American Elsewhere (49 page)

SOUNDTRACK TAPE TO JLB [FILM STOCK MISSING]

MAY 13
^TH
1983

Mona listens as the tape continues in silence. Every document she’s read and every tape she’s listened to has made her feel sicker and sicker, but it is not until this moment, as she listens to Coburn staring silently at the lightning-ridden sky, that she really begins to understand what happened here.

She punches the
STOP
button on the tape player. With a loud
pop
, the wheels stop turning.

She sits back. There’s a knot in her stomach and it keeps getting pulled tighter. She has only pieces of what happened here, snatches of conversation and patches of reports, but she feels she is on the border of comprehending it. Yet it almost defies her. It is too huge, too strange, too impossible.

She remembers reading the word
pandimensional
and wondering what it had to do with anything. She remembers Mrs. Benjamin producing her two mirrors, murmuring (with a sneer) that Coburn never made anything actually worth making. She remembers Parson telling her about the little birds who flew to the top of a mountain from a dying world. And she remembers her mother whispering in her ear that she was not from here, she was from somewhere far, far away, and one day she would come back and take her little girl home…

There’s another loud
pop
. Mona jumps. She peers at the tape player, puzzled. It isn’t moving. But then, that pop sounded awfully metallic.

She sits back and sees over her shoulder that there’s someone
standing in the doorway, pointing something very large and very shiny at her, and she realizes the
pop
was not the tape player at all.

“Hey there, pretty lady,” says a voice.

Without thinking, she tenses up.

“Ah-ah,” says a voice. “You just hold on there. I would hate to do anything mean, you see. And what I got trained on your back does nothing but mean things.”

Mona sees. She stays still.

“Hands,” says the voice, relaxed. He sounds as if he’s having just a ball of a time.

She raises her hands.

The barrel of the gun jerks up. “Now go on. Stand up.”

Mona stands up. Then she turns her head to see who it is who’s gotten the jump on her.

It is a young, chiseled-featured man wearing one of those not-really cowboy hats (because no real cowboy would be caught dead in that beaten straw thing), a pearl snap that is unsnapped past his sternum, and jeans so tight Mona is surprised he could get up the stairs to here. That is, if he
did
take the stairs. Despite these ridiculous ornamentations, he is quite attractive, and were this a year ago, when Mona idled her evenings away shithoused in dive bars, he would be the sort to receive from her a very, very forthright invitation to dance.

“Well, now,” he says, and grins. It is a grin of perfect, thoughtless confidence. “What in the world is a cute thing like you doing in a place like this.”

And that just does it. There is something in his cocksure smirk—perhaps its unearned, swaggering bravado—that makes Mona want to put a brick through it.

“Reading,” says Mona.

“I don’t really care,” the man says. “It was one of them, eh. Rhetorical questions. You ain’t supposed to be doing
any
thing in here. This ain’t a place anyone’s supposed to be in.”

“Says who?”

“Says… says me. That’s who.” He looks around at the records room, uncertain. “Now… what the hell is this?”

He looks surprised—so he’s been here a lot, but he’s never seen this. “It is what it looks like, I guess,” she says.

“How’d you find it?”

“By looking.”

“Shit.” He shakes his head, then nods his head down the hallway. “All right, then. Come on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To wherever I say to go. I don’t know how in the hell you got in here, but I know how you’re getting out.”

He steps to the side of the door and gestures with the gun. Mona, arms still raised, slowly walks out. But as she does, she eyes his piece. It’s a Desert Eagle, the Humvee of pistols: ostentatious, impractical, ridiculous.

And he’s holding it one-handed. She starts thinking.

He keeps the gun pointed at her while he enters the records room and picks up her backpack. “The shit?” he says, holding up the pink child’s backpack. “What you got in here, Barbies?”

He starts digging through it. “Oh-ho.” He holds up the Glock. “Goodness. This ain’t no toy.” He looks through the rest, smirking, and tosses the backpack over his shoulder. “Well, this is interesting. This is damn interesting,” he says. “Now go on. Down the hallway.”

They start walking. She listens hard, counting his footsteps. About four feet away, she thinks.

“So how’d you get in here?” he asks.

“I took the back door,” she says.

“Oh, you did, did you?”

“Yes. And the stairs.”

“The… stairs?” Mona can tell he’s not sure if she’s joking anymore. “What’s your name?”

“Martha,” she says, pulling a name out randomly.

“Like hell it is. You don’t look no eighty years old, and that is a name for an eighty-year-old woman. What’s your real name?”

“Martha,” she says again. “What’s yours?”

He laughs. “What the hell are you doing out here, Martha?”

“Reading.”

He laughs again. “I’m going to enjoy you, I got to admit.”

“Mister… what are you going to do to me?”

“Don’t know. For now, we’re just going to walk. Then I’m probably going to wind up taking you to meet some people.”

“What kind of people?”

“The kind with questions. And those questions they got are the kind that get answered, if you see my meaning, Martha.”

She is silent.

“You understand?” he asks.

“I understand.”

“Good.”

She angles her head to look at him over her shoulder. He lopes, strides, saunters. He is a perfectly relaxed creature, enjoying this game, ambling behind his captured quarry.

He hasn’t done this before, she thinks. He doesn’t know a damn bit about what he’s doing. That doesn’t mean she
has
to get ugly but, if she winds up having to, she’s fairly confident she’ll wind up on top.

She says, “Mister, I… I didn’t know I was doing anything wrong.”

Silence.

“I have a hundred dollars in my wallet. You can take it, if you just leave me be.”

Of course, she has no such thing. She doesn’t even have a wallet. But immediately she feels his hand invading her back pocket, and his fingertips encounter far more of her ass than is necessary for a wallet search. She flexes involuntarily, which makes him grip her buttock a little harder.

He removes his hand and laughs, delighted. “Bullshit. You ain’t got no hundred dollars.”

Mona is quiet.

“You got a lot, though. A whole lot.”

She says nothing.

“And I’m in a pretty good mood today. A damn good mood. But it could get better. You know?”

She doesn’t answer.

“Yeah. You know. You got a lot to give. And I’d let you go. If you were to give it. You see?”

She hears his footsteps getting closer behind her. She peers back over her shoulder a little, looking for the fish-lure silver of that ridiculous gun. He takes this for a positive signal, and moves a little bit closer.

Oh well
, she thinks.
Might as well get ugly.

There’s a reason why, in real life, folks keep other folks at gunpoint from a distance of over four feet: primarily, if your guy jumps one way or another, you only have to move your aim a little bit to hit him. But if you’re right up close and he jumps, you have to wheel around like an idiot to try to draw a bead.

So when Mona leaps back and to the left, she’s out of the Desert Eagle’s range of fire almost instantly. And, since he’s holding this immensely heavy gun with just one hand, it only takes a firm grasp on his wrist and enough force down on the end of the barrel to pop it free from his grip, like a bar of soap in the shower.

For a moment they just stand there, Mona holding the gun by the barrel, the man staring at her blankly, wondering what just happened.

“Hey…” he says.

Which is when Mona pistol-whips him.

And maybe it’s because she’s still disturbed by what she discovered in this lab, or maybe it’s because he just cupped her ass and suggested she fuck him for her freedom, but Mona puts a lot more weight into it than she normally would. The young man’s cheek practically explodes. He staggers back against the wall, face bleeding freely, eyes wide. But there’s something about hitting someone that makes you want to do it again, so Mona does. Six times more, in fact, each time about as hard as the last, and each time his Attractiveness Integer goes down a notch until he’s nowhere near a 10.

When she’s done she just stands there, breathing hard. It’s dark, but his face looks caved in. She realizes she might have just killed him.

Then he moans. So he’s still got a shot, unless she damaged his brain, but a lot of her work was on the more superficial parts of his face.
The world’s loss
, she thinks.

She grabs her backpack, puts a boot in the middle of his back, and searches his pockets. She finds a set of keys, a wallet with a ton of money in it, and a piece of paper.

She reads it, squinting in the dark. It’s directions of some kind, like he was sent to find something, and one of them tells him to check here.

So he was never meant to find her. That’s good, she thinks. Then he must have come alone.

But they will be expecting him back, eventually. And since this is the last place on his list, it’s likely it’s the first place they’ll look.

She stares back down the hallway. She wants to go back and grab as many of those old records as she can. Some piece of them, some rambling paragraph or static-smeared voice, must have a kernel of truth in it.

But she knows she can’t risk it. She needs to leave, and soon.

She takes her boot off him and steps back a little. He is breathing, just barely. Mona has never killed anyone and she has no wish to start now, but abandoning him here might be a rough equivalent. Yet even she can see it’s not particularly wise to try to lug an unconscious man down a mountain in the desert, especially one who now has plenty of reasons to kill her.

“You’re on your own,” she says. “Sorry.”

She looks at his keys as she walks away. He seemed surprised to hear about a back door to this place. Which means he must have used another way in.

She walks until she feels a slight breeze on her face. She sees there’s a little more light down one hallway than the others. She walks toward it, and finds there’s a small, open door with a metal ladder inside, going up. Marked above it are the words
EMERGENCY LADDER
.

She starts climbing, the brilliant blue sky pouring in on her more and more with every rung. Then she heaves herself out.

The light is blinding after her hours in that shadowy place, but she’s never been so happy to be out of the dark. She shuts her eyes, then cracks them and opens them wider and wider until she can see.

She’s on the mesa top. She expected it to be a beautiful sight, but it’s the exact opposite: the mesa is covered with twisted, blackened metal
debris, shards of missing structures, exposed piping. Something big was here, she thinks, and she recalls the telescopes from the mural in the lab. But this does not look like the careful work of a government reclaiming its investment. Whatever was here was destroyed, decimated. It is a war zone.