American Elsewhere

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE




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 anything 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 f*ck 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.

She fights a wave of vertigo when she realizes how high she is. The brown ripples of hills and mountains stretch for miles in every direction. She walks to the edge and sees she can easily climb down, if she’s careful. There’s a glint of metal from just a few dozen yards ahead, and she can see a huge truck parked on a dirt road winding around the mesa. It must have been the cowboy’s ride.

Then she stops. Thinks. And she turns around to examine the ruins on the mesa top once more.

Her perspective is a little better from here. She can see where the telescopes and the radio towers once stood. And perhaps Coburn himself once stood in this very place to watch the lightning in the sky.

But Mona’s not interested in any of that. What she’s interested in are the two huge, long depressions in the mesa’s surface. They are more than a hundred feet long, oblong with undulating edges, forming awkward figure eights among all the devastation. They don’t look natural, yet from the absence of piping or metal or concrete, they don’t look man-made. But the damage to the mesa top radiates outward from them, as if it had been struck by two meteors… but meteors would have done a lot more damage to this place, and the two indentations in the mesa top would not match so perfectly.

They look, Mona thinks, a little like footprints. Big ones. As if something the size of the mountain itself once stood here, staring out at this dry, brown-red world, and the tiny town just below.

She remembers something from one of the tapes. She says it aloud, quietly: “There’s something up there…”

She turns to leave as fast as she can.


The cowboy’s truck is a battleship of a vehicle. Mona is about to hop in the cab when she recalls a time from her cop days when some foolish soul stole a truck with the owner’s Rottweiler sleeping in the back, and was promptly mauled upon arrival at the chop shop. So, carefully, she walks to the edge of the truck bed and peers in.

It looks like the cowboy was preparing for a mining expedition. There are pickaxes, shovels, jackhammers, ropes, pulleys. There is a bundle at the end of the bed, something wrapped in canvas, presumably whatever the cowboy was mining.

Maybe it’s gold, Mona thinks, for no reason.

Then she thinks: What the f*ck am I going to do with gold out here?

She pulls the top of the canvas back. It is not gold, but two smallish cubes that look to be made out of old iron.

“Huh,” says Mona, and she reaches out to pick up the smaller one.

She picks it up one-handed. It is not that heavy. But there is something odd about it. It does not feel like metal to her, but flesh. There is a give to it that is distinctly organic, and it sticks to her, like it doesn’t want to be put down. Yet when she sets it back in the bed of the truck, it makes a metallic clunk sound.

It is when she takes her hand off of it that she suddenly smells something ionized and dusty, like a lightning strike out in the desert, and she imagines someone whispering softly in her ear…

She shudders. She needs to get the hell away from this place.

Mona throws the cab door open and looks in. Then she sees what’s sitting on the floor of the passenger side.

Her jaw drops. “Oh, my God.”


There are a few things you’d never guess about Mona from looking at her.

The first, as has been already mentioned, is her age. Mona is a good decade older than she appears to be, and on learning this people tend to instantly like her less. Partially it’s because they are far more forgiving of her lifestyle if they think she’s in her late twenties rather than late thirties, but mostly they’re just upset she ages well and they usually don’t.

The second thing is that Mona, who is an absolute tomboy in so many ways, is actually really good at crochet. She can make hats, scarves, mittens, potholders, and even coats of impressive quality and with many different and complicated patterns. She had to keep this a dead secret from her friends, especially those on the force, but she made quite a profitable side income selling her goods online.

And the third—which is probably the most surprising—is that Mona has probably received several times more expert rifle training than your average American soldier.

While her father roughnecked around West Texas, he and his daughter had little common ground until the day he took her deer hunting and she showed a remarkable aptitude with a gun. Part of it was just genetics, for Earl Bright himself had served in the 75th Ranger Regiment at the tail end of Vietnam, and had been a commendable marksman himself. Their hunting or training trips soon became the only oases in their acrimonious relationship, and Earl began taking her out to the country more and more, mostly just to get her to shut the hell up.

As a young girl Mona sucked up every bit of knowledge Earl Bright had to offer. She came to know the dance and wriggle of every type of round, the rifling twist rate of every rifle and the primer type of every commercially available cartridge, the difference between shooting with a hot barrel and a cold one. She came to intuit which parts of the landscape better serve the shot, and how to sit for hours at a time with her eye to a sight without allowing herself to cramp, how to ignore hunger for most of a day, how to keep her hands warm and functioning in the cold, and how to stalk through mesquite forests and huisache forests and pine forests.

Looking back, it is only fitting that Mona’s childhood was not based around any sense of love, but the slow, bitter, patient task of killing. For a killing, as young Mona learned, does not start with the pull of a trigger and the bite of a bullet: a killing starts the instant your toe touches hunting ground and you begin circling what you’ve come there to fell.

So when Mona’s eyes fall upon the marvelous piece of weaponry sitting up against the opposite truck door, it’s a little like a Stradivarius falling into a violin prodigy’s lap. To her this rifle is such a beautiful, powerful firearm that she almost cannot believe it. And when she grasps the stock and picks it up, a thousand muscle memories spring to life, kindling many long-dormant instincts and desires in her mind.

She can’t imagine how much this thing must have cost. Christ, she thinks, and she smells its muzzle. It hasn’t even been fired much. There are even boxes of rounds all over the floor.

She brings the butt up and peers through the optic. Then she wheels around and sights a tree below.

It has not been boresighted well: she immediately senses that the reticle is far too low for the distance to the tree. Were she to shoot now, the shot would be high. But she is overjoyed to have this realization come rushing into her head. It’s like kissing or having sex for the first time in years: you remember where things are supposed to go, and how much they want to be there, and everything is so impatient.

She tosses her pink backpack in the cab and situates the rifle nearby. She wishes the cleaning tools were around, for she doesn’t trust the state the cowboy left the rifle in, but it is still a gift.

She turns the truck on, the diesel engine guttering to a roar.

Maybe now, since things are going her way, she’ll get some answers.