PREVIOUS CHAPTER
On the eleventh morning of our expedition, we came to the edge of a canyon.
It was a gash in the forest so broad and deep that even the canopy could scarcely bandage it. Far above, the tips of the trees’ branches strained to nuzzle one another across the gap, leaves fluttering in silent frustration. Sunlight snuck through, harsher than a camera flash, and painted jittery shadows against the walls of the chasm.
Thanks to the onslaught of sunlight, we could see down what seemed a mile into the depths, the descent criss-crossed by debris and fat, grasping roots. Nothing in the chasm moved, but I got the sense that something lurked just out of sight, waiting for a cloud to pass over the sun.
This ravine was too wide to grapple-gun across. We set out along the edge, hoping to find a fallen tree that bridged the gap.
Our normal quiet chatter had dried up as soon as we reached the ravine. Instead of carrying cheer, the sunlight provoked unease. Squinting, I wished for a pair of sunglasses.
Half an hour later, we found the bridge we were looking for in a wide spotlight of sun. The ravine continued, curving away out of sight, losing none of its width.
This tree had fallen recently. Its place in the canopy had yet to be filled, leaving a ragged gash of brilliant blue sky.
Blue was a rarity in the forest, existing only to denote poison. For instance: slimy blue frogs the size of SUVs. They would leave you alone unless you came within a certain radius, but if you ever had the misfortune to touch one, the toxins coating their skin would squirm in through your pores and get to work liquefying your organs.
There were huge, poisonous berries, too, hanging on their branches like blue balloons. We never discovered anything that ate those. There were plenty of fruits and tubers in the forest, but the edible ones tended to be brown or, at their most colorful, a dull, earthy red.
The fallen tree trunk was nearly as wide as a highway overpass, but it still unsettled me to walk across it. The slope on either side threatened to punish any stumble with a tug off the edge. We went single-file, moving quickly but carefully along the very center of the trunk.
Back among the trees on the other side, I realized I’d been holding my breath and let it go in a slow whistle.
“I felt like an ant on the sidewalk out there,” I said.
Zip nodded, adjusting the straps on his pack.
“Squished a million of those when I was a kid,” he said.
Li led the way forward, with Zip a few steps behind.
“Always hated ants,” he muttered.
We made good time the rest of the afternoon, not rushing, but trying to put the canyon as far behind us as possible.
That night, a storm rolled over the forest. As we settled into our sleeping bags, a soothing drone of raindrops on the canopy obscured the normal nighttime sounds. Distant thunder grumbled, but any flashes of lightning were muffled by the thick green ceiling.
Rainwater slithered through the maze of leaves and streamed toward the ground in intermittent three-hundred-foot pillars.
The way our tree swayed back and forth, you could tell that the storm was stirring up fierce winds above the canopy, but by the time it reached us, the gale was toothless. A gentle swirl of fresh, wet air was all that remained, and we drank it in with relish.
Kept awake by the sound of rain, I lay staring out the hole at the top of my sleeping bag and thought back to my Boy Scout days. On a camping trip at Badger Falls, when I was thirteen, it rained every night for three days.
That trip, I was the only kid who didn’t bring a dad. Mine was thrilled to have me out of the house for a weekend. It gave him a chance to have his girlfriend over without my baleful glares making her uneasy.
It wasn’t my dad’s fault that my mom had left, but my seventh-grade self hadn’t figured that out yet.
On that camping trip, I learned that when it rains, you have to be careful not to let anything touch the edges of your tent, because pressure against the fabric allows water to slip through. Sometimes I’d press the tent wall with a finger on purpose and watch the droplets accumulate. Once I licked up some water I collected this way, hoping to see what pure rainwater tasted like. It tasted like my palm, the acrylic sting of bug spray mixed with salty sweat.
In the forest, rangers collected water via condensation nets every night. Tonight, with the rainfall providing extra moisture, those nets would fill our canteens in a matter of minutes.
That was pure rainwater, or close enough, but by the time you had a chance to take a drink, it tasted like the canteen.
Asleep at last, I stood on the forest floor, in the dark, alone. The storm had passed, and all was silent.
Quietly, a thousand spiders crawled up from below, their long, dexterous limbs thicker than lamp posts. Their segmented bodies were smaller than they seemed from afar, in relation to those horrible legs, and they were covered with bristling black hair. The spiders encircled me, crowding against each other so that their legs scrabbled and interlocked.
Fangs gleamed between thousands of furtive pedipalps, but the fear I felt seemed disconnected from the spiders somehow. I sensed no malice in their many unblinking eyes.
The ranks of spiders parted. Out of the darkness swayed Junior, held aloft by the scorpion’s stinger.
“Tetris,” he said with a smile. His teeth were a dazzling white, rimmed with blood.
“Hi, Junior,” I said, peering into his featureless black eyes.
“You haven’t been listening to me, Tetris,” said Junior in his deep, grating voice.
“This is a dream,” I said. The spiders chittered, rubbing their mandibles together, and I saw that they coated the tree trunks, clinging to the bark with sharp, hooked feet. A swarm ten thousand strong, all of them fixing their eyes on me.
I shuddered.
“It’s under your skin, Tetris.”
“You’ve said that before,” I snapped. The worst part was that I could feel it, the skin of my neck crawling, something wriggling to escape. I fought the urge to scratch at it.
My palms stung, and I discovered that my fists were clenched, the fingernails digging deep ruts. I tried to uncurl my hands, but the fingers wouldn’t budge.
“Can’t you leave me alone?” I asked.
The forest was silent. Junior considered my words. The spiders shifted their focus to him, waiting for the response.
“No,” said Junior at last, and the horde of spiders writhed, screaming. The noise was deafening, but I couldn’t move my hands to cover my ears.
The scorpion clacked its claws, and silence fell again, although the spiders continued to spasm quietly, stricken by some searing psychic pain. Their mouthparts flailed.
“Trust your eyes, Tetris,” said Junior, oblivious to the roiling chaos around us. “Trust nothing else.”
The floor gave way beneath me and I fell into darkness.
In the morning I had purple crescents underneath my eyes. Li noticed right away.
“What kept you up last night?” she asked.
Zip, packing his sleeping bag, thought the question was meant for him.
“Hmm? I slept like a koala,” he said. “I love it when it rains.”
“Not you, doofus. Tetris looks like a gorilla punched him in each eye.”
“I punched him back,” I said.
“I’m sure you did,” said Li.
“You ever think maybe there’s a way they could make these breakfast bars taste a little better, but they don’t bother, because it’s cheaper this way?” asked Zip, unwrapping one as he spoke.
“What flavor’s that?” I asked, grabbing a bar out of my own pack. “Mulch or plastic?”
“Mulch,” said Zip.
“Trade you,” I suggested. The “plastic” flavor, which was supposed to taste like key lime pie, left a slick, acrid residue on the roof of your mouth. The blueberry bars might taste like mulch, but at least they went down properly when you swallowed them.
Zip shrugged and tossed it over. When I tossed my bar in exchange, I must have put some kind of crazy spin on it, because it bounced off Zip’s hand and tumbled out of the tree.
“God damn it, Tetris,” said Zip, peering down at the bush where the bar had vanished. “I’m never gonna find that thing.”
We finished packing and rappelled down. As Li checked the magazine in the SCAR, Zip rooted through the bush for his breakfast.
I scanned the undergrowth, half-expecting to see dream-Junior’s smirking face poking out. My jaw throbbed. I placed fingers against the base of my ear and felt the joint pop as I opened and closed my mouth. Must have been gritting my teeth again. When stressed, I had a tendency to clench my molars. I figured I was wearing them down to nubs. On track for dental implants by age thirty-five.
Zip yelped, shattering the early-morning silence. In the distance, something that sounded like a bird, but was almost certainly not a bird, squawked three times in response.
“Are you fucking nuts?” hissed Li.
“Look at this,” said Zip. “Come here! Look at this!”
“Keep it down,” said Li, but she went to look. I stayed where I was, watching the perimeter. Somebody always had to be on the lookout.
Newly-fallen leaves, shaken out of the trees by the storm, covered the ground. They’d shrivel and lose their color within a few hours, but for now they draped like green, veiny doormats all around us. Not for the first time, I marveled at their size. They weren’t quite as limp and floppy as normal leaves. They had skeletons of tough cellulose keeping the green skin rigid, like bones in a bat wing.
Actually, it was kites they reminded me of most. Green fabric stretched flat over supportive struts. I wondered if you could get a forest leaf to fly like a kite, at least in the brief period before it began to decay. Not that I’d ever been able to get actual kites to work as a kid. Flying a kite was another thing you needed your dad to help with.
I examined my smarting palms and found sweat seeping into red marks left by my fingernails.
“Tetris, you’ve gotta see this,” said Li, and a quick glance at her face told me that Zip had found something truly bizarre. I hurried over, abandoning my vigil.
Zip scooted out of the way to show me.
“What’s that look like to you?” he asked.
When I saw it, a prickling chill rushed over me, starting at my scalp and broadening as it went. My insides felt cold and slimy, and the cuts on my palms sang.
Past the tangled matrix of branches and leaves, just barely poking up out of the dirt, was a gray tablet etched with complicated symbols.
“Is that what you told me about, Tetris?” asked Li, hunched over my shoulder. “The thing you told me you saw?”
“What thing?” asked Zip, letting go of the bush so that it wobbled back into place. He looked at us. “You guys keeping secrets from me?”
Trust your eyes, Tetris.
“I think it is,” I said, scratching my neck.
Li crouched, letting the assault rifle hang loose at her waist, and started wrenching away chunks of the bush, flinging them behind her. After a moment, Zip and I bent to help.
We tore into it, driven by an indescribable urgency. When the bush was gone, we could see that much of the tablet lay buried underground, so we dug away at the dirt with our fingers. Soon the soil was everywhere: caked under our nails, smeared on our cheeks, gritting between our teeth.
I couldn’t believe it. Right there, a few inches away, was a literal impossibility, a tangible contradiction of everything we’d been taught about the world. My mind raced to try and come up with an explanation. Maybe it was a sci-fi movie prop that had dropped out of a plane? That would explain why the symbols resembled no language I’d ever seen. They were all sharp corners and fine details. Hieroglyphs? No two symbols were alike. The symbols were large, several inches across, and their contours were complicated by dizzyingly precise, fractal appendages.
When I saw the obelisk, it had been too far away to make a judgment on its composition. Now, as I laid my hands against the rounded gray tablet, I found myself even more confused. The material was too uniform, too featureless, with no visible grain, to be stone. Yet, against my hand, it was cool and smooth as a polished granite countertop.
Not metal. Not plastic. But not stone, either, at least no stone I’d ever seen.
“You guys have got to tell me what this is,” said Zip.
“I’ve got no idea what it is,” said Li. “A couple weeks ago, Tetris told me he saw something covered in symbols, the day that Junior died. Is this what you saw, T?”
I sat back on my heels.
“This is a lot smaller,” I said, “but yeah, it looks similar.”
“This is impossible, you realize,” said Zip. “Nobody’s been this far out here. There’s no way this can be here.”
His head darted left, right, up, searching for some sign that we were being tricked.
“I’m freaking out, guys,” he said.
“Cool it,” said Li. “We’ll get pictures, close-ups, and head home. Once we’re out, we can share the footage and somebody will tell us what we’re looking at.”
I remembered Agent Cooper, the cruel look in his eye as he leaned over the table, the harsh Listerine odor of his breath.
“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” I said.
Li scrunched her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“I think they know,” I said. “Those fuckers. I think they know.”
“Stay with me, Tetris,” said Zip.
“When Junior died, the FBI took me and Hollywood in for questioning,” I said, talking fast. “I thought they wanted to know what happened with Junior, but that wasn’t why they brought us in. The government guy, the agent, he didn’t care about Junior. What he did care about was the obelisk.”
“Obelisk, right.” Zip whipped from my face to Li’s and back again. “Obelisk?”
“There was an obelisk,” I said, exhausted at the thought of having to tell the story again. “When Junior died. It’s why he died, he was going to look. It had symbols on it, just like this does. They must have seen it in our footage, flagged it down.”
“I just want you to know that you sound like an absolute wacko,” said Zip.
“That’s exactly what the FBI guy said!” I yelped. “Look, remember the story Li’s dad told? About Roy LaMonte? He said Roy saw obelisks, structures, people—”
“LaMonte was crazy, Tetris,” said Zip, staring at Li, who’d clamped her mouth shut.
Li didn’t say a word. Her fingertips tapped the SCAR’s stock.
“Oh, come on,” said Zip, “you can’t possibly believe this.”
“The Briggs brothers died on that trip,” she said. “There was only LaMonte’s word to go on. What if he was right?”
“What about pictures? Wouldn’t he have shown the pictures? Taken a video?”
“It all goes through the government first, Zip,” I said miserably. “They could have censored it.”
We stared at the tablet. Was that a slight glow, hovering around the edges, or was it my imagination?
“You realize that the FBI will see our footage, too,” said Zip. “The body cameras. Everything we’re saying right now, they’ll hear every word. If you’re right, and they’re trying to cover something up, we are totally fucked. As soon as we turn this in, they’ll say we’re crazy and lock us away, or worse.”
“So we don’t turn it in,” said Li. “We take the footage straight to CBS, NBC, all the networks.”
I considered that. It wasn’t like they were waiting for us when we came out of the forest. Our return wasn't a scheduled event. Typically, we headed as close to “east” as we could manage with our compasses, and wherever we wound up on the coastline, we called for pick-up. This time, we could slide under the radar, hold off on that call, hitchhike to the nearest town. At any public library, we could hop on computers, make copies of the evidence, and send it everywhere, like an old-fashioned email chain letter. Backups upon backups. Once it was out, the FBI would have no way of stopping it.
“I like that idea,” I said.
Zip ran a finger along the outline of one of the indented symbols. He sighed, his shoulders shrinking in. For a moment he resembled a middle-schooler, disappointed in his report card, imagining the look on his father’s face when he brought home an F.
“Okay,” he said finally, laying his palm flat against the tablet. “I’m in.”
NEXT CHAPTER
On the eleventh morning of our expedition, we came to the edge of a canyon.
It was a gash in the forest so broad and deep that even the canopy could scarcely bandage it. Far above, the tips of the trees’ branches strained to nuzzle one another across the gap, leaves fluttering in silent frustration. Sunlight snuck through, harsher than a camera flash, and painted jittery shadows against the walls of the chasm.
Thanks to the onslaught of sunlight, we could see down what seemed a mile into the depths, the descent criss-crossed by debris and fat, grasping roots. Nothing in the chasm moved, but I got the sense that something lurked just out of sight, waiting for a cloud to pass over the sun.
This ravine was too wide to grapple-gun across. We set out along the edge, hoping to find a fallen tree that bridged the gap.
Our normal quiet chatter had dried up as soon as we reached the ravine. Instead of carrying cheer, the sunlight provoked unease. Squinting, I wished for a pair of sunglasses.
Half an hour later, we found the bridge we were looking for in a wide spotlight of sun. The ravine continued, curving away out of sight, losing none of its width.
This tree had fallen recently. Its place in the canopy had yet to be filled, leaving a ragged gash of brilliant blue sky.
Blue was a rarity in the forest, existing only to denote poison. For instance: slimy blue frogs the size of SUVs. They would leave you alone unless you came within a certain radius, but if you ever had the misfortune to touch one, the toxins coating their skin would squirm in through your pores and get to work liquefying your organs.
There were huge, poisonous berries, too, hanging on their branches like blue balloons. We never discovered anything that ate those. There were plenty of fruits and tubers in the forest, but the edible ones tended to be brown or, at their most colorful, a dull, earthy red.
The fallen tree trunk was nearly as wide as a highway overpass, but it still unsettled me to walk across it. The slope on either side threatened to punish any stumble with a tug off the edge. We went single-file, moving quickly but carefully along the very center of the trunk.
Back among the trees on the other side, I realized I’d been holding my breath and let it go in a slow whistle.
“I felt like an ant on the sidewalk out there,” I said.
Zip nodded, adjusting the straps on his pack.
“Squished a million of those when I was a kid,” he said.
Li led the way forward, with Zip a few steps behind.
“Always hated ants,” he muttered.
We made good time the rest of the afternoon, not rushing, but trying to put the canyon as far behind us as possible.
That night, a storm rolled over the forest. As we settled into our sleeping bags, a soothing drone of raindrops on the canopy obscured the normal nighttime sounds. Distant thunder grumbled, but any flashes of lightning were muffled by the thick green ceiling.
Rainwater slithered through the maze of leaves and streamed toward the ground in intermittent three-hundred-foot pillars.
The way our tree swayed back and forth, you could tell that the storm was stirring up fierce winds above the canopy, but by the time it reached us, the gale was toothless. A gentle swirl of fresh, wet air was all that remained, and we drank it in with relish.
Kept awake by the sound of rain, I lay staring out the hole at the top of my sleeping bag and thought back to my Boy Scout days. On a camping trip at Badger Falls, when I was thirteen, it rained every night for three days.
That trip, I was the only kid who didn’t bring a dad. Mine was thrilled to have me out of the house for a weekend. It gave him a chance to have his girlfriend over without my baleful glares making her uneasy.
It wasn’t my dad’s fault that my mom had left, but my seventh-grade self hadn’t figured that out yet.
On that camping trip, I learned that when it rains, you have to be careful not to let anything touch the edges of your tent, because pressure against the fabric allows water to slip through. Sometimes I’d press the tent wall with a finger on purpose and watch the droplets accumulate. Once I licked up some water I collected this way, hoping to see what pure rainwater tasted like. It tasted like my palm, the acrylic sting of bug spray mixed with salty sweat.
In the forest, rangers collected water via condensation nets every night. Tonight, with the rainfall providing extra moisture, those nets would fill our canteens in a matter of minutes.
That was pure rainwater, or close enough, but by the time you had a chance to take a drink, it tasted like the canteen.
Asleep at last, I stood on the forest floor, in the dark, alone. The storm had passed, and all was silent.
Quietly, a thousand spiders crawled up from below, their long, dexterous limbs thicker than lamp posts. Their segmented bodies were smaller than they seemed from afar, in relation to those horrible legs, and they were covered with bristling black hair. The spiders encircled me, crowding against each other so that their legs scrabbled and interlocked.
Fangs gleamed between thousands of furtive pedipalps, but the fear I felt seemed disconnected from the spiders somehow. I sensed no malice in their many unblinking eyes.
The ranks of spiders parted. Out of the darkness swayed Junior, held aloft by the scorpion’s stinger.
“Tetris,” he said with a smile. His teeth were a dazzling white, rimmed with blood.
“Hi, Junior,” I said, peering into his featureless black eyes.
“You haven’t been listening to me, Tetris,” said Junior in his deep, grating voice.
“This is a dream,” I said. The spiders chittered, rubbing their mandibles together, and I saw that they coated the tree trunks, clinging to the bark with sharp, hooked feet. A swarm ten thousand strong, all of them fixing their eyes on me.
I shuddered.
“It’s under your skin, Tetris.”
“You’ve said that before,” I snapped. The worst part was that I could feel it, the skin of my neck crawling, something wriggling to escape. I fought the urge to scratch at it.
My palms stung, and I discovered that my fists were clenched, the fingernails digging deep ruts. I tried to uncurl my hands, but the fingers wouldn’t budge.
“Can’t you leave me alone?” I asked.
The forest was silent. Junior considered my words. The spiders shifted their focus to him, waiting for the response.
“No,” said Junior at last, and the horde of spiders writhed, screaming. The noise was deafening, but I couldn’t move my hands to cover my ears.
The scorpion clacked its claws, and silence fell again, although the spiders continued to spasm quietly, stricken by some searing psychic pain. Their mouthparts flailed.
“Trust your eyes, Tetris,” said Junior, oblivious to the roiling chaos around us. “Trust nothing else.”
The floor gave way beneath me and I fell into darkness.
In the morning I had purple crescents underneath my eyes. Li noticed right away.
“What kept you up last night?” she asked.
Zip, packing his sleeping bag, thought the question was meant for him.
“Hmm? I slept like a koala,” he said. “I love it when it rains.”
“Not you, doofus. Tetris looks like a gorilla punched him in each eye.”
“I punched him back,” I said.
“I’m sure you did,” said Li.
“You ever think maybe there’s a way they could make these breakfast bars taste a little better, but they don’t bother, because it’s cheaper this way?” asked Zip, unwrapping one as he spoke.
“What flavor’s that?” I asked, grabbing a bar out of my own pack. “Mulch or plastic?”
“Mulch,” said Zip.
“Trade you,” I suggested. The “plastic” flavor, which was supposed to taste like key lime pie, left a slick, acrid residue on the roof of your mouth. The blueberry bars might taste like mulch, but at least they went down properly when you swallowed them.
Zip shrugged and tossed it over. When I tossed my bar in exchange, I must have put some kind of crazy spin on it, because it bounced off Zip’s hand and tumbled out of the tree.
“God damn it, Tetris,” said Zip, peering down at the bush where the bar had vanished. “I’m never gonna find that thing.”
We finished packing and rappelled down. As Li checked the magazine in the SCAR, Zip rooted through the bush for his breakfast.
I scanned the undergrowth, half-expecting to see dream-Junior’s smirking face poking out. My jaw throbbed. I placed fingers against the base of my ear and felt the joint pop as I opened and closed my mouth. Must have been gritting my teeth again. When stressed, I had a tendency to clench my molars. I figured I was wearing them down to nubs. On track for dental implants by age thirty-five.
Zip yelped, shattering the early-morning silence. In the distance, something that sounded like a bird, but was almost certainly not a bird, squawked three times in response.
“Are you fucking nuts?” hissed Li.
“Look at this,” said Zip. “Come here! Look at this!”
“Keep it down,” said Li, but she went to look. I stayed where I was, watching the perimeter. Somebody always had to be on the lookout.
Newly-fallen leaves, shaken out of the trees by the storm, covered the ground. They’d shrivel and lose their color within a few hours, but for now they draped like green, veiny doormats all around us. Not for the first time, I marveled at their size. They weren’t quite as limp and floppy as normal leaves. They had skeletons of tough cellulose keeping the green skin rigid, like bones in a bat wing.
Actually, it was kites they reminded me of most. Green fabric stretched flat over supportive struts. I wondered if you could get a forest leaf to fly like a kite, at least in the brief period before it began to decay. Not that I’d ever been able to get actual kites to work as a kid. Flying a kite was another thing you needed your dad to help with.
I examined my smarting palms and found sweat seeping into red marks left by my fingernails.
“Tetris, you’ve gotta see this,” said Li, and a quick glance at her face told me that Zip had found something truly bizarre. I hurried over, abandoning my vigil.
Zip scooted out of the way to show me.
“What’s that look like to you?” he asked.
When I saw it, a prickling chill rushed over me, starting at my scalp and broadening as it went. My insides felt cold and slimy, and the cuts on my palms sang.
Past the tangled matrix of branches and leaves, just barely poking up out of the dirt, was a gray tablet etched with complicated symbols.
“Is that what you told me about, Tetris?” asked Li, hunched over my shoulder. “The thing you told me you saw?”
“What thing?” asked Zip, letting go of the bush so that it wobbled back into place. He looked at us. “You guys keeping secrets from me?”
Trust your eyes, Tetris.
“I think it is,” I said, scratching my neck.
Li crouched, letting the assault rifle hang loose at her waist, and started wrenching away chunks of the bush, flinging them behind her. After a moment, Zip and I bent to help.
We tore into it, driven by an indescribable urgency. When the bush was gone, we could see that much of the tablet lay buried underground, so we dug away at the dirt with our fingers. Soon the soil was everywhere: caked under our nails, smeared on our cheeks, gritting between our teeth.
I couldn’t believe it. Right there, a few inches away, was a literal impossibility, a tangible contradiction of everything we’d been taught about the world. My mind raced to try and come up with an explanation. Maybe it was a sci-fi movie prop that had dropped out of a plane? That would explain why the symbols resembled no language I’d ever seen. They were all sharp corners and fine details. Hieroglyphs? No two symbols were alike. The symbols were large, several inches across, and their contours were complicated by dizzyingly precise, fractal appendages.
When I saw the obelisk, it had been too far away to make a judgment on its composition. Now, as I laid my hands against the rounded gray tablet, I found myself even more confused. The material was too uniform, too featureless, with no visible grain, to be stone. Yet, against my hand, it was cool and smooth as a polished granite countertop.
Not metal. Not plastic. But not stone, either, at least no stone I’d ever seen.
“You guys have got to tell me what this is,” said Zip.
“I’ve got no idea what it is,” said Li. “A couple weeks ago, Tetris told me he saw something covered in symbols, the day that Junior died. Is this what you saw, T?”
I sat back on my heels.
“This is a lot smaller,” I said, “but yeah, it looks similar.”
“This is impossible, you realize,” said Zip. “Nobody’s been this far out here. There’s no way this can be here.”
His head darted left, right, up, searching for some sign that we were being tricked.
“I’m freaking out, guys,” he said.
“Cool it,” said Li. “We’ll get pictures, close-ups, and head home. Once we’re out, we can share the footage and somebody will tell us what we’re looking at.”
I remembered Agent Cooper, the cruel look in his eye as he leaned over the table, the harsh Listerine odor of his breath.
“I don’t think it’s going to be that easy,” I said.
Li scrunched her eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
“I think they know,” I said. “Those fuckers. I think they know.”
“Stay with me, Tetris,” said Zip.
“When Junior died, the FBI took me and Hollywood in for questioning,” I said, talking fast. “I thought they wanted to know what happened with Junior, but that wasn’t why they brought us in. The government guy, the agent, he didn’t care about Junior. What he did care about was the obelisk.”
“Obelisk, right.” Zip whipped from my face to Li’s and back again. “Obelisk?”
“There was an obelisk,” I said, exhausted at the thought of having to tell the story again. “When Junior died. It’s why he died, he was going to look. It had symbols on it, just like this does. They must have seen it in our footage, flagged it down.”
“I just want you to know that you sound like an absolute wacko,” said Zip.
“That’s exactly what the FBI guy said!” I yelped. “Look, remember the story Li’s dad told? About Roy LaMonte? He said Roy saw obelisks, structures, people—”
“LaMonte was crazy, Tetris,” said Zip, staring at Li, who’d clamped her mouth shut.
Li didn’t say a word. Her fingertips tapped the SCAR’s stock.
“Oh, come on,” said Zip, “you can’t possibly believe this.”
“The Briggs brothers died on that trip,” she said. “There was only LaMonte’s word to go on. What if he was right?”
“What about pictures? Wouldn’t he have shown the pictures? Taken a video?”
“It all goes through the government first, Zip,” I said miserably. “They could have censored it.”
We stared at the tablet. Was that a slight glow, hovering around the edges, or was it my imagination?
“You realize that the FBI will see our footage, too,” said Zip. “The body cameras. Everything we’re saying right now, they’ll hear every word. If you’re right, and they’re trying to cover something up, we are totally fucked. As soon as we turn this in, they’ll say we’re crazy and lock us away, or worse.”
“So we don’t turn it in,” said Li. “We take the footage straight to CBS, NBC, all the networks.”
I considered that. It wasn’t like they were waiting for us when we came out of the forest. Our return wasn't a scheduled event. Typically, we headed as close to “east” as we could manage with our compasses, and wherever we wound up on the coastline, we called for pick-up. This time, we could slide under the radar, hold off on that call, hitchhike to the nearest town. At any public library, we could hop on computers, make copies of the evidence, and send it everywhere, like an old-fashioned email chain letter. Backups upon backups. Once it was out, the FBI would have no way of stopping it.
“I like that idea,” I said.
Zip ran a finger along the outline of one of the indented symbols. He sighed, his shoulders shrinking in. For a moment he resembled a middle-schooler, disappointed in his report card, imagining the look on his father’s face when he brought home an F.
“Okay,” he said finally, laying his palm flat against the tablet. “I’m in.”
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