Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

When will the facility miss him?

It doesn’t matter.

They’ll never find us way out here, at an address that doesn’t exist anymore.

It’s kind of like we never even left, really.

I can see the old walls rising around us. I can see the shadow of the roof, the way it was.

When I was twelve years old, I mapped the interior of our home.

Now, sitting across from my little brother, I’m sketching out a map of the human heart, I guess.

There’s more dark hallways than I knew.

Rooms I thought I’d never have to enter.

But I will.

For him, for Collin, I’ll walk in and pull the door shut behind me, never come back out.

The South Dakota summer sky is a broken china teacup, and I have the distinct impression that when I finally stop the car and step outside and dare to let go of the handle on the door, I will fall straight up into that broken china sky. And I will not stop falling until the world below me is so small that I can make a circle of my thumb and forefinger and catch it all inside. And hanging there, I will freeze like a rose dripped in liquid nitrogen or my blood will boil, but I’ll have captured the world’s disc in one hand. There’s country music on the radio, George Jones and Tammy Wynette singing “Golden Ring,” and I turn the volume up just a little louder, to help take my mind off the smell. On either side of this seemingly eternal highway, there’s shortgrass prairie and patches of bare earth pressed flat beneath that brutal, hungry blue broken cup, and I rush past a comical sort of billboard, an old prospector and his cartoon mule, and the mule is luxuriating in a horse trough, and the billboard promises Refreshing! Free Ice Water! at the Wall Drug Store if I just keep going straight ahead twenty more miles. The kid in the passenger seat is still sleeping. I picked him up last night just outside Sioux Falls, just after I’d traded 1-29 North for I-90 West and the kid said he’d blow me for a ride to Rapid City. And I said shit get it and I have an empty seat don’t I? You don’t have to blow me, if you don’t mind that I smoke, and if you don’t mind the music. The kid said he’d blow me, anyway, because he didn’t like taking anything for free. Yeah, okay, I said, and so we found a truck stop, and he did it in the stall, and I tangled my fingers in his blond hair while he sucked my cock and fondled my balls and, for no extra charge, slipped a pinkie finger up my asshole. I bought him a burger and fries and told him don’t worry, it wasn’t for free, he could blow me again later on, so we’d be even. But I had to feed the kid. He looked like a stray dog hadn’t been fed in a month. And then I drove, and for a while the kid talked about his boyfriend in Rapid City, and I played the radio, and he finally fell asleep. In his sleep, he looked more like a girl than a boy. I pulled over near Murdo, just before four a.m., and I slept a little myself. I dreamed of the White Sundays. “You ever been to Rapid City?” I ask him, and he says no. I ask how it is his boyfriend is in Rapid City when he’s never been there himself, and he tells me they met on the internet. “You’ve never met him face to face?” I ask, and the kid wants to know what difference that makes. “Does he know you’re coming?” I ask him, and the kid just shrugs. “That means he doesn’t, right?” I ask. “He’ll be glad to see me,” says the kid, and I let it go at that. “What kind of drugs?” he asks me, and I’ve already forgotten the lie. It takes me a second to figure out what he’s talking about. “What kind of drugs got you fired from the college?” he prompts, and now he stops watching the prairie and stares at me, instead. “Heroin,” I tell him. “Heroin and pills. And a little coke, just to sweeten the deal.” And he says, “So you’re a junkie. I gave a junkie professor a blow job. What if you gave me AIDS back there? I didn’t know you were a junkie.” I tell him I don’t have AIDS, and he frowns and sighs and wants to know if he’s just supposed to take my word for that? Don’t I have some sort of papers to prove that I’m clean, and when I say no, I don’t have any fucking papers saying I don’t have AIDS, he turns off the radio and goes back to staring out the window. “Your car smells like road kill,” he says, and I say yeah, I hit a dead skunk back at the state line, just as I was leaving Nebraska. “I pulled over at a truck stop and washed off the tires and underneath the car with one of those high-pressure jet nozzles, but I guess I didn’t get it all. “It doesn’t smell like skunk,” he says. “It just smells like road kill. It just smells like rot.” So I ask him if he wants me to pull over and let him walk, and he doesn’t answer. I turn the radio back on. Hank Williams is crooning “You’ll Never Get Out of This World Alive.” “You catch shit from your parents?” I ask him, and he says, “I caught shit from everyone, okay? I caught shit from the whole fucking town,” and I say fair enough and that I wasn’t trying to pry. “It would be just my luck you gave me AIDS back there,” he mutters. “People back home would say I got what I deserve.” I ask him if he’s got any open sores inside his mouth or any bad teeth or anything like that, and he says no (and looks sort of offended at the suggestion), and I tell him fine, then he can stop worrying about catching AIDS from giving someone a blow job. We pass a rusting red Ford pickup truck stranded in the black-eyed Susans at the side of the highway. The front windshield is busted in and all four tires are flat. “Lucas has a red pickup truck,” says the kid, and when I ask if Lucas is his boyfriend in Rapid City, the kid nods and reaches for his pack on the floorboard between his feet. I told him he could toss it in the backseat, but he said no, he’d rather keep it with him. He’d rather keep it close. I didn’t argue. The kid lifts it onto his lap, black polyester bulging at the seams with whatever the kid holds sacred enough that he’s brought it along on his sojourn west. He unzips the pack, digs about for a moment, then takes out a little snub-nosed .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver. The sun through the windshield glints dully off stainless steel. My heart does a little dance in my chest, a surprise tarantella, and my mouth goes dry. “That thing loaded?” I ask, trying to sound cool, trying to keep my voice steady, like it’s nothing to me if the kid’s carrying] a gun. I tell myself, shit, if I were hitching in this day and in this age, I’d be carrying a gun, too. “Wouldn’t be much point in my having it if it weren’t loaded, now would there?” And I say no, no I guess there wouldn’t be much point in that at all. He opens up the cylinder to show me there’s a round in all five chambers, and then he snaps it shut again. He aims the pistol out his open window. “You any good with it?” I ask, and the kid shrugs. “I’m good enough,” he replies. “My brother, he was in the Army, over in Iraq or someplace like that. He came back and taught me how to shoot. And then he killed himself.” I glance at myself in the rearview mirror, and then I glance at the kid again, and then I keep my eyes on the road. “Sorry to hear that,” I say, and the kid says, “No, you’re not. You don’t have to pretend you are. I’m sick to death of people pretending shit they don’t really feel.” We pass another billboard for Wall Drug Store, and the kid pantomimes taking a shot at it. Bang, bang, bang, like he’s seven years old, playing cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, with the neighborhood brats. “Baghdad,” says the kid. “That’s in Iraq, ain’t it?” I nod, and I tell him, yeah, that Baghdad is the capital of Iraq. “Then Iraq is where they sent my brother,” the kid tells me. “He saw a buddy of his get blown up by a landmine. He saw another buddy of his kill a woman because just maybe she was carrying a bomb. Something like that. He said everyone was afraid all the time, no matter how many guns they carried, and he came back still scared. He had to take pills to sleep. I guess he just eventually got tired of being fucking scared all the time. I know I would. He couldn’t get into college, so he got into the Army, instead.” I repress that reflexive urge to say I’m sorry again. Instead, I say, “We’re gonna be stopping just a couple of miles up ahead, so you better put that thing away until we’re back on the road again. You never know when there’s gonna be a state trooper or something.” The kid fires off another imaginary shot or three, and then he says, “Dude, South Dakota’s open carry. What the fuck is it to me whether there’s police around.” And I say fine, whatever, suit yourself, kid. He asks, “Does it make you nervous?” And I admit that it does. “Just a little,” I say. “I’ve never much cared for guns. I didn’t grow up around them, that’s all.” And now I’m thinking about three nights ago at a motel outside Lincoln, sitting on the hood of the car in a motel parking lot, and I’m thinking about the oddly comforting smell of cooling asphalt and about staring up at an ivory-white moon only one night past full. I crane my neck and look up through the dirty, bug-specked windshield and wish there were a few clouds this morning to break the tyranny of that broken china blue sky pressing down on me. Or if not to break it—because that would be asking an awful lot of a few clouds—at least to pose a challenge, at least to stand as a counterpoint. The kid opens his backpack again, and he puts the .38 away. I allow myself to relax a little, quietly sighing the proverbial sigh of relief. “This is the farthest west I’ve ever been,” says the kid, and then he asks, “What’s in Wall?” and he sets the backpack down on the floor between his feet. “Not much at all,” I reply. “Less than a thousand people. There’s a deactivated Minuteman missile launch control facility, just outside town.