Sienna still wasn’t ready to go all the way with Liam, despite having dated him for almost a year. She didn’t understand why people seemed in such a hurry to do something so physical, and, in spite of Liam’s patience with her, she doubted she would ever be ready to try it. So, instead of biting the bullet that late Saturday afternoon, Sienna decided to do something better — she invited him to her secret spot, on the outskirts of the Thirty-Mile Zone, near the solitary and lonely Golden Rocks outcropping, which he had never been to before.

“Can you at least tell me what we’re looking for?” Liam asked, navigating the dry dirt road in his second-hand van.

“It’s near an orange rock pillar…”

“That’s the ‘Golden Rocks’?”

“Yeah, and the secret spot is close by, in the Joshua trees.”

“You, uh… you come here often?”

Sienna nodded. “Lynette and her older sister usually take me every full moon, when the super-creepy thing in it feels more… I dunno, rubbery, I guess?”

Liam raised an eyebrow. “Rubbery?”

“It’s a crazy story, but it’s totally true,” Sienna insisted. “Three years ago, Lynette showed up at school with a black eye, and told me she bumped into the thing randomly while she and Rosie were trying to find a buried football full of weed. Don’t ask me how Rosie heard there was a buried football full of weed out there, but Lynette actually WALKED into the rubbery thing and it got her right in the eye. Bam! I mean, that thing walloped her so hard, she had to wear sunglasses for weeks. She said Rosie took her back a few other times, but they couldn’t find it again, and Rosie thought it must be magic or something. I almost didn’t believe it, either, so Lynette said, ‘Rosie will take us there in two weeks when the moon’s out, you’ll see!’ So two weeks after that, when she and Rosie took me to the spot, I found the thing by putting my hands out in front of me and walking so slow, I brushed my fingers against it and then grabbed it. Trust me, it’s SO weird, and SO much fun…”

“And the buried football full of weed?”

Sienna laughed. “Oh yeah, we found that, too. But Rosie called dibs on it, so we only smoked a third of it before she took the rest.”

“Damn it, and here I was hoping we could’ve unearthed that like pirate treasure and smoked it ourselves…” They laughed together, but then came the slightly uncomfortable silence. “So,” he added, “you, uh… come out here to… grab super-creepy, rubbery things… for fun?”

“Just me and Rosie, mostly. She took us there a few times before the moon was out, but mostly we think it’s really rubbery when there’s a full moon, so we only did it monthly for the last year or so. Lynette only got up the nerve to touch it back in April, and she scared herself so shitless, she refused to go back. I mean, it’s also Rosie’s car, and she’s off to college next fall. Also, we’re not really friends, except through Lynette, so we basically haven’t been back since.” Sienna turned to her boyfriend and asked, teasingly, “You’re not scared, are you?”

Liam bristled and asked, “How can I be scared of… something… supposedly ‘super-creepy,’ and rubbery, but so vague, I don’t even know what it is?”

“Well, if it makes you feel any better,” Sienna answered, “I’m not sure what it is, either. But I know what it does…”

Curiosity piqued, Liam asked, “Fly into people’s faces and giving them black eyes?”

“It… hangs… in midair… like an air-lump.”

Liam laughed. “Sounds like bullshit.”

If Sienna couldn’t tolerate one thing, it was being accused of exaggerating or lying. “No, I mean it! I’ll show you. It’s… wild! Lynette totally flipped her shit and accused me and Rosie of giving her a contact high when she touched it, but I hadn’t smoked in a week. Turn left here — we’re almost at the rocks.”

At the first crest of Joshua trees, Liam hung a left and proceeded through a small grove until the bright orange and abstract rock formation loomed into view, like the burial tomb of Picasso, himself, had he ever been to California. After pulling up, parking and shutting off the engine, something buzzed annoyingly in his ears. “Aw, shit…”

“What’s the matter?”

“Don’t you hear that?”

“No, what do you hear?”

“I dunno… a radio, or something?”

“The radio’s off,” Sienna said, pointing to the darkened dashboard.

Liam rolled down the window and looked tried to look behind the van. “Any stations around here?”

“Not that I know of…?”

“My stupid ears,” he groaned, rolling the window back up and probing gently into his canals with his pinkies. “Probably nothing. Okay, where’s this magical lump?”

“Follow me,” Sienna said, hopping out of the passenger seat.

Liam grabbed his keys, thrust them in his pocket and followed his girlfriend around the rock tower and into a circle of Joshua trees.

In the clearing, Sienna put out both open palms in front of her, slightly above her head, and gently reached forward for the mysterious object. Liam watched as she closed her eyes, slowly walking around in the sunbaked dirt and trusting the universe to guide her to her target. He was reminded of Sienna’s last formal birthday party three years prior, at 14, after he’d come back from boarding school in Canada. Lynnette had tied a blindfold over Sienna’s eyes, spun her around three times, and put a stick in her hands to hit a rainbow-colored donkey-pinata with. Sienna swung once and dropped the stick, but instead of waiting for Liam or anyone else to put it back in her hands, or else remove the blindfold and get it herself, she got down on all fours and shuffled around with her hands in front of her, feeling for the fallen stick with her open palms and outstretched fingers. Liam silently followed her to where the stick was, and as soon as she’d located it, he reached over to help her stand, caught her up in his arms, and was awestruck by how beautiful and serene she looked, not being able to see him. He lacked words to describe why he found her to be beautiful and serene with a blindfold on, but he knew then that he needed to ask her out if it was the last thing he ever did…

He wondered, Had this happened before or after she claimed to find this mysterious, magical lump, with her friend and her friend’s sister? Which informed which?

Before he could fantasize about recreating her 14th birthday scene out in the Joshua trees, or else plan on taking her to prom and losing his virginity to her while she was blindfolded, Sienna’s right hand clamped down on something and she gasped. “Holy shit, it’s still here! Found it!”

Liam blinked, the buzzing having returned to his ears, albeit duller and slower, like it was being choked. “Seriously?” he muttered, silently cursing his ears.

“You bet your life I’m serious,” she said excitedly, holding her fist in the air. “Now get over here!”

As he approached, the buzzing pulsed deeper, as if throbbing. But as Sienna lifted her pinkie and ring fingers off the thing in the air, the buzzing sped up, vibrating along Liam’s skull and spine. “Okay, that is weird,” he mumbled again, swallowing repeatedly and unable to close his ear canals. After stretching his jaw and no feeling change in the vibrations, he added, “Hell with it, let me see…”

Sienna, talking past him, responded, “It’s kind of hard to see with this much light and no dust clouds, but…” She took her middle finger and thumb off of it, leaving only her index on what Liam perceived as a pulsing, translucent-lavender mass-like thing, doing as Sienna said and hanging in the air and positively singing. She looked over her shoulder at Liam and grinned. “Wild, right?”

“Holy shit,” Liam marveled, his whole body vibrating pleasantly, which he couldn’t help wondering if it meant that he was still horny.

“I tried to ask Mr. Phillips about it,” Sienna said of their Physics teacher, “but he said it’s impossible. He even looked at me like I was crazy…”

“You’re not crazy,” Liam said, “it’s definitely there…”

“What do you think it’s for?” she wondered, her index finger poking gently into the lump. “Why is it there? How is it there?”

“I… don’t know,” he confessed, feeling pulled toward it, as it darkened, bruised, and throbbed painfully in his ears. “Um… why don’t you try taking your finger off of it?”

“But… what if I lose it?”

“You won’t lose it,” he said. “Like you said, it just hangs there, and it’s been there for at least three years, so it sounds like it’s not going anywhere…”

Sienna cautiously removed her finger from it, and it cleared slightly, but still pulsed a faded, yet translucent violet. “Shit, where did it go?”

Liam zeroed in on the lump and marveled, “It’s darker when it’s touched…”

“Wait, you… you can still see it?”

“It’s faint, but yeah…”

“How… can you see it?”

“I dunno…”

The air-lump swelled a little bigger, pulsing and vibrating up and down his spinal column, as if stroking him and daring, Come on, touch me… like you touched her… you know you want to…”

“What’s it doing?” Sienna asked. “I can’t see it.”

Getting within an arm’s length of the thing and right next to her, Liam answered, “I… I think… I think it wants me to touch it… If that makes any sense?” He turned to Sienna, who raised an eyebrow in confusion. “Should… should I do it?”

Sienna shrugged. “I don’t know, maybe?”

“What did it feel like to you?” he asked, admiring its strange contours. “Hot? Cold?”

“Warm,” she said, “kind of like… skin?”

“Sweaty skin? Dry?”

“Well, it’s in the air, and I guess skin dries in the air,” she answered. “But it’s not rubbery this time, or oily. Or flaky, so it’s… probably clean?”

From his vantage point, Liam realized with perplexity that the air-lump’s odd shape strongly resembled a swollen testicle. “Okay,” he said with a snicker, gingerly reaching for it, “like you say… it’s just warm, dry skin… hanging in the air…” He wanted to say, Like a swollen ballsack, but thought better of it and doubled over laughing.

“Are you okay?” asked Sienna. “You’re acting kind of funny…”

“No, sorry, sorry,” Liam said, collecting himself. “Pretty sure I’ve got this covered… I mean, what’s the worst that could — ?!”

As he spoke, he casually thrust his index finger toward the mass, but felt no skin that wasn’t his own. The pain came hard and fast as the heel of Liam’s palm ripped open and, at the same time, the lump split open with something like a scream. The cacophony was practically deafening as it widened away from his fingers, yawning into a hole big enough to accidentally suck Sienna’s head and Liam’s hand into it, her neck chafing against his fingers.

Inside the hole, she saw… herself… in a canvas dress and messy blond braids. The other self leaned in toward her face to get a closer look. “Are you… me?” asked the other self.

Sienna stammered, trying to make her mouth work: “M-m-maybe?”

“What’s today?”

“Um… Saturday?”

“What month and year?”

“June… 1978?”

The Sienna with messy braids nodded and said, “Same as me… Met another one of us, but from 1991, so time travel’s a real thing, I guess. You come out here by yourself, too?”

The Sienna with free hair quietly tried to assess whether this encounter was comparable to her last ‘shroom trip, and then she felt Liam’s fingers squirming on her neck, caught between her skin and that of the air-lump, which had constricted around them. “N-n-no, Liam’s with me, I mean, sort of…”

The Sienna with messy braids gasped and her eyes went wide, rifling through her leather purse for something important. “You need to get away from him! Right fucking now!”

“Why?”

“If Liam doesn’t kill you, he’ll be the death of you!”

“What?!”

Before Sienna could get an answer, Liam’s fingers somehow tore the hole just enough to widen it again and drag Sienna out, and back into the clearing of Joshua trees. Almost immediately afterward, the other girl’s hand emerged from the other side, gripping a .357 Magnum and fired in their general direction as the hole closed back up around her wrist.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

“We’ve gotta go!” shouted Liam, practically carrying Sienna through the Joshua trees and back to the van.

The rest of the headlong drive past sunset was a blur, with Sienna practically curling into herself, frantically retracing each and every instance of Liam’s presence in her life, looking for dangers in every date, every kiss, every beer, every joint, every dinner, every after-school project, every class assignment, every cafeteria lunch, even back to their childhood friendship, with Liam hugging her at her father’s funeral a decade ago before he left for boarding school… and she couldn’t stop remembering those strange and nigh-incomprehensible words from her curious double beyond the weird hole in the air: ‘If Liam doesn’t kill you, he’ll be the death of you…’ That can’t be true, she thought, it just can’t. How does that even make sense — Liam is a good person… isn’t he?

“Hey,” Liam whispered, as they sat in the van together at a drive-in diner. He’d instinctively put his hand on her knee, gazing into her face with watery-blue, almond-shaped eyes. “You need anything?”

Sienna looked up at the glowing menu. “What time is it?”

Liam checked his watch. “Seven-thirty-five.”

“Where are we?”

“North of Corona,” he said.

“How far is that from home?”

“Why, your grandpa has a curfew, or something?”

Sienna took a deep breath and sighed. “Ten o’clock.” She almost added, “Assuming he isn’t passed out drunk,” but thought better of it.

“Pretty sure we’ll make it back to Santa Clarita in time,” Liam said.

Sienna was sorely tempted to say that she met her other self on the other side of the hole in her secret spot, and that the other self said time travel was a “real thing” (somehow)… and that the other self had accused Liam of being responsible for killing Sienna at some point in the future (also somehow)… But since the other self also immediately began shooting at them shortly after, that other self was either lying, insane, or the product of a hallucination (again, also somehow)… Maybe the air over there was laced with something that fucks with your mind? she wondered. So instead of giving voice to any of that crazy-sounding nonsense, Sienna asked with looming uncertainty, “What are we… doing here?”

“Well, I… I thought after… you know, all that crazy shit, maybe some food might be good… Anything you want, and it’s yours. Apparently, they still have waitresses on roller-skates here, which, you know, might be… fun… entertainment… on the side, if you’ll excuse the pun?”

Sienna giggled in spite of her best efforts. She wasn’t sure exactly when she fell in love with Liam, but she knew that she was, and figured that was enough. “Maybe… a chocolate shake?”

“Just a shake? Not a burger and fries?”

Sienna shook her head demurely.

“Okay,” Liam said with a half-smile. “I’ll get some extra fries, just in case you change your mind and want me to share.”

He tried to gently squeeze Sienna’s knee, only for her to squeal, “Ow!”

“Oh shit…”

Sienna pulled her knee up and saw a deep, dime-sized impression, as if some pointed rod nearly pierced her skin. “What the hell…?”

“Goddamn it,” Liam muttered, pulling his hand away.

“What happened?” she asked. “What was that?”

Liam wanted to say it was nothing, but he knew damn well that it wasn’t.

Before he could formulate an excuse, however, Sienna grabbed his hand and saw a little white cone-shaped thing sticking out of Liam’s lower palm, with his pink skin bubbling angry-red around it. “Holy shit, you got hurt, too!”

“Yeah, I definitely wasn’t expecting that,” he said, sheepishly.

“Are you in pain?”

“No, no, I’m fine, pretty sure,” he insisted, gently trying to pull his hand back.

Sienna gripped it tighter, holding it up to the light of the drive-in diner’s neon sign. “Oh my god, that looks deep…”

“Um, yeah, sorry about your knee,” he added, “I’ll try to deal with this later…”

“Liam, it looks dangerous,” Sienna said, “you should see a doctor!”

“I will!” he said, yanking his hand away and holding it against his chest. “I promise, I will, just, please… I know it’s ugly and gross to look at, but I swear I’m okay right now and I’ll keep my hands to myself just in case, so can we please just not make a big deal about this? Please?”

Sienna was conflicted. She wanted Liam to get medical attention, but knew he didn’t like being coddled. It was bad enough that his friendly, yet occasionally overbearing mother left for Acapulco the month before, and consequently left the house and her portion of the family trust to him, which had to feel like the worst kind of goodbye… Sienna also knew that kind of goodbye from her own mother leaving her with her grandfather a decade ago, along with about $100,000 to be paid to her on her 18th birthday, which, at six years old, had hurt Sienna more than any wound she could dream of. What good was money if your own mother wasn’t going to be present to seek advice about how to best make use of it? Steeped in sympathy, she figured Liam needed support more than immediate aid, and supporting him meant letting him try to become more of himself, not less. If he insisted that he was okay, then the wound must have looked worse than it felt, and pressing him would feel more like a judgment on her part. Not wanting to judge the love of her life for something he didn’t do on purpose, Sienna grudgingly said, “Okay… just… be careful?”

“I will,” Liam reiterated gingerly, pulling his sleeve over his hand and then rolling down his driver’s side window to greet their server.

When it first opened to the public in 1953 on the northeastern outskirts of the growing California city, the Illinois-based Hart Corporation’s eponymous Hart of Skokie Motel was billed as “The Coziest Entry to Santa Clarita — with Budget Beds and Plenty of Parking,” hoping to attract all kinds of sight-seeing visitors from across the United States. The building’s green-and-purple-tiled design was reminiscent of the uniquely sturdy, hard-petaled flowers that were planted around it — stately goblets of ancient green leaves, with eye-catching puffs of violet on top. In its heyday, it was a marvel of architectural ingenuity, but these days it was considered a lonely, decrepit eye-sore.

In 1968, the original owners sold it off to the Wake Hospitality Company that allowed it to fall into disrepair. The dingy green outer-wall tiles were missing in growing patches, the purple roof tiles leaked on the top floor, and upper management kept promising repairs that never materialized, so the staff simply gave up on asking. Seeing as how rare it was that anybody stayed there on purpose anymore, the expansive parking lot was almost always empty, as was the bone-dry, out-of-service pool in back. Worst of all, enough of the neon letters facing the freeway had burnt out that hardly anybody ever realized it was a motel until stumbling upon it by accident; all five of its current occupants (out of the 250 rooms available) either had broken down cars and were waiting for help, or else had nowhere better to stay on their way to someplace nicer.

Bruce Castaneda was on his fifth year as front desk clerk and, seeing as he wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry, spent the better part of the day reading the local paper, while sneaking sips of whisky from his pocket flask. The main story, still, was about the outpouring of grief in the aftermath of a mass-shooting at a local house-party the week before. Just as he switched to the Nation section and tried to read about a mysterious bombing at a construction site in New York City, a quietly menacing convoy of black vans pulled into the parking lot out front.

“What the hell?” Bruce muttered, leaving the front desk to get a closer look out of the empty lobby’s wide window. He counted about 10 figures in near-black uniforms, who began unloading strange crates of equipment, and three men in gray three-piece suits and aviator sunglasses shielding their eyes. What are they? Bruce wondered. Mafia? G-men? What the fuck would they want in this part of town? Hardly anything ever happens out here…

The tallest and thinnest of the men in gray ran his black-gloved fingers through his close-cropped red hair, then said something to his partners, before splitting off from the group and striding to the motel’s lobby door.

Inconvenience of inconveniences, this turn of events meant that, instead of continuing to educate himself on the news of the day and casually spying on unexpected visitors, Bruce was now unfortunately expected to actually do his job today. “Aw, fuck,” he groaned, pulling himself away from the window, hurrying back to his post behind the clerk’s desk and taking a sip of water from his paper cup, hoping no one would smell the whisky on his breath. Worst case, he figured he could theoretically try to blame it on his new mouthwash. Never buying that crap again, he could say. Makes people smell like boozehounds — there ought to be a law…

The man in gray pushed the swinging door open with hardly any effort, then stopped short as he spotted Bruce adjusting his bow-tie. He tilted his head, and lowered his shades to reveal piercing green eyes. “Bruce?” he asked, before removing the sunglasses completely. “Castaneda? That you, buddy?”

Unsettled and wary, Bruce responded, “Have… we… met before?”

“Southside High? Class of ’62? Speech & Debate club?” The man in gray approached the clerk’s desk and grinned sharpened pearls, adding conspiratorially, “Theatre club?”

It was true that Bruce had graduated from Southside High School in 1962, and that he was also in both of those clubs, which his recently-departed father long held were both equally a “waste of time.” But despite those seemingly-obvious clues, no name came to Bruce for this former classmate, and he felt utterly stupid. How could this strange man know so much about him, and yet he knew so little about this mysterious visitor after all these years? Had sixteen years of minimum wage work, social isolation and functional alcoholism burnt out his nervous system? Not wanting to appear as stupid as he felt in that moment, he pointed with something like recognition, muttering, “Speech… Debate… Theatre…”

“And,” said the stranger, removing his black gloves and stretching his long, bony fingers, “let us never forget the, uh, ‘incident’… in Santa Monica… with the bottle rockets… and Charity Mitchell’s pink-lace panties?”

A lightning storm crackled in Bruce’s brain, revealing the final piece of information he needed. There was only one person Bruce had ever crafted bottle rockets with — and shortly thereafter driven to Santa Monica with — in a mad, heart-broken quest to launch his ex-girlfriend’s stolen underwear into space… only to wind up accidentally hitting a family’s fishing boat out in the Pacific Ocean. “Ernie Burns?”

“The one and only,” said Ernie, grinning ear-to-ear and offering his hand to shake.

“Holy crap, where’ve you been, man?” Bruce took his old friend’s hand, only to immediately cringe at the clammy, cold sensation of Ernie’s palm and fingers… but couldn’t bring himself to say so. In fact, his face suddenly felt so numb, he wasn’t even sure if he could say anything more at all.

Ernie spoke with a curiously intense charm, as he excitedly answered, “All over, really. I’ve seen things in parts of the world that you can’t even begin to imagine, Bruce. Wild stuff. You see my compatriots out there? With the vans and crates?”

Bruce’s mouth seemed to loll open without his intention as he tried to repeat the word, “compatriots,” and his eyes fell on the group outside in the parking lot.

Ernie leaned in even closer and stage-whispered with an impish smirk, “We’re in a band.”

In that moment, Bruce definitely recalled Ernie being a decent singer in their Theatre club musical productions, as well as being fashionable and charming enough to get on a first-name basis with almost every girl in school… all except Charity Mitchell, of course, who swore off boys and musicals after discovering what Bruce and Ernie did with her stolen underwear that fateful summer. Of course, Ernie would join a traveling band, he thought, that’s the most sensible thing he could have done, sharing his voice with the world… He also felt a low-grade, almost-pleasant buzzing behind his eye-sockets as he attempted to ask, “What… are you… called?”

Ernie gently pulled Bruce across the front desk, close enough to whisper directly into his ear: “The Squiggly Lines…”

The eerie reverberation seemed to massage itself — along with the words and their implied meaning — into Bruce’s ear canal and cerebral cortex. In his mind’s eye, he could picture the dark-uniformed men — the roadies — setting up bass and guitar stands, a drum kit, loudspeakers, microphones and lights upon enormous stages… Ernie and his silver-suited fellows using said equipment to perform enrapturing songs in front of sold-out, standing-room-only venues — maybe even stadiums! Legions of girls in their nightly audiences screaming in ecstasy, throwing their bras and panties, following them back to their hotel rooms like lost puppies… Back in the moment, Bruce’s actual eyes on his old friend’s shoulder-pad, and he could practically see the glittering iridescent sequins hidden between Ernie’s black pinstripes… “So… You guys… are a… pretty big deal, huh?”

Ernie’s response was mouth-wateringly tantalizing in its potential: “Trust me, buddy, when we’re done with this next bunch of gigs… we’re gonna be the biggest fucking deal the world’s ever seen…”

Ernie didn’t just put stars in Bruce’s eyes — he filled them with whirling cosmoses of possibility! “Wow… actual rock stars… actually staying here… in MY motel…” Bruce wanted to get on his knees and beg Ernie to take him on the road with the band, promising to do his damnedest to contort his body into one of the crates, if only they’d let him into their delectable-looking orbit… Instead, his mouth decided on its own to ask, “How many rooms will you need?” (Bruce was going to ask anyway, since it was his job to ask, but his mouth did that part first, which was something of a surprise.)

Ernie grinned and answered, “Three.”

“Burns!” barked one of the other gray-suited bandmates from the open lobby door. “Where’s the stuff going?” Bruce figured that stockier one, with dark, close-cropped hair, was likely their surly drummer.

“Working on it, Stone,” sighed Ernie with a dismissive hand-wave. Turning his focus back to Bruce, whose hand he still clasped, Ernie inquired with something approaching tenderness, “Which rooms, Bruce?”

Using his sense memory, Bruce reached behind with his free hand and grabbed three room keys off the wall. “181, 182 and 183,” he said, reading off the tags and passing them across the front desk. “Just cleaned… this morning… Outside… hang a right… up the stairs… No charge, pal.”

“Such a stand-up guy…” In a swift motion, Ernie picked up one of the keys and tossed it to the man in gray behind him. “Okay, Bruce, here’s what happens next… We’re going to need a lot of privacy, in order to practice and prepare for our gigs, right? You will not let anyone into those rooms, or go into them yourself, until I personally come back to the lobby right here and bid you good-bye… If you happen to see us anywhere outside of this lobby, you will steer clear of us, mind your own business, and not ask us any questions… Lastly, and this is crucial, if anyone ever happens to ask you if you’ve seen any men in gray suits around here, or anywhere at all, you will always answer in the negative — ‘No, sir,’ ‘No, ma’am,’ ‘No,’ ‘Never in my life.’ Am I perfectly understood?”

Ernie was clearly magical, infinitely charming, and one of Bruce’s most treasured friends on Earth, with the most cultural power it was possible for a single human to possess. What else could Bruce do, except nod and say, “Yes”?

Ernie jocularly patted Bruce’s shoulder with his free hand, picked up the remaining keys, and then released their clasped hands. “You’re the best, Bruce! We owe you one.”

“Great seeing you again, Ernie,” Bruce said, grinning at the whirling cosmoses of possibility behind his irises. “Rock on.”

“Will do,” Ernie replied, putting his aviator shades back on and turning on his heels.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Outside, Agent Burns passed Agent Stone, who was carrying a duffle bag out of one of the vans. “Can’t believe that shit actually flew,” Stone quipped, holding the motel room key he’d caught earlier.

“Of course it would,” answered Burns. “I knew that guy.”

“No shit?”

“From high school, yeah.”

“I’d ask about the odds,” said Stone as they parted ways, “but honestly, nothing in this nowhere-ville surprises me much.”

Burns felt offended, but figured Stone was new in town, and would learn the error of his ways eventually. The third gray-suit, Agent Morris, directed the dark-uniformed field officers to drive the vans behind the motel to hide them better. As Burns approached, Morris pushed up his silver-mirrored sunglasses and asked, “Did it work?”

Burns handed him the two other keys with the air of a Swiss valet. “Like a charm. No charge, and no questions asked, either. Two for the mooks and the equipment… and one for you, Stone and me.”

“You… couldn’t have gotten one or two more?” Morris asked flatly.

Burns’ laugh was sharp and almost unfriendly. “Don’t push your luck, pretty boy. I may have known the guy at the desk, but I spent a LOT to get that much for us, so consider me all tapped out… at least until I get my next fix.”

Morris brushed his dirty-blonde hair behind his ear, and sighed. “Does Stone know that we’re apparently rooming together, now?”

“Oh, not to worry,” said Burns, pulling out a silver box of cigarettes and a pack of matches, “he will… when you tell him… I think he’s up in 181, unpacking his duffle…”

Morris pinched the bridge of his nose under his sunglasses. “Goddamn it…”

“You worry too much.” Burns lit the cigarette and tossed the match into a gravel patch. “Walk with me, will you?”

“I still don’t smoke.”

“I didn’t ask you to smoke,” Burns admonished, “I asked you to walk with me. Will you?”

Morris shrugged. “I suppose it’s been a while…”

The two strolled around the motel as Burns enjoyed his first cigarette of the afternoon. Morris couldn’t help noticing the otherworldly plants around the perimeter. They looked truly alien — like something from a fantastic novel set on one of the moons of Jupiter. They were covered in gnarled scales up and around their thick stalks, gathering into something resembling a thorny goblet at the top, with a shock of neon-violet spikes shooting up from out of the scaly goblet’s center.

“Vexed, are we?” asked Burns through a mouthful of smoke. “Silent contemplation not doing it for you?”

Morris absently pointed at the growths. “What the hell… are those?”

Burns raised a quizzical eyebrow. “Flowers… I believe?”

“Maybe,” Morris said, “but… what sort?”

“Are you seriously asking me… what kind of flowers those are? Do I look like a plant biologist to you?” As if catching something else unspoken, hanging so low it was practically waiting to be toyed with, Burns asked with a knowing grin, “Creepy as hell, though, aren’t they?”

“Good lord,” Morris muttered, staring at the plants, “they’re like something out of Frank Herbert, or maybe Edgar Rice Burroughs…”

“I can see why you might think that,” Burns replied, taking on a professorial air as he puffed on his cigarette. “They certainly look like they could be Martian Moonflowers. Believe it or not, Morris, these plants are actually earthbound, and, if I’m not mistaken, quite… primordial.”

Morris blinked. “What, more like… something out of ‘The Flintstones’?”

“Oh, they’ve got to be much older than that, my friend, I’m sure. That plant has definitely been common in human civilization since at least the BCs… although, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out, once again, that I’m not actually a plant biologist.”

Morris gazed at the neon-violet spikes at the top. “Hard to believe something so harsh… and yet so surprisingly bright… can exist in nature.”

“Anyone ever tell you that you’ve got the soul of a poet, Morris?” asked Burns. “Just me?” With no reply, he snorted. “Figures. I too have a rather nasty habit of noticing things that I probably shouldn’t…” He took a long drag on his cigarette and exhaled behind him. “Funny thing is… before those flowers bloom so brightly — and hell, before they even get to be so tall and scaly and imposingly creepy-looking… that plant’s bulbs are often harvested early, and steamed to get some particularly succulent and nutty flavors out of them.”

Morris recoiled in disgust. “You can… eat those?”

“Oh yes, they can be delicious when they’re still young… I myself find them excellent with mayonnaise, actually.”

“But… what are they?”

Burns snickered, and leaned in to share the great secret: “Artichokes.”

Morris was so stunned that he could hardly believe his ears. “No joke?”

“None. That, my friend, is exactly what happens to artichokes that ever get to grow up.”

“What… the fuck…?”

“I know, hard to believe,” Burns quipped with a barely concealed giggle. “Not so succulent when they’re older, are they? All fibrous and prickly…”

“And those… purple spikes…?”

“Petals,” answered Burns, stubbing his cigarette out in a nearby ash-can. “Very thin rows of pointed petals. They’re stored in the squishy center of the younger ones, below the succulent scales. Once the color is steamed out of them, they’re rather easily picked out of the hearts.”

Morris recalled the limp, white threads he used to pick out of his mother’s steamed artichokes, and sighed. “Why do I… feel like a murderer?”

Burns snickered again and patted Morris on his gray-suited shoulder-pad. “Oh, come on, man, I mean… who isn’t? In their hearts, I mean? Get it? ‘Hearts’? Artichokes?” Despite his best efforts, he let out a sharp cackle at his own turn of phrase.

“You know what’s really funny?” asked Morris, flatly. “I don’t remember you ever being in spirits this good after smoking a single cigarette.”

“Oh, don’t worry, I had several this morning, and I guarantee you I’ll be having more of them, especially later this evening. We can’t all be hardy, fibrous plants with shamelessly bright colors in temperate, Mediterranean climates. Oh, and before I forget, Morris?” They caught eyes with each other, and Burns added with an impish wink, “Welcome to the edge of the world. Try not to fall off.”

(NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.)

Sienna Holofernes was grateful to have Tiffany drive her to a gas station and convenience store just outside of Quartz Hill that Saturday. The men had doubts about letting them go, but Quartz Hill was practically out in the middle of nowhere, and Kingfisher Ranch needed more charcoal, hot dogs, beer, soap, and feminine pads, which Tiffany wound up shopping for. Sienna, on the other hand, bought a pack of chewing gum in order to justify asking to use the restroom, only to slip away long enough to find the payphone booth and call her classmate, Lynette, back in Santa Clarita. Sienna couldn’t quite explain why, but she was getting that weird vibration in her skull and chest once more, which she took to mean something was wrong with the universe again.

After a week away from Santa Clarita and two weeks away from her friends, Lynette’s concerned voice on the other end of the line felt like a gust of fresh air: “Holy smokes, Sienna, where are you? What happened?”

“It’s… it’s a long story. I was in the hospital about a week ago, but I think I’m doing better now. Did I miss anything?”

“Oh boy, oh boy, where do I even start?” Lynette muttered before almost immediately running her mouth like a faucet: “Annecy’s in a wheelchair for a month, and her parents are freaking out — Ned and Neil are still in the hospital, and their parents are freaking out — the school and City Hall lowered their flags to half-staff, on account of the attempted murder and suicides — and Mr. Schreck said your grandfather pulled you out of school. What is going on? Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Sienna tried to say over the increasing vibrations, “fine, everything’s fine — well, not everything, obviously… Do you, um… do you remember what happened at Annecy’s house?”

“Hang on.” After a few tense moments, Lynette answered, “Sorry, Mom and Dad don’t want me talking about it too much — I just wanted to make sure they left… Yeah, I remember Chas and Frank crashing the party, getting wasted on booze and coke, dumping you in the pool, and then whipping out handguns and shooting at us. I mean, how else do you think the flags are at half-staff, Annecy’s wheelchair-bound and the twins are still in the hospital?”

“Holy crap, were you hit?”

“No, but I got practically trampled trying to get the hell out of there,” Lynette said, trying to catch her breath. “And the worst part was, the cops kept making me tell them what happened over and over and over, and wouldn’t even let me see any of the paramedics about my headache and bruises.”

“Did you see what happened to Chas and Frank?”

“Yuck, no… but Mom and Dad told me the official report says they shot themselves… like total, garbage-eating loser-bastards…”

“Okay, Lynette, I know this is hard, and I don’t mean to be pushy, but… okay, last question — what happened to Liam?”

The pause felt insurmountable, until Lynette finally answered, “I don’t know. Why?”

“There’s just… so much that I just don’t remember about that night,” Sienna said between breaths, “and I’m… really, really worried that something might have… happened to him… at the party.”

“But…” Lynette seemed to struggle before adding, “Liam wasn’t at the party… was he?”

Sienna’s heart put pedal to the metal, because something was definitely wrong with the universe. “Yeah, he was. We came together. He drove me there.”

“But… I’m pretty sure the… I thought you walked there by yourself? Alone?”

“What? No, I didn’t! Who told you that?”

“The… cops, maybe?”

“Why would the cops tell you I walked to Annecy’s house by myself?”

“I mean, the cops flashed their badges all over the place and they were taking everyone’s statements… Didn’t you talk to them?”

“No, Lynette, I didn’t talk to anyone, because I was in the ambulance… on the way to the hospital.” Given the flashes of tidal memory, Sienna had doubts about that particular statement’s veracity, but the point wasn’t to re-live the whole event all over again, only to sort out a particularly important discrepancy — namely, what happened to Liam.

Lynette sounded like she too was spiraling in her own grasp of that night’s events: “I… guess I just… thought they were talking to all of us separately, just to make sure we all told the same story? Like, without talking to each other first? Pretty sure cops do that kind of thing, don’t they?”

Sienna’s gorge rose. “Lynette… were these cops… wearing gray suits?”

“See? You remember, so you must have talked to them, didn’t you?”

The goddamned Men in Gray… Sienna felt faint at the horrible spectre. They got to Lynette, she thought, sweat beading on her forehead. Holy shit, they got to her, too… They must have!

She felt a taloned, ring-laden hand on her shoulder. Tiffany turned her around, swiped the telephone from her hand and slammed it back on the receiver. “Time to go.”

“Tiffany, I’m sorry, I — !”

“ — Shit, get down!”

The two women crouched below the window, just as Sienna glimpsed a sheriff having an intense-looking conversation with the gas station clerk. “Think they’re trying to get us?” Sienna whispered.

“Not sure,” Tiffany whispered back, “but we need to get back to the truck. Now.”

Together, they crept around the side of the gas station, Tiffany threading the car keys between her fingers and peeking in another window until they both saw the sheriff heading into the restroom. With an exchange of nods, they hurried to the truck, hopped inside and sped off north. Sienna was tempted to ask if they were going to a different gas station, but thought better of it.

“And… I forgot to get gas,” Tiffany muttered, scratching behind her ear. “Charcoal, hot dogs, and everything else… except gas. Goddamn it. Looks like we’ll have to stop in Lancaster before we turn around.”

“Tiffany, I’m really, really sorry… I didn’t mean to screw it up.”

“Screw what up?”

“The trip… I know… I know my grandfather thought it was too dangerous, but…”

“Why do you think you screwed it up?”

“I just… I really needed to talk to somebody about something really important.”

“Who’d you talk to?”

“One of my classmates… There was some kind of shoot-out toward the end of the party, some other kids hurt badly, two dead… And I didn’t know that I got pulled out of school.”

Tiffany was capable of great kindness on most occasions, but here she faltered. “That’s terrible what happened to your friends, just terrible… But, as for the school thing, that’s just temporary. I’m sure the sergeant only did it to keep you safe.”

“From the Men in Gray?”

Tiffany’s smooth jawline stiffened. “As it happens, yes.”

Sienna felt tears falling down her cheeks. “Oh my god, why can’t they just leave us the hell alone?! You, me, Amos… my grandfather… Lynette…”

“Your classmate?”

“I feel like the world is trying to make me crazy,” Sienna muttered, wiping her nose. “How can they make my friends forget ever seeing my boyfriend?”

“Ever, like at all? Or just in that one event?”

“At the party… He was there, Tiffany, I know he was… at least until he wasn’t.”

They sat in silence for what felt like an eternity, at least until Tiffany finally broke it: “Sienna, there’s something I didn’t tell you the last time I went into town, and I don’t know if it’s going to help or not…” She pursed her lips and continued, “I know a guy in the Santa Clarita Police Department… and he told me the official story about the party at your friend’s house… and the fact that guns were involved… but, according to my connection, only two boys were confirmed to have died, from the Donder and Fishman families.”

“Chas and Frank?” Sienna tried to square her conflicting emotions — the gravity of knowing that two of her most-hated enemies on Earth were dead, and the theoretical pleasure of not hearing one particular name on that short list of the deceased. “You… think Liam survived?”

“Anything is possible,” Tiffany said solemnly, “but if so, he’s either in hiding… or else he’s been taken.”

“Kidnapped?”

“Yeah.”

“Who’d kidnap him?”

“Who do you think?”

“The Men in Gray… Why, though? What did he ever do to them?”

Tiffany sucked her teeth. “Nothing… yet. But, if he’s as special as you told me he is, I heard they have it out for people like him, and he’s probably not the first to go missing like this…”

(NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.)

Sienna Holofernes sat on the top porch step that Sunday morning with a mug of black tea, watching lizards scurrying and skittering across the gravel, wondering if she were still somehow dreaming. Everything felt wrong. Liam wasn’t supposed to be dead. She wasn’t suppose to be there. The air wasn’t supposed to feel this dry and barren at this time of the year. She wasn’t supposed to be this confused and alarmed about the world she once thought she understood. Outside of Kingfisher Ranch, life might still be going on as usual, perhaps more comfortably and peacefully, but she was stuck there, missing it all, because her grandfather insisted it was no longer safe to be out in the world…

And, if the worst had happened and Liam actually was dead, how could she possibly argue otherwise?

As she watched one green lizard sunning itself with its eyes closed, her grandfather’s former squad-mate, Amos Kingfisher, came out and lit a cigarette. “Need a light?” he asked behind her.

Sienna turned to him over her shoulder, sighed, and answered, “No thank you, Mr. Kingfisher.”

As he moved to sit down on the far side of the porch step, down-wind from her, he quipped, “I’ll have you know that ‘Mr. Kingfisher’ was my father.”

“Sorry… um, what was your rank again, sir?”

He chuckled. “Hell with that title horse-pucky. Call me Amos. Everybody else who truly respects me does.”

Sienna almost said his first name, but stopped herself, and glanced back at the green lizard with its eyes closed. Am I dreaming, she wondered, or are you???

As if trying to make small-talk, Amos began to say through mouthfuls of smoke, “Your, uh… your granddad told me all about your father... Great man. Good soldier. Made your family proud... If he was anything like the men I served with, I have no doubt that he died a noble death...” As if realizing that civilians would take such a statement exactly the WRONG way, he slammed on the brakes and attempted to backtrack toward a reasonable off-ramp: “I know, uh, I know that most people, you know, in the world… well, they generally don’t like to think about death — much less talk about it, especially on account of it making them sad and scared — but the way I figure, it’s all… it’s like ripping off a bandage... The sooner we stop lying to ourselves and each other about death and what comes next, especially for those of us still here… well, frankly, I think we’ll all be a lot better off…”

During that last pause, Sienna heard cryptic words whispered in her ear — not dead but dreaming, not dead but dreaming — and wondered if the lizard was an incarnation of some divine entity or had somehow developed ESP. She took a deep breath and forced her mouth to say, “Is it lying… to think about other things? You know… instead?”

As if realizing how much of a bull-in-a-china-shop he’d become, Amos puffed on his cigarette, mustering the resolve he needed to be less like the soldier he swore to himself he’d never be again, and asked in a slightly less officious tone, “Penny for your thoughts?”

Not dead but dreaming… Not dead but dreaming… Everything still felt wrong, but Sienna had no words to explain, especially not to someone she had just met the day before. “Do you… see… that?” she asked, pointing.

“The lizard? Yeah, I see him.”

“Good, good…” She thought about many ways to try to learn more about the slumbering creature — would it be cruel to try to toss a pebble in his general direction and risk accidentally hitting him? Or would nature take its own mysterious course, and the sky, perhaps, suddenly and miraculously cloud over and dump enough rain to either scare him awake, or else wash him out into the dried-up creek bed? Would knowing the correct answer help alleviate her conscience? “Is… is he… do you think he’s… asleep?”

Amos took a bit longer to respond than she would have preferred, leaning over his hairy knees to get a better look, before leaning back and taking another drag on his cigarette. “Fifty-fifty,” he said quietly. “Depends on if he’s breathing. If so, then yes, most likely he’s asleep.”

The answer was woefully insufficient. In that moment, Sienna felt something like a bandage coming off of her face, but she couldn’t see the latter in her free hand or her lap. She only knew she felt the sting, followed by dry, clean air… the wrong thing still felt wrong, but oddly less so. “Did… did Sgt. Holofernes — ?”

“ — Your granddad?” Amos clarified with residual bitterness. “Can’t believe he still makes you call him that, especially after everything the Army did to us…”

Sienna brought the mug of black tea to her mouth and savored its suddenly very ashen taste for what felt like eternity, figuring that, like charcoal, it might somehow clean out her insides. After swallowing, she asked, “Did he… did he happen to… did he tell you about my mother?”

Amos sighed a smoke ring, as if he also felt existence suddenly take on new, unexpected significance. After the previous evening of late-night whiskeys down in the shelter, among other items of discussion and commiseration,(former Sgt.) Kennedy Holofernes vented an awful lot of half-intelligible invective about an unnamed woman he’d repeatedly called “that treacherous, disloyal hussy”… but it didn’t take a rocket scientist to deduce that the so-called “hussy” in question must have been Sienna’s absent mother. “Not in as many words,” he answered, trying to walk a tightrope between truth and loyalty. “I, uh… I just know she’s, uh… not in the picture.”

Sienna took one last swig of tea and put the mug down on the porch step beside her. She saw no reason to sugar-coat anything anymore, so she told him bluntly, “That’s because she left.”

“Left?”

Sienna nodded, uneasily. “After Dad died, she packed up two suitcases, bought a bus ticket… and left us.”

“How long ago?” Amos asked.

“Ten years,” she said. Dimly, she remembered searching the house for her mother the next morning, only for her grandfather to sit her down at the kitchen table and tell her the awful news: She’s gone, kid, it’s just the two of us now… It was news that she would later tearfully relate to Liam, who hugged her even more desperately than he did at her father’s funeral some time before... “I was just starting first grade,” was all she could bring herself to say.

“Damn shame,” Amos said. “Where’d she run off to?”

“Acapulco.”

Amos spat a ball of mucus onto the gravel, but it was too far away from the lizard to roust it from slumber. He’d heard that Acapulco was in the process of becoming “the Las Vegas of Mexico,” with everything from casinos to nightclubs and “gentlemen’s clubs” to out-and-out brothels. After the venting and ranting he’d gotten from that unnamed woman’s archnemesis, the dirtiest part of Amos couldn’t help picturing Sienna’s mother, drunk and topless, surrounded by legions of other drunken perverts with fistfuls of cash and no pants, shamelessly engaging in the World’s Largest Circlejerk. But, instead of sharing any of that unpleasant vitriol with his former squad-mate’s seemingly-innocent granddaughter, Amos played dumb and inquired, “What’s in Acapulco?”

Sienna shrugged and replied, “Some kind of group. Ever heard of the ‘Missioners’?”

“You mean ‘missionaries’?”

Sienna shook her head. “Not exactly, you see, Sgt — I mean…” She rolled her eyes and corrected herself: “My grandfather says they’re called ‘Missioners.’ He swears up and down they’re called ‘Missioners.’ Don’t ask me why — he rants about them sometimes, especially when he’s had a few too many, or else doesn’t think I can hear him in the kitchen downstairs late at night. I don’t know if they’re all just nuts, or else some… weird business-thing?”

“Business-thing?”

“Something about money and travel. He thinks they’re a…” She wanted to use his exact word — cult — but thought then of the nightmare ghoul known as Charles Manson and the horrible things she’d heard he did to those women on Spahn Ranch, and stopped herself, because that could not possibly be her mother’s fate — it just couldn’t. Instead, she merely said, “He thinks they’re up to something…”

“Bad?”

“Like… Really, really bad.”

“How bad?”

“Unforgivable, he says… All I know for sure is that, when they go to Acapulco, they just… disappear. Like… that’s where Liam’s mother went back in May — he said she told him she was going there ‘for business,’ whatever that means — and she hasn’t come back since… I know she works, but she never once talked about what she does, like ever. So I’m worried she might be… in that… weird business-thing… with my mom, maybe...”

“Holy shit…” Amos’ mind raced with worst-case scenarios. Business…Money… Travel… Absconding with peoples’ mothers… Was it something to do with the men in gray? drug smuggling cartels? human trafficking for unsanctioned experimentation and/or sexual slavery? witchcraft? demon-worship?! alien invasion cover-ups?! He had no evidence whatsoever that the men in gray were affiliated with any government, corporation or nation on Earth… but they were more than willing to visit various Firebases in Vietnam and carry out so-called “caffeine pill” tests on U.S. soldiers with little to no education or means. They came bearing forged badges, suspicious parcels of unmarked fifty-dollar-bills, tins of chocolate, and reams of paperwork that smacked of lies, bullshit and “non-disclosure” sections — which, in Amos’ mind, put them cheek-to-cheek with the fucking antichrist. However, instead of scaring the poor girl with more of his conspiracy theories, he aped civilian and asked, “Wait… who’s Liam, again?”

Sienna blushed and felt tears squeeze out from under her aching eyeballs. Her memory cycled back again, dropping her in the pool at Annecy Woodland’s house, visualizing the many happy memories leading up to it… having sex with Liam for the first time that summer while he let her wear his lucky “Lock-It” necklace… letting him guide her on her first ‘shroom trip out in the Mojave… his running lines with her to practice for Theater class… reuniting with him in Ninth Grade English after he returned from boarding school… his befriending her in kindergarten and lovingly hugging her after she lost both of her parents within two weeks of each other… then snapping her back again to the delirium-saturated pool and the heart-heavy aftermath of the party’s resultant carnage… She wondered how much longer she’d be able to feel Liam’s heartbeat against her own, even if as some visceral sense memory. “I’m sorry, could you say that again?” she asked.

“I said, ‘Who’s Liam?’”

“Oh.” Unable to decide if she should use “is” or “was,” she replied, sadly, “My boyfriend.”

“Oh,” Amos replied, grinning. “I take it he’s the one your granddad calls ‘the little shitball’?”

Sienna nodded but stopped, realizing then what it was that felt wrong — Liam wasn’t supposed to be dead. In every terrifying instance that she’d gone over the pool party incident in her mind’s eye, she’d clearly seen him get shot from behind… so why did he not feel dead? Why did she still feel his breath behind her ears? His arms around her waist? His phantom necklace around her neck? Were Sienna’s thoughts even her own, anymore? Not dead but dreaming, not dead but dreaming… Was that the lizard’s thoughts… or Liam’s? Was he, in fact, not dead but dreaming? Did they even find his body?!

Thinking he’d made another selfish bullock of himself, Amos exhaled smoke and stubbed out the remainder of the cigarette. “Ken’s got his own opinions, of course, but the way I see it, opinions are like assholes — everyone has at least one. So, where’s the boy at? Back in town?”

To her alarm, Sienna could now hear a second heartbeat in her ears — and putting a finger to her neck, she felt her own pulse, which did not match. It was as if the heartbeat in her ears was somehow layered over her own. She started to say, “They… shot him, but…”

“They shot him?” Amos asked incredulously. “Dead?!”

Not dead but dreaming, not dead but dreaming, not dead but dreaming… “Do you hear that?” she asked, her voice quaking.

“Hear what? What do you hear?”

Sienna closed her eyes, felt the over-pulse in her skull, right behind her eye-sockets, and imagined the little green lizard suddenly opening his eyes and staring at her with Liam’s blue pools. NOT DEAD BUT DREAMING… “Shit,” she muttered, covering her eyes with her palms, “not again…”

“What, again?” asked Amos, his voice now metallic and cavernous. “What’s the matter?”

“I-I-I…” Sienna had to fight her own jaw to explain, “If I… open my eyes… I can’t… I just can’t… or else I’m going to see shit that’s… not there…”

“Why don’t — ?”

Sienna threw out her right hand and slapped Amos’ arm away. “Don’t!” she begged. “Please, please don’t touch me! I can’t look! I can’t get up! Get my grandfather, please!”

“Ken! Get out here, man, Sienna’s having a fit! She needs you!”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“It’s okay, honey,” Tiffany’s voice said, cutting through the noise as a cool, moist towel brushed across Sienna’s forehead. “You’re going to be okay, I promise.”

Sienna could practically hear her grandfather spitting as he growled, “That damned dirty little shitball did this to her! Poisoned my angel! Keeps messing with her head, even two fucking weeks later!”

Something shattered in the next room. “Goddamn it, Ken,” Amos yelled, “I got that thing in Boston! It was sentimental!”

Sienna knew she needed to atone again, but wished she didn’t have to. “Sir, I’m telling you I never dropped acid that weekend, sir!”

“Ken, ease up on her,” Amos said, “the boy might be dead, for fuck’s sake!”

“He’d better be fucking dead, or I’m going to fucking make him wish he was dead!”

BAM!

Sienna hadn’t heard an awful sound like that since the last time her grandfather argued with her mother about her father’s funeral arrangements, and then punched a hole straight through the guestroom wall…

Amos drew in a deep breath and shouted, “Sit the fuck down and button it, sergeant!” After a tense silence, Sienna heard her grandfather seat himself and sigh with something like helplessness. “Now I didn’t want to have to pull rank on you,” Amos said sternly. “But just now, you lost your shit, made a goddamn fool of yourself, nearly punched a hole in my wall, and you broke my favorite beer stein, so you kind of forced my hand. Do you get me?”

“Sir, yes, sir,” answered Sgt. Holofernes like a pull-string toy.

“Whose house is this, soldier?”

“Sir, it’s your house, sir…”

“Damn right, this is my goddamn house. And what exactly are you?”

“Sir, I’m a guest, sir…”

“Correct. You are a GUEST… in MY goddamn house. And I will not have my goddamned house-guests losing their shit over boys they don’t like when there’s a sick girl, and dead kids, and fucking men in gray on our asses, out to kill us or worse… so what we need right now is some fucking unit cohesion. Do you get me?”

Sienna heard her grandfather’s voice breaking, as if he were about to cry. “Sir, yes, sir.”

Amos sighed. “At ease, you crazy bastard…”

“When did this all start happening, honey?” Tiffany asked gently.

“At a party,” Sienna said quietly, “September Twenty-Third… I only had one beer, but… but I saw some terrible, terrible stuff…”

“And there were other boys at this party?”

“It was supposed to be all-girls, but… but…”

“Boys decided to show up uninvited.” Tiffany sounded as if she’d been there the whole time, so Sienna nodded in assent. “Typical. One of those little pigs could have slipped her something, either in her beer, water or food, and she’d never know for certain. Wouldn’t be the first time some asshole boy thought he could get away with taking advantage of an unsuspecting girl just trying to enjoy herself…”

It was as if Tiffany had thrown open the curtains in Sienna’s memory. She recalled then that it had been Chas Donder who’d shown up uninvited and almost immediately appointed himself bartender, giving Sienna her first and only beer… only to then later shamelessly attempt ripping her shirt off in front of the rest of the party-goers. “Son of a bitch!” she exclaimed, nearly falling out of bed.

Sgt. Holofernes rose from his seat and dashed over to his beloved granddaughter. “What now?” he asked with his characteristic defensiveness. “What is it?”

Sienna threw her arms around his furry neck and said, “Sir, if you’re so hellbent on shooting somebody over me, then you’d better put Chas Donder at the top of your list, sir.”

“The kid with the Camaro?” asked Sgt. Holofernes.

Tiffany snorted derisively. “Fucking Camaro pricks…”

“Hey, he’s not that dealership guy’s kid, is he?” asked Amos. “He’s insufferable, too, with his stupid fucking radio ads every hour on the hour when I’m just trying to enjoy my goddamned Black Sabbath...”

“Trust me, Amos,” Sgt. Holofernes grumbled, letting Sienna lie back on the bed, “I crossed paths with both of them at the school bake sale back in February, and they’re even worse in person.”

“What did that boy do?” asked Tiffany, with seething recognition.

“He gave me that beer,” Sienna said, crossing her arms, tears welling up again, “and then… grabbed at me later when he thought he could get away with it… and then he tossed me in the pool when I told him to back off, because he wasn’t even supposed to be there in the first place, but he never takes ‘no’ for an answer. He’s a bully and he hates hearing ‘no.’ If anybody slipped me anything, it must have been him…”

“Well, he sounds like an asshole,” Amos concluded.

“Who deserves to get shot,” concurred Sgt. Holofernes, rising to stand, but then painfully twisting a muscle and sitting on the mattress next to Sienna. “Ow, damn it!”

“Hell, sir,” Tiffany said, reaching into a nearby drawer and pulling out a Magnum, “I’m liable to do it, if you don’t.”

“Do you, uh… you know how to use that thing?”

“It was my daddy’s gun, sir,” Tiffany said with a raised eyebrow. “Amos, I left some stew on the stove. Turn down the heat in 20 minutes and let it simmer until dinner. I’m going into town.”

After she righteously stormed out and down the stairs, Amos turned to Sienna and assured her, “Don’t worry, she absolutely learned from the best.” Then he glanced at Sgt. Holofernes and added, “You owe me a new beer stein when this shit blows over.”

“Understood.”

“What was that, soldier?”

“Sir, yes, sir…”

(NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.)

From friendly check-in the previous morning with the lady in rainbow scarves to the sumptuous dinner, bottomless cocktails and topless dancing girls the night before, Ray Figueroa felt he was being treated to an experience he’d long imagined was reserved for Very Important People, like heads of state and actual movie stars. Even his own family didn’t seem to scrutinize too deeply when he told them he’d be away in Acapulco that fall on a film-shoot for a new telenovela, “Amor en la Playa Dorada.” They were always very supporting of his goal to be an actor, as well as avid telenovela fans in their own right — all they asked of him before seeing him off on his journey was that he write them every week and try not to get into too much trouble. Of course, if Ray had known beforehand just how decadent the Cabeza del Diablo would be, he might have been tempted to spill the juicy details to everyone in his life, and that failing would have certainly cost him the job.

Among the gifts he found in his beachfront executive suite, the management left him a cornucopia basket of dried exotic fruits, imported chocolates, and a week’s worth of complimentary meal-and-show tickets for the nightclub downstairs, as well as a perfunctory list of his film-shoot call times and a large chilled bottle of champagne that tasted like liquid gold.

The note attached to the gift basket read, in English:

Welcome to the Cabeza del Diablo! Continental breakfasts will be served door-to-door from 8am to 10am, but if you need anything else — and we do mean ANYTHING — please don’t hesitate to call and ask for Carmelita at the front desk! We hope you enjoy your stay, and please remember that your handler will make contact with you after the the last matinee show ends at 6pm on September 10th — don’t be late!

The stationary even had drawing in the corner — a saucy little cartoon of a goat-horned girl in a bikini, looking over her shoulder and winking, one finger over her sultry lips as she touched a little piece of paper to a small fire with her other hand, and a speech bubble from her read, “Recuerda siempre quemar…”

Ray sighed contemplatively. He wanted so very much to tell Shannon Ayres, his platonic friend back in California, about all of the amazing things he was allowed to see and do in Acapulco, and how much he wished he could tell her about his brand new and exciting job… but, sadly, his new job required him to burn all marked correspondence after reading, and to keep its existence a tightly guarded secret. He wondered if even a vague note (“Delicious food! Spacious rooms by the beach! Fan dances! All this opulence just for a telenovela actor!”) would be too much to share, as he held he note over the bathroom sink and lit its corner with a nearby flip lighter.

Because the truth was… “Amor en la Playa Dorada” was not a real telenovela. Permits had been acquired, filming schedules had been submitted, and a warehouse studio had been rented for a few months, but the permits sat unenforced in lonely file cabinet, the filming schedules were just for show, and the rented warehouse studio would be largely empty that fall.

Once Ray finally made contact with his handler, his first official mission would finally be made clear…

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

After the last matinee show ended with two rowdy visitors groping one of the topless dancers and getting thrown out in a spectacle of anger and violence, Ray waited at the bar for about 20 minutes for his handler to show up. Rosa Llamas, who emceed the show, approached him in her red silk brocade and sagely advised him, “Sir, I’m afraid the show’s over. Maybe you should probably go back to your room, please?” Her tone indicated it wasn’t actually a suggestion.

Thinking he’d somehow fucked up and not actually been selected for the job after all, Ray dejectedly wandered back to his executive suite, closed the door behind him and turned on the light.

“Did you enjoy the show, Mr. Figueroa?” a woman’s voice from behind him asked.

Ray jumped and spun around. Standing in his room by the beachfront window was an older gringo woman with short brown hair, wearing minimal makeup and a black pleated dress. She reminded him of one of his aunts in Los Angeles, especially with the solitary air about her — in his aunt’s case, it became stronger after her husband died in 1972 after a battle with lung cancer.

Ray was tempted to ask what she was doing in his executive suite, but realized this must be part of his test and thought better of it. “Given how it ended in a fistfight outside over a half-naked woman,” he said nonchalantly, “I think I can see why it’s called Cabeza del Diablo… I’m not too late, am I?”

“Not at all,” she said, smiling warmly and extending her hand. “Susan de Mornay. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you,” he said, gently shaking her hand, and then quickly adding, “I hate to sound indelicate, Miss, but… you don’t happen to take traveler’s checks, do you?”

To any other woman, this question would have gotten Ray slapped, and not just in his face. But Susan grinned broadly, recognizing a kindred spirit. “No traveler ever truly needs a check,” came her reassuring, agreed-upon reply, “but it certainly helps.”

“I take it you’re my handler?”

“Correct.”

Ray breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness,” he said, “I thought I’d blown my chance.”

“Trust me when I tell you that Mission Control never lets an asset go easy,” Susan said, with a heavier sigh before wiping her nose on her wrist. “I hope you’ll forgive my funerary black. I just lost a dear friend recently.”

“You have my condolences for your loss,” Ray said, wondering if she meant a former partner or someone else from her civilian past, but knowing better than to pry into matters that weren’t directly his concern.

“Thank you,” Susan said. “I appreciate your sentiments, and I will do my best to keep things business-related going forward. So… I understand that you passed your, shall we say, ‘audition’ with flying colors. I know that a year or more between instructions can feel like forever, but congratulations on your successful efforts. How do you feel so far?”

“This place is… amazing, and the food and entertainment are top-notch,” he said, with a broad smile, trying to choose his words carefully. “However, to be honest with you, Miss de Mornay, I do confess that I feel a little guilty lying to my friends and family about why I’m here… and frankly, I’m still not entirely certain why Mission Control wanted those pictures I sent them…”

Ray was tempted, also, to explain that the pictures in question — surreptitiously taken in February of 1977 while Ray hid in some rosemary bushes— had been of actress Diana Hyland, whom he recognized from a TV movie he’d watched, sitting on a bench by a clear blue pool, a long scarf draped over her head in pale imitation of Our Lady of Sorrows, looking very gaunt and frail, especially compared to her much younger male co-star, whom Ray could see sitting next to her, whispering something to her before delicately kissing her on her bony cheek. From the instructions he’d initially received, Ray still could not be sure if the house he’d been sent to surveil was hers, her co-star’s, or perhaps someone else’s, but regardless of the pool and house’s ownership, there on that bench she’d sat, her costar’s hand in hers, looking very sad and distant, possibly soul-sick as well as physically sick… To make matters more uncomfortable, this all occurred about a month before the local Hollywood trade magazine solemnly yet briefly announced that Diana Hyland had passed away at age 41. Rumors flew among his acting social circles that she endured a particularly aggressive form of cancer, but of course, Ray knew better than to engage in gossip and risk getting entangled in other people’s deeply personal matters if he could help it. Furthermore, for the purposes of induction into Mission Control, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE who wasn’t already in it could know what he personally saw and photographed.

For her part, in that stifling moment, Susan seemed to brace herself for more bad news that Ray might choose to share. Her face hardened so painfully, even he could feel the proverbial “other shoe” hanging in the silent air, waiting for gravity’s resolution…

Instead of imparting those unpleasant items of concern to someone who had just been through a personal loss, herself, Ray opted to spare her the details. For all he knew, it was entirely possible that Mission Control may have been trying to monitor Miss Hyland to ensure she was getting proper medical care… and perhaps it simply wasn’t enough? He took a deep breath, and stated as honestly as he could, “However, I just want to assure you that, in spite of my concerns, I do, absolutely, one-hundred-percent trust the plan, and as far as I’m concerned, work is work, and I’m more than happy to help with the work.”

Susan’s face softened into a warm smile. “That’s the idea,” she concurred. “Mission Control sends us on missions the world over and, once completed, rewards us with handsome prizes and invaluable life experience. Exciting, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Ray said.

“Makes you feel a little bit like James Bond, doesn’t it?”

Her optimism felt infectious. “Indeed, it does!”

“And all you’ve got to do is….?”

“Trust the plan,” Ray answered, beaming.

“Excellent!” Susan pulled a manila envelope out of her bag and held it out to him. “Your next mission,” she began officiously before playfully pulling the envelope away, and quickly adding, “should you choose to accept it…”

Ray giggled and said, “As if I would ever turn down twenty-thousand dollars…”

“Oh, I’m pretty sure this mission is worth a bit more than that,” Susan said, handing him the envelope. “All of the instructions are in there, including the reward specifics, which you’ll find are commensurate with the level of risk involved. As with every mission, you are not obligated to share details if you choose not to — all missions are for a Missioner’s eyes only. However, as you handler, I’ve been assigned to assist you on your very first international mission, and I solemnly swear to do my utmost to answer any questions you may have.”

Ray opened the envelope. It contained a set of keys, a roll of camera film, a roll of microfiche, a cigarette pack with “Por Celestina” written on it in black ink, an Argentinian passport, a Colombian passport, and a one-page letter of instructions, which he proceeded to read.

“You brought your camera?” asked Susan, inspecting the camera film.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Good,” she said, putting it back. “Looks like there might potentially be some reconnaissance work in this… which would make sense. I’m to understand we may have to make a few trips for the duration of this mission. May I see these?” she asked of the passports.

“Yes, please,” Ray said. “Thank you again for your help, I’m grateful for it.”

“De nada,” she quipped flatly. “Hopefully your Spanish is infinitely more competent than mine. Rosa is always giving me at least a little bit of shit for my crappy pronunciation, but some things can’t be helped.” Both passports contained Ray’s picture — the Colombian one bore his name as “Jaime Arreguin,” and the Argentinian one listed “Guillermo Gonzales.” Mission Control is nothing if not thorough, she thought, appraising the care of the work.

Ray finished reading the instructions, then dutifully took out the flip lighter and burned it in the coffee table’s ash tray. “It looks like I have to take that cigarette box to a florist in Argentina,” he said, “and that microfiche to a basket weaver in Colombia.”

“In that order?” she asked.

“How do you mean?”

“Were they listed by numbers or bullet points?”

“Numbers,” he said. “First Argentina, then Colombia, and we apparently have only two weeks for Argentina.”

“Ah, it might be a shorter time-table depending on whether we’re looking for a shop or a street-seller,” Susan said, handing him the Colombian passport. “Then it would make more sense to use this one. Store the Argentinian one, your own and the microfiche in the room’s safe while I go get my kit. I’ll meet you at the bar in 20 minutes.”

“Wait,” Ray said, “there’s a safe in here?”

Susan under-hand-tossed him the ring of keys. “Under the bathroom sink, Señor Arreguin…”

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Ray had been waiting at the bar for 25 minutes before Susan came down in a floral blouse, khaki trousers and leather boots, a sightseeing backpack on her back. “Sorry I got delayed,” she said, catching her breath. “The good news is, the trains are running for two more hours, so we don’t actually have to dash out the door. The bad news is, the local taxi service can’t send any drivers just yet, so that means we should be able to enjoy a cerveza or two, which is… well, frankly more good news.”

“Good thing I took the liberty of ordering you one,” Ray said, gesturing to an extra glass of beer.

“You’re good man, Mr. Arreguin,” she said, savoring her first mouthful of it.

Ray surveyed the people in the bar, and asked, “Is it true that everyone here is a Missioner?”

“Everyone who works here, yes,” she said, “but only some of the visitors, so definitely keep your voice down, and use the code phrase whenever you can.”

“Do you recognize any right now?” Ray asked under his breath, sipping his beer.

Susan turned to survey the room, herself, and said, “Only about a handful. And those are the ones I know personally.”

“So… who would you say is the most dangerous of them?”

“That icy blond over there by the kitchen entrance,” Susan replied, gesturing in the direction of a long-limbed woman with short, spiky yellow hair in a Rorschach-patterned dress. “Hands down. I swear, she must be part whippet, or something…”

“Who’s she?”

“Not sure what she’s calling herself today, but when I first met her, her documents said she was ‘Margaret Taylor,’ and trust me when I tell you that you do NOT want to get on that woman’s bad side.”

Ray figured from the length of the woman’s neck and arms, as well as the width of her pointed shoulders, she must have been very tall. Six feet easily. He watched as she stirred the olive in her martini and then, with immaculately-white-gloved hands, took the olive off its pick, put the pick between her teeth, and surreptitiously tossed the olive onto a busboy’s tray as he entered the kitchen without noticing. “She’s got good aim,” Ray mused, finishing his beer. “Do I want to know what she’s done?”

“Obviously, none of us are allowed to know the full details,” Susan said conspiratorially, “but I can confirm that she’s definitely got me beat, body-count-wise. Plus — and, by the way, you definitely did NOT hear this from me…”

“My lips are sealed,” Ray pledged.

Susan took a big swig of beer, swallowed, and continued in hushed tones, “I heard a rumor, from a very reliable source, that she was single-handedly responsible for the Cincinnati Massacre last year.”

Ray was about to exclaim, “At the NRA election?!” but he stopped his mouth momentarily, took a deep breath, and added in a whisper, “I thought their magazine editor confessed to doing it in his suicide note?”

“After shooting himself… in the chest… with a shotgun?” Susan shook her head, took another swig of beer and continued, “No, no, compadre, that whole incident has that woman’s fingerprints all over it… or, rather, it would, if she wasn’t wearing gloves. Please tell me you brought gloves, by the way?”

Ray patted the day bag hanging at his hip. “And the other stuff we discussed.”

“Good, good,” Susan said, setting her sightseeing bag on a nearby stool, “Listen, I have to go talk to Carmelita really quick. Could you please watch my bag?”

“Of course,” Ray said.

“Thank you!” Susan took off with a wave and trotted off to the front desk.

As Ray turned to order another beer, a deeper female voice asked behind him, “Señor Arreguin? Habla ingles?”

He turned to see the tall, blond woman towering over him in her unnerving inkblot dress. “I speak English, yes,” he said.

She half-smiled with thin red lips, took her hand out from behind her back and held his Colombian passport between her long white-gloved fingers, saying flatly, “I think you dropped this.”

Ray knew she was lying. He didn’t know when or how she picked his pocket, but there was no earthly way that passport could have fallen out of his sport-coat’s inner breast pocket. Instead of lobbing any accusations he couldn’t prove, he took the passport back, slipped it into his trouser pocket, and said, “Thank you.”

“Your English is excellent,” she said. “Let me guess… California?”

Hesitant to reveal his Colombian passport was fake, Ray nodded and said, “I went to university in California, yes.”

“I see. I grew up in California. You know that lady?” she asked of Susan.

“We just met today, yes,” Ray said.

“She was gossiping about me, wasn’t she.”

“She… might have mentioned you, or someone like you, in passing. Though she noted that she couldn’t seem to remember your name…”

“You can call me Miss Tell,” she said, extending her empty white-gloved hand. “Lacey Tell.”

“That’s a nice name,” he said, gently shaking her hand and wondering if her name was as fake as the one he was using now.

The woman called Lacey smirked like an apex predator, and her voice remained cold and business-like. “Susan loves to call me a mass murderer behind my back. And to my face. It’s kind of a friendly joke between us.”

“You make it sound like she owes you money, or something,” he said with an awkward laugh. “And, if so, I’m more than willing to cover for her. Do you happen to take traveler’s checks?”

Lacey sighed and rolled her eyes, responding almost automatically, “No traveler ever truly needs a check, but it certainly helps.”

That was all the evidence Ray needed to know how Lacey and Susan knew each other. “Good to see a fellow Missioner,” he said, accepting his refilled cerveza from the bartender and keeping his voice down.

“So, if you don’t mind my asking,” Lacey retorted with narrowed eyes, leaning on the bar beside him, “since I happened to notice her gesticulating in my general direction, what exactly were you two talking about?”

“The, uh, Cincinnati Massacre, actually,” Ray said, choosing his words carefully. “About the news coverage, the investigation reports, what a bloodthirsty madman Harlan Carter was to do something so barbaric, that it’s probably the worst atrocity in recent memory to be committed on American soil… and, to honest with you, Miss Tell, I was wondering why anyone like him would ever want to infiltrate the NRA, shoot and bomb over 150 members to death, and then kill himself? And all with two homemade box bombs, a shotgun, and a metric ton of shells that would be very, very difficult to fit under his trench-coat…”

“Hatred,” she answered coolly, sizing him up with pale blue eyes. “Resentment. And perhaps a bit of well-deserved guilt.”

“I’m not sure I understand,” Ray said, intrigued, sipping his beer.

“Mr. Arreguin, are you familiar with Ramon Casiano?”

“No,” Ray said, “should I be?”

“Yes, more people should.” Something about the intensity of her speech chilled Ray’s bones: “You see, when Harlan Carter was seventeen, over 45 years ago, he stalked Ramon Casiano to a watering hole outside of Laredo, Texas. Carter waited for him to strip down to his skivvies, then confronted him with a shotgun, falsely accused him of theft, and then shot him in the chest. At point-blank range. Ramon Casiano was fifteen years old, by the way, and he died there.”

“You’re saying that Carter was… a murderer… before the massacre?”

“Tigers don’t change their stripes,” she said with a slight shrug of her pointed shoulders. “Even in trigger-happy Texas, Carter was found guilty of murder… and yet, because Texas apparently takes pity on seventeen-year-old murderers — especially if they happen to be gringos — he was sentenced to three years in prison… of which he only served two.”

“Why?”

Lacey sighed with resignation, shaking her head. “Technically, the judge was legally obligated to inform the jury that… when Carter shot Casiano in the chest, there could very well be… an astronomically-remote-and-purely-hypothetical… possibility… that, perhaps, maybe, possibly, hypothetically… the shooting might, perhaps, maybe, possibly, hypothetically… have been committed in ‘self-defense’… IF ONLY to say that the judge SAID SO, before the jury inevitably found Carter’s pasty ass guilty, anyway, considering the evidence against him was overwhelming. But… because the judge neglected to say the thing he was apparently legally obligated to say, and because Carter’s family had connections to good lawyers, who discovered and then successfully argued this bullshit little technicality, Harlan Carter was released about a year early… just in time to get a law degree, and then join the Border Patrol.”

Ray’s eyes went wide. “You can’t be serious…”

“Oh, but I am, Mr. Arreguin. Twenty years ago, Harlan Carter, while serving as Chief of Border Patrol in Texas, was responsible for a massive, multi-state Federal operation — violating California’s state’s rights, in particular — to invade non-Texas states, round up and forcibly deport all of the Hispanic people that the Border Patrol could get their grubby mitts on, even busboys in restaurants… and even if they were actually American citizens. And those are just the ones we know about — I shudder to think about the ones we don’t…”

Ray felt angry heat rising and couldn’t stop himself from saying, “I… remember my uncle telling me that twenty years ago, after finally getting his citizenship papers… he was kidnapped by Federal agents, from out of his own restaurant, that he started with my aunt… They-they-they sent him to Mexico, and it took him six months to get processed back into the United States and get home to Los Angeles.” He realized then that he had overshared too much, and did his best to recover. “You mean to tell me Carter was a part of this?”

“Oh yes,” she said with a raised eyebrow. “You’re uncle likely has Harlan Carter to thank for that awful tribulation he had to go through. Hell, Carter practically master-minded it, because to him, the cruelty was the point.”

“So… what did the National Rifle Association ever do to piss him off?”

“They helped President Johnson craft the Gun Control Act over a decade ago.”

“What’s the matter with gun control? Isn’t that a good thing?”

“It is,” Lacey said, nodding sagely. “Its crafting was an act of penance, in fact. It was written in the wake of the JFK Assassination — which was committed, incidentally, by one of the NRA’s own magazine subscribers, who mail-ordered his gun through them — you can see how that looks bad for them, can’t you?”

“I can,” said Ray.

“Exactly. The Gun Control Act, among other things, expressly prohibits anyone with a felony conviction from ever legally owning guns. If caught possessing guns, a felon could have them confiscated and perhaps even serve time in jail, depending on the state.” She suddenly grinned with crystal-clear exasperation. “And… guess who was still technically a felon after being released from prison early?”

Just like that, Ray could feel pieces of a puzzle clicking into place. “Harlan Carter…”

“He never once believed in responsible gun ownership,” Lacey Tell said, authoritatively. “He hated Hispanic people enough that he actively looked for excuses to murder them, especially when they were most vulnerable. He fervently and ardently believed, more than anything, that the ‘right to keep and bear arms’ applied as equally to murderers as it did to law-abiding citizens. And it stands to reason that he hated the NRA for standing up for the safety of American citizens and civil servants, and thereby slighting felonious murderers like himself.”

“So that’s why he executed those people at the NRA election?” asked Ray. “Because they prevented him from legally owning guns?”

Her work apparently approaching its close, Lacey Tell grinned. “That’s definitely the conclusion of the Cincinnati Police Department, at least.”

Ray could feel everything she had imparted to him working their way through his synapses like little currents in an alternator. “Wait,” he said, “so why did you think he felt guilty?”

Lacey raised an eyebrow at him again, as if something less-than-friendly had clawed its way back into her gaze. “I didn’t say he felt guilty,” she corrected icily, “I said he was guilty. Deservedly so.”

Not wanting to have accidentally gotten on her “bad side,” as Susan had warned him, Ray backtracked. “Well, after everything he did… I certainly agree with you, Miss Tell, he should feel guilty. Yes, absolutely. But, since you’ve opted to share so much about the massacre and what led up to it… I kind of have to ask… how do you know all of this?”

She smirked. “I’m afraid those details are classified, Mr. Arreguin.”

This answer was expected — if Mission Control forbade the sharing of information, such was the answer a Missioner was expected to give. Feeling they had perhaps reached a tentative end to the discussion, Ray said with his voice low, “Mission Control must have rewarded you handsomely for your involvement… that is, assuming you had involvement.”

“In this case, Mr. Arreguin, an argument could be made that justice is its own reward…” She sized him up, narrowing her eyes again, and then leaned down toward him to conspiratorially add, “Imagine, if you will… if things had, perhaps, been slightly different.”

“Different, how?” he asked.

“Imagine if, say, Harlan Carter had chosen to conceal his felony so deeply, that no one outside of Laredo, Texas, would ever know what he’d done… And then imagine… if, instead of killing over 150 NRA members and then himself in a vicious and ideologically-motivated murder-suicide… Harlan Carter instead chose to use his position as the NRA’s magazine editor to knowingly and willfully spread lies and disinformation about the NRA’s leadership, sowing absolutely irrational confusion and fear about what the Gun Control Act might do…”

Something about the way that Lacey Tell continued to impart her story to Ray made him feel as though none of the other people in the bar were even real anymore. Just animated Pepper’s ghosts. Not a one of them seemed to pay attention to either of them, no matter how she spun her hypothesis to him, practically out in the open.

She continued, “And then imagine… if Carter mounted a run for presidency of the NRA… And then imagine… if he won… so that he could, say, fire all of its financial officers… loot its coffers without any oversight… and, measure by measure, turn a much-storied and well-respected safety organization… into a glorified advertising agency for the gun manufacturing industry… And then, horror of horrors, imagine… if he were able to use the all of that unchecked power to dilute, or worse yet overturn, the Gun Control Act… so that he and millions of felons and murderers just like him could freely ‘keep and bear’ some of the most dangerous weapons in existence… wantonly killing men, women and even children… in schools, in libraries, in movie theaters, in churches, at music festivals and public gatherings… and no authority figure could ever legally disarm them… and no one outside of Laredo, Texas, would ever even know the name of Ramon Casiano, or why he matters…”

Ray could see horrible pictures of unfathomable violence behind his eyelids, and he felt his blood alternating between scalding hot and icy cold. It made him want to throw a bar stool or else break his cerveza, but he didn’t fully understand how or why.

“Now, tell me, Mr. Arreguin,” she whispered, “can you ever imagine that world of armed murderers somehow being a better world than this one?”

“Absolutely not,” Ray asserted.

“Why not?”

“Because allowing a world like that would be irresponsible,” he insisted, his face flushing hot again. “Because anyone who kills children, especially with guns, should never, ever be out in the world with the rest of us, much less entrusted with the power of life and death. It… it would be like trying to rehabilitate a tiger after it’s gotten its first taste of blood.”

“So, in this purely hypothetical scenario,” she inquired, “you could theoretically see yourself justifying the regrettable and unfortunate sacrifice of over 150 members of that well-respected safety organization… if it meant saving our children and future generations from millions of unchecked, gun-toting homicidal maniacs?”

Ray wasn’t so quick to answer this time — between questioning his faith in whether all human life was sacred and mattered, and wondering if anyone in the bar was going to react to anything that had been said so far, or if they could even understand it in the way that he felt that he could — but, eventually, he answered: “Yes.”

He looked up at Lacey Tell’s angular face, and she smiled down at him. “Good,” she said with something approaching softness. “It’s very good that we both can agree on that point. You’ve definitely got a strong moral center, Mr. Arreguin, and I certainly hope that your uncle was able to return to the States safely…”

“He was, thank you,” Ray muttered, suddenly unsure of why he was even there in the first place.

As if offering a gentle reminder, Lacey bent down to whisper directly into his ear, “Be sure to tell Susan to stop gossiping about me, won’t you?”

Susan de Mornay! Mission Control! The job! The letter! Ray felt his trouser pocket and the passport still sitting inside of it. He snickered at how mazy the path had become, and said, “You know, Miss Tell, it’s actually very funny… Earlier, I asked Susan who the most dangerous person in the hotel was, and she swore up and down that it was you…”

“Did she.”

“Yes,” he said, squaring his face with hers. “No one can really say what the details are, obviously, but… well, with all due respect, I’m not really seeing the threat.”

Lacey smirked. “And aren’t those the best kinds of threats? The ones you can’t see?” He froze again as she pushed herself away from the bar, away from him, as her inkblot dress shifted into a menacing mass. “Knowledge is power, Mr. Arreguin. You may not always recall the details perfectly, however… once you know a thing — once you know anything, really — that knowledge shapes you in ways you’ll never see, but rest assured, you will never un-know it.” She said it like a promise and a threat.

“Jaime! Jaime!” called Susan from across the room, barrelling towards them. “Get away from my man, you hussy! Puta!”

Lacey Tell rolled her eyes, flipped Susan the bird, and sauntered out into the evening.

“And don’t come back!” Susan shouted after her, right before grabbing her sightseeing bag. “Thank goodness the taxi finally showed up after 20 minutes... What happened?”

As if overcoming some sort of paralysis, Ray’s lungs finally started to take in more oxygen, and he marveled, “I don’t know… how she did it… but I think she… might have poisoned me…”

“Goddamn it,” Susan muttered, “didn’t I warn you about her?”

“She came up to me… I tried to be nice, but…”

“Don’t worry,” she said reassuringly. “Let’s get in the taxi and get you some fresh ocean air, so it’ll pass quicker.”

(NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.)

As Amos and Sgt. Holofernes practiced shooting tin cans with modified rifles from the top of the barn, Sienna and Tiffany sat on the swinging bench on the little farmhouse’s back porch, sipping iced tea and surveying the horizon with binoculars.

“What am I looking for, again?” Sienna asked, keeping her lenses on a black crow perched on the broken branch of a lopsided tree to the west of the barn.

“Black vans,” Tiffany answered, hyper-focusing her lenses on Amos’ jagged knuckles as he prepared to pull the trigger again. “More than two. At least one for each of us.”

POW! POW! POW!

All three remaining cans disappeared in sprays of shrapnel, and Tiffany let her guard drop enough to giggle like a schoolgirl. As the men started packing up their supplies, she put down her binoculars and sipped her iced tea, then absently remarked, “You know, I remember when Amos used to rent out the barn for indoor movie sets.”

“Really?” asked Sienna, putting down her binoculars.

Tiffany nodded proudly. “Good business, up until the Oil Crisis, at least…”

“What kind of movies did they film here?” asked Sienna, fishing the lemon slice out of her glass and sinking her teeth into it.

“Bs, mostly,” Tiffany replied as she casually adjusted her brassiere strap. “And occasionally Cs and Ds…”

“What are Cs and Ds?”

“Put it to you like this,” Tiffany started with a knowing smirk. “You ever seen ‘Dark Demons from Outer Space,’ or maybe ‘Idaho Thresher Murder Cult’?”

Sienna searched her memory and answered, “Um, no?”

Tiffany cackled like a madwoman. “Exactly! Neither did anybody else! Basically the exact opposite of a ‘wide release,’ yeah?”

“So, Cs and Ds… are movies nobody’s ever seen?”

“Or at least didn’t pay enough to see while it was new and fresh,” Tiffany clarified. “Despite what you may have heard, Hollywood doesn’t care too much for actual creativity. Actual creativity is, well… messy… complicated… and weird, at times. Maybe even uncomfortable. But it makes you FEEL things you’d never expect. Don’t get me wrong, the crews for ‘Dark Demons’ and ‘Idaho Thresher’ were good folks, albeit with funny ideas about space aliens and old gods… Not my first or second choices for subjects, but what do I know? Even though I didn’t get around to seeing their ‘limited releases’ in Galveston or Herkimer, I did hear that they supposedly left in a few scenes they filmed out by that well in the north…” She pointed a red-nailed finger to the well with the upturned roof corners. “Cute little thing doesn’t usually get a lot of love, or chances to look nice for the cameras. But the fact is, most of their scenes, like most of the productions that ever filmed here, were shot inside that barn and old stable.”

“Must be nice and cozy in there,” Sienna muttered as her grandfather and Amos descended down into its rafters.

“Dunno about ‘cozy,’ what with all the extra timber and gravel patches lying around in there,” Tiffany said, “but they all filmed inside mostly to control the lighting, especially when filming at night.” She added under her breath, “Even more especially on the pornos…”

Sienna did a double-take. “They filmed pornos here?!”

“Oh yeah,” Tiffany said with a coquettish laugh. “I was even in one, if you can believe that.”

“No way…”

“Would I lie?”

Now that Sienna looked at her again, Tiffany had the glimmer of some kind of mystical experience. It made Sienna wonder if maybe she’d seen Tiffany somewhere before, like in “Jailhouse Babes,” or “Diamond Ladies”… “Which one?” she asked.

“A delightful little smutfest called ‘The Hummingbird,’” Tiffany said, buffing her nails on her polyester sleeve. “My first film shoot in California. Banned in 48 states, but Amos says he knows a guy at Wainwright who makes bootleg copies of it, so there’s a small audience in Alaska, at least. And possibly Canada, but honestly, at this point, who the hell even knows?”

Impressed that Tiffany trusted her enough to share a tile from the mosaic of her life, Sienna half-grinned and said, “Between you and me, last spring, one of my classmates tried to tried to sneak us into a midnight show of ‘Deep Throat’ at The Nick… but we chickened out at the last minute. We saw a couple of other dirty pictures later, but they weren’t as popular, so it didn’t matter much.”

Tiffany smirked, asking, “And by ‘classmate,’ you mean… the Boy?”

“No,” Sienna said, blushing. “He took me to ‘Star Wars’ last year… I really liked that one…” After a moment of recalling the secret moments she once shared with Liam — at the Drive-In outside Diamond Bar, in his van, and in the Mojave during her first-ever ‘shroom trip — Sienna took a heavy breath and tried to compose herself. “Anyway, you were talking about ‘The Humming Bird’? What was that about?”

“Oh, nothing too complicated,” Tiffany said, waving a ring-bedecked hand. “A sultry femme fatale goes bar-hopping in Tijuana and gets seven different men to go down on her. After everything I’d been through up to that point, I did not expect a film set — and the majority of those marvelous gentlemen I worked with — to ever make me feel that… unique and special. It was a great feeling. Also, I got a lot of head for that gig… and then I met Amos… and it was love at first hand-job.” Sienna giggled, pretending to understand context-laden terms like ‘femme fatale,’ ‘down’ and ‘head,’ only for Tiffany to correct herself: “The hand-job he gave me, I mean.”

As Sgt. Holofernes exited the barn with the guns strapped over his burly back, Amos followed with the tactical kit under his arm, saluting the women-folk with his index and middle fingers, winking and pointing at Tiffany in particular. Then the two men proceeded around the side of the farmhouse to clean their weapons in the root cellar.

Tiffany shook her head, chuckling. “Damn his fingers…” Sienna laughed again in spite of her best efforts, and was relieved to see that Tiffany seemed perfectly happy with even an outsiders’ perspective on the absurdities of her relationship. “Funny addendum to my ‘Hummingbird’ story,” she said, “I was willing and eager to give the crew my full Christian name — I mean, honestly, Sienna, how many stone-cold foxes from Nevada actually answer to ‘Tiffany Otiss-Tripp’? My name is practically a porn-star’s blessing! But then that crotchety old director’s assistant said I only had a ten-letter limit for my name in the credits.” She blew a small raspberry for emphasis.

“Oh no,” Sienna said, finishing her iced tea. “What did you do?”

“Get this,” Tiffany said conspiratorially. “I wrote out two sets of the alphabet… Then I cut out each letter… put all twenty-six of them in each of my brassiere cups… put the cups together… shook them up real good, and then I pulled out five letters from each cup so I could rearrange them on my dressing table.”

“What did they spell out?”

Tiffany took another swig of her iced tea, and said, “Tina Peters.”

“Wow… That’s a nice porn name.”

“I mean, it was either Tina Peters or else Patti Neers, and that last one sounded too much like a stuffy school marm who didn’t do nothing for nobody…”

“Well, at least it’s fake, so nobody’ll find you,” Sienna mused. “Or do anything mean, like try to take you away from Amos…”

“They better not, if they know what’s good for them,” Tiffany said, admiring her many rings.

“Amos’ll shoot them?”

“Yeah, but I got ways of defending myself, too…”

“The throwing knives?”

Tiffany nodded. “I do enjoy those, yes, and my jewelry’s not just for show, either.” She held up her index and middle fingers to the light, letting two rings with big pink quartz crystals on them glimmer back and forth. “See these beauties? Pretty, right?”

“Yeah…”

Tiffany balled up her fist, turning the crystals into spikes, which she held up before her own eyes. “They’re spaced enough apart that, if some selfish fucking asshole ever gave me a reason… I could put both of his eyes out with them.” For emphasis, she simulated grabbing someone by the back of their head and driving her ring-spiked fist into their face.

Sienna couldn’t imagine anyone having the temerity to even try attacking someone who commanded as much respect as Tiffany could. “Holy shit… How do you know all of this?”

“Like I said before,” Tiffany answered, taking Sienna’s glass and getting up from the swinging bench, “I’ve been around. You pick up all kinds of things when you travel the world. Also, you tend to toughen up pretty quick when your mama’s a WAV and your daddy’s a Navy man.”

And with that, Sienna got up and followed after her to help with the dishes, wondering if she could ever be as brave or as confident as an adult...

(NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.)

“Have you ever noticed that a tree’s bare branches tend to look a lot like its roots?” Sienna asked, gazing up at the dead, black tree.

Liam took a break from the joint he was licking closed to check his watch, which read 8:48pm in the campfire light. He looked up at her and asked, “What do you mean?”

She pointed in the direction of the tree, where two black birds sat in silence just outside of its tangled, twisting branches. “That one… looks like roots, or maybe a vein? Heart vein? Like the kind Mr. Phelps was showing us in Biology?”

“Carotid?”

“Yeah,” she said with a suddenly very reverent smile. “It’s so gorgeous against the moon…”

That was the moment when Liam figured the ‘shrooms were finally kicking in.

The month before, Sienna saw a Health class film about the so-called “dangers of drugs,” and instead of scaring the living daylights out of her, it only made her curious — it was curiosity fueled by the kind of anxiety that drove her to try to understand things, in the hope that she wouldn’t be ruled by blind, irrational fear of those things. Given that Liam was the only person she knew with intimate connections to such things, she asked him too many questions to count about acid in particular (what does it smell like? what does it taste like? how long does it last? does it hurt or make people sick? if it’s really so bad that it makes people sick, why do people do them in the first place or keep doing them again in secret?); such curiosity, he remembered, presaged her own clandestine experimentation with marijuana, which he’d been happy to introduce her to, and which she tolerated well. He did his best to answer her questions as he could, and further advised her, that if she wanted to try it for herself, to start slowly with something less intense, and offered to begin by testing out ‘shrooms on her while they were camping on the first night of Spring Break. All she needed to bring was a favorite stuffed animal — her yellow stuffed dog, Rex — and Liam would bring everything else. If she handled the ‘shrooms well, he promised, he’d see what he could do about introducing her to acid on a different trip later, maybe over their summer vacation…

This evening, however, aside from the humble campfire and the stars dotting the velvet black sky, there was no other major source of light for Sienna to see with her eyes. Liam had heard stories about sensitive people being able to hallucinate lights or see coronas around things, but this was the first time he witnessed anyone actually doing so, and he couldn’t help being fascinated by it, himself. He’d always known Sienna was special, and not just because he’d been in love with her since kindergarten. She swayed gently in the air, looking both beyond reality and also in need of some chivalrous assistance. He licked the joint closed and put it in the repurposed cigarette box in the back of his brown van, whose back doors remained wide open, and the little yellow stuffed dog sat perched on a clean white pillow. Then he got up from the campfire, sauntered up from behind her, and put his arms around her waist, deciding now was an opportune moment to quote their favorite movie: “‘That’s no moon!’”

Sienna laughed out loud, clearly still understanding words. “Is this what being high feels like?”

“Yeah,” he said. “How do you like it so far?”

“Like… on that desert planet in Star Wars… dust and sand everywhere, but the air is so clean…” She put her hands over his and sighed. “Feels good…”

Liam could feel his heart vibrating with hers. He figured that sitting people on ‘shroom trips was always easier when he didn’t have to think too hard about anything — just feeling vibrations between them, and letting those feelings dictate what happened next. “Did you know,” he gently whispered in her ear, as they stood out in the dark, “that millions of years ago… before Pangaea broke apart… before there was even any air… all of this… was once under water?”

“Really?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he continued, rocking her side to side as if they were two pairs of entangled kelp. “Right now… we are standing… at the former ocean floor…” As he spoke, the dead, black tree swayed its branches as if it were also becoming kelp. The two black birds flapped their wings, became fish-like, and swam off into the air. “In its vast, ancient existence… it used to have plankton… and fish… and crabs… and jellyfish… and mollusks… all kinds, all over… from here, to there… and even into the sky…”

Sienna arched her neck backward over his shoulder and gazed up at the glittering stars, which now pulsed as if rippling behind a watery surface, which the bird-fishes pierced through on their way out. She felt the subtle pressure-change in her ears, making her dizzy in Liam’s arms. “It must… have been so… beautiful,” she said, awed.

For a precious, sparkling moment, Liam could see the future sprawled out in his heartscape—giving up selling weed for film production; location scouting while she was earning a theater degree; her getting cast in the next science-fiction epic and winning an Oscar; both of them working behind and in front of cameras, teaching people how to dream instead of helping them momentarily escape reality; a storybook marriage after her brilliant Oscar speech; sailing to distant lands on their honeymoon; flying to old worlds in search of new stories; traveling across the continent in his van like a giant sea turtle; and maybe even settling down in an actual house once they’d finished exploring together — but before any of those was the most important task at hand: helping his girlfriend to map out her own heartscape. “Would you believe me if I told you that I see it in my dreams?”

“You mean it?”

“I do,” he said, slowing down the rocking motion as he spoke. “I see it all under water… really deep and dark… but with every life glowing in the dark… the plankton… and fish… and crabs… and jellyfish… and mollusks… and even a sexy mermaid… that looks just like YOU!” He kissed her ear for emphasis.

Sienna giggled again, turning around his his arms, standing on his toes and embracing him around his neck. “You dream about me?” she asked, beaming. “How sweet… I dream about you, too.”

“Really?” he asked, kissing her temple. “What kind of dreams?”

“I, uh, I probably shouldn’t say…”

“Why not?”

She kept one arm around his neck, but pushed her other palm into his chest to separate slightly. “You’re going to think it’s silly…”

“Come on… You know me. I won’t think it’s silly.”

“You won’t tell anyone?”

“I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

“Pinky promise?” she asked, extending the pinky finger of her free hand.

Like they did back in kindergarten before they were sent to separate grade schools, Liam solemnly entwined his pinky finger with hers. “Pinky promise,” he said, sealing the agreement and squeezing her close once more as they slow-danced in the sand. “What happens when you dream about me?”

“I dream about us,” she whispered in his ear, squeezing him back. “And we don’t have school, or work, or anything else to get nervous about… so we’re in the back of your van… alone… stoned… naked…”

He shuddered as she kissed his neck. As her boyfriend, he felt validated to know that their heartscapes appeared to be in cosmic alignment… however, as her sitter, he also felt absolutely disgusted with himself in this moment. Good sitters were not even supposed to think about having sex with people who were too busy mapping their own heartscapes. He vividly remembered his connection in El Centro recounting going through seven ex-girlfriends who each threatened to kill him over such violations of trust while they were incapacitated, and Liam did NOT want Sienna to despise him, kill him or leave him for any reason. Trying to maintain a noble air of keeping his shit together despite hating himself to his core, he uneasily replied, “We should probably talk about this again… when you’re sober.”

“Aw,” she moaned, “do I have to…?”

He closed his wide blue eyes and regretfully sighed. “Yes. You do.”

“But… but… if I’m sober, then I just know I’m going to be so nervous when the time comes…”

“Hey, hey,” he admonished. “You and me both. When the time comes, I promise you, we are both going to be nervous as hell. But the truth is, we’re both not ready. You have to go through your trip, and then get sober... And I need to get some good booze, for once… I have to buy some fancy chocolates, like a good boyfriend should… I have to pick up some rubbers…”

“What a gentleman,” she mused, snickering.

“I know,” he said, grinning at his own stupidity for almost missing the obvious. “And that’s not all I have to do for you, Sienna Holofernes, no, no, no. I have to sweep out the crumbs and stems and ashes from the back of the van… I have to wash out my ash tray… I have to get some more pillows and blankets… and then wash the ones I already have back there, because you do NOT want to know what some of those pillows and blankets have seen, trust me.” She laughed again, with pearly teeth and rose-petal lips he desperately wanted to kiss. “It’s… it’s a lot of work just to get comfortable, right?”

“Right…”

“Tipsy is one thing,” Liam said, “high is another. High is good, don’t get me wrong, but high is best when there’s no pressure at all, okay?”

Sienna could feel her ears re-pressurizing and she nodded. “Okay…”

“And the last thing either of us needs is to get so high we don’t even remember what we were doing, right?”

“Right…” Sienna bit her lip and then added, quietly, “But… what if I chicken out?”

“It is my duty to help you have the best experiences possible,” he said. “And if you get nervous for any reason at all, right now or later on, that’s not chickening out — that’s you feeling what you feel. And as far as I’m concerned, it’s really important for you to feel what you feel, and I would hope that you could try to tell me what you feel, especially if it’s not good, so I can try to fix it for you… even if fixing it for you means giving you some space.”

She looked up at him with wide doe-eyes. “You won’t be mad?”

“Never.”

“Even if I’m a chicken?”

Liam laughed and stroked her hair. “You’re not a chicken.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because just before we left school this afternoon,” he said, “when Chas Donder cornered you in front of your locker and tried to make a pass at you, I watched you tell him, loudly, to go fuck himself and then you flipped him the bird in front of everybody in the hallway. That took guts. Hell, you were probably the first person ever to tell that asshole to go fuck himself. You are not a chicken — you’re a goddamn spitfire. Where did you even learn to do that?”

Sienna grinned and said, “From the best boyfriend ever… especially when he was coaching me while I was auditioning for Estelle in ‘No Exit’…” She took a breath, closed her eyes, and recited, “‘Then two years ago I met the man I was fated to fall in love with. We knew it the moment we set eyes on each other. He asked me to run away with him…’” She trailed off for what felt like forever, and then stopped. “I can’t. I can’t yell at you now. And the rest of it’s… just too sad.”

Liam couldn’t stop himself from snickering and hugged her again, relieved to have found the closest possible thing to a soul-mate. “Goddamn, I love you.”

“I love you,” she said, as if hoping it was enough.

“You’re the prettiest girl in town,” he said. “You’re the kindest person I’ve ever met… And, honestly, if anyone deserves to be nervous about our first time, it’s me.”

“How come?”

The boyfriend-part of Liam wanted to confess to her that he’d been in love with her since kindergarten, that he’d loved her even more after she’d hugged him during her father’s funeral ten years ago, that he missed her so much in boarding school that it almost made him crazy, and felt that reuniting with her in high school was a sign that they were meant for each other. But, after reminding himself that such proclamations were more likely to freak women out than calm them down, especially if they were high, the sitter-part of him won out in the end. “Because I have to do right by you,” he said. “You matter to me, and your happiness matters to me. So, in addition to cleaning the crap out of my van and buying some good quality drinks and snacks, I need to be on my best behavior. A gentleman, like you said. Because if I mess it up and hurt you, even by accident, I’m pretty sure your grandpa’s going to put me down like Old Yeller, and you know what? I’d deserve it.”

“No, no, no,” she pleaded, snuggling him like her beloved stuffed animal.

“Exactly,” he said, gently extricating himself so he could look her in the eyes. “The absolute last thing either of us wants is for your grandpa to shoot me in the face, right?” Sienna’s eyes went wide with horror, no doubt seeing awful pictures in her head, and Liam realized in that instant that he’d fucked up his sitting duties. “I’m kidding!” he said, laughing. “I’m just being stupid, and saying silly things that totally aren’t going to happen, Sienna, I’m sorry.”

Tears welled up in her eyes. “Promise me you won’t get shot in the face?” she whimpered helplessly.

“Pinky promise, pinky promise,” he said, taking her pinky finger in his again and squeezing them both harder than intended, “I solemnly swear to you that nothing like that is ever going to happen.”

“Ow, my finger — !”

“ — Oh shit, I’m sorry,” he pleaded, releasing their pinkies. “I’m sorry, Sienna, I won’t do that again.”

Instead of nursing her pinky, she threw her arms open and clung to his middle. “I love you so much,” she said, sniffling, “if anything happened to you, I don’t know what I’d do…”

“It’s going to be okay. We’re going to try something else, all right? Remember your stuffed dog, Rex?”

“We brought Rex?” Sienna released him and seemed to catch her breath again.

“Yeah, yeah, he’s napping on my good pillowcase,” he said, trying to sound reassuring as he pointed to his brown van by the campfire, where the little yellow stuffed dog sat perched on the clean white pillow. “We’re just going to lay you down over there on the safety blanket, I’ll fetch Rex for you, and get you some water and chips, and we’ll see how you feel in an hour or two, okay?”

Sienna pouted and nodded, and they made their way back over to the campfire, Liam helping her sit cross-legged on the green patchwork quilt he’d laid out. He then did as promised and gave her the hand-made dog toy to cuddle, running her fingers over its buttery-soft fabric and black-button nose. When he came back again with the chips and canteen of water, she cuddled Rex under one arm and put her other arm around Liam’s shoulder again and sighed. “I’m sorry I got so scared, Liam.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “It’s good that you told me, and now we’re both on the safety blanket.”

“Is it bad that I want to be sober?”

“It’ll be okay,” he said, offering her the canteen. “You have Rex and me, and nothing can hurt you while you’re on the safety blanket. I figure in another two hours or so, maybe we can get the good pillows, get you nice and cozy, and sleep it off… and then the world will be more or less the same when you wake up. Trust me, once you are sober, you’ll be so happy we’re both completely safe.”

She seemed to accept this, and drank deeply from the canteen. As he kissed her forehead afterward, he hoped against hope that everything he’d seen in his heartscape would come to pass — that both of their lives would change for the better, and that they could be happy… especially if they could stay together.

(NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.)

Herschel Webber’s Pallazzo di Nickelodeon was hardly the first movie theater in Santa Clarita, but it was among the oldest—having been built in 1928 — and it remained the most talked about since he purchased it in 1968. To those who knew him personally, Webber often attributed this notoriety to his fervent adherence to the age-old maxim, “There is no such thing as bad publicity.”

More often simply referred to as, “The Nick,” the theater managed to earn a reputation for showing what the owner liked to call “tinderbox films” — the ones considered too violent, too sexual, and/or too controversial to be shown in studio-affiliated cinemas. Church groups had tried for the last ten years to shut the place down, but Webber fought back not only on First Amendment grounds, but also by staying open later past the church groups’ bedtimes, and his summer midnight showings of such fare as “Dirty Harry,” “Last House on the Left” and “Deep Throat” were considered the stuff of legend. Every teenager who was anybody in Santa Clarita had been to the midnight shows at least once, if not more — that is, assuming they weren’t caught and kicked out due to being under 18. And even if they had been kicked out, that alone just added to the place’s mystique, and made the young folk even more determined to get in by any means necessary…

Julie Merrimack had been going to The Nick every Saturday night since she first snuck in at fifteen in the summer of 1976 with her high school classmate, Joe Nedermeyer, who was sixteen at the time, but fortunately looked five years older with a small, neatly-trimmed beard he’d started cultivating at puberty. As a reward during that fateful midnight show of “Carnal Knowledge,” mostly for “chaperoning” her into the theater (and very emphatically NOT as a “date,” minimizing the risk of her parents finding out), she attempted to give Joe a surreptitious hand-job under his popcorn box. Not only had he generously fed her ego by periodically whispering in her ear (“You’re so pretty, Julie… you’re way prettier than Ann-Margaret… you should be a movie star…”), but she also learned from watching his face during the movie that he seemed to go soft every time the characters in the film talked for longer than four minutes and attempted to simulate sex. Either they weren’t doing it right, or it wasn’t doing it for him. This was embarrassing information she later used as the proverbial “stick” to her hand-job-offering “carrot” to press-gang Joe into doing her Biology homework for her, and free up more time for her cheer practice after joining the squad later that fall.

Against what should have been his better judgment, Joe continued to take Julie to the midnight shows until he finally got kicked out during a show of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” the summer before. Not long afterward, Julie found out that her fellow cheerleader, Edie Horrocks’ older brother, Mark, was not only 18, but also worked the ticket booth at The Nick, and was able to pass his friends in for free — Julie was all too eager to trade up for a connection like that. Convinced that The Nick was magic, and capable of making participants do whatever she willed them to, Julie made it her mission to convert Edie and their classmate and fellow cheerleader, Pearl Flanagan, to Julie’s growing obsession with controversial films and the power they held.

Then came Shannon Ayres. She arrived at Crocker High School in late February of 1978, transferring in as a Sophomore, but somehow doing enough catch-up work to join the Junior class instead. That wasn’t all she did in those two and a half months, however. Despite being short, stocky, and just about the frumpiest thing Julie had ever laid eyes on, with unkempt black hair and a taste for boys’ jeans and leather jackets, Shannon somehow managed to impress the PE teacher, Mr. Randolph, with her athleticism and rhythmic dancing that he decided to fast-track her onto the cheer squad. It also didn’t hurt that she was strong enough to under-gird the squad’s pyramids without breaking a sweat.

Because there was technically no “head” cheerleader at Crocker, like at other high schools, aspiring-queen-bee Julie disliked the last three new squad members Mr. Randolph selected so much that she and Pearl took all three of them separately to that summer’s midnight show of John Waters’ “Multiple Maniacs” at The Nick. After shocking them so deeply that they all swore off drugs, alcohol, sex and even food, Julie convinced Edie to join them conducting in this surreptitious hazing ritual on Shannon.

“Trust me,” she said, “Shannon definitely has to see this movie, and you’d be helping out so much if you came, too…”

The Nick’s staff were supposed to check ID cards on these shows to make sure they were only admitting patrons over 18, but luckily Mark was working the ticket booth that night and waved them all in without incident because, as he so succinctly put it, “The owner doesn’t pay me enough to care, so I don’t.”

As Julie and Pearl sauntered inside to find seats and Shannon went to buy popcorn, Edie turned to her brother and asked, “How is it, by the way?”

“Ask Julie,” he said, “she’s seen it, like, ten times.”

“I’m not asking Julie, I’m asking you.”

“Well, I’m not about to spoil it for you, but since you’re asking,” he said, leaning in and whispering conspiratorially, “Hold onto your ass…”

In retrospect, it was fitting that he said it that way, because what Edie didn’t realize was that the last three girls Julie and Pearl had taken to see that particular movie never made it past the infamous church scene, where two promiscuous female characters conducted some elaborate foreplay in the pews of a church until one simulated shoving a rosary bead string up the other’s ass. A lapsed Catholic wracked with ancestral guilt at having been educated against her will, Edie ran out of the auditorium and dry-heaved into one of the women’s restroom toilet stalls for a few minutes until Julie peeked in to coax her out.

“Just keep it together, okay?” Julie cooed, wiping her friend’s face with a wet paper towel. “This is exactly what I needed your help for, Edie, and you’re doing a great job! Just another five minutes or so, you’ll see…”

“Oh my god, Julie,” Edie groaned, “what the hell are we watching?!”

“Just trust me,” Julie said, “by the time that scene is over, that grubby little piggy is going come running in here, too, crying her eyes out, freaking the hell out, and then either resolve to shed some pounds this summer, or else drop out and leave cheer-leading to the professionals…”

But after waiting another five minutes, Julie got impatient and dragged Edie back into the auditorium, where Pearl still sat next to Shannon. Instead of wincing or averting her eyes from any of the continuing on-screen depravity, Shannon appeared to happily spend the majority of the film absently munching her popcorn, listening to the fast-paced dialogue and watching the action play out with a studious look on her face, and only occasionally laughing out loud at the various shocking twists in the narrative.

“What the hell is she still doing here?” Julie whispered.

Pearl shrugged and whispered back, “Watching the movie, I guess?”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

After the movie let out at 1:37am, the girls began a brisk walk back to their suburban houses down yellow-lamp-lit streets. Edie was disgusted, mostly with herself. Julie was quietly furious, no doubt angered that the spell she’d tried to cast apparently failed in spectacular fashion. By contrast, only Shannon and Pearl seemed oddly gleeful.

“Wow,” Pearl marveled on the walk home, practically bouncing on her heels next to Shannon, “you didn’t even flinch at the Puke-Eater eating out of his own bucket…”

“Ugh,” Edie muttered, “please don’t talk about puke…”

“Why?” Shannon asked, with a laugh. “It’s not that bad. It was probably just creamed corn, or something. Might be a little gross to eat it cold, but it’s not going to kill you or anything.”

“How do you know?” Julie asked, huffily.

“I mean, have you ever died eating creamed corn?”

Edie volunteered delicately, “I think what Julie means is, how do you know it’s just creamed corn? I mean, it looked so…” She shuddered at the visceral memory of it, and added, “Gross… you know?”

“They filmed it in black-and-white,” Shannon said authoritatively, “not color. Lots of movies film in black-and-white when they want to pretend a safe thing is a dangerous thing. Like how Hitchcock filmed ‘Psycho’ in black-and-white so nobody would know he used chocolate sauce for blood, because nobody would be all that scared of chocolate sauce. Or else maybe they’d just get confused and think it was diarrhea?”

“Eeeeeew,” Edie groaned, her stomach revolting. “I’m never eating chocolate again…”

Pearl giggled and said, “And here I thought they filmed movies in black-and-white because they were, like, OLD… or, you know, didn’t have enough money for color.”

“My parents do special effects for movies,” Shannon said proudly. “Let’s just say I’ve seen, and also done, a LOT of weird stuff on movie sets.”

“Get out! You’ve actually been on a movie set?”

Shannon grinned. “More than one.”

“What kind of stuff happened?” asked Pearl.

“Well, two summers ago, my friend Barney and I got to travel with our parents to Canada and dress up in rat costumes for ‘The Food of the Gods,’” Shannon said. “That was pretty fun, playing a giant rat. Not long after that, I helped my parents and their friends fill up and hang the red corn-syrup buckets they dumped on Sissy Spacek in ‘Carrie.’ The finished scene was really cool when they took me to see it. Then, last year, Mom scored me an internship with the make-up team on ‘The Fury’ — I got to learn all about blood-squibs and how to make fake gashes, and also help clean up the set after they fucked up the body explosions a few times. We even had a blood-fight, too.”

“Blood… fight?” asked Edie with alarm.

“It’s like a food-fight, but with all that extra corn-syrup. Hilarious. Oh yeah, and before all that, when I was twelve, Mom took me to see the bedroom set for ‘The Exorcist,’ showed me where all the wires and pea-soup-tubes were, and then used this weird machine to shake the bed while I sat on it. It was so awesome!”

As Shannon talked, listing her credentials, Edie could practically feel Julie seething with something approaching hatred. “Wow,” she said, uncomfortably trying to change the subject, “I’ll bet you met a lot of… important people… like actors and directors and stuff.”

“Well, not to brag or anything, but Andrew Stevens is probably my hands-down favorite actor, and getting to watch him work was incredible. Also, between my parents and their friends, I do get the inside scoop on nearly every movie in progress from five different studios.”

“Oh, bullshit!” Julie spat.

“If you only knew the stuff they have ready to go in the next five years,” Shannon said, with a cheeky grin, “you’d never stop shitting yourself.”

“Please stop talking about shit,” Edie moaned.

After a moment, Pearl asked, “So, was any of that… super-weird stuff… from the movie even possible?”

“Super-weird, how?”

“Like… I dunno, the giant lobster???”

“I highly doubt there are lobsters that big,” Shannon said, “but my dad likes to say ‘anything is possible… especially with enough wax and corn syrup.’”

“And, just checking… they definitely put away all of the Manson family, right?”

“Yeah, pretty sure.”

“So… can you really make $200 a week selling weed?” asked Pearl, before Julie shot her a dirty look.

Shannon laughed and countered, “Maybe, why? You looking for a hook-up, or a side-job?” When Julie’s angry glare caught her own eyes, Shannon added innocently, “What?”

“You,” Julie snarled, “did NOT just say that garbage in my presence…”

“Oh my god, Julie,” Shannon said, snickering. “It was a joke. I was joking, Jesus… Lighten up.”

“You shouldn’t joke about that,” Julie retorted imperiously. “I heard that stuff is dangerous.”

“From who? Your pastor, or whatever?”

“Yes,” said Julie defensively. “And Principal Hobart and Sister Judith.”

Shannon sighed. “And when was the last time you ever saw any of them smoking weed?”

“Never,” Julie exclaimed, “because it’s illegal and dangerous!”

“Hate to play devil’s advocate,” Shannon said, “but if they’ve never done it, then how do they know that it’s dangerous?”

Julie rounded on her, pink-faced, and shot back, “How do you know that it’s not?!”

Realizing they’d stumbled into argument territory, Shannon straightened up her posture, stood toe-to-toe with her and said, “If you’re accusing me of something, Julie, I’d appreciate it if you just said it to my face.”

“Julie, don’t,” Edie admonished. “Please, please, just don’t. It’s late, we’re all tired and crabby. Let’s just get home, okay?”

More than the new girl’s tragically poor taste in clothes and tomboy-ish manner (contrasted with her almost-paradoxically enviable access to the inner workings of the film industry), Julie narrowed her green eyes and almost instantly figured out what it must actually be that she truly hated most about Shannon: “You smoke it, don’t you.”

Shannon cracked her knuckles, and answered defiantly, “As it so happens, no. I don’t.” She raised her leather-clad forearm and pushed past Julie for emphasis.

Not to be steamrolled, Julie followed and stuck another needle in: “Then why the hell are you so fucking defensive about it?”

“I just don’t see the threat, is all.”

“The threat?” Julie asked with toxic sarcasm. “The threat?! It makes people lazy, smelly, fat, and-and-and… fucking anti-authoritarian!”

“Oh my god, you guys,” Edie exclaimed, “stop fighting, please!”

“She’s right,” Pearl exasperatedly whispered. “We need to keep it down. If we wake up the whole neighborhood, everyone’s gonna know what we did, and our parents will ground us for a year…”

“Well hell,” Shannon said, lowering her voice as she turned around at the wrought-iron gate of the Merrimack household, “I don’t know about all that other creamed corn Julie just decided to puke up, but I’ve been anti-authoritarian since I was five, so I’m pretty sure I don’t need to smoke anything to help me with that.”

Julie put her manicured index finger and beet-red face up in Shannon’s and hissed, “Lose six pounds by August, check your bitchy attitude, stop throwing yourself at Mr. Randolph, and I swear to Christ, if I find out you’re a pothead, you’re off the squad.” She then turned on her heels, opened the gate, and slammed it behind her with a deep, resounding GONG…

Edie and Pearl froze, checking around to see if any neighbors had woken up… but the streets remained quiet and dark as Julie strode to her front door.

In response to the most recent insult, Shannon flipped Julie the middle finger behind her back, grumbling, “Back at you, shitbird,” with the power and intensity of a hex.

Since their respective houses were still along the way, Edie and Pearl nervously followed after Shannon. Between Oleander Drive and Green Street, all three girls kept silent, especially Shannon, who kept her fists balled up in her leather jacket pockets. Edie and Pearl couldn’t stop exchanging glances, as if to ask each other by telepathy what they could say to put that whole conflict behind them and maybe try to all be friends again.

“Not going to lie,” Pearl said quietly, “that movie gives me the heebies sometimes, especially when all those people die… but I’ve seen it four times now… and I’m still mostly okay, I think.”

“Good,” Shannon remarked, not looking back.

Eventually, Edie gently asked, “How are you so… smart, Shannon?”

“Practice and experience,” she replied brusquely.

Attempting to smooth things over, Pearl said softly, “I… I really don’t think she meant to say all that stuff. At least not like that. That was, um… really nasty and mean and rude, how she said it. She was just, um… more likely mad at herself, I think.”

“No,” Shannon said, sighing with an air of nonchalance, “I’m pretty sure she was mad at me… and she definitely meant to say it exactly how she said it.”

“But, Shannon — !”

“ — Otherwise,” Shannon interjected icily, through gritted teeth, “she wouldn’t have fucking said it.”

Edie tried to signal to Pearl to shut up, but the latter continued, “See, I… I think what she meant to do was just, you know… take you to the movie and kind of, well, scare you a little bit with all the… you know, creepy sex and violence and weird stuff, and… you know, just… help you… re-think your life, and maybe… I dunno, make better choices?”

Feeling her stomach twist itself into a pretzel, Edie smacked her forehead and muttered, “Nooooo…”

“‘Make better choices’?” asked Shannon with a butcher-knife’s edge.

“I mean,” Pearl said, giggling nervously, “most of the new recruits Julie took to ‘Multiple Maniacs’ left between the Puke-Eater and the church scene, which are, like, the grossest and weirdest parts, or something. I’m not sure exactly why, but all of the girls we took had really intense reactions to it. Between all that and the nudity and drug stuff, I think… I think they kind of saw it as, like, a wake-up call, and got more committed to fitness and healthy living. It’s kind of funny, really. You’re the first one to actually make it all the way to the end and not… be, you know, scared or sad.”

“Pearl, stop it,” Edie hissed, sensing this was the wrong way down a dark road none of them wanted to ever take in the first place.

“Why did Julie think I should be scared or sad?” Shannon asked coolly. “Don’t interrupt, Edie, I want to know. Really.”

Put on the spot, Pearl finally realized she was walking through a minefield with bare feet. “I don’t know if I —! ”

“ — Tell me… why Julie… tried to scare other girls with that movie. Explain.”

“Well, because… I guess none of the other girls wanted to be… well, you know, fat or slutty or on drugs, so Julie got the idea to show it to them so that they can see what it looks like… and… well, so she, you know, wouldn’t have to say it… the way she said it.”

Shannon stopped in front of her own house and turned on them. “So let me get this straight,” she began quietly, “Julie Merrimack invited me to see ‘Multiple Maniacs’ with you all… just to try to scare me?”

“I mean — !”

“ — Shannon, don’t listen to Pearl, I hadn’t seen it either, I had NO IDEA — !”

“ — Because apparently Julie,” Shannon continued in a procedural fashion, “thinks I’m bitchy and fat, and not-typical-girly-enough to hang out with on my own… and yet… also, somehow, just slutty enough that I’m either going to sell my body for sex, fall prey to some horrible addiction, or else get raped by a giant lobster puppet? Only she’s too much of a cowardly cunt to be honest about not wanting me around and just kick me off the squad already because I clearly make her uncomfortable? Do I have that right?”

“Wait,” Pearl said, looking very confused and alarmed. “That… ugly lobster-monster-thing on top of Divine… was a puppet?!”

“Not the point, Pearl,” Edie admonished.

“Well, okay, but you don’t have to worry, Shannon,” Pearl said. “She totally can’t kick you off the squad yet.”

“Pearl, goddamn it…”

“I mean, it’s just bluster—PMS, or something—my point is, she can’t kick you off the squad.”

“No, she can’t,” Edie concurred. “And she won’t. It’s not her decision, anyway, so she shouldn’t have said so. Especially since you didn’t do anything wrong. Right?”

“Yet…” Shannon shook her head ruefully. “It’s only matter of time, isn’t it. She’s waiting for fall tryouts. Find some freshmen or sophomores to kick around, right? Try to use that movie to make them feel shitty about themselves, and then either use that self-righteous church-guilt to make them hate their bodies, hate their womanhood, or else puke creamed corn on them when it doesn’t fucking work… because any sane grade school kid can tell you that ‘Multiple Maniacs’ is just… too fucking silly… to ever be taken seriously. By anyone with half a brain.”

“Well, I mean, that’s your opinion, but actually — ”

“—And the worst, most shameful part in all of this bullshit,” Shannon continued, “is that, when that time comes for Julie Merrimack to puke creamed corn on those poor unsuspecting girls — !”

“ — Can you please stop talking about puke— ?”

“ — Both of you fucking traitors are going to stand there and let her, because I’ll bet you a hundred dollars she did the same fucking thing to you, didn’t she. Yeah, I saw you freak out and run to the bathroom during the church scene, Edie, that’s no fucking excuse. I’ll bet she made you both fucking miserable with either that movie or something like it, and only bonded with you over your shared misery, and that’s the only way any of you know how to make friends, because misery fucking loves company. Doesn’t it.”

Feeling intense anguish from her head to her toes, and desirous to make it stop, Edie stepped between them and put her hands up in surrender. “Shannon, I’m really, really sorry about everything that’s happened,” she said weakly. “I mean it, I had NO IDEA what was going on, all Julie said was that you definitely needed to see that movie, I didn’t know why, I swear, and I’m sorry, okay? I just want us all to get past that and be friends again…”

“How dare you?” Shannon asked. “How dare you act like we were ever friends in the goddamned first place?”

Pearl looked hurt. “Shannon — !”

“ — Shut up,” Shannon hissed. “At least I’m honest enough to tell you to your face that I am NOT your fucking friend. And you can stop defending that cowardly cunt, Julie, because guess what? She’s not your fucking friend, either. If you think I give two flying rat turds what either of you or Julie thinks about me, then go jam your rosary beads up each others’ asses.”

“Shannon!”

“And you can even tell Julie I said that… if you’ve got the stones!”

She flipped them twin middle fingers, and they both felt the sting of it in their eyeballs. Nothing they could say could change her mind as she stormed to her family’s garage. It was said and done.

“Think Julie’s going to do it?” asked Pearl, emotionally injured. “Try to kick her off the squad? Think Mr. Randolph will go along with it?”

“Shut up,” Edie begged. “Please, just shut up already…”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Shannon’s parents were out, again. The garage was still empty, save for her father’s collection of fake eyeballs and wax severed appendages. At least this time, they left a note in the kitchen:

Honey, we’re on the studio lot until very, very late tonight— there’s TV dinners in the freezer, but we still haven’t replenished the bamboo box yet, very sorry. Try not to stay up later than us, and we’ll bring you back a souvenir. Love you! Mom and Dad

Shannon tried not to miss them too much. She figured that once she finally worked up the nerve to leave California for New York, she’d miss them desperately if she allowed herself to. At least in New York, everything was real, versus the overly-pristine smoke-and-mirrors of the West Coast she’d known her whole life. She’d been saving up her allowance and lawn-mowing money for almost two years, and kept that $200 in her piggy bank by her bedside, right under her Ramones poster. She imagined meeting them somewhere in the Bowery, maybe after a show at CBGB’s, maybe saving them from an alley-street-fight with real punks in real steel-toed boots, drinking real beer with her idolized band, becoming real friends with them, and then maybe — just maybe — losing her virginity to them or someone in their orbit in some dingy, graffiti-splattered bathroom. It would be exciting, she thought, because it would be real — spontaneous, earned, and not in any way prearranged with a handshake or a phone-call. In a moment of temptation, she popped the cork out of that little pig and teased out a crumpled fistful of singles and fives. Then she went to the kitchen, picked up the telephone and dialed a familiar number, counting out the bills as she waited for a response.

“Hello?” said a boy’s voice over the line, sounding slightly irritable.

“Hey, Liam? It’s me, Shannon.”

“Oh hey,” he said, voice brightening ever so slightly. “How’s it going?”

“Shitty,” she answered.

“Sounds cheerful,” he replied with a sarcastic groan. “Fuck, what time is it?”

“Does it matter?”

“I mean, if I’m going to sleep until noon, as usual, I should probably be asleep by midnight and get a solid twelve… and, fuck me, it’s almost 2am. Shit, three fucking bowls all by my lonesome, and I’m never going to get to sleep, am I.”

“You can sleep when you’re dead,” she riposted. “I need a favor.”

“What kind of favor?”

Shannon finished counting out her savings, and sighed. “You holding?”

“You know it,” he answered. “Got some Thailand Express, Lebanese Purple, Acapulco Gold, Alaskan Thunderfuck, AK-47, KGB, none of which is helping me sleep apparently, but which is all nonetheless fucking delicious, especially the AK-47— how much do you need?”

Remembering Julie Merrimack’s beet-red, green-eyed, hateful face, Shannon absently muttered, “Enough to burn the rancid taste of cheerleader puke out of my mouth.”

After a moment, a dumbfounded Liam asked, “Do I… want to know?”

Her flat reply was an emphatic, “No.”

“Okay, none of my beeswax, got it,” he said. “Since you sound like you’ve had a rough night, I’ll hook you up for thirty — sound good?”

She sighed again. “As long as it gets me to stop giving a damn about shit that doesn’t actually matter…”

“That, it definitely should. Meet me at the gas station, or…?”

“Nah, fuck that,” she said, “I just got back in from The Nick.”

“Really? What’s playing?”

“Put it to you like this,” she began in the way she usually started her complex jokes. “You ever seen ‘Two Thousand Maniacs’?”

“No?”

“Good, then you’re gonna love ‘Multiple Maniacs,’ which is what they’ve actually got. I guess they couldn’t get ‘Desperate Living’ or ‘Pink Flamingos.’”

Momentarily unsure of how to respond, Liam asked, “That, uh… that good, huh?”

“No, but it’s fucking hilarious in spite of how bad it is. You can come on over here, I’ll let you in through the back and maybe tell you all about it once I’m good and properly stoned.”

“About ‘Pink Flamingos’?”

“No, no, ‘Multiple Maniacs,’” Shannon corrected. “And now that I think of it, that one seems better for John Waters virgins, because trust me, buddy, as your friend, no matter how gutsy you might think you are, I can assure you that you are definitely NOT ready for ‘Pink Flamingos’ and I’m not even close to ready to explain that one to you…”

Liam cackled on the other end, and then asked, “Your parents asleep, or out at work?”

“That second thing. Hell, they might even be passed out at work, for all I know, or crashed out in somebody’s trailer...”

“They won’t be mad if we, uh, partake a little?”

“Please,” Shannon scoffed. “If Mom and Dad gave a shit about me smoking, they’d tell me. Not that they ever would, since they smoke, too. Their stash is apparently empty, so I thought to myself, ‘Self, who do I know who’s usually got the hook-up? Oh yeah, Liam-fucking-Berkeley, that’s who. Here’s hoping he’s still awake so I can give him my money and get higher than a fucking kite.’”

“Well, thank you ever so much for your generosity and your business, Shannon. It’s a good thing I wasn’t asleep. Tell you what, I’ll even throw in a little extra for your folks, and maybe help them out, too?”

Realizing this arrangement wasn’t going to set her back as much as she feared, Shannon sighed and declared, “You’re a fucking saint, buddy…”

(NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.)

Former NCO Amos Kingfisher pulled his dusty cowboy hat down over his eyes, and then sat on the top-most step of his thick wooden porch with a nice, cold beer and proceeded to light a cigarette. He had every intention of cleaning his modified M21, which silently rested with its kit on the swinging bench behind him, but instead he got distracted blowing smoke rings, savoring the grassy taste of hops on his tongue, and meditatively watching lizards on the sun-baked rocks, until he saw the familiar dark green coupe pulling up off the road and rolling up the gravel path to his ranch house that Saturday afternoon. The front bumper of the visiting car bore a sticker that read: “Jesus is coming… and, boy, is he pissed!”

Amos didn’t know the twitchy girl with the moon-face who exited the passenger-side, but he almost immediately recognized the grizzled, gray-bearded driver as his former squad-mate, Sgt. Kennedy Holofernes.

“Long time, no see, Ken,” Amos said, waving his beer can in greeting, and then dragging on the cigarette.

“Same to you, Amos,” replied (reluctantly former) Sgt. Holofernes. He gestured to the girl, adding, “This here’s my boy’s daughter, Sienna.”

“Ma’am,” Amos said, half-smiling and tipping his hat toward her with the cigarette still between his fingers. “What brings you two out this way? Supplies? Training?”

“Training’s over,” Sgt. Holofernes said gravely, moving in closer. “The grays are back.”

Amos nearly coughed up his mouth-full of beer, but forced himself to swallow and then shot his friend a pants-shittingly terrified look. “No way.”

“Yes, way.”

“How — ?”

“ — They went after her and her friends,” Sgt. Holofernes said, gesturing to his granddaughter again. “Last week. And if they’re so brazen as to go after a bunch of teenagers in Santa Clarita, at least one of whom is my flesh and blood, then it stands to reason that you and me are probably next.”

“Fucking shit-balls.” Amos pitched his cigarette into the gravel, chugged his beer and rose to his flip-flop-clad feet. “You packing?”

“Eight pistols between us,” reported Sgt. Holofernes, “and a shotty.”

“That’s a start,” Amos replied, “but I can tell you right now, we’re gonna need a lot more than that. Pull the car around back so we can empty it out, then lock it up with the jeep in the barn. When you’re done and you got all your belongings, meet me in the kitchen so we can get some sandwiches before stepping into my ‘office’…”

***************************************************************************

In the kitchen — alternating between making sandwiches and hurling knives at a wall-mounted target — was a sultry woman with rose-gold hair in a thick, neat braid, and glittering rings on each finger. She looked pristine and classy, like she’d sauntered out of a noir film and was trying to blend in with modern-day fashion via crystals, leather and polyester; regrettably, she couldn’t quite blend in, because while Amos somehow managed to get the lady out of the noir, he couldn’t seem to get the noir out of the lady no matter how hard he tried. Like finely-sculpted granite, her exterior never seemed to crack, not even when he affectionately put his arms around her.

“And this,” he announced, kissing her cheek before letting her go, “is my soul-mate, Tiffany. Darling, this is Sgt. Holofernes, and his granddaughter, Sienna.”

“One of my favorite colors,” Tiffany remarked, offering to shake Sienna’s hand first. “Very desert-y…”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Kingfisher,” Sienna muttered.

“Oh, honey, I hate to break it to you, but…” Tiffany giggled and gestured to Amos. “‘Mrs. Kingfisher’ is his mother. Call me Tiffany, or, if you really want to be nice to me, call me Miss Otis-Tripp.”

“Miss — ?”

“ — Tiffany Otis-Tripp,” she repeated, enunciating each word and grinning pearls.

“Met her at the Tropicana,” Amos said to Sgt. Holofernes with a wink, before turning to Sienna and adding, “She used to be a showgirl. In Vegas.”

“As opposed to what, Atlantic City?” asked Tiffany, smirking. Seeing Sgt. Holofernes raising a quizzical bushy eyebrow at their antics, Tiffany composed herself and saluted him. “Sergeant, it’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir.”

“Ma’am,” replied Sgt. Holofernes, saluting back before appraisingly surveying her knives sticking out of the target on the wall. He then addressed Sienna: “Looks like this one could teach you a thing or two about self-defense, young lady.”

“Sir, I don’t think that’s a good idea, sir,” Sienna mumbled nervously, imagining the absolute worst-case scenario of having another fit and coming to after accidentally having stabbed him in the face with a stray knife…

“Sir,” Tiffany said, following Sienna’s lead, “with permission, I’m more than willing to teach your granddaughter some valuable life-skills, sir.”

“We’ll cross that bridge after we agree on the next steps,” Amos said, taking a sandwich. He pointed to a thick steel door with imposing rivets, and added quietly, “My ‘office’…?”

“Lead on.”

***************************************************************************

To Sienna’s shock and awe, her grandfather’s former squad-mate practically plastered his basement walls with all manner of Doomsday paraphernalia — a giant spiraling timeline of war articles, official-looking photos and dossiers, local, state and world news reports of seemingly unrelated fires, floods, poisonings, bombings, and other disasters, both man-made and force majeur — all threaded through with red and green lengths of yarn. Most of these threads connected to identified photos of politicians, current and former soldiers, cult leaders and suspected government agents — a lot of them potentially having connections to the assassinations of Mahatma Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and, most recently, some Muslim cleric in Paris, whose name she couldn’t pronounce — but occasionally to photos with questionable names, if not the singular Question Mark (“?”) itself… She couldn’t help following them while the two older men opened various boxes and gun racks, talking tactics and other business.

“Looks like Pendleton came through for you, again,” marveled Sgt. Holofernes as the two men perused Amos’ extensive collection of rifles and submachine guns, as well as their respective boxes of ammunition.

“Well, more like my associate at the armory did,” Amos replied, displaying a shoebox full of grenades. “Honestly, can you believe those cheap fuckers in D.C. only pay him and six other guys five dollars an hour to count — by hand — each and every little piece of ordnance, even down to the last unexploded grenade, over and over, day in and day out? Not only is that enough to drive a man absolutely bug-nut… but five measly dollars? Hell, with prices being what they still are, that’s not nearly enough scratch to feed their wives and kids, man.”

“It could always be worse, at least until the army ships their asses off to the next big conflict,” Sgt. Holofernes quipped, looking through the scope of a sniper rifle. “I mean, hell, you think five dollars is bad? Wait till they turn around and make the WAC remnants do it for two-fifty…”

Amos chuckled. “That, they would, the cheap fuckers… although try not to say that shit around Tiffany, lest she take it personally. Her mama was a WAVE, served in the Pacific — get me?”

“Got that,” Sgt. Holofernes said, “but why the… shoebox?”

“My associate had to smuggle them out two at a time in his pockets,” Amos said, unveiling a grenade launcher. “You don’t even want to know what he had to do to get this puppy outta there…”

“Sweet Christ on a cracker…”

“The way I figure,” Amos continued, “at some point in the next week at least, we’re probably gonna have to booby-trap the house.”

“Really?”

“Yep. We place this sucker on a trip-wire hooked up to the front door, pointing down the stairs, so we can either scare them shitless, choke them out with smoke and shrapnel, or bomb their asses to Kingdom Come before they can breach this emergency shelter.”

“This is an emergency shelter?”

“You bet your ass it is,” Amos said, turning on a light, revealing an underground hallway. “We got water, beds, two johns with piping all the way out to the desert. On top of that, once that door’s sealed up, we’ve got enough canned food, pills, medical supplies and beer to last us a good two or three years, tops.”

Sienna eventually followed the green line of yarn to two images — one of a portly man with dark curly hair, whose name card was inscribed with, “Red Clover Lab??? — Shellshock, 09/29/78 19:19HRS” and the other of her family’s doctor, Angus Basil, whose name card only read, “Drunk Canuck — Shellshock, 09/29/78 19:10HRS” “Wait,” she started, before turning to her grandfather and asking, “Sir, what’s Dr. Basil doing here, sir?”

Amos’ eyes bugged out and he strode up to her with renewed suspicion. “Wait, wait, wait, missy… you mean to tell me you actually know that man?” he inquired, pointing to Dr. Basil’s photo.

Sienna wasn’t prepared to be put on the spot so soon, especially by a strange man she had just met that day. Her grandfather caught up and got a look at the photo before saying, “That’s Dr. Basil. Local physician. He’s been seeing us for years.”

Amos rounded on Sgt. Holofernes and continued, “And just what the hell was he talking to a goddamn Red Clover lab tech for?”

“Who the hell knows? Doctor-stuff?”

Amos pointed to the photo of the lab tech and said, “That pudgy fuck ain’t a goddamn doctor. My buddy, Jim Walker, at the camera shop? Jim followed his ass from Red Clover Labs to the Shellshock bar last night and caught these two sharing beers and jawing together. Do you even know what Red Clover does, man?”

Before Sgt. Holofernes could get out a simple “no,” Amos Kingfisher reached up and pulled on a string, unveiling from the ceiling a rolling screen patched up with an addendum to his modern Doomsday references —a list of nine corporate entity names. At the very top of the list were “Dow Chemical,” “U.S. Rubber Company,” and “Monsanto Company” (with five other names below that Sgt. Holofernes didn’t recognize), but right smack in the middle was “Red Clover Laboratories (bought Syntex Agribusiness 02/23/72).”

“All of these corporations,” Amos said of the list, “contracted with the U.S. government to develop and weaponize Agent Orange, Ken! That toxic shit killed and injured a helluva lot of Vietnamese, regardless of whether they were VC or civilians… and also our goddamn brothers-in-arms who got caught in the cross-contamination! Hell, Jim’s still got breathing problems after he was exposed in ‘73, man…” He pointed back to the photograph of Dr. Basil and concluded, “So why the hell is this drunk bastard, who you tell me is a goddamn medical doctor… talking to a facilitator of chemical goddamn warfare?!”

Sienna froze in horror, trying to recall her panicked, terrifying visit to Dr. Basil’s clinical office the week before, her corporeal body lying sideways on his exam table — alternating between crying, screaming and vomiting before Dr. Basil ordered her to be sent to the local hospital — while her mind’s eye raced around Annecy Woodland’s backyard, attempting to count the men in gray suits, trying to figure out how to save Liam from getting shot before going supernova on everyone present, herself included… She knew that something had been done to her brain that day. But was it Liam, the love of her life, who had done this to her? The men in gray? Or was Amos on to something — was it, in fact, Dr. Basil all along, who’d been the family’s doctor ever since she could remember, and who bore some responsibility for this? What had he even done to her before sending her to the hospital? How could she know for certain? Who could she trust? Had anyone else at the pool party who survived… experienced similar symptoms to hers? Or was she just going crazy? Regardless, those awful words — “chemical goddamn warfare” — reverberated fatefully throughout her conscious mind, in her grandfather’s and Amos’ combined voices, eventually quieting down to whispers, but pointedly NOT going away… How could they go away? Where were they even expected to go?

“So that’s it, then,” said Sgt. Holofernes with resignation. “We can’t leave, can we.”

“I do not recommend it, no.”

“Your, uh, better-half — ?”

“ — She knows the dangers just as well as I do,” Amos said, hoisting the grenade launcher. “And mark my words, Ken, if I’m right, this is just the fucking tip of the ice-berg. Since we have no earthly idea how deep this shit goes, or just how many are involved, we need to arm the fuck up for whatever’s coming next…”

(NO AI TRAINING: Without in any way limiting the author’s exclusive rights under copyright, any use of this publication to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.)

Officer Nathan Jessup, lean and reedy, lay on his back in the squad car’s rear passenger seat, his off-white-socked feet up and dangling out of one open window, exhaling thick clouds of smoke out the other, and gently twirling the hand-rolled joint between his fingers in silence. His quietude helped him contemplate the circumstances of his existence thus far, and also to keep his mouth shut, because, after five years of service in the Santa Clarita Police Department, he knew better than to mess with his partner during his mid-day key bumps.

Officer Emery Ongaro, a stout lion of a man, carefully peeled open his latest prize — a little bag of white powder — then flipped open his little red pocketknife and scooped out a blade-full. He tasted an index-dusting of it, then brought the blade to his left nostril, closed his right with his thumb and inhaled sharply. His lungs no doubt newly invigorated, and in all likelihood feeling his heart and major arteries speeding up his bloodflow, Ongaro then slid his left index finger along the little knife’s blade and savored the dusty remains.

He’d often tell ladies in town that he’d been an eagle scout in high school, which was how he supposedly earned that knife, but Jessup also overheard him bragging to the chief about knowing a guy in South Carolina who made knock-offs for cheap — so who could really say?

“That Donder kid’s got the hook-up, I tell you what,” Ongaro said. “That’s some good fuckin’ shit, right there. Way better than that rotten dime-bag crap…”

Jessup, meanwhile, was thousands of miles away. It occurred to him that, when they were first assigned together in the spring of 1973, both he and Ongaro bonded over a small number of commonalities — both men were California transplants (he from Alabama, Ongaro from Texas), with shared interests in football, law enforcement, guns, and, in their off-duty hours, beer and “Southern history.” But the singularly thorniest deviation of their commonalities was their stark differences in opinion about the Vietnam War…

Jessup, being skinny as a jesus lizard and yet healthy as a gila monster, had been drafted right out of high school and shipped off to three different places whose names he had trouble pronouncing for three separate tours each. He’d seen battle on multiple occasions, with squad-mates and leaders alike cut down in their 20s and 30s… Unfortunately, he’d also seen a hideous pink-skinned soldier pick over the victims of a village their company had just attacked, cutting off farmers’ ears to wear on an equally hideous necklace of flesh… Jessup saw men and women tortured in two different Firebases as revenge for U.S. POWs… Worst of all, on his first “caffeine pill test” (for which Uncle Sam paid him exactly fifty dollars and a tin of chocolate), Jessup wound up doing exactly as his fellow test subjects — stripped himself naked, tried to roll around in the shrubs and dirt outside to get the little purple mites off his body, and then bore witness to what he was convinced was an enormous golden turtle, looming high up in the air, glaring down at him in judgment with wide blue eyes, weaving between seaweed-undulating trees near the river, glowing menacingly as it went before dissipating in haze of microscopic bubbles and vanishing…

In short, and in the closest approximate clinical terms, Jessup had seen some shit — a lot of it being horrible enough that the only way to begin to contemplate it from a place of emotional security was to bake himself out of his own skull. Thankfully, the Fear could be largely dulled with marijuana, and in doing so, Jessup was hopeful that such meditations would eventually help him along on his path to becoming something of a man of peace.

By contrast, Ongaro was a “fortunate son,” as they said… The second son of a sheriff, who himself came from a long line of sheriffs dating back to the 1840s, Emery’s father somehow managed to get a doctor to diagnose the 18-year-old as having bone spurs in his hips, and, as a consequence, he never even received a draft card. The way he told it, Ongaro made a good show of patriotism, repeatedly insisting that the Vietnamese “deserved everything they got,” and claiming to absolutely hate his father for having pulled Emery out of a valiant “soldier’s life” overseas… at least until the day that Jessup walked in on his partner talking to his father over the telephone. He remembered Ongaro clearly saying, in soft and loving tones, “Thanks again for the wire, Daddy, it’ll really keep the landlady happy for the next six months. I love you and Momma so much, you know that, right?” and that was the exact moment that Jessup realized Ongaro was a fucking phony. His partner, Jessup now knew, was nothing but a spoiled rich boy, despite his 34 years on this earth, who wasn’t hurting for money or comfort or losing battles with hunger and table-diving in the diners while off-duty, and yet who had absolutely no qualms about stealing a little bag of cocaine out of another spoiled rich boy’s candy-red Camaro, proudly proclaiming to take it as “evidence,” only to almost immediately start consuming it as his own, snorting that powder off his little knife like a hog in shit…

Jessup took one last hit off the joint in his fingers and giggled in spite of himself, spoiling the smoke ring he tried to blow, but not caring about it anymore. Why should he? Why care about anything at all? Instead, his skinny lungs contracted repeatedly, snickering at the absurdity of their wild and twisted five years together, and he muttered, “Rich eating the rich…”

Up in the driver’s seat, Ongaro finished the bag off with a joyful snort, and Jessup absolutely lost it, doubling over with cough-laughing and slapping his thighs.

“Good lord, Jessup, I cannot understand why you smoke that dirty crap…” Ongaro added, as if to actually wound his partner, “Makes you lazy.”

The joint was, in fact, dead, so Jessup stubbed it out and threw it out the window over his head, adding slowly and deliberately, “I’m… thinking…”

“You’re too high off your damned gourd to think! Come on, get the hell up already and drink some coffee! We got another four hours monitoring this damn speed trap!”

Slowly stretching his limbs and sitting upright, Jessup said gingerly, “Partner, you really, really oughta think about easing up on that snow… especially since I’m pretty sure that kid’s daddy ain’t gonna be too happy that you pulled him over, ticketed him and stole that bag outta his glove box, too.”

“It’s goddamn evidence!” Ongaro said, defensively. “For all we know, that damned kid likely stole it first, which is more scandalous, if you ask me. And you can take it from me, ain’t no way him or his daddy gonna make a big stink about something they’d rather not have in the local paper. Besides, you’re one to talk…”

“What?”

Ongaro spat out of his open driver’s side window. “Don’t act all innocent, or like you’re better than me, or nothing! Especially not after this very morning, when I saw you — with my own two eyes — hit up those other high school kids for their rotten dime-bag crap… which you just smoked.”

It was true that as they passed by a gas station that morning, in a moment of weakness, Jessup found himself pressuring a sandy-haired boy with wide blue eyes into handing over his unconcealed dime-bag. It was even more shameful that the boy’s moon-faced girlfriend looked on with sad brown doe-eyes, as if to ask, How can you do this to us, Mr. Policeman? What did we ever do to you? Ongaro wasn’t wrong to bring it up, as it was surely the most sinful thing Jessup had ever done that week. But what Ongaro hadn’t heard from the driver’s seat of the squad-car was Jessup stage-whispering to the boy and girl, “Look, kids, my partner saw you waving that thing around, so I gotta say something. It’s my job, y’see? So tell you what, if you hand over just half of what you’re holding, I’ll let you two go with a warning.” The sandy-haired boy shrugged and handed Jessup the dime-bag, then put his long, pink fingers up in the air, indicating the agreement was sealed. Even though Jessup put on a show of his own, sternly shaking his finger at both kids and warning them not to be “pushing or dealing” around there again, he liked to think that hopefully those two kids had enough left for themselves after giving him the single dime-bag, at least so his conscience might theoretically win out in the end.

Instead of sharing any of this with Ongaro, however, Jessup just shrugged and said, “Ain’t saying nothing like that. Just… be careful, is all.”

“I AM careful,” Ongaro insisted, tossing the used cocaine bag out the driver’s side window. “Now, get your ass up here! This VASCAR ain’t gonna monitor itself! Get, get! I ain’t no hare, and you ain’t no tortoise, is you?”

‘Tortoise’ is just another fancy word for… Jessup hated thinking of the golden turtle, but swallowed back his own bile and answered, “No, I ain’t…”

*************************************************************************

After about 25 minutes of watching cars breeze through the speed trap at under 55 miles per hour, the dime-bag weed decided to start kicking in. As the sun blazed outside, and Ongaro practically soaked his uniform with sweat from shadow-boxing a cactus, Jessup sat cozy in the squad car’s passenger seat and suddenly felt as though he were submerged in a fish tank, every inch of his body cool and calm, waiting and ready to handle whatever threat might rear its Moray eel face…

He’d once seen a Moray eel eat a fish whole while scuba-diving, and it terrified him almost as much as the demonic soldier with the necklace of ears. But, unlike that soldier, Moray eels were, in fact, humble creatures of the earth, and, dangerous as they could be, their existence was indeed comprehensible.

Pickup truck? No Moray.

Chevrolet? No Moray.

Volkswagen? No Moray.

Suddenly, a beat-up gray van went tearing down the road at what must have been at least 70 miles per hour, and Ongaro’s hat flew off his head, sending him scurrying to fetch it out of the nearby ditch. VASCAR confirmed “77 MPH” in bold red lights. Jessup could feel a school of Moray eels twisting and writhing around his ankles, trying to crawl up his pant legs. He opened his mouth and shouted, “Gray van! Gray van! Go, go, go!”

Ongaro practically fell over himself scrambling back to the squad car and shoving his bulky body into the driver’s seat again.

“Gray van!” Jessup gasped, pointing. “Going 77!”

“Hot damn!” Ongaro shouted, stepping on the gas. The squad car roared down the road, Jessup activating the sirens to keep other cars away as Ongaro caught up to the gray van. “Got you now, you sumbitch!”

Jessup took the speaker microphone in hand, but before he could instruct the van to pull over, the driver swerved violently, stepped on the gas again and popped one of its rear tires, sending a plume of noxious, smoking rubber at the squad car. Neither Jessup nor Ongaro were fast enough to crank their windows back up before the skunky odor polluted their nostrils.

Ongaro gripped the steering wheel with white-knuckled rage and snarled, “You’re gonna get it, pig-shit!”

“What the hell, man?” Jessup started, before his partner smacked the front of the squad car into the back of the van and sent it spinning off the road and into a telephone pole engine-first with a loud

CRASH!!!

It sat there, smoking and silent.

“Jesus… Christ!” Jessup yelped.

Ongaro wiped his nose on his wrist and snorted, “That’ll teach ‘im.”

“Emery… what the fuck did you have to go and hit him for, man?”

“Safety.” The answer simultaneously perplexed and terrified Jessup — either he was so high out of his mind that he misheard his partner’s response to the question, or else Ongaro was so high out of his mind that he couldn’t be trusted with a pocketknife, much less a moving vehicle… and even less a service weapon that, for the moment, remained holstered on his belt. As Jessup’s gaze shifted between his partner and the crashed gray van, Ongaro added, “I saw it on the Autobahn, to keep crazy drivers off the road. Trust me, man, police do this shit all the time in Germany, and its one of the safest countries on the planet.”

In that moment, Jessup thought to ask — no, to demand to know — why the hell Emery Ongaro would ever have need to go to Germany, watching their police start car wrecks on purpose, and speak so highly of a nation that was still in the process of atoning for unspeakable acts of evil committed less than forty years prior, but he felt his right eye twitching, which meant the Fear was coming on, again. His mind was flooded with reminders of the men he’d served with overseas, the ones with barren heads and swastikas on their chests, who killed anything that moved, or didn’t answer in English, or else so much as looked at them funny… And, as the Fear was wont to do, these reminders were then followed by paranoid thoughts of Ongaro, perhaps, NOT being the man that Jessup first thought he was… perhaps demanding loyalty demonstrated by silence… perhaps losing his cool if Jessup somehow displeased him with whatever answer came, with Ongaro then unholstering his service weapon and offing the only witness to his crime… Instead of giving voice to any of these world-shattering, Moral-eel-slithering terrors, thankfully, Jessup swallowed and turned his gaze to the crashed gray van, almost wishing it would bleed more than just plumes of smoke and broken glass. “Think he’s still alive?” he asked with no small amount of trepidation.

“He damn well better be,” Ongaro said, throwing open the driver’s side door and getting out his nightstick. “I ain’t done with that punk, yet!”

Lord, forgive us, Jessup thought, carefully exiting the passenger-side door.

Just as they started approaching the van, a spherical object was thrown out of its driver’s-side window, falling to the asphalt with a stream of broken glass. It was a severed head, bleeding into its long, light-brown hair, spilling out over the road and glass shards.

Something inside the van growled…

Jessup stared at the severed head bleeding onto the asphalt and had a flashback to a nasty fight in the jungles where his commanding officer got beheaded by someone in the dead of night, viscous red oozing into the dark earth. He could feel his own sweat bleeding into the air, and found himself thinking, Meet the new enemy — same as the old enemy… What he uttered instead was, “What the fucking hell…?!?!”

“Police!” Ongaro shouted, nightstick in one hand as he reached for his pistol with the other. “Come out with your hands up, shitheel!”

The thing inside snarled low but loud, cornered.

“Y’all better not be dog lovers, or nothing,” Ongaro taunted, “‘cuz one false move, and I guarantee you Rover’s gonna meet his fucking maker! You hear me, punk?!”

“Emery?”

“What?!”

“We need to back off, man,” Jessup whispered. “Seriously.”

“Why?!”

“I’m getting the Fear, man!”

“Fuck your goddamn ‘Fear,’ man!” Ongaro spat, his face sweating and demon-red, the coke having consumed him, body and soul. “Fuck it right up it’s hoo — !”

The van’s back doors burst open violently and its windows and steel closures shattered. Out of the back leaped a sickly-yellow, vaguely-humanoid creature with long, bony limbs and a monstrous hump on its back. Its eyes were wide and gangrenous, almost reptilian, and it ferally howled a blood-curdling roar from its angular mouth-part.

Ongaro finished with a scream of his own — “HaAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” — and began firing wildly at it.

Whether or not any of the shots hit the creature, Jessup couldn’t tell — he almost immediately turned tail and ran pell-mell down the road as it proceeded to leap at his partner with long, jagged claws. No point in attempting a complex task like driving with every nerve in his body firing wildly in panic-mode — Jessup needed to hide, to collect himself, to breathe… and maybe even to vomit, if it came to that. Clouds passed overhead, casting ominous blue shadows upon the terrain, as his eye twitched uncontrollably. The Fear unceremoniously cast him back into those foreign jungles in 1968, fresh out of high school, hopelessly lost, alone, praying not to die — shots firing around him and the earth exploding behind him, with airstrikes landing where his physical presence had been not more than 10 minutes prior, scared for his life… And then, thankfully, he found himself diving over a log and wound up in a dusty ditch outside of Santa Clarita in 1978… no longer a knobby-kneed high-school dropout, but a 28-year-old man with promise, and a career, and the vague yet tantalizing hint of a possibility of contributing more to the world than just going through the simple motions of living. And also, crucially, he had a department-issued pistol of his own, and the world was his oyster!

After a few tense moments, drinking the refreshing oxygen into his nose and mouth and lungs, the Divine Madness gave way to something resembling clarity. The yellow skin… the wide blueish-green eyes… the hump on its back… and all at once, he realized, The Golden Turtle! The one that swam through the jungle trees like enormous kelp, judging him from on high, before vanishing into death-stinking mist! Either that terrifying thing had followed him back to the States from Vietnam and the desert had sickened it… or else it had bred, and its malnourished offspring had come looking for revenge!

“Lord God,” Jessup whispered desperately, “damn my filthy, miserable soul for all the shit I’ve seen and couldn’t stop… Do whatever you want to my cowardly ass when this is all over, but please, please, please spare my idiot partner, who weren’t there and don’t know no better. Amen.”

He heard howling and roaring behind the log, but couldn’t distinguish which sounds belonged to Ongaro… followed by a sticky squelch and a yelp! Imagining taking aim at the thing’s head and putting a bullet straight through its skull, Jessup readied his pistol and then rose up, aiming over the log on the side of the ditch. To his momentary relief, Ongaro was sitting upright on the asphalt. After gingerly approaching, Jessup saw that the creature was nowhere in sight.

“Where’s it at?”

“Dunno,” Ongaro answered, breathing heavy and coughing. “Throat punched it... Ran off crying…”

Doing his due diligence, Jessup followed his pistol to the crashed van, making sure the monster wasn’t hiding in there, licking its own wounds. Looking in through the open back and the passenger-side windows, all he saw was the one body, its clawed-up overalls falling off in places, its head having been torn off at the base of the skull, chunks of flesh missing and exposing the bloody bones underneath… But, thankfully, no monster.

“Thank you, Jesus,” Jessup muttered, holstering his pistol. “Just one body in there!” Returning to his partner, he saw Ongaro nursing a series of nasty-looking gashes — no doubt claw and bite-marks — weeping all over his face, hands and forearms, with a scattered few on his shoulders and chest. “Holy mother of god, Emery, we need to get you to a hospital!”

“No!” Ongaro whimpered, recoiling. “No, no, no, no…”

“Sweet Jesus, those cuts look deep, man,” Jessup said, helping him to stand, “you seriously need medical attention!”

“No,” Ongaro insisted, pointing at the trunk of the squad car, “first aid… first aid kit!”

“Emery, I mean it, you need a doctor! Stitches! Some shot or other!”

“First aid! No hospital!”

“Man,” Jessup moaned helplessly, wishing they weren’t so far away from Dr. Basil’s clinic, “I weren’t no medic! I don’t know nothing ‘bout any first aid!”

Gnashing his teeth as the pain finally caught up with him, Ongaro grabbed Jessup by his collar and snarled in his face, “I ain’t going to no hospital till the goddamn powder wears off! Get the damn kit in the trunk… then call in the body and van… while I use the goddamn kit, you sorry sumbitch!”

Jessup’s head swam through quicksand as the automatic pilot in his brain switched on, and hurriedly followed his partner’s instructions — got the kit, called in the vehicle and corpse, and then desperately tried to remember how to perform the motions to drive the squad car back to headquarters — only to wait for backup to arrive and help process the crime scene.

“We need to get it straight,” Ongaro muttered in the passenger-seat, applying bandages to his isoprophyl alcohol-soaked cuts.

“What? The bandages?”

“NO!” Ongaro snapped. “Our story! We need to get our goddamn story straight, for crissakes…”

Jessup started to say, “I told them… about the van… and the body, but…”

“Van was speeding,” Ongaro said, pointing at the road to indicate its path. “Seventy-miles-per-hour — !”

“ — VASCAR said it was seventy-seven,” Jessup noted, picturing the red numbers in his mind’s eye.

“Exactly,” Ongaro agreed without skipping a beat, “seventy-seven-miles-per-hour, which… is…”

“Twenty-two?” asked Jessup.

“Twenty-two miles over the speed limit, which is a crime,” Ongaro lectured, some of his unpatched gashes still weeping. “We pursued, as was our duty…” Pointing at the crashed van, he added, “Dumb shitheel hit the phone-post over there… and the driver decapitated himself. End of story.”

“But,” Jessup started, “what about the — !”

“ — Weren’t nothing else about it.”

“But, what even was that — ?”

“ — Nothing, you dumb-ass!” Ongaro snarled. “It weren’t nothing… And, even if it was, ain’t no sane man would ever believe it, so there ain’t no goddamn point in trying… For all anyone knows, you just got hysterical on that dime-bag crap and HALLUCINATED that shit!”

“But… then, how’d you get all slashed up?”

“Reaching in the driver’s side window,” Ongaro answered, pointing to the van’s blood-spattered door. “Thought I could save another body in it, but there weren’t none…”

Jessup’s mind raced — was it the Golden Turtle or its progeny? A chupacabra? An alien? Or just a hallucination, like his partner said, a howling nightmare? All the while, his conscience plaintively noting, Nathan Jessup, you actually took the time under fire, at great risk to your own safety, to invoke the Lord God and pray for your partner’s safety from that diabolical thing, after not even attending church for the last ten years… and this is the thanks you get? Him hollering at you, making you out to be the dumb-ass while he takes all the credit, and just to cover for his own defiantly unrepentant sins, which could have gotten you both killed, and which he has no reason to change? Ain’t there no peace nor truth nor justice to be had in this world, man — ain’t nobody gonna stand up for those values? Inspired, Jessup grabbed Ongaro’s bloody shoulder, digging his thin fingertips in as deeply as he could.

“Ow! What the fuck, man?!”

“Emery,” Jessup said slowly and sternly, “as one sinner to another, I will help you out in this instance… but ONLY if you solemnly swear to take time off and get medical attention once the powder wears off… because, mark my words, if you show your face in the office tomorrow, one way or another, the chief WILL run you out on your ass, you hear me?!”

“You mother — !”

“ — Do you hear me?!” He squeezed the wounds again.

Ongaro squealed in agony. “Fine! I give! I give!” The fingers released his aching shoulder, and he snorted blood and mucus back up his nose. “You’ll get the story straight?”

“Yep.”

“Let me be?”

“Yep.”

“And you won’t say nothing ‘bout the powder?”

Jessup glanced out the rear-view mirror and saw two back-up cars, a fire truck and an ambulance about thirty miles behind them. “Only if you don’t say another dirty word about the giggleweed,” he hissed. “Ever.”

Ongaro weakly reached over to shake Jessup’s hand. “Deal.”

They shook hands, but Jessup couldn’t help muttering, “What in the hell was it, though?”

“I don’t want to talk about it no more, Nathan,” Ongaro said as the four other vehicles finally arrived.

*************************************************************************

The good news, as far as Jessup could tell, was that the fire truck and ambulance were there mostly for the van and the corpse, and that their colleagues seemed to accept Ongaro’s comprehensive-sounding statement of events without much scrutiny during the preliminary investigation… at least until one of the sergeants, Bellanger, took Jessup aside as they waited for a tow-truck to come collect the van.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking, Officer,” said Bellanger, “but there’s just one tiny little detail that doesn’t quite fit.”

Jessup swallowed. “And what all would that be, sir?”

“I hope you’ll forgive the indelicacy of this question, but…” Bellanger leaned in and asked, “Do you mind my asking how Officer Ongaro managed to, uh, shit his pants?”

Jessup blinked. “What?”

“I mean, I understand you’ve both had something of an eventful day today,” Bellanger said, “but honestly, you couldn’t smell it? We’ve been waiting for him to say something, but he’s not even acknowledging his injuries. Hell, he’s almost fifty feet away and I can smell it from here…”

The pungent odor of diarrhea finally wafted its way up Jessup’s nostrils. He glanced over at Ongaro, just now noticing the seat of his pants were dark brown and soggy. Jessup could feel his solar plexus stifling a urge to open his mouth to the heavens and laugh out loud. He owes you a debt, Nathan, his conscience whispered, he owes you everything! But at the same time he managed to choke the urge back, the spiritual floodgates opened and the answer seemed to flow out of his mouth like the divinely-inspired Word: “It’s his first dead body, sir. Most sane people are liable to lose their bowels at such a sight…”

“What about you, then, Jessup?”

The truth is with you, said his conscience, so why lie? Uneasily, he responded, “It… ain’t my first, sir…”

In the time it took Bellanger to soften his tone enough to ask, “Where?” Jessup found himself straddling two time periods — one foot still firmly in the dry, temperate present, and the other squelched in the mud, blood and entrails of that tropical horror site of his past he’d tried so hard to erase from his memory… the burned-out houses… the scared people, scared of him and his mad cohorts… the silent parts, arms, legs, heads, bodies…

The moment of truth had arrived, in all its resplendent and terrible glory, and the very last one, the one he fought his hardest to pronounce, as it needed to be said: “My Lai…”

“Holy Moses…” Bellanger seemed to continually shake his head, trying to make sense of that name and how to appropriately respond to its utterance. Jessup wondered if Bellanger was there with him, seeing that same awful site… until the sergeant put a hand on Jessup’s shoulder and dragged him back to the dry, temperate present. “Thank you for your service,” as all that Jessup could hear at that moment, ringing hollow in his ears.

He saw the body-bag being zipped up and rolled into the ambulance, no doubt to be driven to the morgue, and felt the spirit leaving him. All he had left to respond with was a bitter lie: “T’weren’t nothing.”