Last Call For Caviar (20 page)

The wind harried our backs as we raced towards the camp entrance, where Father Dominic and the Sisters were holding Mass. I looked back at Johan one last time. He was still sitting there, a lonely sentinel keeping guard, etched against the darkness and ruin that was rapidly overtaking us all.

We arrived in time to hear Father Dominic lead the three—hundred-odd kneeling souls gathered before him on the wind-lashed shore in David’s prayer, the Psalm to declaim in the presence of great evil, when all seems lost.

As his last words died away, the sky overhead was torn asunder by great jagged forks of lighting, crackling downward as though seeking to impale some callow soul. War drums beating out the rhythm of death and doom boomed over the bent heads of the crowd on their knees, cowering forsaken upon the shore.

A murmur of unease rippled through the crowd. Fear shone on faces as many made the sign of the cross to ward off this sign from above. Then the heavens opened in a flooding torrent, a river falling from the sky; apprehension turned to urgency as the crowd scrambled to its feet and fled.

Rain lashed at us, and the wind greedily tore at our clothes as though to strip us naked before the storm’s wrath. Father Dominic and Bilal herded the black-clad flock of nuns toward the shelter of the truck and van.

We cleared the checkpoint but were stalled behind a line of cars fleeing the camp when a black Ducati, the helmet hiding the rider’s features, flashed by going the other way. I rolled down the window and stuck my head outside, straining to see through the sheets of rain if I could identify the mystery rider. He was about one hundred meters away, and even though he had removed his helmet to talk to the military guards, it was still too far away to see.

The truck moved forward another twenty meters, then stopped. The bottleneck at the crossroads up ahead was starting to ease. I didn’t stop to think. I wrenched the truck’s door open and hit the ground running, not caring that my hair was plastered across my face, blinding me, or that any of the debris flying on the winds could have taken my head off.

His back was still to me as I closed the distance; I couldn’t see his face. Though he was clad in black motorcycle gear and the rain blurred my vision, I knew the set of his shoulders, the ease in which he moved. I saw him laugh with the guards and shake their hands before turning back towards his bike. They were lifting the barrier; in seconds it would be too late, and he’d be through.

I opened my mouth and screamed his name, but the words were flung away on the wind. He didn’t hear me. I was still thirty meters away when arms grabbed me from behind. I was trapped in bands of steel; no matter how I twisted and kicked out, they held me fast.

“No, Bilal… Please. You don’t understand. Its Julian… He’s there. Let me go to him.” I pleaded as I watched him approach his motorcycle, “He’ll be gone any second. Let me go… Don’t you understand?”

“I’m sorry. I know. But we have to go now. There’s no time. We’ll find him again, Inchallah. Or he’ll come for you,” Bilal shouted over the storm, as he dragged me inexorably, foot by foot, towards our vehicles. “Look over there towards the lake! There’s no time! You have to stop this, Maya Jade! We’re all in danger, and you’re risking everyone’s life!”

His words cut through the anguish howling inside me, and I looked where he indicated. On the far shore of the lake, the black funnel of a tornado pasted against a sickly yellow sky towered above the waters and bore down on the camp. The roar—louder than a hundred trains coming down the tracks—rent the very air. The fight went out of me, and I sagged in his arms.

I turned to look at Julian one last time, and I saw him staring at us over the widening distance. The commotion we’d made had caught his attention. I felt our eyes meet, and something unspoken fired between us: a current as powerful as the lightning crackling down on the ion-charged air.

He took a step toward us. We had almost reached the van, and as Bilal hauled me inside, he started to run. Father Dominic put the van in gear, and we rejoined the flow of slow-moving traffic.

I watched him running after us through the back window, but something made him glance back over his shoulder. Now he, too, saw the tornado menacing the camp. He came to a halt in the middle of the road.

In that moment, something broke; I could feel it give way inside. I’ll never forget how he looked, the rain streaming down his leather jacket, his green eyes stark against his face, his dark head unbowed by the fury of the winds and debris of the enormous tornado swirling ever closer in the background. I watched his figure receding, until the storm swallowed him from sight.

The sisters offered me sanctuary at Laghet that night. But there was no comfort to be found kneeling on the cold stones worn smooth by so many others’ sorrow. The nuns spoke words of comfort. They talked of God’s will and grace. But my silence and the unshed tears in my eyes were a rebuke. From God, my face was turned; here, there was no solace to be found.

My last glimpse of Julian was seared into my soul. It would haunt me always. I wanted to go home, close my door to the world, grab a bottle of whiskey and watch the moonlight dance on the cove.

I’d abandoned him, standing on the edge of the abyss, death and chaos bearing down upon him; I didn’t know if he had survived. Now, a chasm yawned between us. There would no longer be a way to the other side. That day, something withered inside me. That day, hope died.

.

CHAPTER 22

D
REAMLAND

The next seventy-two hours, I slept around the clock. Each time I felt myself swimming back from the sweet depths to consciousness, I’d grab the bottle on my nightstand, take a couple more sleeping pills, wash them down with a slug of whiskey, and retreat once more to dreamland. This world hurt too much to inhabit; I didn’t want to see that the sun still shone, smell the fragrant sea breeze on the winds. I just wanted to stay swaddled in a cocoon of substance-induced amnesia in the shadow land beyond.

The fourth day, I awoke and watched the dawn breaking on the shore. The mist was dove-gray shading into watercolor streaks of oyster-shell pink and a melancholy sigh of blue. The day was newborn and fragile, like the first steps I took outside. I emerged into the land of the living, and no matter how much I ached inside, I was famished and thirsty, and I needed to pee. The flesh of my body wouldn’t be denied. As much as I could wish otherwise, I would survive.

After trying to induce a coma for the last seventy-two hours and coming up short, my body now demanded movement and fresh air. Even though I felt like the recently-awakened dead, I decided to drag my ass up the hill to the Astrarama. Buddy’s company and the solitude on the heights were all I craved.

Before I left, I turned on my computer and scrolled through my inbox. Though I knew it wouldn’t be likely, I searched for word from Julian and ignored the other missives. I’d deal with them when I felt stronger. Then, I saw Leah’s email. It had been a couple of weeks since I’d had any news.

Hey, lil’ Sis,

Just wanted to let you know how we’re getting on. We’re thinking about leaving the beach house next month, and move to the compound by the Washington border. Looking on the bright side, it will make it easier for you to join up with us, if you can get to Vancouver. So far, the border is still open between Washington and British Columbia. Have you had any luck yet finding a flight? We’ll all breathe easier once you’re back safe, so get the lead out, girl. Hurry up!

The monsoons have been even more intense lately. In fact, it seems like we’re in the midst of a biblical storm that is going to last more than forty days. Every day, I look out at an endless expanse of moving liquid, the breakers rolling in and the rainwater gushing down; I can hardly tell where one starts and the other ends. I half-expect to see schools of fishes swimming past in the sky. There’s so much moisture in the air, if this keeps up we’ll have to grow gills. We haven’t seen the sun in a month. We’re living in water world.

The wildfires have burnt out along the coastal plains in central Cali. So that means there is a corridor open along the coast for the freak show from the south to travel north. The news out of there is so damn bleak! They’re at each other’s throats, and its all blood and mayhem. There’s a rumor the government is finally going to set up a perimeter—pretty much cut the state in half—to try and quarantine the madness, so we aren’t in any real danger here yet, but Jack and I feel uneasy just the same.

We were right to get out of Vegas when we did, and we’ve decided to trust our premonitions once again. Our instinct tells us it’s time to get out of Coos Bay; danger is coming up the road. Strange days coming soon, I can feel it in my bones.

Her words sent a chill through me when I thought of how lucky they were to have escaped Las Vegas.

I can remember many hot summer nights cruising the Strip with Leah in her convertible. The desert winds in Las Vegas carried the scent of adventure, something sinisterly delicious you could almost taste. It wrapped around you like curling tendrils of smoke after a long, slow pull on an opium pipe.

On the Strip it’s all dazzle, illusions shimmering on every side.

But on the other side of town, away from the resorts and casinos, squats another Vegas. It’s a city of trailer parks, porn shops, meth labs and tattoo parlors in run-down strip malls; of seedy strip clubs where the girls who can’t cut it anymore at the upscale lap dance emporiums still bump and grind.

Whole neighborhoods of foreclosed homes, abandoned construction sites and unfinished housing tracts that are slowly being buried in the desert sands.

The underbelly of the beast, where dreams die.

Leah had been right to leave before it was too late, because once the last vestiges of social order disappeared, Vegas was a fat, juicy plum—too ripe and tasty not to devour. Those who’d been on the outside too long would have their day.

They’d overrun the casinos, invade the palaces dedicated to vice and pleasure, looting and burning. Gangs would stake out territories, set up headquarters, and fight turf wars over new kingdoms. In the long, last dark night, the drums would beat, bacchanal would reign, and beggars would be kings until the last wick guttered and went out.

I continued reading her email.

Speaking of strange times, I had an email from Janice, a gal I used to work with in Vegas. It seems there have been stories about disappearances popping up all over southern Nevada. Of course, stories about weird lights and UFO’s around Groom Lake have been circulating for years: alien abductions, anal probing, and human experimentation, implanted microchips, monitoring and mind control.

But now, we’re hearing reports of mass disappearances affecting entire communities. The whole population vanishes for a week, and not everybody returns. The ones that do sometimes wake up in their own beds; other times, they come to wandering in the desert miles from town. And no one has a clue about where they’ve been all this time. It’s collective amnesia! Even weirder…inexplicable lights are reported in the sky around the time residents do their disappearing act.

Following the disappearances, teams of private contractors show up, escorted by the military, everyone decked out in hazmat suits and masks. They quarantine the survivors, collect evidence and conduct their own tests. From what we hear, there’s no biological or physical explanation. But they- the “authorities”—say they are worried about a contagion. A radiation leak doesn’t make people disappear! Hence, what’s up with the hazmat suits?

I’ve been trying to corroborate these rumors online. Theories about wormholes and alternate realities abound. My favorite crazy story is the government out of Dreamland is using the inhabitants of these godforsaken towns as guinea pigs in some weird-science, time traveling experiment.

According to Janice, no one realized the disappearances were happening in Las Vegas, or on such a large scale, until one morning everyone woke up to columns of tanks and white-hazmat-suited troops from Nellis Air Force Base, rolling down the Strip. The military effectively quarantined the whole city. Still, everyone is panicking. Inside the quarantine, it’s pure anarchy! Riots and looting are breaking out all over town. Some are saying half the population vanished, but even assuming those numbers are wildly exaggerated, tens of thousands seem to have disappeared…

Ordinarily, I’d dismiss what Janice told me about the vanishings and the white-suited government personnel who show up in their wake and what I read online, as wacko internet rumors and yet another Vegas urban legend, except something similarly spooky happened to us here.

There’s a pool hall and bar here in Coos Bay, where Charlotte likes to go for a drink and to rack them up, when she goes into town for supplies. She’s always been a bright lights and fast city sort of gal, and I can’t really blame her; it gets kind of lonely for a single female with just us and the dogs for company. So she’s gotten popular and intimately acquainted with the local male population of Coos Bay. Sometimes she stays overnight in town, or even for a few days, if she’s got a new lover. As you can well imagine, Chaz doesn’t always let us know when she’s not coming back home for the night. God love her, but she’s such a slut!

By the way, Mama and Charlotte really hit it off. They sit for hours telling war stories about their conquests. Honestly, the things Mama got up to when she was a showgirl. I never realized our dear mother had such a racy past! Chaz has even taken her twice to Mick’s Tavern. The owner, Steve, is the go-to-guy for Redwood Forest weed. So I’m told.

So when Charlotte went into Coos Bay for a supply run, about ten days ago, we didn’t really think anything of it when she didn’t come home. Except, when we got up the next morning, Mama was gone. She ate dinner with us the night before, and I saw her reading in her bed at nine o’clock.

We looked for her everywhere in the house and along the beach. Then, even though it’s more than fifteen miles to Coos Bay and hard to imagine Mama finding her way there, we tried to reach Charlotte, but with no luck. In the panic, it slipped our minds Kobe was missing, too. Jack and I went into town to Mick’s Tavern to find Chaz; Sloan and Matt set out to see if they could pick up Mama and Kobe’s trail in the redwoods

Steve said he hadn’t seen Mama with Chaz. She’d left with a trucker named Sal, who does the run between Coos Bay and the Canadian border twice a month. Sal’s a regular on the nights he’s in town, but Steve didn’t know where he lived. Chaz’s car was still in the saloon’s parking lot.

As you can imagine, I was out of my mind. Visions of gore and slasher movies flashed through my head. I know it sounds crazy, but I imagined Mama, Chaz and Kobe tied up and tortured by some axe-wielding, truck-driving maniac in a backwoods shack. We went to the Sheriff to see about getting a search team to comb the beaches and woods nearby.

Charlotte came rolling in the next day; she’d been shacked up with Sal in a town further north up the coast and hadn’t seen Mama the night she went into town. By then, we had an all-points bulletin county-wide. For the next forty-eight hours, volunteers helped us search the beaches and woods. It wasn’t looking good, and I feared in my heart it could only end badly.

Maya Jade, you won’t believe me, but I swear it’s God’s truth. On the fourth night after she’d gone missing, I couldn’t sleep, so I went into Mama’s room at about three o’clock, and there she was, with Kobe curled up and sound asleep on her bed. I woke her up yelling, I was so relieved and furious. I wanted to shake her and hug her at the same time.

And the freakiest thing is, like those people in Nevada that Janice wrote me about, she had no idea where she’d been. There were no cuts and bruises. She hadn’t been harmed. She was wearing the same nightgown, and it wasn’t soiled and torn as it would have been had she been tramping through the woods in a downpour for days. She actually looked well-rested, though her hair was mussed from sleeping. Her eyes were clear, and her face was smooth.

When I demanded she tell me what had happened—where she’d been—she just looked at me serenely, almost as though she was comforting a child afraid of the bogey-man. What she said was perfectly normal, but the way she looked—an eerie light glowing in her eyes—raised the hairs on the back of my neck.

“Don’t worry, my sweet Leah, everything is going to be fine.” She sat up and wrapped her arms around me. By then, I was sobbing tears of sheer relief that she hadn’t been harmed.

She stroked my hair and crooned in the same soft voice she used to comfort us when we were little girls, “Shhh… It’s okay now, my darling. Everything’s going to be alright. You don’t need to worry or cry. They sent me back. They said it wasn’t my time.”

I don’t know who “they” are. When I asked, she got confused and couldn’t tell me anything more.

I can’t stop thinking about what Janice said about government scientists and troops in hazmat suits showing up on the heels of other disappearances. What happened to Mama is too similar, right down to reappearing days later in her own bed. I keep asking myself, “Can the same thing be happening here in Coos Bay?”

Too many people know about Mama’s vanishing. It seems half the coast was out here, beating the woods. And there’s a lot of innuendo and speculation about us, ever since she turned up without a scratch after having gone missing for days.

We’re telling everyone that Mama was found wandering and returned by kind strangers, but the Sheriff’s asking questions we can’t answer. I don’t know if there have been other mysterious vanishings, since we really try and keep to ourselves. There are always convoys of people passing through, heading for sanctuary up in British Columbia. Down south, civilization has collapsed and been set on fire, but it’s still pretty quiet up here. I feel as if we are living in the land time forgot.

Still, I can’t wrap my head around what’s happening, and I can’t shake this feeling of apprehension. I don’t want to think about government-funded weird science, or alien beings from beyond the stars…

Like I said before, these are strange times, with even stranger days ahead, and you know when I get this feeling, even if I can’t explain it, I’m usually right. But one thing I’m sure of is that I’m not going to let anyone quarantine Mama and study her like she was some kind of lab rat.

I may be jumping at shadows, Baby. But you know me, and my motto is, “Stay ahead of the game.” So we’re preparing for the worst-case scenario, albeit a little earlier than anticipated. The old smugglers’ tunnel that comes out in the redwoods two miles inland is our escape hatch. We’ve got a Wrangler and an off-road truck than can’t be traced to us, hidden nearby. Every two days, one of us checks to see they’ve remained untouched. They’re loaded up with gas and any supplies we’ll need to make the trek to the compound up north. We’ve got extra weapons cached in the tunnels. If anyone comes calling we don’t want to see, we’ll be in the tunnel before they can break down the front gate.