Agents of Dreamland(3)

Immacolata lays the card back on the table, facedown, and selects another of the photographs. It strikes him for the first time how long and delicate her fingers are; they seem almost frail enough to snap like twigs.

Maybe they would. Maybe one day I’ll get to find out.

“Jesus,” Immacolata whispers, and she licks her ashen lips.

What big teeth you have.

The Signalman picks up one of the photographs, the one with his shadow in frame, the one where some trick of the light makes a corpse appear to be smiling. Every time he looks at these, every time he touches them, he feels unclean. He went through decon with the rest of the response team, but he only has to revisit these souvenirs of a horror show to be reminded how some stains sink straight through to the soul and are never coming out.

“How tight is the lid on this?” Immacolata asks him, and she raises an eyebrow plucked straight and thin as a paper cut.

“It’s all right there on the suicide drive,” he tells her, and points at the contents of the envelope scattered across the Formica tabletop.

“No,” she says. “I’m not asking you to parrot back to me what they’ve put in the reports. I didn’t come here to play Polly Want a Cracker.”

The Signalman stares at the tip of his cigarette, wishing this were going down in a proper f*cking bar, someplace he could get a shot of Johnnie Walker Black or J&B. His mouth is as dry as the arroyos and sage waiting out there just beyond the halogen glare of the streetlights.

“We got lucky, after a fashion,” he says. “We have geography on our side, the hot zone being situated where it is.”

“That’s not what I asked you,” she protests.

“You ever been to the Salton Sea, Ms. Sexton? The lid’s on f*cking tight, okay? The CDC would get a hard-on, the lid’s so goddamn tight. Neiman Marcus would be proud of our f*cking window dressing.”

He hears the annoyance in his voice, the aluminum-foil edge, and it pisses him off that she’s getting to him.

“Am I making you nervous?”

No way in hell he’s going to answer that question, not for a gold-plated penny.

“The Moonlight Ranch is about three miles north of Bombay Beach,” he says instead. “Off Route 111. The only way in or out is a dirt road, not much more than a cattle trace. Lockdown is solid.”

“The Moonlight Ranch? What, is that one of Watertown’s supersecret code names?” And there’s that smirk again, curling at the corners of her mouth and setting her eyes to glimmering.

I’d give a hundred bucks for a shot of rye whiskey, he thinks, and swallows hard. I’d give a million to blow her f*cking brains out.

“No, that’s just what the locals call it, and what Standish’s followers called it.”

“Yes, well, I’m beginning to have Helter Skelter flashbacks to Charlie Manson,” she says. “Moonlight Ranch, the Spahn Movie Ranch, appropriate names for pens to hold all the thunderstruck little sheeple. We’ll run cross-references, see what pops. You know we’re expecting access to the quarantine zone, right?”

“Albany anticipated as much. You’ve got eyes-only clearance, and you’ve already been assigned a handler.”

Immacolata nods, then leans back in the booth and just stares at that one photo held in her alabaster fingers. He’s not even sure which one it is. The way she’s holding it, he can’t make out the number printed on the back.

“And you’ve got mycologists on the ground?” she asks, then takes a sip of her coffee.

Moses on a motorbike, but isn’t she cool enough to freeze brimstone in Hell? Wouldn’t winding up on her bad side make a death sentence seem charitable?

“Yeah, sure. We’ve brought in people from Duke and the University of Michigan, and we’ve given them a state-of-the-art lab on the premises. Right now, they’re talking about cutaneous and subcutaneous mycoses, hyperparasites, opportunistic pathogens, cryptococcosis, aspergillosis, entomopathogenic fungi, and f*cking zombie ants,” he tells Immacolata Sexton, reeling off remembered bits from Wednesday morning’s briefings, not because he’s trying to impress Y’s asset, just because it’s something to say, all that geek chatter. And, right now, saying anything feels better than saying nothing. “Jesus, you ever even heard of f*cking zombie ants?”

She ignores the question, and he continues.

“But they’ve never seen shit like this, right. And you don’t need a shrink to see it’s sorta blowing their minds.”

She nods and says, “I trust no one’s been so careless as to whisper a word about Vermont or the Scituate Reservoir?” she asks without taking her eyes off the photograph.

“Despite what you may think, we’re not total f*cking idiots. Besides, it’s not like they’ll be walking away from this with their recollections intact.”

“Perish the thought,” she says, peeking at him over the top of the photo, and she taps the side of her nose three times.

“Anyway, that’s what I brought, and I believe it’s now your turn,” says the Signalman, and he jabs a callused thumb at the attaché case. She nods and lays the picture from Moonlight Ranch back down on the table.





2. Words Written Backwards (June 29, 2015)


DREW IS TALKING TO ME, whispering in my ear, even though he’s not here. At high noon I’m standing in the darkness cast by my own shadow—the only darkness remaining in the world—and I stare out across the desert, past Salt Creek, towards the hazy, uneven gray-periwinkle line that the Chocolate Mountains draw between the sky and the everlasting brownness of Coachella hardscrabble. Behold, the Kingdom of Caliche and Horned Toads, Drew said (and he laughed) the first day I was an inhabitant vomited upon the coast of the Sea. That day when first I stood upon the hot tin and followed the weathervane of his crooked finger. From there—from here—my eyes set eastward, I can see all the way to those crumbling schist ridges and peaks, laid down in Precambrian oceans. If I squint hard, man, and harder still, like I’ve been taught, I might as well be seeing much farther away, past what mere eyes can discern, to other mountain ranges and maybe all the way to the Palo Verde Valley and Blythe, where the desert is tormented so that green things will grow to feed us all and please the fickle eye of mankind. There are trees in Blythe. I remember trees.