CHAPTER FOUR

Eleanor Robertson jammed the phone booth door shut, sealing herself off from the stinging grit of the desert winds. Outside, there was nothing—just cacti and a passing train with the word “CORPSE” grafitti’d onto it. This was nowhere, that stretch of scorching emptiness between California’s bustling coast and Las Vegas’ tempestuous glowing lights, the Mojave.

Nowhere was exactly where she needed to be. Out here, across potholed roads lumpy with asphalt patches, you weren’t likely to see anyone. And if you did, they probably had somewhere to be, and it wasn’t the middle of the desert. Finding this phone booth was a stroke of good luck for her, bad luck for its owners. Down the way was a gas station lost to time, a failed attempt at seizing the American Dream, making something all your own.

She sunk against the phone booth’s wall, thankfully it was more glass than metal and didn’t sear her exposed bra-straps into her skin, and let out a deep sigh. She would’ve killed for a Marlboro. Hell, even a Pall Mall would’ve been good enough. Just something to help her ignore the pounding in her chest. It was like a broken clock, tock-ticking instead of tick-tocking.

At least she was safe. Secluded. Had some time to think without the pressure of being hunted. Problem is thinking was the last thing she wanted to do. If she let her thoughts run she wouldn’t ever catch them, so she smudged sweat off her brow and took a couple deep breaths. When she finally drug the phone off its hook, she kept her eyes away from the glass. Reflections were dangerous—they betrayed how you truly felt.

And Eleanor Robertson knew she was scared. Fucking terrified.

The phonebook was gone. Stolen, lost, blown away by a sandstorm, who knew. That was okay. She had every number she would ever need memorized. Part of the job, she’d say. A gift from God, her mother had once told her. And where was God now? Leaving her to the fucking wolves.

She punched in the number and waited through the dull rings. One, two, three, four. She knew that, on the other end, some poor secretary was juggling lines, transferring connections and tossing out countless hellos and goodbyes and one second, pleases When the ringing finally stopped, a bubbly voice sprang through the receiver, gifting her a “hello” of her own.

“Hello, you’ve reached the desk of Samuel Hartman, editor in chief for the American Tribune. Tell me, do you have an appointment?”

“No, I don’t,” Eleanor said. “But I—”

“—I’m so sorry, but appointments, even telephone appointments, are required. Mr. Hartman an all-too-busy man and hopes you understand. Goodbye!”

“Wait, wait!”—but she was too late. The secretary didn’t have time for half-second delays. In the time it took Eleanor to dial the next number, she had probably already traversed three different phone-calls. Getting through to these types of people, who hid behind a wall of other people, was a nightmare. Now, with all that had happened, it might be impossible.

This one answered on the sixth ring. Not a good sign. Through bubblegum pops, with a thick New York accent, came a less friendly, more ready-to-get-this-over gal. “You’ve reached de aw-ffice of Mister Dale Simpson, head of Empire State Papers. He’s busy and isn’t taking no messages. If you caw-ll back later, he’ll—”

Eleanor wasn’t going to be snuffed out this time. “—If I call back later, he’ll still be busy,. Dale Simpson is always busy, because he’s Dale fucking Simpson.” On the other end there was an affronted gasp, some whispers, then giggles. The New York girls were getting some action today. Not another boring fan, but a troublemaker. “Tell him E.R. is on the phone, and that E. R. is asking for a favor, and willing to do a favor.”

The secretary tried playing snooty-snoot like she held all the cards. “Oh yah? And why should I do dat?”

“Because if you don’t and he finds out you didn’t—uh-oh, goodbyes, you’re off to the salon, painting nails and gossiping with girls who cover their insecurities in spray-tan. Trust me, a favor from me outweighs whatever loyalty you’ve ‘earned’ from him.” Eleanor wasn’t in the mood for bullshit. She wanted to tear this girl down even more but guessed she was the type who appreciated a bitch, but wouldn’t take shit from one, so she reeled herself in. “Plus, you pass this along, you might get a promotion.”

There were further hushed whispers. These ones were frantic and serious. When the HOLD music jumped out at her, Eleanor pumped her fist. When the call went dead, Eleanor’s entire body deflated—she considered calling back but knew it was pointless. Dale Simpson had heard her name and decided it wasn’t worth risking everything.

“Fuck.” This was exhausting. “Fuck!”

She banged the phone into the side of the machine once, twice, and the third time, a chunk of sharpened plastic flew off it, past her head, and it took every ounce of willpower to not strike it again. Even if things were going this poorly, she had to remain calm. If even just one of these calls got through…

With a defeated sigh she put in one number after another. What came was rejections, hangups, and please-holds that went nowhere. Outside, the wind kicked up in a flurry—the desert was furious an intruder had lingered so long. She was too. After a fifteenth call led to nothing, she had one number left to try, one she wanted to avoid at all costs.

Because that number belonged to one Noelle Livingston. While Eleanor had a list of people who thought of her as an enemy that stretched a mile-wide, the list of people she thought of as an enemy was only one, and it was Noelle. Their last meeting had ended with a stinging slap, and she didn’t doubt their next meeting would open with one.

That is because Noelle Livingston was the one thing Eleanor hated more than anything else—greedy. She was the CEO of the Livingston Corporation, who ran many news stations across the country, the most well-known of which being LA Nightly, who’s slogan was “We tell you what today brought so that you know what tomorrow will bring.” The problem was, Noelle didn’t give a shit about bringing people the news, just raking in as much cash as she could. She was known to withhold any story for the right price, no matter how heinous or important. Poison could have been found flowing through the water and she would’ve been fine letting everyone croak so long she made a few extra bucks off their deaths.

The last time they met, Noelle had approached her kindly, and Eleanor had rebuked her with the full-force of her disgust. Here, she guessed, Noelle would do the same. Or worse, she’d sell her down the fucking drain. But it was worth a shot.

The phone was only allowed to ring once. What spoke through the receiver sounded like an answering machine, repeating a well-rehearsed line. But it was filled with too much annoyance to be a robot. “You have reached the desk of Noelle Livingston, head of the Livingston Corporation. I do not take calls after 3PM and if you have the right to know this number, you should know that about me, as well. Goodbye—”

“Noelle, wait, listen. It’s me. It’s Eleanor. Eleanor Robertson.”

Silence on the other end. Anyone else, Noelle would’ve cut the call without a second thought. But Eleanor Robertson? Eleanor Robertson was interesting because Eleanor Robertson wouldn’t dare call her on a normal day. Not unless something terrible had happened.

And it had. The whole world knew that.

“You shouldn’t be calling me,” Noelle said. “You shouldn’t be calling anyone.”

“Why? Because I’m missing? You shouldn’t believe everything the news tells you. Sometimes, they keep half the truth tucked away in a little gold-plated box.”

Eleanor bit her lip. She couldn’t afford to be venomous.

But words meant nothing to Noelle—she had heard them all before and had the shell of a tank. “The road to Hell is paved with riches.”

“Sounds like you’re planning a visit.”

“Oh, I am. I’ll give the Devil a golden brooch and make him love me so.” Noelle cackled. “But hey, that’s enough about me. I’m just a boring old lady. A ‘callous cunt’ as you so kindly called me last time we met. You, Eleanor Robertson, are the talk of the town. Everyone in America wants to know just what happened to you.”

“Evidently not what people think, considering I’m still standing here, breathing.”

“But still more than you’d like, considering you’re calling me.”

“Listen, Noelle, I’m not going to bullshit you. I’m in trouble. Deep fucking trouble.”

“A whole boat-load of it, from what I’ve heard.” She could practically feel Noelle’s shit-eating grin through the receiver. “Why don’t you tell me all about it?”

Eleanor wasn’t going to spill anything to Noelle. Not here, over the phone, where she held all the cards. “I’ve got a deal for you.”

“A deal for me?”

“Yes. I can’t tell you what’s happening to me, or where I am, but I can guarantee you the biggest story your station will ever air. All you have to do is trust me and give me the means to get it out into the world. Do that and you’ll be the talk of the town.”

“And tell me, Eleanor—will I also end up on the run? Color me skeptical. Trusting you is like diving my hand into a den of snakes.”

“This snake doesn’t want to bite you. It has its eyes set on one man, one man only.”

“And who might that be?”

She hesitated. If she was going to convince Noelle to help her, she had to give a little bit of something. “D’Angelo Darce.”

There was silence, then…

“Oh, sweetie, you really screwed the pooch on this one!”

…an eruption of laughter.

Noelle banged her desk as she cackled. “Gee, how badly did YOU fuck up?”

“I didn’t fuck up. I found something. I saw something. And once I get that something out into the world, it will cause such a firestorm that Darce will spend the rest of his lifetime trying to snuff it out. I just need a chance.”

“Is that what he’s trying to do to you? Snuff you out?”

Eleanor tried to say something, but Noelle cut her off.

“All right. Know what? I’m a fair gal, so I’ll do you a favor. Tomorrow, when the five PM news flicks on, I’ll personally get in front of the cameras and tell everyone the truth, which is—”

“—But you don’t even—”

“—That Eleanor Robertson is dead.” Noelle pushed the receiver closer to her mouth and spoke in a seething whisper. “Because by the time they find you, you will be.”

When Noelle’s laughter rose again, Eleanor yanked the phone from her ear like there were rats swarming out of it and slammed it into the receiver hard enough that it shattered, nothing more than a sparking cord, now. She stumbled backward, nearly falling out of the phone booth as the desert sand speckled her skin like a million miniature coals.

Never, even in her darkest days in the old Belridge printing-press, had she ever felt so alone. She was trapped in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the biggest story the world had ever seen to her name, and nobody wanted it.

Nobody except D’Angelo Darce.

According to the American media, Eleanor Robertson had been missing since December 1st. That night, while the neighborhood slept peacefully, men armed with M16s and AR-18s kicked in her doors, smashed through her windows, and ransacked her home before setting it ablaze.

The culprit changed depending on which reporter held the mic. Sometimes it was gang violence. Other times a scorned lover or terrorists. Right-wingers blamed Russia, left-wingers blamed the CIA. The public mostly agreed that Eleanor had bitten off more than she could chew—that one of her powerful enemies turned out to be too powerful.

But although everyone had a theory on who did it, nobody knew why twenty men, a minor militia, snatched up one little writer, and more importantly, nobody knew where she had gone. What happened to Eleanor Robertson? That question dominated the nationwide consciousness and news crews camped outside the smoldering ruins of her home, hoping to be the first to learn of whatever clues the police searching them found. So far? Goose eggs. Nothing but cinders and ash.

Her neighbors ate the attention up like a pack of spoiled hounds, camping by their front doors, always eager to answer questions they didn’t deserve to be asked. They weren’t celebrities, just folk who wished they were. They poured their earnings into the same luxury homes as the elite, hoping to buy their way into fame. Eleanor detested them. They were nothing but leeches.

She sat on a stained mattress in a Days Inn with termites munching on the wood in the walls, and watched through a fuzzy TV as men she hadn’t ever seen stood side-by-side with reporter Mindy Collins, recounting memories they never made with her. One fella, James Milton, even had guts to bawl his eyes out as if he was truly grieving. “They set fire to it all, Ellie,” he said, smudging away tears. “These great Goliaths, dressed in bulletproof armor, with guns that could kill an ox. I swear, they was ready for a war in there.”

Even Mindy Collins could see through his bullshit. She had been breathing in the ash of a millionaire’s home for over a week and just wanted to get back to her apartment. “I’m very sorry you had to see that, Mr. Milton,” she said sourly. “If Eleanor Robertson is still out there, what would you wish to say to her?”

Milton snatched this opportunity for screen-time up like it might never come again. He pulled the microphone out of Mindy’s hand and made sure his lips when quivering when he raised it. Behind him, other members of the neighborhood shambled toward him, zombies hungry for flesh. “Oh, Ellie, just know that no matter where you are, we’re prayin’ for you, the whole neighborhood. We’re—”

Eleanor clicked the OFF button on the TV remote and watch the man’s face melt into mud. If I could say something to you, Mr. Milton, it’s that you can’t act worth your own self-respect, she thought. And when I get back, I will say that to you.

She threw herself back onto the bed. It reeked of unwashed, sweat-soaked linens and other people. She smelled the evergreens of the Midwest, the sycamores of the East Coast. She smelled cologne, gasoline, hard days of work, good and bad sex, skunk-weed and cheap vodka. She decided to add to it, fishing a half-smoked Marlboro Red out of the crinkled pack in her pocket. With one hit, she huffed the cherry down into the filter.

Images of the smiley-faced man flooded her mind…

Chop them up, feed them to the dogs.

Cracked skulls. Hay gummed with brain matter. Tar-streaks of artery blood.

“Fuck.”

The word came out, trapped in smoke, poisoned by nicotine.

It carried all the weight of the day. The week.

One week as a fugitive already well spent, she thought. Doing nothing but running.

She flicked the butt into an ashtray with TEXAS printed on its rim. Inside was an Everest of ash and spent cigarettes. Underneath it all, she guessed there might have been an outline of the state and guessed she might have been in the state, too—yesterday evening, she’d entered a land of overpasses and roadwork. Further and further from California, from home. How long could she keep running with nowhere to go?

After Gorman’s party, she had expected Darce to come knocking with a subpoena, a search warrant, and a whole lot of questions—not a hit squad. Now she knew what the stakes were. He, or whoever the fuck was dishing out his orders, didn’t want her brought in. They wanted her buried.

That wasn’t a problem. Eleanor was sure plenty of folks wanted her dead. But he wasn’t some has-been hack like James Rotner. He was dangerous.

As she laid there, staring up at a ceiling fan which spun down a snow-shower of years-old dust, it was tough not to imagine Darce as sort of supernatural being who was everywhere all at once, always ten steps ahead of his victim. When she closed her eyes she thought of him not as a man, but rather a collective. A hivemind of the United States’ dirty-laundry department, the same folks who covered up Roswell.

She couldn’t think about it anymore. If she did, the worry-engine in her brain would kick on with a sputtering grumble, and the fresh Marlboro she had just pulled out the pack, her last Marlboro, would sting, not go down smoothly, and then she wouldn’t get any reprieve from the bullshit of a day spent in the car, cruising down interstate for hundreds of miles, stopping only to piss, grab a drink, and fill up on gas.

Tomorrow, Arkansas. Day after that either, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia. Then she could either go south and dip into Florida, or cut north, toward the Great Lakes. She hadn’t decided whether she was headed to the Caribbean or Canada yet. Living in the Caribbean would be a dream, but Canada was more practical—less ways to get caught and she knew a couple Canucks who could help her along.

But probably wouldn’t.

During the day, she was nobody—just a roving cast of characters she churned out on a whim, always the same face from a new place with a new name. At the Shell gas station this morning, she was Dorothy, a cute lil’ southern belle with an accent that turned heads. During lunch at McDonald’s she was Missy from Mississippi, a mother of four who had to find a way to turn ten bucks into enough to feed all of them. When she checked into this Holiday Inn she was Kelly, a model looking to get out of the limelight and stay somewhere a little more…scenic.

But that night, as she moved into the bathroom and caught a glimpse of herself in the water-smudged mirror, those personas faded away. Dorothy, Missy, and Kelly melted into one, a disfigured gremlin who didn’t belong anywhere. Several days on the road had soured her entire body and she looked like a withering flower, with clumps of her sundried hair tangled into a spiderwebbed mass she couldn’t run her fingers through without tugging her scalp. This was no way to live, but this was who she truly was—Eleanor Robertson, just a girl on the run.

She needed to scrub the grime off her body, scrape the plaque off her teeth. Make herself human again.

Stop, Fido. Stop.

This couldn’t be the rest of her life. She’d sooner put a gun in her mouth.

Stop.

But…

…What was there to do?

Nobody wanted the Berea manuscript. Nobody would ever want the Berea manuscript. It could contain the meaning to life, proof of God’s existence, and the truth behind Kennedy’s death, and she wouldn’t be able to pay someone to take it off her hands because of who she was. The words she had written in it would change the world forever, they were that powerful. Unfortunately she was not.

Before showering, she pulled out the one bag she had brought from her home. In it lay the manuscript, a bundle of supplies, and a Colt Cobra snub-nose revolver that was given to her by Jo Atwood, head of one of the many New York zines she bounced around. She gifted it to her on the day she quit, saying: “This gun killed someone down in Atlanta when a crook got a little too jumpy,” she said. “It’s hungry for more blood and I don’t like it, but you seem like someone who might need it, so here, have the damned thing.”

She set it on the back of the toilet seat and kept the curtain open just enough that she could always see it while she showered. Being vulnerable, even for a second, could cost her everything, and she wasn’t willing to risk that. If not for her own well-being, then to spit in the face of the jerks trying to stop her. If Darce broke through this door like he had her home, she was going to shoot him, and any cronies he brought with him, dead.

She came out of the steaming shower steaming with rage. D’Angelo had kicked her out of luxury and into the this, a room with cockroaches behind the toilet and bed-bugs bunking in the mattress. And what had he gotten for it so far? Boxes of old knick-knacks. A broken typewriter. Some destroyed furniture and a whole lot of media coverage. No dirt on her. That’s for sure. But she’s got plenty of dirt on them. On him. He was no different than those leeches or those famous fucks. One way or another, she would get it out to the world.

Nobody was untouchable. Nobody.

Eleanor rung her hair out into the sink, squeezing out the last remnants of sudsy water, and took a deep breath, trying to steel herself. This wasn’t the time to get worked up and personal. That was how you lost. He could plan ten steps ahead, sure, because he had a network and she had been cut off from hers. But when it came to thinking in the moment and relying purely on instincts…

…well, she had survived Berea, where everyone else died, and that meant something, or so she thought.

Her third and final cigarette made her wish she had a glass of whiskey to calm her racing thoughts. Really what she needed was someone to talk to. Someone to tell her everything was going to be okay. Because the silverfish who was trying to make his home in pack of cigarettes made it clear things were very much not okay.

She picked up the phone and took a long drag off the Marlboro. If she called anyone, she would have to rush out, and if she rushed out, that would be suspicious. A minor talking point among the employees over morning coffee, but something they’d offhandedly remember if official folk came around. Hardened gum clotted the receiver. Doubt clouded her mind. The last hundred calls she had made were worth nothing—why would this one be any different?

Because he wouldn’t abandon me.

…would he?

She pushed her fingers into the plastic, soda-encrusted buttons too quickly for her mind to warn her to stop. There was a ring, then another, and another, and then…

…A rather groggy: “Hello…?”

Five days alone, on the open road, staring ahead at endless interstate and listening to the fuzzy hum of the in-and-out radio, had driven away any thoughts of familiarity. Hearing a voice she knew, especially she held so dear, seemed such a foreign concept she didn’t know how to respond.

…A rather impatient: “Who the hell is this!?”

Eleanor closed her eyes and let the picture paint itself around her. The molded, paint-peeling walls of the Days Inn were torn away, replaced by colorful, frame-covered walls of the hideaway diner. The ceiling fan which rocked in its socket became a hanging Coca Cola light and the TV in front of her because a big-bellied, bushy-bearded man intent of devouring his stack of syrup-soaked pancakes.

A voice with coal-miner-grit coughed out order numbers, and a young boy with shaggy hair and freckles hauled plates of cardiac-arrest food to tables of dreary-eyed truckers. Somewhere in the back, a boy with too many quarters was queuing up Twist and Shout for the thirteenth time and waitress was struggling to make sense out of an order from a gaggle of drunken men.

There, for a couple seconds, it was like nothing had ever changed. All the pieces of her normal life had fallen back into place. It was just another normal day in Eleanor Robertson’s life. She was visiting her good friend, her only friend, for some advice. She clung to this memory tightly as she did the phone cord, wanting to rip it out and keep it forever, never letting reality sour it.

…A rather pissed off: “Call me up, waste my time, waste my dime. You’re lucky I don’t know your name, kid, or your mother would be hearing some very choice words from—”

“—Martin motherfucking Atters,” Eleanor moaned, barely able to keep herself together. “Oh, Martin.”

There was a flurry of movement on the other end of the line. She guessed Martin had probably been cozy in bed and was now scrambling to get dressed. “This isn’t who I think it is,” he gasped, thank god not saying her name. “Is it?”

“I do know who I am anymore,” she said. “But fuck am I glad to hear your voice.”

Martin took a moment to collect himself. There was a lot they needed to talk about, a lot more they needed to be careful about saying. “Are you okay?”

“Define okay.”

“Alive, breathing.”

“Barely. Between the Marlboros, the mold, and the dirty air-filter in this room, it’s tough. But I’m getting by. Now, if you asked me if I’m doing well? Shit.” She took a long huff off her cigarette and coughed into the receiver. “I’m doing as well as a dead fucking duck. Don’t ask where I am—you know I can’t say shit.”

“They’re listening?”

“Who knows.” Eleanor profited off paranoia but didn’t want to let it consume her. “Better to be safe than sorry, especially when they…”

“…Yeah.” He cut her off, not wanting her to stumble into anything incriminating. Martin typically bulldozed conversations, wanting to get to the meat of them like his belly was grumbling. But over the phone he was quieter, calmer. He lacked that rough n’ tumble grime she loved. “Those journalists, they, uh…”

“Think I’m dead. I know. Bunch of slop.” Eleanor stabbed the Marlboro into the ashtray-mountain. “That’s because they don’t know me.”

There was scratching on the other end. Eleanor couldn’t tell if the line was jammed up or if Martin was scrubbing his bushy mustache. “He doesn’t know you,” he said. There was a wet raspiness to his voice, but he tried covering it by speaking his chest. He pretended things were normal—he was trying to paint his own picture of the diner. “You ain’t just some silver-screen starlet he can push around. You’re fuckin’…”

“…Carrying a snub-nose with me everywhere I go, even to the toilet,” she said, cutting him off. His fake confidence was rubbing off on her. The words flew free with gusto. “And I’m itching to blast it off at the first suit who steps to me.”

“You ever shot a gun before?”

“Seen plenty of them. Held a few. How hard can it be? Pull the trigger and—BLAM!—Blood soup splatters the wall. A few more shots if you wanna add brain-balls and bone-croutons. Chef Boyardee and Campbell’s ain’t got nothing on this bolognaise.”

Bloody bolognaise. Billy Kid holding his intestines. Widowed women sobbing.

“Ahhhh, you’re speaking my language now,” Martin said. “Though you ain’t really makin’ me hungry, just a little less fuckin’ worried, which should hopefully fix my appetite. I ain’t eaten in days.”

“That’s the Eighth Wonder of the world—Martin Atters on an empty stomach!”

Both of them chuckled, and it was a good long laugh that Eleanor really needed. A laugh that kept the diner in place, kept normalcy about. When their amusement petered out, Martin stamped out the silence with a heavy huff.

“Now listen, I heard who was after you,” he hissed. “Don’t ask from who. You know from who. Mr. Can’t-Keep-His-Fucking-Mouth-Shut-These-Days. But if ya live to see him again, let him off easy, these are extenuating circumstances, and if I’m worried, he’s worried. And know what I think? I think you should take the fight right to ‘em.”

That wet raspiness had dried into burning conviction. If Martin was here, in front of her, she had no doubt he would’ve been thumping his fist against the table to punctuate each sentence.

Eleanor played with the pistol, running her thumb down the chamber and causing it to spin, rattling against metal. “I wonder if I shoot Blabbermouth’s lips off if he’ll finally shut up.”

“I’m being serious. You know how fuckin’ serious I’m being?” Martin Atters paused, took a deep breath. “Eleanor, you need something to take D’Angelo Darce down, and you need it quick.”

“Martin, don’t—”

“—I know. I’m in danger now too. Fuck it. Those black vans have been circling my block all week and I’m sick of hidin’. Eleanor, he blitzed you and it stunk. But get over it! Water off your fuckin’ back. It’s time to blitz him. To remind him who he’s fuckin’ with, ‘cuz clearly he doesn’t know that you’re…”

“…the Samurai.”

“No, no, no. I ain’t gonna have feds beating down my door for some half-assed response like that. Who. The. Hell. Are. You?”

“Eleanor Robertson, the motherfucking Samurai.”

“There we go! The motherfucking Samurai. People rush at you, ya chop ‘em up! So what makes Darce any fucking different? He’s just a name. Like assholes, everyone’s got one. Who gives a fuck if people are afraid of his? They’re afraid of yours, too. He might not be, but that’s ‘cuz he’s a goddamn maroon. You got dirt on him, dontcha? Real dirt?”

“Fucking mud,” Eleanor said. “Enough of it to bury him six feet under. Hell, enough to cover this whole country in a layer of its own shit. Just gotta find a way to get it out there, to the people. Even if they don’t believe it…shit, they won’t…once word is out, it’s out.”

“You’ll figure it out. You always do. You’re the best goddamn writer in the world. Ain’t no motherfucking glasses-girl anymore, are you?”

That name…

That name was known only to her, Martin Atters, and…

…Lewis Gordon.

Just hearing it took her back to Belridge, where she spent night after night crammed in that basement, freezing her butt off because the heater wasn’t strong enough to warm the concrete walls under the frozen soil. She remembered bundling up in quilts that carried that sat-too-long-in-a-dresser funk, shaking the spiders out of them before cocooning herself, and carefully pressing each page of every piece of every paper they printed. It was a laborious process for five people, let alone one, even if she was only making fifty papers a week. From time to time, the ink fumes made her dizzy…

Just thinking back made her dizzy…

Back then, she wasn’t Eleanor Robertson, the journalist. She was Ellie, the klutz. Just another short girl from Colorado with pasty skin, a messy bun, and Jackie-Kennedy-glasses who dreamed of getting the hell out of the snowy mountains and into the sunny hills. She had. She had and swore she wouldn’t ever go back to that dreary place.

It was a name Eleanor had purposefully scrubbed from her mind. A name Martin Atters wouldn’t bring up without intent, and she knew exactly what that intent was.

Lewis Fucking Gordon.

A man who taught her everything she knew about journalism…

…and a man who she betrayed.

Would he really want to help her?

Probably not. At least not without some convincing.

But she could convince him. No, she had to. Lewis Gordon was a man who cared about the news above all else—even his own health. If she brought him the truth about Berea, he wouldn’t forget old grudges, but he would move past them, if only to ensure the word got out. And once it started, it would spread like a plague. From one small town to another, even D’Angelo Darce, with his immense network of agents, wouldn’t be able to keep the word down.

People wouldn’t believe it at first. They didn’t believe the Red Legion, either.

Billy Kid. Stop, Fido, stop. Bullet-holes in the walls. Smiley-Faced Man.

“Kill them all. No survivors.”

“Don’t let her escape.”

Blood-soaked wife-beater. Cornfields blowing in the breeze.

Blinding lights.

It was worth a shot. Hell, it was the only shot she had.

“No. I’m not. And I sure as shit won’t ever be her again.”

With that, Eleanor hung up and hurried out the door. Every minute was precious, so when she got in her car, she drove like the Devil was chasing her, because he was—somewhere out there, in the darkness, the suits lurked…

 …all she had to do was make it to Belridge before they caught up to her.

CHAPTER FIVE

The tires of Eleanor’s Coronet crunched through fresh snow as she left I-70 behind, replacing rumble strips with the jagged bumps and thumps of an exit road carved straight through the mountains. A golden FALLING ROCKS sign warned her that the hulking stone walls on either side of her weren’t always friendly.

She kept her eyes on the road, her fists white-knuckled around the steering wheel. Empty coffee cups cluttered her passenger-side floor, along with greasy burger wrappers, takeout cartons, and crunched-up plastic bottles that once held sodawater. She had been on the road for nearly thirteen hours straight and had done similar drives each of the five days before, stopping only when her body begged to. Now, she was feeling it. The weariness of repetitive motions was grinding into her bones.

Accelerate. Brake. Stop. Go. Turn signal left, turn signal right. Check side view mirrors. Look in rear-view mirrors. Glance over shoulder. Honk horn at the idiot. Yell at the idiot. Push pedal down, lift foot up, push other pedal…

Eleanor didn’t hate driving. Martin Atters did. Kenneth Colton, too. Most people she had met, especially on the West Coast, grumbled about their commutes like they were the worst burden of the day. But she enjoyed sitting in the car. She kept the radio off and used the silence as a tool to corral her thoughts. She talked to herself, forming narratives or rehearsing conversations. Driving was, to her, the closest she would ever get to meditation.

But being cooped up for so long wasn’t natural. When it started to become muscle memory, with the cockpit of the car feeling like just another set of limbs, leaving it behind became a chore. After a while, it felt less human to walk on her own two feet than to push down on the gas pedal and let the wheels do the work.

You’re almost there, Eleanor. Almost fucking there…

So she drove on. For some time, it seemed she was in an episode of the Twilight Zone where everything was looping—she saw nothing but snow, and stone, and evergreen trees. It took twenty minutes for some variation, when finally one of the mountain walls faded away as she began to travel up the other one. She was on a one-lane road so tight that her driver’s side door nearly scraped the guard rail to her left, which was the only thing keeping her from plunging into the abyss.

She drove slowly, hunched forward, squinting through her windshield as her wipers worked overtime to keep it clear. At first, she couldn’t see anything. But one by one, her hi-beams began catching the first warning signs of civilization. It started with a street name: STEEL-TOE DRIVE, then a SHARP TURN sign, then a DEER CROSSING sign, and then, finally, the pièce de résistance—the WELCOME TO BELRIDGE sign.

Last time she had seen it, she was speeding down this road in the opposite direction, intent on never coming back. And yet here she was.

She was fast-approaching the town’s only gas-station, a two-pump quick-stop only ever used by the officials who had to begrudgingly leave town ever so often to meet with the city-slickers who didn’t know a damn how they lived. Most people in Belridge didn’t drive. Didn’t have a reason to, really—the town was small enough that you could see everything you ever needed from your front porch.

She pulled in by the first pump, peeled herself off the leather seat, and stumbled out into the wintery night. Her bones grimaced at the notion that it was their turn to do some work, so getting to the front door, which was slathered with peeling Coca Cola and Little Debbie stickers, took a few more minutes than it should’ve. She pushed through and a ding! alerted a snoozing old man at the counter that a miracle had just wandered in—a customer.

He didn’t budge. Next to him sat a portable TV that was buzzing through the nightly news and a stack of empty Lucky Lager cans.

That man was Mr. Milford, who had run this station since before Eleanor was born. Her parents used to bring her here every day, after work, when she was too little to see over the counters. Back then she couldn’t keep herself from pawing at everything shiny and sugary and her mother, with the tone of a god-fearing woman judging the damned, used to always hiss as they walked by the packs of Budweiser and Coors.

Drinking this poison is a first-class ticket to Hell, Ellie. That Mr. Milford? He’s gonna visit his grave early, I bet. That liver of his prolly shivers with every drink, but he don’t notice because he’s too busy grabbing the next one.

Turns out she was wrong. The booze didn’t take him out—he outlived her, actually—it just made him look like complete and utter shit. He might have been seventy, eighty at most. He looked two-hundred and bad for his age. His gut, a lump of fat pregnant with scabbed-over ulcers, pushed against the counter as he laid on his gout-swollen arms. His skin was the hue of yellowed paper, leathery with bunched up wrinkles, and he had no hair to speak of, not even gray whiskers lining his chapped lips.

His snores, heavy and filled with grit, fueled by dreams that didn’t seem too pleasant, echoed through the empty store as Eleanor retrieved a can of Coke and a handful of snack cakes, a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit, and a bag of beef jerky. When she reached the front, she let everything fall onto the counter with a thump! before rapping her knuckles against the metal. “Don’t mean to interrupt your beauty sleep,” she said.

Mr. Milford’s body started to move before his mind caught up. He shimmied up straight, yawned, and began batting the items across the counter. With glassy, half-open eyes he groggily scanned each price-label and subsequently punched its numbers into the register, mumbling nonsense to himself as he did so. His breath reeked of dried, yeasty-spit.

As Eleanor fished her faded wallet out her pocket, her eyes were drawn to the portable TV. Its reception was shoddy—likely a combination of interference from the mountains and the fact that the antennas carrying the signal were cheap bits of metal wiring wrapped around one another—and so it was blanketed by a haze of fuzzy gray dots. Through this haze, she could just barely make out two newscasters choked by their overly-tight suits. Their words jittery and robotic, laced with the buzzing imperfections of the poor connection.

“And tonight…bzzz…we bring you…bzzzz…bzzzzzzz…breaking news...bzzzz.”

Their words were lost to distortion as the color of their faces flicked in and out, sometimes disappearing all-together. It took her back to youthful nights here in Belridge, where she clung to her radio in hopes of hearing even a whiff of music, and the sweet joy of a car ride south, out of the mountain’s embrace, when her father would crank on KLZ and Connie Francis’ voice would fill their Volkswagon Beetle.

“Mffflgnhhh,” Milford grumbled, cracking her back into reality as he opened another Lucky Lager. Instead of putting sense to his mumbo-jumbo, he just guzzled the beer like it was water.

“Put a full tank on pump one,” she said. “What do I owe you?”

Mr. Milford was so bothered by this that he retrieved another Lucky Lager before he had even finished his first. “Too much,” he said, his weak voice raspy. “Not enough.” He coughed phlegm onto his lumpy palm. “Somewhere in-between.”

Eleanor remembered how difficult Milford could be. When he was boozy, he was lazy, and when he wasn’t, he was cranky. She tossed a few ten-dollar bills onto the counter. Might’ve been too much, but she needed to get a move on. He was scrubbing his eyes like he recognized her. That wasn’t good. She gathered up her things. “Lay off the Lager,” she said. “I could’ve gotten all this for free if I weren’t a good Samaritan. No way to guarantee the next folk who come in will be.”

“Ain’t gonna be no next folk,” he said. “Ain’t nobody come into Belridge I don’t know, ‘cept you, that is. Ain’t nothin’ here, not even a place to stay. You should turn around and git while you still can.”

Thank God for blurry vision.

“Nowhere to stay? There isn’t a hotel, motel…anything?”

Eleanor knew there wasn’t but figured it best to play dumb. In Belridge, if someone was visiting, it was because they knew someone and would be staying with them.

Mr. Milford cackled. “Ha! Git the gunk outta yer head, lady. If I cain’t keep a gas station stocked with junk food, ya think a hotel could keep itself stocked with people?” He gulped down the rest of his Lager, burped, then crunched the can. “Listen, if sleepin’ in the snow don’t scare ya off, there’s a storm comin’. Nasty one. Weatherman says it’s gonna keep this town blocked in least a month. Folk like me? I gots to freeze my ass off in this store, else I don’t earn a livin’. Folk like you probably got some place to go, and you should be gettin’ on.”

A storm…?

Eleanor took a deep huff, trying to make herself seem frazzled. She did her best to look like a young girl who had gotten herself into something she wasn’t quite sure of. Really, this was all an act to bury the grin wanting to spread across her face. This was a stroke of fortune she couldn’t have predicted. Her mother would have called it God. Martin Atters would have called it Karma. Eleanor knew it for what it truly was—plain ol’ Luck.

Men like D’Angelo Darce could do almost anything. They could build towers of metal which punched into the clouds and carried thousands of people. They could make devasting bombs they could obliterate even more in a fraction of a second. They could seize the skies with planes and even conquer space, traveling all the way to the moon.

But they could not best Mother Nature, the bitch that she is.

A storm in Belridge was a gift of time she couldn’t afford to waste. D’Angelo Darce could pluck whatever strings he wanted—once that mountain pass was snowed over, there would be no way in or out until the rescue crews came.

Realizing Mr. Milford was still leering at her, waiting for an answer, she said: “I’ll take my chances. I’ve come here to meet someone and they’ll be very disappointed if I leave without doing so.”

The drunken man waved a hand at her and grumbled. He wasn’t gonna try talking sense into her, he wasn’t that type of fella. He turned his attention to the TV, which was still a garble of electro-sounds, and beat it with his fist. After three good thwacks, color bloomed across the screen, static scurrying away like a flurry of roaches. There were two newscasters present—one man, one woman—and across the bottom, a crimson streak said: BREAKING NEWS.

The man adjusted his tie, cleared his throat, and looked straight into the camera as it zoomed in on his face. He spoke with a calm seriousness that heightened the tension. “If you missed us earlier, I will repeat what we have just learned. By in mind, this is breaking news and we have not received all the facts yet, but according to reports…

“…Eleanor Robertson has been found…”

Eleanor Robertson body moved on its own. She threw herself forward, across the counter, and yanked the TV around so she could see it, ignoring the mffflgnhhh! from Mr. Milford.

The newscaster took a deep breath, steadily himself, and then delivered the bombshell:

“…dead.”

Eleanor Robertson pulled the nozzle out of her Coronet with trembling hands and returned it to the pump. Deep in her chest, a scream was swelling her lungs like balloons, but if she let it free, she was afraid she wouldn’t ever stop.

The gas station store’s lights flicked off, but Mr. Milford didn’t come out. He didn’t even have a car parked anywhere she could see. She guessed he still roomed in the back of the building to save some extra cash and was probably in bed, boozing his way into incoherence. Good. That meant he wouldn’t ride her ass about sparking up a cigarette and fuck did she need one.

She didn’t get back in her car. She couldn’t. She needed to be free, unrestricted, for at least a few minutes, else she was going to explode. She sat on the hood of her car, letting the chilled metal prickle her skin with goosebumps and took a long hit off the first Marlboro from a fresh pack. One puff caught the scream in her lungs and suppressed it. Another puff smothered it entirely.

Eleanor Robertson was dead.

The thought sent shivers down her spine. She took another hit, watching the cigarette fade to ash, its cherry blooming bright red.

D’Angelo Darce wouldn’t have put out such a bold statement if he didn’t intend to follow through on it. He must have believed, without a doubt, that he was going to win—that he already had.

Did he know about Belridge?

Maybe. Probably. She thought it was likely he had been tracking her ever since California. But how? She had kept her eyes aware—no cars had tailed her on the interstate and here up in the mountains it would be impossible to hide or pass by without her noticing. There was only one road in, after all.

Obsessing over the how wouldn’t do any good. She never dealt in conjecture, only fact, and the fact of the matter was simple—to the world, Eleanor Robertson was now dead, and that meant when Darce caught up to her, he would have to make it so.

She stabbed the cigarette on the frozen ground then climbed into the car. Much as she wanted to dally just a few minutes longer, any time ticked off the clock was time ticked off her life. It was Belridge or bust.

Lewis Gordon held her fate in his hand.

On she drove into the pouring snow which had, just in the last thirty-minutes, kicked from a flurry into a frenzy, and now obscured road completely.

On she drove in silence, let with only her thoughts, what may be her last.

CHAPTER SIX

Belridge, Colorado was the sort of place that never really changed. Years passed, people died and were born, but it never seemed to grow, only age. New buildings weren’t built, old ones just fell into disrepair. There wasn’t a need for a new general store, just less of a need for the original one. Belridge was a place people didn’t come back to, just a place people left, as the dwindling population sign warned—ten years ago, it had read one hundred. Now it read seventy. Another twenty years, who knew.

It wasn’t a town meant to survive, just thrive then die. It was founded in the late 1800s by Mr. T. Walter Williams, a man with a dream of exploiting the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, looting the mines for all they were worth then skedaddling—and he did. For years, young men chewed through the mountain’s silver lode and their poor lungs, earning Mr. Williams dollars that they profited pennies off of. When the Act was repealed, Mr. Williams went off in search of a new venture, and Belridge became just another sleepy town—nothing to do, nothing to see, nothing to leave behind.

Most people go the route of Eleanor. They stay glued to the town until they’ve got nothing else keeping them there. Once family their family passes on, they kiss the town goodbye and go off to explore a world still living, not a place frozen in time.

Yet now, she was doing the unthinkable—returning.

As she rounded the last curve of the mountain and turned onto Belridge’s main street, one of only three official roads in the entire town, she almost couldn’t believe it. Through the falling snow, her past blinked into view, and she wasn’t sure if that terrible feeling in her stomach was nausea or nostalgia.

There was Mr. Baldwin’s Clothing Store, front-two porch steps still broken, and the Hutchingson’s Infirmary, which was painted a vibrant cherry so it always shone bright, just in case. Sandwiched between them were the homes of the Shelby’s, the Anderson’s, and the Martin’s, all three of whom liked to claim, and bicker over, the fact that their families were the first three to settle here after Mr. Williams set the mines up.

Everything was as it always was, though there was a commotion in the road. Everyone, unused to someone driving on it, was rushing to-and-fro across it, ignoring crosswalks as they carried bundles of carpets and clothing, sacks of food and carts of firewood. The people of Belridge, many of whom she recognized even at a glance with a decade having passed, didn’t need a fancy weatherman to tell them a storm was brewing. They could feel it in their bones, like the mountain itself was calling to them.

The fact Eleanor couldn’t was a sign of how far she had gone from home.

Her Coronet had, as she expected, snagged their attention. She only counted three other cars, and one of them belonged to Sheriff O’Ryan, or maybe his son now if he had taken over, so that didn’t really count. Folks stopped and glared, not unwelcoming but more so unsure. She on through, slinking down into her seat, using her frost-covered windows to keep herself from being recognized. Milford was easy to fool, he was a drunkard. The other townsfolk? It wouldn’t take them a second.

If I cruise on through, maybe they’ll think me just some ghost.

Truthfully, she knew exactly what would happen—she’d become the talk of the town. For the next several weeks, while Belridge was in lockdown, folks would whisper about the car that drove through. Who drove it, why had it come, and where was it going? Hopefully once the storm cleared, she’d be long gone, forever a mystery.

Off main street spread two roads in opposite directions. One took you up further toward the mountain’s peak, where the trees multiplied from a bundle into a forest of evergreens with snow-sagged branches. A hundred years ago Williams had harvested them relentlessly, but these days their use was seasonal, only being chopped down during the coldest months for firewood.

The other road wasn’t much of a road at all, more a bumpy path beaten into the Earth by century old horse-hooves, preserved in the boreal soil. Her car battled down it, nuts and bolts juddering against one another as her wheels scraped over frozen stone. This was Silver Lode Lane and about halfway down it, she’d have to abandon her car by the tall-reaching ponderosas and trudge the rest of the way on foot.

Past this point, any semblance of Belridge faded away. Down this road were scores of mineshafts, many of which had been blown shut with dynamite, and jagged, uneven boulders sharp enough to slice through skin. Hibernating grizzly bears and ravenous mountain lions still seeking flesh. All things worth warning a child about, as her mother often did. “There is no good down in those hills, Ellie. Only greed and death to those who seek it.”

As a teenager, she had rebelled against these warnings. As an adult, she wished she could heed them and turn around.

But there was no going back. Ahead of her, the lodge blinked into view, illuminated by swaying lanterns which hung from rusted metal posts. Once, steel-miners rushed through it, covered in bits of rock-ash, eyes bleary from too-long in the decrepit dark, arguing about their pay, demanding more rations, or inquiring about their assignments. Nowadays it was home to one man who wished to be left alone. A man who argued, demanded, and inquired solely through the airwaves. A man who believed it was his duty to bring Belridge the news.

Lewis Gordon.

Even a one-stoplight town like Belridge, news was still important.

News, Eleanor supposed, was important everywhere.

But just like how people in Baltimore didn’t give a damn about Seattle, people in Belridge didn’t give a damn about anything outside the mountain’s embrace. What good doing worrying about the Russians do for them? Why did it matter who was, or who was going to be, president? Their life and everything that mattered to them existed across a stretch of ten miles—an E. Coli outbreak in Miami? That may as well have been on an alien planet.

What they cared about were the things that affected them directly. Stuff that would’ve made a New Yorker, who was used to everything happening a million-miles-a-minute, groan in boredom. Homegrown problems, Eleanor always called them. Singular problems was another good way to phrase it. Problems that only affected one tight-knit community. Problems they would have to band together to address, fix, or struggle through.

How long was Tommy-Joe, who taught down at the three-room school, gonna be sick for? When was Gregson moving out and was his family, most importantly his two hardworking brothers, going with him? What supplies was the general store running low on and which neighboring towns had them? Why were the Darnells and Flanders feuding? When was Jim Stilton’s bum knee going to heal so he could repair the shingles on the Marlon’s home so they could stop rooming with the Adams’?

This was the news cycle of a jerkwater town and though it was imperative everyone stay up-to-date with their local happenings, it wasn’t such an easy thing to ensure. Word of mouth was unreliable and all it took was a few misheard words to spiral things out of control. You’d tell one person, and they’d tell another, or maybe they wouldn’t, maybe they’d forget, or worse maybe they’d mishear it and fudge a few details, then the next in line would fudge a few more, and by the time word got around, it was a useless bunch of nonsense that wasted everyone’s time.

That was why folk like Lewis Gordon existed.

Their duty was simple—deliver truthfully news as quickly as efficiently possible. Local presses operated under an entirely different ruleset than your national gazettes. While those profit-fueled papers sought to cram as much information as they could into a bundle that would be spread across the country and sold to thousands upon thousands of Americans, these smaller endeavors, typically run by one person, sought to keep things as short and concise as they possibly could.

Their aim wasn’t money, their aim was purpose. Like the loggers who felled trees and the hunters who shot deer, the journalist had a role to play too. They needed to keep their people informed and did so by sifting through the facts and trimming them into concise summarizations that hardworking folk could scarf down with the same veracity they attacked their morning breakfasts with.

They took the garbled grumblings of the neighborhood and made it digestible.

Most of these types ended up being men gluttonous for power. The kinds of guys who already sought to lead their towns and saw journalism as nothing more than a way to expunge their biases among the people. They relished the adoration it brought them, not the stability it brought their companions, and though Lewis Gordon spoke with knuckleheads like this every day, he thought they decided the same treatment as a pile of manure—a sneer, a pinch of the nose, and a quick scurry away.

To Lewis Gordon, a journalist was not a celebrity. A journalist was not even a person. They were merely a conduit for the news and if their name became known, that was a failure on their part. It means your words aren’t speaking loud enough. It means they hear your voice, and if you want folk to hear your voice, then you’re not journalist, just an actor who couldn’t cut it. A hack.

Eleanor hadn’t seen Lewis Gordon in over ten years, yet his high-pitched, nasally squeal was seared into her brain. How many nights had she spent beside him, listening to him bark orders as her and hiss curses at himself until he wound up on the floor, sobbing, agonizing over tomorrow’s paper which, he was certain, was destined never to see the light of day but always did? Too many. To call him eccentric was to put it kindly—she always thought he fit more in Caroll’s Wonderland than real life.

She remembered her first time here, wandering down the hill alone, having left Martin Atters up by the ponderosas instead of her car. He had insisted it was a terrible idea to come down here, and it was, but she was fourteen, so that didn’t change much. Her curiosity had always been magnetic—when she was drawn to something, it sucked her in completely, and she couldn’t stop until she got ahold of it. And that day it had latched onto the idea that the man behind the local papers was a genius who she had to meet.

When she first met him, he was outside, sitting on the porch, watching a bundle of shredded papers burn. Without looking up, he said his first words to her—“Journalism is a tool. With it, we can manipulate the minds of the populace. It can be informative or destructive, depending on the talent, and malice, of the individual wielding the pen. But when you try turning news into art, this is what happens. Hogwash.”

She said nothing. He asked her nothing. She took a seat next to him, watching smoke dance into the midnight air as the flames chewed away carefully written, once-loved words. Lewis Gordon barely noticed her presence, already back to work, reassembling the pieces in his mind with soft-spoken mutters. She would later learn that his rough-drafts always took the form of words and that he only jotted them down when he had arranged them to his liking, a methodology she would take from him.

Only most of the things he wrote still ended up like this. Burnt, trashed, washed in the drain, ripped to shreds. She had even watched him eat a draft of his before.

It took her minutes, and the fire nearly burning out, to work up the nerve to speak. “Will you rewrite it?”

“Not so clumsily,” he said, breaking his string of unintelligible mutters. “God mocks me, making my mind leak out such slop. Sometimes I detest writing, I truly do.”

“Then why bother?”

Lewis Gordon never stopped to think. He spoke a thought as it bloomed in his mind, leaving no room for indecision or, worst of all, tact. “The very same reason you are bothering me—because it has to be done.” He cleared his throat. “And I have to be the one to do it.”

The next day, she came back and asked for a job, and the rest was history.

Stood here now, in front of that same porch wrought with scars from pickaxes dragged lazily across it, Eleanor felt like she was fourteen again, showing up for her first day of work, unsure what she was getting herself into. She looked over her shoulder, half-expecting to see young Martin Atters hidden among the trees, a hair shorter and a fair bit skinnier—but all that was there was her car.

She checked her watch. The desert hadn’t treated it kindly and the blustering storm wasn’t either—sandy grains, gummied together by wet flakes of snow, smeared across the numbers with each tick of the hands. It read six PM. If it wasn’t broken and if Lewis Gordon hadn’t changed, which he didn’t seem the type to, that meant it was tea-time.

He threw a fit when tea-time was interrupted.

A man’s after-dinner tea is the perfect time for rumination, he used to say. You’re full, so no pesky thoughts of hunger, and you’ve finished mostly of your daily duties, so no undue stress about things to do.

Deciding he was going to throw a fit no matter what, Eleanor sparked up a cigarette, letting the nicotine kill off her anxiety, and banged her wrist on the heavy iron door. “Lew!” she said. “Lewis Gordon!”

A groan. Muffled murmurs of dismay. Shuffling footsteps and tumbling piles of junk. But Lew, she knew, wasn’t coming to the door—he was chasing down the whistle of his ready-to-pop tea kettle. She tried peering through the window, but it was stained with dust and blocked by awkwardly piled bins of paper.

She beat on the door again, this time more roughly. “Don’t play deaf on me, Lew,” she said. “I know you recognize this voice. You don’t let me in, I’m gonna stand here yelling all night. I’m not letting you sleep.”

That groan became a growl. No murmurs followed the footsteps to the door, just the silence of indecision. When he finally heaved it open, it dug through grooves it had cut into the wooden flooring decades ago as its rusted hinges, long asleep, let out a chalkboard-scratch yawn. He did not open it wide enough to do anything but shove a hand through and wave her off.

“I’m not taking visitors, especially not you. I’m taking tea and my Biscoff cookies and am not in the mood to chit-chat or tongue wag, again, especially not with you.” His voice was frail, weakened through years of misuse. His vocal cords had grown accustomed to whispering only to himself, and so each word came out pitchy, like the squeak of a mouse. “So go on, get going, leave, march home.”

“Don’t got no home to march back to, Lew,” she said. “You were right all along—journalists like me, they don’t last. Our slop gets scarfed down until it’s too bland to stomach, then the mere thought of us makes people queasy.”

“A hacked-up, makes-you-hack, hack,” Lewis hissed. “I warned you.”

“And I didn’t listen,” she said. “I was young and dumb. I’m old and still dumb, but at least now I know it.”

On the other end of the door, Lewis scratched his whiskers, mumbling to himself as he grappled the idea of letting her in, which was certainly less about her, more about his wasted tea-time. His words were nonsensical—garbled bits of thought he spoke soon as they popped into mind: “Cold. Sugar. Another pot. Idiot. Doorstep. Needs to go. Poor man’s Poe. Hack. Graaah!”

The rest of the door was eased open and Lewis Gordon, a meek man with pasty skin and clothes with dangled off his toothpick body, stuck his head out, glaring her up and down. It had only been ten years but he had aged forty—a lifetime inside, with little to do but move from bed to desk to kitchen to toilet, would do that to a man. He wore the gaunt face of a ghoul and she wasn’t all-together certain he wasn’t one.

“Lew,” she said. “Lew, it’s been too fucking long.”

“Language,” Lew said. “Only the foolish use foulness to propel their emotions. A true writer should be able to get their point across with subtle tact—fuck and shit and all that other fucking shit is a crutch for the untalented. Ah, well. I suppose it’s only fitting.”

“Hard to fix a potty mouth once it starts leaking. We just spew shit everywhere and expect other people to clean it up.” She took a step forward. “So, am I allowed in?”

“I’m unsure. Haven’t fully decided yet.” He gnawed on his thumbnail as he spoke. “You were told never to come back here, and I don’t think you would without good reason, but I find it hard to believe someone like you would have a reason someone like I would find worthy.”

“I do and I don’t. It’s a long story that’s worth hearing, I think, even if it’s just to mock me for being a screw-up.” Eleanor blew hot air onto her hands and scrubbed them together. “But right now, I’m freezing my lips off. No way I could tell the whole thing out here. I’d keel over!”

Lewis pursed his lips and, for once, kept his mumbles trapped in his throat. His face screamed turn her away! but she had pulled at his curiosities and he, like her, often struggled to resist them. With a deep sigh, he stepped out of the doorway and held his arm out, motioning for her to come inside. “It is tea and Biscoff time,” he said. “If you are to come in, you will have to eat Biscoff and drink tea, two sugars, no more or less.”

“I’ve eaten thirteen Big Macs in the past week,” she said. “This may as well be a gourmet feast.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Walking through Lewis Gordon’s home was an acquired skill, for it was full of non-negotiable obstacles that wouldn’t budge even if you tried barreling straight on through. You had to navigate it like a maze, carefully trudging through piles of ancient, unneeded but still wanted relics from his prior life—back before he settled in Belridge, when he traveled the world, running the same journalistic circuit that Eleanor had.

He hadn’t spoken about it often. She gathered that he didn’t look back on it fondly. Yet he kept his loot from that era piled all around, cluttering lazily stacked bins, spread across messy coffee tables, and stamped into the cracks in the floor. There was a little bit of everything everywhere. Invicta typewriters that had seen action in the Pacific Theater and bore the bullet from Type 99 to prove it. A ballpoint ink pen that, according to its engraving, belonged to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and another that he claimed had been used by J. Edgar Hoover to sign away the freedom of all those depression-era gangsters.

Most of all, though, were the newspapers. He must have amassed a collection of at least a thousand and with nowhere to go, they ended up stuffed in every nook and cranny. Between the couch-cushions, overflowing out of the cabinets. They hailed from all over the country—Chicago, New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, New Orleans, Seattle, Houston, Sacramento, San Francisco. She wouldn’t have been surprised if every city in the U.S. was represented here.

There were clippings denoting the bombing of Hiroshima, the establishment of the United Nations, the start of the Korean War, the inauguration of Eisenhower, the launch of Explorer 1, Sputnik 2, and Pioneer 4, and who knew what else—the collection of histories was near endless, like a library dedicated solely to the past. Unfortunately, it was so disorganized that she stepped on Mr. Kennedy’s face as he was sworn into office and tore it in two, turning it, and its words, into nothing more than another pile of paper.

Once, this room had been full of men coming and going, busy with the turbulence of an uncertain, unsteady life. Now it was full of stories without love. Stories with plenty of meaning that was lost to the very man who had gathered them—Lewis Gordon was a man always pushing forward, trying to forget a past he couldn’t let go of.

They sat on Coca Cola stools in what had once been a storeroom but was now a kitchen. The cabinets had been meant to collect important files. Instead, along with the forgotten newspapers, they housed canned food from Lewis’ yearly excursion into town, and if she hadn’t smoked her sense of smell fully away yet, tonight’s dinner had been pork n’ beans and fried spam, one of his favorites.

He poured her tea until it overflowed, spilling off the table and onto her jeans. “There. That’s what you deserve. A stain. Because that’s exactly what you are. A stain.”

“Ever so kind,” Eleanor said. When he handed her a cookie, she took it and munched into it. Dry. No wonder. They were a year past date. “Same as I remember them.”

“They changed the recipe, I think,” he said. “I’m not so much a fan, but even less a fan of change, so what can I do but eat through my displeasure.”

He chomped through the first cookie in one bite. The second one he went easier on, taking it down in two bites and flushing all the crumbs back with a gulp of tea. The table wobbled with every little movement—his workstation, the Hermes, was too heavy for it. Had been used well, too. Most of its plastic caps had been replaced with bottle caps.

Eleanor drank her own tea. Bitter and overbrewed, just how he always liked it. “Not much has changed,” she said. “Tell me, what’s on today’s docket?”

“Oh, nothing someone like you would find interesting, you big-city-broad. The Gregson’s truck broke down, so all timber will have to be hauled on foot, and Mr. Malcolm Davis believes he spotted a pack of bear-teethed cats down my way, so everyone needs to watch out. Mrs. Jessica Miller will be having a baby come noon tomorrow, and so Dr. Harvey will busy tending to her. He requested, ahem, that everyone ‘avoid sickness like the plague.’”

Eleanor chuckled. “So Harvey hasn’t changed a lick.”

“He lost some teeth, but not his humor, no.” Lewis cleared his throat. “The most important piece of business to inform everyone on is the storm. I’ve spent all day by Hoss, that blasted machine, gathering intel from the neighboring towns.”

Hoss was an old H.A.M radio that took up most of his counterspace. The fuzzy voices of other backwoods broadcasters, two beers deep, ready to be ten deep by midnight, flowed freely from it. These men ran their own newspapers in their own little towns and shared whatever info they could with their fellow journalists. Lewis had never seen them, likely would never see them, but they were the closest thing he had to friends.

“What are they saying?” she asked.

“What do you think? The usual bunk. The roads are blocked! Snow is falling from the sky! Nothing I couldn’t ascertain on my own.” He groaned. “Also, quit forcing it—your words are unnatural and awkward. Small-talk between the disgruntled always is.” He groaned again. “At least when you write it feels authentic. Like it’s really you speaking, for better or worse. Often worse. Have I mentioned how displeased I am with you?”

“Once or twice,” she said.

“I should mention it a thousand times more.”

“Last time I was here, you told me life would be better if I burst into flames.”

He glanced her up and down, bit of cookie crumb coating his cheek. “If you expect me to apologize, apologize to yourself for thinking so foolishly, because I truly meant it—you’d warm us all up, at least, and that would make this pesky storm more tolerable.”

Noticing she hadn’t eaten her extra cookie, he took it upon himself to do away with it and tossed it into his mouth. “Now, we’ve twaddled on long enough. Why have you returned, Eleanor Robertson, ‘the samurai’” His sneer served as a verbal air quote. “If you’re seeking employment, forget it. I’ve managed printing on my own fine enough for some years now.”

Eleanor sipped at her tea. Her steely nerves were forged right here, in this cramped room, by the crass crackpot glaring her down. Yet the realization that she was going to have to lay it all out to convince him made her nauseous.

Smiley-Faced Man. “Kill them all. Butcher the bodies.”

Blood dried onto her chest. Blood oozing down the gash atop her head.

Blood. Blood. Blood.

Berea.

“You’re shaking,” he said, eyes widening.

“I’m fucking scared.”

“Language.” His tone had lost some sharpness. “Eleanor, why are you here?”

She set the cup of tea down. “Because I saw something I wasn’t supposed to and, in doing so, pissed the wrong people off.”

“Isn’t your entire job to ‘see things you aren’t supposed to’? You make your living uncovering secrets! What, getting cold feet?”

“I didn’t see a secret. I saw a cover-up. One perpetrated by the U.S. government. Hell, me even telling you this, it’s dangerous. Not for me, but you.” She leaned across the table, lowered her voice to a whisper. “I’m being hunted by a man named D’Angelo Darce. He has eyes and ears everywhere. I don’t know who he works for but I’ll tell you this—he told the world I’ve been killed and I don’t doubt he plans to make that a reality.”

She gnawed her lip. “If you don’t want to risk winding up dead yourself, kick me out now, because once I start talking, I’m not going to stop, and once you’ve heard it, you can’t unhear it—you’ll be on the same shitlist I am.”

Lewis crossed his arms, bent toward her, and spoke very seriously: “But is it news?”

“Yes. God, yes.”

Lewis nodded. “All right, then, answer me this—is it important?”

“More than anything I’ll ever write.” Her vision was blurring, eyes filling with tears. “I was willing to throw away my career for this. I’m willing to throw away my life for it.” She sputtered around, searching for the words. In the end, she simply said: “People need to know this.”

A minute passed by with nothing said. Lewis looked her up and down, clearly trying to ascertain whether it was right to trust she who had already wronged him. Years ago, when she was nothing more than a no-name prodigy, she had taken his greatest story, that of the Belridge murderer, and claimed it as her own, propelling her to superstardom. Now she was groveling before him, begging him to save her.

But no, that wasn’t it at all. For the first time in a long time, she didn’t give a shit about herself. The only thing she cared about was getting this story out to the people.

“This is about news, Lew, not me, or Darce, or even you. Hell—” she reached down, yanked her bag off the floor, unzipped it, and pulled out the Berea manuscript. “—if you want to take credit for it, go ahead, I don’t care. All that matters is that it goes out into the world. That people learn the truth.”

The Berea manuscript, burnt and bent and beaten, shook in her hands as Lewis looked down at it, eyes glossing over the title, the coffee-stains, the flaking charcoal dog-eared corner. It took a few minutes, but finally, a smirk spread across his face. “Well, Eleanor Robertson, color me not just amused, but also impressed.”

“I’m not trying to impress you.”

“I know, and that’s what is so impressive. You’re this not fueled by any ulterior motive. Rather, you’re fueled by this story. That, Eleanor Robertson, is genuine journalism, something I thought you entirely incapable of.”

Lewis sprung to his feet and began to pace laps around the tiny kitchen. His hands fumbled about, searching for something to occupy them, pawing at the cabinets, the furnace, the logs meant for the furnace, before eventually siccing his gaze back on her. His eyes looked ready to pop out of his skull. “But why me, Eleanor Robertson? Why me. I am but a ‘backwoods bumpkin’, you said so yourself many years ago!”

“Because everyone else is afraid of D’Angelo Darce,” she said.

Realization washed across him. “But I do not know him, thus I have nothing to fear.”

“Exactly.” Energy coursed through Eleanor’s veins. She stood and motioned toward the old H.A.M. radio. “With Hoss, we can spread word slowly. Some people won’t believe it—hell, most won’t. But those that do, they’ll keep it alive, and once it’s out there, Darce won’t ever be able to stop it.”

“It might not change anything. Likely won’t. Most people, they’ll just move on.”

“That’s for them to decide,” Eleanor said. “You told me that a journalist shouldn’t ever let their work be backed by bias. You aren’t trying to convince people of something—you’re trying to give them the facts and let them decide for themselves. Even the Samurai believed that.”

Lewis smiled. A genuine smile. “Ellie,” he said. “You’ve finally grown up.”

Eleanor didn’t say anything—she just returned his smile.

Lewis retrieved a chair from across the room. It was cushioned, though most of the stuffing bulged through cuts in the leather. He knocked the newspapers off it and slid it across the room with little regard for the health of the wooden floor, putting it right in front of Hoss. Then, he looked at her. “Sit down, put on those headphones, turn that dial, and when you speak into the mic, you’ll have an audience.”

Eleanor took a seat in front of Hoss and stared at the manuscript in her lap. It was only five pages deep, written in long-faded, smudged ink on pages soaked with blood. She flipped forward, reading the garbled mess she had written the night of the incident, and wondered how she was going to convince people it was true.

“Don’t read from this,” Lewis said, reaching pulling the manuscript away from her. “It’s made of too much of the heart. Speak truly—tell them what you saw.”

Shivers ran down her spine…

What she saw…?

She put the headphones on…

“Kill them all.” “No survivors.” “Chop them up!”

She pulled the microphone up to her lips…

Blood-soaked barn. Bullet-holes in the wood. Broken glass. Car alarms.

Bloody black goop. A thousand eyeballs. Serrated teeth.

She reached out, turn the dial, and felt the static flushed from her ears…

Stop, Fido, stop.

Stop.

A bright light.

Finally, she spoke.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I am Eleanor Robertson. You might know me. Maybe you’ve read my work, maybe you’ve just heard about it. They call me the Samurai, though that feels silly now, hiding away here in the mountains. My duty is to the public—I spill the secrets of the famous and let you all judge their fates. A week ago, my home was raided. Tonight, I was pronounced dead.

Ahem. Here I am, still breathing, nicotine-stained lungs tainting the air.

Maybe, by morning, I won’t be. Hell, maybe I won’t even finish this broadcast.

I’m here to tell you a story. A true story. It might seem a lie. Most of you will probably write it off. But connect the dots and think, please. I promise you, what I’m saying is the truth. Do you really think a dead woman would rip herself out of the grave just to make some garbage up?

I’m going to tell you what happened in Berea.

And I need you to listen good.

Because people died in Berea. Good people. They were slaughtered like cattle.

And their story needs to be heard.

This story would be a baseless recollection of violence without context. Before I can recount the atrocities I witnessed, I must explain how I ended up in Berea, with brains splattered across my cheek. What led me to that night, that place, that table, that gore, began five years prior when I, by happenstance, met a man known as Billy Kid.

Billy Kid was born with no future to a pair of wild west rough-n’-tumblers who gunned down lawmen for fun and drank their livers into mush and made him swear to never, never-ever, grow up. He took this to heart. Never once did he get a job, instead choosing to just “get by” earning little bucks here for doing a thing or two like a child with their chores. It worked well enough that he could eat himself into survival, but never a healthy weight, and that he could form a routine of changing clothes every three months. He once told me that life is not about productivity, it is about getting what you desire.

What Billy Kid desired was exploration. Our world, he said, was getting more closed in each day. People were leaving their homes less and less, staying glued to TVs and radios, caring less about the trees dying than they did about when the next episode of The Andy Griffith Show was going to air. He wandered, he hunted, he foraged, he saw. To him, the world was beyond our comprehension, too giant to even imagine a snippet of—what he wanted, more than anything, was to see as much of it as he could.

When I met him, he was fifty years old. He looked like he might’ve been a couple million, like a relic of the Jurassic era, a fossil that had grafted its leathery body back together. I was working for the bigwig papers then, chasing down a story about stick-‘em-up biker gangs, and found him lying on the side of the road, curled into a ball, so thirsty his body was trying to suck the water out of his skin and crunching it like a straw. I asked him if he needed help; Billy Kid said: ‘only if you have the time.’

I wouldn’t call Billy Kid a saint. He would detest that. But I’ll just say this—once I got Billy Kid well-fed, I asked him what the hell had happened to him, and he said life hadn’t been too kind to him. When I told him he was kind, he just said back: ‘kindness ain’t natural to the world, ma’am. We stop giving it back, one day it’ll go away for good. I try my best.’

All of this is foreign to you. That I’m sure of. Unbelievable, I’d bet. This is nothing like the Billy Kid you’ve been told to keep in the same breath as that bastard Manson. According to Uncle Sam, Billy Kid is a menace to society—public enemy numero uno. The news, they call him all sorts of things. A vandal. A thief. A propagandist. An anarchist. A kidnapper. A killer. An anti-American. A cult leader. A silver-tongued Devil. A threat to society. A poison of the youth. A Russian spy. A terrorist.

None of that is true. If I, Eleanor Robertson, the journalist whose entire career is built off destroying reputations, can impart one thing on you, please let it be this: Billy Kid did not found, run, or organize The Red Legion. They were merely a collective intrigued by his existence, drawn together by the singular notion that he was a unique person worth following. They were driven not just by his kindness, but by his outlandish stories—Billy Kid claimed that, once every decade, the aliens came to visit him.

The Shuunites, he called them.

Creatures with snotty bodies fuzzed over with moldy fur and a thousand eyeballs that blinked at everything curiously. A gaggle of slimy octopus tendrils served as their arms and legs, smudging goop onto everything they touched. He said they resembled Jello left out in the heat too long, stank like it too, and didn’t communicate verbally. They did have mouths and they were filled with constantly shifting shards of bone powerful enough to chomp steel into atoms. But instead, they relied on those tendrils. One touch would transmit all their thoughts straight into you and vice-versa. For a Shuunite, there was no need for secrets.

A Shuunite was a deity. They were cosmic dust turned into being, meant to live on, never to die. They could not reproduce; they could not feel pain. Despite this, they had no intentions of conquering—their only duty was to history. Their being immortal had made them the official scholars of the universe and so they traveled across solar systems, studying plants, races, cultures, and marking them down in the annals of galactic record. Once a decade, they would descend upon Earth to study us more closely. They would disguise themselves, walk among us, and attempt to learn all they could from us.

Billy Kid met his first Shuunite when he was ten years old. Back then, when his parents would go out conniving, they’d drop him off at dying, or already dead, towns, and leave him there for days on end. It was during these times that he learned to be self-sufficient and one night, while out hunting, an immense light washed over him, like the sun itself was about to come crashing down.

It was not a UFO. The Shuunites did not fly saucers. It was a bullet-shaped pod, barely big enough for two, and it crashed into the Earth with enough impact that it bulldozed the wooden haystack homes. Upon approaching the wreckage, he was greeted by a beast who had expected not a soul out so far from society. The Shuunite was the first one ever exposed to a human and introduced itself as Fido. Billy Kid made it clear this was not its real name, rather an approximation of a fitting human one. The two bonded and Fido, the gelatinous fuzzball, promised to return.

And he did. When Billy Kid turned twenty, he came back. Then when he turned thirty, forty, and fifty. Billy Kid kept mum about his Shuunite encounters, fearing others would cast him off as insane, and hoarded this experience for himself. That is, until he met me. When he met me, he was in a dire state, having just learned that when he turned sixty, the Shuunites would visit Earth for the final time. That is because one of their own had been captured—Fido had been captured—and they wanted it back, then they were off to other galaxies, other histories.

Billy Kid wanted to get the word out. He wanted everyone to know who the Shuunites were, the tragedy that had befallen them, and he wanted justice brought to the culprits who had taken his friend. He thought I was the key to spreading this story and that our meeting was fate.

When I first heard this story, I didn’t believe Billy Kid. I don’t think he would blame me for that. But I saw the potential, the profit, and so I agreed to help him. Billy Kid was barely a bag of bones then but when he spoke, he commanded your attention. He had an indescribable way with words, a charm that made you always swoon over to his side, even if you didn’t know it.

That was the start of the Red Legion, and the Red Legion’s true purpose—to save Fido and bring justice to the Shuunites.

And so Billy Kid let his story fly, dedicating each day to conversation. He went door-to-door, town-to-town, meeting hundreds of people, telling his tale to all of them. Most slammed their doors in his face or said not-so-nice things to him. But the ones who listened? They understood. And no matter how many Christians debased him or Atheists skeptically mocked them, he always engaged them with a smile, enthusiastically listening to their side before beginning to explain his own. To Billy Kid, the road ahead was a tireless one. But one he walked gracefully.

All the while, I trailed alongside him, keeping myself out of the limelight and writing under various pseudonyms. I kept track of his journey, submitting stories about this mysterious man to local papers, and each time I visited him, there were ten more people shadowing him, eager ears hanging off his every word.

What started as campfire jamborees quickly became mass gatherings. Soon he wasn’t bouncing door-to-door, he was bouncing microphone-to-microphone, chuffing cigarettes and showering the cosmos down upon the crowd. He spun wondrous yarns about his five meetings with the Fido, and his one journey into space. He spoke about being beamed up, saying it was like being stuck inside a waterbed, and painted the Shuunites as a prosperous, peaceful people.

His name spread like wildfire across the desert, with local Californians catching snippets of his story through buzzing radios and passing it along like high-school gossip. Murmurs popped up everywhere—people were curious about who he was, what he was saying, and most importantly, if it was true. By the time Billy Kid had turned fifty-nine, I urged him to think bigger, to chase the world, and pulling some strings, I got him an interview with Burnaby Broth, a New York late-night host known for taking risks and bringing on uncertain guests.

It was after this that the timeline I know, and the timeline you know, start to diverge.

The first you heard about Billy Kid was the Capitol Plaza bombing in Nevada. After that you learned of his terrorist militant group, The Red Legion, named so because bloodshed is what our country was built upon. You saw them beating lawmen in the street. You saw them vandalizing police stations, courthouses, and post offices. You saw them blowing up cars, buses, and planes. You saw them run up to Larry Ryan, put a gun to his head, and blaow! right there on national TV.

You saw the lies.

I, Eleanor Robertson, still living and breathing, have been giving you the truth.

Now I’m going to tell you what happened in Berea, on Billy Kid’s sixtieth birthday.

The day Billy Kid was murdered.

Berea was bloody and began with bolognaise, because Berea was not a city, nor even a town. It was a restaurant. A restaurant that, abstractly, served bolognaise and only bolognaise.

Truthfully, to call this drab place a restaurant was a favor it didn’t deserve. It was a barn. A barn that, during the day, housed animals, and at night, hungry people, and likely wouldn’t pass a single health code if it were up for review. It served sustenance, but nothing edible, certainly nothing one would call food. I’m not just being posh, either—the bolognaise, snot -spackled egg noodles with brainy-bits of cow-flesh, was served in a lumpy clay pot on a haybale table and tasted like it had been cooked in a horse’s ass.

With nobody eating, everybody chatting, it was a fine scene for a murder, and there had been several there before. One in ’19, one in ’32, and two in ’51, though those were accidents. What happened that night wouldn’t be.

The Berea Barn was a collection of the midwestern conscious, and a glimpse into days-gone-by. Once, this had been a wild place of rough-and-tumble cowboys. The sort of place Billy Kid’s parents probably would’ve hung out at. It was still a wild place, and the men were still rough-and-tumble, though these days, they were cattle-farmers hoping to stuff calories into their faces and move on. That night, those men had already moved on, and the owner, Bolognaise Tony, kept his doors open extra-late, just for the Red Legion.

Bolognaise Tony wasn’t used to publicity. Wasn’t used to people, really, either. Bolognaise Tony only started the Berea joint because there were mouths to feed and nobody else to feed them, and he made bolognaise because he didn’t know how to make anything else. That day he barely spoke to any of us—just rushed undercooked food out the door and prayed the food poisoning took us out. He knew about the Red Legion. To him, trouble had rolled in, and he wanted it gone.

The “food” didn’t matter, even if it was cold beef silver-skin glued together with congealed grease. What mattered was that the Berea Barn was buried between the cornfields of Nowheresland and Forgotten-About and wouldn’t be easily found by the surveillance vans that struggled to track Billy Kid’s every movement. They wanted to kill him and make a big show out of it. He just wanted to save Fido.

I hadn’t been invited to this meeting. Billy Kid, I think, didn’t want me there. I came of my own accord, surprising him out behind the barn, where I found him so tense he could barely speak. He begged me to leave, but I didn’t, and when I asked why, he said tonight could go very, very badly, and that if it did, he didn’t want me hurt. At the time, I thought his nerves were just getting to him. After all, he was merely hours away from being labeled a fraud or a prophet by the entire world.

Now I know that, deep down, he knew of the storm that was brewing.

Eventually, we went inside to find a crowd had formed. It was made up of many familiar faces. Men and women who had been following Billy Kid since before anyone but me knew his name. They swarmed him, they greeted him, and I retreated upstairs, to an alcove above the barn where excess bales of hay were stored and watched the clock. Billy Kid was born at 6PM on the dot and had told us that, at 6PM, after our meals, they would come.

I readied my cameras, removed my notebooks, and got out my pen. I normally don’t write things down, I think it’s bad business to leave notes lying around. But this seemed important. Something to capture the energy of in the moment. What I started there was the manuscript I hold right now, crusted with dried blood, torn, crinkled, burnt and full of half-finished thoughts. The clock continued to tick. At five-forty, the undercooked bolognaise stopped coming out. At five-forty-five, Billy Kid took the stage. At five-fifty-five, they showed up.

The crowd was too busy cheering Billy Kid to even hear the words he was saying, much less notice the newcomers. There were three in total and they were led by a man with a burlap sack on his head that had a smiley-face painted onto it. The other two wore sacks as well, though they had frowny-faces. I was the only one who saw them and recognized them for what they were immediately—government types here to shut the whole show down.

I didn’t say anything.

I should have.

I knew when I saw them that all of this was real.

Observe and record, I told myself.

You’re not really Billy Kid’s friend, I told myself.

Nothing matters more than the story, I told myself.

Then it happened.

Six PM struck and my world, our world, changed forever.

It started with a noise not unlike television static. It was faint at first, barely a whisper. A whirring scrape of metal on metal that grew into a nauseating grinding, like a pair of brakes going out. Everyone stood, ready to rush out the door, but Billy Kid warned them to wait. He needed to go out first alone and make sure it was okay—if it was, he would call them all out.

Before he could even step down off the platform, the barn was encompassed in a radiant, golden glow, almost like the Gods themselves were kissing down upon the Earth. With it came a powerful swelling of air, gusts of wind which beat the wooden panels into the support beams they were slatted to and sent tables, chairs, and cold bolognaise tumbling over. The Legion’s skepticism was washing away with each gust—everyone was realizing Billy Kid’s words were true.

That was when the Smiley-Faced Man hopped onto the stage, drew a craftsman’s knife, and planted it into Billy Kid’s stomach.

There was screaming. Blood-curdling screaming. But you couldn’t hear it over the rushing winds. The crowd quickly became an unruly mob unsure of which way to stampede. The buzzing grew to an ear-bleeding decibel, almost like it was spurned by the heinous act. Billy Kid hit the floor, choking on his own blood, and the Smiley-Faced Man pointed his blade at the crowd and mimed the act of slashing his own throat.

“Kill them all.” His words were lost, but I could read his lips. “No survivors.”

That’s when the shooting started.

The mob became cattle led to slaughter and the Frowny-Faced Men were the blades of the meat grinder. Mangled skin mixed with bile-coated bits of stomach, shit-spewing colons, and gummy brain matter to form a stew of death. Bodies fell, not one by one but ten at a time, with the ease of a school-child smudging an eraser across a piece of looseleaf, wiping away all that their ever was, leaving behind nothing but pieces of shaved flesh.

Each bullet felt like it ripped a piece of me away.

I sat there, frozen, unable to move, unable to speak.

I wanted to run. I couldn’t. I wanted to cry. I couldn’t. All I could do was write, and that was instinctual. I scribbled nonsense, less of a person, more a machine transcribing the mess before me.

I watched as the last vestiges of the crowd were snuffed out. The Frowny-Faced Men walked through the twitching bodies and—BANG—killed—BANG—one after another and—BANG—did so like that were smacking down—BANG—flies.

I watched as the Smiley-Faced Man twirled his knife calmly between his fingers like a pencil, meticulously rattling off the name of every corpse carpeting the floor around him. The names of people I knew. People I had introduced to Billy Kid. People who were curious about aliens and nothing more. People who were good. People who didn’t deserve to die.

I watched.

“Marvin Pointe,” he said.

I watched.

“Sheryl Jones,” he said.

I watched.

“Tammy Snitker. Gracy Ruth. Jacoby Milson.”

I ran.

I didn’t even notice what I was doing until I was hanging out the top of the second story window, looking down at the mass of black, tinted-window, armored cars that had pulled up and made a mess of the parking lot. More Frowny-Faced Men, armed to the teeth, were approaching the barn, and all of them were looking up at me as I balanced on the etched-out beams of the barn’s frame.

They began to shoot; I leaped out the window and landed in the grass. A roiling pain surged through my legs and later, when the adrenaline faded, I’d learn of a torn ACL, a shattered kneecap, and too many broken bones in my ankle to count—but in that moment, I didn’t feel a thing. I just ran, fleeing into the cornfields as bullets whizzed over my shoulders.

There was movement everywhere. The sleepy Berea Barn was wide awake and exhilarated. Red Legion escapees ran alongside me, screaming as they fumbled through, going anywhere but here. None of them lasted long. Luck was the only thing that kept me alive. I was shot in the shoulder twice—Nelson Newton ate a bullet he never saw coming and Meryl Shelly caught one in the throat. I tripped over Bolognaise Tony’s body and fell into a worm-eaten stalk. The worms were already eating him, too.

“We’re gonna have to butcher these bodies,” I heard someone say. “Cut ‘em all up.”

“Nobody can know?”

“Not a fuckin’ soul. I’d be surprised if they didn’t butcher us.”

I laid there as the heavy boots of well-trained soldiers trampled the fields, shooting anything that twitched, and took off only when they were all out of sight. It was only then that I noticed what I was running toward, what everyone was running toward—the sun in the night’s sky.

The Shuunite’s ship.

Looking at it for even a second plagued me with a purple-specked blink, so I kept my head down. Each step was getting tougher. My body was waking up to the fact it was hurt. I knew if I charged into whatever the Hell that was, I likely wouldn’t make it out, but I had to know. Curiosity killed the cat and that night I was certain it was going to kill me too.

I remember thinking ‘this must be how people feel when I’m hunting them.’

Weak. Pathetic. At the mercy of someone who doesn’t give a shit about you.

I ran on.

I ignored the gunshots. The screams. The buzzing. The gnashing of blade against cartilage. My own belabored breaths.

I chased the light, the ship, until it was blotted out—in front of me, a blur of blackness appeared, writhing and wet. I skidded to a stop so abruptly that all the pain of the day caught up to me, swelled around my kneecap, and burst. I doubled over in agony but slapped a hand to my mouth, aware of how dangerous a scream could be.

Then, I looked up.

What towered over me was proof of all the things Billy Kid had said, and that proof was currently eating him alive—in front of me was a Shuunite and it was using its hundreds of teeth to chew through the top half of his head, acidic spit melting away his skin to reveal the cracked skull underneath.

“Stop, Fido, stop,” he said. “Stop, Fido, stop,” he repeated.

“Stop, Fido, stop,” he pleaded. “Stop, Fido, stop,” he begged.

Fido was a mound of flesh, a congealed glob of mold and debris that looked like sludge ooze out of a clogged shower drain, clumped with hair and human gunk. Its numerous eyes blinked ravenously as its tendrils snapped at Billy Kid’s spasming limbs, keeping them in place. Down there, among the cornstalks roots, it couldn’t see me, or maybe it just didn’t care. Its focus was on its meal and the dozens of armed Frowny-Faced men who ignored his feast in favor of what waited ahead.

The Shuunite’s Ship.

From it extended a beam of light which plummeted to the Earth with enough force that it blustered the cornstalks flat, creating a clearing of dead, stamped-on crops. At its impact-point, nestled in the warmth of the beam, were a group of them, all the same as Fido, and I watched as the Smiley-Faced Man, who stood ahead of them all, urged them to abandon the beam and come out to greet them.

He spoke of peace between their species and of a future of kindness. He talked like he hadn’t just ordered a barn of his own race slaughtered. Like he hadn’t kidnapped and enraged one of their own. Like he wasn’t using it for bait.

Bait the Shuunites were not taking. They sat there, wiggling their antennas, barely paying attention to the humans. Smiley-Face noticed this and became incensed. What he didn’t notice was Fido reacting to it—the Shuunite’s eyes next to me blinked crimson, then white. Bloodshot, then clear. Somehow, they were trying to snap it free of its delirium, but it wasn’t working.

That was when, upon order from the Smiley-Faced Man, the Frowny-Faces raised their guns and unloaded, pounding the beam with bullets that disintegrated into dust in midair, leaving behind nothing but the sulfuric stench of a battle lost. They shot and shot and shot, until eventually clouds of metallic ash darkened the air.

Whatever barrier the aliens had made the Frowny-Faced men jittery. Some abandoned their weapons and ran only to be gunned down by their former cohorts.

Once again, I was frozen.

Watching.

I needed to run. I had to run. I was going to die if I didn’t.

But I just watched.

Then, a hand a caught mine. It was torn open, swollen muscles expanding out through parted flesh. It gripped me tightly, popping veins through too, spurting blood.

It belonged to Billy Kid.

His grip grew weaker quickly. His voice was never strong at all. He tried to speak, but bubbles of blood gurgled in his throat. He stared deeply—purposefully—into my eyes, and as the light left his, he mouthed one last request. Billy Kid, who had never asked me to do anything but believe him, said: take Fido back home.

With that, his body went limp, his fingers uncurling one by one before falling down and dangling in the dirt.

I took it and squeezed it, trying hard to fight back tears, and closed my eyes as another wave of bullets came. When finally it passed, I looked up to see Fido glaring at me with the same monstrous intent he had Billy, wanting to gobble me up, and I knew I had to act right then or I’d in its belly, dead with nothing done.

Truthfully, I don’t remember much of what came next. It’s a blur, a smear of near-death. I jumped to my feet, I know that, and I put my entire weight against Fido’s back, shoving it forward, charging across the clearing like it was a battlefield and it was my battering ram. I let it go, it slid into the light, and then I ran, and ran, and didn’t look back, didn’t think, just kept moving, refused to stop, screamed until my throat went raw.

I woke up days later, in a shed some ten miles away, soaked in sweat and blood and sick to my stomach, clutching this manuscript. I wrote everything I remembered, afraid I’d forget most of it, and now…

…now I’m here, being hunted by D’Angelo Darce and who knows else.

All because I survived Berea. Because I saw the truth.

And now I beg of you to spread it far and wide.

I, Eleanor Robertson, saw the Red Legion be slaughtered in the Berea Barn. I watched as they were chased through the cornfields and relentlessly mowed down and chopped into bits. I witnessed the first ever negotiation between mankind and an alien race and stopped it from going catastrophically.

And now, I’m likely going to die, but you must make sure this story lives on.

Goodnight.

Eleanor Robertson took the headset off and let out a deep breath.

Her heart was thrumming and her head was pounding. It was like she had taken the weight of the world off her shoulders and given herself a hangover. She didn’t need an aspirin, though—she needed a couple drinks.

Behind her, Lewis Gordon cleared his throat, and when she turned around, she expected to be assailed with questions.

Instead, what she saw was the Smiley-Faced Man stood there in the same blood-soaked suit from the night in Berea, pointing a revolver at Lewis Gordon’s head. As the journalist shivered, the assailant glared at her.

“You really shouldn’t have said all of that, Eleanor Robertson.”

With that, he pulled the trigger.

END OF PART TWO

part three will be the final part and will go up later this month!