Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival Read online

  Susanna walked around to the driver's side and put the car into first, pulling away from the crescent of parked vehicles and in the general direction of the distant highway. The dim headlight bulbs cast a flickering, incomplete image of the path ahead, and the dusty windshield made it even harder to see. She could just imagine shredding a tire on one of the bits of old adobe building still jutting out of the ground. That would be just the thing to make this night complete.

  More thunder.

  A flash of lightning.

  And that strange ozone smell again.

  "Wayne?"

  "Yes?"

  "Can the lightning hurt us?"

  "I'm sure we're safe," he said, his hands clasped in a kind of pennant gesture. "I'm sorry for all of this, Susanna."

  In the rear-view mirror, a flash of lightning illuminated the sky behind Devil's Peak, and for a moment it again seemed like the monstrous giant it had when Susanna first saw it.

  She couldn't look away—more and more electricity danced in the sky behind and above the mesa.

  It was an otherworldly light show. She had the distinct impression the lightning was coming from the mountain.

  She wondered what was going on inside the mesa at that moment—inside that massive, hollow cavern of light and water that was so impossible, and so wondrous.

  The Jeep hit a rock, and bounced violently.

  "Shit!" Susanna let out. She brought her eyes back to the road.

  "Wayne, I gotta keep my eyes on the road," she said. "But take a look at the mountain back there and tell me there isn't something very strange going on with it."

  "Strange? What do you mean?"

  "Just look at it."

  Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wayne peering to their rear. A light, like a flashlight, illuminated his worried gaze.

  "Jesus," Wayne said. "He's following us!"

  Susanna glanced back up at her rear-view mirror, and saw the distinctive double-globe appearance of the Volkswagen Bus' headlamps.

  "Oooookay," Susanna said. "This has gone on long enough."

  She braked hard, bringing the Jeep to a dusty stop. She stepped out and flagged Jesse down.

  "Susanna, what are you doing? He could be murderous!"

  "Quit being so dramatic. He's not 'murderous,' he's your brother."

  She turned back to the bus, which was slowing too.

  But her attention was pulled away by the sight of Devil's Peak. Columns of lightning still danced over its head.

  And the mesa was…

  …glowing.

  That was the only way to describe what she saw. Red-hot, exactly like iron in a crucible, not yet cooled—the whole mountain! Its molten glow pulsed, rhythmic.

  The wind whipping up, the skies full of charcoal clouds, the mountain and thunder—it all struck her as positively Biblical, like one of those 70 millimeter Technicolor epics that were popular when she was a little kid.

  The door to the VW swung open, and Jesse stepped out. Even though it was the middle of the night, his shape was perfectly cut out against the sky, which was more of a dull grey than black at this point, shimmering as it was with rippling light. Jesse must've seen the slack-jawed expression on both Susanna and Wayne's faces, because he turned around, still absentmindedly stumbling backwards towards them, and looked up at the light show.

  Susanna felt a chill in her bones. She had the distinct impression this is what it felt like in the last few moments before a bomb went off.

  Devil's Peak was absorbed in a brilliant white light. But she couldn't look away.

  A ribbon of energy shot out from Devil's Peak, across the desert plain. It was heading for them like a train.

  She didn't have time to say anything. It was on top of them before she could flinch.

  The ribbon of energy impacted with the Jeep.

  She opened her eyes.

  She was still standing. Still alive.

  She looked around. Wayne was still next to her. So was the Jeep.

  What happened?

  But then she looked at the ground underneath her feet.

  It was liquefying. Where moments before there had been the dusty desert floor, she now saw a sea of molten earth, floating on a layer of golden light that glimmered through breaks in the soil. The strange ozone stench rose out of the ground itself.

  Wayne tapped her on the shoulder, wordless. He was looking up at something behind them.

  Susanna turned around and saw it:

  A ball of white energy rose from the sea that now surrounded them. It was four stories tall and just as many wide, tossing ribboning flares of magma into the night sky. It was, in its own way, beautiful.

  The liquefied earth beneath their feet spun about the light sphere, caught in a riptide vortex.

  Susanna, Wayne, and the Jeep began to move with the liquid floor towards the ball of light.

  "Get back in the car!" Susanna shouted.

  She leapt in, turned the ignition, threw the transmission into reverse and slammed her foot on the gas. But it was to little effect. They were in the tide now, the Jeep caught in the paranormal undertow.

  Where's Jesse?

  Susanna jumped out of the Jeep and kicked furiously against the spinning vortex, but the phenomenon only pulled against her harder.

  Wayne was saying something to her. She couldn't hear him.

  Everything was going white. And getting hotter.

  She was waist-deep in the liquid earth now. She had absolutely no control over the situation.

  She flipped onto her back and looked up at the Jeep, which was tipping upright like a sinking ship. Wayne was clinging for dear life on the back of the car, one futile hand outstretched to her.

  Susanna gave up trying. She stopped moving, and let the strange waves crash over her, consume her.

  "Just give me the fucking keys, Joe!"

  Jesse wasn't in the mood to ask politely. Wayne was taking off with his girl. The one who'd just shot him down.

  This wasn't how the night was supposed to go. Jesse was supposed to be engaged right now. Discovering the wonderland inside Devil's Peak had been a sign. A sign that this was the right place to build his commune, true; but also that this was the place to bring Susanna to propose. Someplace so beautiful she'd have to say yes.

  But he'd read the tea leaves wrong, and now he was drunk, dirty, and bleeding. Susanna probably hated him. And he hated Wayne.

  So all he needed were the fucking keys from Joe, so he could take the Volkswagen and chase down the Jeep. Get his car back. And his girl back.

  "Joe," Jesse repeated. "Please."

  Joe looked guilty, like he knew he was doing something wrong. But he handed the keys, replete with lucky rabbit foot keychain, to Jesse.

  Jesse cooled his demeanor. He took a deep breath, patted his loyal reveler on the shoulder, and said, "Thank you."

  Then he got in the bus, started it up, and tore off down the desert flat towards the Jeep that was receding towards the horizon.

  Lightning crackled in the sky overhead.

  Jesse kept his eyes on the road, but his mind wandered. He and Wayne had always fought. What brothers didn't?

  But there was something different about the competition between them. It was rabid. Hurtful. It always had been, ever since they were kids.

  Why was that? When had it started? Why did Wayne resent him so much?

  Jesse thought back to the summer of 1958. Twelve years earlier. The first summer after their parents had managed to wrap their Buick around a tree, and the two brothers had gone to live with their grandparents in Jackson.

  The move had been a culture shock to the California boys. The air was different, the bugs were different. Their grandparents were Depression-era hard-asses. Bitter people, and if they had any love for the boys, they didn't show it. Not that Jesse had ever needed touchy-feely shows of approval, but there was a coldness in their house that was hard to ignore. Grandma hadn't let him put up any of his baseball posters in the former nursery r
oom he moved into with Wayne. She said she didn't want any holes in the wall, and when he offered to use tape, she said she didn't want the tape to leave marks in the paint. The message was clear—this isn't your room, you can just stay here until the law relinquishes us of your custody. And when you go, don't leave any reminders that you were ever here.

  He would be happy to oblige them; it was his last summer before high school, and he had no designs to live with a couple of angry old farts in a baby's nursery room any longer than he had to.

  His parents had taken the brothers to Disneyland when they were good; there was no Disneyland in Mississippi, and if there had been, Jesse doubted his grandparents would have seen fit to take them there. There were only the swamps, portals by which to get lost in one's imagination. Jesse spent every moment he could that summer away from the city, getting lost in the swamps.

  The swamps of Mississippi give up none of their secrets easily. In Los Angeles, the waters were clear but the skies were choked with smog; in Mississippi, it was just the opposite. The skies were clear and had been for millennia, while the waters were murky, full of promises of hidden dangers and hidden treasures alike.

  Though the swamps made a great attraction for Jesse, they were marginally less appealing to Wayne, who was deep in an Isaac Asimov spell at the time and would have just as soon stayed in his room all weekend, devouring the copy of Foundation that he'd pulled down off the shelf of his grandfather's study. Nevertheless, Jesse usually managed to wheedle him into coming with him, because at the end of the day, the nursery room was stuffy and even Wayne could only put up with it for so long without going stir crazy.

  After twenty minutes' walk along old dirt roads and through the woods, the brothers came to their usual spot at the edge of the swamp. The earthen scent of dirt and stagnant water filled their nostrils. It was comforting.

  Jesse removed his shoes, and dipped his toes in the muddy bank. "Come on!"

  "Yeah, you can go ahead," Wayne said. "I'm not ruining my shoes."

  Jesse looked out at the water. He spotted a waterlogged, decrepit old raft composed of strung-together timber just a ways down the shoreline. "Look at that raft!"

  He began to run towards it, all the while splashing water with as much force as he could.

  After a moment, he realized Wayne wasn't following suit. He turned around. "Come on, it'll be fun!"

  Wayne put his hands on his hips in an older brother disapproval posture. "We can't just take someone else's property for a joyride," he said, exasperated. "Besides, where are we going to go once we're in it?"

  Jesse rolled his eyes. "Out there," he said, matter-of-fact, gesturing broadly to the deepening swamp behind him. His finger landed on a small, muddy bit of land in the middle of the swamp. "Island" wouldn't have been the right word for it—it was more of a pitcher's mound, albeit one that would be right-sized for Paul Bunyan. "We can take the raft," Jesse said. "That way you don't have to look like you're drowning, trying to dog-paddle across."

  Wayne said nothing.

  Jesse felt a little bad for always bringing up the fact Wayne had never learned to swim. But not that bad.

  He gave a big, dramatic sigh. "I'm supposed to be the kid brother you beat up on, you know. Not the other way around."

  Some moments later, they were on the raft, floating across the body of still, soupy water to the tiny outcropping in the middle of the swamp.

  When their dubious raft reached the little island, they disembarked. Jesse, excited, began to explore the stomping grounds.

  Broken bottles of booze. Empty cigarette boxes. "Kilroy was here" graffiti on one of the rocks.

  Yes'sir, this place had all the marks of a great, good-for-nothing hangout.

  "Look at all this neat stuff!" Jesse said with a hushed, reverent excitement. "I bet it's been here for a real long time."

  Wayne rolled his eyes this time. "Paper wouldn't last that long in these humid conditions. It would deteriorate too quickly. And this vandalism is fairly recent, judging by the tools used."

  "Gah," Jesse said. "You're such a know-it-all. Have to take the fun out of everything."

  "You know, Jesse," Wayne began. "If this stuff does belong to someone, what happens if they come back? They're probably not going to be too happy—"

  But Jesse was already in the raft and pushing off into the swamp waters, cupping the scummy water to wash his hands of silt.

  Wayne saw him, and started to exclaim. "Hey! Hey! Don't leave me here! What are you doing?"

  Jesse started to laugh. This was too rich.

  As the raft pulled away from the island, he spotted, in chicken-scratched thick black paint, a rockside scrawl. It read:

  "Crupp's Rock."

  He didn't yet know that name, but in time he'd come to know it well. Crupp was the biggest, most vile, spiteful paragon of racist Confederate hillbilly trash the Cole brothers would have the misfortune of going to school with. The only people Crupp hated more than black people or eggheads were "Yankees," which apparently Californians like Jesse and Wayne qualified as. Likewise, it seemed like Crupp had been going to high school since the Civil War, and wasn't about to graduate any time soon.

  Jesse heard a deranged, wolfish howl emanate from the waters behind his raft. He turned and saw the troglodyte he'd later come to know as Crupp, along with his lackeys, Verne and Mud. The home-fried trio was floating towards the little island with Wayne on it, aboard a skiff of their own.

  Wayne ran to the shore, alternately cursing Jesse and pleading with him to circle back around and pick him up.

  Crupp held in his hand a Louisville slugger, which he ominously patted in his meaty paws like a medieval club. Crupp pointed it at Wayne. "Just what-in-the-hell-dya-think yeeeeeeer doin' on my island?" he shouted across the way.

  Wayne shrieked and jumped into the waters, paddling like mad just to stay above the surface.

  Jesse was still watching the commotion with amused horror at this point. It served his know-it-all brother to get knocked down a peg or two every now and then.

  Crupp pulled Wayne out of the water like a wet cat, by the scruff of his shirt. Then he dragged him back up onto the little island.

  Then the three brutes commenced roughing him up.

  A sucker punch to the gut.

  A kick to the shins.

  Wayne cried out for Jesse to help him. It was a pathetic, mewling sound.

  The scene no longer amused Jesse.

  Crupp smacked Wayne and threw him against the ground. Then he muttered something in Wayne's ear—Jesse, paddling furiously to close the gap, couldn't make out any of it.

  The bully handed his bat to Mud, the shortest of the three. The stocky lackey twirled it about in a menacing wind-up.

  Jesse paddled faster towards the atoll. "Hey!"

  All three brutes turned their attention to him.

  As the raft listed onto the sandy bank, Jesse leapt from it and hit the ground running, oar in hand, his forward momentum unbroken. He was smaller, skinnier than either of the three older boys, but he would not be intimidated.

  He swung his wooden oar just as Mud had swung the bat a moment earlier.

  Mud was the first to go down. He dropped the bat.

  Jesse pivoted and jabbed his oar, using it as a splintery, jagged spear. Verne high-tailed it out of the scene and into the water, limbs flailing akimbo.

  Crupp picked up the Louisville slugger, while Mud, dazed, followed Verne to the far side of the landing.

  Crupp took a swing at Jesse, but the younger boy whirred around evasively, spinning his rotten oar. It connected with the bully's thick skull with enough force that its compromised form gave way, and it snapped in two. Wood chips burst in all direction. Crupp lifted up his bat to deliver a counter-blow.

  But Jesse kneed him in the groin, yanked the bat out of his hands, and began a savage beat-down of his own, hitting Crupp against the backside.

  Mud and Verne could only watch, mouths agape, unsure of what to do. And certainly
too embarrassed to look at each other.

  To all present, it was as if the sound of Crupp's great spanking was loud enough to ripple throughout all of Mississippi.

  The would-be assailant stumbled into the water, crying for help, and paddled away.

  Jesse helped his thoroughly soaked and bloodied brother up onto his feet. Wayne was winded, but relieved.

  They climbed into their little borrowed raft and paddled back to safety, using the baseball bat and their hands in lieu of an oar.

  The ride back to shore was silent. Wayne watched the three bullies on the island as they sat in silent defeat, looking back at Jesse and Wayne as they disappeared into the thick of swamp trees.

  Wayne waited until the bullies were no longer visible to speak.

  "Thanks," was all he could manage.

  It was a half-hearted show of grace, for every time that Jesse had to rescue him—and there had been plenty already—it only cemented Wayne's status as the Littlest Big Brother in the World.

  And so the resentment grew. And deepened. And metastasized, until Jesse could virtually do nothing right in the eyes of his brother. And, in turn, Wayne could do nothing right in Jesse's eyes.

  At least that was his theory, right now, as he chased after his own Jeep that Wayne had so thoughtlessly stolen from him, along with Susanna.

  More thunder, and lightning. Real wrath-of-God weather we're having tonight.

  Jesse was driving the Volkswagen as hard as its little, wheezing, blue-exhaust-spewing engine would let him. It sounded like the bolts holding the damn thing together were unscrewing themselves from their bearings. He bounced and jolted around in the cabin that smelled of stale pot.

  He was no longer quite sure why he was pursuing them, or what he'd say to Susanna once he caught up to them.

  Maybe he should give up the chase. Maybe this was a stupid idea.

  No, it definitely was a stupid idea.

  The taillights on the Jeep lit up in red. They were stopping, after all.

  He hit his own brakes in turn, and the Volkswagen bus began to lurch downwards, skidding against the dirt floor.

  He shut off the bus and stepped out.