“Have you searched for others? Who the hell is out there?”
Bo didn’t respond, and in the dark, Cal couldn’t see whether he intended to. So he went on. “There have to be more of us. Why haven’t they shown themselves?” He paused. “Why haven’t they killed us and stolen our shit?” He and Frida asked themselves this all the time. Besides a lunatic who had jumped in front of their car on their way through the Central Valley, they hadn’t been bothered by a soul since leaving L.A. Where were all the marauders—the Pirates—that everyone in L.A. was so frightened of? It couldn’t just be luck that had kept Frida and Cal safe.
“Why do you assume they’re bad people?” Bo asked.
Cal laughed. “I’ve seen movies.”
“They trade with August, they keep to themselves.”
“But why?” Cal asked. “What do you know?”
Cal heard the slosh of the liquor in Bo’s Mason jar, and a strong gulp, as if the man were preparing for a long story. Cal waited.
“When Sandy and I first came out here—years ago—we went on an exploratory mission. We were still living in the shed, and we secured it with this big bicycle lock before we left. Not that it would really keep anyone out, but we figured it was more important to know the area, dangerous or not.”
“Were there Pirates back then?”
Bo sighed. “We were curious, like you.”
Cal wondered why Bo was being so shifty. He thought he could see that Bo had his eyes on the tent, where their wives were hushing the children. He seemed suddenly anxious that Sandy might hear them. Would she contest his version of events? Maybe she had another story to tell.
“We walked due west for days,” Bo said, “and found no one, nothing. Nothing human, at least. Then we retraced our steps, and when we reached the shed, we went in the opposite direction.”
Bo paused, and Cal forced himself to remain silent, to wait him out.
“On the second day,” Bo began, as if he were reading from the Bible, “traveling east, we found a sign.” He paused, as if this should mean something. As though this was a well-practiced script. Cal had no idea what he meant. Was it a simple octagonal stop sign or the Virgin Mary, burned into a rock?
“There were large spikes coming out of the ground.”
“What do you mean, ‘spikes’?” Cal imagined a line of them, like at the exit of a parking lot. Severe tire damage, he thought.
“They were huge,” Bo said. As he and Sandy approached, they saw that the spikes weren’t smooth and uniform. They were made up of cast-off objects—car parts, old clothing, plastic—and wrapped in barbed wire, their tips sharp and jagged. They were twice as tall as Bo, and they leaned, as if into a strong wind. “They were menacing. Their presence meant, Turn around. Go away.”
Bo and Sandy only wove their way around a few. There were a hundred of them, easily, but if they’d had the time—and the courage, Cal thought—they could have discerned a route through them. Not all of them were spaced closely together. If you knew how, you could get in and out.
“You know all those contested nuclear waste sites?” Bo asked.
Cal nodded. When he was a kid, there’d been endless debates about where to store radioactive waste. He remembered politicians winning votes by promising to fight the proposed projects—not that they could. The fear of another Chernobyl or Fukushima or Tarapur wasn’t as strong as the need to put the radioactive material somewhere. Plank’s campus hadn’t been too far from a disputed site.
Cal took another sip of the liquor, and it burned down his throat. “What does this have to do with nuclear waste?”
Bo explained that experts in the previous century had designed different ways to warn of a site’s danger, so that anyone might understand them: the foreigner, the illiterate, the alien. Large spikes had been one suggestion. In a thousand years, the message had to be clear, so that people understood what had been left there. “For the future,” Bo said, and a thread of ice inched down Cal’s spine. The future had arrived.
But the government had ultimately opted for something predictable; they’d plastered the sites with multiple signs bearing scientific information and stamped with the traditional nuclear symbol. Some said that future generations might take the image for an angel if they didn’t know better. “Tough shit for them, I guess,” Bo said.
“So these spikes you and Sandy saw? It wasn’t a nuclear waste site?” Cal asked, confused.
Bo shook his head. “Doubt it—but they reminded me of one. As if they’d been made in homage to a rejected vision.”
“So if the government didn’t build them, who did?”
“I don’t know,” Bo said. “But they weren’t that old. We found footprints, barely faded, and someone had dropped a leather belt, buckled very small. They must have been using it as a stirrup.”
“So what did you do?”