The Ninth Metal

by Benjamin Percy

  Talia couldn’t help but seethe her breath. “Yeah, you are.”

  “I’ve been given a second chance I don’t deserve.”

  “And?”

  “You know how, after Mom died, Pops sent me off to boarding school? Juvenile-delinquent daycare? Hoping it would give me perspective, make me into a better man?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Think I need to do something like that. Except on my own terms.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I need to go. Far away from here.”

  “The whole world’s falling apart. Nobody’s going to know what you did.”

  “But I know. This isn’t about getting caught. I don’t care about that. It’s regret. I’ve got nothing but regret. It’s poisoning me.”

  “Johnny . . . I get it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ve understood from the very beginning. You took it hard, Mom dying. You blamed yourself and maybe you could tell we blamed you too, even if we never said so.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But we’re past that. We’re past all of that. This is a new fucking dawn. Earth two point oh. We all get a redo. You’ve done some stupid shit. You hate yourself for it. You want to stop being a waste and start being an earner. Fuckin’ A. But look at you. You’re a freak show. A monster. Nature gone wrong. You’re going to end up in some government lab if you’re not careful. You need your family right now. We can protect you. We can . . . use you. What do you think you’re going to accomplish, leaving at a time like this?”

  He looked her hard in the eye and said, “I’m going to escape myself.”

  21

  * * *

  Now . . .

  August gives way to September. The seasons come fast here. The heat blows off. Nights creep toward freezing, and days barely break fifty. The birch and aspen trees go gold with fall color, and the leaves shimmer the air and dapple the lake water Stacie paddles. Her father sits at the stern of the canoe, alternating his strokes and steering them against the current and the sharp wind.

  They are on Wolverine Lake, two portages from where they parked the Explorer. That was their agreement: Stick to lakes accessible by roads and never portage more than twice. There’s too much water to survey otherwise. And someone looking to dump a body would want convenience as much as isolation.

  A fish finder is transom-mounted to the canoe, and her father checks the display screen for what must be the thousandth time today and then adjusts the transducer. The water is so clear, she could have read the date on a quarter up to twenty feet. After that, visibility blurs—and toward the center, the lake bottoms out into a gray-green nothing, sometimes a hundred, sometimes two hundred feet deep.

  “Did you know,” her father says, “that you’re surrounded by some of the most ancient rocks on Earth? The Midcontinent Rift.”

  Three point five billion years old, she mouths at the same time he says it. She knows and loves all of his stories and lessons. She has spent her whole life listening to them. He was one of those fathers who tried to make every moment teachable. He was sometimes painfully earnest in the way he saw history and geography and botany and geology and education as all intertwined. To hike or canoe with him meant pausing constantly to learn that morel mushrooms were ready to harvest when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel’s ear or that the color of lichen was a good indicator of toxicity in an environment or that 6 percent of Minnesota’s surface area was water, more than any other state.

  “Rocks are the reason people are here,” he says. He’s referring to the copper and nickel that established Northfall, but he could just as easily be referring to omnimetal.

  The Boundary Waters consist of more than a million acres along the Canadian border, untouched by roads or towns or cell towers. A flooded green carpet. Unchanged since the glaciers melted twelve thousand years ago. A human here is a tiny intrusion. “If you’re going to disappear,” her father says, “this would be the place to do it.”

  There is a sameness to the lakes that makes her feel small and lost, but her father always knows exactly where they are. He has a map that he takes out every now and then, not to consult, but to mark with a red pen and show their search.

  They find a wolf’s paw print in the mud. They spot a moose grazing in a marsh and lifting its broad rack of antlers to study them. They watch the dark dots of loons diving into and rising from the shivering water. In a rocky cliff side, her father points out a reddish pictograph of an Ojibwa hunting party. But no sign of Dan Swanson, only the occasional false alarm that turns out to be a log or a cluster of turtles.

  “Maybe he’s gone?” her father says. “Maybe he hightailed it to someplace else? You can spit from here and hit Canada.”

  “Maybe.”

  Except she knows that wasn’t what happened. The other day, a Black Dog mine was sabotaged. Four half-ton pickups, three bulldozers, and two dump trucks. Their tires were slashed, their brake lines cut and batteries ripped out. The day after that, a Frontier Metals “man camp”—over two hundred trailers housing four times as many men—lost power and water from clipped lines and blasted mains. There was some sort of battle going on, and the Northfall PD was somehow caught in the middle of it. When cops showed up at the scene, mining representatives told them that all was well and sent them away.

  She’d asked the sheriff about this in his office one day, and he tried to tell her ecoterrorists were to blame. “We’ve dealt with plenty of that around here. As long as I’ve been working, there’ve been hippies putting sand in the gas tanks of timber trucks and hammering railroad spikes into trees about to be logged.”

  “Shouldn’t we be looking into it?” she said. “Isn’t that our job?”

  His phone started ringing then and his eyes locked on it. “Look . . . Stacie . . . we’ve got more drunk drivers and fistfights and domestic assaults and space-dust overdoses and neglected kids than we can shake a stick at.” He picked up the phone from its cradle and motioned her toward the door. “How about let’s not get too ambitious?”

  If she wanted to pursue more than she was assigned, she would do so on her own. Or at least with her father beside her.

  He knows all the campsites and uses them to navigate their course. They survey the air for vultures and the shore for tire tracks or signs of trash. “What am I looking for?” her father says, and she says, “I don’t know. A trash bag or latex glove or tarps or duct tape. But don’t limit your vision. Anything unusual.”

  He’s been taking her out whenever she’s off duty. “It’s kind of like fishing, I guess,” she says. “Except without bait.” She has her swimsuit and goggles with her, and occasionally, her father will pause his paddling and say, “Take a look at this,” and after some deliberation, she’ll plop into the water to investigate. In deeper waters, they’ve trolled with heavy hooks and steel line.

  “We’ll find him, don’t you worry. Your mother always said I was a good looker,” he says. “Get it? Good looker? As in, good at looking?”

  She digs in with her paddle. “I get it, Daddy.”

  “Did you know there were once beavers here that weighed five hundred pounds?”

  * * *

  Stacie smiles at the memory of yesterday. Now her neck and lower back ache from perching so long on the bow seat. Her hand is still sore and blistered from the paddle. And the squad car, as it rumbles along the crumbling, potholed streets of Northfall, reminds her of the lake chop brought on by yesterday’s autumn wind.

  Hank sips from the Styrofoam cup of coffee bought from the Kwik Trip, then licks the splash off his mustache. “Just you wait,” he says.

  “For what?” she says.

  “What I’ve been talking about the past five minutes. Just you wait. You’re going to break.”

  “I’m going to break?”

  “You’re going to become a coffee drinker. You can’t be a cop and not drink coffee.”

  “Oh,” she says, realizing she’s tuned out the drone of his
voice. She used to be attentive to his every word, thinking he might have something valuable to teach her. But while her father generously shared his knowledge of plants and Chippewa myths and the Pleistocene era because it was his way of saying I love you, Hank seems interested only in showing off his big-butted authority. A mansplainer.

  “No,” she says. “I want to like it, but coffee tastes like dirt. I’ll stick to Diet Coke.”

  “No, you won’t.”

  “Yes, I think I will.”

  “Nope. Another month, I’ll have you drinking dark roast. Mark my words.”

  She almost says no again but then gives a noncommittal mmm instead, hoping it will quiet him. There was a time, not very long ago, when she met every situation with a smile. There was a time when she tried to be as agreeable as possible and chase away any discomfort. There was a time when every sentence seemed to include a qualifier like “I’m sorry but” or “I guess” or “I think.” It’s still a struggle for her, but she’s doing her best to change. She’s trying not to go out of her way to help others feel comfortable. She’s learning, slowly, to take a stance.

  This is dawn, and they are rolling out of town, headed to Frontier Metals. The gated campus takes up several hundred acres and consists of windowed office buildings, a fleet of trucks, a sorting facility, and a number of equipment and storage warehouses. It could be mistaken for a Walmart distribution center if not for the guards in Kevlar patrolling the perimeter.

  Security officers wave them through and they roll toward the loading docks built into the side of a warehouse. Here they park and get out and wait as the ten trailers are hitched. The semis idle. Diesel scents the morning air. Stacie remains by the squad car while Hank hitches up his pants and walks over to the silver-haired, crewcut warehouse manager and bums a cigarette off him. The two men blow smoke and trade jokes and maybe comment on the weather or how the Vikings are shaping up this season. And then it’s time to go, and Hank drops his cig and smashes it beneath the heel of his boot and jogs back to her.

  The same routine every morning for the past two weeks, including what happens next. Upon their departure—after they fire up the siren and swirl the rack lights and head out the front gates, escorting the long line of semis behind him—Hank always pulls out his cell and types out a message one-handed.

  Today Stacie pretends to stretch, one way, then the other, leaning toward the phone. She sees the number 4. That’s it. The entirety of the message.

  The squad car rolls over the center line and Hank readjusts the wheel and she says, “You need me to text for you while you drive? I don’t mind.”

  “Don’t you worry about it, princess,” he says and hits Send. “I got everything under control.”

  The squad car continues past the exit ramp, canceling its siren and rack lights, while the semis downshift and chirp their air brakes and take the long sloping turn that will merge them onto the Highway 1 corridor. The roads up north are so battered from the winters and the traffic that crews recently resurfaced the highway, added two extra lanes, and widened the shoulders. The asphalt is a silken black and hums beneath the truck tires as they pick up speed and begin their four-hour journey south to St. Paul.

  Autumn has hurried here, and winter will soon be behind it. The sky is a pale blue pillared with clouds and triangled with geese. The sumac growing in the ditches burns a bright red. The wind carries leaves in it that stick briefly to windshields like wet stars before flurrying away.

  Every truck in the brigade is a black Cascadia Freightliner with a silver grille like a clenched jaw. The ten semis maintain a steady speed of sixty-five and a distance of twenty yards from one another. Several hundred thousand tons of steel flowing southward. Their windows are tinted and give nothing back.

  A billboard advertises a strip club called Chubbies. Another billboard advertises a gas station and McDonald’s oasis fifty miles ahead. The highway is otherwise walled in by pines. Every few miles they are cut away to make room for electrical stanchions or a road.

  It is on one of these side roads that the four armored trucks wait. They are white half-ton Fords with brush guards and no license plates. They pull onto the highway after the semis blast by. They accelerate hard, kicking up smoke.

  In the passenger seat of the lead vehicle is Mickey Golden. He—along with everyone else in his twelve-man crew—wears an alien mask. Gray skin, bulbous head, black oval eyes. But you would know him by his rings or Hawaiian shirt or gold-chain necklace or the ropes of yellow hair tumbling down his shoulders. He activates a device and sets it on the dash. It looks a little like a Wi-Fi router—a plastic square with six short antennas and many blinking lights—but it is a scrambler. All cell and radio signals within two hundred yards will be disrupted.

  His vehicle launches up the left lane and then quickly nudges into the space between the fourth and fifth semis. The other three pickups follow—two screaming past him, the other keeping pace with him—and soon the semi they’re after is boxed in.

  Horns deafen the air. The topper at the rear of Mickey’s pickup opens and two men in alien masks appear holding a spike strip between them. They chuck it, and the semi behind them doesn’t have time to turn or brake. The barbed metal clicks the pavement and then disappears below the grille. A second later the tires shred.

  Black strips of rubber kick out of the wheel wells. The rims bite the pavement and send up fans of sparks. The semi lurches toward the ditch. The driver overcompensates, yanking back at the wheel. That’s when it’s rear-ended. The trailer crumples. The rig jackknifes and tips. With a screech of rent metal, the laws of physics play out violently. The overturned semi skids another forty yards, gouging the asphalt and spitting debris, before coming to a stop. The southbound lanes are now blocked.

  The semi before Mickey slows. He knows that the pickups ahead are braking and that the men in the toppers have their AR-15s trained on the driver. But before he can calculate the next step, the rear doors of the trailer unlatch and swing open.

  Inside, he does not see a shining load of omnimetal. He sees a tall, muscular woman. Talia Frontier. The black curls of her hair whip around her face. She wears a harness, and ropes run from its loops to bolts in the wall and floor, anchoring her in place. She hefts something onto her shoulder, what Mickey recognizes too late as an RPG launcher.

  “Brake, brake, brake!” he cries out to the driver just as—with an orange flash and a cough of smoke—the warhead streaks toward them.

  22

  * * *

  Afew days ago, John told his sister she was on her own. He told her he didn’t want to be part of the trap she was planning. He told her, “You’re playing a dangerous game.”

  “This isn’t a game. It’s business.” But she was smiling when she said it.

  They were in her office, just the two of them. The sun was sinking and the night was chasing it. Only a single lamp burned on her desk. Neither of them stood in its light. “Talia, come on.”

  “What?”

  “The night of your wedding . . .”

  “What about it?”

  “You gamed me then.”

  “I didn’t game you.”

  “You did. You trapped me here. And you’re trying to game me again now.”

  She put her big hands on his shoulders and drew him close. “You’re a part of this family. And this family is Frontier Metals. You’ve had your little vacation. Your walkabout. Your vision quest or whatever the hell. Now you have to make up for lost time.” Her fingers worked at his muscles, hard enough that it was an effort for him not to flinch. “Don’t you realize how important you could be to us?”

  “You’re gaming me. Stop gaming me.” With her this close, he had to tip his neck to look up at her. “You’re going to make things worse. I’ll help, but only if I can make things better.”

  Her middle finger found the space between two of his vertebrae and prodded it. “It’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t feel like a sac
k of shit, but you’re sure acting like one.”

  “Talia . . .”

  “Don’t have a heart attack. I’m just busting your balls.” Her smile was open-mouthed, revealing the grape gum she gnashed with her teeth and twisted with her tongue. Her breath smelled like spoiled fruit. “I actually respect you. You know that, Johnny?”

  “John.”

  Her eyes narrowed to slits. “I know who you are.”

  Outside, the sky darkened and the stars brightened. “I’m going to look into finding the kid, okay?” he said.

  “You really think there’s a kid?”

  “I’ve got a feeling, yeah.”

  “A feeling. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it, but that’s going to be my contribution. That’s going to be my way of helping.”

  “That’s good,” she said and she cupped his cheek with her hand and laid a nail along his birthmark. “You haven’t forgotten your family.” She lowered her voice, though there was no one around to hear them. “Stay loyal, okay? We’re in this together. To the end.”

  * * *

  John’s first step is recon. There is no address for the DOD facility in the phone book. And there is no satellite view on Google, that section of land curiously blacked out, as if cut by scissors. But Yesno pulls out the map and confirms the location—in the woods west of town. “The trouble is, you can’t simply drive past,” he says. “The road was built specifically for the facility. If you go there, they’re going to notice.”

  “How heavily is it guarded?”

  “Heavily, I understand.”

  Three drones patrol the Frontier estate, staggered according to their geolocation software. A dozen more sit on a shelf in the storage shed, ready to rotate out or be salvaged for parts. He snatches a quadcopter, peels off its FAA ID, wipes its memory card, then tosses it into his Bronco.