“What makes you so sure?”
“Because you left.” There is a short silence between them. Their breath steams in the cold. “I was hoping we could talk?”
“Isn’t that what we’re doing?” He puts his hand on the door, ready to drag it closed.
“I’m honestly kind of nervous right now. Because . . .” She digs her phone out of her pocket. “Hold on.” She cringes as she snaps a photo of him. “Because I don’t know how you’ll react.” She hurriedly texts the image to her father. “Sorry about that. Sorry to be weird.”
“You took a photo of me? Why? To document we’re together?”
“Yeah. Just in case, you know, you try to . . .” She isn’t sure what to say, so she pockets the phone and then mimics strangling someone. She giggles out of nervousness and hates herself for it. “Sorry.”
He doesn’t look as angry as she thought he would. He takes his hand off the door handle and rests it on his thigh. “It’s smart to be careful.”
“Yeah.”
“But not so careful you risk hypothermia. Now that you’ve taken your photo and convinced yourself I’m not going to murder you, how about you get in? We’ll talk in the cab.”
“I’ll stay out here. Thanks.”
“Have it your way. Hit me. What did my family supposedly do?”
“Before we get into that . . . I feel like I need to get a better sense of your code?”
His eyebrows shoot up. “My code?” He laughs and it’s the first time she’s seen him smile. He’s missing one of his molars and the black gap is somehow upsetting. “Who says I have to have a code?”
“I do. And if it’s something you haven’t thought about, you really need to.”
“That sounds like something you got from a therapist or a magazine or some dumb website that’s supposed to make you feel special.”
He isn’t wrong. She subscribes to an e-mail listserv on mindfulness and every day a message pops up with an affirming quote or lesson or exercise. The other week it suggested she write a code. A kind of contract or belief system—separate from any religious doctrine—that informed her choices. She tried out a few different options that she erased. Finally she settled on something simple as her code: Be brave and be good. After some consideration she added mostly. Be brave and be (mostly) good. This she scratched on a pink sticky note that she affixed to her bathroom mirror.
But she’s not going to tell John any of that. “This place,” she says. “Northfall. It’s mixed up. It doesn’t know what it’s supposed to be. And look at it. It’s chaos.”
His smile fades. “Yeah, this town’s gone crazy for sure.”
“If you don’t have a code, I think the same thing could happen to you.”
His eyes narrow, but she can’t tell if he’s annoyed or intrigued. “You think you know me, huh?”
“I know enough. I know you were a complete—pardon my French—screwup. And now you’re trying not to be.”
“You know you cringed when you said screw? Screw is a bad word to you? That’s kind of hilarious. You’re such a Girl Scout.”
The wind picks up and she stamps her feet, trying to kick the cold out of them. “You know what?” she says. “Maybe I will get in.”
“Be my guest.”
She walks past the grille of the Bronco and a struck moth weakly flutters its wings. She yanks open the passenger door and climbs inside. The seat is ripped. The dashboard is dusty. A nest of receipts and cans and wrappers clutters the floor. “You know, for a rich guy, you drive kind of a lousy car.”
He turns the key in the ignition. “You’re the one who said it.” He adjusts the heater, nudges a vent toward her. “I’m not the rest of my family.”
She wears a fleece and tucks her hands deep into its pockets, balls them up, trying to get warm. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve been pretty mixed up too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I think what happened was . . . my code changed. Not all at once, but gradually, over the past few months.”
“Your code changed? Jesus Christ, you talk about it like it’s a password-protected phone.”
“I used to think about the world in terms of black and white. And now —”
“And now it’s gray?” He shakes his head. “Not exactly a groundbreaking epiphany. Welcome to reality.”
“No. Not gray. I don’t think there’s even a color. Or if there is, we don’t know the name of it yet.”
“You’re not making any sense. Get to the point.”
“Let me tell you what I know. Then let me tell you what I think I know. Then let me tell you what I think we should do.”
“We?”
“We.”
“Okay, Girl Scout. I’m listening.”
“First, let me make a confession. I thought you were responsible for what happened to Dan Swanson and your father.”
“Not exactly news.”
“But you know what? I’ve changed my mind.”
“Lucky me. How did that happen?”
“When I was a kid, my father and I used to sit on the front porch and whittle. Whenever my knife slipped and I made a clumsy notch or took off a big chunk of wood, he’d encourage me not to get frustrated. He told me to think of the mistake as a happy accident.”
“You should really teach Sunday school or something.”
“So a frog became a dog, for example. Or a fish became a man. I just needed to be open-minded about the change.”
“We’re getting to the point soon, I hope.”
“I’ve been looking for Dan Swanson’s body.”
This makes John go still and quiet.
“My father is a wilderness guide, and I’ve enlisted him in the search, and we’ve been working our way through a lot of water. Fishing the Boundary Waters, I guess you could say.”
“Yeah?” John says, his voice now quiet and serious. “Find anything?”
“In fact, we did.” She lets this set in and waits to study his response but gets nothing back. “I was looking for one body, but I ended up finding another.”
At this, he wrinkles his forehead. “What?”
“And I guess you could also say that I was looking for one suspect, but I ended up finding another. The body in the woods—he was my happy accident. He helped me see the design of everything differently.”
“Who was the body?” John says.
“A geologist working for Frontier. And do you know what he was doing? When he crashed his ATV and broke his neck? He was surveying the area for omnimetal.”
“I thought you said you were in the Boundary Waters.”
“I was.”
“It’s illegal to mine there.”
“That’s what I thought. But here’s what I’ve learned.” She’s rehearsed this several times, but the words feel logjammed in her throat. “Frontier has been surveying the Boundary Waters for omnimetal strikes. Once the press gets wind of this, busloads of protesters are going to show up from every corner of the country. But for now, the prospecting isn’t public knowledge. I made some phone calls. And it turns out the feds, on an emergency order, granted your company —”
“It’s not my company.”
“A provisional mining license that nullifies the protected status of the BWCA.”
“I got nothing to do with the business. Zero.”
“This license was granted by the Department of Defense. Do you understand what that means? Frontier is now a military contractor.”
“What?” John visibly flinches. “No. No, that’s not possible.”
“You’re going to be their principal supplier for omnimetal-weapons research and development.”
“I said that’s not possible. We’ve got a policy going back to when my great-uncle died in Vietnam not to —”
“Like a code, you mean?”
“Yes,” he says, sighing around his words. “Like a code.”
“I’m not done.”
John opens his mouth to say something
more but doesn’t. He makes a go-ahead motion.
“This is why I think your father was targeted.”
“For working with the DOD?”
“The opposite. For refusing to work with the DOD.”
John’s eyes go somewhere else. He seems to understand now what she might be suggesting.
“This is where the code comes in,” she says. “This is what I was nervous about. What do you stand for? Lashing out and being a big stupid idiot? Or making peace? Because personally, I’m interested in making peace and protecting this community.”
He clenches his fist and softly bashes the wheel. “You’re saying it’s Talia.”
“As soon as your father was declared incapable, she became the acting president of Frontier. She’s the one who signed off with the DOD.”
“When? When did she sign off? Did you check the date?”
“It was days later. He was still in the hospital. To me that implies —”
“Impatience.”
“Now, there are a few things going on here, mister, that I have some pretty big problems with. But the biggest one is this. I became a peace officer—a cop—because I love Northfall. And right now, a place that’s near and dear to me is being threatened.” She holds up a finger when John tries to speak. She doesn’t want him to interrupt because she’s going to tell him a story. A story her father shared with her. A story her father shares with everyone he takes out into the BWCA as a wilderness guide.
“It happened right here. Or not far from here. Over on the Gunflint Trail. About two billion years ago, a meteor hit. Big one. Giant fireball. Did you know that? I bet you didn’t. The impact crater was a hundred fifty miles wide. The winds that came off it would have carried you to Oz. This was back when northern Minnesota was underwater, sunk under a shallow sea. There would have been earthquakes, tsunamis. An end-of-the-world type feeling. Kind of like what we all went through five years back, but worse, if it’s possible to imagine.
“Anyhoo, the ejecta from the impact site gets mixed up in the mess of all these storms, and then it gradually settles and forms a layer of rock. You follow me? Only about twenty inches thick, but it reaches all the way up into Canada and all the way over to Michigan. That layer, it’s exposed at Gunflint Lake. The fireplace at Gunflint Lodge? It’s made out of that rock. That whole area is called the Gunflint because of it. Because the rock—that alien rock—was popularly used as gunflint in rifles. A lot of people died because of it, in a roundabout way. And that’s what I’m getting at. This strike. This omnimetal. The business interest in it. The government interest in it. The military interest in it. It’s got me and my daddy and a whole lot of other people worried. Because this place has a long tradition as a source of weapons, of killing.
“Now, history has a habit of repeating itself. And maybe I’m naive—I know I can sure seem like I am—but I see a way to stop this. To stop the killing.” She waits a beat and then says, “Okay. You can talk now. Do you want to know how to stop all the killing?”
“All ears.”
“It’s you. You’re the way.”
He says the word as if it’s a punch line: “Me?”
“At the hospital, you told me you lied about your military service because you wanted your father to be proud of you. Well . . . maybe this is your chance.”
John’s face hardens. He slams his hand against the steering wheel.
“What do you stand for?” she says. This isn’t the sort of peace-brokering she imagined doing when she signed on to become a cop. But it is justice nonetheless. The rules have changed. She is changing with them. “What are you going to do next?”
31
* * *
Four years ago . . .
John didn’t know where he was. When he escaped his cell, when he stumbled out of the compound and into the cruel sunlight, he might as well have been on Mars. Dun-colored hills knuckled with rock and tufted with wiry brush reached off into the distance. Every panting breath felt choked with hot dust.
A bullet struck him then. In the cheek. He brought a hand there experimentally and felt the warmth of its impact. And then, in quick succession, he was shot in the shoulder, ribs, thigh. The rattle and pop of automatic fire was drowned out by the harsh chipping of his skin as it deflected lead. A fresh volley tore up his T-shirt, and from the gashes came blue sparks, like a lighter that fails to catch.
He turned toward the source. The compound was built into the side of a hill with dirt shouldering the structures, and a man with a thick mustache and an AK-12 stood framed in one of its dark doorways. His eyes were open so wide they looked lidless. He dropped the rifle. At first John thought it was in disbelief—but then his body slumped and collapsed, and Anton appeared behind him with a blood-slick knife.
His fellow prisoner looked different out of his cell, free in the sunlight. He was straw-haired. Pink as the skin under a scab. Awkwardly tall and long-limbed. He hoisted up the fallen rifle and yelled to John, “Remember when I am telling you to get in truck, foolish asshole? Get in truck!”
Voices could be heard shouting inside and Anton nosed the rifle through the doorway. A quick spray of gunfire strobed the shadows yellow. Someone cried out in pain. Anton let out a laugh and sprinted after John.
They scrambled into a Toyota pickup that might once have been white but was now skinned with dust and mottled with rust. The keys dangled from the ignition. It took John a few cranks to bring the engine to life and then they were on their way, skidding and thumping and grinding along a rutted road that twisted off to nowhere.
They studied the mirrors for the next ten minutes. When Anton decided they were safe enough, he dug around in the cab and listed off what he found. “Petrol. Bullets. Blanket. Flashlight. More bullets. Boobs magazine. Bag of roasted chickpeas.” He uncapped a dirty jug and sniffed it. “Water, I am thinking.” He took a swig and offered a contended grunt. “Water.” He tipped the jug back and guzzled until he needed to catch his breath. Then he showed his yellow-rimed teeth in a smile. “So, what are you, man? Devil or angel?”
“I don’t know what I am,” John said.
“You are always like this?”
“No.”
“Since Cain, then?”
“How did you know?”
Anton sloshed another drink, and water dribbled down his chin. He shoved the jug at John. “Everything has been strange, yes? Since Cain? In Pakistan, near Nanga Parbat, I was on job. Locals tell me to stay away from village. You know why? Everyone there was ice cube. Frozen. I thought this was nonsense until I saw for self. Not just people, but houses, trees, dogs. Like Pompeii, yes? Nobody knows what is coming. Excepting for the ash, people are covered in ice and looking like dipped in glass.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Oh, you know, I was supposed to be killing someone. The usual, blah-blah.” Anton’s voice lulled here, then he continued on with excitement. “And then, near my grandmother’s, farmer discovers worm. White worm size of python. You know what he uses to fight worm? Pitchfork. You know what happens to pitchfork? Blades rust to nothing by next day. Gone. Poof. And then cow steps in place where worm bleeds? Big mistake. Hoof gone. Leg no longer working. Milk becomes blood. Farmer must kill cow. All because of worm!”
“Jesus.”
“Son of God, He is not seeming so special anymore, yes? Making fishes and bread and walking on the water? Pfft. Who is caring? We have metal man now! And giant white worm with rust blood!”
“I guess.”
The road forked and Anton threw out an arm and said, “Go that way. Left. Left!”
John did as he was told, cranking the wheel. “So you know where we are?”
Anton popped open the glove box and rifled around in it. “Not really, but left is lucky.”
The road was sometimes sand and sometimes stone and sometimes hard-packed clay. It cut now through a valley where evening had already come. John clicked on the headlights, but only one of them worked.
“I co
uld sell you, you know.” Anton wagged a long finger and croaked out a laugh. “I could tie you up and sell you for big money, metal man.”
“Why don’t you?”
“You are lucky you saved me or I would! Also, maybe I am having another idea. A way I can make money off you that is lot more fun.”
* * *
At boarding school, John had to participate in a sharing circle every day. A counselor would arrange a dozen folding chairs in a room and students would all sit around and stare at their hands. You were supposed to unload your regrets and anxieties, hopes and dreams. No one was allowed to judge you there. And no one was allowed to repeat what was said outside of the room.
One day the counselor—a man who favored Easter-egg-colored sweater vests and white Velcro sneakers—asked who they dreamed of being. Their fantasy selves. “If you could be anyone, in any time, doing anything, what would it be? Sky’s the limit,” he said.
John had always loved westerns and samurai movies. He related to the gun- and sword-slinging loners who wandered through lawless territories, got caught up in some local trouble, kicked ass, then headed off into the horizon. They were masterless. They abided by no one’s rules but their own. They did bad things for good reasons. So when it was John’s turn to speak, he said, “A ronin.”
No one knew what he was talking about, and when the counselor pressed him to say more, John said, “It’s like a wandering knight.”
There was a moment of silence before the counselor said, “You used the word wandering. If I’m hearing you correctly, John, that means you want to travel? I’d say that sounds like a very positive goal.”
“That’s not what I mean,” John said, but everyone’s attention had already moved on to the next student in the circle.
* * *
But Anton knew what he meant. Ronin was what they named their private security team, a two-man task force that they pitched as a small-scale Blackwater or Academi. They couldn’t risk taking anyone else on for fear of John’s secret being discovered.
The Ninth Metal Page 23
