Unassigned Territory (14 page)

“Damn straight,” Delandra told him. “Cross me and you’ll wind up like this poor son of a bitch.” She jerked open the door, reached inside and flipped the tarp away from the case. The man and his wife came a couple of steps forward. With the car door thrown open, the seat forward, and the sunlight streaming through the glass, the profile of the Mystery of the Mojave was lit up like a jewel in the sun. The lady opened her mouth and put a hand on her husband’s arm. The man stretched his neck and squinted. “It’s some kind of fake,” he said. But there was a funny kind of expression on his face when he said it and he did not seem inclined to move any closer. “Takes one to know one,” Delandra said. She replaced the tarp and climbed in behind the wheel from the passenger side. Obadiah followed her. “I think we should call the Highway Patrol,” he heard someone say as he slammed the door behind him. Delandra swung the car around and gunned it, leaving the motorcyclists to eat her dust. “Citizens,” she said, “they make me sick.”

I
n another hour they came to another town. At least it was more of a town than the junction. Two-story brick buildings baked in the sun along a paved main street. Upon closer inspection, however, Obadiah could see that most of the windows were boarded, the buildings, like the mining shacks which dotted the hills, empty.

He might have taken the place for a ghost town had it not been for the dozen or so late-model cars he saw parked here and there as they drove along the street. At last Delandra pulled up in front of one of the buildings and killed the engine. The building was made of brick with a deep wooden porch which extended to the street. There were benches on the porch and a high wooden railing and several old men rested there in the shade. “Let’s stop here for a beer,” Delandra said. “I want to run something down for you.”

They went up some steps and into the building. The saloon was deserted, dark, and cool. A bartender walked out of the back room as they came in. Delandra called him by name, ordered a pitcher, and then directed Obadiah to a table against the wall. “Look,” she said after they had seated themselves, “I want to show you something.”

She passed him a thin white piece of cardboard with a typed message on it. The message had been typed in red ink, using all capital letters.

Obadiah took the card.

“It’s from Sarge,” Delandra said. “He always made up a little something to go with his newest version of the Thing.”

Obadiah turned the card over. The back side was blank. He looked again at the red ink and began to read.

It seems that Sarge had gone to sleep one night in his camper at a roadside rest near a town called Trona, that sometime later, during the night, he was awakened by a peculiar wind. Looking from a camper window, he observed a strange light in the sky and what appeared to be a cigar-shaped craft descending toward some salt flats near which he was parked. Somewhat shaken, he gave it a few minutes thought, then grabbed a shovel—the nearest thing to a weapon he had in the truck—and went out to investigate. He did not get far. Somewhere on the dark flat he was set upon by a strange creature. The creature was large and powerfully built, though somewhat slow. There followed a lengthy battle—what felt like hours to Sarge Hummer. He swung his shovel hard and often, connected with blows he was certain would have killed another man, and then, finally, was himself knocked unconscious.

When he came to, it was morning. The weak light given by a quarter moon had been replaced by the light of a rising sun. Sarge stood and dusted himself off, amazed to find himself still alive. He retrieved the shovel, started back toward his truck, and that was when he made his remarkable find. His first guess was that it was the creature that had attacked him, though he could find no marks which might indicate a fatal blow. After getting the body to his truck, he retraced his steps out onto the flat, this time going much farther than he had the night before. He found no cigar-shaped craft. He did, however, find some strange crystals near a blackened ring of earth. Later, a friend examined the crystals and said they appeared to be sand particles which had been fused by a high heat. The card ended with the words AND SO THE MYSTERY REMAINS. WHAT IS IT? ALIEN BEING? MISSING LINK? YOU BE THE JUDGE! The card was signed:
Sarge Hummer, 1961

When Obadiah raised his eyes he found Delandra watching him, leaning forward across the table.

“Well?” she asked him. “What do you think?”

“Quite a story.”

Delandra nodded. “That was my old man.”

Obadiah was silent. He was trying to remember something. It seemed to him there was some biblical connection to be made. Something from the Old Testament—one of the Hebrew prophets calling down fire from heaven to consume one of Baal’s altars; years later archaeologists finding unusual crystal formations on the site. He could not remember any more. He looked back at Delandra. “So what do you think of it?” he asked her.

Delandra shrugged. “He made up things like that to go with all of them,” she said.

The bartender crossed the room with the pitcher. “But you did say this Thing was different from the others?”

Delandra nodded. “You’ve got to give it to him there. Credit where credit’s due. At any rate”—she tapped at the card with her finger—“this may come in handy yet. Let me tell you how I was thinking of financing our trip. About ten years ago this retired doctor moved out here from the East Coast and began an operation even crazier than Sarge’s. He bought up a bunch of land around Table Mountain and began building things. He built something called an Electro-Magnetron, a Martian Museum; he even went so far as to build a landing strip for alien craft. I’ve never seen the stuff, but I’ve heard about it. He holds a big convention up there every spring and UFO freaks from all over the country show up. I don’t know what they do. Wait for the Martians to come and carry them away, I suppose.”

“Kind of like the rapture, in other words.”

“The what?”

“Christ on the clouds to receive the elect.”

Delandra nodded. “Christ on the clouds. I had almost forgotten about Him. Is that what you were waiting for yourself?”

“No. We believe He’s returned already but no one knows it.” Delandra nodded once more. “I see,” she said. “Interesting.” He could see, however, that she wasn’t in the least. But then neither anymore was he. He watched her take a drink of beer, following a bit of sunlight as it moved along the side of her face. He had never imagined that she was the kind of girl he would love. Pre-Delan-dra fantasies had never included anyone even remotely like her. And yet, sitting with her now, half looped in a town he could not name, studying the arch of her brow and the place near her temples where the dark hair joined the skin, he did not see how he could go on without her. It was a frightening thought and he reached for the beer.

“Dr. Verity is the guy’s name,” Delandra was saying. “I don’t know what his whole rap is, something about being in contact with aliens, relaying messages, that sort of stuff. But I know one thing. I know that one time the old fart showed up out at our place and offered to buy a version of the Thing that wasn’t anywhere near as good as the one you and I’ve got right here.” She waved toward the swinging saloon-style doors through which they had entered. “You get my drift?”

“So there really is a buyer.”

“I think so. That’s what I’ve been up to on the phone. I’ve been trying to get through to the old fart. I wanted to set up a meeting.”

“And?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know yet. I got hold of some people but they’ve been giving me the runaround. I finally set up something for tomorrow. We’re supposed to meet this guy at the landing strip.”

“Verity?”

“I don’t think so. Someone in his group. But I would say we’ve got a shot at connecting with someone who will want to buy. That’s the main thing.”

Obadiah was still holding Sarge’s card. He turned it once more, looking at it in the dim light. “So why have you waited?” he asked. “Why didn’t you and your brother sell it to him before?”

Delandra sat tracing a pattern in the moisture left by the pitcher with her finger. She was still wearing the white-rimmed shades, which sat just a bit crookedly on her face. “Rex wouldn’t want to sell it,” she said. “And, well, you know me. I am a sentimental girl.” Obadiah nodded. He could see that she was smiling back of the shades. The smile soon turned into one of those grins with too many teeth in it—the likes of which he had seen upon his arrival at the Chevron. This time, however, the grin was complicated by the crooked glasses. She looked just a bit wolfish and slightly crazed.

“And then maybe I never had a good enough reason to sell it before, either.”

“And now you do?”

Delandra moved her shoulders. “I’m here, aren’t I?”

Obadiah looked back toward the light and the doors. There were particles of dust caught in the light, and the light, as it moved toward the bar, took on a certain delicate glow because of them. It ran to golden and drew a slender brilliant vein along the wooden edge of the bar before splashing to a dusty floor. The bartender had gone somewhere out of sight, leaving Obadiah and Delandra alone with the dust and the light. He was trying, he found, to think of about six different things at once. He was trying to think about what Delandra had told him and how, or if, it changed things. He was trying to think about Delandra being here, because of him. He could not say he was unmoved by the thought. The idea that he was good enough reason for anyone to be anywhere seemed to him at the moment nearly as mysterious as the Thing in the back of Delandra’s car. He poured the last of the beer into their glasses and sat looking at the note which still lay between them, its red letters shining in the yellow light, “When we go to meet these people,” he said, “will we be going anywhere near the town of Trona?”

“Right through it.”

“And how about that roadside rest, the one Sarge mentions in the note. Will we get a chance to look at that?”

Delandra looked at him the way his mother might had he just announced the discovery of spots on his throat. “I suppose,” she said. “But why do you ask?”

Obadiah shrugged. He was looking down at the note which still lay between them on the table. “I don’t know. It might be interesting to have a look.”

Delandra signaled the bartender for a second round while making an odd high-pitched whirring sound with her mouth, like she was doing sound effects for a grade B horror flick, “I’m sure there’ll be a lot to see,” she said.

T
wo pitchers later they were back on a dusty street—much too bright after the dim saloon. It was Delandra’s plan that she and Obadiah take a cheap motel she knew of on the outskirts of Trona. Not only would this give them a place to spend the night, it would give them a place to stash the Thing when they went out the next morning to, as Delandra liked to say, contact the contact. Since, however, they did not want to check into the motel until after dark, there was, at present, time to kill.

Unhappily, for Obadiah, who was now anxious to get back on the road, time does not die easily in towns like Rimrock. After Sarge Hummer’s last note and testament there was not much to see. Or perhaps it was just that what there was seemed suddenly pale by comparison. Obadiah tried getting Delandra to tell him more about Verity but she had already told him what she knew. He tried getting her to talk more about her father but that subject did not seem to interest her. “What’s there to say,” she said. “Just some yahoo like the rest of them.”

“The rest of them?”

“Nuts. The desert’s full of people just like him. They get out here and pretty much do as they please. Build houses out of tin cans, wait for the aliens to come and carry them away, ride around in four-wheelers with six-guns on their hips like goddamn cowboys. Goofballs on the range. What can I say?”

The town of Rimrock lay on a grade, giving it a high side and a low side. The main street, which at one time had been paved, together with the brick buildings, sat on the high side, backed up against a squat, stony ridge. The rest of the town fell away in a southeasterly direction, ending in a sorry collection of shacks scattered about the edge of a dry lake. It gave one the impression that the town had once been perched at the edge of the sea but that the sea had deserted it. There also appeared to have been, at one time or another, an upheaval of some magnitude, perhaps an earthquake, for all along the western side of the main street there were places at which the ridge had given way and slid down to destroy a building or two. There were perhaps half a dozen such pockets of destruction along the quarter-mile stretch of road.

Obadiah and Delandra walked slowly along the street. It did not appear as if any effort had been made to restore the damaged buildings, so that Obadiah guessed the town must have begun to die before the slide came. He and Delandra looked into the windows of rooms which must have looked now very much the way they had when the rocks came pouring through their western walls. Broken pieces of furniture and various mangled appliances could be seen in some of the rooms, often half covered by mounds of earth and brick. The rooms were possessed of a heavy, musty odor and the shafts of sunlight which pierced the windows and ruined ceilings were streaked with dust, so that the rooms had about them something of that same dusty golden light Obadiah had seen in the bar, and he found that strolling among the wreckage made him unaccountably happy. There was a certain finality about the place he found oddly satisfying. He asked Delandra if people had been killed here but she pleaded ignorance. “You were never curious?” he asked her.

“About what?”

“About what happened here.”

“The ore ran out and the ridge came down. That’s what happened here.”

They had by now reached the end of paved road. At their feet lay the desert, a vast expanse of land dotted with creosote bushes and mining shacks. The shacks ended after a mile or so and then there was just the creosote going on for as far as the eye could see. They turned back toward the town.

Obadiah, never having been a lover before, was at times uncertain about how to conduct himself. His interest in the town, for instance; Delandra seemed to find it boring. His interest in Sarge Hummer’s note and the roadside rest at the edge of Trona she seemed to find irritating, so that he was somewhat torn between a drunken sense of happiness and the feeling that he was blowing it. He had wanted them to operate on the same frequency. He sensed instead that certain intangibles were slipping out of sync. Maybe it was just him. Maybe he thought too much about what all of this was costing him and it was making him weird. The odd part was, he was enjoying himself anyway, right here and now, and when by chance they happened upon Rimrock’s lone barber shop, he was set upon by a sudden screwball notion to alter his physical appearance. Perhaps, he thought, one could learn to enjoy being weird.