For Brad Schaffer, the day was not just a Wednesday, it was THE Wednesday. The one that he had fantasized about for ten long years. He’d downloaded a little countdown timer on his laptop, oh how he hated that laptop, slick black, and underpowered. Only the best for Vantage Aerospace Solutions or VAS (pronounced V-A-S). He had downloaded that countdown timer and mapped out the date of his retirement. And for ten long years, he’d watched earnestly as the days ticked by—even as he had plotted his revenge.

He’d planned his retirement from this godforsaken place that some people still pretended was a business. It was of course, not a business, because corporations are not businesses, they are fiefdoms. Saying a corporation was a business, was like saying middle managers were leaders. It was like saying there was a free market when there was no hard money, he thought.

Regardless, this was his Wednesday, this was the day he retired for good.

He stared at the steaming cup of coffee on his desk. His last morning coffee. The mug said World’s Greatest Dad. It had been a gift from his son on a Father’s day he could no longer clearly remember.

Brad sat there and considered his life. Considered his moment of victory, and somehow, it still felt hollow. He was 55 and no longer recognized the person in the mirror every morning. It was still his face of course, but time had taken its toll. His eyes bulged slightly, and he had gained weight. His skin was sallow, and his hair thinning. Getting old was a bitch, he thought.

He took a sip of coffee. Savored it. The first sip of his last cup, on his last day.

Lisa typed away in the cubicle next to him. She hummed a tune to herself, lost in her work, the blue screen of her laptop reflecting off her store-bought readers.

“Brad,” Lisa, said. “Brad, are you ok?”

She sounded distant, muffled almost. He stood up quickly, so quickly that he felt dizzy. He did, however, feel lighter on his feet.

Had he dozed off?

“I’m fine,” Brad said quickly as he regained his bearings. Lisa stood next to him. She stared at his desk.

“Lisa, what’s wrong?” he asked, but she didn’t respond. Didn’t even acknowledge him.

He followed her eyes to his desk and then gasped in shock. His body—his own slumped form—passed out on the desk before him. He took a step back waiting for the dream to collapse like it did every time he realized that he’d been dreaming.

But it didn’t.

“Brad, wake up,” Lisa cried. She shook the slumped form harder and harder.

“Lisa, I’m right here,” he said. He reached for her shoulder, but his hand passed straight though.

He examined his hand as Lisa continued her bluster. It was a hand. It looked normal enough. He reached for the mug on his desk, absently craving more caffeine, but to his amazement his hand passed through again. Glitched through, like... interrupting a hologram. Except, he was the hologram.

He was nothing.

Brad stared in equal parts shock and horror as the EMTs worked over his empty shell. One-two-three, his ribs cracked beneath the force of the chest compressions. The EMT pinched what used to be Brad’s nose, and then clamped his own lips over the now graying body’s mouth.

How strange? It didn’t seem real.

Brad watched in horror as the show continued, and his anxiety grew as he waited for the dream to fall apart.

Weren’t you supposed to wake up when you die in a dream?

“He’s gone,” the man said at last. “Cardiac arrest.”

The EMT guided Lisa to a seat. Everyone had gathered. Brad watched Jack, his boss, as he forced what seemed like the whole office to take step back.

“Back to your seats, give the men some room,” his boss yelled.

Brad grabbed for the EMT, “But I’m right here, I’m right here I tell you.” But the man didn’t react. Brad watched as they wheeled his body away, and the full weight of the situation finally settled in—he was dead.

He watched as Jack consoled Lisa and then sent her home. He watched as Jack sat back down at his own desk, three spaces up, and just sat, and sat, and stared, and stared.

Brad made another pass at the coffee. The craving for caffeine having grown more intense. God, how he had wanted to finish that coffee. But it was no use. He could not pick it up. He could not lean against his desk. He was nothing. The material world as far away from him as he was to it.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the horror of the situation dawned. He was a ghost. He had died at work, and he was stuck here. Stuck in the very place he had always wanted to escape. And on his last day too. Oh, the irony, oh what a fucking cruel joke of a universe, he thought.

Brad tried to leave through the exit, but some barrier, invisible even to him, kept him from leaving. He pushed on it, and his limbs merely glitched through. He was trapped. This was it. This was home now.

When everyone had left for the night, he walked the halls in the dark. It was only then that he realized the depth of his mistake. The thing that he had left undone. For that was what chained the spirits of the dead to the earthly realm—things undone. He had never left. The thought had barely passed through him, when he wondered how it possible, how he could think without a brain. Unless, thoughts never came from the brain. What were thoughts anyways? Were they real? Or was the brain an antenna that drew in signals from the ether. Messages from some place beyond. Thoughts certainly existed on this side of the veil. Or was the spirit the receptor? And if so, who or what sent the messages?

If only he’d had more time.

But he’d had all the time in the world, had every day since the very first time he realized that his job was killing him. He’d waffled of course. The benefits were so good. The economy was doing badly. But when was it not? No, all those were excuses, he finally admitted to himself.

It was cowardice. Cowardice and laziness and bitterness that had held him back. He’d wasted his time, and this was his reward. He could’ve taken the leap whenever he had wanted to, but he didn’t. And so, he was here, chained to this building, this place he so loathed, bound by his very essence—a collection of vices and cravings and moral failings—all caught in the filter of his own soul.

The days passed slowly and life in the office went on more or less normally. Brad was somewhat surprised by this. He hadn’t really expected there to be a fountain of tears every day, but he had expected something... something more. The fluorescents were harsh on his astral form, their buzzing even louder this side of the veil, and since he had no use or need for sleep, his days had been extended by eight hours. The peace and quiet of after-hours was really the only time he found solace. His spirit ached with a million different cravings—for caffeine, for sugar, for sex even—like one giant itch that was impossible to scratch.

It was a week after his funeral that he saw them. His wife and son came to pick up his things. He sobbed silently as they packed up his little knick knacks and packed them away in a little brown cardboard box. He had decorated his little gray cell with them. Pictures of his family, a small bobblehead of Elvis Presley. A Pez dispenser of David Bowie. The whole of his person, his persona, packed loosely in a cardboard box.

He tried to hug them, but it was no use. But still he tried, channeling all the love in his soul in an attempt to deposit his presence.

His wife picked up the coffee mug, and she smiled gently, eyes brimming with tears, and his soul sang. She had felt his presence, he was sure of it.

His son was 19 now and had turned into a strapping young man. He had played both football and basketball throughout high school, and Brad thought of his late nights in the office that had occasionally made him miss one of the games. It hadn’t happened often. But it happened enough. Regret was the smoky discharge of tragedy, and tragedy the flame of lost potential. He was both.

And then they left, as quickly as they had come, and Brad’s ghostly form retreated to the back halls, where nobody worked anymore, and the lights were dimmed.

The following week, Brad caught a conversation between Lisa and Jack while they lounged in the breakroom.

“Are you going to replace Brad’s position?” Lisa asked.

“Not really planning on it,” Jack said, “we hadn’t needed it for a while.”

Lisa nodded dutifully and Brad drifted closer, venturing from the shadows into the violent lights.

“That job just meant so much to him, you know, I never really had the heart,” Brad continued. “But no, the answer is no. We aren’t planning on replacing him.”

Hadn’t had the heart, Brad thought. He hated this job. Hadn’t they seen that. Had they never seen him seething at his desk? Had his professional maske been that good, or had they never cared? What about his plan? They were supposed to need him. They were supposed to be crippled without him.

Brad retreated again to the back halls of the office building, and there he stayed.

A little over a month had passed since that fateful Wednesday, and the office had all but forgotten that Brad had ever worked there. There was no plaque. No stories or yarns told idly in his remembrance. It was as if he’d never existed. This had bothered Brad at first, but he made peace with the fool he’d been, the time he’d wasted, and the decisions he’d made. He had barely done so when another problem started. One with his astral form.

He was breaking down.

As he glided through the halls at night, he started to lose bits of himself on whatever he came into contact with. A wall, a desk, a cubicle, even the floor became like fly paper for his ghostly bits. Instead of glitching through them, now he left just a bit of his energy behind.

It also became harder and harder to remember things. He just had bad feelings now, and no idea why. The cravings had subsided to some extent, which he was grateful for. And he knew that he had had a family, but he didn’t remember what they looked like. Or even what their names were.

In fact, the only thing he knew for sure was that he was supposed to leave this place—that was all he had owed his own soul. The degeneration continued, and at times, he helped it along, frustrated and aching for it to end.

And after about a year of this, he was gone. Gone at last. No longer a soul, but an energy, a collection of bad vibes soaked into the masonry. And occasionally, someone in the office got a strange chill, or if they stayed late at night, reported that they heard sobbing near the back hall. Some said the office was haunted. Others said it had a weird energy. Still, others said the vibes were off. And occasionally, in a small cautious whisper, they talked about what had happened to Brad.

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Federal Agent Mason Taylor sat somewhat uncomfortably in the small office chair, draped as he was in Kevlar body armor and assorted gear. His brown hair was carefully combed backwards. Two piercing blue eyes perched high up on his hawk-like face.

He stared at cellphone in front of him. He was waiting for a call. At this very moment, the Omaha Field Office was on the phone with the black suits in Washington DC attempting to obtain last minute approvals for their raid. Across from him, sat almost half of the FBI Agents working at the Des Moines Resident Agency.

There were four of them in all, and kitted for bear, or in Mason’s case, whale. For this case was his white whale. It was the sort of case that he’d joined the FBI to solve. He hadn’t known it when he signed up and thrown away a promising career in biotech to go to Quantico. But somewhere deep down, he knew he’d been looking for this… this particular case, this particular suspect, this particular cause…

The conference room itself was fairly drab. Cinderblock walls painted white. Dirty blue carpet that was ripped in several places. A computer in one corner that hooked up to an overhead projector. A whiteboard hung crooked on the wall.

Normally, they would be busting balls, but Omaha had kept them waiting so long that nerves had set in. Agent Kim, a big Mexican looking hulk who was actually half white and half Korean, drummed his fingers lightly on the table. His pencil thin mustache made him look like a cartoon character. Rivera stared at the phone as if her focus would make it ring. Her crow black hair was restrained by a donut shaped bun, just the way the Marine Corps had taught her. Agent Nelson, for his part, was pencil thin. He had a JD and a degree in forensic accounting. He wore wire rimmed glasses that matched his body type and ran a marathon every six months, almost religiously. But looks could be deceiving, for he was also the best shot on the team.

He sat with his eyes closed. His lips moving slightly.

“The fuck are you doing?” Rivera asked.

Nelson opened one of his eyes, looked at her, and then said, “reciting Psalms.”

“How many you have memorized now?” Rivera asked.

“I’m up to 90.”

She gave a slight whistle.

“I can barely remember to pack my lunch,” Kim said.

The cellphone rang, vibrating sideways across the table. Once more the air was sucked out of the room.

Mason picked it up.

“Yes,” he said. Then, “Oh.” Then another, “yes.” Followed by a “thank you, sir.” Followed by a, “Did they say why?” and another “oh.” This continued for upwards of a minute.

He could feel his flush as Omaha talked back at him. And he could feel the words slip out through the opposite ear as his brain scrambled to make sense of them. And then he’d mumbled, “yes, sir,” for the last time and he’d heard the line had gone dead.

“It’s off,” Mason said.

“Did he say why?” Kim asked.

Mason pursed his lips and stood up, ripping the Velcro flaps of his vest. “Washington cockblocked us.”

“Well obviously,” Kim said. “But did he say why.”

“We don’t have enough.”

“That’s bullshit though. We have everything,” Kim said.

“Rangel thinks the Pentagon or the Agency got involved, but he wouldn’t say more.”

“The CIA?” Nelson asked, arching one eyebrow.

Mason shrugged at him. “Maybe.”

“Well what more do they want?” Rivera asked.

“Nothing,” Mason said, feeling the color in his cheeks drain. The pallid hand of helplessness brushed his shoulder, then rested there. The same one he’d felt so many years before.

“You mean they killed the whole thing?” Rivera said, putting a hand up to her mouth. “But…”

“I know,” Mason said, lifting a hand to pause her. “I’m taking the rest of the day. Don’t come looking for me... but if it’s really important, I’ll be at Moe’s—with my cellphone off.”

Moe’s was the type of hole in the wall that one assumed had to be a front for something. There was more homeless out front than customers inside.

He sat in the darkest and dankest corner of the bar, underneath a raggedy old deer head that “bumper tagged” circa 1960. Red neon light from the Budweiser sign illuminated his face. And in front of him, a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue and a small crystal glass.

He only came to Moe’s when things went wrong. The last time was six months ago, when Lena had left him. It He rotated the whiskey glass in his hand and watched the Budweiser sign’s neon light bounce every which way off the crystal bottom.

Before Mason was Agent Taylor, he was just a boy. An eleven year old farm kid from Polk County Florida who had sat across from his father in a bar that looked very similar. Back then, he’d watched his father stare at his whiskey glass in much the same way.

“Well,” his father would finally grunt. “I guess it’s time to head back.” Then he would rise, stagger, catch his balance, and toss his keys to a still bright eyed Mason.

“Sorry Dad,” Mason whispered as he remembered it. He felt like the boy again.

Then they would walk back out to the truck, the sun crawling for the horizon, his father staggering. Mason would help him up into the passenger side, and then he’d shut the door of the old red square bodied Ford behind him.

Mason would sit on the very edge of the bench seat so he could reach the truck’s pedals, and then he’d shift old faithful into gear and start her down the dirt road towards their farm. He’d roll his window down, hang his arm out the window, and the night would smell fresh from one of the showers that made for a Florida afternoon.

They’d enter the back way, and drive past rows and rows of orange trees, the smell of citrus on the breeze, followed by sickly sweet notes of rot and spoil. Some still had their leaves, some were even heavy with fruit, but the oranges that hung from them were diseased, half green things that would never ripen.

Just like us, Mason would think.

He’d only known it as the blight at first. That’s all anyone called it. In University, when he was studying for an undergraduate in Biochemistry, he would learn its official name was Huanglongbing, also known as the Citrus Greening disease. He would do his thesis on it in his Master’s program.

The blight was brought to Florida sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. It was nearly impossible to pin point an exact date. By 2005 it would go on to affect nearly 90% of the state’s orange groves. For whatever reason, better or worse, Taylor Farms had been hit the hardest.

His dad would never make it to 2005. Because at the end of that summer, the summer of 2004, Old Man Taylor would hang himself from one of his rotting orange trees and Mason would be the one to cut the body down.

Mason took up the glass up and washed down the memory, then he poured another. He looked up to see Michelle on her way over. She was a trim bottle blonde about five years his senior. Laugh lines and the type of freckles that come from too many tanning beds made her look ten years older than that. One of these mornings he would wake up next to her, and whether that would represent rock bottom or not, depended entirely on how good the sex was.

She slid into the booth across from him, dirty dishrag in her hand. Her bust taking up a rather large amount of his field of view.

“That bad?” she asked.

He smiled. “Not good.”

“Can I get you anything,” she asked, her hand brushing his.

“Not tonight,” he smirked at her.

“Well, you just let me know which night,” she teased. “I’ll be over there if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” Mason said.

She glided off and he threw back another slug of whiskey.

Mason woke to drab yellow curtains, wood paneling, and a fly buzzing itself to death on a fly strip. He was in a living room of sorts, right next to a kitchen. The sofa was an ugly green. Yellow light crept in through even more yellowed polycarbonate windows. He was in a mobile home, but who’s he couldn’t even begin to answer.

He sat up, and his head punished him for it. The throbbing went from gentle to jackhammer. He heard movement at the front door, and then a key in the lock, and fully expected Michelle to appear next. But it wasn’t Michelle, it was Rob Lamont.

The throbbing in his head took the form of alarm bells as he tried to stand.

“You were blacked out,” Rob said. “I almost shot you actually, thought you’d come to settle old scores.” He dropped two bags of groceries on the counter.

“How did… I get here?” Mason asked, easing back down onto the sofa.

“You drove,” Rob said, opening the door on the fridge. “You owe me a mailbox by the way.” He walked over with a Busch Light and handed it to Mason. “Hair of the dog, you’ll need it after a night like last night.”

Mason took it. But instead of opening it, he held it against the side of his head. “Did I say anything?”

“You need someone killed,” Rob said.

“Dammit,” Mason said, more to himself than Rob. He cracked the beer open and took a sip. He knew how he’d ended up here now, the idea that had just barely scratched the front of his rational mind last night had parlayed itself into action after so many whiskeys.

Rob returned to the kitchen and started the gas stove with a crackling pop. “You want eggs?”

“I need to be going,” Mason said.

“No you don’t,” Rob called back. “I want to hear how you think The Sons of Chiron can help.”

Mason rubbed his head, and wondered what he’d been thinking. What kind of drunk had brought him all the way out here, looking to farm out a hit to a man that had been one of the prime suspects in a capital murder investigation over a year ago.

Mason ticked off the highlights in the man’s profile. He was a former Navy SEAL. Now he lived in a trailer park on the edge of town. He had been diagnosed with PTSD. Now he collected 100% disability. Received an Other than Honorable discharge for something that Mason had never been able to dig up, even with his own clearances. The military court had sealed the files.

Now he ran with a motorcycle club that called themselves the Sons of Chiron. They weren’t into anything criminal, at least nothing that the FBI could prove. But the FBI did have a file open on them, and they didn’t just do that for everyone.

The murder of a guy named Omar had landed Rob on his radar over two years ago. Omar had been “drawn and quartered” out by Lake Red Rock. A pair of hikers had found him. Motorcycle tracks were left all over the place. The chains that had been used to do it had been soaked in diesel to get rid of any prints or DNA. They’d left the chains tied around the man’s four limbs.

As for motive, Omar was a serial rapist, and a repeat offender to boot. He’d just beat his latest case via a mistrial. The District Attorney had declined to prosecute the case again. There were rumors that the judge was a political appointment.

Regardless, the mistrial had been his death sentence.

Mason had bird dogged the case hard, and he’d never come up with anything but circumstantial evidence. Nothing that a jury wanted to see these days. Not DNA, nor cellphone geo-positioning in the area, no suspect google searches. They’d brought four or five of the club in as suspects, but they hadn’t been able to flip any of them. The case had died.

“Well, what about it?” Rob asked, interrupting him.

“You still going to therapy?” Mason asked, now desperate to change the subject.

“The court ordered stuff is done,” Rob said.

“PTSD, right?” Mason said.

“It’s a moral injury, not PTSD, but if they want to pay me for it I don’t care what they call it.”

“You didn’t answer the question?” Mason asked.

“Therapy is for narcissists and losers,” Rob said. “Now tell me why you want this…” He snapped his fingers. “This Wang Hao.”

“I talked a lot then.” Mason glanced at him.

“Yes you did,” Rob said, not turning around from his eggs.

Mason took a beat, and everything in his body told him to get up and walk out, but those bent and dead orange trees hung heavy in his mind’s eye, like his father, who hung even heavier. “Wang Hao is a professor at Iowa State University,” Mason said. “He teaches a few of the Ag classes. Unknown to the University, he also has another employer—the CCP.”

Rob scooped eggs from the pan onto a plate, and then walked into the living room. “The Chinese?” He handed the plate to Mason.

Mason nodded. “We’ve been keeping tabs on him for a while. Monitoring his communications, tailing him, building a case. The standard shit. But he hadn’t really done anything wrong just yet.”

“And then?” Rob asked.

Mason took a bit of eggs. They were a bit slimy for his taste, but helped curb the acid in his stomach. “Three days ago an agent working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security smuggled a fungal plant pathogen through airport security in Toronto. He landed at Des Moines International Airport. Then he handed it off to our Wang Hao.”

“How’d it get through customs?”

“We think there were payoffs involved. Security is only ever as good as its human factors.” Mason said.

“What does the FBI want with a fungus?” Rob asked.

“It causes fusarium head blight,” Mason said. “Destroys wheat and barley… corn too. It’s almost unstoppable once it gets going in a place. Wang Hao wants to release it here, smack dab in the middle of America’s bread basket. Or at least that’s what we believe. It could be one of the single most devastating cases of agroterrorism ever. Billions in crop damage. Food insecurity… suicides.”

“So arrest him,” Rob said.

“They killed it. They killed the case. One of those smug pricks in Washington killed it. A year down the drain, and they told us to walk away. They told us to do nothing.”

“Why would they kill it?” Rob asked.

“I don’t know,” Mason said. “I racked my brain, and I just don’t know. It could be anything. Maybe some Senator caught wind. They only get caught in bed with a Chinese honeypot every other week. I just don’t know, and that’s what’s killing me.”

Rob said nothing.

“They call it Universal Warfare,” Mason continued. “Two PRC officers wrote a whole paper on it back in the 90s. It’s a strategy for them. The idea is to win without ever declaring war. Sun-Tzu type of shit.”

“Who was a hack by the way,” Rob added.

“But anyways, the best way to weaken your enemy was with a thousand tiny underhanded cuts. Nothing is off limits. Economic, psychological, informational, technological, even cultural warfare. A war with no gloves.

“Every year they fight this war, while we go on about our business as usual. Every year, billions in intellectual property is stolen and shipped back to China to be used in foreign products that undercut the American market.”

“Oh I’m aware,” Rob said.

Mason held up a hand, “Do you know how many Americans fentanyl kills every year?”

“Too many.”

“Almost 70,000 every year. And you know why right?”

Rob shook his head.

“It’s because China provides the precursors to the drug cartels. They provide the money laundering services, and they push the fentanyl. And the Cartel goes along with it. And China gets revenge for the opium wars. And you know what makes it so especially insidious? That by its very nature, you sound nuts if you talk about any of this. It’s almost unthinkable to us to fight this way, to cause this much economic and ecological damage… this much collateral damage, and yet… here we are.”

Rob pursed his lips. “How do I know how I can trust you.”

Mason’s mouth fell open in a stammer but no words come out. The question had thrown him off.

“How do I know this isn’t the FBI creating some type of murder for hire scheme where one never existed?” Rob pushed, pressing his interrogation.

“Have you heard of HLB?” Mason asked, suddenly finding his voice. “Citrus Greening Disease?”

“No,” Rob said.

“It’s caused by a bacterium spread by this special type of gnat called the Psyllid,” Mason said. “Only way to kill it is to burn the trees. There’s no cure. Orange production in Florida has fallen by 86% since the 90s and it’s still going down.” Mason paused. “They don’t know how it got here. Intentional sounds like a conspiracy theory. You can’t prove it. It just happens. The same way this wheat blight would just happen if we hadn’t happened to catch the operation.”

“You still haven’t answered my question?” Rob said. “Why should I trust you.”

“I grew up in Florida. On an Orange farm. And I cut my Dad down from one of those blighted trees.”

Rob looked at him, in silence, then took a sip of his beer. “I still need more.”

Mason let out a sigh. “You know, when we were doing that investigation. We kept hearing things. Through the grapevine, or whispers. Just hearsay. But your club has a reputation.”

“I think all MCs have a reputation,” Rob replied.

“Yeah, but yours is good. Like the Mafia’s in Vegas type of good. People like you. The normal people, the ones that are supposed to like me.”

Rob sat back and rested one leg on the other.

Mason continued, “They feel safe knowing the Club is out there. Omar isn’t the only criminal that has died mysteriously. It seems like anywhere the Club takes an interest, the streets get cleaner, not dirtier.”

“The Club believes in community service.”

“Yeah,” Mason said. “Anyways, that’s the story.”

“You’re going with me then,” Rob said. “And if this is a set-up, well, you are either catching a bullet or we’re both going to the chair together.”

Mason frowned. “Fair enough.”

Wang Hao woke early and padded quietly to the kitchen, careful not to wake his wife. The tile floors felt cool on his bare feet. Sunlight was just starting to stream in through the venetian blinds over his sink. He made a pot of coffee, measured the water, and dumped the grounds. Two heaping spoons of Dunkin’ Donuts French Vanilla and he shuffled back to the little stool behind the breakfast bar to wait for it to brew.

Coffee was something he’d found an affinity for in America, one of the many things. The truth was, he loved this country. He loved the movies and the music and the food and the people. He loved the vain and self-centered will to power that throbbed beneath every advertisement and stood like a clay idol at the end of every job interview. No where else on earth could a man come and have the opportunity to make something different of himself… of his family. Nowhere else could a man start over. In China, a boy had to pick his path early, and if he didn’t get into the top schools, it might as well be over. To the American, collectivism like Confucianism sounded superior, it sounded spiritually healthier, but Wang Hao now remained unconvinced.

The coffee maker gurgled and hissed, startling him back to the present. He glanced around nervously, then checked the blinds. The street looked clear. No cars he didn’t recognize. Just an early morning in an Iowa suburb.

Back in the kitchen he thrummed nervous fingers on the counter. He thought then of his mother and father back in China. He had of course known what the deal was when the PRC agreed to fund his American education. But back then he’d been young and dumb and just approved for a Visa. That was before he’d acquired a taste for french vanilla coffee. Before, his weekly trips to the movie theater. Before, he’d grown so proud of his work. Before, he’d gained the warm respect of his peers. That was when he’d still been Chinese. And while he’d not forgotten about the PRC, he’d hoped that they had forgotten about him.

And then one day, the man had come. He’d been a tall man. Dressed in khakis and a Hawaiian shirt. He’d looked like a Han Chuck Finley. Wang Hao smirked at his own Burn Notice reference. It was bittersweet now, remembering the old days. He’d watched a lot of crap tv when he’d first come to America.

The man had walked into his office, closed the door behind him, and set a manilla envelope on his desk. “Open it.”

Wang Hao still didn’t know why he’d complied. Occasionally, he would wake up from a dream at night where he’d tried to do something different… something silly like, jumping out of the window or calling the police. But it always ended bad, because the consequences held in that envelope were already in play. They’d been at play since that first PRC officer had interviewed him. And so he’d opened the manila envelope, and he’d taken out the pictures of his mother and father.

“That man in the middle,” Han Chuck Finley had said. “Your parents believe him to be a family friend. One that has been known to them for a long time. It is up to you whether he remains their friend or becomes their assassin.”

“What do you want?” Wang Hao asked.

“Three days,” the Han Chuck Finley said. “We make contact.”

The pot beeped twice signaling that the coffee was done, interrupting the ghost of menacings past, and Wang Hao stopped his thrumming.

He poured the coffee into his travel mug, slung the strap of his laptop bag over a shoulder and then grabbed his keys. In the garage, he stopped in front of a mini fridge, bent over, and retrieved the small Styrofoam container that held his mission. Twenty vials containing a special saline infused with millions upon millions of fusarium graminearum spores.

He opened the Mercedes AMG’s front door and set the Styrofoam container on the passenger seat.

Wang Hao’s first stop was at the gas station just down the road from his house. He bought two gallons of distilled water. When he exited the little gas station, and walked to the Mercedes, it was with a heavy mind. And perhaps that is why he didn’t notice the silver F-150 with heavily tinted windows parked four cars down. Inside, sat two figures. Two figures dressed from head to toe in all black.

Wang’s next stop was at Bomgaars. He bought a little two gallon farm sprayer for forty dollars. He wondered if that wasn’t a bit expensive, and thought that maybe he should have driven the extra distance to Home Depot. It was only as he was pulling out of the parking lot that he was struck by the gauche irony of trying to save twenty dollars while in the process of inflicting billions in crop damage. It was not lost on him that he was instigating what would be an apocalyptic famine should it have occurred two centuries ago. Of course no one would truly starve now. Famines did not exist in a global economy, not really, and certainly not if you were America. For America never viewed anything it could buy its way out of as a problem, the Dollar was more powerful than any nuke. The Dollar was almighty.

He braked hard at a stop sign and then pulled out behind an eighteen wheeler. It was ten more minutes until he found his exit and merged onto I-80 headed west.

He’d travelled this route countless times. The University partnered with several farms in the area that let them run studies and conduct field research. This gave him access to thousands of acres of wheat and corn.

His palms were sweaty, and he fumbled with the AMG’s A/C. Someone behind him honked as the cars sensors sounded off warning him that he’d swerved out of his lane. He overcorrected and glanced around nervously. In his rear view mirror, a silver F-150 with heavily tinted windows sped up to him, and then went around.

A motorcycle took up the lane next to him, and he tapped the brakes to let the biker overtake him. He didn’t like when cars hovered in his blind spot let alone motorcycles.

As the man on the bike passed he looked over at Wang. He was clean cut, his hair buzzed close on the sides. He wore a leather vest, one of those biker vests. On the back was a half horse half man looking figure styled as if a marble statue. Wang tried to remember what such a creature was called, something from Greek mythology… but the name escaped him.

He’d audited a class on Greek mythology once, when he’d first started working at the university. All he could remember about the man-horse-things was what they symbolized—man’s dual nature, the tension between civilization and barbarism.

He took his exit after that, happy to finally be off the Interstate. He didn’t enjoy driving the Interstate. It made him nervous.

Twenty more minutes of blacktop roads and he’d be at his destination. A box truck pulled out in front of him nearly ten minutes in and he resigned himself to following along behind it. The road was of a two lane sort, the kind that required one to pass into oncoming traffic, something Wang rarely trusted himself to do.

Just before he got to his turn off another motorcycle crested the hill in front of both him and the box truck. He thought little about it, only barely registering that this biker also wore the same vest as the one he’d seen earlier as he passed into his side mirror… more of the man-horse-things.

Then he saw tail lights in his rearview mirror, and watched as the motorcycle braked, then flipped a U turn, and then rode up behind him. Wang’s stomach dropped. He felt stalked now. As if the biker had been looking for him specifically.

The box truck braked hard and Wang Hao struggled to smash his own in time, distracted as he was by his rearview. Then he watched in disbelief as the truck took his same turn onto a dusty gravel road. Every bone in his body screamed at him to keep driving straight, but still he turned. His heart nearly stopped as the motorcycle followed him through the turn. Green stalks of corn rose as walls on either side of the dusty county road.

Something was off. Fundamentally off, and he couldn’t place what it was. He ignored the skin prickling goose bumps that climbed his neck as paranoia.

He panicked and hit the gas, his wheels spinning gravel as he attempted to cut around the lumbering box truck. But the box truck was already in his way, gently hovering into the center of the road.

Wang hit both the brakes and the loose sand at the edge of the county road. He felt the AMG lose traction and whipsaw violently as he yanked the wheel into an overcorrection. Then the car was out of control.

When the spin was over, Wang Hao lifted his head to find he’d come to a rest in the bar pit, stalks of green corn were pressed up against his rear glass. A cloud of dust hung around the car. The AMG’s dash dinged and blinked.

The box truck was backing up towards him. He watched in disbelief as the rear door slid upward to reveal at least three men dressed totally in black, their faces ski-masked. They held military style rifles. One of them held a wood stocked AK-47.

Wang Hao braced himself against the steering wheel and clinched his eyes shut. The AMG’s windshield burst in an ear shattering sea spray of glass. The rifles sounded like rolling thunder, up close and distant all at once. His chest felt like it was on fire. His arms went numb. He felt his bowels release.

He sat immobile, covered in blood and glass as his chest grew heavy. He couldn’t feel anything except the faint stinging in his cheek where the glass had struck him. He very briefly wondered if he was paralyzed, but the distant sound of his own gurgling distracted him. Something smelled like shit and piss and… copper.

He watched as the door of the box truck was pulled back down. They did that to retain all of the brass, Wang mused, his own calmness catching him off guard. He was outside of the situation. Watching as if a bystander now. Detached.

The biker whipped gasoline from a bright red can all over the hood of Wang’s car. The walls of corn started to close in on him.

He felt sleepy. And then just before curtains, one last satisfying answer was urged to the surface by the last firings of his dying neurons, and he remembered that those man-horse-things were called Centaurs.

The man that sat across from Agent Mason Taylor was cold looking. His eyes were an empty golden green. They were wolfish eyes. Silver hair was swept backwards beneath a pair of Oakley sunglasses. A bandanna hung around the man’s wrinkled neck. He wore a fly fisherman’s vest over a white collared shirt. “You work for us now,” the man said.

Mason pursed his lips and said nothing. He didn’t know who this man was, or how he’d found him. A minute ago he’d been here, inside Moe’s, half a bottle deep into asking forgiveness for his sins.

Then the man had slid into the booth across from him.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Mason said. But he did. It was all he could think about.

“That bottle says otherwise,” the man said. He picked it up and poured two fingers into Mason’s own glass and then helped himself to it.

“We look for initiative. Decisiveness. And most of all a certain moral flexibility.” He paused, reaching into one of the pockets of his vest and pulling out a can of wintergreen Copenhagen. “You have all of the above in spades. And the fact you’re here, half a bottle deep, means that flexibility isn’t too flexible… if you know what I mean. Psychos are fine and all but they can be a little hard to manage, and they make bad bunkmates.”

“What do you want?”

“You,” the man said, taking a pinch of Cope and tucking it into his bottom lip. He offered the tin to Mason, but Mason declined. The man shrugged and put it back into his pocket.

“Look,” Mason said, “just tell me what’s going on and let’s stop with the word games. It’s been a long, life changing week.”

The man chuckled. “Life changing is right son. You work for the Company now.”

“The Company?” Mason asked.

The man looked slightly pained. “Don’t make me spell it out. The Agency.”

“You’re CIA,” Mason muttered, feeling the stomach drop out of him.

The man visibly cringed as if he’d taken a bite of something rotten and held up a hand, “we don’t call ourselves that. Also it’s not something you say. Just say The Company.”

“Are the Sons of Chiron…”

“They are what they are,” the man said. “We work with who we need to. We run the underworld while you fools try run the overworld. We just both happened to pick the same guys for our wet work.”

“That’s why Washington called it off,” Mason said.

“Look kid,” the man said. “This is a war. You don’t arrest people and try them. You don’t fuck around with habeus corpus, and you don’t wait for some politically appointed judge to get his marching orders from his donors. You put them in the dirt. You send the pictures back to Beijing. You bleed em dry, scalp them, and hang ‘em high for all to see.” He spat a stream of black juice into the whiskey glass.

“What if I like being in the FBI though,” Mason said.

“It’s this or Federal Prison, son. You either work the overworld or the underworld and you picked the underworld.”

Mason let out a long sigh and watched Michelle as she wiped down the bar. Tonight seemed like the night to test out rock bottom. “I’ll have a pinch.”

The man in the fly fisherman’s vest handed him the tin. “Welcome to the Company, boy.”

The spacecraft made a distinct hum that Dr. Noah Fischer could only describe as otherworldly. It was the sound of their repulsine engines, the two giant spinning electromagnetics that propelled the bell shaped craft forward through the vaccuum of space. The sound made Noah’s skin crawl. He did not want to be here, and how he’d come to be here was something of a tangled mess. He ran a hand through the equally tangled hair that crowned him and glanced towards the front of the ship as it whined forward.

At the helm, sat Jack Davenport, a former test pilot and ace, and next to him sat Roy Lancaster, his co-pilot and once wingman. Davenport was Commander of the crew. Salt and pepper hair, a square jaw and rock solid frame. He was everything you would expect from an ace fighter pilot, well mannered, decisive, fearless.

If Noah ever had a daughter, Davenport would be his hope for her. Unfortunately, he imagined that she’d probably pick Lancaster. He was younger, less put together, more arrogant. He had an easy swagger, a carefree attitude, and considered himself something of a player. The type to have a woman in every port… or at every airfield… at least that’s what Noah imagined.

The third and final member of the crew, the one who’d started this whole mess, sat across from him—Gail Keats. Black hair, green eyes, and a body made for entrapment.

One month earlier, she’d sat down in the back of Noah’s class. He’d been teaching a class on early Indo-Aryan linguistics at Dartmouth. She’d been dressed like every other college girl, and yet… he should have seen her coming.

Her sweaters had always been a bit too tight, and her skirts, they had a habit of riding a little high up her thigh, nothing too distasteful, but enough to make her long porcelain legs seem even longer. She was whip smart, confident, and feminine. She asked pointed questions, she paid attention, she gave small teasing compliments. She was like no one he’d ever met, much less a student, and definitely not like his wife.

Awkward since birth, it had taken Noah a week just to make eye contact, but once he did, she never dropped it. Several times she stayed after class to continue discussions on topics that most other girls couldn’t pretend to care about. These discussions soon became full study sessions, and then finally research sessions—late nights in the library, talking and giggling as she helped him work on his research.

He’d married a wonderful woman who valued all of the things about him that he did not, and she seemed quite happy being a bookish professor’s wife. To Noah, she was his world, but if she was the world, then Gail had quickly become his moon. For she was clever and funny, and doting without ever being sentimental. She made him feel wanted. Wanted in a way that Evalyn never really had. After half a semester, Gail had him wound so tight around her pale fingers that he could not think straight.

And so, almost inevitably, they’d found themselves next to each other one night. The library’s dim yellow lights and the stale smelling stacks of books providing the sort of romantic ambience that only a bookish professor could ever fantasize about.

They’d been talking about something, he couldn’t remember what now, but he’d removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. And when he’d re-opened his eyes, he’d found hers closer, cat-green emeralds, gently staring back. Her mouth had hung slightly open, pink and wet and wanting… and then they’d kissed.

Her hands had found the edge of his shirt and slipped underneath, fingernails blazing new paths into his skin, and then, as if it was suddenly his idea, the academic in him, the overthinker, the analyzer… they all let go… and the man took over. And he had her, he had right there on top of the table. And when they were done, though he would not know it for another three days, his life was to remain fundamentally changed.

She did not show up to his class the next day, nor the day after that, and he found himself worried sick about her. First for her well-being, and then gradually, over the fact that he’d perhaps done something to offend her. That he’d overstepped somehow. The overthinker was back.

And through all of this, his wife never suspected a thing, and for some reason this made him hate her. She was a fool for not seeing it, no matter that it was he who’d made her one.

Three days later a man had come to see him. He had knocked politely on Noah’s office door. He wore a dark gray suit, and carried a leather brief case. Bushy gray brows hung heavy over a pair of piercing blue eyes.

“Please come in,” Noah said, motioning towards a chair on the other side of his mahogany desk. “How can I help you?”

The man sat, resting the briefcase across his knees. “I work for the United States of America. My name is Mr. Wolff.” The man spoke with a heavy German accent.

“Ok,” Noah said, a bit surprised.

“Your recent paper… I read that. We read that. Interesting stuff.”

“Which one exactly?” Noah asked, “I’ve published several in the last year.”

“Before Silence: An Argument for Ancient Inhabitation and Interplanetary War in Our Solar System.” The man rattled the title off as if he’d come up with it.

Noah grimaced, having been somewhat scared that this was the one the man had wanted to talk about. As the title suggested, it was about as close to career suicide as a linguistics professor could get without just straight up advocating for therapeutic psychedelic use in the Saturday Evening Post.

“We want you to work for us,” the man continued. “We have a special project coming up. It will be about one month of training, and then the project itself will last a week at most.”

“I… don’t think I can,” Noah stammered the words out. “I have my job. My wife.”

“By working for us you can keep both,” the man said, smiling. It was a wolfish smile, and the first since the man had entered. “Look… you are one of the best and brightest linguists working today. You are fluent in Ancient Sumerian, or at least as fluent as one can be in the oldest and deadest language known to man. You’re one of the few professors more interested in doing actual work… less interested in publishing Marxist drivel about earth mothers and peaceful savages. How long can a man like you last in these institutions?”

“I’m sorry,” Noah said. “I just can’t uproot my life.”

“Unfortunately,” the man said, “we thought you’d say that.” Gently, he unbuckled the briefcase and peered inside.

Noah watched him.

The man withdrew a sheet of paper and slid it over to him. “Now, one more time. This is a non-disclosure agreement,” the man continued. “You’ll sign it. And you’ll report to Wright Patterson AFB next Monday. And you won’t like my next offer.”

“But what is the special project?” Noah asked.

“You don’t get to know that,” the man said. “It’s a matter of national security.”

“But what about my wife… We can’t just pick up and leave and go to Ohio.”

“Of course you can,” the man said. “You’ll simply tell her that the University and the Air Force have partnered on a project, and you’ve been recruited for the whole affair on account of your specific set of skills. We have made arrangements for her to stay with you. At this point, all that is needed from you is your signature.”

“I won’t do it,” Noah replied. “And I don’t really see how you can force me to.” He was starting to feel bullied and he was not at all accustomed to being thrust into adventures.

The man pursed his lips and dipped his head again. He re-opened the brief case and withdrew several photographs. They were large, glossy, color photographs printed on 8x11. He tossed them somewhat flippantly onto the desk.

They were obnoxiously large photographs of Noah’s night in the library. It was rather jarring to see oneself flash frozen in pornographic time. The nature of memories and shame make memory of trysts like that somewhat malleable, and eventually, forgettable. But now his sin was memorialized forever. Yet one more death knell for romance, Noah thought, or would think eventually. Just then, he had been too stunned to respond, his mind racing in a thousand different directions.

“You are going,” the man stated flatly. “Or you’ll be going under physical duress and without a wife to go with you and without a career in academia to come back to.”

Reluctantly, Noah picked up the pen and scribbled his signature.

“Gail will meet you at the gate in Wright Patterson to escort you on.”

“So she wasn’t a student,” Noah asked.

“You really think a student would fuck you like that?” the man asked.

The vulgarity with which the man had said it sent shivers down Noah’s spine.

“I don’t… know,” Noah stammered.

The man chuckled and Noah suddenly realized how dogs must feel when you rub their nose into their accidents.

“You keep those for posterity’s sake,” the man said with a wink, motioning to the pictures. “We made copies.” He rose after that, and then pausing at the door, said, “you’ll be receiving a packet in the mail with instructions regarding your move. In a year and a half you can have your life back. Until then, you’re ours. Make the most of it.”

Two days later America had landed on the moon. He’d soon found out, during his very own space training, that it had all been faked, shot on a sound stage in Laurel Canyon. A psyop conducted by NASA, the propaganda arm of the Air Force’s space program. But the lie wasn’t that America had gone to the moon, it was that America hadn’t already been on the moon.

No, the real space mission was kept nowhere near NASA. It was, as Noah had come to find out, kept at Wright Patterson AFB and was two centuries ahead of the rest of the world.

The high-pitched whine turned into a scream as Davenport throttled down. Somewhat counterintuitively, the X-Bell made more noise when it slowed down then it did while speeding up. And even more counterintuitively, none of this speed, or velocity was transmitted to the crew via motion. That was mostly because they weren’t flying in the normal sense. They were sliding through space. There was no gravity, no thrust, no lift, no drag to worry about because space itself was bent around them. The repulsine engines themselves were only really called engines because it was too conceptually tedious to come up with something else to call them.

“This is it,” Davenport said, punching buttons on the ship’s dashboard.

Through the porthole windows that lined either side of the ship, Noah watched as inky blackness swirled past, then suddenly parted in time with the ship’s screaming. Noah clapped hands over his ears but it didn’t help. The sound was vibrational. Exiting subspace was supposed to be uncomfortable, but Noah had not been prepared for just how grating. Then as if a great black veil had been snatched away, stars blinked in the distance, billions of them, then momentarily blotted out as they passed through the shadow of a massive stellar body.

“Switching to manual flight,” Davenport called out.

“Roger,” Lancaster answered him.

Gail stood and straightened her suit. She smiled at Noah. “You ready cowboy?”

He gave a slight nod. The truth was he still had no idea why he was even here.

“The landing zone is 3000 clicks away,” Lancaster said. “Putting in the coordinates now.”

Gail motioned for Noah to follow her. “I’ll help you suit up. Come on.”

He followed her down the stairs to the lower level, the landing level. A terrified heat rose in his chest.

“You ok?” she asked, putting a hand on his arm. “You know I won’t let anything happen to you, right?”

Noah shrugged, and pushed her hand away.

“Noah, you know it was real right?” Gail said.

“It’s over,” Noah said. “You got me where you want me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to wallow in it like a pig in shit.”

She’d spent the last month making passes at him. He didn’t know what else to call it. Alternating between seduction, apology, and distress. Something about it had felt like an act, inhuman on one level, animal like on another. She was still beautiful, but the love he’d once felt, or thought he’d felt, had soured as soon as he’d found out it was all a ruse. He’d even surprised himself a little bit, finding a hidden dignity that had never been put to the test before.

He didn’t know why she still tried though. Whether she was being pressured from higher up to keep him strung along… carrot and stick sort of thing. Some sort of fucked up tradecraft to make sure he stayed compliant. Or whether she’d really developed some sort of feelings. He couldn’t say. Maybe she was just one of those women that only wanted what she couldn’t have, and so his sudden principles made him something of a white whale. Of course women like that were never happy when they finally harpooned their white whale, and the emotional butchery that followed was doomed to be more violent and torrid than a Nantucket sleigh ride

He opened the locker that held his space suit. “When do I get to know why I’m here.”

“Now, I guess,” Gail said. “That paper you wrote… Before Silence: An Argument for Ancient Inhabitation…” She snapped her fingers trying to remember the rest.

“…and Interplanetary War in Our Solar System,” Noah finished it for her. It was a bit rambly, he thought.

“You argued that nearly every planet in our solar system was once inhabited. That an intergalactic war had occurred millennia ago, and Earth was the only one left inhabitable.”

“What about it?” Noah replied.

“You were right,” Gail said, moving towards one of the port holes. “Look out there.”

Noah moved to the window, and watched as a massive rocky body slid into view. It reminded him of an asteroid, or at least what he imagined one looked like, but it seemed a bit too big.

“That is Ceres,” Gail said.

“Were in the asteroid belt?” Noah asked.

“That used to be a planet,” Gail said.

“You’ve already been here,” Noah said suddenly, finally having enough information to start piecing together scenarios.

“What makes you think that?” Gail said coyly, her voice almost a purr.

He wondered how long she’d been waiting to tell him this. To let him know what it was all about.

“You wouldn’t have brought me unless you’d already found something.”

“Took you a while,” Gail said. “But yes, we’ve already been here. Several times actually, but not in the way you think.”

Noah ignored the implications of that, and asked the question he was driving at, “What then? What did you find?”

“Ruins,” Gail said.

Noah’s heart skipped a beat.

“Ruins from a previous civilization,” Gail said. “What appears to be an ancient temple.”

“But how do you know all this if you’ve never been here?”

Gail turned and took two steps towards the far wall. She slid a piece of paneling back to reveal a large television set. The lower deck served as both briefing room, loading dock, and locker room. She opened a drawer next, and pulled out a magnetic cassette tape, this she slid into the tape-player beneath the TV. She hit the power button and the TV crackled to life, analog lines cutting across the black and white picture… static… and then the video steadied.

Gail turned the volume up.

In the video, a woman leaned backwards in some sort of recliner. Her head was shaved, and electrodes were taped onto her head, dozens of them.

Next to the woman, sat Ludolph von Wolff. It was the same man that had recruited him.

“Wolff was once the head a top secret occult research group Hitler stood up towards the end of the war,” Gail narrated. “When the war ended, we granted him asylum in exchange for his knowledge.”

Noah leaned forward and squinted at the woman on the TV, he suddenly asked, “Is that you?”

“Yes, that’s me,” Gail said flatly.

“What are you doing?”

“Just watch,” she said.

He watched as Dr. Wolff set something on her outstretched tongue.

“What was that?” Noah asked.

“Serum 44,” Gail said, brushing her hair back, “what you know as LSD.”

On the screen, Dr. Wolff handed her what appeared to be a 3x5 card. Gail took it. Read it. And then handed it back. Then she closed her eyes.

“Are you ready?” Dr. Wolff asked.

“I am,” Gail replied.

“Tell me what you see?”

“I see a mountain. It towers above everything else. I’m in a low point in the land… in a crater of some sort. Lots of ice. The dirt is gray.”

“Try moving,” Dr. Wolff directed. “Can you walk?”

“I think so,” Gail replied.

“Very good,” Dr. Wolff said. “See if you can do a 360 degree turn and tell me if you see anything unique.”

A long moment of silence followed, then Gail replied, “I see a cave… well not quite a cave. It’s an entrance of some sort. Like an underground bunker.”

“Can you get closer?”

“Yes,” Gail said. “I’m moving now.”

“Tell me when you’re there,” Dr. Wolff said.

“I’m going in,” Gail said. “It’s black. I can’t see anything. I need a flashlight.”

Noah watched as Dr. Wolff bent down and retrieved a flashlight from a small basket on the floor next to him. He set it in the incapacitated Gail’s hand. Her hand closed around it.

“How though?” Noah asked.

“It’s magic,” Gail said, snidely, then added, “It’s not of course. It involves quantum entanglement. But it might as well be.”

The tape continued.

“A long hall,” Gail said. “There is writing on the walls. I can’t make it out, but it looks ancient. Like some sort of cuneiform.”

“Where are you now?” Dr. Wolff asked.

“There is a door of some sort. Like a vault door. There’s a panel, with more of the writing. It could be instructions.”

“Can you open it?”

“No,” Gail replied. “It’s locked somehow, but I feel confident that if I could translate the words I’d know how to.”

“Can you transambulate?” Dr. Wolff asked.

“I can try,” she said. A long moment of silence followed, “Something is blocking me.”

“That’s ok,” Dr. Wolff coaxed.

Suddenly Gail sat straight up in the recliner and screamed. Then she collapsed backwards. Dr. Wolff stood over her, he was trying to shake her awake.

“She’s unresponsive,” Dr. Wolff shouted.

Gail cut the tape there. “Anyways, you get the idea.”

“What happened there… at the end?” Noah asked. A white hot chill swept his body. “Were you alright?”

“Never better,” Gail said, and winked. “Now suit up, we should be landing any minute.”

They exited the X-Bell in the shadow of Ahuna Mons. It was the largest mountain on the tiny dwarf planet. Shiny silver streaks ran up and down it’s sides, almost flickering as the light from the sun hit it.

“It’s cryovolcanic,” Gail said, her voice sounding a bit tinny over the spacesuit’s communication system.

“What does that even mean?” Noah said somewhat irritably.

“It erupts gases,” Gail said. “Water, ammonia, hydrocarbons. Those silver streaks are likely salt and ice deposits.”

With that, she bounded forward in a slow arcing jump that deposited her several meters ahead. Noah followed while Davenport and Lancaster brought along the rear, each of them carrying one end of a large tool tote. On earth it would weigh 500 lbs. but on Ceres the tub felt like 15 lbs. or so.

The entrance to the bunker was a black pit on the edge of the crater.

“Does it look the same?” Noah asked, thinking back to the video. He found it uncanny how close it looked to the description she’d given.

Again the white hot chill swept his body as they neared the black maw of an entrance. It was the kind of chill one felt when someone suggested playing with a Ouija board or recommended having their fortunes read. That sense that certain things were left undone and better left undisturbed.

Noah clicked the headlamp built into the side of his helmet. It was clear now that the cave was not a cave, but some sort of structure. Thick angular slabs of rock or concrete framed the dark entrance, stairs leading downward into the spider black heart of the dwarf planet.

They waited for Davenport and Lancaster to catch up, watching as they awkwardly wrangled the chest of tools through low gravity.

“You said you thought this was a temple of some sort earlier,” Noah said. “What do you expect to find?”

“We’re looking for our origins,” Gail said. “The beginning of humanity. The truth about God. You name it.”

“I wasn’t aware the Air Force was so concerned with archeology,” Noah said.

“It’s an exploratory mission,” Gail said, “not everything has to be about war.”

Davenport and Lancaster came flying in hard and almost sent the tools tumbling down the staircase. “Overshot that one a bit,” Davenport said, straightening.

“Come on,” Gail said, leading off.

Noah followed, ice and dust crunching underfoot.

They descended for what seemed like an eternity. The staircase curving down in wide circles. The smooth rock walls guiding them downwards via corkscrew. It was hypnotic in a way. For one could only see so far around the next bend in the stairs, and when one reached it, another blind spot lay just ahead. The only light was from their headlamps. Down and down they went, until Noah’s legs felt shaky, his breathing heavy, and his muscles felt on fire.

So far he’d seen no sign of any cuneiform writing. Just smooth stone walls, as if laser cut.

Once, he turned back around and looked up the steps, but the light from his headlamp only made it a little ways up the staircase before being defeated by the darkness. He could not see any dot of light that could be construed as the entrance. Not finding that dot of light gave him vertigo. He felt clammy and hot and then the suit was beeping at him to slow his breathing.

“You ok, Dr. Fischer?” Davenport asked. He felt a hand close around his elbow, as the pilot helped him straighten up.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Noah said.

At the bottom, it was another hour of walking before they found the first bit of cuneiform writing on the wall. The heads-up display in the top corner of his helmet said they’d walked approximately five miles since leaving the ship. He’d already cycled through his oxygen supply four times, and was rebreathing, the suits carbon extractors working overtime.

“Well?” Gail asked.

Noah lifted a hand to the stone etchings, and ran his fingers over the symbols. “It’s Sumerian,” Noah said. “Or at least uses many of the same symbols.”

“What does it say then?” Gail hissed through the mic.

“Cuneiform is logo-syllabic, meaning some symbols stand for whole words or ideas, while others represent sound or syllables. Without more context, I’m not sure, and half of these logograms I’ve never seen.”

“What about the ones you have seen?” Gail said.

“Death and Queen. Those are the only words I can make out. And that’s what they meant on earth over six thousand years ago. Out here, who knows if they had the same meaning.”

“They do,” Gail said, as if privy to some information he was not. “Count on it.”

A bit further and he heard Gail give a sharp gasp. She froze. Two steps further and Noah realized why, the tunnel dropped off, a deep shaft having opened up in the middle of their path. The gap was about twenty foot wide, with the tunnel continuing on the other side. How deep it was, he couldn’t tell because the blackness swallowed up all of the light from their headlamps.

“We can jump it,” Gail said.

“Are you—”

“—Easy jump,” Davenport said, and then without missing a beat hurled himself across the chasm.

Noah watched as Davenport somewhat effortlessly floated across the canyon. Noah had still not yet fully adjusted to what was physically possible in a low gravity environment. Gail jumped next, not even bothering with a running start. And then went Lancaster, towing the tub of tools along behind him.

“Come on, Noah” Gail said. “We have got to get going.”

Gingerly, Noah took a step forward, gulped hard, and then sprinted towards the edge of the gap. But just as he pushed off, he felt something slip beneath his boot and he lost traction just as he pushed off. Tripping over the edge, he somersaulted headfirst into the chasm.

It was the curse of the overthinker, he thought, even as he gently spun downwards, any opportunity to use his body or his muscles typically ended like this, in some sort of clumsy disaster, his mind failing to get out of his body’s way.

The next few seconds were a mass of awkward tumbling through space. Then finally, he slammed bodily into the far wall of the chasm, lashed out desperately to try and catch the edge, again failed to perform athletically, failed to catch a hold of the ledge he’d lashed out for, and once more started falling down the black well.

He fell for what seemed like an eternity, somewhat exasperated by the slow motion nature of his death.

At last he landed, flat on his back, a bit stunned by the softness of the landing.

“Noah”—hiss—“ok”—hiss—“come in.” The comms were broken up something awful and Gail’s voice sounded even more tinny and distant than usual. The rock walls of the planet were making a mess of their radio signals.

Slowly, he picked himself up. His head lamps sputtered, and he gave them a strong slap to steady them out.

He’d landed on a floor of some sort, almost perfectly flat and marble smooth. Intricate designs were laid into the floor, of birds and fish, and animals he’d never seen before.

Slowly, he turned around and around, finding himself in some sort of enormous chamber. The light from his headlamp reflecting off of intricately carved pillars that traveled upwards. Millenia of dust covered the floors. And then he saw it, a massive statue of a dragon. The figure coiled upwards out of the floor, its base ten or twenty yards across. At the top of the statue, the serpent’s body split into two heads. Forked tongues hung from heavily fanged mouthes. But the eyes, they were the most mesmerizing. They glowed red, almost as if they were alive.

He gasped in awe and fear.

“Hello,” came a voice from the dark.

Noah whirled even as his stomach dropped out of him. With some surprise, he found her the source of the greeting—Gail. She stood right there behind him. But it was Gail minus her space suit. Minus any clothes at all in fact. Her pale naked form alabaster in the glow from his headlamp.

“Gail?” Noah said, hesitantly. “Where is your suit?”

“Who are you?” she asked. “Do you know me?”

“It’s me?” Noah said. “Noah.”

She walked towards him confidently, hips swaying from side to side, as if she was totally unaware that she was naked. She stopped just in front of him. And then slowly, without knowing why he did so, he lifted a hand to touch her. But as he did so, his hand passed right through her.

“A ghost? A mirage?” he whispered.

“We don’t have much time,” Gail said. “You have to listen to me.”

“I was just with Gail, and she had a space suit… and a body…” Noah stammered the words out.

“That’s not Gail,” the spirit replied, and then lifting her eyes towards the statue, she said, “it’s her.”

“Its who?” Noah asked, turning to glance at the twin-headed serpent behind him.

“Something far older and far more evil than you could imagine. She’s been trapped here for thousands of years. Disembodied… imprisoned.”

“What are you talking about?” Noah asked, taking a step forward.

“She stole my body when I was remote viewing this place. Locked me out of my own body. Can you believe it.”

“So you and I never made love?” Noah asked.

“No, what?” the spirit asked.

“Oh God,” Noah cried, “Oh God, what a mess. What the fuck is it?” he reached out to grab her by the shoulders, but his hands slipped right through.

“She’s chaos. The god of it. The mother of monsters. She’s been called many things, but to us on earth, she’s known as Tiamat.”

Noah’s jaw dropped and he felt like he was about to blackout. “Tiamat, the ancient Sumerian goddess. The one Marduk supposedly slew.”

“You have to stop her,” Gail said.

“From what?”

“We were looking for a weapon,” Gail said. “Whatever shattered this planet, or swept away the atmosphere on Mars, the Air Force wanted it.”

“What does the Air Force want with planet killing weapons?” Noah asked. “Gail… or Tiamat… She said this was an expedition to find humanity’s origins.”

“She lied,” Gail said. “The Soviets have already set up a secret colony on Mars. We weren’t the only ones who got their hands on Germany’s scientists. Besides, we don’t know what else is out there. For all we know there’s a whole universe of warmongering empires that haven’t destroyed and enslaved us purely out of the dumb luck fact that they don’t know we exist. But we’ve escaped our planet, and it’s only a matter of time before we meet them.”

“Is there then?” Noah asked. “Is there warmongering empires we should be worried about?”

“That’s classified,” Gail said.

“Ok, but I still don’t get how you switched bodies?”

“When I was remote viewing this place, she found me. She’d been locked off from the physical world. Banished here by the ancients somehow. Trapped on this rocky planet,” Gail said. “I gave her a way back into the physical. I created a door. And she locked me out behind her.”

“So why would she come back here?” Noah asked. “She had your body, she’d escaped?”

“I think,” Gail paused. “I think she needs something. I think whatever was holding her here was magic, or a curse, or something. That or she wants the weapon. I think she wants to kill earth. Wipe all life in the solar system out for good.”

“But you don’t know that,” Noah said.

“I don’t need to,” Gail said. “I’ve explored this place. The murals tell the story, Noah. She’s no good.”

“Ok, and what do you want me to do?” Noah asked.

“Follow me,” Gail said.

The atrium was dominated by a massive altar standing in the center. Five pairs of steps led up to the platform, laid out like the points on a star. Cuneiform script glowed around the altar’s bottom. Three basins were carved into the floor just in front of the altar.

Above the cylindrical altar floated a red cube. It glowed, pulsing with energy. The writing on its surface unreadable from this distance.

“That’s the weapon?” Noah asked. “What does it even do.”

“I think so,” Gail said, pointing to the walls around them. “We didn’t really know what was here, or what we were looking for.”

They were dominated by large colorful murals, one showing a large figure wielding a mace against a dragon, and another showing the figure using it to shatter a planet.

“Now what?” Noah asked.

“You have to get the cube back to the ship,” Gail said. “Leave with it before the others can get down here, before she can get down here.”

“What about Davenport and Lancaster. I can’t fly the ship by myself. What about you?” That last question took him off gaurd.

“Don’t worry about them… don’t worry about any of us,” Gail said. “The ship has a return home function. Hit the bright purple button that says Auto, and it will do everything for you.”

Noah stepped nervously forward, towards the floating cube.

“Stop!” The voice came in loud and clear over his headset. Across from him, having entered on the other side of the room, stood the embodied Gail, Davenport, and Lancaster.

Gail had her sidearm leveled at him. It was special-made for the low-g atmosphere and used rocket propelled ammo. They all had one, except him, even though he’d been trained how to use it should any contingencies arise.

She walked up the steps towards him.

“That’s not Gail,” Noah said, locking eyes with Davenport. “That’s Tiamat.”

The thing that was wearing Gail for a skinsuit stopped suddenly, and smiled wide as if thrilled to hear her real name spoken.

“You’ve cracked, Noah,” Davenport said. “We’re here to take you back to the ship.”

“That weapon,” Noah said. “Do you know why she wants it?”

“Noah, calm down,” Lancaster said, pulling his own sidearm.

Noah glanced around for guidance, but Gail’s ghost was gone. For a moment he faltered, thinking that perhaps the stress of the fall had caused him to hallucinate her.

Then, two gunshots—Tiamat’s gun spit flame.

Noah crouched, clinching his eyes shut as he did so… bracing himself for the impact… ready to bleed out… but no such thing happened.

Slowly, he opened his eyes. Before him, he found Gail, or Tiamat, circling the bodies of Davenport and Lancaster. They lay still.

“You killed them?” Noah asked. “But why?”

“Because I need them,” Tiamat hissed, her voice raspy now, and forceful. Otherworldly.

“I need the hearts of men,” Tiamat said. “I am the dragon. I am Chaos. Men caged me here, and men will set me free. Their blood bound my corporeal form within the cube. Their blood will give it back to me.”

She bent and grabbed Davenport and Lancaster by their collars, then dragged both men up towards the altar.

Without missing a beat, she flicked open a knife and cut open the pilot’s suit. Then she started on his chest cavity, cutting him wide open from stern to stem. She reached into the steaming chest cavity and pulled out his steaming heart. Then unceremoniously, she plopped it into one of the basins. Without missing a beat, she started on the second body.

Three basins, two hearts. Noah had just started doing the math when movement caught his eye from across the room. Gail’s ghost had reappeared, she stood at the far entrance and waved for him to follow.

He bolted for the far exit, took several steps, and somehow, when he’d needed it most, his body had not betrayed him. He was half way across the room before Tiamat realized he was on the run.

He’d just turned the corner out of the atrium when he heard the bark of her pistol and the zing of the slugs as they ricocheted off Ceres’ rock walls.

The X-Bells doors opened with a hiss. Noah flew up the ramp into the space ship and hammered the button to close the door. His spacesuit was screaming at him to stop running, the rebreather failing to keep up.

As he waited for the doors to close he could see Tiamat in the distance. She was jumping towards him, taking long arcing bounds towards the ship.

And then finally, the doors closed. Noah hit the release on his helmet, and gasped for new air.

“Now turn the red lever to manually lock,” Gail commanded. Her ghostly visage still accompanying him.

Noah turned the lever, just as he heard a tremendous thud on the outside of the ship.

“She’s here,” Noah muttered.

“You locked her out,” Gail said. “You’re good. Now go to the helm, and hit the purple button.”

Noah hurried to the front of the ship.

The pounding on the door had subsided, and now, it was eerily quiet. Noah held his hand out over the button, and let it hover there. “Wait,” he said, “what about you?”

“Who cares about me,” Gail said. “Just go.”

“I can’t,” Noah said suddenly. “You need your body back. You’ve helped me too much.”

“This is all of earth we are talking about,” Gail said. “If she gets ahold of your heart, this show is over. She gets her body back. She becomes the dragon. Besides, I can ride along. Better to end up a ghost on earth than here.”

“You’re right,” Noah said, and with that he slapped the purple button. The X-Bells engines whined, and the whole thing began to hover and wobble as it prepared to return to base.

But it was just as they slipped into the inky blackness of hyperspace that he saw her. There, in the door way behind them, stood Tiamat.

“But how?” Noah asked, the words falling out of him.

“You forgot about the weapons bay,” Tiamat said, taking off her helmet. She tossed it casually aside. In her other hand was the pistol. She lifted it, aimed, and then pulled the trigger.

CLICK.

She started laughing maniacally. “Oops, I guess I’m out.”

Noah just stood there, rooted to the floor, in disbelief at her appearance, and at the fact that he was still alive.

“You’ve got to fight her, Noah,” Gail said.

Tiamat stopped laughing. “Shut up you stupid bitch.” Then she pulled the knife from its sheath on her boot and charged Noah.

Noah twisted to the side, spinning one of the pilot chair’s into her hand, disrupting the thrust enough for her to miss.

She countered with a big swiping arc towards his head, and he fell backwards against the control panel. She slashed away at him, and he scrambled sideways, trying to regain his balance.

Then she caught him with a lucky overhand stab. The knife sank into his arm, right into his shoulder, but just as he was twisting away.

He took a long beat, staring somewhat confusedly at the knife sticking out of his shoulder. Finally realizing that he’d managed to wrench it free from her hand when he’d twisted away.

He grasped it, pulled it free, his own hot blood streaming down his arm, and he charged her back, swinging the knife like he’d been born to it.

She sidestepped, then twisted, caught his arm, and then wrenched his whole body downward with a wrist-lock.

He dropped the knife, and it clattered across the floor.

She let up on the wrist lock in an attempt to bring a knee into his face, but it wasn’t enough. He tore his arm free, and just like that night in the library, the academic let go, and the man took over. He picked her up in a great big bear hug, lifting all 120 lbs. of her off the ground, and then he drove forward as hard as he could, gaining tremendous speed before smashing her into the far wall of the cockpit.

A crunch, and then she went limp in his arms. He dropped her, and gasped for air, his hands on his knees. When he’d finally managed to catch his breath, he looked down at Gail’s limp body.

“Oh no,” Noah said. He held two fingers to her neck in search of a pulse.

A faint beat. She was still alive, but unconscious.

Gail’s ghost sidled up next to him. “You need to get her sedated. She’s only as powerful as her human shell.”

“The med kit,” Noah said, without missing a beat. He snatched an emergency case off the wall, and then opened it up. Gail helped him find the right syringes.

Tiamat was just starting to wake.

“Hurry,” Gail said.

Quickly, Noah drew sedative out of the small glass vial, tapped the side of the syringe, and then purged air from the needle.

Tiamat started to rise, but was still trying to place her surroundings.

Noah plunged the syringe into her neck and injected the sedatives. They seemed to hit her almost instantly, and she slipped back under, sliding back down the wall into a pile.

“How long?” Noah asked.

“Should keep her until we land,” Gail said.

“How do we get you back in your body?” Noah asked.

Gail pursed her lips. “Dr. Wolff should know.”

Noah walked towards the helm… watched as the inky blackness slipped over the viewscreens… it looked like they were flying through oil.

About One Year Later

Noah sat in his office, feet on his desk, a cigarette burning between two fingers. There was snow on the bushes outside, and the sky was gloomy and moody—a gray Connecticut day. He was no longer at Dartmouth. Instead he’d taken a position at Yale. A few calls from Dr. Wolff and his ilk and he hadn’t even had to interview.

He looked at his hand, now free of his wedding band. Not even a band of white from the tan lines remained. He was a bachelor now, having screwed up maybe the only thing in his life that he’d ever done right. He’d confessed the affair almost as soon as he’d gotten back home. He left out the part about it being with an embodied eldritch god. She’d left that night, crying something awful. There’d been the usual stages of grief then. There was an attempt to make it work, then more anger, then marriage counseling, sadness, and then finally the divorce papers. And then the body was in the ground, the marriage contract torn up, and he resigned himself to a life of lonely academic study.

He eyed the dumbbells in the corner of the room, next to the weight lifting shoes. A new habit he’d taken up. He woke up with nightmares about Ceres, and most of them revolved around his inability to defend himself. That he’d survived was mostly due to Gail’s clever maneuvering and dumb luck.

And what of Gail? The question that hung ever present in his mind. They’d shuffled him off the base and away from the Air Force and into Yale the day after their ship landed, and they’d not communicated with—

A soft knock on the door frame.

Noah glanced up to find Gail Keats—in the body—standing there. He stood, his face no doubt showing his confusion.

“Hi, Noah,” she said softly.

“Gail?”

“It’s me,” she said. She entered, pushing a stroller in front of her, and then gently closed the door behind her. She sat down, flattening her pencil skirt as she did so.

“They got you back?” Noah asked. “I was worried about you. I was wondering about you. And this…” he motioned towards the stroller. “You had a baby?”

“Noah,” she said. “We can’t stay long. I’m not even supposed to be here.”

“What is it?”

“Dr. Wolff helped me swap back into my body.”

“And what about Tiamat?” Noah asked.

“Noah, I’m scared.” She stood up then, and pulled out the baby. “This is our daughter.”

Noah felt the blood drain from his face. He took two hesitant steps backwards and then fell backwards into his seat. “But how?” he finally muttered.

“When you slept with her… me… her with my body,” Gail said. “You got me pregnant. It pregnant.”

Noah was up then. “Let me see her?”

Slowly, Gail handed the baby over to him. Noah took her.

With two gentle fingers, he pulled down the blanket to reveal a round, cherubic face and a button nose and tiny hands. The little girl’s eyes though. There was something wrong with them. There was no Iris. As if it was all pupil. Just inky blackness the color of subspace.

“I think when I took my body back, Tiamat found another….” Gail offered slowly.

“So this is Tiamat,” Noah said.

Gail gulped and nodded.

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The waterskin on the back of Jude was all but done leaking its water, having been pierced by an arrow.

He reloaded the pistol from the horn of powder slung across his gut. It was a Colt Paterson, a cap’n ball gun, and a pain to load. It had also misfired on him more than once. One of the first revolvers ever made, and ever sold, the Paterson’s novelty had no doubt saved his life.

The Comanches, expecting only one more shot after he had fired off the rifle, for they had only ever been acquainted with flintlock pistols, had tucked tail and ran as soon as he went on firing.

It wouldn’t matter though. They would be back for him once they worked up the courage. That, or after he died of thirst. Then they would be back to do the honors on his dehydrated scalp.

He was one hundred miles away from anyone or anything that looked remotely like him. He was horseless and without water. Effecively missing two out of the two things necessary for survival in the West Texas plains.

Around him, holes littered the wadi where he had made his camp. And even now, the shovel he had used to dig them beckoned him to continue his search.

There was gold here, he could feel it. It was on the map, the one he’d traded off of Jouquin de la Mora of the Mexican Navy for a single rolled cigarette.

He pulled said map once more out of his pocket, and carefully unfolded it. Stained yellow now, from sweat and dust, it crinkled as he manipulated it, having become brittle.

He checked his bearings. To the north was Elephant rock, and to his south… nothing but more of the Llano Estacado, or as the white man called it—the Staked Plains. Thirty thousand square miles of the most inhospitable land man had ever had the displeasure of wandering into.

He glanced upwards at the sun lolling overhead. A brilliant white heat. Not even a sun really, just a ball of flame. An all-seeing eye of death that baked the life out of whatever its gaze touched. He squinted, wiped his brow with the bandana and briefly wondered if he could get the moisture back out of the little scrap of cloth.

If he slept the rest of the day, he could start back towards the last waterhole he passed. It wasn’t far off. One night of walking at a good pace and he would be there. He could patch the waterskin, and maybe make it back to the next hole, that one was a good four nights of walking. With the waterskin patched up he could make it though, especially if he holed up during the day. And with enough guts and a little luck he could walk himself out of here.

But the gold… he desperately wanted to know it was here. To touch it. To hold it. To have it to come back to. Even if he found it, he knew he couldn’t tote it out on foot, but dammit, he at least wanted to know it was real!

Glancing from the shovel back to the map, he decided to take one more poke before nightfall.

Then he heard the laugh. It was faint. Barely audible, but unmistakeably the laugh of Joaquin de la Mora, Captain of the Santa Maria.

The laugh of a ghost.

He was taunting him. Taunting him from the grave. “Senior Edwards, one thing you will learn, you may hang me, shoot me, or beat me, but Joaquin de la Mora will always have the last laugh.”

Slowly, despite himself, he picked up the shovel. He knew better. He knew better than to waste his strength and his moisture on more digging. But it didn’t matter. He was so close and the gold was only ever one more hole away, and then one shovelful, and then one last scoop…

The first time he’d met Joaquin de la Mora was on the deck of the Santa Maria. The ship was listing badly to the starboard side and taking on water quickly. The smell of gunpowder was thick in the air.

They’d been bold in their attack, thick as that morning’s fog had been, and it was not clear that the Santa Maria had even seen them coming.

They were Texians, sailing aboard the San Jacinto, a two-masted schooner which was as quick as she was nimble. Originally built for the slave trade, she was now property of the Texas Navy. And her new mission—protection of the fledgling Republic.

They’d slipped up beside the Santa Maria, overtaking her quickly, and let loose with every gun they had. Then, not waiting for an answer, nor taking time to reload their own cannons, the Texians had prepared to board.

Tate was one of the first across, pistol in one hand and a short saber in the other. He had cut the saber down to be about half as long, turning it into one big knife that still sported a saber’s sweeping hand-gaurd. It was a weapon for a rogue and not a gentleman, made for brutalism and tight spaces.

His first shot had taken a scrawny Mexican sailor just under the chin, dropping the man in place. His second shot had missed the next man up, splintering the wood on a mast arm just behind him. But they’d crossed blades after that, and it took no more than a parry-slash-thrust for Tate to gain the upper hand.

The Mexicans had swarmed the deck then, crawling up from the ship’s underbelly like so many ants. They let off a volley of musket fire, but it did nothing to slow the Texian’s momentum.

Then the fight was hand-to-hand and blood slicked the Santa Maria’s deck. And at the last of it, Tate leveled his revolver at a scrawny sailor, more boy than man, and canoed his head right down the middle.

The Santa Maria surrendered.

It was as the ship settled and smoke cleared, that Tate glanced around.

He spotted Lothrop at the bow of the ship, busy accepting terms from the Mexicans. Lothrop was Captain of the San Jacinto. A tall man with an angular face, who possessed a harsh and judgemental gaze. He considered himself an officer and a soldier, and forbid the looting of the dead or of prisoners. Often, Lothrop had declared his crew to be, “true Navy men and not God-forsaken pirates.”

Tate was of different mind.

Working his way stern, Tate placed mast and cabin between him and Lothrop’s petty stare.

Then, Tate picked over the bodies of the fallen, as was his tradition, and relieved them of what jewelry or trinkets they had on their person.

When they were relieved of their possibles, he checked their mouths and, using his cut-saber, pried loose any gold teeth he happened upon. Such were the tight spaces that his knife was made for.

“Lothrop will give you the lash if he catches you,” a sailor named Weston said.

“Sod off,” Tate snapped. “You tell him and it’ll be me you have to worry about.”

Weston merely shrugged.

That was when Tate saw the necklace on the next body over. Glimmering around the corpse’s neck was a gold chain, and what appeared to be a golden locket.

Tate reached for it, but all he caught hold of was the wrist of Peter Clarke, another of his shipmates, and the man who had somehow managed to snatch the locket a second before him.

“That’s mine,” Tate snarled, pulling the skinny Clarke by the arm.

Clarke swung on him then, and his fist clipped Tate something good in the side of his head.

Tate fell backwards, slightly stunned, and Clarke tried to scurry away.

But they were at it after that - Tate scrambling across the dead on all fours, catching Clarke by the heel, twisting him to the ground.

Clarke, now more or less sitting on the deck of the ship, kicked out at Tate with his free leg as hard as he could.

Tate let go of the man, part-ways because of the kick and part-ways because at just that moment, the ship had tilted violently in the water.

Then Clarke found his feet, and Tate scrambled to his own. Standing now, they both circled each other, unaware of the crowd that had started to gather. They were brawlers and circled each other as such, Tate with hands held low and loose by his sides, like a big bear waiting to catch a salmon in its paws. And Clarke, crouched so low that his hands nearly swept the deck, cat-like and looking for an opportunity to pounce.

It was Tate that moved in first, throwing a wild overhand right—but Clarke was expecting it and moved the top of his head to meet it.

There was a crack as Tate’s fist met the top of Clarke’s head, and Tate yelped, grabbing at what could only be a fractured hand.

Clarke moved in then, grabbing up Tate’s legs and flipping him hard down into the deck—

—a gunshot split the air and the noisy throng of sailors parted for one, Captain Lothrop: “What’s this about?”

Nobody answered.

“Show me your hand,” Lothrop commanded Clarke.

Slowly, Clarke lifted his hand, displaying the golden locket.

“Looting,” Lothrop said. “This is your first offense, isn’t Clarke?”

Clarke started, “It is—”

“—than count me a virgin if this is his first,” Tate broke in.

“Shut up, Tate,” Lothrop said. “If you weren’t so stupid this would be your first time too. But you’re not. So its ten lashes.”

Tate lunged upwards. “Why you fucking—”

Two men, Kitt and Briggs, stopped him. And at the command of Lothrop, they lifted his weapons in one smooth motion, leaving Tate as toothless as a new born babe.

“You got first, second, and third watch of our Mexican friend here,” Lothrop said, moving aside to reveal the Mexican officer standing behind him. Lothrop motioned to the Mexican officer, and then to Tate: “Take our Mexican friend, he’s your responsibility. If anything happens to him. Molested in anyway, or if’n he escapes—you’ll have to fight the noose.”

Briggs shoved Tate forwards.

Reluctantly, Tate snatched the Mexican Captain by the arm.

“And Tate,” Lothrop said. “This isn’t me giving you light duty. Its giving you a chance to get yourself hung.”

In the San Jacinto’s hold, Lothrop showed the Captain to his new quarters. Lothrop had apportioned a part of the ship’s belly for a makeshift brigg, which was nothing but a string of shackles bolted to a cross-timber at the stern of the ship.

Tate locked the Captain up, wrists above his head, and then sat down on a little stool, his back set against one of the ship’s supports.

The Mexican started to chuckle.

“What you on about?” Tate asked.

“At you, the man to whom winning is not enough. You are compelled by a very base impulse, Senior,” the Captain said cheerily. “You want more. And when you get more. You want even more. Until at last, you find yourself here, waiting for your lashes and stuck with my company.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with looting,” Tate said. “It’s time honored tradition. But Lothrop comes from a line of Puritans or Quakers or some such and got no natural instincts.”

“My name is Joauqin de la Mora the Third,” the Captain said. “And yours?”

“You just keep calling me Senior,” Tate said. “Got no need for more friends.”

“As you wish, Senior.”

Tate scowled.

The sun was just setting when the edge of Tate’s shovel struck something hard and metallic. The clang was deep and brassy, sounding like he’d struck solid iron. Dropping to his knees, he pawed away at the dirt until he could make out the shape of an object. It had a curved edge and a smooth, iron rim.

He took at it with the shovel, clanging away, and pausing every so often to inspect his discovery.

It was the iron hubcap of a wagon wheel.

He stepped back, and paced. Smiling and excited, not hardly believing his luck. Then he let out a terrific yell, jumping high, and throwing his hat on the ground. “Dammitt. Dammitt-all-to-hell.”

Why did he have to go and find something. “Lord,” Tate said. He looked up at the stars that spun overhead and shook a fist at the creator: “I am not a strong man.”

Every bone in his body wanted to continue working at the hole, to uncover the wagon and the gold it had carried, but he couldn’t. For already the devil had his throat.

He was playing a dangerous game digging like he had for the last few hours. He’d worked up a pretty good sweat, and already his head was pounding from dehydration and his tongue was starting to swell. If he didn’t make it to that waterhole tonight, he wouldn’t be alive to spend the gold.

At this, and realizing he had no other choice, he picked up the watersack and slung it over a shoulder, setting off towards water. He reckoned it was 15 miles, give or take a few. Assuming he kept a good pace through the night he would make it just around daybreak. He was a fit man and walking was easy enough.

The stars were bright and there was just barely enough light to navigate by. He cleared the wadi, and followed the little game trail that had brought him here.

He had been walking for the better part of an hour when he felt the unreal sensation of being watched. A cold breeze brushed the short hairs on his neck, and he froze up, all silent like, just listening for any sign of what was out there.

He waited awhile, still, with bated breath.

It was just when he was starting to move again that he heard a bird call out. Clear as day—and that was the problem—it was night…

Another bird answered the first, sounding like desert quail. And he was sure that it was neither bird nor beast that stalked him, but man. The Indians were back, come to finish him off.

Pulling the Colt he started forward, for there was nothing else to do. And every so often, out in the night, a shadow would waver, or a pebble would go a-scattering, there’d be a-rustling, and the night quails would call to each other.

“A smoke Senior,” Joauqin asked. “There is no reason to be completely miserable down here.”

Tate continued to roll the cigarrette and ignored the Mexican.

“Senior, I am the one destined for the gallows, but you, merely a whipping. Certainly, sharing your tobacco is not too much to ask?”

“I ain’t got much left,” Tate said.

Joaquin laughed. “This could be so easy, Senior. You give me a cigarette, I smoke, I lean back, I relax. We share some conversations as friends, and then I leave you alone. I can die in peace when we get back. But instead you are a greedy man. A very greedy man, Senior. It is not a good thing. This greed. This need to have and to keep. Already, it has set you up for a lashing. Do not let it be the thing that kills you.”

“The hell you talking about, kill me?” Tate asked.

“Senior, a cigarette?” Joauqin asked once more. “Just one. Please do not make me barter with you, for you will surely lose such a negotiation.”

“I already said no,” Tate said. He struck a match on a leg of the stool, and lit the smoke now hanging out of his mouth.

“I hope you have another,” Joauqin de la Mora said, changing tacts. “For if you do, it could make you a very rich man.”

Tate leaned forward. “What you mean Mister? What you got to trade?”

“There it is, Senior. That greed I was talking about.” Joaquin smiled, and his hands opened like flowers in the shackles above his head. “Sure, I have something to trade.”

Tate rubbed the whiskers of his chin, until finally, he said: “How ‘bout I just take it off you.”

Joaquin’s brows came together, and a small, queer grin made a contortion of his mouth. “Senior, what I have to trade… it is in my head.”

“Sounds ‘bout right,” Tate said. “Fantasy and fae-tales. I will fall for no such thing.”

“Senior, let me tell you a story. And then when I have finished… you let me know if a single smoke is too high of a price.”

Tate leaned back again, and took a puff.

“Have you ever heard the story of one, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado and his search for Quivira?” Joaquin asked.

But Tate said nothing, smoking contentedly, and determined to remain uninvested.

“The story goes that Quivira was a great city on the plains,” Joaquin continued. “It was rich in all manner of spoils. Copper, Gold, Silver… And ruled by a Chief, but not an Indian Chief as we would think of him, someone we would most assuredly recognize as a King—”

“—such never been found on the plains save naked Indians and Buffalo,” Tate broke in. “And certainly, no Indian monarch.”

“This was many years ago, Senior. Almost three hundred years ago to be exact, what Empires have risen and fallen in such a time. Is it not possible, that these lands were once very rich, and the people in them very rich?”

Tate waved him on.

“Regardless, Coronado and his party, they heard of this distant kingdom from an Indio whom they called ‘the Turk.’ If you ask others of the story, or perhaps you are familiar with it yourself, the story goes that Quivira was never found.

“Coronado and his men marched around the plains north of the Rio Colorado, and at last under threat of death, the Turk confessed that such a place did not exist. It was a deception, concocted by the Turk’s people, the Cicuye, to lead the Spanish hero and his army out onto the great sea of grass that he may become lost forever.”

“See, weren’t nothing out there,” Tate said. “Nothing but naked Indians.”

“But you are wrong, Senior. As I have already indicated. The Turk was executed not because he lied, but because he knew too much.”

“What do you mean?” Tate asked, leaning forward.

“They found the gold. A wagon full,” Joaquin said. “But in their greed, they loaded it so full of treasure that it could not make the journey. As soon as they reached especially rough country, an axle broke, and with it the men’s dreams of wealth and fortune.”

“What happened to it?” Tate asked.

“Coronado ordered it buried. Then he swore each man to silence and executed the Turk. When they returned to Mexico, he concocted the great tragedy of the meaningless quest. Which was, of course, a convenient lie designed to keep others from searching for the treasure that he buried. After all, who would search for something that never existed, eh Senior?”

“Well? Did he ever go back for it?” Tate asked. “Come on, spit it out.”

“He died before he could ever raise another party.”

“What about the other men? The ones that he swore to silence?”

“Some tried, yes,” Joaquin said, but none ever made it. “The country had become perilous by then. Even now, it is in the middle of Comancheria.”

“But it wasn’t Comancheria way back then,” Tate said.

“True, it was not. But one cannot take wagons into that country, Senior. It made them slow, and easy targets for the Indios that were there. They may not have faced down Coronado with his army… but a few spaniards with their wagons. Well… they never came back.”

“Should have taken mules,” Tate said. “A couple of mules could haul an awful lot of gold out of there. Move quick too, in and out. Like you said, no need to get greedy. Just one saddlebag would make a man rich beyond his wildest dreams.”

“Indeed, Senior,” Joaquin said. “Now you see what I am trying to tell you about greed.”

“Whereabouts was this wagon supposed to be buried?” Tate asked, hesitantly.

“I know. But I will not tell,” Joaquin said. “It will go with me to my grave.”

“You don’t know nothing,” Tate said. “How could you? A secret like that don’t keep for no three hundred years.”

“It has been kept, Senior, because one of my ancestors on my Father’s side was on that expedition with Coronado. And he was not a greedy man, Senior. He kept the secret, and he kept his neck. We the de la Mora’s care not for gold, but for life, and for love… we like to laugh, Senior. And to play jokes.”

“Do you have a map?”

“It is in my head, Senior,” Joaquin said.

“You could tell it to me, and I could write it down,” Tate said.

“I could, but you would not even share a cigarette with me,” Joaquin said. “Why should I share a fortune with you.”

Tate stood then, upset, and paced. Then he bent over the Mexican Captain, and with a finger in his face said: “Now look here. You can have all the tobacco on me. All of it. You just got to give me the location of that buried wagon.”

“That is a poor trade, Senior,” Joaquin said.

“They are gonna hang you,” Tate said. “It ain’t going to do you no good when you’re dead. But it could do you good now. It could buy you one of these here smokes you want so bad.”

Joaquin made a face of disapproval and turned his head, making a big show of his predicament. “Fine. I will give you the map. Do you have paper and pen?”

“I can sure get some,” Tate said, already up and taking two steps backwards. “You hold on right there.”

“But where would I go?” Joaquin called after him, and then he broke into a laugh. A long and loud laugh.

Day broke over Tate with his face held to water. He’d made it back to the water hole. No Comanche had bushwacked him, neither had the Llano Estacado swallowed him up, nor had he succumbed to his thirst.

He had walked through the night, a man with a mission. A man who must live to collect the riches no doubt buried in that wagon.

He drank his fill, and then lay on his side, one of his hands touching the water, the way a man might let his hand linger on a lover after a long night of bliss.

He rested there for a long while, worn out, but happy. The kind of happy that only a newly rich man could be, and would ever be. And while he had not seen the gold, he had discovered the wagon, touched it even. And he knew the thing was in his grasp.

As the sun grew brighter, and thus hotter, Tate stirred.

Rising from his place by the water, he filled the waterskin. He had repaired it, to the best of his ability, with a needle and thread. It held only half as much now, for he could only fill it about half way before it started leaking from the hole he had stitched shut.

He found a little crevice in the rocks that lay someways off, a place hidden from the sun, and he wedged himself up inside. Clutching the waterskin to his chest, he settled in to sleep the day away.

About noon he woke, having slept and dreamed, and stirred awake by the terrible heat.

He pushed himself upright, and took a long drink from the waterskin. The water tasted stale and warm and murky. It did not taste nearly as good now as it had earlier.

He stared out at the white waste before him. Sand-and-rock-and-scrub-and-limestone-and-rock-and-limestone-and-scrub repeating over and over in so many different concoctions. Lonely desert crags, and dried brush. Mesquite trees and cactus. The greenery of the desert was its own deception, for it led a man to believe that he could live in such a place, if he but tried.

Of course, Tate knew better. For water holes were few and far between, scattered across the country and changing by the season. Only the Indians had fully mapped them out.

Two of the waterholes Joaquin had told him about were dry, and he had been lucky to stumble upon a few of his own.

His eyes hurt, for it was bright out, and the land seemed to catch the light and reflect it. It was the devil’s country, surely.

His thoughts turned once more to the gold. Now with a belly full of water, and having proved he could make it back to the water hole in one easy night’s journey, and knowing the gold lied the same journey away, he wondered why he shouldn’t go back. Retrieve a small portion of it and walk it out on foot. He couldn’t take much of course, but he could take some. Enough for a new outfit. Maybe, he could even raise a proper party, enough men to guide a wagon…

And then it was settled.

As soon as the sun went down, Tate started back towards the wagon. The water in the waterskin felt cool against his back.

He could be walking out of here, completely. It was four nights to the next hole at least, and even as he walked back to the wagon a pit in his stomach was forming. It was the type of pit that meant he’d reached for too much, had talked himself into trouble again.

Up to this point, he’d hardly make the case he was responsible for his misfortune. He’d played as safe as possible. Losing his horses, his mules, and his water had not been his fault, just something to be dealt with.

But now, he was taking a gamble. He was betting on those Comanches not finding their courage, and he was betting on his legs not giving out, and he was betting on the water staying where he knew it to be.

This country was not one to be trifled with. It did not let a man live on margins, and that’s exactly what he was trying to do.

As he walked, the night again played tricks on him, or so he thought. The shadows cast by rock and mesquite moved twice as much as the night before, and a lonely brazos wind from somewhere up north made it sound like something was always moving out in the underbrush. The night quails even made another showing, but this time he counted upwards of eight.

He worked the shovel until his hands were raw and his back felt near to giving out. The wagon had been buried on its side, with what had been the top of it left up against the bedrock wall of the wadi.

The wagon’s positioning against the wadi’s rock wall made him think a chamber had been left inside the wagon relatively free of dirt, and filled with just gold.

An hour after day break, he struck something hard just where the side of the wagon should have started showing. More work and he discovered that the side of the plank-wood wagon had already been opened up. Stones were set over the hole in its side so that it could be reburied.

Someone had already been here.

His heart stuck in his throat, even as he pried away the stones covering the hole in the side of the old wagon. He lifted the slabs off one at a time, and tossed them off onto the ground behind him.

The side had been opened up pretty good, and it was dark inside. He couldn’t see anything, so he dropped down on his belly, and let his arm dangle down into the cavity. He lashed around for something, anything, but he touched nothing save for the floor of the wagon and the bedrock wall opposite.

It was big enough for him to slip inside, so he lowered himself down. Then he pulled a match from his pocket and struck it for light.

Dust particles swirled and danced inside the little cavitation, and it smelled dry and stale, and old. And it was empty. Empty, save for a small wooden box at the far end.

Tate scooched forward and grabbed up the box, for it was small and shaped like a trunk, yet no bigger than a man’s head. It felt empty, light as it was.

Disillusioned, he climbed up out of his hole, pulling the small box up behind him. Atop the wagon, with the sun high in the sky, he set for a moment and considered the box, knowing whatever was in it, was not gold.

Tate opened the box. At the bottom, was a scrap of parchment. Old and faded, but unmolested from the years, due to the dry nature of both the box and the place where it had been buried.

Carefully he unfolded the scrap of paper. There was writing on the inside, several lines of script. The first two lines in Spanish, the second two lines in a language he assumed was French, and the last two in English.

He read slowly and carefully: If you are reading this… know that there was gold here. But I, Joaquin de la Mora, II, beat you to it.

Tate read and then reread. Then he crumpled the paper and laughed. And he laughed until he cried a big weeping cry.

Joaquin de La Mora the Third had skunked him. His father had already retrieved the gold. He had sent him on a wild goose chase to the far reaches of the plains, and he’d surely laughed about it even as the noose snapped about his neck.

“Please do not make me barter with you, for you will surely lose such a negotiation.” Tate heard the words again, clear as day.

At least, Tate thought, he still had his life.

He woke just before nightfall to find that he had been pilfered of everything that he still had. The watersack, which he had set down right next to him, lay someways off, cut wide open and laid flat, the stain of water baked into the sand where it had been left to leak out.

Instinctually, he reached for his pistol but found his holster empty. It was gone, as was the horn of powder and his bag of cap’n balls. All, either lifted or cut from his person while he was sleeping.

Dread found him then, just as the temperature was falling.

For surely, it had been the Comanches. But why had they not killed him? What new game was this? If they could steal from him they could kill him, so why toy with him?

With the sky a flaming orange, he cut open the bloated horse.

He hoped to salvage the stomach, and use it as a container for water. Two days in the sun had started the thing well on its way towards decomposition, and the smell nearly gagged him. He stuffed the bandana into his mouth and held his breath.

The stomach was stretched near its limit by bloat and gasses. As he cut it out, it hissed something terrible, spewing foul juices. He stripped out of shirt, finding the smell unbearable and then emptied the stomach of its contents. The organ was still in passable condition and while he was sure that it would hold water, he doubted his ability to drink from it. No doubt, the spector of death by thirst would make him more amenable.

He set off then towards the waterhole. He was upset, piss mad in fact, but glad to at least be clear of this god forsaken place. He would make it to the waterhole. He would fill this foul stomach, and he would walk his ass to the next one, and then all the way out of this place, never to return.

He still had the Comanches to worry about, of course, but he felt less concerned, buoyoed by the fact that they had so far not killed him. They were playing with him. Torturing him to see what he would do. But they had not counted on the stomach. And as long as he was still alive, he had a chance to give them the slip.

The night quail did not visit him once that night, and their absence somehow made him feel all the more anxious.

He made bad time that night, moving slower for the lack of water and his depressed spirits. Twice, he made a wrong turn in the dark, and twice, he’d had to find his way back to the trace. As such, it was mid-morning and already hot when he spotted the waterhole.

He stumbled towards it, his mouth dry, and the horse stomach slung across his back stinking to high heavens.

He was no more than fifty yards away when the party of Comanches came riding up out from behind the rock towers that lay to his left.

It was as if they’d been waiting for him.

There were twenty of them, all squat and ugly looking bucks. They wore buckskin leggings, and their torsos were naked, all sinew and tightly-strung muscle. Bright and colorful feathers were woven into their hair, but their faces were not painted.

Tate stopped, and watched them come, barely able to care that he would die and hopeful that it would be quick. There was no running from a mounted party. And there would be no fighting, for they’d already disarmed him.

But they did not come for him, instead, they pulled rein at the waterhole and let their horses drink.

As their horses drank their fill, they looked on at him, pointing and laughing, and carrying on in their own tongue.

Tate watched as the Comanche horses drank the water hole dry, and with it, his hopes of walking out.

Then one of the bucks heeled his horse forward, Tate’s pistol conspicously tucked into the brave’s buckskin pants and his horn of powder slung across the Comanche’s chest.

The buck stopped some feet off from Tate, and asked in Spanish, “Encontraste el oro?” which translates, “did you find the gold?”

Tate heard the laugh again, the one that belonged to Joaquin de la Mora, but this time it did not come from the Mexican’s ghost, but rather, the party of Comanche braves.

Conrad Penney, age 29, Caucasian, height 6 feet 2 inches, weight 205 lbs. Blue Eyes. Brunet. That is me. I have heard it listed out, or read it on a screen, damn near every day for the last ten years. That’s the sum of the man. My body, my mind, my race—my name. That is quite literally all I have.

The blacktop outside of the prison is baking. The West Texas sun above me white hot. Its not the familiar golden sun of my childhood. Its changed, or maybe I’ve changed. I don’t rightly know. What I do know is that it used to be a warm, golden color. It used to smile down softly. Now it glares. Menacing. Its color has changed too. There’s a harshness to it, as if its just gone supernova and the truth of life after death will be discovered in about eight minutes flat.

Eight minutes is the time it takes for light from the sun to reach us—allegedly. Prison fills your head with all sorts of facts. Some of them useful. Most not. After all, information without an outlet is just schizophrenia. That’s the problem with book heavy programs. Some minds grow inward, rooting deeper into themselves. Thats why a physical regimen is paramount. For every page read, comes ten pushups or thirty air squats. Sometimes I would throw in burpees. Pullups if my area could support it.

I stare down at the toes of my cowboy boots. They still fit. They are ten years old. Not really any worse for sitting on a shelf somewhere. Still scuffed like the day they hauled me in. In my hand is a trash bag with the clothes I wore when I was 19. The shirt no longer big enough to accomadate my frame. And the jeans are too tight in the legs and loose in the waist. Time and age are a weird thing to face.

There’s a weird dichotomy with prison. It strips you of all the things that matter, but also all the things that don’t.

It perfects the animal.

The real thing I’m getting at is that a man is only as strong as his program. You learn that quickly. You do pushups. You do squats. You do pull ups. You do them, because your life depends upon it. Its an arms race, literally. Without that sort of competition, without life and death stakes, a body withers. But even that is just an excuse. The stakes are always life and death. You can stay on a program anywhere, you don’t need to be in prison—

—brake squeal interrupts my sermon. Talking to the imaginaries that keep you company all day is another art you perfect in the pen.

The little red toyota corolla hits the curb as it turns in. My ride, and she’s on time, her name is Lolo. Women that can’t drive… something immensely attractive about it. Endearing is probably a better word. She pulls to a stop in front of me. She’s hotter than her picture—weird.

“Get in,” she says. Her voice is high, feminine, a very slight and throaty rasp at the end.

I open the door and slide into the passenger seat. She has raven black hair, hazel eyes, and a slightly aquiline nose. Just enough hook in it to be preposterously attractive. The Japanese apparently call this phenomena wabi-sabi—beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.” I’ve always held that the concept mostly only applies to women.

“Fuck,” she says. “You’re not what I expected.”

“What did you expect?”

Green eyes dart. Color fills the space between chin and high cheekbones. She does a little waving motion at the length of me, and says, “not this.”

“Good, I hope.”

“Yeah,” she says a bit breathy. “Not bad.”

 I lose focus at the pale flash of her wrist. Ten years in the pen and all I can notice are her delicate, slender wrists. Femininity.

The cheeseburger tastes like something from another planet. Beef. Real beef. Not beef cut with whatever they cut it with. Nothing but prime, Grade A Texas-raised Angus topped with American cheese, onions, lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and whatever this sauce is.

Lolo is staring at me.

“What?” I say.

“It’s that good?”

I nod. I feel like her subject. She’s done nothing but ask me questions and make observations since I got in the car.

She sinks her teeth into her own burger, taking a massive bite. A bit of sauce drips on her chin. And then its gone, wiped away quickly with a napkin.

It sort of blows my mind how attractive I find her. Everything in the right place, the right size, a body full of curves, and that fucking voice.

But there’s something else. A deep appreciation. Mostly for not having to be alone right now.

We met through a letter exchange program the prison set up. Which seems weird maybe, but I don’t really care. Who am I to judge. I’m the con, right? I’m thankful for her. Mostly for the company. Loneliness sucks. It sucks bad. The sights, the colors, the noise, the everything… its really kind of overwhelming, and her smile steadies me. More than she probably knows. I’m sure half the kink of this is some mix of danger and safety for her—yes, when you read every book in a library sometimes you catch a taste for harlequin romance.

But the truth is, I keep looking to her for my cues. For how to act, for how to seem normal, for whether that loud noise is something I should be concerned about.

“So,” she says slowly, her mouth still half full. “This is weird.”

I look at her. “I know.”

“I thought it would be more awkward,” she says. “I almost didn’t come.”

“I’m glad you did. I can’t imagine having to eat this burger alone.”

Her mouth makes a small mock frown, the type women do when they see something cute like kittens or a baby deer. “My friends all think I’m crazy...”

“Are you?”

“A little.” She shrugs a shoulder and grins.

“Anything I need to worry about?” I say.

“Maybe,” she says. “Just don’t look at anyone else, and you’ll never have to see it.”

“Who would look at anything else?”

“Tell that to my ex.”

“Strikes me as a dumbass.”

“He was.”

“Why didn’t you go back?”

“To Arizona?”

“Yeah,” I say.

“Eh, I left the Rez for a reason, even if following a guy was the wrong one. Besides, writing you kept me sane.”

“Still coulda gone back.”

“I just kind of waited around when I found out you only had two years left. You probably think I’m needy, or like have a hang-up. I have—”

“—it’s cute. It helped. It kept me out of trouble.”

She gave that small frown again. Smaller this time, reflexive.

“What next?” I ask.

“We rob my ex,” she says.

“I thought that was a joke.”

“It doesn’t have to be. We rob him. Take the cash and run to Mexico and they never find us.”

“And then we live happily ever after.” Read enough romance and that’s how they always end.

“Obviously. Or kill each other over the money.” She smiles.

“Or murder suicide.”

“Toxic,” she says, taking another bite.

“How about we keep that option on the backburner.”

“I know,” she says. “It is actually a joke… mostly.”

She always does that. She jokes about something, but you aren’t sure if it is a joke or if she’s just testing the waters.

“I promised myself I would give it a shot,” I say. “A normal life. I don’t really plan on breaking it. If you can’t keep promises with yourself, how can you keep them with anyone else.”

“I like that,” she says. “Buuut, if we really need to.”

“Like I said, backburner.”

We both return to our burgers. The silence between us pleasant. A comfortable silence. Then she breaks it.

“Do you want to go to back?” she says. “To my place.” Her demeanor is playful now, eyes sparking, and my pulse quickens.

“In Dallas?”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s only a two hours from here. You can stay with me. Fuck this place. I would want to go far away from here if I were you.”

“Alright,” I say.

She waves the waiter over and he brings the check. “I wasn’t planning on taking you back tonight, was going to set you up in a hotel, but you passed. You’re not a weirdo.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. And you talk how you write in your letters. It’s funny. Cute-funny. I feel like I know you.”

“Well shit, I would hope so after two years.”

She smiles, and drops forty bucks down on the table. Then flicks her head towards the door.

She wakes me. Hand on my stomach. Her face inches away from mine. Sunlight is pouring in through dirty apartment windows and resting on sun-kissed shoulders. We’d probably only actually fallen asleep three hours ago.

“Hey,” she says. “Do you want breakfast?”

“Coffee. I miss real coffee.”

“I got you,” she says, then she slips into a baggy t-shirt that hangs over her butt and doesn’t bother with pants. Dancer’s legs carry her around the little kitchenette. The studio apartment is small. But clean, and put together. Paintings of desert landscapes hang on the walls. Over the bed is a tapestry of beadwork that makes some sort of tribal design. I push myself up in bed, and watch as she makes coffee.

“Is Lolo short for something then?”

“Lozen,” she says. “It’s Apache, obviously.” She does a half-curtsy. “She was a warrior. Fought with Geronimo. Bad bitch if you ever look her up.”

“What’s it mean?”

“Horse thief,” she says. “At least that’s how it translates.” She walks over and sits on the edge of the bed.

“Are you full Apache then?”

“Half. Daddy was white. Never knew him. Momma met him at the Casino.”

I nod. “Do you have a laptop?”

“Yeah, why?”

“I got an interview. They make you set one up before they process you.”

She grabs a computer from beneath a pile of clothes on the floor. Cocktail dresses, and glitzy things. I feel a pang of jealousy at the sight of them. “Do you work tonight?” I ask.

“Yeah,” she says. “But you can stay here while I’m gone.”

I nod.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

I take the computer out onto her little second floor balcony. The sun feels good as I fumble my way onto zoom. She opens the glass sliding door, and sets the plate of eggs down, then the cup of coffee, and wishes me good luck.

I log in and wait for someone else to join. Its just a black screen. I hope I haven’t fucked something up. Five minutes of this, and I open the sliding door.

“Hey, can you make sure I did this right?”

“Yeah,” she says.

I show her the link in my email, and she checks it.

“You’re good, they just haven’t joined yet.”

“Oh. Thanks.” I feel stupid. Like the world has passed me by. Everything is so different. Everyone is so different.

Two minutes more and someone logs on. Its a heavy set guy with wire frame glasses and a pudgy face. The interview starts off well enough. I answer his questions. I try to talk about myself. But there is something in his tone. Something I sense. Condescension maybe? Or like I’m supposed to impress him… an expectation for me to impress. I think that’s it. And something of charity. Like this is my big chance to work at a warehouse, since I’m a felon, and if I don’t get with this guy’s program, I’m going to blow it.

Maybe that’s it. Everyone is living someone else’s program.

I see his desk, the pen he keeps twirling between chubby fingers, and then in my mind’s eye his head is slamming into that desk, and that pen is meeting that fatty neck—

“—Conrad, you still with us buddy. Can you tell me why you think Metalworks Solutions would be a good fit for you?”

Shut-up. Shut-the-fuck-up. Why, does he have to talk so nice. So sing-song. Like I’m a child. Its quite frankly faggy. I know he’s not gay. Likely has a wife at home probably. But just talk to me, man. Like a man, man-to-man. I want to strangle him. I don’t know why.

I bumblefuck my way through the rest of the interview but my heart isn’t in it. It ends. I sit there in the sun for a while and wonder what the fuck just happened. I wonder why I can’t be normal.

There was a guy I was friends with. He was only out a year before he landed right back in the same cellblock he’d left. I asked him why? Why did he fuck it up?

“I couldn’t do it,” he said. “I couldn’t help myself. Its all so gay. Its like a script. You have to stay on it. But its bullshit. This right here is real. You fuck up, you bleed out. Circle of life baby. Out there, you know. You fuck up, and they just like bitch at you, or do some other shit and tell you it has nothing to do with what you did. The truth is, its an open air prison, but with enough complexity you can pretend. Nothing happens as long as you pretend, but its the pretending that was hard. Its weird. But I’m a retard, what do I know.”

I thought he was nuts. I don’t know now. I think I get it. But I’m not fully convinced I’m the abnormal one. I think its universal. It has to be universal, just most people learn to ignore it.

I want to strangle that interviewer. I want to hunt him down and shove his face into that keyboard and… I don’t know why.

Think to the last time you road raged. Someone just cut you off, and you thought about what you would like to do to them. Think about that split second image. Just a curb, a head, a boot. It flashes through your mind. Its like that scene in Fight Club, where they splice a split-second of porn into movies at what they call the *cigarette burn. That’s what its like having a capacity for violence. Pay attention. Everyone has it. If it wasn’t in the genepool, you wouldn’t even be here. Its a legacy. All day long you have this lizard brain whispering at you. Its barely audible. Blink and you’ll miss it, but its there. Kill. Take. Do. Fight. Fuck. Its intrusive. They aren’t thoughts as much as inputs. Reactions. Your lizzard brain whispering the secrets of evolution. Animal instincts. Violence the basecode of civilization. Everything else, polite abstraction.

I shut the laptop, and sit there for a long while.

The sliding glass door pulls back with a woosh. Lolo fills the space.

“How did it go?”

“Not great,” I say. “Well, maybe fine. I’m not sure.”

She sits down in the chair across from me, and pulls a pack of marlboros out of her sweatpants. Lights up. Hands me one.

I light it and inhale.

“I don’t want you to dance anymore,” I say, exhaling smoke. The nic hits me like a freight train.

She laughs. “I thought you said you didn’t know how it went. Now you want me to quit my job?”

I say nothing, ashing the cigarette over the concrete. She’s so fucking hot in sweat pants and a baggy shirt. Cigarette between thin fingers. Smoke whisps rising. Fuck her. Take her inside now. There it is. The lizard brain. Did you hear it? That’s its other main—

“—Oh, you’re serious.” She says. “Fine. Done. I won’t dance anymore.”

“Just like that?” I ask.

“Yeah, why not. You asked me too. I’m into you. Honestly, I think it would be weird if you were cool with it.”

“How seriously have you really thought about Mexico?” are the next words out of my mouth, they come spilling out before I can even think them through.

The stash house is on the edge of town, fully in the ghetto. She sits in the car next to me. Stray cats do loops around the neighborhood. A little black and white one peers out at our parked car from the shade of a dumpster.

“Rico was a dealer,” she says. “This is where he would hang out. He told me that there’s a safe in the back. Upstairs. He kept the money there. Someone would come collect it the last saturday of the month.”

“So two weeks from now.”

“Just before is the time to hit him,” she says.

“Do you know who he worked for?” I ask.

“Some guy named Ekon.”

“Cartel?”

“No God, not cartel,” she says.

“Good. That would be a bad way to die,” I say. “When was the last time you were here?”

“A year ago, maybe.”

I shoot a look.

“You were in jail. Besides you hadn’t asked me to be your girlfriend yet.”

“I was in prison. Jails are county.”

She rolls her eyes.

“Is there an entrance in the back?” I ask.

“Yeah, but it was always chained up and locked.”

“How many usually hang out in there?”

“Four or five. They’re dumbasses. Always high, they just sit down stairs and smoke, and play video games, or put porn up on the big screen.”

“Why were you even with this guy.”

“He had money. And then I caught feelings. I was in a bad place, ok. Sometimes you think you deserve things.”

“Geez,” I say.

“I’m a soft-bitch ok. Lucky for you.”

“We need to work on your choice in men.”

“Oh do we.” She shot a be-careful-what-you-wish-for in my direction.

“I’m an upgrade, shush.”

“Time will tell.” She cracks her gum, and squirms down in the seat folding arms across her in a manufactured pout.

It took a week for me to get my license situation figured out. Best not to commit a misdemeanor in the process of committing a felony. She cancelled the lease on her apartment. And I helped her toss the furniture, and most everything else that wasn’t clothes or sentimentals.

The trunk of clothes is damn near the width of the bed, and is the heaviest trunk of clothes I have ever lifted. I asked her to take some of them out, but she flat refused, said she needed all of them.

Then we camped in a little conservation area at the edge of Dallas for three days. We barbacued burgers and drank beer. We fished. I caught a few bass one day, and Lolo just hung out, watching me, laughing with me. She was down with it. People have a certain idea of dancers or strippers as being high maintenance, but they’re not. Not usually. A bit brash, maybe, but they aren’t afraid to live the moment for what it is. They aren’t put off by the shit life throws at you.

We traded the Corolla in for this old ranger. Anything newer would make us an immediate target once we crossed the border. Driving a new car down there was a death wish or so I’d been told.

She still isn’t sold on the guns.

“Will those work?” she asks. She’s sitting on the tail gate next to me, bouncing her feet and smacking mosquitoes. The trees at the campsite are thick and green and all around smells sweet from the wildflowers at their base.

I palm one of the guns. Its a Pietta 1851 Confederate Navy Black Powder revolver chambered in .44. “Theres a little public range up that trail, half the reason I suggested this.”

“Let’s go,” she says.

 I take my revolvers, two of them, one looped over my neck with a piece of paracord threaded through an eyelet I screwed into the buttstock, the other tucked into my pants.

“Do I look the Outlaw Josie Wales?” I ask.

“Who’s that,” she says.

“Its a movie I liked.”

“Why not just get a regular gun though?” she asks.

“Because I’m a felon,” I say, hefting one of them in my hand.

“Buy one off the street.”

“I don’t know anyone.”

“I know people,” she says.

“Look, I get it. But blackpowder guns don’t require a background check or really have very many restrictions on them at all. Sure, they have their drawbacks. But for a pinch, the kind we are in now, they work. I don’t know, its always made me feel good knowing they were an option. So this crackhouse is just gonna have to deal with being teleported backwards about 150 years.”

We spent the rest of the evening blowing holes in cans. I was a bit surprised by their accuracy. A bitch to reload. Definitely not happening in the middle of a shoot out, and I get why the rangers carried around like five of these things.

Over 30 yards and you were flirting with misses fairly often. But up close, which is where I would be. You couldn’t really miss too bad, not with a steady hand anyways.

***

It was dark out when we pulled up and parked outside the little safe house. We had our escape route from the house planned, and a back up, both of which would dump us out on the I-35 S. Then it would be another 15 hours to the border. Yeah. Texas is big. But I doubt anyone would be looking for us.

Lolo pulls out the little plastic bag with my silicon halloween mask. Its a “realistic” old man mask, complete with wrinkles, and a shitty white mustache. Its pretty good. Not as good as Bodhi and Johnny Utah’s Dead Presidents, but still good.

We watch the safe house for about twenty minutes. Then, like clockwork, her ex drives up in a Chrysler 300 and parks down the block. He sits for about ten minutes, and then gets out, puts his hood up, adjusts his ballcap, and makes his way to the house.

“That’s him,” Lolo says.

“What if he won’t give up the code?”

She looks at me with that deer in the headlights type of look, and then shrugs.

“Yeah. I didn’t think of that either.”

I’m wearing a hoodie. I stick one of the revolvers in the big front pocket. I crack the door on the ranger, and the cabin lights stay black because I disabled them earlier. The other revolver goes into my waistband at the small of my back.

I watch as she slides over into the drivers seat. Once shes situated, I give her a wink and pull the mask over my head. Casually, I walk towards the house.

I have killed with shivs, shanks, and once with my bare hands. Most they never caught me. Or didn’t want to. Sometimes the gaurds let you make their life easier. But all were some form of self-defense, even if pre-meditated. Anything that happens in the pen is self-defense because the stakes are survival. But this is different. But not enough for me to care. They only ever tagged me for one of the stabbings, and that bitch added eight years to my original two and probably caused just as many of the shivings.

One of the weirder things about being out now is all the sharp edges. They’re everywhere. Edges, blades, points, shoe laces. Outside is littered with weapons. And yet nobody has to worry, there’s something nice about that. I realize then that I am the problem now, cursed with knowledge that I’ll never be able to let go of. The world is changed, because I am changed, even if its only because of the way I see it.

I turn the corner and walk the ten feet to the front door. I hear music thumping inside. I pause, listening, waiting. I check the hinges. It opens inward like most all front doors.

My foot meets the door just next to the knob. A sharp crack and splintering, but I’m still not in. I give it one more kick, drawing the revolvers as I do so, and the door flies open slamming against the opposite wall with force.

Someone is running down the hall towards me. I have a split second to register the baseball bat in his hand. I raise one of the pistols and fire. He takes a lead ball in the chest, shuffles backwards, falls… immediately the house is ringing.

Cocking the hammer, I pivot into the living room leveling both revolvers to find three white pie-pan-faces all illuminated by the reflection of cartoons playing on the tv. They stare back in suprise. Freeze reflex in full effect. Or just stoned…

And then there is a moment where they try to help themselves. But its in my past and their future, for my adrenals have bent time, and I work my way down the line, one-shot-after-another, rythmically, the single-action pistols clicking and barking thick clouds of white smoke and the smell of sulphur and then they are all some form of dead.

The place is dark, but I see a light on in a far room, near where the stairs should be. He’s in here somewhere, because we just watched him enter. His hoodie is not among the bodies on the floor. Probably, upstairs. I need him alive. I need the code to the safe.

I step over the bodies in the living room, give the revolvers a rest, and pick a Glock up off the coffee table. The smoke from the guns still hangs acrid in the air. I check to make sure a round is chambered, and then move forward, holding it with two hands, scanning the bannister.

Then there is a rush of movement from somewhere in the house, the sound of nails on a hard wood floor. Thats the first time my brain connects the giant doggy bed next to the tv to the fact that dogs exist, and not only that, exist in this house, and that’s when a gray mass of fur and muscle rounds the corner into the room, slips on the hardwood, slams hard into the couch—I shoot—but I miss… and then the dog is lunging.

He bites down hard on my blocking forearm, and I crash backwards through one of those tray tables found in bachelor pads and drug dens and meant for eating tv dinners. I feel it shatter underneath me as 75lbs of all american pitbull tries to tear my left arm free of my body. The Glock clatters off somewhere in the darkness.

I give the dog two quick punches right in its ribs, but it ignores them, punishing me by biting harder. I scramble to my feet as best I can, the dog still hanging on for dear life. I’m too mad and terrified to care about anything other than killing this fucking dog.

I scoop the whole damn thing up with my other arm, lifting with my legs. He squirms, and I almost lose my grip, but his mouth is still latched on my arm, and then like a pro-wrestler I jump and dive, and slam the pit as hard as I possibly can into the floor with the full weight of my body. 

Ribs or something crack, and I feel him release. I scramble backwards through the wreckage of the dinner table, and the dog struggles back to his feet, looking slightly dazed.

That dive wrecked my shoulder, but the dog misses only a beat, and he’s back on me, latched on again in the same damn face, and my whole arm is fire.

But my hand, quite by chance, finds one of the heavy wooden splinters from the tv tray table and then I attack its neck, stabbing repeatedly with all the animal fury that ten years of pushups can lend. The dog fights harder at first, but we are both slipping around in pools of blood, his and mine, and the floor is slick as a wine press, and I know he’s done for.

He still doesn’t release though, even when sweet death collects him, and I spend another panicked minute prying his jaws off my arm which is made more difficult by only having one hand to do it with.

Then I sit there. I heave and wheeze, my mind swimming with pain, and I hold my arm. Then another man rounds the corner, and he has a gun. He holds it like a jackass—side-ways—

But I roll hard through the blood, and reach one of the revolvers. Wood splinters behind me and I can hear the thwump of bullets. But I’ve got one of the revolvers up. I fire and the gun bucks the same instant I see another one of his muzzle flashes.

I stand over the body. Revolver in hand, silicone mask in the other.

“You killed him?” I look up to see Lolo standing in the front door.

“Yeah,” I say.

She moves in slowly, tentatively. Then she see’s I’m bleeding, and rushes over. “We have to get out of here.”

“What about the safe or the code?”

“He’s dead!” she says. And then spits on the body. “Fuck the safe. Let’s go.”

We run outside then, and there are people watching from cracked blinds. I jump in the driver seat and hit the gas on the little Ford. And I drive with my good arm, the piece of mincemeat that was my left, cradled in my lap.

We are on the Interstate when she starts, “I didn’t mean for you to get hurt.”

“I don’t know what we are going to do for money,” I say. “But we can’t stay here.”

“Fuck the money. I have money.”

“What money do you have?”

“I was a stripper stupid?” she says. “Cash. What do you think we get paid in.”

“So why did we have to rob your ex?” I ask. I glance over at her, and can feel the heat rising.

She scrunches her face, that universal sign of female embarrassment at a chain of (il)logic and impulse that only looks so in hindsight. In a small voice, she says, “he pissed me off.”

I turn my attention back to the road. Then I remember the trunk of clothes. The heaviest trunk of clothes that I had ever carried. “How much is in the trunk?”

She makes a sucking sound with her teeth, knowing I’ve put it together. “About one hundred thousand.”

“How much really?”

“Two hundred and thirty five thousand,” she says, her voice getting higher at the end of it.

“I feel a little manipulated, you know.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I just wanted to get him back.”

“Well… you did that alright.”

I take a beat, watching the phosphorescent lines, the road sign that says 540 miles to Monterrey. And I start to laugh. Deep laughs that hurt everytime I jostle my arm, and she asks me what is so funny.

I don’t have a good answer, but I suppose its something to do with lizard brains, and the fact she has them too.

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Check out my new piece of short fiction published in Man’s World. This story was chosen as one of two runner-ups for the Pulp Fiction Prize. All three stories will be published in MW14.

US Sailors and Marines working their way up the Mekong Delta in the middle of the Vietnam war are attacked by an ancient enemy even Charlie fears.

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Red Lenses by Frank Kidd

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