John Case - Ghost Dancer aka Dance of Death

“Denny.” The bartender polished another glass.

Burke sighed. “Wilson’s foster mother is sick.”

“No shit,” the bartender replied, his voice thick with skepticism.

“No,” Burke said. “Really, she’s in a trailer, over in Fallon. The only address she had for him is a P.O. box. I said I’d try to find him, but…”

“She ain’t been up here?”

Burke shook his head. “No. But he hasn’t been up here all that long himself.”

The bartender thought about this for a moment. “About three, four months is all,” he said.

“Building a plan-e-tar-i-um,” one of the poker players remarked.

“He’s not building a planetarium, ” the bartender corrected, “he’s just building a place for a telescope.”

“Big difference,” the poker player declared. “He’s still stargazin’.”

The bartender ignored everyone, his eyes on the television.

Burke wanted to get to the point, but he sensed that if he tried to rush it, he wouldn’t get anything out of these men.

“I’ll bet he’s stargazin’ right now,” said one of the players at the card table. “You got your solstice tomorrow. Longest day of the year.”

“That concerns the sun, ” the bartender told him.

“Uhhh, Denny?” the poker player said. “The sun’s a star ?!” The other players at the table laughed.

The bartender turned to Burke. “This foster mother,” he said, “she doesn’t have his telephone number?”

A shout rose up from around the card table. “ H-whoaa! The Bat was bluffin’! The Bat was bluffin’ your ass!”

The lady at the slot machine came over to the bar and pushed her glass toward Denny. She had the wistful eyes of a child, and a weather-beaten face. She was forty or sixty, Burke couldn’t be sure. The bartender mixed her a 7 & 7, then turned to Burke and pointed west.

“It’s about sixty miles,” he said. “Nice place. National forest all around him.” He drew a tiny map on the back of a coaster, keeping up a running commentary as he made it. “There’s a blue trailer on your right, all beat to shit. Got some of them pink flamingo statues in the front. You see that, you hang a left, and it’s about fifteen miles from there. You’ll see the sign over the fence. B-Lazy-B. Can’t miss it.”

“Bull shit !” someone exclaimed.

The bartender smiled. “Well, yeah, I guess you could miss it, but…” He handed the coaster to Burke. “What are you drivin’?”

Burke shrugged, and laughed to himself. “I forget. It’s a rental.”

“Off-road?”

“No.”

The bartender leaned back. “But it’s an SUV, right?”

“No. It’s just… a sedan.”

An incredulous wince. “Well, that’s gonna be exciting.”

The slot machine gushed, and a siren went off. A waterfall of coins crashed to the floor. The woman just stared.

“You want one for the road?” the bartender asked.

Before Burke could answer, one of the poker players corrected him. “You mean one for the goat track!”

Everyone laughed.

Burke, too.

Burke rolled the trip counter in the dash to zero, and took it slow.

He had to. The road was so washboarded that twenty-five miles an hour amounted to reckless driving. He could taste the grit in his mouth, and he was thirsty. But there was nothing he could do about it. He’d forgotten to bring any water – not good planning if you think Armageddon is just around the corner. Or, more accurately, up ahead and to the left.

Somewhere around the thirtieth mile on the trip counter, he began to yawn. It was the beer, he told himself, a self-indulgent mistake. He turned on the radio. All he could get was a country-and-western station out of Boise. He turned it up, but it didn’t help. A couple of times, he almost nodded off, but was jolted awake by a pothole. He rolled down the windows.

The effect was instantaneous. The freezing desert air hit him in the face like a bucket of ice water. Falling asleep was no longer a danger. What with the noise, the dust, and the cold, he was uncomfortable enough to stay awake without having to work at it. And the stars were amazing. Distinct and glittering, with the Milky Way draped across the night like a bridal veil.

He rolled up the windows, thinking he’d rather die in a crash than freeze to death. At least, it would be quicker.

Three hours later, he was hunched over the steering wheel, using his windshield wipers against the dust and bug spatter. He was looking for the blue trailer with the pink flamingos, and he was worried. Wilson’s ranch was so isolated that surprise was out of the question. He’d see the headlights from a long way off, and even if Burke were to kill the lights (without somehow killing himself), the noise was inescapable. The car sounded like an avalanche of rebar tumbling down a mountainside.

If he saw the ranch soon enough, he could leave the car and walk in. But “soon enough” was a big question mark in the wide-open spaces he was driving through. And if Mandy was right about this solstice thing, Wilson wouldn’t be asleep at all. He’d be getting ready to dance.

He’d fire the transmitter at first light, Burke thought. And that would be the end of it.

Though, who knew what Wilson was planning to do. If he wanted, he could probably vaporize half the country, à la Tunguska. Just clear-cut the place, from sea to shining sea. But he won’t do that, Burke told himself. Wilson was about the Ghost Dance, and the Ghost Dance was all about the land. Loving the land. So it wouldn’t be Tunguska on a grander scale. It would probably be a reprise of Culpeper, but bigger. If Wilson could permanently disable the electrical and electronic infrastructure of the country, it would be a disaster of geological dimensions. Nearly every economy in the world would crash, and millions would die. People everywhere were dependent on modern technology for everything from food and water to transportation, medicine, and lighting. It would be the end, if not of the world then of the last five hundred years of progress. It would be 1491, all over again.

The idea was so outrageous that Burke didn’t want to take it seriously. It kept spinning away, like the radio signal out of Reno. The body count in San Francisco had “stabilized” at 342. Police were looking for…

A new signal overrode the old. Repent.

Ten minutes later, a clusterfuck of pink flamingos materialized in the headlights in front of a darkened blue trailer, about fifty feet from the road. As Burke drove past, he saw that someone had sprayed the trailer with the words, “Bad Dog!” written large.

Two miles farther along, Burke turned left as he’d been told to do, and immediately, the road got worse. The washboards were now so tall and deep and insistent that it seemed to Burke that the car’s undercarriage wouldn’t be able to take it. Then the road rose up, and the car began to climb the side of a mountain – a feature the bartender had sketched as an inverted V.

His ears popped as he maneuvered through a series of hairpin turns, his headlights strafing the mountainside on his right, then shining off into the abyss on his left. Suddenly, a jackrabbit sprang into the car’s path and, reflexively, Burke slammed on the brakes.

Big mistake.

The car began to surf, riding the washboards, even as its rear wheels fishtailed out of control, spraying gravel. The sedan was moving on its own now, sliding over the road as if it were made of ice. Its relationship to the steering wheel and brakes was suddenly theoretical. In the end, the only thing that stopped the slide was the mountainside itself. The car slammed into a runoff beside the road. The chassis shrieked. There was a thud, a crunch, and the sideview mirror was airborne. Then the car came to a sudden and complete stop, one headlight shining toward the stars, the other in smithereens at the base of a wall of red rock.