18 #2
It was a tube gate, and the red paint was flaking. It ran across a cattle guard, and the ditch below was choked with winterkill. A chain with a padlock secured the gate.
“Well,” Jem said, voice bright, “looks like we’re climbing again.”
Tean nodded.
“Unless you brought bolt cutters?” Jem asked and then he laughed.
“No,” Tean said. On the other side of the gate, a dirt road ran into the line of cottonwoods.
If any of the buildings from the videos were still standing, they were behind that screen of trees.
And if Scott was right and Kai and the others were hiding here, they were hidden back there.
They might even be watching Tean and Jem right then. “Do you think they know we’re here?”
“If they’re in there,” Jem said, “it’d be hard not to. I haven’t seen a car in almost half an hour, and they must have heard us coming.”
Tean nodded. The wind was picking up. It rippled through the cottonwoods and made the sage tremble. Dust whipped up from hardpack, and then the wind changed, and the cloud snapped sideways like someone had jerked on an invisible string.
“So,” Jem said, and some of that glittering edge dropped from his voice, and he sounded more like the real Jem, “the question is: do we still go in there?”
“I think we have to.”
“This is when it’d be really nice to have the police do their jobs.”
“Yes. Well. They took the tip when I called. I suppose we could leave it at that.”
“Oh yeah,” Jem said. “I’m sure this is a top priority for them. Meanwhile, these fuckos just keep doing whatever they want, which includes—for some reason—wanting to kill Amy.”
Tean unbuckled his seat belt and opened the door.
The cold was like something he’d forgotten, and the wind felt like it was pulling him out of the car.
It whistled across the open floor of the basin and then tangled in the trees, sending the branches thrashing, the remnants of last year’s leaves hissing as they tried to pull free.
Tean could smell water in the air, and the vegetable rot of the winterkill in the ditch, and then, like he’d put a razor in his mouth, juniper.
He turned, trying to spot it; it must be nearby.
Metal chimed as Jem stepped onto the cattle guard, and Tean moved to join him.
Jem hauled himself up the gate’s tubular frame, and the gate swung and clanged as the chain pulled tight and the gate rocked back again.
Tean steadied it as Jem finished his climb and hopped over, and then Jem held it for Tean as he followed.
They raised puffs of dirt as they followed the road toward the cottonwood. The wind was louder. A crack rang out—
Gun.
—and Jem grabbed Tean’s arm, laughed, and Tean muttered, “Branch.” Because there, in front of him, it tumbled out of the cottonwoods, snapped off by the wind.
The sound of the trees was louder when they moved under the canopy, swallowing up the tread of their steps. Dead leaves thrashed overhead, and their frantic movements sounded somewhere between a vibration and a rattle. The water smell was stronger. The underbrush was thin and bare.
The first roof came into view. And then another.
Jem put a hand on Tean’s chest, holding him back while Jem moved forward. He still had his hands in his pockets, but Tean recognized how Jem was holding himself: ready to fight. Ready to kill, if it came to that. And the wind was only getting louder.
In a clearing on the other side of the trees, they found the ranch.
To Tean’s surprise, it looked much as it had in the videos: a cluster of frame buildings slowly toppling under the weight of the years.
There were differences, yes. One of the cottonwoods had fallen, landing across the path that led between two of the buildings.
And the sun-bleached shiplap looked silver in the midday light.
But the roofs were still balding, and the porches sagged with dry rot, and the windows gaped like empty sockets.
No one was here.
“They’re not here,” Jem said.
Even though Tean had thought the same thing only a moment before, he asked, “How do you know?”
Jem shrugged. “I don’t know, I—” He paused. His face was blank, like his mind was somewhere else—somewhere out there, searching. Finally he said, “I don’t think they’re here.” For another moment, a long one, he said nothing. And then gave a tight laugh. “This place is fucking with my head.”
Tean opened his mouth to say something—something reassuring, something trite, something about how there was no reason to be afraid and all the stuff about paranormal activity was just bunk.
But the words wouldn’t come. He couldn’t bring himself to believe that aliens—or space wolves—visited this place.
But there was something strange about it.
The words for it, as old-fashioned as they sounded, were simple: it made his skin crawl.
Or as Jem had put it, it was fucking with his head.
They weren’t here. They weren’t. Nobody could live like this; there’d be some sign, tents, something.
But—
But what?
Jem roused himself first, shaking his head like he was clearing something away, and then beckoning for Tean to follow.
They circled the fallen cottonwood and worked their way past the buildings.
One had clearly been the farmhouse, a two-story structure.
One corner of the building was gone—Tean suspected another deadfall, long years ago—and empty window frames and a missing door gave plenty of lines of sight inside.
Not that there was much to see: the interior had been stripped down to the boards, and aside from moldy plaster and a rotting floor, there was nothing left.
The next building was smaller, barely more than a shed with rusting machinery inside it.
When Jem glanced at Tean, he whispered, “Pump house. For the well.”
And he wasn’t sure why he whispered.
They passed two more sheds. One still had the doors on it, but both were empty, and the only thing they found was a rat that squeaked at Jem.
Jem shouted, “Oh fuck,” and jumped about six inches straight up, and when Tean laughed, it was too much laughter, and it felt off.
Because he wasn’t laughing, not really. It was the skin-crawling.
The mindfuck. It was all of that, trying to get out in a laugh.
Beyond that central cluster of structures, the ranch spread out into the basin.
There was a barn with Indiangrass growing up around it.
There was a building that Tean suspected had been some sort of metal shop, maybe even originally a blacksmith’s forge.
Other buildings. A wash hut. A fruit packing shed.
He was guessing, because they all had that same worn look, walls falling, shutters torn away to expose empty interiors, the wood shining like it’d been sanded down to glossy bone.
They saved the barn for last.
“They fall down,” Tean said.
“What?”
“Barns. Old barns. They collapse. They weren’t built to the same standards, and the structure is wood.”
“Tean, everything is falling down.”
“I know. But this one will probably fall down on top of us. Because we’re going to have to go inside.”
The look Jem shot over his shoulder was not happy.
“I think,” Tean amended. “You’ll see what I mean.”
“Fuck me,” Jem muttered, but he started toward the barn.
“It’ll probably collapse right when we reach the center,” Tean said. “So there’s no chance for us to escape.”
“I’m pretty fast,” Jem said without looking back. “I might make it.”
“You won’t,” Tean told him. “A rafter will fall on you and pin you.”
“Shit. Well, okay. I guess if a rafter falls on me.” He stepped around a plow that had been left to rust in the waist-high grass. “What happens then?”
“Well, if we’re lucky, there’s a freak lightning strike.”
“That thing would go up in a snap,” Jem said.
“Exactly. And then we’ll have two to three minutes of agony. And then we’ll be dead.”
“But we’ll be dead together. That’s pretty cool.”
“Well, it’s not cool so much as it is extremely painful.”
“What happens if there isn’t a freak lightning strike?”
“I suppose we’d die more slowly. It could take days or weeks depending on our injuries.”
“Weeks?” Jem stomped down on a patch of nettles. “Fuck that.”
“It could definitely take weeks. If it rains. Or snows. And we can keep ourselves alive with water.”
“Or we have to drink our own pee.” Jem perked up. “That would be badass.”
“No, that would be disgusting.”
“But we’d be alive.”
“But only to prolong our suffering. And eventually, we’d die anyway.
And some billionaire will probably buy this place.
And they’ll set up a fracking operation.
And that’s how we’ll spend eternity, as silent witnesses to some asshole raping the earth so we can continue to rely on petroleum products that will keep the same people wealthy and in power until, presumably, we destroy ourselves either by poisoning the planet to an unlivable degree or in some kind of world war or nuclear winter. ”
Jem nodded. He looked like he was taking this all in. And then he stopped, hands on hips, and considered the barn. “You know what would be friggin’ awesome?”
“If we didn’t rape the planet?”
“This place would make a kick-ass Cracker Barrel. And then we could be ghosts. And we could haunt the shit out of people, but in a fun way. Like, what’s that game with the little wooden thingies?”
Tean thought he might be losing control of this conversation. “Uh, peg solitaire?”
“Yeah. We could really fuck up some games of peg solitaire.”
“Right, but there’s no such thing as ghosts—”
“And we could eat as much of those cheesy potatoes as we wanted.”
“I don’t think ghosts eat.”
“And they’ve got that candy that can break your teeth.” Jem nodded like this had somehow decided it. “Okay, cool. I’m down. Let’s do it.”
“Well, it’s not so much a ‘do it’ situation as a ‘have it be done to you’ situation, mostly with the barn collapsing on us.”
“I know, babe. But you’ve got to be proactive with shit like this.”