"Mister, I'm gonna have to ask you to turn that thing off."
The tourist-wife stepped in front of the camera, did a bizarre little wave. "I think we've seen everything we came to see. Mother?" Too late, Storch spotted the kinky wire jacked into the camera running up the tourist's polo shirtsleeve, the plastic dong sticking out of the back of the camera. Antenna?
The doors blasted open, black Kevlar-suited berserkers stormed Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply. "Down, get down!" guns in faces, jackboots on ribs.
The end of Zane Storch's world had come.
Storch and Buggs grabbed for sky, but Pop Sickle let out an eerie bleat and made for the back door. Phut Phut Phut: three shots in the old morlock deflating him like a boiler bag half-full of rancid clam sauce. An armed and armored stormtrooper braced Storch like an invitation to dance, all his hand-to-hand training jamming common sense, he can take the guy and feed him his rifle, but eight more like him? And the tourists have automatics, and Buggs down behind the register to appease the fucker on the counter, Storch's last glimpse of his cashier a bloody gash from a rifle barrel on his forehead.
Where the hell is Harley? Did he know this was going down? Was he an informant? Informant on what? Harley and Hiram talked his dad down out of the hills before I got here, hated the government like poison, and anyway, what would there be to inform on? Storch didn't even sell half the shit you could buy at any gun show, let alone anything the ATF would want. He never did business with militia or cult groups, and knew of nobody in the area who was making or selling drugs. Did they just come for Pop Sickle? Storch saw the crumpled body for the first time, a trickle of something like scorched motor oil reaching out from the corpse to where he lay. He jerked up, came back down hard under a jackboot in his ear.
"Stay down! Close your eyes!"
From behind the counter: "So, are we gonna be on the teevee?" The countertop-commando jumping down on Buggs with both feet. Screams, silence.
"Are you Sergeant First Class Zane Ezekiel Storch, retired, acting proprietor of this establishment?" Mr. Tourist leaning down in his face. Cold, freezer-burn breath.
"You've gotta know I am. Let me up. I'm not gonna hurt anybody." Boot off his head, sitting up, rubbing his temples. Ten guns and a camera still in his face, Mrs. Tourist zooming in on his government-issue welts. "Who the hell are you people? You got a warrant to serve?"
"They're from Majestic, Zane! They know Pop Sickle's a saucer-man." Buggs begging to be kicked again. The commando obliged.
"Stop kicking him, goddamit!" The abuse stopped.
"Will you cooperate?" Mr. Tourist playing Good Cop.
"You ATF?" Storch asked.
"We'll ask the questions. Where is Harley Pettigrew, your stock manager?"
"You oughta know," Storch muttered.
"Elaborate." Mrs. Tourist leaned into his face so he could see his defeated image in stereo in her enormous sunglasses.
"You know who we are, you scoped out our place. You bust in, kill one of my customers and beat the shit out of my cashier inside of sixty clicks, and no due process. We're law-abiding, tax-paying citizens, and I'm a fucking vet! You tell me where my manager is, and what the fuck you're doing here!"
Mr. Tourist waved off the stormtroopers: "Search." Six of them fanned out, stomping down the aisles and sweeping his inventory off the shelves. "Mr. Storch, you can help things along by showing us where the cache is."
"What, the safe? This is a stick-up?"
"No, the weapons cache."
"I don't know what the fuck you're talking about."
"Don't lie, Mr. Storch."
Mrs. Tourist, watching him through the camera, seeing more than was there. "He's telling the truth. So far as he knows." A polygraph-camera?
"Did Harley Pettigrew have the run of the store after hours?"
"Of course he does. He closes five nights a week! But he wouldn't hide anything from me."
From the back: "Jackpot."
Hands hoisted Storch to his feet, guns in his back herded him to the corner where Hiram Hansen did his taxidermy. Rearing prairie dogs, striking rattlesnakes, rampant gila monsters. In Hi's loving hands, the gentlest of Nature's creatures looked rabid, which led many to speculate on whether they were really dead when Hi stuffed them. Formaldehyde made Storch go into convulsions, so Hansen used a special preparation of herbs from a mail-order catalog that claimed to be the same process used on the Pharaohs.
A big section of the floor pried out to reveal a beam-reinforced hole, four feet deep, dug out of the sand beneath. Filled to the brim with gray shrink-wrapped bricks, propane tanks with BABY MILK PLANT and something in Arabic stenciled on them, and guns, guns, guns: Heckler-Koches, Enfields with grenade-launchers, Barrett sniper-rifles, Uzis, Cobrays, Kalashnikovs, AKMs, Spas auto-shotguns. Ammunition: NATO 7.62, 9mm, AK tracer, armor-piercing and anti-personnel rounds, shotgun shells, grenades. A black-market armory under his dad's store, under his nose.
"Assault weapons and ordnance stolen from an ATF impound armory in Idaho; high explosives from Hong Kong and Libya; VX gas from Iraq. Can you account for any of this, Mr. Storch?"
The phone rang, splitting the silence like a fat man's pants. Storch looked at Mr. Tourist.
Storch's handler gripped his neck and steered him into his office. "Answer it. Just be yourself."
Storch picked up the phone at his desk. "Sgt. Storch's Quartermaster Supply Store. Harley?"
"Zane. Zane, I'm sorry, partner."
"Where did all that shit come from, Harley? Who are these fucking guys? They shot Pop Sickle in cold blood and beat the shit out of Buggs, and there's a Jesusfuckingchrist huge stash of terrorist ordnance under the store. Why didn't you come in to work today?"
"Zane, I didn't mean for you to get involved. I just had to do something. The future of our race is at stake. I just couldn't just sit by, while those Radiant Dawn freaks pissed in our genepool. Shit, they're listening, ain't they? Well, now hear this, you pricks. Zane didn't know a fucking thing about the weapons and shit under his store. I take sole responsibility."
"Harley, who were you holding that shit for?"
"Don't try to do their job for them, boy. I don't expect you to understand, but I'm sorry I let you down, and I'm sorry I let your father down, and…shit, I'm just sorry about the whole fucking thing." A fat pause, then, "Zane, some people are going to try to contact you soon. Don't…"
"Don't what, Harley?"
"I'm sorry, Zane." BLAM. The gunshot peaking out the phone so Storch barely noticed the second shot before the line went dead.
Mr. Tourist standing in the doorway. "We believe you, son."
Outside, two hours later. Storch and Buggs back on the porch, holding ice to their battered heads. At least there were no TV cameras to immortalize their disgrace.
Mr. Tourist debriefed the Sheriff's Deputy, who seemed eager to cooperate. He'd been not nearly so solicitous with Storch, who gathered they'd told him nothing, because the deputy gave out even less to him. Sheriff Twombley himself would've come and might've made a difference, the Deputy allowed, but he was laid up with a case of hemorrhoids, and wouldn't get off the cushioned seat behind his desk in Furnace Creek. An ambulance had come and gone with Pop Sickle's body. Hansen's library truck was gone.
Buggs munched a sandwich and Storch smoked his first cigarette in eight years. It fed fresh fuel to his migraine, but it steadied his nerves.
"Did you know that soon all American beef-cattle will be living on a diet consisting almost entirely of their own manure?"
"Buggs, shut up. I don't want to hear any more of your bullshit Earth Day schemes today. That's the most fucking disgusting one yet."
"No, really, boss, it's a good thing, because as the human population rises, it consumes and converts more and more of the earth's organic resources into people. Cattle eat a lot of grass, and we eat a lot of cattle. So, if we close the system by feeding cows their own nutrient-enriched shit, we'd stabilize population growth and save the remaining natural biomass from being turned into more people. Think of the possibilities if we just eliminated the middleman and ate our own shit? We owe it to future generations to adapt to the idea. You want a bite of my sandwich?"
"I'm going home. Buggs, take the rest of the year off."
From under the porch, the Bad Mood Guy snarled, "I told you the world was going to end today.
2
It was the kind of day that makes one glad to be working in the ER. Death had seemingly taken the Fourth of July off, at least in Bishop, and one could almost feel content that something, for the moment, was right in the world. With dusk, however, would come the fireworks, and the earnest, patriotic consumption of alcohol. Four staffers were due to come on duty in about an hour, and if the peace kept up until then, Stella Orozco would be able to go home before the casualty parade got started.
Stella sipped from a steaming mug of herbal tea at the reception desk and watched the sunset through the smoked glass of the outer doors. Rosalinde and Terry, the other nurse and orderly on duty, were playing cribbage in the breakroom. Ruth Fisher and Jean Velazquez, the other two nurses, and Dr. Balsam, the attending physician, were taking their dinner break in the cafeteria. Dr. Quon, the intern, had gone up to Radiology with a scared eight-year old who'd broken his elbow falling out of a tree.
Stella herself had handled only two injuries this afternoon, one an epileptic, autistic boy who'd bitten his tongue during a seizure, and a teenaged girl who'd managed to lose a condom in her uterus. Despite the boy's writhing and the girl's panicking, she'd sent them both off in under an hour.
All of the carts had been stocked, the instrument pans sterilized and dried; all the soiled sheets were bagged for either the laundry or the incinerator; all the duty rosters had been made out and approved. Like a college town diner awaiting the end of a homecoming game, the ER was only taking a breather in anticipation of the non-stop chaos that was sure to begin with the first shadow of dusk.
In the lazy, air-conditioned silence, Stella's mind reached out to previously unnoticed minutiae to keep itself busy. She wrinkled her nose at the fetid, rotten-foot odor that hung in the air. Someone had been eating Fritos. The powerful antiseptics used in the hospital subdued even the reek of charred flesh, but mutated the smell of any fatty fried snack into a palpable cloud reminiscent of gangrene. A Muzak rendition of Nirvana's "Come As You Are" spewed from the speaker above her head. Every so often, the nasal squawk of the intercom summoned someone she'd never heard of to somewhere she'd never had cause to go, but nothing was going on in the ER.
Stella Orozco's features were what men called "exotic," and women called "striking," when they wanted to say "weird" and "intimidating."
From her father she'd inherited the bronze skin and ebony hair common to Mexican mestizos, but her face was a gift from her Indian mother, with angular brow and cheekbones, deepset black eyes, an aquiline nose and an almost too-wide, generously lipped mouth that scarcely moved even when it spoke, which wasn't often. Her shortness, her fragile slimness could do nothing to contradict that face, those eyes that were forever saying,
Leave me alone with my secrets, or I might just tell you one.
At twenty-nine, Stella had been an LPN for only three years, having taken community college courses for four years to get certified. Her age and temperament led her coworkers to think Stella had drifted into nursing the same way other young women of poor prospects might end up in retail or clerical work, and she offered them nothing that made them think otherwise. But Stella's path to her present life had been a struggle up out of depths none of the other staff could imagine, and she wanted no one's pity.
Her parents were migrants from lower Mexico who began crossing the border to work the fields of Central California in 1970. They scrambled over fences and through sewers to get into the U.S. every harvest season; toiled for twelve to fourteen hours a day for a few dollars every week, inhaling pesticides like DDT, malathion, parathion and experimental compounds the USDA would never hear of; lived in shanties with no electricity or running water for five months out of the year, and snuck back over the border like thieves, their only crime a season of backbreaking labor for pennies.
Stella's mother was already three months' pregnant with her that first season, and they stayed in California long enough for her to be born a U.S. citizen. They still migrated back to Mexico for the next couple of years before legitimately applying for citizenship themselves and settling in the dusty farm town of Modesto. By the time she was eight, Stella's father was doing landscaping and construction work and owned a truck, and her mother stayed home and devoted herself to spoiling her only daughter rotten. Stella's mother was so generous and radiant with love for her that Stella never noticed how sick she was. She died just before Stella turned twelve; her father started drinking in earnest and abandoned her less than a year later, most likely returning to Mexico.
Cycled through a route of wildly variant foster homes, Stella forgot that parents were for loving, and learned to view them as models to be observed, obeyed and evaded. She quickly picked up which responses earned her her privacy, her meals, and minimal emotional support, and learned to spot which ones simply couldn't be reasoned with, and how to keep them from hurting her. From them, she had learned that an education and a calling were what separated the former from the latter types, and she threw herself into getting both.
She worked long and hard, and got further than statistics predicted for one so poor, and so late in learning English, but not nearly so far as she'd dreamed. For all that her quick, cautious mind ran circles round most others who'd never had to work as hard, the language would always be a strange tool on her tongue, with appendages she could not grasp, and textures that eluded her palate. Fortunately, Stella recognized this early on, with the characteristic talent for accepting hard, ugly reality that comes naturally for those who have never been able to afford self-pity. Taking stock of her marketable natural talents, Stella discovered that she enjoyed caring for people, was excited by science, and (perhaps a scar of her years in the fields, an untouchable whom even transients never willingly saw) needed invisibility. She decided to become a nurse.