At the station, Nurse Fisher presided over the rows of chairs in the waiting room, over a cattle call of minor and major injuries, of knots of distraught families and friends wringing their hands and wondering why they let Uncle Jed drink all that whiskey and drive home from Pioneer Days in Mammoth, or why they gave little Cousin Jenny all those bottle rockets to play with. Nurse Fisher did triage effortlessly, sending the night nurses off with the more serious cases, dictating the proper procedure for filling out forms, deflecting unreasonable panic, and keeping an atmosphere of wry humor afloat in what looked like a war zone. The cinnamon roll she'd brought for Stella still sat parked at the desk beside her cold tea, its icing scabbed over.
"Stella, why don't you try to weed out the kooks and the drunks for me, there's a good girl," Fisher said, then, "Excuse me, that's a courtesy phone, it won't dial out. Use the payphone by the restrooms, thanks."
Still shaken, Stella waded into the crowd of holiday casualties. Hands grasped at her smock, pleading voices wheedled at her for news of loved ones, for a doctor's attention, for drugs. Half these people didn't need medical attention at all, they just needed to go home and sleep it off. She passed out reassurances and moved on, trying to get back into her job.
A hand clutched at her smock and tugged when she tried to move away. Stella tried to pull free, but the hand wouldn't let go. A voice that cut through all the others asked, "Is the man from the train going to be alright?" Stella looked down.
The owner of the clutching hand was blasted almost purple by a lifetime of hard sun and harder alcohol; a livid nebula of nuked capillaries spread across his sunken face. A white beard tinged with the sickly yellow of a polar bear pelt in the zoo fringed a sinkhole of a mouth, radiating a visible haze of booze-breath and advanced tooth decay. The eyes, bloodshot and swimming in tears, bored into her own. "Is he going to live?"
"What do you know about him?" Stella breathed.
"I'm the one who called," the old hermit wheezed. "I'm the one who found him."
Stella led the old man to the cafeteria and bought him a cup of coffee and watched him stir sugar and Cremora into it until he could eat it with a fork. The man stared fixedly at his beverage, seemingly unwilling to acknowledge her. So used to listening to others who couldn't seem to stop talking, she couldn't frame the words to get the old man started.
After a few more minutes, Stella dared ask, "There was a detective here looking into the accident. You spoke to him?"
"Not gonna talk to no cops," the hermit bristled.
"Well, you sure came a long way for a cup of coffee."
"I just come to make sure he's alright."
"Well, he's not alright. The people who took him away say he's dying of cancer, and they can't reattach the leg, couldn't find the hand."
The old man swallowed hard, slurped the coffee, and went back to staring into the blank formica expanse of table between them. Damn this old drunk white man, too gutless to open his mouth, too frightened of something to leave. Was he to blame for the accident?
"There something you want to ask me, mister…?"
"Napier, name's Napier. Seth. Live hard by the tracks south of Lone Pine. I just wanted to make sure he was gonna live. I called the ambulance, like I was supposed to…"
"You called as soon as you found him, right after it happened."
"Yup." The man was almost completely out of the habit of talking, let alone lying.
"You didn't call until just before sunset, Mister Napier. He was run over by a train coming from Lone Pine at three-thirty this morning. If he was run over by a train…" She honestly didn't know she was going to say this last. What the hell was she trying to do, play detective? Was this man supposed to throw his coffee in her face and run, a psycho-killer unmasked by Stella Orozco, terminally ill LPN detective? She wanted to leave, wanted this man not to know what she was asking about, but she could tell from the way his face fell, as if the table was no longer blank, but a dreadful window, that he knew.
"You won't tell the cops?" Napier asked.
"No."
"I don't want to talk to no cops," he growled, and then the words started to come out all in a rush. Like so many wounded or distraught people in hospitals, Napier saw her as a confessor. "I didn't do nothin wrong, ma'am, an' I'll swear to that on a stack of Bibles. If I didn't call right away, it's only 'cause the man was a goner anyway, an' I didn't want to tangle with no cops. I figgered if I just kept to myself 'til the railroad folks came back for him, I could say I was on a bender, an' slept through it. Shit, wouldn't be far from the truth, at that." He sipped at the coffee again. "Can I smoke in here?" he asked.
"No, but there's a stairwell down the hall." She got up, led him to it, and stood as far from him as she could while he lit up. She could see the gibbous moon rising over the town's main drag through a narrow slit in the concrete walls, could hear the blaring of horns, the sporadic popping of firecrackers and, she knew, a few real guns, from outside.
For a long time, Napier only stared at the guttering cherry of the cigarette, and Stella began to think he'd unloaded his peace, and wanted her gone. "You want to know how he's still alive. That's why you're here."
"I don't s'pose you know, either, do you?"
"No, Mr. Napier, I don't suppose we do."
3
Like the Spartans whose fateful stand against the Persians gave the town its name, the proud citizens of Thermopylae would gladly kill or die for their independence. Some wag who spoke for the rest of the town nailed a sign to the "official" one on the Interstate.
Thermopylae
Elev. -10 ft. Pop. 63
REDS, FEDS & DEADHEADS KEEP ON DRIVING
They would fight any invader, foreign or domestic, who threatened their hermitage, and it was only because no pair of men among them could agree on the color of sand, let alone mobilize against a common foe, that the town had not presented a genuine threat and been wiped out long ago. The only way the Field Marshal was able to collect anything like a tax for public improvements was with the Apocalypse Pool, a standing kitty of pooled bets on the date and manner of the End. If you weren't waiting for Armageddon in the form of wrathful angels or the ATF, you had no business in Thermopylae. Few of its citizens slept for more than a few minutes at a time, and all of them had something much more substantial than a baseball bat by their beds.
Despite their steely-eyed vigilance, the raid on Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply Store had caught the town in mid-siesta, sleeping off the excesses of the Millennial Fourth, and word of the raid sent the entire town into the hills, with their houses in tow.
Aside from Storch's store, there wasn't a single structure in Thermopylae that couldn't be towed away or knocked flat and buried inside of an hour. The library was a converted ice cream truck; the post office was a Volkswagen Thing, and Town Hall was the cargo hold of the Field Marshal's half-track. Only one permanent relic of Thermopylae would remain on the Day of Wrath. Someone had laid out a winding grid of cul-de-sac traps for an insane tract-housing scheme that never materialized. Like the mysterious designs on the Nazca Plain in Peru, they codified some inscrutable invitation to visitors from space. Buggs preached that the Nazca lines were the work of a mysterious race predateding the Incas, and were beacons for aliens to pick them up before the Conquistadors came.
As if Buggs's stupid theory was true after all, the entire town of Thermopylae was gone. Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply stood alone on the plain, the hub of a wheel of tire tracks radiating out to every point on the compass. Storch couldn't bear to sit on the porch anymore, so he went home.
Storch had run Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply for his father, who'd been in an asylum in Norwalk since 1992.
Zane Ezekiel Storch was named for his father's penchant for paperback westerns and his mother's fervor for the Bible. He was raised an army brat, Sgt. Major Dad stationed at Taegu, South Korea; Schweinfurt, West Germany; Ft. Hamilton, Brooklyn. When he was sixteen, Zane caught his mom in bed with a Captain. She packed her bags and was gone before Dad got home. Dad flipped out, got religion, got born again hard, got Section Eighted, ditched Zane, fled to Death Valley to live in a borax mine, eating surplus Air Raid shelter biscuits and writing the New Dead Sea Scrolls on toilet paper. Storch boarded with his grandparents until he was old enough to enlist in '83. Made it through Airborne, Rangers, made Sergeant, joined Special Forces. Combat duty in Desert Storm, seven confirmed kills, maimed in action, awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart.
But within a few weeks of his return home, Storch began to get sick. Little by little, he lost things and forgot he'd had them: fluency in Arabic, German and a little French, field operations training, recollection of faces. Chemical fumes—gasoline, solvents, even hairspray—made his blood pressure and histamine levels skyrocket, scrambled his brain so his words came out wrong. Because he was an injured vet they kept it off paper, but they told each other it was a nervous breakdown.
Discharged for medical reasons only officially connected to his wound, he came to Death Valley at his father's summons. The old man had wrestled his demons and come down from the mountain to put his life savings into a survivalist's general store in the middle of the desert. With no other prospects, and too ill to live in the city, Storch thought of getting right with the new, saner dad and then moving to Needles or Bishop, becoming a deputy sheriff. He bought his dad a TV and a satellite dish. That night they watched the '92 Presidential Debates.
Dad got born all over again. Dad looked at the screen and saw the Unholy Trinity: Bush, Clinton, Perot the abominable Anti-Father, Anti-Son and Unholy Ghost of the Apocalypse. He knew that the public was merely being asked to choose the form of its destruction, and that unless they either voted for all three or abstained from voting altogether, the world would begin to end on Election Day. He stole his son's truck and the next time Storch saw him was on TV, a week later, when he tried to drive the truck into the hall where the second debate was being held. That the truck was full of barrels of holy water and Eucharist wafers only made the media less sympathetic to his case. At least if he was only trying to kill the candidates, they would've understood. Character witnesses who attested that his dad apologized to God whenever he stepped on a bug only helped thicken the padding on his cell. Dad looked to be a lifer, and Storch, up until this afternoon, did too.
Storch lay on the bed in his trailer, mowing his head with an electric razor, pounding distilled water with lemon juice and watching CNN, Reno, Los Angeles, San Francisco local news. Nothing about the raid. He felt like doing a whole lot of pushups, running to Mexico or blowing something up. He'd frozen up in the raid; now his body jolted with impulses hours too late. He looked at the bottle in his four-fingered right hand and wished to God he could stomach even the odor of hard alcohol.
What kind of war was being fought in this country, that the government could keep it from the news media? If the Oklahoma bombing and bank robberies perpetrated by white-supremacist groups were so extensively covered and caused such a furor, wouldn't the government want to make sure the public saw that they gave as good as they got?
Militia groups. More than anything else, they were the cause of Storch's leaving the army; them and the gas-sickness. Nearly half the regular soldiers he served with belonged to one or another of several cabals of frustrated racist patriots, whose agendas parted ways with the
U.S. Constitution the moment they got their hands on guns. It became next to impossible to try to give orders to people who were in different armies, and who'd just as soon kill their black comrades or their CO as an enemy.
He couldn't figure Harley Pettigrew for the militia type. Harley couldn't cooperate with anybody, and the militias hated individualists as much as they hated ethnic federal employees. His final talk about racial purity didn't jibe with a widower thrice married, to a Filipino, a Vietnamese and a Mexican.
His phone rang. He picked it up but heard only a constant dial tone. Ringing again, the receiver still in his hand, and for a moment Storch thought, this is it, this is how you start to lose it, and then he pinpointed the sound. It was coming from his closet.
Storch slowly sucked in a deep breath, held it, and produced a serrated survival knife from beneath his pillow, speed-crept up beside the closed door. Third ring, not like his at all, cellular. Whoever's in there, he's too stupid to live, he told himself. He coiled up inside himself, playing the scenario in his mind so that when it happened, he'd be watching a familiar old movie.
He seized the knob and yanked it back and in a single motion stepped into the closet with the knife out-thrust, and slashed a fearsome pile of dirty laundry twice before it registered. He stepped back and spun to meet a possible attack from behind, but he was still alone. A tiny cell phone lay on the top shelf of the closet, between his detergent and a box of signal flares. Warily, still looking over his shoulder, he picked it up, looking it over, finally decided there were simpler ways to blow him up, and pressed the SPEAK button. Waiting for the caller to speak, he exhaled. No doubt even this phone was being monitored, he'd volunteer nothing.
"Sergeant Zane E. Storch?" The voice warbled like a badly tuned shortwave signal, or an anonymous witness on a talk show. Digitally scrambled, pitch shifted.
"This is."
"This is the Mission speaking. You've been awakened. Do you wish to go back to sleep?"
"I'm wide awake, thank you. Who the fuck is this, really?"
"We have not contacted you before to protect you from violent reprisals such as the one you experienced today."