Empire Of Salt (13 page)

Fear had a taste and it tasted like steel. The taste of a bayonet in the rain, or of a rifle shell clenched between the teeth to keep from screaming.

Gerald turned his head and beheld the monster.

Its skin was a universal green, like necrotic skin around an untended wound. A military uniform clung to the monster, torn at the sleeves, across the chest and at the knees. Its feet were bare and had rotted partially away. The monster's arms hung at its side, long, muscular, mottled green, its hands opening and closing. The face was half gone. Cheeks gave away above the jaw, the tip of the nose was gone, an ear was missing. Hair hung in clumps, leaving spots of baldness. The eyes were the only things still intact, but they were changed, replaced by a yellow so incandescent, it was like urine on freshly packed snow.

It lunged at Gerald, and he screamed.

But the monster drew up short as the chain attaching the iron-jawed trap on its leg to the trailer's axle snapped taught. It wheezed loudly in the small room as it pulled against the chain, less than a foot from Gerald's face.

But Gerald kept his eyes shut. He felt his insides shrivel. Something clamped around his heart and constricted it. Urine soaked his pants. He realized that his hooks were trembling on the end of his arms.

He remembered what his old sergeant had told him when he was in Korea. There was a phrase he was told to repeat over and over and it had worked for a time, keeping the fear at bay.

He opened his mouth to speak, but the sandpaper that his lips had become refused to work. He ran a thick tongue over them several times until he was able to speak.

"Fucking gook bastards," he whispered.

He willed his eyes to open just a crack.

The monster leered at him with yellow eyes.

"Fucking gook bastards," he managed to say with a little more conviction.

The monster lunged at the end of the chain but couldn't get any closer.

"Fucking gook bastards!"

Gerald felt the power of the words come back to him. He remembered their entire platoon screaming the phrase over and over as they were attacked on his third night in the country. The mantra had rang out over the valley, even louder than the rifle fire. They hadn't lost a man that night. The power of the words had held them together.

So now, as then, Gerald crowed the words to the ceiling, as if his friends in heaven could hear him. He began to laugh, a strange laugh that he hadn't heard come from his mouth since the war.

And he screamed the mantra. Over and over, the words that had kept him alive so long ago bounced off the snarling face of the green-skinned monster that stared back at him with mad glowing eyes.

"Fucking gook bastards!"

He screamed it again and felt better for it.

Her nose was inches away as she tried to see under the door. But the hallway on the other side was all darkness and shadows. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn't pierce the gloom.

Was it gone? Was it still out there?

She'd caught herself several times with her hand on the door knob, prepared to open it. Only at the last second did she recognize the danger, remembering her husband's words after he'd finished the construction.

"Don't open the door no matter what happens," her husband had said. "When the end comes, and it will, you want to be the last one standing, so let the rest of the world fight it out while you wait here inside."

Only one thing kept her from following his instructions - her hunger. It was devastating. It ate at her inside, clawed at her throat and needled into her psyche.

Feed me. Feed me. Feed me.

She hadn't had a thing since yesterday morning.

"Are you there?" she whispered.

No answer.

She turned back towards Trudie, whose gaze remained fixed on the door. The dog had been her danger barometer and still believed that the thing was outside. But could it be wrong? Could the dog merely be as scared as she was?

"Please. Are you there?"

And then she heard it, the slight wheezing sound of the creature.

She tried to peer into the darkness and see where it was, when an eye suddenly appeared before her on the other side of the door. Yellow and unholy, it stared back at her.

Trudie barked, breaking the spell.

Abigail scrambled to her feet and ran back to the bed. She grabbed the pistol with one hand and her dog with the other.

Sooner or later that creature had to go.

Abigail glanced down at her dog as she stroked its downy fur. Hopefully sooner, because she was getting hungry.

"What about a mermaid?" Derrick asked drowsily, still smirking at her story. He lay on the couch, his head pressed into a pillow.

Natasha stared at the snow on the television and tried to ignore the thousandth question Derrick had posed on learning about the hand she'd seen. He'd run the guess gamut from the Hulk to green M&Ms. It was clear that he didn't really believe her, but she knew what she'd seen and the vision still haunted her - the Mad Scientist applying surgical clamps to the tendons of an amputated hand. It occurred to her that Derrick would have more readily believed her if she hadn't said the hand was green. As strange as it was, the idea of a regular dismembered hand was normal compared to the reality of the green one.

"What about the Creature from the Black Lagoon?"

She sighed, took a sip from a coke that had long ago turned warm and flat, then returned the can to the end table. "The hand wasn't webbed," she said flatly.

"Aha!" Derrick pumped his fist. "Now we're getting somewhere."

Natasha shook her head. They'd turned in for the night, lying once again on the leather couches. Her dad had come in late in the afternoon, talked to her and Derrick for a moment, and gone into her grandfather's bedroom. She'd heard him crying. She'd heard it a lot, but it still disturbed her and wasn't something she wanted to hear again.

Later, Maude had come over and made shrimp tacos on the grill. Auntie Lin made fried rice. They'd all sat on the roof patio with a view of the sun's dying rays across the red-hued Salton Sea. Her dad and Maude drank a few beers. Natasha was happy to see that he only had a couple.

They talked a little about the missing Beachy boy, then spent the rest of the conversation talking about Gertie. It seemed that she was prone to going off by herself. Something that had driven Natasha's grandfather crazy when he'd lived with her, but as Maude pointed out, he was also often the reason Gertie left. As of yet, there was still no sign of her, but then again, for increasingly obvious reasons, no one had really looked.

Maude explained to the Olivers how she and Gertie had both dated Lazlo. Maude had met him first and been with him for ten years. When they separated, he'd spent the next ten years with Gertie. During the last five years, both of them had dated him on and off, but at their age, it was nothing like when they were younger.

Maude also emphasized that neither she nor Gertie were the reason Patrick's father had left his mother. That had been a woman truck driver named Emily Ferger, with whom he'd decided to start a new life in El Centro. Within months he'd regretted leaving, but knew that he could never go back; he'd broken a trust that could never be mended. To return would have been "a Band-Aid on cancer": he hadn't wanted to do more harm than he already had done.

Maude explained that she'd always been more independent than Gertie. Maude came from a family of eight children and Gertie had been an only child. She'd needed Lazlo as both a friend and a lover and was taking his death harder than Maude.

Natasha replayed the conversation in her mind several times. She'd had friends, but she'd never felt as if she couldn't live without them. She'd wondered if there was something wrong with her, because everyone else she knew, Derrick included, seemed to need their friends as if they were extensions of themselves.

But not Natasha. She had an independent streak a mile long. She'd been picked second to last once on the kick ball team and, instead of playing, had walked away. She hadn't needed to play to have a good time. She'd just wanted to be around people, to see them laugh and play and to live vicariously through them. Although she hadn't been able to think about it in those terms back then, she was coming to understand it now.

"What about a man from the moon?" Derrick asked, his voice on the verge of sleep.

"He'd be made of cheese," Natasha said.

"Could be green cheese," he murmured.

"Stinky cheese. You would have smelled it."

Derrick nodded sagely. "We would have. Good point, Watson."

Natasha stared at the television screen for awhile, letting her mind drift. So much had happened. Looking around Bombay Beach, other than Veronica, she didn't think there were any other kids - and the Amish kids didn't count.

"Natasha?"

"Yes, Derrick."

"Why do you think they call static on the television snow?"

"What does it look like to you?"

Derrick considered for a moment, then answered. "An electronic Etch-a-Sketch."

"Do you see shapes?" She felt sleep only moments away.

"Sure. Like clouds."

She was beginning to drift along the current of her dreams when she felt a tug at her arm.

"Natasha, wake up."

She didn't want to leave. Everything tasted like peppermint, even the air. There was a rumble as if a volcano was erupting purple, molten chocolate far away -

"Natasha, come on. Wake up."

She opened her eyes. The rumbling was still there.

"What is it?" She levered herself to a sitting position on the couch.

"Something's going on outside." Derrick headed for the door. "Come on."

Natasha followed, careful to close the door quietly so she wouldn't wake Aunt Lin or her father, and hurried up the steps to the rooftop patio. On one side, the moon shone down on the Salton Sea, creating quicksilver waves in the darkness. On the other was the highway, where three bull-nosed buses were pulling off and heading into town. They had no markings, and the windows were heavily tinted.

"What do you make of that?" Derrick whispered.

Natasha shook her head. It was a little late for a tour group, plus, those buses didn't seem to be the type to be carrying octogenarians out for a discount week of sun, fun and adventure.

Natasha and Derrick watched from the roof as the vehicles drove into town, turned at sump pump #1 and ran the length of Fifth Street to sump pump #2. Instead of turning then, the buses went straight; the metal barrier that usually blocked access to the desalination plant had been removed. The buses followed a sandy road across the quay which was lit up like a Christmas tree.

Her grandfather's telescope rested on a homemade wooden tripod near the far edge of the patio. She tugged on the telescope and, with Derrick's help, was able to get it free. She carried it over to the opposite rail, knelt and tried to see through it to where the buses idled at the gate to the plant.

She saw a man dressed in a black jacket and blue jeans checking items off on a clipboard as the buses entered the gates. He waited until the last bus had come to a stop, then, after glancing back along the quay toward Bombay Beach, he closed the gate.

It was in that moment that she recognized him. It was Sam Hopkins, the ecologist who'd come into the restaurant earlier that day.

Gerald woke from a nightmare, sitting up with a start. In his dreams the Chinese had stormed over the hill and had infiltrated camp. This had happened only once in his memory- never to his platoon, but to a sister platoon farther along the line, nearer Inchon.

He reached over and grabbed his left prosthetic. He always kept one on. Without his wife around, he had no one to help him into them, so each night he rotated, removing one or the other, but never both.

He dressed as quickly as he could, then went to the living room.

He heard the cries from his dreams again, this time from down the street.

He grabbed his old carbine from where it sat beside the door and exited onto the porch. It was hot and muggy, little more than a breeze stirring the night. He slid into the seat of his golf cart, backed out, and headed down the road at a walking pace.

He kept his headlights off, knowing that they'd attract attention if lit. The screams came again. He turned down Avenue F, heading for the water. Figures ran into the street and back out of it.

He rested the carbine across his lap so he could use it if necessary. The big wooden and steel rifle was the only thing he could shoot with any accuracy. Pistols were out of the question. As were shotguns, their recoil ruining his tenuous grip.

But the carbine had gotten him through the Korean War and had proven itself many times.

As he crossed Third Street, he was able to make out a commotion coming from the Beachy place. He rolled a few more feet, then halted.

A monster stumbled into the street, dragging someone.

Gerald leaned forward. It was Mrs. Beachy. Her face had been all but bitten off and her stomach ripped open. The monster looked around, then headed towards the seawall.