—Must have been a bitch dragging it all the way here, he said. The horn appeared petrified; yellow and gray with streaks of black, like a rotten tooth. Balanced on end it reached his breastbone, and at its thickest, he estimated a circumference equal to his own muscular thigh. —Gotta weigh fifty kilos, easy.
—You aren’t the only one who knows how to make a travois, she said.
—I assume you took photographs.
Her mouth ticked in a smile, or a grimace. —Once I saw it, I lost my head… Everything is a blur.
The weird horn, her inconceivable lapse of protocol, stymied his inclination to argue. —So, what else?
—They’d hacked this free from the wall of the cave. There’s a glaciated curtain of stone farther back. I didn’t bring a flashlight and it was dim…man, there’s something huge fossilized in that wall. Maybe ten feet tall. A statue. Has to be. This horn came from whatever’s in there.
He brushed his fingers across the horn. His cock stiffened. Saliva poured down his throat. He stepped away from the horn fast. —Good fucking God….
—Yeah, exactly, she said.
He studied the sky, the emerging stars. —Let’s grab a lamp and mosey over to this cave of yours.
—No chance in hell, buddy. I won’t go back there. Not in the dark.
—Why not?
—Take a good look at that thing. It’s obscene.
—Fine. In the morning.
—Okay.
She unzipped his sleeping bag and crawled inside. They fucked. She howled into the pillow, hands locked on the frame of the cot. He rode her in a haze, arm around her hips, lifting her into each slow, savage thrust. It was so good he spent a few dizzy moments in the afterglow confused as to why he’d let the relationship die, and fell asleep while still puzzling. His eyes popped open a bit later when she nuzzled his ear and stuck her finger in his asshole, exactly as she’d done one too many times during their previous affair. He smacked her hand away. She snored, occasionally mumbling. He lay uncomfortably wedged against her, his heart thudding, useless anger kindling in the pit of his gut.
The first knock was faint and he didn’t realize what it was until the second one came, slightly louder; a distinct rap against the hatch. He stopped breathing, mouth wide, his entire body an antenna tuned to this most unwelcome vibration at the entrance of the habitat. Then, three sharp knocks. He was on his feet and fumbling for the hunting knife he kept hanging in its sheath. She didn’t stir, although her muttering became querulous.
Conscious of his nakedness, he crept through the module, navigating the obstacle course of chairs, benches, and crates by the ethereal glow from the monitors. He quickly toggled the security feeds, but they crackled with snowy interference, revealing nothing of the perimeter. He ventured to the mud room, a cramped chamber inside the entrance, designed for removing outdoor gear prior to entering the central compartment. His tongue was thick as leather, and his hands shook, yet a sense of grim exultance drove him forward. Of all the biologists a creep, or creeps, might choose to pick on, he was likely to be the most hostile, if not the most capable of retaliating in a vicious manner.
He crouched against the hatch, pressing his ear to the metal while testing the bar with his free hand. Locked tight. He waited, ticking off the seconds as they built into minutes, and his legs started to cramp. Something scratched against the steel door—nails, a stick. He scuttled on his haunches from the door, knife held reflexively before his eyes. The rifle was nearby in its cabinet and he decided now was an appropriate instance to consider deadly force. Someone laughed and he froze. The scratching came again, then the laughter, farther away. It sounded like two voices. He couldn’t be sure and the darkness became thick and suffocating.
After a while, he gathered the courage to unlimber the rifle and slip outdoors. He padded in a stealthy circuit of the module, stalking from shadow to shadow, finger heavy on the trigger. Wind scuffed up little puffs of dust. When he began to crash from the adrenaline high, he went inside, locked the hatch, and settled in to keep watch until daylight.
She found him sleeping in the fetal position under the table, the rifle clasped to his breast. —Get laid and go back to the Stone Age. Why the hell are you letting all the bugs inside?
The hatch hung ajar. Gnats swarmed in the cold white light of the opening. —The world is large and unknowable, he said.
She stepped into the threshold, her form rendered a black shadow limned by fire. —I lied about the horn, she said. —I made up that stuff to scare you, piss you off. I like telling tales. Whatever. It was lying in the bushes near an ant nest I’ve been studying. Been there so long it looked like petrified wood. Animals dug it up, probably. Freaky as fuck no matter how you slice it. She closed the hatch and its clang reminded him of a cage locking.
The only tracks around the module belonged to him and her. As expected, the surveillance footage went offline in conjunction with the nocturnal visitation and the recordings were useless. He waited until she’d gone into the field to check on her ants, or wasps, or what-the-hell-ever she did instead of analyzing tape, and dialed his supervisor in Seattle to deliver the weekly report.
His supervisor was intrigued by the theory that the aberrant wildlife behavior could be linked to poison, although he dismissed the idea of military testing. Hunter activity, on the other hand, was sexy. —I’ll send a chopper in next week. Have some water samples ready.
He cleared his throat and said, —My partner may not be handling the stress.
—How so? Are you two having problems?
—She’s cracking. He was grateful they weren’t speaking via satellite video, acutely aware of his wild, matted hair and beard. —Nothing serious, yet.
—If it’s not serious, than what?
—Look, it’s difficult to describe. Her work hasn’t been stellar. Make a note, is all I’m saying. We get back to civilization, I don’t want the blame for shoddy data.
His supervisor sighed. —The Sierras rumor is true, huh? I’m not much of a marriage counselor, but my best advice is if you ever get another opportunity to spend sixty days stranded in the wilds with an ex, pass.
—Thanks. Never mind. An insidious thought surfaced: What if hooking him up with his ex-lover and stranding them in the wilds
was
the whole point of the exercise?
His supervisor said goodbye and good luck.
He sat for a while, observing her on Feed One. She was insubstantial, wandering across the foreground with a stick, flipping over rocks. Looking for bugs. Innocently or not, erasing clues. He thought about the scratching against the hatch, the faint unearthly lullaby his mother sang when he was a baby and before she left forever. He switched the camera off. He took his rifle and left, muttering about checking his traps as he passed her.
He didn’t go far, perhaps two hundred meters into a copse of alder on a nearby hill with a clear view of the camp. Burrowed like a tick deep into the leaves and the dirt, he tenderly wiped moisture from the scope and snugged it to his eye. There she was. A blurred patch of shadow. When he looked through the scope it was as if the largest part of him dissolved and what remained was the kernel everything sprang from. The cathode stole everything, rendered him nameless, a seed floating on a vast cosmic tidal current.
—Where’s your friend? he said. Sweat poured into his eyes until the world doubled and distorted like a kaleidoscope. —Where’s your friend? Where’s your friend?
—You believe in God? She was snapping pictures of the cryptic horn, working it from multiple angles.
He remembered with clear and explicit detail his father walking with him through the reeds where the buck had dropped in its tracks. The buck was alive, its eyes warm with a last, candescent surge of vitality. The marsh was cold and dim. Their collective breath rose like smoke into the black sky. His father handed him the knife.
—Which one? I can get behind the idea of one of those evil cocksuckers the ancients kowtowed to. A few years ago a lost temple was discovered beneath some rainforest. There were caverns with altars to a hideous anthropomorphic beast. Researchers documented dozens of enormous slabs with sluices, for what was literally rivers of blood. There was a primitive sewage system built to handle the gore. Could be they gathered up slaves and enemies and sacrificed thousands at a time during festivals. There’s the real deal. That’s how a real super being would roll.
—I mean the our Father who art in Heaven.
—Oh, that guy. The Old Testament dude, sure. He’d slept the entire day and dreamed of fleeing through a barren, red-lit landscape. He wore the form of the buck and his father was the hunter.
The afternoon had been brutally hot, and stars undulated as though through warped glass. He felt mentally and spiritually torpid, helpless to make meaningful decisions. It was as if a low-grade sedative pumped through his veins, robbing him of volition; it was the sensation of being trapped in quicksand, or paralyzed in a permanent nightmare. Everything around him was television, and he was acting from a script. He should call HQ and tell them the project had gone off the rails in a major way. He
would
make that call. In a few minutes, once he gathered the ambition to rise from the lawn chair and stumble inside.
She half-straddled the prodigious horn. Her sinewy back gleamed. She’d worn only his hat and a pair of panties the last two days. The sun had scorched her bronze, except for slashes of ivory at her hips and the creases of her buttocks. He too went shirtless since that morning. She chuckled and called him a Nubian stud and flirted with unbuckling his belt until he pushed her away and retreated into his sleeping berth. He didn’t think either of them had bathed in several days. Her cheeks were smudged with grime. She appeared wild as an ancient Celt, naked, her hair lank and stiff as if limed for battle. His nails were black and he smelled the ripe sourness of his own body.
—Did you hear the knocking? I bet you did.
He wished for another bottle of scotch. —Yeah.
—Someone wants in.
—I know, he said. —Who?
She grinned at him over her shoulder. She stroked the horn’s ridges, dug the inside of her thigh against them until blood welled and ran in a thin rail toward her ankle.
His head felt light and empty. Static hissed like windblown sand somewhere in the depths. —We should bag this job and head home. I’m getting a bad feeling. He turned his gaze from her legs, regarded the stars.
—A bad feeling? You’re so primal, so in touch with your roots. I can see you and your homies with spears and loincloths on the savanna.
—Go on, let your hair down, he said. —You’re among friends.
—Don’t be touchy. It’s a fucking compliment.
—Shut up.
She chuckled.
—It’s not as if every single nut case that followed the cult went to the slammer, he said. —What if some of those crazy bastards have come home to the ol’ stomping grounds? Makes me very uncomfortable.
—We’re alone, she said.
—Are we?
—You’ve said so at least a hundred times. Don’t change your story now.
—Only fools and the dead never change their mind.
She turned and walked over and sat beside him. —I haven’t even heard a plane since we got here. Might as well be on the moon. There’s a certain aura, something in the fabric of the land. Feels like an acid trip. Whatever happened to the farmers who settled these parts?
—Ranchers.
—Right, ranchers.
—The original parcel got split and sold to a bunch of local interests. The hardcore folks dwindled, moved away. The grandkids weren’t eager to carry on with the Old West lifestyle. I’m sure they’ll put in a mall or a parking lot. Haha, condos and a retirement center.
—No, she said. —Nothing will be built. They’ll be sorry if they do. I think you’re wrong about the ranchers, by the way. Did you research it, or just accept what we got spoon fed at the briefing?
—I was a baby bird. Cheep, cheep.
—Me too, buddy-boy. Me too. I’ve been pondering it more lately. I bet anything, if you were to dredge up a hundred and twenty years’ worth of newspaper articles, county documents, federal reports and local folklore, you’d get a completely different perspective. Murder, lynching, rape….
—Which would be typical of much of rural, agricultural America, he said.
—Oh, sure. Except here, you’ll find it was epidemic. The cowpokes and their kin were probably crazy as shithouse rats by the time the second generation outgrew diapers. Society kept its mouth shut, of course. Glossed over the frequency, downplayed all but the most sensational atrocities. I’ve seen it in more genteel settings. This shit’s happened since when. I think the Family came because like attracts like. They were drawn by lunatic music only the Devil’s own can hear. Yeah, man, no way to ever be sure, but I’d put money that the sickos were nothing more than the latest victims of Hell Range.
—Pretty insane, he said.
—That’s how this would go if it was a horror flick, she said.
—Scripting one?
—There’s this producer in L.A. who says I’m talented.
—Him fucking you and you actually being able to write are two different things.
—Nah, he’s ugly as sin. My sister, the model, he did fuck her. Got her a gig doing hand lotion spots. Silly bitch’s face only appears for like two milliseconds. I believe in God.
—Yeah?
—Because I know who that horn belongs to. Can’t have one without the other.
He didn’t say anything.
—C’mon, can’t you feel it? she said.
—Can’t
you
feel it when something should remain unspoken? Most cultures consider that a survival trait.
—Beware of Things Man Is Not Meant to Know? I don’t fear the immensity of the universe. Some things are too big to worry about. I’m highly credulous.
Once, when he was much younger, he’d walked across an ice-locked expanse of the Bering Sea and comprehended his insignificance. —Chickens have a twenty-minute memory. We primates cope through booze and denial. Dial up more of that denial part, you’ll last longer.