After the Fire Read online

  “Okay. Hop in.”

  Chuck lived three blocks north in the garage apartment behind his parent’s home. It was an odd place to drop in on someone. Any time I pulled my car down the alley beside his folks’ house, the window curtains would part and I’d see the hatchet of a hard nose jab at the window. The Hollands were keeping tabs on their forty-year old son.

  “So how’s it going?” I asked once Chuck was in the passenger seat.

  “Remember all that hurrah about the moon landing hoax stuff?” he asked.

  “Sure. I remember it.” There was this documentary making the rounds about how it was impossible for the U.S. to have launched a space capsule to the moon and back, in the dim and dark days of my childhood.

  “Well. I found evidence that we really did go to the moon in 1969 and in subsequent years. So you can pretty much disregard all that bullshit about it being a government cover-up to hoodwink the world into thinking we beat the Russians without actually going.”

  “So, we went, huh?”

  “Yeah,” Chuck deflated a bit. I did a u-turn in the Copy Store parking lot that Chuck managed, and aimed the old Mercedes north.

  “How’d you figure it out?” I asked.

  “Well, you see there’s this little-known and almost never talked-about experiment that began with the moon shot in ’69. One of the first things Armstrong and Aldrin did was to put out these reflector pads on the moon so that this guy at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas could bounce a laser beam off of it. He’s been doing it every day for the last forty-three years.”

  “What’s the purpose of the laser beam?”

  “To measure down to the millimeter exactly how far the moon is from the Earth. They’ve determined that in the past, say a few million years ago, the moon was much larger in the sky because it was closer. In a few million more it’ll be much smaller.”

  “The moon is going away from us,” I stated.

  “Yeah,” Chuck said, with a voice like I’d shot his dog.

  “And this project was never a big public thing?”

  “Yeah. A very minimally funded project, which was never even brought up by the anti-moon-hoax scientists. Figured it out on my own.”

  “Sometimes the truth hurts,” I said, and pulled into the narrow rock driveway.

  “So what’s up?” Chuck asked.

  “Maybe nothing. There’s something I want to look into, but it’s apparently even dangerous to start asking questions.”

  Chuck laughed. “It’s always dangerous to ask questions. Why do you think I do it?”

  “You like danger?”

  “I’m over forty and I live behind my parents’ home, Bill. I’ve worked at the same job since I got out of high school. I’ve only ever had the one girlfriend and it’s because I found a girl that never wants to live together or get married. No, I don’t like danger. Danger paralyzes me. So the only way I can live at all on the edge is by reading everything in the world on conspiracy theories. It’s the same reason engineers read fantasy and science fiction.”

  “I never thought about it that way,” I said, and parked the car in front of the garage doors beneath Chuck’s flat.

  We got out into the night. I followed Chuck up the stairs to his apartment. His keys rattled in the door and after a moment we were inside.

  Chuck Holland’s apartment was like a computer science laboratory that had come into major collision with a used bookstore. Computer desks with computers and laptops lined the walls, interspersed with bookshelves bearing literally tons of paperback books, mostly of the conspiracy theory variety—including flying saucer and alien visitation books—old computer printouts, and every kind of dictionary known to man. There were damned few places to sit.

  Chuck turned on the lights one by one, mostly half a dozen dim lamp lights. He went into his kitchen area and started heating a pot of water.

  “Tea, Bill?” he asked.

  “Whatever you’re having.”

  “Tea it is. Tell me about this danger that you can’t actively investigate.”

  “Alright. What if I were to tell you that there was a subdivision on the outskirts of Austin that had an extremely high cancer and sickness rate among the people who live there?”

  “Hmph. Hold on a sec.”

  Chuck came back into the living room and sat down at a small laptop computer. He began typing away. I looked over his shoulder and saw him log into the Centers for Disease Control website. After a moment he was downloading what appeared to be a rather large file. The download status bar moved slowly but steadily from left to right. Chuck reached to his right and took a USB plug and snapped it into the laptop. He reached over and hit a button on a small device there and a large projection from overhead lit up a blank area of wall toward the rear of the apartment.

  “Just a second,” Chuck said. “This stuff takes time.”

  The file completed downloading and Chuck saved the file, then clicked on another icon. The wall went blue.

  I watched as he moved the new icon that appeared on his desktop over onto the program that was using the projector. A topographical map of the United States sprang into view. There were hundreds of little red flags all over the lower forty-eight states.

  Texas zoomed into view, filling the screen, then Austin. There were several of the little red flags scattered around, but few of them in the downtown area. Austin boasted one of the cleanest, environmentally sound metropolitan urban areas on Earth. I noticed that the flags were mostly in the outlying areas, and then mostly north, south, and east.

  An arrow moved onto the screen in tandem with Chuck’s mouse movements. He clicked on the one area with the largest number of red flags and the area zoomed into view.

  “Here’s your subdivision,” Chuck said.

  He zoomed in closer and moved the mouse around. There were twenty red flags spread over what at first glance appeared to be a rural subdivision of about a hundred or so homes.

  Slightly to the west of that, past the sinuous curve of a creek bed, was Sol Gunderson’s goat farm.

  “How the hell did you do that?” I said.

  “I knew it,” Chuck said. “This is the place.”

  “Passive,” I said quietly.

  “What?”

  “This has to be a passive investigation. Do you have any idea what can happen when a person starts asking questions in matters like this?”

  “Um. Let’s see. The people who caused this—usually it’s some big corporation—hires someone to snuff out the person who’s asking. It would surprise you to know that I know things I’m not supposed to, Bill. And not other people’s theories about what happened, but what actually happened in some of the big cases in the last hundred years.”

  “I believe it. So then you understand me when I say ‘passive.’ ”

  “I do. What do you want me to do? I live for this kind of shit, Bill.”

  I thought about it, but only for a moment. “Do? I want you to do the hardest, toughest thing I could ever ask you to do. It won’t be easy, but I think you’re made of sterner stuff, Chuck.”

  He turned to me in his chair. “What’s that? Name it?”

  “Alright,” I said. “This is going to be hard for you. I want you to do exactly this: nothing. I want you to download nothing further. I want you not to mention this to anyone. I want you to forget I said anything. I want you to not even think about it. Can you do that?”

  He stared at me, unblinking. For a moment, I thought he wasn’t going to take what I’d said seriously.

  “Okay. I know what you’re saying. But it’s not going to be easy.”

  “Oh. It’s worse than that. I want you to promise me, right now, Chuck. Promise me that you won’t...everything I just said.”

  I waited.

  “Alright. I promise.”

  “Okay. Good enough. Kill that projection, log out of CDC, and delete the file, right after you put a copy of it onto a disk for me.”

  “Wait a minute. You! You’re going
to do something.”

  “No. But I want a copy of that. If worse comes to worse, I can mail it to somebody at the newspaper or the television station. I’ve learned that things always have a way of coming back around. I think this thing may be no exception. It’s dangerous. People have and will die over it. The only way to keep snakebites at bay is to carry snakebite antidote.”

  “I see,” he said. “Okay. You’ve convinced me.”

  Chuck inserted a small thumb drive into his laptop and copied the file to it. He removed the drive and handed it to me. I dropped it in my shirt pocket.

  “Thanks, Chuck. Okay, I gotta get myself home.”

  At that moment the teakettle began whistling.

  “You won’t stay for tea?” he asked.

  “Naw. I never can get to sleep if I drink tea in the evening.”

  “Oh. Okay, Bill. Thanks for letting me help. Anything you need, let me know.” Chuck stood and shook my hand.

  “Thank you, Chuck.” I turned and started for the door. At the last instant I felt a chill. I turned.

  “You made a promise. I expect you to keep it.”

  “Oh. I will, Bill. I will keep it.”

  As I walked down the stairs in the dark, I found myself beginning to believe him.

  It was stupid of me.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I went home. It’s where my heart dwells.

  By the time I got there, Julie had a plate of cold food for me, Jessica was home from her night classes, Jennifer, our seven year old, was home from the neighbors, and Michelle was cranky and ready for bed. It was my job to put her there.

  “Daddy, can I have the light on?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “I mean, the whole time I’m asleep?”

  “Yes, darlin’. This light stays on,” I said. I walked over to her and kissed her forehead.

  “You’re a good daddy, Daddy.”

  “And you’re a good little girl, darlin’.”

  I closed the door softly on the way out.

  I stopped in on Jessica, who was in the process of commandeering the garage for her own personal apartment space.

  “Hey, dad.”

  “Hey yourself. So, looks like I won’t be able to park my car in my own garage anymore.”

  “You never did to begin with. There was way too much junk in here.”

  Jessica was on the rollaway bed, a temporary measure until she had time to move her queen-sized bed into the garage. The place looked decidedly different. Gone were the stacks of boxes, the memorabilia from days gone by, the abandoned projects. I decided I had better not inspect the outgoing garbage and recycle bins. It was safer that way—there’s no telling what I would want to salvage.

  I noticed Jessica’s posters already on the walls. There was a time when her wall decor ran from evil-looking goth rock bands all the way to the latest Hollywood heartthrob. Those days were gone. The centerpiece of the montage was a blown-up poster of the Travis County Sheriff’s Department in full uniform, taken in the park next to the Courthouse. Jessica had pasted a cutout photo of herself in uniform, kneeling down in front.

  “So how’d the written test go today?” I asked.

  “I passed.”

  I pointed to the cutout of her with the other deputies. “Cute. So you’re going to do this thing. Gonna be an officer, huh?”

  “You know it, dad.”

  “I shouldn’t have let Patrick Kinsey overly-influence you over the years.”

  Jessica smiled up at me and tossed her short, straight black hair.

  “It wasn’t Pat,” she said. “It was you. All of your best friends have been cops and investigators.”

  “Some of my worst friends, too,” I said.

  “Yeah. Still, it’s what I want to do.”

  “Okay,” I said. “When are you supposed to qualify?”

  “Tomorrow. It’s just a formality.”

  “You nervous?”

  “Of course not. I was born to do this.”

  “Alright. Say, you remember when I used to run around solving things for people?”

  “What do you mean? You still do that. It’s a character flaw of yours.” She smiled.

  “Maybe so. There’s one thing that’s going on right now that I’m extremely reluctant to pursue.”

  That got her interest. She sat up and regarded me, unblinking.

  I sat down on the bed beside her.

  “There’s danger, isn’t there?”

  I nodded.

  “From the look on your face,” she said, “this isn’t something small, like bailing out one of your friends or chasing someone down in a helicopter.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hmm. You’re talking about danger of death.”

  I nodded. “You remember one time, you went to stay for a few days with one of your friends while mom was out at Uncle Nat’s ranch?”

  “Yeah. That was a long time ago.”

  “I arranged all that to protect you and her while I was being stupid,” I admitted.

  “I take it that the danger is maybe bigger now. Your friends. You, mom, me, the girls.”

  “Yeah. I have to decide who to turn this over to. Let me tell you, though, it’s bigger than the local Sheriff’s Department.”

  “I don’t see how that could be. Dad, you’re getting all serious and shit on me. This isn’t like you.”

  “I’m older. My fiftieth birthday is not far away. I’m not sure I can do this anymore.”

  “Let me ask you this, then. What happens if you do nothing?”

  It took me a moment, but I said it. “Innocent people continue to die. Slowly.”

  “Uh huh. I know you, dad, if I know anyone. You’re not the kind of guy to allow that to happen. It’s not in your DNA.”

  “Yeah. Hence the problem. Alright, that’s enough of this talk.” I stood up. “But thanks for listening to me.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, and I turned to look at her. Our little girl was all grown up—a woman now, with all that entails. Gone was any trace of the child she’d once been. “Dad, I want you to tell me if and when it heats up so I’ll be ready. If you’ll recall, I’ve shot a person before. If I have to, I’ll do it again to protect you and this family.”

  “I know. Me too. Alright, you see if you can get some sleep.”

  She nodded.

  I paused on the way out the door and said to her, “By the way, Mom’s pregnant.”

  Jessica nodded and smiled.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Around four a.m. I awoke in a cold sweat and the phrase came to my lips: disease cluster. That’s what anomalous incidence of the same disease or related diseases in a specific geographic area are called. Typically it’s caused by some environmental issue, and almost always man-made.

  The thumb drive Chuck had given me sat on the nightstand beside my bed. I reached for it in the dark and found it. I grasped it in my hand as I went over everything that had occurred thus far.

  It wasn’t long—about the length of time it takes to decide to do something—before I was asleep, and dreaming.

  *****

  I was in a sheriff’s patrol car with Jessica, who was driving. She was in full uniform.

  “So, where are we going?” I asked.

  “I’ve got to take this goat to jail,” she said.

  I glanced in the back seat, and there was a Spanish goat. It was alive, although it was busily losing patches of hair all over the seat. Tufts of it drifted around in the air, but it didn’t seem to mind.

  “What’d he do wrong?” I asked Jessica.

  “Hey,” the goat said, in Danny Devito’s voice. “You’re talking about me and I’m right here. That’s terribly rude.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t pay him any mind, dad. He’s a criminal.”

  “What’d he do?” I repeated.

  “He,” Jessica said, “has been an environmentally unsound goat.”

  “You can arrest him for that?”

>   “Of course she can,” the goat said. “She’s the law. Us goats don’t count for anything. It’s not right, I tell you. It’s just not right.”

  “I think you’re violating his civil rights,” I told Jessica.

  “He’s got none. He’s just a goat. He doesn’t care what he does, who he poisons with his radiation.”

  “Taking him to jail, huh?”

  Jessica passed right on by the courthouse. “Nope. We’re taking him down to NASA. Gonna put him in a space capsule and launch him into the sun.”

  “Say,” the goat said. “That’s a little harsh. Don’t I get a lawyer?”

  “You’d only eat him,” Jessica stated. “Shut up, you!”

  “I’m a ram, not a ewe!” the goat complained.

  “I dunno,” I said. “Shooting him into the sun is what I’d call overkill.”

  “It’s either that or...”

  “Or what?” the goat asked.

  “There’s always underkill.”

  “That doesn’t sound nice either,” I said.

  “What is it?” the goat asked.

  “We take you and push a mountain of dirt on top of you. ‘Under’ plus ‘kill’. Underkill.”

  “I won’t be a party to this, Jess,” I said. “You can let me out here.”

  “I can’t stop. The river’s coming up. You’ll have to jump for it.”

  “Can’t you slow down?” I asked.

  “Not with this goat on board. We’re spreading radiation all over town at this point. You’d better jump while you’ve got the chance, dad!”

  I opened the door and looked down. There was nothing but river down there, through what looked like a thousand feet of space.

  “Three,” Jessica said. “Two. One. Jump!”

  I jumped and was falling. Falling through space.

  And that’s when I woke up.

  It took half an hour for me to get back to sleep.

  *****

  I got up early, got myself showered up and was getting ready to kiss Julie goodbye before heading out the door, when she said to me, “Give it to someone else, Bill. Give it to someone who will do something about it.”