Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (14 page)

"What about the fact you've got Sheriff White
running around, forcing people's land from their hands?"

Wayne gave him a perplexed look. "Who said I
was doing that?"

"Come on, Wayne, I'm sure all the land you're
pumping oil out of wasn't just up for grabs. What did you promise
him in exchange? How'd you buy him out?" Jesse didn't see fit to
mention Earl McInnis, or the Lotus Boys, or Mr. Black.

But Wayne's attention was pulled elsewhere
before he could retort—a flash of light and a booming shockwave
registered out on the oil field to their left. Black smoke rose
high into the sky. One of the tower-like derricks was beginning to
burn.

Wayne cursed, and turned the car off the main
road towards the site. It began to jostle violently along the way.
Jesse wished they'd taken his Jeep.

"It's those fucking thugs. I bet you
anything," Wayne said. He threw the Mark I into higher gear and
floored it as they bounced around in the uneven terrain. "They've
been a thorn in my side since the beginning. They live in the hills
like vultures. We're far enough from civilization out here that the
government mostly leaves them alone. But if Bridgetown becomes
worth something," he glanced at Jesse, "that'll change!"

"Why would the Lotus Boys want to burn the
fields?" Jesse asked. Of course, he knew the answer. He was just
very curious to hear Wayne's justification for all of this.

His brother forced a laugh. "Maybe they know
that a rich, industrial Bridgetown would mean the end of their safe
haven out here, beyond the eyes of civil society." Wayne angled the
Mark I towards a wooden shack that lay a quarter-mile from the
burning derrick, beside a steep hill.

Jesse could see Susanna taking cover behind
the shack beside her own car. Wayne pulled up alongside, and the
brothers disembarked.

Jesse walked to the edge of the shack and
peered around the corner, hunting for a better look at the derrick.
He saw two figures on horseback, both cloaked in black, hollering
war cries and firing their rifles in the air, triumphant. The duo
circled the derrick a few more times. Then they rode off beyond the
hills, leaving the towering inferno as a work of performance-art
graffiti.

Jesse took several steps toward the scene. He
was far enough away from the shack that the others' voices were
muted. From his vantage point, he watched as Cole Co. workers, and
then White and his deputies, began to arrive. Everyone ran about,
no doubt barking about shut-off valves or some way to quell the
chaos. He was mesmerized by the scene, and by the strange beauty of
the burning tower as it belched flames a hundred feet into the
blackening sky. It was a tower, he noted, that wasn't supposed to
exist in the first place.

He reached for his pack of cigarettes, and
realized with a bit of dismay it was his last one. He didn't even
remember smoking the last two. No matter, he'd just have to get
used to the local variety. He lit it, and savored several long
draws from it, watching opaque pillars of black smoke rise into the
sky. Petrochemical energy, sitting beneath the earth for eons,
scattering into the sky in a chaotic display.

He tossed the empty pack onto the ground, and
flattened it with his boot.

Someone behind him took a few steps towards
him, accouterments jangling with each one. He glanced over his
shoulder to see if it were Wayne or Susanna. It was neither.

A man in a black duster and a black hat stood
before him. The brim of his hat cast a long, deep shadow, such that
Jesse couldn't quite make out his features.

Sandeman
. It was the stranger in the desert, the one that had spooked
Jesse the night before.

"It is quite a sight, isn't it?" The figure
said.

"You were watching me last night," Jesse
blurted. Then—a realization. "You're him, aren't you? Their leader.
The one they call Mr. Black."

The man nodded almost imperceptibly. "We need
to talk, Jesse."

"How do you know my name?"

"Follow me. We can't stay here." Black turned
around, without waiting for acknowledgement.

Jesse followed.

"Where are we going?"

Black pointed ahead. There was a horse, tied
up to a hitching post beside a well. "I'd like to invite you to my
side of Bridgetown," he said. "So you can get a full sense of what
we stand for."

Black untied his horse, and hopped on. "Have
you ever ridden before?"

Jesse shook his head.

"Just climb up, and hold on."

Jesse got on the horse, and situated himself
behind the ominous figure. What was he doing? He turned back to
look at the cabin—but it was already hidden somewhere beyond the
hill. Susanna and the others were probably too busy trying to put
out the fire to even notice his absence.

"Of course," Black said,
"I'll have to blindfold you." He took out a long strip of dark
fabric, and Jesse obliged, allowing Black to put it around his head
and tie it tight. It struck him at that moment how valuable a
ransom property he would be—at least, how valuable Black
would
think
Wayne's own brother would be. If Black knew Jesse's name, he
could easily know his blood relation. But what Black couldn't know
was that Jesse's being out of the picture would be quite the stroke
of convenience for Wayne's personal affairs. Jesse tried to put
this out of mind.

Black got the horse moving. Soon, they had
left the scene at the derrick far behind.

"You can remove the blindfold now."

Jesse took it off, and let his eyes adjust to
the light.

The outlaw had led the horse down a winding,
rocky canyon. The mouth of the canyon opened up now, into a wide,
circular basin surrounded on all sides by limestone walls and
obelisk-like towers.

Within this natural amphitheater, at least
two dozen tents had been erected in a round-table arrangement.

At the center of the camp, there was a fire
pit. A garrison of bandits milled about the camp. Some were
bedraggled, with long beards and rough skin. Others were younger,
practically still boys, with a mean gleam in their eyes that said
they'd grown up hungry and so trusted no one. All of them had
rifles slung across their backs, or revolvers at their sides.

The twenty or so men Jesse could spot all
turned to face Black and his new guest. Their leader acknowledged
them with a slight wave. He led the horse to a hitching post, and
Jesse hopped off.

"Keep walking with me," Black told Jesse. "My
tent's the one in the middle there, just across from us by the
pit."

Jesse walked, through this crowd of
shifty-eyed bandits, protected only by his current, tenuous
association with Black.

Jesse opened the flap on Black's tent at his
behest, and walked in, Black right behind him. It took his eyes a
few moments to adjust to the dark.

"Can I get you something to drink?" Black
asked. "Tea?"

Jesse nodded. "Sure." He looked around the
tent. This seemed an improbable place for a tea drinker to live—in
a tent, among bandits, relegated to these harsh wastelands where
high society dare not build.

Black's preference for tea over whiskey was
not the only thing about him that ran counter to the stereotype of
an outlaw. His tent was full of objects of antiquity, both

European and native. And unlike his henchmen,
armed to the teeth as they were, Black had apparently gone to the
scene at the oil field without so much as a pistol. When Black
placed a tea set on the floor mat between them, it did not consist
of simple metal cups, but a set of fine china. Jesse wouldn't have
been surprised if Black revealed himself to be an academic,
studying the bandits as part of some anthropological stunt.

Sitting cross-legged before Black, Jesse
could finally take in his features. In a way, he was surprised to
find the enigmatic figure had a normal, plainly human face. It was
long in its features and pockmarked, the face of a man who'd lived
a hard forty years.

"They say you're no ordinary man," Jesse
said. "But some kind of mystic. That you understand the strange
properties of Devil's Peak."

Black raised his brows and
tilted his head. "I may know a lot of things," he said, "but as far
as I know, I'm no mystic." Black took a sip of his tea then, and
made a
goddamn, that's tasty
face, as if still surprised to find it so
satisfying. "Well, Jesse, what else do they say about me? What does
your brother say about me?"

"Wayne says if Bridgetown becomes too
important, your gang will run out of town. He says that's why
you're waging war on him."

Black laughed, a big, genuine laugh. "Oh, is
that what he told you?"

"Yeah, but you people live in tents. You're
already in exile, and there's plenty of desert where you could hide
and scheme. No, whatever it is that's got you rankled up over
Wayne, it's more than that."

Black rubbed his palms together and rested
his chin on his clasped hands.

"Well, what is it, then?" Jesse asked. "Why
stick around and wage war on a town that's not got much going for
it besides the one factory? Why not act like real bandits and ride
the rails, robbing banks, or whatever it is you're supposed to
do?"

A fly buzzing around the tent made its
presence known. Black clapped his hands over it, and kept them
pressed together.

"I'm no common thug," Black said. "For
starters..." He released his hands, and the fly buzzed out,
unscathed.

"...I cannot hurt a fly."

What was Black going on about?

Black began to answer Jesse's unspoken
request for elaboration. "When we are brought into this world, we
are entrusted with certain mortal responsibilities. I violated that
trust. So I was punished. I lost the power to harm, and gained a
new responsibility in its place. Now, my job is to be a guardian.
You could call me a gatekeeper."

"Devil's Peak," Jesse blurted. He felt his
own eyes light up as the pieces locked into place in his mind. "The
rabbit-hole in the desert. The one Wayne and Susanna and I fell
into—"

"You must understand," Black said with a thin
smile. "Being gatekeeper of an entire desert's not an easy job.
Holes can pop up anywhere, at any time. And the targets that get
through are quick, and small. Like rats. It's a burden I've had to
bear for a very, very long time."

Black might have laughed a little just then;
it was hard to tell. "To be perfectly honest, Jesse, you and your
companions are a pestilence. Your very presence upsets the natural
order of things. You're like conquistadors, giving smallpox to the
natives."

"So why not kill me where I stand?" Jesse
asked, curiosity overriding any reasonable fear. "Or why not have
your goons do it, if you really aren't capable? You've got me right
where you want me."

"That's true," Black said. "But I'm no
monster." He looked up to the heavens for a moment. "At least, not
anymore." His eyes returned to Jesse, and he took a deep breath.
"Jesse, I'm not going to kill you. I want to help you. And more
importantly, I need your help."

Jesse's head was beginning to feel light, and
he could spot a slight shimmering around the edges of the objects
in the tent. Even Black, who seemed to live up to his name by
absorbing the light around him like some crushed-velvet vortex,
wore a halo just then. Was it just shock at the strangeness of it
all? Was the surreality of Jesse's last day and a half finally
catching up with him? Or had the gangster put something in his
tea?

Of course. He'd just been slipped a
mickey.

Sound was stretching out all around him,
taking on the quality of having mass and tangible dimension. The
imagined barriers between both space and time were breaking down.
Jesse began to perceive only the one true property of the universe,
that of space-time. The moments just before, and the moments just
after his sudden cognitive break, were visible to him in spatial
relation, as apparent and mundane as three upturned plastic cups on
a table. This was no hallucination. This was more spectacular, more
real, than any acid blotter or mushroom could deliver.

A warm, white glow began to fill Jesse's
chest and tingle throughout his body. He looked down at himself—at
least, he thought that's what he was doing—and he saw his true form
for the first time. He was a great, long wormy thing, at one end a
zygote and at the other, ancient bone-dust dissipating into
potentiality. Every moment of his life that he'd ever lived as a 5'
11", steel-eyed three-dimensional being was just a single slice of
himself. A fragmentary snapshot of a continuous, but finite,
organism that existed in time and space. This meta-body curved and
kinked its way through space-time, as three-dimensional Jesse, back
in the lowly three-dimensional world, made choices and committed
actions, blithely unaware of where he was, in truth, going.

"Jesse," a voice called out from across the
ether. It was Black. "I know this all seems very strange, but try
to focus."

"How are you showing me this?" He didn't know
how he was speaking, only that his voice was echoing out
across—well, across whatever existed outside his ordinary
perception of life and the universe.

"Think of where you are, right now, in
space-time."

"I'm everywhere."

"But where were you? Just before you became
fully aware?"

"I was in the tent, with you. Back at your
camp."

"Good. Now where were you a day ago?"

Jesse moved back along his wormy meta-body,
shuttling through the snapshots in time as though flipping through
a rolodex. Actually, it felt more like jogging through a filmstrip
in reverse on one of the Movieolas he used to use at UCLA.

There he was, exactly twenty-four hours
earlier. He was in the general store, asking the shopkeep why he
wore a green visor on his head. He could recall the moment with
perfect clarity. The dust visible in the sunbeam cast by the
storefront window. Every wrinkle and crevice on the old man's face.
The sour smell of the shop's old wooden floorboards.