“Bodies. Desiccated bodies, piled against the glass. But I can see inside, at least. I’m at the doors. There’s . . .”
“What?” He waited. “Campbell?”
“There’s a sound.”
“What kind of sound?”
“I don’t know. Shut up a second; let me listen.” Time passed. “Like a hum.”
“A person?”
“No. Like a machine. Something electronic. But that can’t be right. There’s no power here. It’s not that loud. I’m going to open the doors.” There was a scraping. He heard the kid gagging. “Fucking hell.”
“What is it?”
“The smell.”
“Stop where you are.”
“Okay. Okay. I’ve stopped.”
“Look around. Tell me everything.”
“Seats. Reception desk. Shit on the walls.”
“Shit?”
“I mean stuff. Ads. Get your vaccinations. Eight out of ten mothers experience postnatal depression. When was your last prostate exam.”
“What about the sound?”
“Oh. Yeah, that’s flies. Ten billion flies.”
“Stand there a minute.”
Time passed. “She’s not here, Eliot. I told you. If there was anything bigger than a squirrel moving around in here, we’d know it.”
“Rabbit. There are no squirrels in Australia.”
“No . . .” The kid broke out in laughter. “No squirrels? Are you shitting me?”
“No.”
“Well maybe I’ll fucking move here! It’s starting to seem like fucking paradise!”
“Keep it together.”
The kid’s breathing came harsh and ragged. “You’re right. You’re right.” He steadied. “I’m going in.” There was a scrape. The ambient noise altered, thickening. “I’m inside.”
“Tell me everything.”
“There are lines on the floor. Colored lines. Man . . . well, I guess I’ll follow the red one. For Emergency. There are so many bodies . . . it’s hard to avoid them. Jesus fuck. I am never getting this smell off me.” Shuffling. “Doors are propped open with bodies. I’m in a corridor. It’s getting darker. The, ah . . . yeah, the lights don’t work. Just confirming that. There’s . . .”
“What?”
“There’s a skull with an ax in it.”
“An ax?”
“Yeah. A red ax. For fighting fires. I can see where someone pulled it out of the case. Someone broke the glass and took the ax out and buried it in this dude’s head. Hey? Eliot?”
“Yes?”
“I’m taking the ax. Okay? I just . . . I’d feel better if I had it with me. So I’m going to put down the phone for a minute to pick up the ax.”
“Okay.”
The phone went clunk. He heard the kid grunting, then a brief squeal. “You there?”
“I’m here.”
“I got it.” The kid laughed. “I just pulled a fucking ax out of a skull.” He exhaled. “I feel better. I feel kind of badass. Hey. I just had an idea. I’m going to take a picture of this shit, send it to you.”
“On your phone?”
“Yeah.”
“Can you do that without ending the call?”
“I don’t . . . uh . . . not sure.”
“Then don’t do that.”
“I’ll send it and call you right back.”
“Do not hang up the phone.”
“Okay. Jesus. Okay, okay. Just an idea. I can see the doors to Emergency up ahead. Double doors. Lots of . . . oh. I just figured out what this black stuff on the walls is.”
“Blood.”
“Yeah. Lots and lots of blood.” A pause. “Is that . . . ? Yeah. That’s them.”
“Who?”
“An extraction team. I know these guys. I mean . . . I saw their video. You know these people in black suits Yeats uses sometimes? The soldiers with the goggles? They’re supposed to be screened against compromise.”
“Yes.”
“It’s them. Some of them, anyway. They’re not wearing their goggles. They . . . they’re pretty messed up.”
“How?”
“They’re tangled. In each other. Their faces are black. Dried blood. They don’t have any eyes. I don’t know if . . . I don’t know if that’s decomposition or if . . . or what.” His voice shook. “They look like they went through a fucking shredder, Eliot.” He realized the kid was crying.
“Campbell—”
“But they weren’t poets. That’s the difference. I’m the king of defense.”
“Come back. You can report in what you’ve learned. Try again tomorrow.”
“No. No.”
“Yeats can wait another—”
The kid’s voice rose. “Eliot, you have no fucking idea what’s required, okay? You’ve been in the fucking desert and you don’t know. I am not telling Yeats I got this far and left. That is not fucking happening, and if you had half a clue you wouldn’t suggest it.”
“Not all of us agree with Yeats.”
The kid sucked air awhile. “I could have your head, Eliot. I could have your head on a plate for what you just said to me.”
“I know that.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” Seconds passed. “Doors ahead. Closed double doors. Sign says Emergency.”
“Campbell, please.”
“I want to hold the ax in two hands. I’m going to wedge the phone under my ear.” There was a scraping. His breath came in gulps. “Hey, Eliot?”
“Yes?”
“I appreciate it. Saying that about Yeats. That’s good of you.”
“Campbell, please stop.” Command words rose in his mind. Weak, over the phone. Probably pointless.
“If anything goes wrong, I want you to tell Yeats I was cool under pressure,” said the kid. “I’m opening the . . .” There was a squeal of hinges.
“What do you see?”
The kid’s breathing.
“Campbell? What do you see? Talk to me.”
The phone barked into his ear. He jerked it away. By the time he brought it back, there was nothing but dead air. It had hit the floor, he thought; that was the noise. The kid had dropped it.
He thought he heard a faint squeak: the kid’s shoes? “Campbell?” He said the kid’s name again, and again, and again, and there was nothing.
• • •
Eliot waited against the car as the sun settled behind him and heat bled from the air. He didn’t expect the kid to return. But he was giving him the chance.
Why are you here, Eliot? You see where the organization is going. You know what’s coming. Yet here you stand.
In an hour, it would be dark. Then he would climb into the car, drive four hours to his hotel, and phone Yeats. He would tell him Campbell had not come back, keeping his voice empty, and Yeats would express his sorrow, in the same tone.
Emily, Emily, he thought. Where did you go?
Something shimmered on the road. He squinted. The haze had lifted, but the wind blew dust into his eyes. Then he was sure: Someone was coming. Eliot straightened. He raised a hand. The figure didn’t respond. There was something odd about the way it was moving. Its gait was lopsided. Not Campbell? But it had to be. There was no one else out here.
A minute passed. The haze condensed into Campbell. The reason he was lopsided was that he was carrying an ax.
Eliot returned to the car, opened the glove compartment, and retrieved his gun. By the time he returned to the fence line, Campbell was two hundred yards away. Eliot could see his expression, his focused emptiness.
He stuck the pistol into his waistband and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Campbell! Stop!”
The kid kept coming. His shirt was soaked with sweat. Wet, matted hair poked from beneath the THUNDER FROM DOWN UNDER cap. He had lost a shoe.
“Campbell, drop the ax!”
For a moment, he thought the kid was obeying. But no: He was hefting the ax over his shoulder. Fifty yards. Close enough to smell.
“Vestid foresash rai
ntrae valo! Stop!”
The kid shambled through the words like they were water. Eliot drew the gun.
“Stop! Campbell, stop! Valo! Stop! Valo!”
The kid’s lips stretched back. The tendons along his forearms tightened. The ax rose. Eliot squeezed the trigger. The kid grunted. His expression didn’t change. Eliot pulled the trigger twice more. The ax clanged to the blacktop. The kid fell to his knees. He tried to rise, grunted again, and fell face forward onto the road.
Eliot sank to his haunches. The sun had almost set. The world was awash in orange. He rose and began to load the kid’s body into the car.
• • •
He buried the kid in the desert and drove through the night. When the city lights rose, he couldn’t stand it anymore, and pulled over onto the shoulder and climbed out. He leaned on the car and dialed, inhaling night air. Cars whizzed by. “Yes?”
“It’s Eliot.”
“Ah.” He heard a tinkling: ice in glass. “How are things proceeding?”
“Campbell’s dead.”
He heard Yeats sip at his drink. “Do you mean he failed to return?”
“I mean I shot him in the chest.” He closed his eyes, but that was no better, so he opened them again. “I mean he came out of there carrying an ax and I shot him.”
“You sound unsettled.”
He dropped the phone from his ear. When he could, he raised it. “I’m fine.”
“You’re saying Campbell came back insane. Is that correct?”
“Yes. Insane. Compromised. Something.”
“Do you know how it happened?”
“He made it to the Emergency Room. We were talking. Then he just stopped.”
“How did he sound up to that point?”
“He was cool under pressure.”
There was silence. “It’s so intriguing,” Yeats said. “What I would give to know what she did in there.”
He waited.
“Come home, Eliot. It’s been long enough.”
“I haven’t found Woolf.”
“Woolf is dead.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Stop believing what you want to believe. It’s unbecoming. You’ve found no trace. Your assignment is terminated. Come home.”
He laid his head against the cold metal of the car and closed his eyes. “Yes, sir.”
• • •
A dot appeared in the snowscape. A car? Yes. Eliot checked his coat, made sure the gun was out of sight.
Behind him, Wil’s footsteps clattered down the airplane steps. That was quick, Eliot thought. He must have thought of something.
“What happened to being worth it?” Wil shouted. “Isn’t that what you said to me? Those people who died back there, I had to make myself worth it?”
Eliot didn’t answer.
“Is that a car?”
Wil’s shoes crunched toward him. He stopped beside Eliot, hugging himself. Eliot glanced at him. “Don’t leave me, you motherfucker,” Wil said.
“Fine.”
“What? So . . . we’re good? We’re staying together?”
“Yes.”
“Then what the hell was that before? Was that a joke?”
The car slowed. Eliot saw glassed-in faces gaping at the plane. “This will be easier if you’re calm.”
“Are you fucking with me now? I’m trying to deal with . . . magical, killer poets and you’re fucking with me?”
“I reconsidered,” Eliot said. “You made a good point.” He walked toward the car.
GHOST TOWNS: #8: BROKEN HILL (AUSTRALIA)
Following discovery of the world’s richest zinc-lead ore deposit in 1883, Broken Hill became one of the world’s largest mining towns. At its peak, up to thirty thousand residents lived here, many employed by the Broken Hill Proprietary Company (BHP).
Following exhaustion of two primary mines in the 1970s, however, the town began to decline. Several smaller mine sites remained viable, but isolation—the nearest city is three hundred miles away—and the inhospitable environment contributed to a steady fall in population.
In the early afternoon of 14 August, 2011, the zinc-lead refinery, situated near the heart of the town, experienced a catastrophic explosion followed by a rapid, hot-burning fire. Reports suggest a river of deadly methyl isocarbonate flowed down the main street. Within the next few hours, all three thousand residents died from toxic fumes. Several emergency services teams that entered the town in the ensuing hours were likewise overcome.
The town is currently fenced off at a radius of five miles and expected to remain uninhabitable for the next two hundred years.
From: http://nationstates.org/pages/topic-39112000-post-8.html
Re: broken hill conspiracies???
what people don’t realise about broken hill is alot of the people didnt die from fumes at all at least not directly. it was the panic when they realised what was happning and couldnt get out my uncle was on the first perimeter team and he said people were killing each other in there
[TWO]
She sat in a red leather armchair and watched a fish. The fish was in a tall hourglass, with water instead of sand. Every few seconds a drop fell from the top to the bottom with a plink she could hear only because the room was a mausoleum. The fish wandered around, ballooning as it approached the curved sides and shrinking away again as it neared the center. It didn’t seem to care that its world was shrinking one drop at a time. Maybe it was used to it. When the water level was low enough, the hourglass must tilt, swing the fish to the bottom, and start refilling one drop at a time. Some kind of art, she assumed. It was installed in the middle of this room with no other function; it had to be. It was making some point about time or rebirth. She didn’t know. She shouldn’t be thinking about the fish anyway. She was in a situation.
Charlotte had driven her, deposited her in this room, and clack-clacked off into the depths. Charlotte had not spoken during any of this, not one word, even though Emily tried to provoke her. There was a disturbing softness about Charlotte this morning. A kind of sympathy in her silence, which Emily did not like at all.
She wished Jeremy were here. She wished there was some possibility of this day ending in his room, her telling him about it. You would not believe this fish hourglass they had, she’d say. And Jeremy wouldn’t say anything but she would be able to tell he was interested.
Her time at the school was over. That was what Eliot had said. But no one had made her leave. They’d put her in a different room and in the morning a fresh school uniform was hanging on the door. Then Charlotte, soft and silent. Emily didn’t know how to reconcile all this.
She was giving serious consideration to running. Many problems, Emily knew, could be solved through running. She was not exactly sure which way led to the street, since she had arrived here via an elevator from the underground garage, but still. It was worth keeping in mind as an option. She stared at the hourglass. Plink. Plink. She couldn’t see a tilting mechanism. But it must move soon, because the water level was getting pretty low.
She heard heels and identified them as Charlotte’s. It was her last chance to flee and she let it pass. Charlotte emerged and crossed the room without looking at her. She opened a door and waited.
Emily rose. “Are we leaving?” Charlotte did not respond. She looked at Emily and her eyes made Emily feel like she had made a mistake not running. But it was too late for that. She would get out of here one way or another. She always did. “O-kay,” she said, and went through the door.
Charlotte took her to a stairwell and finally to a door marked ROOF. She opened this and Emily stepped out into sunshine.
The roof was maybe a hundred yards to a side, with gardens and a pool and a tennis court. Like a floating resort. And she could see other rooftops floating in the sky around her, and they were all the exact same height, because this was Washington. She marveled at this for a moment and the door clacked shut behind her. She turned and Charlotte was gone. “Hmm,” she said.
br /> She began to explore the gardens. There was a noise like: schock. Following this, she came upon a man in light gray pants, no jacket, standing with his back to her, straddling a green mat. His knees were slightly bent. He was holding a golf club. She stood very still, because even from here she could tell it was Yeats, the man Jeremy had promised her she’d never have to speak to, who had shark eyes.
He swung the club. Schock, and a golf ball arced into the air. She watched it, thinking it was going to land on one of those other buildings, but they were farther away than it seemed. The ball fell below the horizon of the low rooftop wall. That would be kind of dangerous by the time it reached ground level, she felt. Kind of like a bullet.
Yeats turned to her. To her enormous relief, he was wearing sunglasses. He almost looked normal. Or not normal, but like a politician—a congressman or senator, someone who might tell her the country needed cleaning up. More solid than normal. He wasn’t smiling but didn’t seem angry, either. He was just looking at her.
“Hi,” she said.
He took a white cloth and began to clean the end of his club. This took a while and his eyes didn’t move from her, as far as she could tell.
She shifted from one foot to the other. “Charlotte brought me here but—”
“Vartix velkor mannik wissick. Be still.”
Her mouth snapped closed. It happened before she realized what she was doing. The surprise was that it felt like her decision. She really, genuinely wanted to be still. It was the words, Yeats, compromising her, she knew, but it didn’t feel like that at all. Her brain was spinning with rationalizations, reasons why she should definitely be still right now, why that was a really good move, and it was talking in her voice. She hadn’t known compromise was like this.
Yeats took a golf ball from a basket and dropped it to the green mat. He positioned himself, raised the club. He struck the ball and watched it sail into the distance. When it disappeared, he returned to the basket and did it again. He wasn’t watching where those balls landed, she noticed. It wasn’t like he was taking some kind of perverse joy in turning golf balls into bullets. It was more like he didn’t care. She had misjudged this whole situation. She had thought it was going to be about her. That hourglass in the lobby, she realized, that didn’t tilt. It was someone’s job to come by twice a day and replace the fish.