed in some way from it all, as if it happened on the other side of a screen. As if, Ken thought for a moment, it happened in some other reality that only pressed against theirs but didn’t bleed through.

  In this way, observing the ongoing battle without participating in it, they made it to the Bronco. Ken slid in behind the wheel and the other two took their now-customary positions, Hal riding shotgun while Penny straddled the rear bench, leaning forward between the two men.

  “It’s in the cave, isn’t it?” she asked as soon as the vehicle was in motion.

  “What I’m thinking,” Ken agreed.

  “Seems it’s got to be,” Hal said.

  “I never wanted to go back in that freaking cave.”

  “You’re not alone there, Penny,” Ken said. “But it looks like we have to.”

  “Yeah, I know. Just saying I don’t like it, that’s all.”

  “Don’t have to like it,” Hal said. “Nobody’s asking us to like any of this.”

  Ken drove the Bronco up the dirt road that led away from the Slab and paralleled the Coachella Canal. At the first siphon he came to—the only points where the road crossed the canal—he went across and onto the road that followed the line of warning signs the Marines had put up at the border of their bombing range.

  “You’ve lived with this whole magic thing since the second World War?” Penny asked Hal. “And never told anybody?”

  “I tried to tell a couple of people, in the beginning,” Hal admitted. “But I couldn’t even explain it. Hell, I could barely believe it myself.”

  “I know what you mean,” she said. “When it was happening, I never really doubted it. But the next day, it was like, no, that didn’t happen. There’s some other explanation.”

  “It happened,” Ken assured them both. “It all happened. It’s still happening.”

  “Has it ever lasted this long, for you?” Penny wondered. “I mean, it’s been, like, three days or something.”

  “Always just been a day or so, far as I can remember,” Hal said. “Of course, half the time I can’t remember what my thumbs are for, so don’t pay too much mind to me.”

  “Your memory’s just fine now, you nut.”

  “Now, yeah. Either of you given any thought to what’s going to happen to us whenever it wears off? We’ve been running around like maniacs, not eating, not sleeping, working ourselves too hard. I know my body isn’t up to this kind of punishment any more. Yours might be, Penny—don’t know as I’ve seen a body in shape like yours outside of a magazine in twenty years or more. But I’ve got a bad feeling that when the magic is gone we’re all going to be hurting something fierce.”

  Ken glanced over at him. Hal was right—he’d been acting like a thirty-year old man, but he still looked every bit as old as he had a few days ago, before they had touched. Ken tried to keep himself in reasonable condition, and he might be just sore and aching for six months or so after this extended workout. But Hal…well, he didn’t quite see how Hal would survive it.

  “Who’s to say it’s going to wear off?” Penny asked. “I mean, it’s already broken all the rules, right? If there were rules in the first place. It’s never lasted more than a day before, but now it’s all Sears Diehards. We’ve never shared it with anyone but now it’s stronger if we’re together. I don’t know about you guys, but I’ve never been able to do anything like that…whatever that was, protective bubble or whatever that we put over the Slab back there. That’s all new.”

  “I think we’re all just guessing,” Ken said. “Assuming it’s going to wear off, because…well, if it doesn’t, what does that make us? Some kind of gods or something?”

  “That might be going a little far,” Hal said. “But something other than human, that’s for sure.”

  “Maybe we’re some kind of mutati
on. A new generation of human, a new subspecies, I don’t know…metahuman.”

  “And maybe they’ll write comic books about us, Penny,” Ken said. “Dress us up in tights and give us red capes.” He turned up the jeep road that led into the Chocolates. Into the gunnery range. He left he headlights on, even though they were now trespassing on military land. This was not a road he’d be willing to drive in the dark, especially in a hurry. And he had a feeling the folks over in Yuma would have other things on their mind tonight, like trying to figure out what had happened to their airplane. “I’m thinking we need to just play it by ear. Don’t try to parse it out because we don’t know enough about it anyway. We got so many questions we don’t know the answers to that we don’t even know what all the questions are, or who to ask. I’m for just letting things play out, and we’ll see where we go from there.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Penny agreed. “I guess that makes sense. I’m the kind of person who likes to know where I’m going, that’s all. But—”

  “I know what kind of person you are,” Hal interrupted.

  “I guess you do,” she said with a low laugh. “I guess you both do. And vice versa. And by the way, I can’t believe how long it’s been since you got laid.”

  Hal turned around in his seat and looked at her, one eyebrow riding up high on his forehead. Ken caught a glimpse of the glare he gave Penny as he turned the Bronco’s wheel to the right. “You are talking about Ken, right, Penny?” Hal asked.

  Penny laughed again, full-throated and loud this time. “Yes, I am,” she confirmed. “You stud.”

  The image of Mindy Sesno flashed across Ken’s mind again. He’d pinned a lot of hopes on Mindy, without ever doing anything to make those hopes become reality. Well, that wouldn’t happen again. Penny was right. He’d been denying himself for too long, and once this all was over with—if he could still stand on his own legs and get out of the house—he’d find himself someone, first thing.

  The key phrase in that was the “once this was all over” part, he knew. Survival was implied, but not guaranteed.