“I’ve had enough scenery to last me awhile,” he says, and takes a sip of whisky, making a point of not offering Dunaway a drink. “You didn’t answer my question.”
Jack’s eyes dart from the southern view to the Signalman, then back to the window and the desert rushing past on the other side of the tinted glass.
“I’m afraid you’re not going back to L.A. You’re getting off at Williams Junction. We have you flying out of Clark at six seventeen this evening.”
The Signalman wants to punch Dunaway in the face.
“I don’t fly,” he says.
“They need you at Groom Lake.”
“Fuck Groom Lake. I don’t fucking fly, you know I don’t fucking fly, and besides, Dispatch said I could stand down after running courier to Winslow. Send Vance.”
“We’re sending you,” says Jack Dunaway. He doesn’t sound annoyed or impatient; he just sounds bored.
“Fuck that. Send Vance.”
“Well, that would have been my first choice, but Vance is benched for the duration. Maybe longer.”
“What the hell for?”
“You got a lot of anger in you, you know that? A guy your age, that’s not so good for the ticker. All that anger and all the hooch.”
“Groom Lake is Vance’s neck of the woods,” says the Signalman, letting the observation about his temperament slide. It’s not like it isn’t true.
Dunaway glances at the bottle of J&B, then takes one of the disposable plastic cups from the sink and helps himself. He squints at the sunlight through the window.
“She came up red last night. She’s already in quarantine in Atlanta. Anyway, Albany doesn’t want Vance, they want you, and you’ll be on that plane.”
But the Signalman doesn’t hear that last part. He doesn’t make it past She came up red last night. Suddenly there’s an icy knot in his bowels that no amount of whisky’s ever gonna burn away. He stares at Dunaway, and Dunaway stares back at him.
“How’s that even possible? She went through decon. We were all clean.”
Dunaway shakes his head, sort of shrugs, almost smiles. “Man, you take the cake, you know that? After all these years, you’re still out here bothering with why and how. I don’t fucking know how it happened. She came up positive. That’s what they told me, so that’s what I know. How about you stop busting my balls?” He screws the cap back on the bottle and offers it to the Signalman.
You smug little shit, he thinks. When’s the last time you so much as got your hands dirty? The Signalman empties his cup, then refills it halfway. He sets the bottle on the floor by the briefcase, safely out of Dunaway’s reach.
“Anyone else?” he asks.
“Anyone else what?” Dunaway wants to know.
“Is Vance the only positive so far?”
“From the team, yeah. As far as I know. That’s all they’ve told me.”
“So nothing from California? No bad news from Bombay Beach?”
“Dude, if you’d bother to check in more often, you might be a little more up on current events. As far as I know, no cases in the hot zone. Of course, we both know that means next to zilch, what with the epidemiologists still stuck trying to suss out exactly what we’re dealing with.”
“We know what we’re dealing with,” says the Signalman, wanting a cigarette so badly, his hands are shaking.
Dunaway does that almost-laughing thing again. “Right, well, you’re just going to have to excuse me for not drinking Standish’s purple Kool-Aid. If you want to, go right on ahead, but I’m waiting for something a little more scientific than a madman’s gibberish about extraterrestrial mildew from Planet X.”
The Signalman takes out his half-empty pack of Camels, opens it, then puts it away again. Look at the bright side, right? With Williams Junction coming up fast, at least he can grab a goddamn smoke or five before they shove him onto the plane to Nevada.
“You’re just made out of bad habits, aren’t you?” smirks Dunaway.
The Signalman ignores him. “You weren’t there. You didn’t see it.” And he wants to start ticking off the long, long list of shit this thirtysomething asshole hasn’t seen and doesn’t know and apparently can’t imagine, but what’s the point. Here’s the next generation sitting across from him, the future of the Company just waiting around for the gullible old Cold War spooks like him to retire. The future so bright and all that happy crap. One good thing he can say for Barbican Estate, you don’t hear all this skeptical, rationalist mumbo jumbo from the agents of Y.
“Whatever you say. I’m just here to make sure you don’t find some way to fuck up and miss that flight. You want to believe in little green men, you go right ahead. Toss in the Easter Bunny, I won’t argue.”
“What about the case?” the Signalman asks Dunaway.
“It goes with you. I’ll take your report, you keep the case.”
The Signalman nods. “We didn’t used to be so damned sloppy,” he says. He’s thinking about Vance reading clean, then reading hot. And he’s also thinking about all the people he’s had contact with since he was released from quarantine: L.A., Winslow, the train and taxis, restaurants and bars, the hotel. What does that come to? Five hundred, maybe? More than? And all those people, how many have they had contact with? If he’s infected, how many thousands of opportunities has the contagion enjoyed at his expense? He shuts his eyes and concentrates on the rhythm of the steel wheels against the rails.
The end of the world as exponential growth.
“I don’t need a fucking babysitter,” he says.
“And I don’t need a gig as your keeper, but there you go.”
The Signalman doesn’t say anything else. He just keeps his eyes shut, trying not to think about Vance locked away somewhere and dying. Yeah, man, good luck with that.
6. The Beginning After the End (July 2, 2015)
“YOU ARE SO BEAUTIFUL,” Drew tells us, me and Madeline and all the faceless others. They have, to me, become faceless. “All of you, each one, so perfect. You are my dreams made manifest. We are the children of all the eons. You are the path unto deliverance. There are no accidents here.” I’d say that the television sounds like a waterfall, except I’ve never been to a waterfall, only heard them recorded, and recordings are only echoes, and echoes can lie. So, I’ll say that the television sounds like rain on the streets of a fallen city I’ll never have to see again. Not ever, and that’s a promise. We sit within the mandala Drew has scratched into the floor of the room with the television. My God, this room is filled with ghosts, and those are echoes, too. I can hear them, and I can see them. I don’t know if the others can. Last night, when I told Drew, when I only whispered about the ghosts because maybe they can hear me, he said it was a sign of the nearness of the star winds. That gave me chill bumps, sent something small and frightened scurrying across the grave that I will never have. And now, we sit here in the night with the television blaring white-static wasp voices and the night wrapped tight about the house like a wet towel. Drew reads to us from the Black Book. He has told Madeline (she has told me) that he found the book in Iran, where it had been hidden since the Achaemenid Empire, a.k.a. the First Persian Empire, in the year 352 B.C., when it was placed in the tomb of—well, he never reads the name aloud. Some things are like that, he assures us. You do not say some words out loud. You only know them, and you only dare mutter them in dreams.