I know the day I die . . .
And then from everywhere comes the hateful, cheated bellow of a titan, a god that is no god shaken awake from its ancient, imprisoned slumber, thinking how its time has at last come round again—only to be told to go right back to sleep, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars, better fucking luck next time. It bellows, and the walls and floor and ceiling shake. The concrete balcony begins to crumble beneath Ellison’s feet and she thinks maybe a sound like that, it could almost split the moon in two. Such a sound, it might even snuff out stars. And then the world unravels around her once again, melting away, evaporating same as the whitewashed stone cabin at Ynys Llanddwyn melted away. Only this time, the darkness isn’t waiting there to claim her. This time, she doesn’t fall. Instead, she finds herself in bright daylight, kneeling on dry, rust-colored sand and rock with the Glock still in her hand, as a bitter January wind howls across John Ford’s valley and the predatory shadows of unmarked black helicopters race across the landscape towards her. Ellison gets to her feet and waits for them, and she tries not to think how maybe that had been just a little bit too easy and how maybe Jehosheba had known it was coming all along. Buying time, that’s the new V-Day. . . .
17.: The Small Print
(East of Birmingham, Alabama, February 19, 2018)
It’s a bright, chilly Monday morning, almost a month to the day since Utah, and Ellison Nicodemo stands near the top of a low hill on the edge of a weary little town, almost within easy sight of the interstate. She’s surrounded by grey granite headstones that seem to stand silent guard against the tawdry, metastasized sprawl of Walmart and fast-food restaurants and strip-mall parking lots bordering the cemetery. The sky overhead is a wide carnivorous blue, not even the hint of a cloud to relieve the monotony. It’s the sort of sky that can blind you, she thinks, if you stare at it too long. Dressed in her sharp black suit and shiny black shoes and black sunglasses, a matching black knapsack on her shoulder and the bolo tie the Signalman gave her cinched about her collar, Ellison imagines she looks like someone who belongs here among these graves and beneath a merciless sky like that. A crow, a raven, a dapper vulture dutifully come to ferry a soul down to Hell.
Unfortunately, she isn’t alone. No way they would have let her come by herself, and so there’s her handler waiting in a black Ford sedan outside the Cedar Grove First Baptist Church and there’s also Agent Jack Dunaway standing at her side, a thin, officious prick of a man whom the Signalman had loathed. For the past four weeks, Ellison has seen far too much of Jack Dunaway, as she’s been shuffled to and fro between Groom Lake and Albany and the bunker at the Dugway Proving Ground. He’s watched on while she’s endured a barrage of debriefings and interrogations and so many medical, metaphysical, and psychological tests that Ellison finally lost count and lost track and decided it would continue for whatever remained of her life. But then, two days ago, Dunaway called her into a conference room and told her she’d be permitted to attend the Signalman’s funeral. Until that moment, she hadn’t even been sure that he was dead, though any other outcome had seemed unlikely. The Beechcraft King Air B200 had disintegrated in midair, and the wreckage was found scattered over more than a mile of desert. Only Mackenzie Regan survived. Her parachute had deployed, and the Signalman’s hadn’t, but survival had come at the cost of an eye, her left leg below the knee, and a couple of fingers. So, the Signalman was dead, along with the pilot and copilot, both found with their lungs filled with seawater. Yet here was Ellison Nicodemo, who’d walked away without so much as a scratch or a bruise or a broken fingernail. The retrieval team had picked her up on Navajo land, not far from the Arizona border, just shy of forty-eight hours after she’d disappeared from the plane.
Lucky girl.
Ellison glances up, and there’s a jet tracing a white contrail streak across that too-blue Alabama sky.
“You have any idea how much it would have pissed him off, you being here today?” she asks Jack Dunaway, and he shrugs the shrug of the truly indifferent and checks the Timex on his wrist.
“If you want to say your goodbyes,” he tells her, “you should do it now. We have to be back at Sumpter Smith by noon, and it’s already a quarter past ten.”
“Yeah, sure,” she says. “Don’t piss yourself. I won’t be long,” and then she leaves Mr. Jack Dunaway and goes halfway down the hill to the place where, if the company’s to be believed, the Signalman’s body has been laid to rest. There’s no marker yet and no flowers, either. There was a minister here a little while ago, and he read a dutiful, perfunctory service over the mound of soil and red clay only mostly hidden beneath a dingy blanket of synthetic turf. Ellison had thought it best to hang back until he was done. Whatever was being read from the minister’s book, it probably wasn’t anything she wanted to hear.
You know what I hate worse than cemeteries? the Signalman asked her, years and years ago. Nothing, that’s what. Absolutely nothing at all.
For a minute or two, Ellison just stands and stares at her feet and at the abominable fake grass. Then she takes the silver pocket watch from her blazer, the Signalman’s silver pocket watch, made in 1888 by the Elgin Watch Company of Elgin, Illinois, and she opens it and checks the time. The watch is just about the only other thing that survived the
