by Joseph Fink
“I like you. You’re the most interesting one yet. I can see why they sent me.”
“Who sent you? The police?”
Again that laugh, like porcelain falling on tile.
“You think the highest it goes is some thugs in blue? You think the Thistle Men could live in peace on an air force base because some state troopers are in on it? The police don’t understand. I feed on the police.”
“Try to feed on me. You wouldn’t be the first.” Keisha had made the decision that she wouldn’t be afraid, no matter how afraid she got.
“I could dismantle you with just my teeth. I’ve done that too.” The officer patted the car and walked away. She called as she went, not looking back. “My name is Officer Steak. I’ll be seeing you around, Keisha. This is going to be a good time, I think. Isn’t it so nice, you know, when you love your job?”
The cruiser started up again. It turned and headed perpendicular to the road, out into the desert. About fifty feet away its lights switched off and it was invisible, undetectable except for the fading hum of its engine.
Keisha laughed. She couldn’t stop laughing. Every part of her was so afraid and she couldn’t stop laughing. The Thistle Men had been hungry. But this woman was something else. Something a whole lot smarter and more powerful.
23
An entire day spent waiting and searching. Slab City, for its initial appearance of emptiness, was crowded with life and art. A sculpture garden made of discarded junk. A library tucked away among sage and trailers. A towering monument to Jesus made of hay and latex paint. A particleboard shack on a hill with a big yellow eye. No truck, though. No woman from Bay and Creek. The commander and her vehicle had disappeared into the homesteads and the squatters.
Keisha, still rattled, still rattling around inside her head, decided to give up the chase for a bit. Head north. Lie low and see where the commander resurfaced. If her routine was anything like it had been, it wouldn’t be long before Keisha found her again. And she had no interest in staying anywhere near the woman whose named changed midconversation and who was definitely not a police officer.
She went up the West Coast for a couple long days of driving, going until her eyes went bleary and the road in front of her duplicated itself and she knew she needed to rest for a bit. Eventually she came to Cape Disappointment, a couple miles north of the Oregon border, and decided it was isolated and beautiful enough to stop.
The beaches were broad and solid enough that the locals drove on them. When she walked on them, she was often the only person in sight. Waves repeating themselves at the tide line, clouds of birds fluttering up and resetting. It made her feel safe being so alone. Then she thought about earthquakes and tsunamis. Both were coming for this region eventually. This area would have to pay for being beautiful lowlands by the ocean. Everyone just hoped the bill would come due after their life span.
As she walked, Keisha thought through the timeline. First the dogs would bark. They’d know before any human. Then she would have six to fifteen minutes. Ten to thirty seconds after the dogs start barking, the ground would shake. Six to fifteen minutes later the tsunami would come.
If she began running when the dogs started barking, could she make it through the grassy dunes and up to the hills? No. She could see the route to safety, but she couldn’t outrun the wave. Six to fifteen minutes after the dogs started barking she would die. That’s what would happen.
Each day, she finished her walk still alive. When what was coming for her would finally come, there would be no warning.
Her break wasn’t entirely rest. She went to libraries and city halls and university archives, took the time to talk and to listen and to read. She kept her eyes on the margins of the highways, the weird places that people saw and then later believed they had misremembered. The things people know but choose not to know. She searched out stories that could easily be discounted and she didn’t discount them.
She heard about a town called Charlatan that was encountered by different travelers in completely different parts of the country. A town unchained to geography. She heard about a black barge on the Columbia River, always floating at the same point, never moving with the current, crewed by the lost souls of the people who had unwisely searched for answers about it. She heard about a factory in Florida, on a remote beach, right on the water, that thrummed with activity but never seemed to have a single worker.
The country was full of these stories, often told but rarely listened to. She listened to them.
She heard something else too. A name she thought she had heard before. Praxis. No one seemed to know what Praxis was, what it stood for, if it was real or a fiction whispered by drunks with their elbows propped on sticky bars off quiet roads where once the mill traffic had passed. But wherever something was off in the country, there, too, was the name Praxis. A mystery hiding behind all other mysteries. She heard the name from dive bar regulars and from microfiche archives dusted off from city filing rooms and written in drooling spray paint on underpasses.
“Yeah,” said one of those dive bar regulars, a woman named Mallory who would, three weeks later, slip and hit her head on the wet floor of a cereal aisle and find when she awoke that she could no longer stand the taste of alcohol, a change that she would think later likely saved her life, or at least her marriage, “I know Praxis.”
“What do you know about them?” asked Keisha, who was growing tired of having conversations that always went a bit like this.
“They’re unknowable, aren’t they?” muttered Mallory as she got up and headed toward the door, skidding a bit on the freshly mopped barroom floor. “It is not for us to know. It is only for us to believe.”
Keisha went north, drove until she hit Seattle. Following an instinct she didn’t understand, she drove to the Fremont Troll. A huge piece of public art designed to rehabilitate the area, run off the lowlifes and drug dealers, bring in the tourists. But all had not been peaceful around the statue. Less than ten years after it was built, a man murdered the driver of a moving bus on the highway above, sending the whole bus, full of passengers, flying off the bridge, and crashing next to the troll. A few years later, twelve sheep skulls were found placed in a nearby yard. No one knows why. A prank, probably.
Or, Keisha thought, staring up at its concrete face and its hubcap eye, worship. There was worship here, she could feel, but she didn’t know what was being worshipped. Not the statue, she thought. There was movement in the shadow by the troll’s hand, and Keisha realized a person in a hoodie was standing there, watching her. Their hood was pulled far over their face. Their hands rested in the front pockets of the hoodie. Keisha could feel great power, as tangible as the giant concrete hands, as the gray hoodie.
And then the person was gone. Against every instinct, Keisha rushed forward, but no one was there. The sidewalk was visible well in each direction. The person in the hoodie had vanished. She thought again of the power she felt from them.
Yes, there was worship here. Worship of a being perhaps well worth worshipping.
24
Even as Keisha began to date Alice, she still thought of herself as committed to staying single. She didn’t allow herself to understand what they were doing as dating. They were friends who sometimes had sex. They went on dates but weren’t dating. Being with Alice felt better than anything, but there could always be something better. Never accept what she already had. Reach for what she could theoretically someday have.
She tried to be honest with Alice. “I’m not a good person to like,” she would say. “I don’t want a relationship right now.”
“Sure,” Alice would say, like Keisha had made an offhand comment about the weather. “Hey, let’s drive to the beach.”
The beach was cold and kind of miserable, but they took a walk anyway. Between a pile of rotting seaweed and an inlet where water poured from a metal pipe, Alice took Keisha’s hand and spun her out and then back so that the two were facing, and they kissed for a long time. The beach
smelled sharp, like milk about to turn, but neither of them could smell it. Keisha completely belonged to Alice at that point but hadn’t realized it yet. Maybe Alice already knew.
It was Alice who said “I love you” first. They had been talking on the phone, and Alice got to class and needed to hang up. “Ok, I love you, bye,” she said. Then she texted. “I think I said I love you. I do.”
“I love you too,” Keisha texted back and realized that it was true.
All this happened, no matter what happened after.
With no experience in corporate research or the structure of companies, little knowledge even of the basics of how a business was organized, Keisha did her best to trace the history of Bay and Creek. She searched the internet for public records and quickly found a seemingly endless number of layers, shell company after shell company. Some of the records, registered in sleepy, rural counties, had yet to be digitized and those she had to drive out for, make small talk with clerks at town halls that looked like residential houses while the clerk shuffled through a stack of paperwork that no one had ever needed anything from.
“What’s all this for?” the clerk would ask, and Keisha would shake her head ruefully and give them an underling-to-underling look.
“Hell if I know,” she would say. “My boss sends me after all sorts of weird things. Not my job to ask why.”
“I gotcha,” the clerk would answer, and then there would be ten minutes more of small talk before the record was found. But it only ever led to another shell company. Some companies seemed to, through several layers of other names, own the companies that owned them. A closed loop of corporate record keeping.
Keisha also looked for any record of an organization that went by the name Praxis. There was no sign of them in registered businesses. Whatever they were, they kept everything they did off-book. They did leave evidence, though she wasn’t sure if this was intentional or not. Going back decades, even into the last century. Local legends that included the name Praxis. One story from the Civil War, a vision of motley-dressed dancers seen in the sky above a bloody battle, led to an academic paper no one had requested in over forty years that mentioned agents of Praxis carrying out missions of uncertain purpose during that war. Even which side those missions were meant to support was unclear, and the authors of the paper dismissed the reference to Praxis as a distortion of history through years of retelling. But Keisha believed in these agents of Praxis. She just didn’t know what they wanted.
Risking discovery, she made tentative posts on a few message boards related to conspiracy, the kinds of places she would never have opened before her life became more complex than the most grandiose of conspiracy theories. Mostly her queries went unreplied to or were met with links to Wikipedia articles about strange cults or out-of-place artifacts, or, if the replier was lazy, aggregated lists with titles like “The 50 Creepiest Articles on Wikipedia (Number 16 Made Me Cry Out and Reach for My Partner in the Middle of a Sleepless Night).” But a few posters on a forum dedicated to government overreach mentioned that some of the terms Keisha was using reminded them of a woman named Cynthia O’Brien who used to post on the board but who had stopped abruptly a year or so before. Cynthia had been one of the names on the billboards in Georgia. A victim of the Hungry Man. Maybe Cynthia wasn’t a random victim after all. Maybe none of the victims were random.
After three weeks of research across the country, Keisha was in North Carolina, leaving the library at Duke, where a reference to Praxis had been gathering dust for decades in a misfiled index that had taken three days to track down, and she saw a person in a hoodie down the road, peeking out from behind a low concrete wall. The hood was pulled low over their face, but the direction of their body was unmistakably oriented directly at Keisha.
“Hey,” she shouted and ran for the person. It wasn’t that she wasn’t afraid. The only way to be brave is to first be afraid.
The person in the hoodie stepped back behind the wall. Keisha got to the wall a few seconds later. It was a small alcove for dumpsters, no outlet, and it was completely empty. She spun around, looking for where the person could have gone, and she saw them, impossibly, another hundred feet away, leaning against a tree in a parking lot. This time she sprinted, arms pumping. As she ran, the person casually pushed off the tree and stepped behind it.
“No, you don’t,” Keisha said, going full speed at the tree, and slapping her hands on the trunk to slow herself down. But again, there was no one there. At this time of night, the parking lot was mostly empty. There were no nearby cars, nothing for anyone to hide behind. She looked carefully around, but there was no sign of the person in the hoodie. As she started to walk back to her hotel, she looked up and felt all the sweat on her skin go several degrees colder. An old tobacco factory a quarter mile away. Tall stacks that emitted no smoke. On the roof of the old building, barely visible, but definitely there, a person in a hoodie with their hood pulled low over their face.
“What the fuck are you?” she shouted at it, and to anyone who happened to be in the area.
The figure in the hoodie didn’t respond. Didn’t move. So Keisha just kept walking toward her hotel. When she looked again a few moments later, the roof of the factory, and the street all around her, was once again empty.
25
After they graduated, Keisha and Alice lived in a tiny apartment in the Bay Area. The apartment was basically a kitchen with a bed in it, the bed itself barely big enough for the two of them. It was the only furniture they had and so they spent all day in it. They slept, ate, and talked, all on the cheapest mattress a small amount of money could buy. When they finally upgraded to a midrange bed, the guy who collected it said it had sagged more than any mattress he had ever seen.
Moving in together hadn’t been easy. There were fights, discomfort. Two people with two lives figuring out how to shrink those lives to fit a tiny bed in the corner of a kitchen. Gradually Keisha realized it wasn’t a constriction, but a rearrangement of terms. There was infinite space in that tiny apartment, if they could reorient themselves to find it. Soon they settled into this new way of living, and the two of them became a unit. It was the first step to having a life together.
The realization that their life as a couple could have the same length as the lives of their bodies didn’t come until Keisha’s father died. They stayed for a couple weeks in her mother’s house on a guest bed that was bigger than the one in their apartment. Keisha was still in shock, and her head didn’t feel attached to her body. One morning they lay facing each other, the sunlight lighting half of Alice’s face. Keisha said, “I could spend my life with you.” And Alice said, “That would be nice.” They wouldn’t get married for another few years, but that was the moment that the possibility of forever revealed itself to them.
Keisha returned to work. Miles meant pennies meant dollars meant a paycheck. But she didn’t stop investigating. She reached out to friends at Bay and Creek. Forming friendships with coworkers in a workplace so diffuse was obviously tricky, but there were the folks at the distribution centers, and sometimes the shipments took a bit to work out and you’d hang and chat. That’s how she had come to know Lynh. Lynh was a dispatcher, monitoring the routes and making sure every delivery was being made in the most efficient way possible. Bay and Creek had a complex proprietary software that tracked the route of every truck and calculated how to make the most money with the least amount of fuel and driver costs.
If Keisha wanted to know what was happening at Bay and Creek, access to that software system would be momentous. A picture of everything the company was doing at any given time.
“I’d love to settle down. Get off the road, get into dispatching, you know?” Keisha said.
“Sure,” said Lynh, a little suspiciously. Keisha had gotten her to meet on the pretense of a friendly catchup but this was sounding awfully professional.
“But I don’t have any training in that kind of thing, you know?” said Keisha. “If I could borrow your login, I could watc
h how it all works. That would give me the advantage I need the next time there’s an opening. I promise I wouldn’t touch anything. I just want to learn.”
“It’s not worth my job, sorry, dear,” said Lynh. She sighed. She liked Keisha and had been looking forward to hanging out with her. Everyone wanted something from everyone, or at least that was Lynh’s experience over forty-nine goddamn years of life.
“I’ll give you two hundred dollars,” said Keisha.
“Two hundred dollars still isn’t worth my job. They take access to their system very seriously.”
“A month. I’ll give you two hundred dollars a month to let me watch how it all works.”
Lynh eyed her over a bottle of light beer. “Why would you be willing to spend that much for this?”
“Because when I get a good job, I’ll make back more than that. Help me out, Lynh. I don’t want to drive a truck forever.”
Lynh frowned but nodded at the same time. She didn’t believe a word Keisha was saying. “I’ll give you a training login. It allows you to watch but not change anything. Don’t tell anyone at all. And don’t let them know that you’re looking to change roles. Companies these days. They value absolute loyalty from their employees but show no hesitation in dropping anyone at any moment.”
“Thanks, Lynh.”
“Don’t mention it. And don’t be silly. Two hundred dollars a month is ridiculous. I couldn’t accept that.”
“Well”—Keisha put her hand on her chest—“I really appreciate—”
“I’ll take a onetime payment of four hundred dollars. Cash, please.”
That was how Keisha got the access to monitor the entire Bay and Creek delivery system. She would stay up late, watching dots move across the country, the flow of fuel and pallets. More specifically, she found the truck the commander drove and followed its assignments. None of them were unusual. She wondered if Bay and Creek had noticed they were being watched and so were being more careful. Or if the commander’s side trips weren’t noted in their official system, which was more likely. Keisha wondered if this was all a kind of busywork for herself. Like in the grief groups, she was still trying to describe the shape of the monster that was devouring her. She watched the Bay and Creek system until her eyes went dry and red and heavy, and she fell asleep despite herself.
