Agents of Dreamland(22)

The very last, I hear Madeline whisper. By the time you arrive, little afterthought, the deed will be done. The parade will have come and gone. But don’t be sad. Every revolution needs a rear guard, just in case. Someone will be thankful, I’m sure.

In the hallway, between the kitchen and the television room, that’s when I see the shotgun. It’s always been there, the break-top double-barrel twelve-gauge that Drew said he got cheap off some bikers up in San Bernardino. To keep away the coyotes, he said, though I’ve never seen a coyote come anywhere near Moonlight Ranch. I don’t know what the f*ck they’d even eat out here. I’ve never even seen a jackrabbit or an armadillo, either, and it’s not like coyotes can eat creosote bushes or cacti. I check to see if the shotgun’s loaded, pushing back the latch to open the breech. I can’t recollect just when I learned to do that. But maybe Drew taught me, right after I came here. In case there were coyotes. I find two shells in the gun, and didn’t Madeline tell me there were more in a kitchen cupboard?

What are you doing, Chloe? What the f*ck do you think you’re doing?

I find the extra shells, and I carry the gun with me when I go to the television room. All the others, they’re too far along for the bunks, and so they’ve slept here, bathed in the salt-and-pepper light of the television, wrapped in the lullaby voices buried deep in the static since the Big Bang was new. My 6,997 days, the cosmos’s 13.7 billion years, this planet’s 4.5 billion years. I never used to have a head for facts and figures, but the messengers have brought so, so many gifts.

The room is becoming a garden, and it’s my job to see that the flowers open out of doors, not inside this stifling room. They would be wasted here. What good is a rose that no one ever sees or smells.

What are you doing?

I won’t even remember pulling the trigger. I know that. I am absolutely certain of that, just as I’m certain that I’ll also have no doubt whatsoever that I did. It isn’t fair that I should be the last, not when I’m his favorite. I know that, and Madeline knows, too. It was always a part of his plan, she whispers behind my eyes. But not a part that even he fully understands. It’s like that, you know. Sometimes even prophets need a helping hand. Just like Judas helped Jesus. Maybe you’ve never been a Christian, never gone to church or prayed, but I bet you know that story, I bet you understand that analogy. So don’t you worry your pretty head. You won’t be last, after all.

It wouldn’t have been fair.

I find them all right where they ought to be, and the gun cracks the day like an egg.





11. Lowdown Subterranean End-Times Blues (Revisited)


THE HAUNTED HUMAN PSYCHE craves resolution. Indeed, it petulantly demands it. This unfortunate state of affairs may be a simple issue of how gray matter has been hardwired by millions of years of mutation and natural selection, a quirk of evolution riding piggyback on the emergence of a complex higher consciousness. We cannot know if the australopithecines or their forebears were burdened by this same weakness—and it is a weakness—as we cannot observe their interactions with an unresolved and likely unresolvable universe. We can’t question them. But humans, inherent problem solvers that we are, chafe at problems that cannot be solved, questions that cannot ever, once and for all, satisfactorily be put to rest: the assassination of President Kennedy, the Permian–Triassic extinction event, the Wow! signal, Casper Hauser, the Voynich manuscript, the identity of Jack the Ripper. Just for example.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?

I got a million of ’em. The mind balks at the idea that these mysteries will never be solved. Which, of course, has no bearing on their solvability. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men are for naught.

Wishing ain’t getting.

In his heart of hearts, the Signalman knows this is gospel. But his job is, all the same, to pursue answers for the Powers That Be, the powerbrokers, the gatekeepers. And in the absence of answers, he’s learned to settle for the doubtful consolation of necessary fictions. He is, above all else, a practical man. Whatever idealism he once might have harbored was sacrificed a long, long time ago. Scar tissue stiffens and numbs the inquisitorial soul.

The “death” of Chloe Stringfellow closed avenues of investigation that can never again be opened.

And the answers in Immacolata Sexton’s dreadful briefcase only get him just so far.

And so it goes.

Still, and all, there is a trail of half truths and three-quarter lies that leads him, finally, to San Diego and the Hollister Street Days Inn, less than three miles from the Mexican border, less than a hundred miles from the ranch on the shores of the Salton Sea. He caught a lucky break, got a tip from a CI, a schizophrenic who’s spent the last two decades creating a concordance for the Weekly World News, “the World’s Only Reliable News,” painstakingly cataloging and correlating everything from Jersey Devil sightings to Bat Boy, from Israeli mermaids to the discovery of an alien spacecraft at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and patterns inevitably emerge. All those strange things that come and go as early warnings. And one of those patterns leads the Signalman and three FBI agents to Room 210.

That the tip came from the lunatic fringe and not from complaints about the smell is just exactly the sort of thing that never ceases to amaze the Signalman.

There in the parking lot was Drew Standish’s 1967 red Buick Sport Wagon, and behind the door to Room 210 was his corpse and the corpse of a woman who will later be identified as Madeline Nightlinger, a former Facebook executive who’d been missing since January 2013. A coroner back at Groom Lake will determine that they’d both been dead since at least July 5. Their skulls have been cut open and their brains removed, the brain stem so neatly divided from the spinal column that even the most jaded neurosurgeon would surely be impressed. There was not so much as a drop of blood anywhere. The bodies have been positioned on their backs, hands folded on their chests. Both were naked, their clothing neatly folded and placed thoughtfully in the room’s chest of drawers. As for the top halves of their bisected crania, genuine skullcaps, those turned up in the bathroom sink. Hungry ants were everywhere.