Hummingbird Salamander(90)

Through metamorphosis, P. omena learns to live on land. Adapts to a place so different from what it knew. Glands develop that enable direct oxygen diffusion without investment in lungs. The skin infused with capillaries creates a respiratory service for survival. It also easily transmits pollutants from the environment into the delicate interior.

“To be porous. To see colors no human can see. To receive what we cannot receive. To be receptor. To be transmitter.” Part of Silvina’s journal I’d almost forgotten.

The intimacy that salamanders have with their environment forces them to be sentinels of environmental change. Environmental degradation of air and water from pollution that dumps chemicals will distort and damage the pores of the salamander’s skin. Extinction of P. omena is attributed to habitat degradation. Extinction of H. sapiens is attributed to destroying its own habitat.

There are no vernal ponds these days to which the road newts return. Those thousands upon thousands of years of return are gone. They are gone forever.

By the time I found the little windy road up to the storage palace, it was dusk.

An urgency possessed me. I had to make up for lost time. Silvina’s salamander had reached me late, which meant the letter had reached me late, too. Now the timing was off. Now my timing was off.

If I was right about any of it.

If this wasn’t just another game or test.





[95]


The road ended with the storage palace. Lights remained on, but the front door had been wedged open and the green plastic carpet shoved to the side for some reason. A squirrel darted out of the doorway and ran, panic-stricken, for the trees.

No cars. No sign of anyone following me. So I went inside. Accompanied by my cane and an automatic rifle. I didn’t trust the Fusk gun for this one.

The lights were on, but no one was on duty. Why would they be? The little door to allow access to the kiosk and counter lay ajar. I found the key to number 7 hanging on a hook. Everything was neat behind the counter, nothing out of place.

The storage unit wasn’t my first guess about Silvina’s project. How could something so small contain something that must be so large? But I wanted to rule it out. Back to the beginning. Salamander back to hummingbird. What if something new lurked in the storage unit?

But it was empty. But it didn’t matter.

Even the chair was gone. Same moldy panel of wall. Same flickering light. Same emptiness.

Came back out careful, watchful, sure I’d be ambushed at the doorway. Still no one. But night had overtaken the trees in that brief moment. The road gleamed with moonlight, mixed with shadow. A thick insect sound bursting forth, waning, bursting forth.

On a moonless night, I might have waited. But I had that urgency that Silvina needed me, that I was late. Or, that I needed to stop her. Or, that it wasn’t clear to me. I wasn’t an ideal receiver. Just that I needed to find her … or the next message (terrible thought) as quickly as possible.

My best guess, given the scope of the project, the funds put into it, was that whatever her secret was … she had hidden it behind the barbed-wire fence that sequestered the abandoned mining project. That up on the ruined mountaintop, she had built something or made something. Made it her headquarters. That the mining operation itself had been cover for another project altogether. What else could it mean?

It had struck me in the car that it could mean Silvina was deranged, delusional. That I might be delusional, deranged. That Langer chased ghosts. That whatever Hellmouth Jack wanted didn’t exist, either. Scattering cigarette butts. Dressing up in a clown wig. For nothing.

I left Shovel Pig in the trunk. Put on a backpack with food and supplies. Took the Fusk gun and my automatic rifle. Hid the rest of the arsenal under some leaves and branches to the side of the parking lot.

Then, cursing, I opened the trunk again and took Shovel Pig with me. Stupid, superstitious, but it felt wrong to leave her behind. It just took time to empty her of what I didn’t need. All over the backseat of the car.

The fence a little ways up from the storage unit was a beast. I’d brought bolt cutters, but some animal had dug underneath a section and it was easier to put on gloves and just dig it out more. Even so, I scraped up my back, almost torqued my bad knee. Great start, but I felt jaunty. Doing something physical. Far away from the farm.

I started haltingly up the incline. It took a while to get used to the cane with the ground wet, sometimes muddy. Along not so much a path as a rut from rainwater flowing downslope. Bending at the knees like I was on a boat helped.

I had a map I’d hastily drawn from an online source showing Vilcapampa’s mountainside holdings. Predictable, that search engine maps of the area were blurred out and a decade out of date. But some of the topographical detail would help.

It felt possible no one but Silvina and lost hikers had been up here in decades. I was looking for a building or a bunker or anything that suggested human activity. The land had been placed in an environmental easement, ironically enough, and in theory nothing had been built on it since the mining excavation.

Just a half hour in, visibility changed. Fog came in and the moon tore at the edges of that, made the shadows more prominent, light rationed out. Patches of glistening reflections off the water onto leaves and branches, latticework that confused more than helped. I tried to just look down at the rough trail.

Surprisingly soon the grass, leaves, and rutted ground turned into black, glistening gravel shot through with dying weeds. Not a road, but a kind of ruined excavation. A suggestion of prior rockfalls from above.