American Elsewhere - By Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,151

leave, and soon.

She takes her boot off him and steps back a little. He is breathing, just barely. Mona has never killed anyone and she has no wish to start now, but abandoning him here might be a rough equivalent. Yet even she can see it’s not particularly wise to try to lug an unconscious man down a mountain in the desert, especially one who now has plenty of reasons to kill her.

“You’re on your own,” she says. “Sorry.”

She looks at his keys as she walks away. He seemed surprised to hear about a back door to this place. Which means he must have used another way in.

She walks until she feels a slight breeze on her face. She sees there’s a little more light down one hallway than the others. She walks toward it, and finds there’s a small, open door with a metal ladder inside, going up. Marked above it are the words EMERGENCY LADDER.

She starts climbing, the brilliant blue sky pouring in on her more and more with every rung. Then she heaves herself out.

The light is blinding after her hours in that shadowy place, but she’s never been so happy to be out of the dark. She shuts her eyes, then cracks them and opens them wider and wider until she can see.

She’s on the mesa top. She expected it to be a beautiful sight, but it’s the exact opposite: the mesa is covered with twisted, blackened metal debris, shards of missing structures, exposed piping. Something big was here, she thinks, and she recalls the telescopes from the mural in the lab. But this does not look like the careful work of a government reclaiming its investment. Whatever was here was destroyed, decimated. It is a war zone.

She fights a wave of vertigo when she realizes how high she is. The brown ripples of hills and mountains stretch for miles in every direction. She walks to the edge and sees she can easily climb down, if she’s careful. There’s a glint of metal from just a few dozen yards ahead, and she can see a huge truck parked on a dirt road winding around the mesa. It must have been the cowboy’s ride.

Then she stops. Thinks. And she turns around to examine the ruins on the mesa top once more.

Her perspective is a little better from here. She can see where the telescopes and the radio towers once stood. And perhaps Coburn himself once stood in this very place to watch the lightning in the sky.

But Mona’s not interested in any of that. What she’s interested in are the two huge, long depressions in the mesa’s surface. They are more than a hundred feet long, oblong with undulating edges, forming awkward figure eights among all the devastation. They don’t look natural, yet from the absence of piping or metal or concrete, they don’t look man-made. But the damage to the mesa top radiates outward from them, as if it had been struck by two meteors… but meteors would have done a lot more damage to this place, and the two indentations in the mesa top would not match so perfectly.

They look, Mona thinks, a little like footprints. Big ones. As if something the size of the mountain itself once stood here, staring out at this dry, brown-red world, and the tiny town just below.

She remembers something from one of the tapes. She says it aloud, quietly: “There’s something up there…”

She turns to leave as fast as she can.

The cowboy’s truck is a battleship of a vehicle. Mona is about to hop in the cab when she recalls a time from her cop days when some foolish soul stole a truck with the owner’s Rottweiler sleeping in the back, and was promptly mauled upon arrival at the chop shop. So, carefully, she walks to the edge of the truck bed and peers in.

It looks like the cowboy was preparing for a mining expedition. There are pickaxes, shovels, jackhammers, ropes, pulleys. There is a bundle at the end of the bed, something wrapped in canvas, presumably whatever the cowboy was mining.

Maybe it’s gold, Mona thinks, for no reason.

Then she thinks: What the fuck am I going to do with gold out here?

She pulls the top of the canvas back. It is not gold, but two smallish cubes that look to be made out of old iron.

“Huh,” says Mona, and she reaches out to pick up the smaller one.

She picks it up one-handed. It is not that heavy. But