What we did see was all kinds of garbage on the side of the road. That’s the thing about the desert, nothing rots or gets overgrown or sinks into the earth. You throw something away, it just sits there. We drove past these little piles of fractured aluminum tubing and cut metal and broken machine parts and colored glass and cracked ceramic insulators and shit like that. It was past midnight, there was a half-moon in the sky and all kinds of stars, so it looked pretty strange, sort of Martian, if you know what I mean—these trash piles with rebar and steel girders sticking out. Six feet high, some of them, then ten feet high, until we were driving down an alley made of trash, and Bastián slowed up and started to look worried. Eugene, he says, this is not a normal operation. No shit, I said.
I don’t want to be seen here, he says. What ever these people are doing, they don’t want company. Well, I say, and it was probably the Pisco talking, I came out here to see and I mean to see.
Okay, but on foot, Bastián says. Toyota makes too much noise.
Okay. So we get out and climb up an embankment that’s mostly industrial refuse. Slipping on sheet plastic and grabbing rebar like it was tree branches, all in all probably making more noise than we would have if we just kept driving. But it turns out Bastián picked a good place to stop, because from the top of that ridge we could see the whole installation.
If you want to call it that. The compound. What ever. That’s no mine, Bastián says. Yeah, I said, that’s pretty fuckin’ obvious.
It was a patch of desert the size of a small town, with this trash heap around it like the side of a bowl. Most of the buildings in it were long sheds, tin roofs, plywood or cinderblock walls, no marks on them. In the middle there was a tower, not very tall and kind of squat, holding up what looked like a ten or twelve big mirrors arranged like the petals of a flower. You could tell they were mirrors because they reflected the lights from the buildings and also the stars overhead. Real industrial-looking. Around it there was a bunch of pumps and pressure tanks full of god-knows-what and fat electrical cables, all told taking up about as much space as a regulation football field. That was where the light came from, the light we saw all the way back at the depot where we worked.
“How do you know that’s where it came from?” Thomas suddenly asked. Dowd gave him a shut-the-fuck-up look and paused. Cassie put a protective arm around her little brother.
We knew because it came on while we were watching. Nearly blew us back down the trash heap. I mean it wasn’t loud or anything, there wasn’t any noise at all except what might have been a compressor buried somewhere underground. But bright, oh, Jesus! Maybe thirty seconds before I could see anything but the glare. Bastián put his head down, but I couldn’t help sneaking looks. The beam of light went straight up, and it didn’t spread out like a spotlight, it was straight as a pencil all the way up to where it disappeared. The air started to smell electric, like hot metal and burning insulation.
Bastián said in a sick little voice he wanted to get back in the Toyota and go home. And I thought that was a good idea. Because with all that light we were pretty conspicuous, and worse… I could see things moving. Moving toward us. Look, I said.
People down there, he says. Anyway we guessed they were people. Between the glare and the shadows it was hard to tell. The way they moved, they might have been animals. Big ones. So. Come on, he says, let’s get the fuck out of here. So we scramble down the dark side of the trash heap, half-blind, tripping over shit. I cut myself on a piece of sheet metal and didn’t even feel it till later. Still got the scar—see?
Dowd lifted his T-shirt to expose his torso. The scar ran at right angles to the staves of his ribs, a pale irregular line.
Then Bastián says stop, I hear something. So we stand still. The wind had come up, so I could hear scraps of roofing paper and torn plastic rattling in the trash pile, plus industrial sounds from the compound, that compressor or what ever it was beating like a drum, and over that—this is what Bastián was talking about—a kind of scrabbling sound, like a dog might make digging through garbage. Getting louder. Bastián looks up at the ridgeline of the trash heap and kind of gasps, and I look where he’s looking, and there’s this, uh, thing up there—
“What do you mean?” Leo asked. “What kind of thing?”
Dowd gazed abstractedly at a torque wrench he had picked up.
Well, that’s a good question. I don’t know what else to call it. It was something about halfway between an ape, a spider, and a Swiss army knife.
Thomas emitted a bark of laughter, more nerves than anything else. Dowd ignored him.
Moved like a spider or a crab. Had about that many legs. But it bent up at the middle, I mean it had a kind of a waist, and arms above that, but not hands—more like tools, blades and pincers and shit like that. And it had a head, which was the only human thing about it. Not a human head exactly. But eyes, a mouth.
So it comes down the side of that trash pile, headed straight for Bastián. Bastián starts looking around for something he can use to defend himself. Grabs a piece of rebar that’s sticking up but it’s buried too deep, he’s like desperately tugging on this iron rod, doesn’t take his hand off it until the thing is on top of him. Then he tries to back up but he’s on a slope and he can’t move fast enough and the thing just—well, it basically took him apart. Three quick moves. Snip snip snip. Three pieces of Bastián rolled past me, leaving blood trails.
Then it came for me, but I’d had a little more time get ready. Or else I just got lucky—the Lucite rod I grabbed out of the trash had about the weight and heft of a baseball bat. The thing had long arms and those fingers, or blades, or claws, were fast as lightning, I got a couple more scars I could show you but I’d have to drop my pants—anyway I managed to bring that rod down on the thing’s head, maybe not hard enough to kill it, I don’t know, but maybe I did, it dropped like all its strings had been cut and I proceeded to move the fuck elsewhere.
Got to the Toyota. Did a crazed U-turn and as soon as I’m pointed the right direction I see a half-dozen more of those things in the mirror, gaining on me. Stepped on the gas so hard I nearly ran the fucking vehicle off the fucking road. Kicked up a big cloud of dust and sand, which in the glare of that light was like a smokescreen.
The next thing I see is in front of me, and this time at least it’s a human being, a guy in jeans and a white shirt standing in the middle of the road trying to flag me down. Which was almost reassuring, except the guy has a pistol in a holster and he’s starting to reach for it. I mean, to me he looked like a mall cop. But what am I gonna do, pull over? So I stand on the gas pedal.
The guy looked weirdly calm, and I could see him real clear in that freaky light, trying to level his pistol before the Toyota hit him. Like it was a race between the pistol and the Toyota. The Toyota won. I hit him full-on.
Which pretty near killed me. Any of you ever been in a car when it runs into a large animal, maybe a deer? No air bags on that vehicle. No seat belts. If my legs hadn’t caught on the steering wheel my head would have gone through the windshield. As it was I took a nasty crack on the dashboard. Lost control. The vehicle went up on two wheels, almost turned over. It was halfway up the embankment before I got control of it again. Big dent in the front end and the engine making a sound like a circular saw with a bent blade.