by Joseph Fink
“Keisha, do you think we could have a civil conversation?”
“We’ll have a civil conversation when you’ve earned it, even if it takes six years. Hold this steady.”
Two months together like this. Friction so intense it would have sent them flying off in different directions if it hadn’t been for the complete devotion they both had for their goal. Still they both slept in the tiny cabin, and night after night they ate across from each other in truck stops and fast-food restaurants. They would try to move the conversation toward safer waters but find that there were no safer waters. All subjects led to the great black crevasse that was Alice’s abandonment.
“Ok, these are done. Let’s get going.”
“You’re going to have to forgive me at some point.”
“Alice, my love, I don’t have to do shit.”
The two of them decided to not speak for a bit after that. See how that went. Anyway, it would go faster if they divided up. Each of them took a bag and they hopped out of the truck. They were parked down the road a bit, deep in a grove of trees, in the hope that they wouldn’t be spotted.
“I’ve been keeping track of you,” Alice said in the library. “From the moment Bay and Creek hired you, I couldn’t sleep I worried so much.”
“That’s sweet,” said Keisha in a monotone. She turned and walked out of the library, not looking back at Alice. They needed to be gone. The buzz of the reunion was fading. And had the body of the officer moved?
“I’m sorry, Keisha. I thought I was doing the right thing. I tried to keep you safe,” said Alice as she hurried after.
“I don’t need you to keep me safe.” Keisha was stunned to find that the outside was the same quiet town she had come to just a few hours before. She made herself look at Alice and, despite herself, she would not have traded places with anyone else in the world in that moment.
The motel was creepy. Old abandoned motels tend to be, but this one was also clown themed. welcome to the clown motel, the sign said. Figurines of clowns still hung from some of the doors. Keisha tried not to look at their milky eyes, the pupils having faded away, as she tried the door and found it unlocked. The inside of the room had even more clowns, lining the shelves. Enormous paintings of clowns on the walls. Everywhere big toothy grins leered at her through red painted lips. She tried to block it all out, just take the package out of the bag, leave it on the bed, move to the next room.
It wasn’t until the last room in the row that she screamed. Alice came running up the stairs, a knife pulled out that Keisha hadn’t known she had been carrying, a wicked-looking blade designed for violence.
“What is it?” said Alice, scanning the area, blade aloft. “Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine. Honey, I’m fine.” She took Alice’s hand and gently lowered it. She pointed into the room, where there was a life-sized statue of a clown, frozen in the middle of a horrible wink.
“You sure you don’t want me to start stabbing it?” Alice asked.
“Shut up,” said Keisha, but soft and affectionate, as she walked past the horrifying statue and placed the final package.
Quieter, and hand in hand, they walked back out to the highway. They turned and looked at the Clown Motel. It was drifting toward evening, and the clowns painted on the building were going into shadow. The giant sign hadn’t been lit in years. This was about to change. Behind the motel was an old graveyard. The scene was weirdly lovely, and Keisha regretted what would have to happen next.
“You want to do it?” said Alice, holding out her phone.
“No,” said Keisha. “This was your find. You pull that trigger.”
Alice held the phone up. “Hey, this is still how my heart feels every time I look at you.” She pressed the call button. There was a whump they felt in their chests. Ten bombs in ten rooms simultaneously went off. Bits of the Clown Motel were blasted up into the darkening sky, a translucent orange against the setting sun. It was beautiful and stupid and sublime and violent.
“Corny,” said Keisha.
“Couldn’t help myself.” They hurried through the trees to the truck before a passing driver saw the fire and tried to figure out what authority should be called about an explosion in the middle of nowhere.
“Thank you for saving my life,” said Keisha, back in her truck in the library parking lot. There had been a moment of hesitation from Alice as she automatically headed toward her truck, but Keisha hadn’t wavered for a moment and hopped up into the cab in which some of the worst moments of her life had occurred. Alice settled into the unfamiliar position of the passenger seat.
“Of course,” she said. “I’d do anything for you.”
“And fuck you for following me like I needed looking after.”
Keisha started the truck. That familiar vibration of the engine had a calming effect, a meditation of the body.
“I’m not coming with you,” said Keisha.
“Oh.” Alice looked down at her hands.
“But if you want, you can come with me.”
It was Alice’s turn to drive.
“Do you think it’s actually hurting them at all?” Keisha said.
“Blowing up entrances to their bases?” said Alice. “It certainly can’t be helping them.”
“So we’re at least ticking them off.”
“Ticking them off’s a start, right?”
“Right, sure,” said Keisha.
Sabotaging every possible Bay and Creek or Thistle facility they could find. The press didn’t know what to make of them. Blown-up buildings across America felt like it should be covered as terrorism, but was it terrorism when the criminals only blew up old abandoned buildings in parts of the country that had been slowly bleeding population for a long time? They were called the Derelict Bombers. TV comedians referred to them as architectural critics, taking down some of America’s oldest, ugliest eyesores. But Bay and Creek would know. Hopefully they were hurting them a little. Any kind of sting at all.
Someday they would have to move past annoyance and really take the fight to them. How they would do that, Keisha had no idea. Alice didn’t know, either, but her focus was less on the big picture of the battle. She needed to somehow make up for what she had done.
41
In college, Alice had put up a placid face to Keisha’s insistence that she wasn’t interested in a relationship, but she would take walks alone in the forest near campus and shout until she had let out her frustration and hurt enough to once more be placid. Unequal affection is cruel. But she sensed the affection was not actually unequal. That Keisha only wanted it to be, so that she could feel a sense of strength after the end of her last relationship. And so Alice waited her out, or at least would for a little while. She wasn’t going to wait forever.
When she said “I love you” by accident, it had been an unforgivable showing of weakness for herself, and she wondered if there was a way back from this crack in the façade she had put up, but then Keisha had said “I love you” back and had meant it, and the façade came down for them both. That week they lay in bed.
“I need proof,” said Alice.
“Of what?” said Keisha.
“Of us.” She hated being this vulnerable. But it had been a tough few months, and she was tired of pretending. “I want proof of us,” Alice said. There was a moment of quiet. Maybe she had gone too far. She was the cool one. And this wasn’t cool.
But Keisha laughed. “That I can give you,” she said. She kissed Alice, and the feeling between them was so evident it was all the proof either of them needed, although they subsequently expanded on that kiss just in case.
It was the night after the Clown Motel. Keisha watched the stars peekaboo behind the shifting clouds while Alice lit a fire. There was never an explicit setting of responsibilities, but Alice mostly did the menial tasks of their new life without being asked, as a way perhaps of atoning for what she had done. Keisha never asked why she did it, and Alice never thought about it. These were the roles t
hat they had given themselves, and they were what they were.
The rig was parked some ways off the highway. Mostly when they could they slept in the wilderness, lighting fires on the side of the truck away from any possible road so they couldn’t be seen. Neither of them knew if this would keep them safe. Bay and Creek obviously had a far reach and Thistle had a kind of mystical instinct that neither of them knew the extent of. For all they knew the brush around them teemed with hidden Thistle Men, musty spittle dripping down loose chins.
Weeks now of this new existence. Living as outlaws. Causing damage where they could. Hoping that it meant something. In the evenings, sitting around a fire, mostly not talking, because mostly they didn’t talk. Keisha wouldn’t even kiss Alice. She slept in her cot and Alice curled up on the narrow floor. They never discussed this sleeping arrangement, but Alice did not dare try to change her position. She would be forgiven or she wouldn’t be. In the meantime, there was a greater evil to address than her own past sins. They weren’t partners in romance but fellow soldiers in a war. At least for now.
The fire flared up, eating through paper and into the twigs and starting to nip at the larger blocks of wood. Alice used a stick to better arrange the structure. The two of them looked more like weekend campers than truck drivers. But what does a truck driver look like?
“This isn’t working,” said Keisha. Alice froze.
“Us?” she said.
Keisha didn’t respond to that. She kept her eyes on the clouds. After a moment, Alice half-heartedly poked at the fire and then put the stick down and sat next to her wife.
“We are mosquitoes,” said Keisha. “We are drawing tiny amounts of blood and all it causes is a moment of discomfort and then they forget about us.”
“Mosquitoes are one of the most dangerous creatures in the world. They cause something like a million deaths a year.”
“It was a metaphor. We’re not giving Bay and Creek malaria.”
“So what else could we do?” asked Alice.
“I don’t know. I don’t know at all. I just know we can’t keep doing what we’re doing and expecting anything at all to change.”
“We have to do something though, right?”
This was the belief that both of them were living on. Even if this wasn’t the right thing to do, at least they were doing it. Even if they wouldn’t succeed in acting, at least they were acting. It was a personal triumph, rather than one that actually hurt their enemies. And that was the problem. What good was fighting if it was only for the sake of having fought? If they didn’t have an end point, then where were they going?
“Do we think the whole government is involved?” said Keisha.
“I don’t think so. There’d be too many moving parts. Even within Bay and Creek most people don’t know. Parts of the police. Parts of the military. A few of the folks in power. I’m sure there are some who know that they are aligned with Bay and Creek and believed as I believed that they are trying to keep the country safe with the help of a useful organization. And some know that they are aligned with Thistle. Those who see a use for random violence and fear. I doubt there are many who know they are aligned with both.”
“How many people, do you think?”
“I don’t know,” said Alice. “A few bad apples.” She smiled.
“A few bad apples, shit. Good apples and bad apples don’t matter if the outcome of the system is harmful. A good person doesn’t matter if they’re working in a bad system.”
“As one of the good apples for a bit, I agree. But our intentions were good.” She shook her head. “Our useless intentions.”
“The mosquito,” Keisha said again, but in a different tone of voice, like it was the answer to a question Alice hadn’t asked.
“Hm?” she said, facing the fire. Alice was tired. She was so tired, but there was no rest in sight.
“Why is the mosquito such a dangerous creature?”
“Disease. Malaria.”
“Yeah,” said Keisha. “Yeah, exactly. The mosquito itself isn’t dangerous at all. What’s dangerous is what it carries inside of it.”
“Ok . . .”
“We’re like mosquitoes, Alice. We’re not dangerous for who we are. We’re dangerous because of what we carry inside of us.”
“Malaria?”
Keisha gave her a joking slap on the shoulder. “We have information inside of us. They have a secret, right? We need to make it not a secret anymore.”
“Huh.”
“We need to get that information out of us and into everyone in this country. Then we’ll be dangerous the way a mosquito actually is.”
“So what do we do? Flyers? Graffiti? Make a website?”
“I don’t know,” said Keisha. “I think we can’t do this on our own. I think we need help from someone who can make people listen.”
“Who would that be?”
Neither of them knew. They started looking through major news sites, finding people who seemed to report on national stories and looking up their contact info. And then they started calling them, from pay phones always. There were still pay phones, a few of them, at older gas stations, in the hallways of cheap motels with crumbling walls.
Mostly they got no response at all. Or the person would hang up on them. But then Keisha called Tamara Levitz from the Los Angeles Times.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“I am one of the Derelict Bombers,” she said. “And I want to tell you why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
There was a pause. Keisha waited for the click. Instead, Tamara’s voice again.
“Ok. I’ll need proof of your identity.”
“That I can give you.” She laughed in relief, hoping it didn’t make the call sound like a joke. “That I can give you.”
42
Alice signaled for the waitress. Three years into this new job, Keisha safe back at home, and still her pulse was racing like it was that first time at the Painted Rocks.
“Yeah?”
“Could I get a little more orange juice?” she asked, loudly.
“Sure thing, hon.” The waitress took her glass, winked at her. After twenty minutes in the place, she and Alice were best friends. Alice had that effect on people, an ease that implied intimacy even if nothing was truly shared. She made friends with bus drivers, bartenders, waitresses. Mostly because she went into their interactions with the goal of improving their day and expecting nothing in return. Directly behind her a woman slid out of her booth and headed for the front door. A minute later Alice got up, too, and followed. The waitress was just coming out with the glass of juice. It looked good. Fresh squeezed or at least a good simulacrum. But she couldn’t stay.
“Sorry, I got a call. Have to go. Can I pay here up front?”
She had a sip of juice as she waited for her change. There was always room for a little moment for herself. But then she was outside and jogging. Lucy was waiting for her. The wound that Alice had made in her cheek on that first day they met had settled into an angry scar. It felt to Alice like a physical manifestation of the compact between them, this mission they carried out together.
“Took you long enough,” Lucy said, already jogging even though she didn’t have a direction yet. “No more flirting with waitresses. Where did you see him?”
“Heading through the lot. Around back there. I wasn’t flirting. Some of us are just friendly. You might try it sometime.”
Lucy angled her jog toward where Alice had pointed, and they both picked up their pace until they were flat-out running across the pavement. It was daylight, and so this wasn’t ideal. People would be watching them, wondering what was going on. But Alice had worked for Bay and Creek long enough to know that if they didn’t move fast, it was likely their target would be long gone. The Thistle freaks had a way of fading into the walls and into highway traffic. That wasn’t going to happen this time. It had been months since she and Lucy had caught anything. They were ending that streak here, today.
Th
eir target had walked right by the window, as wrong a sight in the sunlight as any creature of nightmares, but no one in the diner had reacted. Many of them had seen, some of them might have even known what they were seeing. But they had turned away. Made the safe choice to forget what they had seen. People, Alice knew, were capable of that. Of knowing, but choosing at the same time not to know.
“Don’t worry,” said Lucy. Her voice was always calm and composed. Even as they sprinted through the heat, she sounded like she was chatting over cocktails. “We’re gonna get him.”
“Damn right we are,” huffed Alice through gasping breaths. She wasn’t even calm or composed when she was chatting over cocktails, and here, sprinting, the adrenaline for what was coming next building up in her? Forget it. As usual, her anxiety was projected outward and manifested itself as a familiar feeling of protectiveness. Not that Lucy needed her protection.
They came around the corner, and they weren’t too late. The hunched, snuffling figure was between two dumpsters, facing the wall. When he heard their footsteps, he turned. Loose skin, yellow teeth and eyes, an earthy sweet smell. His skin bulged and writhed, as though tiny creatures were trying to escape his body.
“Oh, Lucy,” he said in a high, phlegmy voice, “you seem to have healed up so well. I’m glad to find you in good health.” Lucy touched her cheek reflexively, and then she stepped forward.
“I’m here under the authority of Bay and Creek.”
That buzzing laugh, like a colony of insects burrowing up out of his lungs. “I bet you are.” He shook his head fondly, and it was in that moment, when they assumed that nothing would start yet, that he came at Alice. Like all the Thistle monsters, he was awkward and shambling, but when it came time to hunt, he moved quickly. He had her flying through the air before she could reach for a weapon or brace her body. Then her arms were pinned under his boneless, heavy legs, and his toothy mouth was lunging at her face.
