by Joseph Fink
Keisha stood there, feeling like a drained battery.
“So I still have a job?” was the best she could manage. The commander laughed.
“Ordinarily, no. You really fucked up the whole being-a-trucker part of your being-a-trucker job. You stole company property, and seriously messed up affairs with a big client of ours. You, in short, didn’t do good. But”—she nodded back at the town of horrors—“as you can see trucking is only part of our concern. And you put an end to Vector H with your own hands. We’ve lost a few of our own trying to bring him down, so . . .” She put a hand on Keisha’s arm, and Keisha flinched at the rare human contact. “We’re gonna let this one slide. But don’t steal and then wreck any more of our rigs, ok?”
Keisha nodded, grappling with all the information of the last few minutes.
“Keisha, listen,” the commander said, “they ran when they saw us coming, but they won’t be gone for long. It’s truly incredible that you handled one of them, it really is, but you need to go before the rest come back.”
She gestured to the truck. Keisha opened the door and stepped up into the cabin. It looked like her old one, except, of course, none of her stuff was in it. All her clothes and books, lost in a wreck, in a secret town, on a US government air base.
“Good-bye, Keisha,” the woman said. “You’ll hear from us again, I’m sure. Until then . . .” She thought for a moment, shrugged, and said, “I dunno, I guess keep doing what you’ve been doing. It’s kept you alive this far.”
Keisha started the engine. Left the Thistle town behind her. She was alive and she hadn’t expected to be. She didn’t know what to do with that. A couple hours later she pulled off the road just south of the Nevada border, next to a vast field of mirrors reflecting light up to a strange black tower. It looked like an alien starship, landed by a major highway an hour or so outside of Vegas.
If Alice didn’t want Keisha looking for her, then she wouldn’t for now. But she wasn’t done. Because she had been looking in all the wrong places. Why did a trucking company have a private army? Why had they been secretly paying Alice for years? What was Bay and Creek? She had no idea. But she sure as hell was going to find out.
Part II
Bay and Creek
Why did the chicken cross the road?
Because the dead are born, because the dead grow and eat, because the dead make bad decisions and good decisions, because the dead love, because they love, that’s why, but also because the dead work and make things for the rest of the dead, and then the dead slow and relax and lean back onto the time that’s given to them, and when there is no time left, they allow themselves to stop and the dead finally die.
21
Alice hadn’t been her first. There had been Mindy Morris in high school. Mindy and Keisha were friends and then knew they were more than friends and didn’t know what to do about that and then figured it out. Keisha wanted it to be a secret, Mindy didn’t. They kept it a secret. A lot of people knew anyway. Keisha was sure that she had successfully fooled her parents, but her parents knew. Except in some ways they didn’t know. They knew, but didn’t like it, and so made a choice to not know. People are capable of that, of knowing but choosing at the same time not to know. Eventually Keisha would tearfully tell them, and they would have to know then, and they were more ok about it than either they or Keisha had thought they would be. Later they would be completely fine with it. In between there was a period of adjustment. Not everything can be alright all at once.
When Keisha went to college, she and Mindy were still together. They would talk every day on the phone, and then every few days. And then it had been a while and they both realized they weren’t together anymore, but still hung out on breaks when they were both back home. Toward the end of freshman year, there wasn’t even that. In that moment of clarity that she was single, Keisha thought: This is good. This is good. It’s time to be single for a while. Learn more about myself. I’ll stay single for at least a few years, and then see what happens.
Two days later she ended up in a study group with a student named Alice. Remembering it now, it was possible she had thought nothing except that Alice was interesting and funny, and cute when she ran her hands through her hair. But Keisha chose to believe the version of her memory in which she had seen Alice the moment she had walked in and she had thought about her plan to stay single, looked across the table at Alice, and thought: Well, shit.
And now: routes and deliveries. A few cents a mile. Eating at truck stops. Sleeping in her cab. Back to the rhythm of existence as it had become for her in the last year or so. She needed a break from the mystery. A break from yearning. For now she would just go about her job, a job that recently she had thought was over for her. She had thought all things were over for her. Now she would stay out of trouble and try to live something like a normal life for a little bit. The mystery would be waiting for her whenever she was ready. There was no rush, now that Alice didn’t want to be found. Keisha could be a human being for a bit.
Sylvia had reached out the morning after Keisha’s night in Victorville. The night before, in the Extended Stay, she had felt a plummet in her gut, as though remembering a terrible event, but also knew with inexplicable certainty that the terrible event she was remembering hadn’t happened yet. She didn’t know how she could remember something from the future, but she had learned to trust herself and so she hid out in the parking lot, and that’s where she had been hiding when two Thistle Men had opened her door as though the door were not locked at all, and then they came shambling back out and went to talk with the wide-eyed guy at the front desk. She thought it best if she disappeared back into the roads, but she left Keisha a few phone numbers of people who might be able to get to her if needed.
Keisha, meanwhile, saw the Bay and Creek commander not two weeks after their first meeting. The woman who had led a heavily armed team into the Thistle town was dressed like a truck driver, was driving a truck for the company. Was, Keisha supposed, actually a truck driver. At what point of pretending to do a job do you end up just doing the job? Keisha wondered for a moment why Bay and Creek hadn’t kept their routes separate, but Keisha must have been below the company’s interest. Perhaps even below the company’s notice.
The commander was chatting with a warehouse worker at a distribution center outside of Omaha, at ease, a truck driver on a smoke break, talking, flirting maybe. As she winked at the warehouse worker and tossed her cigarette on the ground, he handed her a piece of paper, which she slipped into her pocket without reading. No, these two were not flirting. There were those dark currents again, surging under the precarious layer of Keisha’s day-to-day life. She had a choice. The correct way forward, she decided, would be to forget this, to pick up her delivery, and scatter out to the Kmarts and supermarkets of the land.
Keisha had always found it difficult to do what was correct. She told her supervisors she needed a break, and they gave her one without comment. After all, they didn’t pay her if she wasn’t working, and like at any company, if she wasn’t being paid, then she no longer had to be considered. Go as long as you want, she was told. Let us know when you want to make money again. She bought another cheap civilian car, using up the little bit of money she had earned since getting back into the life, and she waited outside that distribution center in Omaha. A week later she saw the commander again and followed her truck. Together they went to Chicago, where the city starts an hour out from the city limits, and then back up across the rolling green of Wisconsin over to Minneapolis, where the people retreat into tunnels during the fierce winter, and still none of the stops the commander made were unusual. No suspicious activity. Until she drove south and south until they reached the desert east of Los Angeles. She hadn’t picked up a new shipment. There were no distribution centers in that region. She was driving an empty truck into empty land. Keisha followed.
Dead stop traffic in the San Fernando Valley. High above, way up there, on a power line, three tiny birds. They swaye
d as the line swayed; at any moment they could take off.
An hour later, over the hill into a plain of suburbia. Orange tiled roofs and the signs for Targets and Walmarts arrayed out into the distance like the flags of nation-states. Acres and acres of lot for every acre of store. Entire medieval cities could fit into one of these parking lots. At night, in the least lit corners, teenagers learned the best secrets of being an adult, before trudging, the next day, to their cashier jobs in the Target or the cell-phone stores to learn the worst secrets of being an adult.
Past Palm Springs, and south toward the Salton Sea. An expanse of salt water created accidentally by a flood and maintained by agricultural runoff. With no natural flow of water in or out, the sea is destined to die, evaporating back into salt plain and, because of the fertilizers in the runoff, subject to algae blooms that cause mass fish die-offs.
When Keisha was a kid, she lived near a good deal of agriculture, and from the road she and her friends could see a pond near the edge of some fields. The pond had a little island in the middle and trees all around it. The water was bright green. One day, they had snuck under fences, through fields, and to the pond. The pond bottom was lined with black plastic, something she realized only now was because they didn’t want whatever was in that pond seeping into the groundwater. They swam for a couple hours. Then they went home, showered, and agreed there was something wrong about the water there, and never went back.
That’s the story of the Salton Sea. All of California spent the ’50s and ’60s sneaking into a sea of agricultural runoff, and then realized that there was something wrong with the water and they should never go back. The resorts died, crumbling away or buried in mud.
And still the commander drove, into an area where there was no industry, where there were few people at all.
22
The sun was setting over the Salton Sea when they turned off the highway in a town called Niland, at the hollowed-out ruin of a corner store, still advertising beer prices on one of its remaining walls. In the ruin, there were a dog, a pony, and a horse all hitched together against a broken wall. Past this there was a scattering of houses and trailers, and then an electrical substation, bright lights and heavy security, and then some railroad tracks, and finally a concrete pillbox spray-painted with the words Slab City. The Last Free Place.
Slab City is a squatter’s city. A mixture of gutter punks and anarchists and artists and retirees looking to make their pensions stretch. Anyone who wants a patch of land without worrying about paying for it. The last free place. The commander’s truck rumbled ahead. As they moved into the barren places and the roads got emptier, Keisha let her get farther and farther away. A truck like the commander’s would be easy to spot leaving. There was only one road into and out of Slab City.
It would have seemed to Keisha impossible that her life could be changed in the next few moments. But flashing blue and red lights cut through that night. She swore and pulled over. The old fear again, layered with new and fresh fear.
Several minutes passed. The lights flashed behind her. She stayed parked in the dry dirt, waiting. The slam of a door. The woman who got out of the police car was small, a wisp of person, flickering toward Keisha through the lights. When she reached the window, she stayed back. She had no bright flashlight in Keisha’s eyes. She seemed almost meek, with her hands in her pockets. Her face was disjointed shadow, an eye here, the corner of a mouth, but no cohesion.
“Hello, I’m Officer . . . Clock,” she said. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”
“I think I was . . .” Keisha had been driving in a dark desert on poor pavement. She had been driving at or below any possible speed limit. “How fast was I going?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I asked,” the officer said. Her voice had a sigh to it, like it took her more breath than most people to talk. “What’s your name?”
“Keisha. Uh, Keisha Taylor.”
The cop nodded. Her hair was over her face. Nothing about her posture read cop. She seemed unsure. Like someone who had been dressed in a costume and shoved onstage without knowing which play she was in.
“No problem, Keisha. I’ll need your license and registration, please.”
“Sure. Right.” Keisha gave her a fumble of paper and license, and the officer snatched it out of her hand like a bird pecking gingerly at feed.
“Ok. I will run these through the system. Sit tight.” The woman flickered her way back through the lights and disappeared into the car.
The longer Keisha waited, the more convinced she was there was something deeply wrong about what was happening. Deeper than the usual terrifying dynamics of a situation like this. The officer’s uniform had been loose, sloppy. Details in the wrong places. And the badge. The badge had looked plastic, like a child’s toy. What would happen if she just started driving, driving out into the last free place? She put a toe on the gas, rested one hand on the keys. The road invited her forward.
“You can have these back.” Keisha had not seen or heard the officer return. Her paperwork was thrust back through the window. The cop made no comment about Keisha’s hand on the keys, and Keisha lifted her hand and accepted the proffered items.
“Thank you,” Keisha said.
“Did you get a chance to visit the beach?”
“What?”
The officer gestured with a tilt of her head. Her neck was limp, not set correctly.
“Of the Salton Sea back there. Weirdest beach ever. The sand isn’t right. Not the right texture.”
The cop still had no flashlight, was slouched in a shadow between headlights.
“Then you look closer at the sand, you know, of the beach? And you realize. The sand isn’t sand. It’s fish bone. The beaches are made of bone here.”
“Is there a problem, Officer?” A cliché but Keisha wanted this encounter to move into cliché. To make any kind of sense.
“I used to have this thing as a kid.” The woman was whispering now, but even from a few feet away Keisha heard every word clearly. “I didn’t like uncovered windows. At night I thought there was something out there watching me. Even if only a sliver of the window was uncovered. I would picture an eye pressed up against it. Then during the day it was different. I would imagine a monster shuffling around the house, and the monster would be arriving in that window soon and they would see me, but worse, I would see them.”
“Was there a reason you pulled me over?”
“You were going fast.” The officer leaned forward now, putting her thin arms on the car door. Keisha could feel the woman’s breath, and that drove a spike of anxiety through her chest without knowing why. There was a detail her body had noticed but that her mind hadn’t picked up on.
“I was going over the speed limit?”
“No idea.” The woman laughed. “You were going fast. It’s exciting. Anything moving fast, you want to chase it.”
“What department do you work for? Are you a state trooper or . . . ?”
The officer glanced back. In silhouette her face appeared to be entirely made from straight lines.
“I’d have to check the car. I forget what it said when I got in it.”
“When you got in it?”
“It was dark. I’ve gotten more used to the dark. I’ve grown as a person. I would have thought you’d be proud of me.”
Keisha put her hand back on the keys.
“I need to see your badge.”
The woman giggled. “Sure.” She held it out. Keisha had to lean to see it.
“This doesn’t say any department on it. And it says that you are a Police ‘Instigator’?”
“I could take off both your arms.”
An engine roared to life in Keisha’s body, a thrum she felt from scalp to sole, but still her fingers stayed frozen on the ignition.
“With my own hands. No tools. I could take them off. I’ve done it before. It was easier than I thought it would be.”
Finally Keisha found movement and the c
ar came to life, but before she could shift the woman’s hand darted out and shut the car off again. Her torso was in the car and here finally Keisha saw her face. There was no fat and her flesh was so thin as to be nearly transparent. Her eyes were sunken, her nose was tight around the cartilage. She seemed a paper person, every movement a paper movement, but her strength in forcing Keisha’s hand on the keys had been unmistakable.
“Driving away would be an error.”
“What do you want?”
The woman unfolded her torso back out of the car. She was the same size as before, but she no longer looked frail. She was an animal wound up to pounce.
“You know, it’s been so long since anyone asked that. I was just thinking about it, standing on that beach made of bone, near a town with its cheery ’50s resort sign still up, a woman on water skis in a bikini, and now the whole town’s settling its way into the silt, and I was standing there thinking, what do I want? I don’t know what I want. So let’s instead think about what you want. You want to be careful. You’ve seen things. We don’t like people who have seen things. I would say it makes us nervous, but we don’t have the capacity for nerves, so more it makes us agitated. Makes us wild.”
Keisha leaned out of the car now, thrusting her own body into the other woman’s space.
“I’ve faced fiercer dangers and walked out alive,” she said with a courage she did not feel but could sure as shit project. “You want me scared? Officer, you have no idea. I’m always scared. You think fear is new to me? You think fear is the novelty that will change my behavior? For me, fear is living. And I’ve lived this long, haven’t I?”
The woman cocked her head, said nothing. “Haven’t I?” Keisha repeated.
The officer crossed her arms over her chest. Her arms were much too long for her body.
