Chapter Text
It's five in the afternoon just outside of Corpus Christi and I and my poor old Elantra with the broken AC are stuck in a traffic jam because some dickhead decided he wanted to cut across five lanes of traffic and got mangled by a semi truck. And then the jam’s compounded by all of the damn lookie-looes slowing down to a crawl as they squirm through the two lanes still open, the metaphorical arteries of the gigantic beast that is the United States highway system, trying to get a good look at something gory on the way home.
I'm slowly melting into my seat, barely able to keep my eyes open. I keep glancing over at the water bottle I'd set snugly into the passenger seat, my cupholders being full with spare change and old receipts and little mini bottles of hand sanitizer, but just the way the sun's reflecting off of it makes me sick thinking about how warm the water must be by now.
I'm a few cars back from the wreck now. A police officer, looking sweaty and tired, steps out into the road, stopping traffic to let a couple of paramedics cross. A loud radio ad is playing in the car next to me and I look over. The guy in it looks about as done with this as I feel. I smile to myself, go back to watching the wreck.
The paramedics have stopped now and are talking to the policeman in the middle of the road. He looks annoyed, gestures at the cars ahead of him. One of the paramedics shakes his head and points back towards the smashed remains of the car on the side of the road.
The radio ad ends and the throbbing beat of Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire" comes on and I find myself singing along under my breath without even thinking about it.
Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnnie Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio...
Another paramedic joins the group in the middle of the highway and then they hustle over to the wreck. The police officer gestures and we move fractionally forwards, then stop again. The asshole in the giant pickup truck ahead of me has decided to stop and watch them peel the door off the crushed sedan like the scab off a fresh cut. I can see something pink and fleshy and hurt-looking inside, where the driver's seat ought to have been, and I look away quickly.
We didn't start the fire
It was always burning since the world's been turning...
In looking away I end up meeting the eyes of the guy in the car next to me. He's bobbing his head along to Billy Joel. When he sees me looking he stops and gives me a somewhat sheepish, embarrassed look. He's balding, looks about forty. A tired, haggard, sweaty face. I roll my eyes and smile at him and he smiles back. Someone behind me honks and I twist backwards and give him the finger, really slam it at him against the dirty rear window. We're rolling forwards so slowly that it's absurd to even honk, just people blowing off steam. I suppose on some level it's equally absurd to give him the finger for it, but whatever.
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
ARPANET, Free Tibet, what's in Mystery Flesh Pit?
Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, space monkey, Mafia
Hula hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go...
Wait. What?
Now that we're past the wreck the highway widens out. More lanes open and the guy next to me merges over to the left. Billy Joel's voice disappears into engine noises and honks and the sound of the wind whipping past my open windows, but I still keep thinking about the lyrics I had just mouthed along to.
What the hell is a Mystery Flesh Pit?
I glance over at the phone sitting in its holster on the dash but something about the way the car I’d just passed had crunched in on itself like a discarded candy wrapper makes me think better of it. I shift a lane or two to the right, get in line for my exit, and then I'm off the freeway. I make every light on the way to my apartment, all four of them, and it's just enough time that I forget about the line in the song. I jump into the shower and let the cold water run over me for fifteen minutes, which turns into thirty, which turns into forty-five, which turns into an hour.
When I get out I'm shivering but the warm Texas air blowing through my open window wraps me up like a hug and I don’t feel so cold. I shrug into a flannel shirt, leave it unbuttoned. I put my cigarette out, leave it crumpled in the ashtray, stifle my coughs. I’m still not used to smoking this much. I eye the half-empty pack laying on the table but I let it alone.
The letter I received yesterday is on the kitchen table where I'd dropped it. The envelope is still on the floor somewhere. I think about going back and reading it again, or going and finding the envelope and throwing it away, but I don't want to. There wouldn’t be a point.
It was strange, but after reading it I had felt the most calm and relaxed that I’d ever been. It felt like pieces falling into place, like a jigsaw puzzle being completed. Questions answered themselves and everything was so obvious. The fear only came later.
My phone buzzes; I see the name of the contact and let it ring. I don’t want to talk to him.
Outside, down in the courtyard, the old man two floors down from me is taking his dog for a walk. There is a vast darkened array of clouds closing in from the east and it already smells like rain, the wind is carrying it. I might take a walk too, later tonight.
I go back to the dresser and take my shirt off, slip a bra on, and then put the shirt back on. I almost light another cigarette, then I stop myself.
What the hell is a Mystery Flesh Pit?
I had almost forgotten. Almost, but not quite. Billy Joel got stuck in my head and while I'd been puttering I'd hummed along until I got to that verse. I had never really listened to the lyrics before, I guess; it’s one of those songs where you know the tune but you never really listen to it. The chant-like drone of all those landmarks in time blending together into just a meaningless babble like a catechism.
I shake my head and go get my laptop, type it into google half-expecting to find a porn site. A few travelogue type posts, a Wikipedia page...I click on that one and get hit with a redirect. Permian Basin Superorganism Containment Area? ("Mystery Flesh Pit" redirects here. For the defunct U.S. National Park, see...)
I read the page, and then I stop. The growing sense of unease I felt while I devoured the Wikipedia article is now almost too much for me to handle.
This can't possibly be real. This has to be a prank or something, some kind of internet joke gone out of control. I click on the link to the National Park and see pictures, too many and too high quality to be faked. It's like something out of a Michael Crichton novel but it's real. It has to be.
“The Permian Basin Superorganism (Immanis Collosseus),” I read, “is a subterranean organism unique to modern biology, being the sole occupant of the Phylum Immanemqa. The organism was discovered by a pilot well drilling crew in 1973; later efforts were made to expose more of the organism through drilling and surface mining explosives. The Permian Basin Superorganism is notable for its immense size, being the largest living animal on the planet, its equally immense age, and for the degree and sophistication of human exploitation concerning the animal, culminating in the opening of a National Park largely within the creature’s body, allowing visitors to descend within the Permian Basin Superorganism and…”
I read about gullets and bones and digestion, about an ancient animal of some kind living baked into the stone and earth outside of Gumption, Texas. I read about the sheer enormity of it, stretching miles around into the arid scrubland, I read about how a mining company turned it into a tourist attraction, splitting its throat wide open with metal retaining walls and letting people ride an elevator a thousand feet down into its insides. I read about ballast, some kind of secretion exuded by the creature that acts as a kind of panacea, healing afflictions untouchable by conventional medicine. They made great baths out of the glands that produced it, let people bathe in its diluted aphrodisiac waters. I read, finally, about the 2007 disaster that closed the park, when a pump failed to activate and drowned the thing, making it wake up – god, wake up? – and swallow almost seven hundred people, making it spew caustic vomit so high into the air that there are still pockets of it being found here and there nearly a hundred miles away, burning into the ground and poisoning water tables. And the way they managed to get it to go back to sleep is classified by the US Government. Did they nuke it? Christ, Gumption is only...okay, well, it's about five hundred miles away, so I guess I'm a little less concerned, but, god, this happened in the same state as me and this is only the first time I'm hearing about it. July Fourth, 2007...
I realize after a moment, with a strange little knot in my stomach, that actually, I did hear about it. I wasn't in the state in 2007. It was four years ago, I'd just gotten out of school and I was still in Oklahoma, but I remember my parents telling me about an earthquake at midnight that they'd felt, that woke them up, knocked a couple of things over. I had never known...
I feel a little like I've just woken up and gone to the bathroom and looked outside and all of a sudden the sky is a bright green, and everybody I ask about it just looks at me really strangely and says that it's always been green.
I google my way all over the internet, looking at photos people have taken decades ago on their family trips, hosted on filesharing sites or on ancient GeoCities pages. I see smiling families, people in hiking gear, people swimming inside biological hot springs, people digging pitons into great sheer walls of flesh, not minding the blood that gushes out. I see a shaky video someone's taken of their television, of CNN back on the Fourth of July, 2007. I see a vast bloody pit, carved into the great flat nothing of central Texas.
I feel like my head is spinning. I get up, get away from the computer, grab another cigarette and smoke it slowly, standing on the balcony, looking out over the sprawling cityscape in the general direction of Gumption, Texas, or at least where I think it should be. If north is that way, then…
It can’t be real, but it has to be real. The sheer amount of effort that would have gone into faking all of this… I shake my head. Alright, it's real. There's enough evidence, photographs, videos, spread across so many different web sites that it would be impossible to fake. I look up an old rating list of National Parks, making sure that it's from around 2004 or so, and find Mystery Flesh Pit near the bottom. The tiny two-sentence blurb describes it as "strange," "horrifying," and "easily skippable.” I almost laugh.
And, of course, the ballast. Some kind of miracle liquid. I read on Wikipedia that they’d tried to synthesize it after July 4th, after the supplies had been cut off, but no matter how molecularly perfect they could make the compound it was so much drossy bathwater, without the power to cure even a hangnail. It has to come straight from the source for it to be any good - who knows why.
There is a slow, anxious curl unwinding in my stomach, and for a moment, I fear the results it may lead me to.
But I can’t keep myself from thinking it, can I? I can picture it now, a little antique or curio shop in dusty little Gumption, Texas, and within a dusty little bottle of ballast, waiting for me to buy it. My heart leaps and I cringe at myself.
Ballast. Something that stabilizes, balances, buoys up. I can feel my heart beating in my chest, the pulse thumping along at the base of my collarbone.
Hope isn’t something I had expected. I had been doing so well with the calmness, with the resolution. I had been able to believe that everything would be wrapped up for me neatly and tidily without having to get myself messy. My tears had dried up by now and the fear had mostly faded.
I look at the map I'd opened in another tab again; Gumption, Texas; a tiny little county named after a tiny little town. Now that I’m thinking about it, I vaguely remember passing through Gumption once, very briefly, during a family road trip back when I was six, but I don't remember much more than that. The only reason I even recognize the name of the town is because at the time I thought it was a funny name and I kept saying it to myself after I'd asked my mom what the word on the sign meant when we drove into town. Welcome to Gumption. Did it have more, perhaps? “Home of the Mystery Flesh Pit?” I don't remember visiting the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, that's for sure. I think that would have stuck with little six-year-old me.
I eye the scale on the map, use my fingers to estimate the distance from Corpus Christi to Gumption.
It'd be a solid day of driving, seven or eight hours on the road, not counting breaks for food, sleep, restroom. I grimace at the computer screen, then zoom the map out. Lubbock, though...I could take a plane to Lubbock. That'd be, what, like two hours? And then rent a car, drive down to Gumption...it’d be a hike but a more palatable one.
I swallow, then laugh at myself. Why bother? I think. Why bother driving down to look at some fences and security guards? It's closed off, the Wikipedia page said, nobody in or out, just some scientists and a sedative plant. The fun stopped when it woke up, back in ‘07.
But the ballast …
I stare at the screen for a moment, trying to will myself to just get up and go do something more productive, and then I google ‘corpus christi to lubbock nonstop.’
Flights are cheap. Ninety-nine dollars, ninety-five dollars. I start to type in the address to check my bank balance, but I don’t have to, I know I have enough. I fold the computer closed. I want a cigarette.
On my way out to the window my foot brushes against the envelope I'd left discarded on the floor and again I think of picking it up and putting it away, and again I leave it there. It doesn't really matter.
It'd be a horrible waste of money, probably. And I doubt I'd find anything really meaningful. Even if, you know, I use the excuse of going and looking around so I could write a story on it or something, I don't know if Jim, my editor, would really care that much. From what it seems, Mystery Flesh Pit is ancient history.
And it’s not like I’m really going there to look at the Pit, I remind myself. I look down at the smoldering cherry-red tip of the cigarette in my fingers and cough a little. There’s a scratchiness in the back of my throat; I try to think of how many cigarettes I’ve smoked today and I can’t come up with the number.
I stand there for maybe ten minutes before I get cold and shut the window, stub the cigarette out and stalk over to the kitchen. I take another look at the sheet of paper sitting on the table, curled over on itself like a dead spider. Fuck it, I think, then repeat myself out loud. I stub out the cigarette and go retrieve my cell phone, look up the phone number for American Airlines out of Corpus Christi airport. Fifteen minutes on hold later I am the proud owner of one business class ticket to Lubbock, Texas, leaving in four hours out of gate nine. I hang up the call and say "fuck it" aloud again because it makes me feel a little better, and then I go pack.
* * *
The plane ride was okay. I realized from the pleasant-unnerving swooping sensation in my stomach when we took off that it had been long enough since the last time I'd been on a plane that I had forgotten what it feels like. I was lucky to grab a window seat next to a little kid and his father; they didn't bother me as much as I'd expected. Once he turned to me to show me something on the handheld video game he was playing but his father quickly intercepted him and apologized to me; I was a little put out, honestly, I would have wanted to look at it. I'd forgotten to stick a book in my carry-on so I had been stuck staring out the window, and about a half hour in the plane had angled in such a way that the setting sun was glaring me right in the face and daring me to enjoy the scenery, so I did the most sensible thing I could and closed the shutter and tried to fall asleep. I think I managed to do so about fifteen minutes before we landed, which lead to me letting out a rather embarrassing yelp when the landing jolted me awake. The kid and his dad looked at me and I blushed, mentally kicking myself for blushing, but I smiled at them and shrugged and said that I'd fallen asleep and we had a laugh about it.
And then once we got off the plane I had spun in a circle in the fresh Lubbock night, staring at the sky, dark and vague and light-polluted, and then gone to look for a place to rent a car.
Lubbock is alright, I guess, if you don’t look at it too closely or stay too long. I consider driving to Gumption right away, but I decide after some deliberation that it'll be better to do a little reconnaissance here first, if I really am going to make a story out of this. Am I? I've been treating that as my excuse so far and yeah, I brought my voice recorder and my camcorder and my DSLR and plenty of memory cards and extra batteries...but I guess I hadn't really taken it seriously.
The city's very alive at night, more so, it seems to me, than Corpus Christi, but I also don't get out very much back home, so maybe my perception is skewed. Everywhere I look there are clubs and shows and bars and things, and then, as I pass into the seedier areas, huddled groups of people spotted here and there. I imagine they’re eying me as I drive past and I tamp down the little curl of fear rising in my stomach, telling myself not to be ridiculous.
I find a Motel 6 and then I try to find a Waffle House, but seemingly there aren’t any in Lubbock. I settle for someplace called The Pancake House, and then a couple hours after I feel better, and then a couple of hours after that I finally manage to fall asleep.
I wake up having slept like the dead. I think about going someplace for breakfast but think better of it after I sit up too quickly and my stomach gives an uneasy lurch in protest. I get dressed leisurely, not caring that it’s almost noon – it is my weekend, after all. For a moment I even manage to fantasize that I'll be able to catch a flight home in time to make it to work on Monday but then I laugh at myself, which I seem to be doing quite a lot of lately.
I don’t need to care about things like that any more, I think, and then I stop, rolling that thought around in my head. I don’t like it very much.
Barely a hundred miles away, Mystery Flesh Pit is waiting for me. I don't know what I'll find there but it feels nice to have a purpose for once, to feel as though my life is being put to some kind of use other than to see how many cigarettes I can smoke in a single day and still retain some dignity.
It's nice to not have to think.
I take a breath and throw some clothes on and get started on the boring part.
* * *
First stop: the guy mopping the floor at the bus stop.
"Excuse me, sir? Do you know anything about the Mystery Flesh Pit Disaster of 2007?"
"The what?"
Second attempt: businessman on the street, approached while tying his shoes.
"Excuse me, sir? I'm doing some research on the Mystery Flesh Pit disast –"
"I'm sorry, lady, I don't have any money."
Third try: lady at the counter of the pharmacy.
"Excuse me, ma'am? I'm trying to find out some information on the Mystery Flesh Pit, do you have a moment to talk about it?"
"Sure, honey, but I'm afraid I don't know that much about it. That was back in, what, 2003? 2004?"
"2007, actually. Did you ever happen to visit while the park was still operating?"
"It was a park? I just remember something about some sort of tunnel collapse."
"Right. Thanks for your time."
Fourth attempt (beginning to give up hope): guy at the 7-11, asked while filling up the tank on my car next to him.
"Hey, dude, you know anything about the Mystery Flesh Pit?"
"Went there once when I was a kid. Pretty cool. Why?"
"I'm a reporter, doing a story on it. You remember the disaster that closed it down?"
"It's closed now? That's lame. What happened?"
"Thing woke up and ate everybody."
"For real?"
"Yeah. I've been asking around, like nobody's heard about it. Kind of surprising."
He taps his finger to his chin. "You know," he says thoughtfully, "it has been like five years since then."
"Four years."
"Even so. People don't have any kind of attention span any more."
His pump clicks off and so does our conversation.
Yeah, alright, maybe it isn't a very representative group, but it seems like nobody cares. Is that reasonable? Well...seven hundred plus people died, most in pretty gruesome ways, according to Wikipedia. Then there were the, god, the thousand or ten-thousand-plus people affected by the vomit and ejecta scattered hundreds of miles away. I’m not sure. You'd expect that apathy from the rest of the nation, maybe, I don't know why somebody in Arkansas or Kentucky or Illinois or wherever would give a fuck if they didn't personally know somebody who was affected, but here? Just a hundred miles from the place or so?
I almost immediately snort and discard my suspicions. Americans don’t give a fuck, I think to myself. It would have gotten four, maybe five months of coverage and then it would have died. Shit, it might not have even been national news. It's only the little towns and places where the legacy of it will have really clung on. I know there has to be a story, somebody who was there, somebody who saw it. That jerky camcorder video of CNN is a start, but something real, something visceral, in the words of a survivor...
That was the one thing I didn’t find much of, when I was frenziedly googling everything I could about the Pit. No memoirs, no autobiographies, just a few mentions here and there but nothing like a back-to-front story of what that night was like. That is what I’m really after.
I put my cigarette out in one of those trashcan-cum-ashtrays that dot the corners of every city I've ever been to, Lubbock no exception. I get in the rental car and again forget that it has crank windows instead of buttons. "To the library, and step on it," I giggle to myself as I pull out into traffic. I feel a little lightheaded and I remember that I never bothered to eat anything today.
* * *
Perusal of the newspaper archives at the Mahon Public Library downtown confirmed what I'd already assumed – that there was no big government coverup, there was no conspiracy of that sort. The disaster at the Mystery Flesh Pit was capital-letter Very Big News for about three months, back in 2007, at least in the area. The stories towards the end of the third month cast a little light on why it didn't last, though – it wasn't ongoing, it was just sort of a one-and-done thing. Yeah, finding the caustic vomit everywhere kicked up another stink a week or so later but the Powers That Be apparently got that under control fast, at least in more populated areas. After that there were grumblings about disclosure and fault and blame and all that, and quite a few articles about Anodyne Mining or whoever going bankrupt but by the end of the month, aside from a few overly sentimental memorial pieces which were extremely vague about the exact causes of death of the people they were memorializing, the news had moved on.
A librarian pokes around the corner of the stacks with a cart and smiles at me; I smile back at her. She's young, pretty, long skirt, dark eyes. I scoot forward so she can pass behind me. I read on for a while, the faint swish of her skirt and the slim sliding sound of books going back into shelves registering dimly and pleasantly in the back of my mind. I put the paper down and stretch a little, and then I notice she's glancing over at me. I smile at her again.
"Doing some research?" she asks, and I nod.
"Yes," I say. "I'm a reporter for a paper in Corpus Christi and I'm doing a story on the Mystery Flesh Pit. Have you heard of it?"
As soon as the words pass my lips her face changes. There's something dark and guarded lurking in her eyes that makes me perk my ears up. She waits a couple of seconds before she answers, clearly thinking of what to say, of how much to tell me. I mention, after a moment, that I'm surprised that so few people here in Lubbock seem to really remember it or care about it, and she nods, leans up against her cart.
"It was a big deal for a while," she says, gesturing to the stack of papers next to me, "but after that I guess it just wasn't exciting any more. You ought to try Gumption. Here in Lubbock, they just had men in vans working overtime to clean everything up and then it was easy to forget about. Every now and then I hear about them finding another pile of that vomit somewhere just...festering away out there in the desert."
It’s a long shot, but I ask anyway. "Were you there that night?"
"No," she says, "but my brother was."
"I'm sorry," I tell her. I want to reach out and pat her arm or something but I don't know if she'd appreciate it, so instead I keep my sympathy subdued. "Is he - ?"
"No, no," she says quickly, "he's alright. He was a park ranger there, he just…happened to be working that night. He, ah...it really messed him up for a while," she says finally, giving me a grimace. "We haven't talked in a long time."
"I'm sorry," I say again. "That must have been hard, for both of you."
"Yeah," she says, cutting her glance downwards. "He always said some strange things about the disaster, real Alex Jones type stuff. But he just couldn't, you know, move on at all. We got in a big fight about it and, well, that was that."
I wonder what to say for a moment before I cross my legs, set the newspapers aside. "You must have gone there, then, while it was still operating."
"Yes, plenty of times."
"What was it like?"
She laughs softly. "God, that's such a...like, where do I even begin, you know? Have you been to many other National Parks?"
"A few," I tell her. "Not as many as I'd have liked. Crater Lake, Devil's Tower, Badlands, Petrified Forest..."
She laughs. "Real Midwest girl, aren't you?"
"Hey, Crater Lake is in Oregon, that's not the Midwest."
"I wasn't knocking it. Um. Well, it wasn't like any other park you've ever been to, I can guarantee that. It was like, you drive up to it and you park and you walk up these stairs to get to the main observatory building, and you get in there and you look down and there's just...skin,” she gestures. “Skin In a hole in the ground. It was extremely disconcerting. From that distance it didn't look real, it looked like it was plasticine or something, like it was a model. And there was something...I don't know, kind of lewd about it?"
"Lewd?"
"Yeah. The way they were spreading it open with these giant metal, like, flanges or whatever, and how it was all raw and pink around the opening...Freud would have had a field day with it. Made you feel like you were watching a gynecological exam."
"I still kind of can't believe they found this thing and thought opening a theme park was the best thing to do with it."
"It was the 70s, I guess," she shrugs. "Place is old, you know. Anyway, once you actually got down into it, it was...it was an experience. You rode this giant elevator down and they had a massive visitor center something like a thousand feet down inside the thing's throat, and you could look out the windows and see all this flesh outside. It was honestly like something out of a movie, it was so surreal. I went there a bunch of times with my brother cause he got an employee discount and I could get in for five dollars, and I saw at least ten people have panic attacks just on the way in.”
I think about my next question for a moment. "Would you say overall that it was, you know, a bad thing? Like, the park on the whole."
"No, absolutely not."
"Why's that?"
She thinks about it for a little bit. When she speaks her voice is hesitant but grows stronger quickly, like she’s finally giving voice to thoughts she’s had for a long time but never put into words. "I think that it's really easy to forget how small we are. Like, humanity. We've done all these great things, we've built civilizations, we've put people on the moon, we're exploring the bottom of the ocean, I think humanity in general likes to think that we have everything figured out." She shrugs. "The Mystery Flesh Pit is a really good reminder that we know basically nothing. I mean, they were studying it but they knew practically nothing about it, not how big it was, not whether there were more creatures like it elsewhere in the world, not where it came from, not even if it was awake or if it could move or what the thing looked like as a whole. I think what they ended up doing with it was stupid as hell, but as far as the experience of actually going down inside of it and walking around on a trail and, I don't know, watching macrobacteria roll past outside the fence or seeing something really weird moving around down there and seeing the park ranger guiding you not know what it is either, that's an experience I genuinely wish everybody got to have. It'll change your life."
"How did it change yours?"
She laughs. "Besides, you know, everything with the disaster and my brother and all that shit? Just going down there really made me realize who I was."
"How, exactly?"
She shakes her head. "Like I said, I figured out just how small I was and how – I don't know, how insignificant we really are. These days whenever I get worried or bothered or I stress out over something I think about standing there in the elevator looking up through the glass ceiling and watching the light get smaller and dimmer, like I was falling into a bottomless pit, and I find peace."
"Seems like an odd way to find peace."
"Different strokes, right? Anyway. I really ought to put these books away. Was there anything else you wanted to know?"
I think about it for a moment, then shrug. "I'm planning on heading down to Gumption tomorrow, aside from the pit itself is there anything else I ought to check out?"
She lets out a low whistle. "I think you're going to be very disappointed. They don't let anybody go to the Pit any more, it's all sealed off, has been for years. And Gumption, well...that town has seen better days. I'll give you a tip, though, even though maybe I shouldn't. Look for my brother there, I know he still lives in town. I can't give you his number or his address, unfortunately, because I don't have them any more, but I know for a fact that he works at the only gas station in town. It’s a 7/11, you can’t miss it. Ask around there and you might be able to find him. His name's Peter; I'd tell you to tell him I sent you but I kind of get the feeling that might not get you very far."
I thank her for the tip and set the newspapers aside. If I head out tonight I might be able to get some good shots of the fence around Mystery Flesh Pit. I think of it, of the sunset, then discard the thought. Forget it. I'll need a whole day to really dig into it, I think. And more's the better. I have plenty of batteries, I have plenty of storage. Easy girl, there's no rush. Assuming they let me just walk up and start filming, but if I really hype myself up I can half-believe I could talk my way into at least getting some shots of the fence, at the very least.
"Oh, and one last thing,” I say, tearing myself away from my reverie. “Do you have any idea if there’s a place in town where I could get some of the ballast?”
Immediately her face closes up and she shakes her head. “I don’t think you can get that any more,” she says, and though I prod her a little she won’t say any more about it.
* * *
The drive down to Gumption is dusty and hot and boring. I get about halfway before I realize I'm not driving my poor old Hyundai, I'm driving a rental car, and that it has a functional air conditioner, and then I feel very silly, for though the wind certainly felt nice on the whole I would have much rather just rolled the windows up and sat in the cool air. I see a grand total of four other cars, all coming from Gumption, on the two-hour drive. It's mostly a straight shot but at the end my phone tells me to take a county road that turns into just a dirt track that, after a little meandering, plops me out onto a back street of Gumption, Texas.
The research I'd done suggested that at one point Gumption had been a bustling little town, fuelled by the Pit’s tourist draw, and initially its size would indicate that it still is. But as I drove slowly through the empty streets, the general air of disrepair and decay became more and more apparent. I saw a couple abandoned houses, and not the foreclosed sort with realtor's signs out front, but straight-up shattered-glass, boarded-windows, holes-in-the-roofs abandoned. The ones that weren't just looked sad, like no one was taking care of them properly. The cars parked on the street were all at least five or six years old, as best as I could tell. I saw only two people out and about while I was driving around at 15 miles an hour, getting some video footage, cruising down the middle of the road, eyes flicking between the empty street ahead and the screen on my camera. One, a youngish-looking black guy, kept his head down and didn’t look at me, and the other, an old man in a wifebeater mowing his lawn, stared at me all the way down the street, until I turned the corner and pulled onto the main road.
I find the 7/11 immediately, right on the corner. I'm tempted to head to it right away but I refrain, and instead look for a diner or something, but the ones around look about as welcoming as the rest of the place. There's a McDonald's but it's so small it doesn't even have a drive-through, which is something I'd never seen before. There's a drug store and a liquor store and one of those tiny little storefront churches, something something Starry Wisdom. I think about going to McDonald's but instead change my mind, pull a u-turn, and head back to the gas station. The clerk, a haggard-looking woman, doesn't look up from her magazine when I walk in. I wander to the back and grab a Coke out of the fridge unit. The credit-card reader is broken so I have to dig around in my wallet and find some bills. The entire exchange continues without any speech at all until I work up my nerve and lick my lips and ask her if there's a hotel around here somewhere.
She looks at me for a few moments and then jerks her head towards the road. Her voice sounds like a frog croaking. "There's a motel down the road a ways. When you pull out take a left and turn at Third street."
"Thanks."
"No problem."
"By the way."
"Yeah?"
"Can you tell me when Peter works?"
I had to think for a moment to remember his name. I have it written down in a notebook but it's out in the car. Her eyes flash a little more lively. "Who's asking?"
I think of what to say for a moment before I shrug. "A friend."
For a moment I think she's going to tell me to fuck off, but something in my face must have convinced her. "He's off today. Come in tomorrow at eight or nine at night, he'll be here. He works graveyard most days."
"Thanks."
"Don't mention it,” she says, and bends her head down to her magazine again as though I had disappeared.
I walk out the door and the heat hits me like a thrown punch. I blow a breath out and lean up against the rough cinderblock edge of the gas station building and drink my Coke.
It's four in the afternoon and it'll take me maybe half an hour to drive down to the Mystery Flesh Pit. It'll be cooler, too, in the evening, and if this town is any indication I doubt there'll be much of a line. I wonder where the people who work there live; maybe they have a dormitory there or something. Clearly they don't live here in town. Maybe there's some little patch of suburbs somewhere, behind those hills over there, perhaps, where all the people are, but it's four in the afternoon and I've seen a grand total of three other cars driving around, so maybe not.
The guy at the motel gives me a nicer greeting than the lady at the 7-11 did, although not by much; at least I get a few dirty molars of a smile out of him as he hands me the key to my room. I had to wake him up from his nap at the front desk in order to get the room to begin with, and though I tried to do so as gently as I could he still started and almost fell out of his chair.
"Here for the Pit?" he asks as I'm about to leave, and I turn back, glance at him.
"Yeah," I say after a moment. "Just going to see what's there now."
"You're heading over now?"
"Yes."
"Huh," he grunts after a moment. “I thought that -“ he starts, and then immediately cuts himself off. “You have a good stay, ma’am,” he says.
"What?"
"Nothing, ma'am. Now if you'll excuse me –"
"Wait, hang on –"
"You have a good day now, ma'am."
He disappears into the back room and I stand there, giving the door a dubious look. It strikes me very suddenly that I feel like I’m in the opening of a horror movie, before anything’s actually gone down. Then I laugh at myself.
I push the door open and let the heat swallow me up again. There's no sense brooding on it; the only thing to do is to move forward.
* * *
Before I head for the Pit, I stop by the antique shop in town. I can barely keep my heart from racing as I turn the car off and sit there in the cool air, staring through the window at the dark, dusty storefront. The sign proclaims that it’s open but the place looks dead as the rest of this town.
I sit there until the air turns stale and lukewarm, and then I get out, forcing myself to be calm. Inside, the place smells strongly of potpourri. It’s dark and cold in here, the AC going full blast, and I actually start to shiver a little from the abrupt change in temperature.
The antiques are fairly mundane, at least up at the front. Cups, souvenirs, postcards…I look around for someone at the counter but the place seems deserted. There’s a small scuffling sound from the back, around the corner, and I press deeper into the store, glancing down the hallway behind the counter at the front. All I can see is an emergency exit door at the far end, and a door flung open midway down, casting a bright rectangle of light onto the other wall of the hallway.
There are racks and racks of froufrou and other garbage. Some of it is marketed as being related to the Pit, although I can’t see how. Historic Gumption coffee mugs, a little snow globe with what I guess is a model of the Pit in it, looking a little like a blood-red turnip.
Footsteps sound from down the hall. I look up and see a tall, gaunt man, heavily whiskered, with a bolo tie and a bright checked shirt. He seems almost shocked to see me and hurries out, apologizing profusely. I hide my smile and tell him it’s quite alright, and so on, and then I ask if they sell any ballast.
His face falls. “No,” he says, his deep, twangy voice shaded with disappointment. “No, we don’t have any of that. They don’t take it out of the Pit any more.”
“They don’t?” I ask, trying hard to ignore the little stab of panic in my gut. “That’s a real shame,” I say carefully.
He shrugs. “Can I do anything else for you?”
He must get people in here all the time asking about ballast, I realize. That’s why he’s acting so disappointed. I grab the snow globe and bring it to the counter, and he gives me a big grin. “That’ll be $18.95,” he tells me, and I grab it out of my wallet and hand it over. As he’s bagging it, I nod at the globe.
“Does the Pit really look like that?”
He shrugs again. “Who knows?”
* * *
The drive down to the Mystery Flesh Pit is, if it were possible, even hotter and more boring than the drive down to Gumption. The heat is pounding on the window and begging me to let it in so I turn up the AC, trying to drown it out, but it's no use. No matter where I put my arm the sun is pouring down on me, and if I leave it still for more than a moment I get that unpleasant prickling sensation that tells me I'm starting to burn already. I've already got a pretty terrible driver's tan from the ride down but this is just overkill.
The snow globe is sitting in the passenger seat. I glance over at it every now and then, trying to imagine the enormity of the thing beneath me, wondering how far out it stretches. A mile, maybe two? Or is it bigger? It’s hard to comprehend.
No cars pass me on the long road that my phone assures me is the way to the Permian Basin Superorganism Containment Corporation. It's only wide enough for one so if someone did come by someone's going off the road. Hopefully not me, as this rental Toyota is not built for that sort of thing. It's already been complaining at me creakily and jostling me around. I'll have to get it a car wash or something when I get back to Lubbock, whenever that ends up being. I didn't read over the rental contract very closely but I'm pretty sure if I bring it back this dusty there's some kind of fee.
I can see the outline of the plant, growing larger up ahead. It looks unassuming, exactly like any other indecipherable cluster of industrial buildings you'd see along the side of the highway, all greyish-white, tubes and pipes and tanks and corrugation, warning signs and fences and barbed wire, power lines and scaffolding and light poles, all clustering out of the ground like mushrooms after a cold rain. The guard in the gatehouse is watching me as I pull up, but I turn off the road, turning the car around so I'll be ready to go whenever I need to, well away from the road so anyone trying to get in or out can get by without any trouble.
The sign on the fence broadly proclaims that this is the site of the Permian Basin Recovery and Superorganism Containment Corporation, and says that the administration building is to the right, along with the barracks, infirmary, commissary, and so on.
I get out, shut the car door, take my camcorder with me. I keep it on but held low, taking a shot of my feet. I wander up to the gatehouse and the guard steps out, hand on the butt of his pistol, resting loose but confident. He has an MP helmet on and I wonder whether the National Guard is in charge of security or something, and then I wonder if I'm about to get got for trespassing. Surely there'd be more of a commotion if I was, right?
The guard has a sharp face but disconcertingly watery eyes. "Hi," I say.
"This area's off-limits to civilians, ma'am," he tells me.
"I'm not trying to get in," I assure him. "I'm a journalist, I just want to take some photos. Is that okay?"
He relaxes a little, points up and down the fence. "Right now," he says, "you're on public land. You go over that fence, you're trespassing on Federal land. Understand?"
"Yessir," I grunt, reflexively. Some old habits never die.
"You can take photos of whatever you like except for people inside the fence, understand? Before you leave I will check your camera."
"Yessir."
"Any questions?"
"Can I take a photo of you?"
"Am I inside the fence?"
"No."
"Then yes, you can."
I bring my DSLR up, snap a picture of him. He gives me a cheesy grin. I look at the display and then back up at him. "You blinked."
"Better take another."
I do so. "You know," I say to him, "this is a much more civil interaction than I expected it to be."
He pauses, halfway back to the guardhouse, to shrug at me. "You're just lucky that the government doesn't also own the land around the park. On most military bases it's like that, you know, they own a hundred-foot radius out from the fence, but here it's different."
"Cause it used to be a National Park?"
"I believe so."
"Do I have to stay in your sight or anything?"
He shakes his head. "No, there are cameras. Just make sure you don't touch the fence, it's electric."
I look at the sign on the fence again; I'd sort of skimmed over it before but a few more things catch my eye this time, especially the bright red one proclaiming that it's charged to 10,000 volts. I whistle. "Y'all really don't want people getting in, huh?"
"It's dangerous."
"So I've heard. Want to do an interview?"
"Can't do that, ma'am. What paper are you with?"
"Corpus Christi Star-Tribune."
He raises his eyebrows. "You're a long way from home. What brings you down to Gumption County?"
I briefly explain what got me interested in the Mystery Flesh Pit and he nods. "Lot of people seem to have forgotten about this place. It's for the best, I'd say."
"Care to elaborate?"
"No, ma'am," he says, but not unkindly. "I can't talk to reporters."
"Come on," I wheedle. "Who'd know?"
"We're on camera," he repeats.
"Fair enough," I shrug.
He gets back in the guardhouse and I run a hand through my hair and turn my attention to the fence. I take a shot of the gates, of the fence, of the signs on the fence, of the great bulging buildings visible through the fence. I get a nice one of the fence extending along into the horizon, a great metal wall bisecting the flat, hot plain of West Texas earth, extending into infinity, it seems, a shimmer of heat distortion bubbling off of it down in the distance. I get another good one of the sun dipping downwards behind the plant, swallowed by it, casting shadows across my face, long spidery ones that scrape the ground. Then, once I'm at about fifty-percent capacity on my memory card, I put the camera away and sit there on the trunk of the car, kicking my heels idly against the gravelly ground, taking it all in. I read the sign again and I call out to the guard. After a moment he comes out of the gatehouse again.
"What is it?" he asks.
"What's that sign mean?" I ask him, pointing to it. He turns, looks at it.
"I don't think it's very ambiguous," he tells me, and I roll my eyes.
"No, I'm serious. What the hell does it mean? 'Over 500 people die each year attempting to commune with the Organism?' What does that - ?"
"Ma'am, I really can't talk about it."
I look at him carefully but he seems serious, and the sign, well...it's a sign on an electric fence on federal property, so surely it's serious as well. I turn my camera back on and snap a photo of it, then I realize that there's a bit of background noise, coming slowly closer. It's the rumbling of an engine.
There, down the road, is an unmarked white Ford van. It flashes its brights at me and I step out of the road, let it pass by, while the guard at the gate straightens his uniform. It pulls up to the gate and the guard leans in. He and the driver have a brief conversation before the guard steps back and reaches into the booth to open the gate. The gate opens but the driver of the van sticks her head out and looks back at me. She’s deadly pale, with a pointed, aquiline face that calls to mind the edge of a knife. Even in the growing twilight I can see her eyes are a clear, bright blue.
"And you, what are you doing here?" she calls, and I get up, a little surprised to be addressed so abruptly. The guard comes out in a hurry, shaking his head.
"Ma’am," he starts, but the lady in the van isn't having any of it.
"Shut up for a second," she says. "Honey, what're you doing out here?"
"I'm –"
"Ma’am, you really shouldn't –"
"Honey," she says, leaning further out of the van, “how have you been feeling? Is there a pull?”
"A pull?" I ask, bewildered. I get a prickly feeling all up and down my spine, like I'm hearing something I ought not to.
"Ma’am," the guard says, urgently now, "she's a reporter."
The woman's mouth snaps shut so quickly she might as well have been a cartoon character. She flushes an angry red and glares at the guard as though she wants to say something but instead she just ducks her head back through the window of the van and drives through the gate, which closes after her. I shake my head.
"I suppose," I say after a moment, "that you aren't going to tell me what he meant?"
"Not a chance."
"Well," I say, getting up and stretching, "it's been fun."
"You have a good night now."
"Am I going to get a visit from the Men in Black at my hotel room later?"
"I wouldn't worry about that."
"Riiiight." I waggle my eyebrows at him. "That's exactly what they'd want me to think."
He laughs. "You’ll be fine," he says, but I do not feel entirely reassured.
* * *
I drive back to Gumption with the setting sun blazing in my rearview mirror. It slips out of view entirely and coats the sky in dusky purples that quickly fade to black, and then it's the figurative middle of the night. One-handed I manage to wriggle a cigarette out of the pack on the seat next to me and transfer it to my mouth and then feel around for my lighter, and then I groan and pull over. The guy at the rental desk at the airport had seen the pack of cigarettes in my hand while I was filling out the paperwork and told me very strictly that I had better not smoke in the car and I, of course, had managed to forget completely. It's a good thing I remembered before I lit up.
The night is cold but not unbearably so. I spend a long time there, leaning against the trunk of my car, cigarette in my hand but forgotten momentarily, staring up at the sky. There's so little light pollution out here that I can see what feels like all of the stars, practically, great scattered dustings of them sweeping across the whole of the night sky like someone had tossed them there. There's the Big Dipper, there's Orion, there's the Little Dipper... I think that bright one is Mars, maybe, it looks a little reddish. And that cluster there must be the Pleiades.
I take a breath and blow it out and realize exactly how tired I am. It's somewhere lurking in the back of my skull, right behind my eyes, coiled around my neck. If I closed my eyes I'd probably be able to fall asleep out here, right on the hood of the car.
I crack my neck and wince. The moon's bright and full tonight, at least, so I can still see the barren terrain all around me.
I consider the cigarette for a moment before I throw it to the ground and crush it out. I don't normally litter, really, I swear, but the exhaustion creeping over me is making me not care.
There's a long drainage ditch along the side of the road here, terminating in one of those white-concrete tunnels disappearing into the dirt, its mouth wide enough to swallow me whole if I felt like going down there. I stifle a yawn, kick a rock down into the ditch, and traipse around the side of the car, get in and start it up. From where I parked it, the headlights angle downward enough to reveal a sliced-pie cut of the inside of the tunnel and there, inside it, I see for only the briefest second a pale, wide-eyed face staring at me, along with a dark-jacketed body and a hand, curled there on the floor of the tunnel like a spider before, in a flash, the man retreats into the darkness deeper in the tunnel and is gone.
I can feel my heart beating out of my chest and I realize my mouth has dropped open. Real animal fear has seized me and my rational mind cannot jerk back the reins. I put the car into gear, fumbling first and sticking it in neutral, and then push the pedal all the way to the floor and roar off into the dark.
I was very lucky that there was no one trying to get to Mystery Flesh Pit that night, for I probably would have flipped the car trying to go around them. The closer I get to Gumption, the slower I drive, until finally I manage to get myself to stop the car just outside of town. I pull over again and get out, curling my lip at my shaking hands, and light up another cigarette.
It was just a homeless guy, hiding in a drainage ditch. I probably spooked the fuck out of him, pulling up right there on top of him and hanging out. He must be wondering what the fuck I was doing out there. Probably scared him more than he scared me.
Why did I wig out so bad anyway? I like to think I've got a pretty good nerve. Well, stress is a good excuse, I guess. Or perhaps it's because he was simply hiding down there, unknown, unnoticed, the whole time I was sitting there on the hood of the car, completely oblivious. He could have rushed out and attacked me, if he'd had the guts to, and I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it.
I take another drag at the cigarette and glare up at the stars again. Ursa Major, Orion, Pleiades. Sometimes, when it's quiet like this, I allow myself to think about what the coming year, or possibly years, will be like.
Whatever.
I crush the cigarette out and drive back into town, head back to my motel room. I feel better once I've showered and put on some shorts. I get into bed and pull the covers up, and even though they're the scratchy, weird-feeling covers used in seemingly every cheap motel in America, regardless of location, I drift off to sleep easily enough.