Bridgetown, Issue #1: Arrival (31 page)

Though the flickering light was dim, he could
perceive that the staircase was finally about to bottom out. He
estimated he must have been four stories below ground by now. The
air was stifling. At the base of the stairwell, an archway at the
right opened up into the next passage.

White took a breath, steeled his nerves, and
made the turn:

He was in another snakish tunnel, but there
was a light coming from whatever was on the other side. He walked
briskly, avoiding the muddy spots as best as he could. Towards the
end, the dirt walls were covered in plaster, forming an
antechamber. When he reached this spot, he leaned up against the
wall, breathing shallow to keep quiet, and poked his head past the
doorway into the next room.

What was this? The room was warm, lit up in
long drippy candles. In the center of the room was a desk. And at
this desk was a man.

White's heart skipped a beat, and he nearly
gasped.

The man wore a long dark coat, and his
features seemed to recede into the shadows.

"Black," the sheriff uttered.

The form rose up from behind the desk and
came around it. He approached White, and stuck a hand out to shake.
White did so.

"Sheriff White," the man said. "It's nice to
finally meet my better half." He smiled, and crows' feet formed at
the corners of his deep-set eyes.

White did not have it within himself to
return the laugh. He was bewildered, disoriented. What was this
place? What was going on?

"Why?" he managed to ask. "Why are you here?
What is the meaning of all this?"

Black shrugged. "I need a place to do
business."

"That's not what I'm talking about." White
was trying not to shake. "Where have you taken Mrs. Cole? Why did
sixteen people have to die tonight? Why do you burn our derricks to
the ground? Why do you work so hard to turn this town against
me?"

A teakettle reached boiling point, and began
to sound out. White and Black both turned their heads towards it,
and the sheriff noticed the little gas burner in the corner. As
Black broke away to tend to the kettle, White looked down at the
desk. Papers on it bore a writing he had never seen before. The
characters looked ancient to him. Perhaps it was a cypher, part of
some secret society that Black bore membership to.

"Sheriff," Black began, pouring water from
the kettle into porcelain cups, "If I told you in words why I do
what I do, I'm afraid it would not yet make sense to you. Imagine
trying to explain the invention of the cannon to an indigenous
people who only have flinthead arrows. They would think it a divine
weapon from an angry god. A device capable of transmitting thunder.
You would not only have to explain the properties of gunpowder, but
show them it was possible to extract metal from the earth to forge
the cannon itself."

"Get to the point."

"What I'm saying, Sheriff, is that if you
wish to understand who I am, and why I do what I do, there are new
aspects to existence that I must first show you."

Black held out a teacup to White, and
beckoned for him to take it.

White gave him a look of suspicion.

"It's not poison," Black said.

"I didn't say it was," White retorted. He
took the cup, and smelled its contents. The tea was fragrant. Just
its aroma was pleasant in a sweet way, and made him a little
lightheaded for a moment. "What is it?"

"The tea is ground up from the buds of a
flower called the lotus," Black responded. "Not the lotus flower
from the Orient that you might be familiar with, but a more exotic
specimen."

"What's it do?"

"It allows you to see that which you are
otherwise blind to. To tap into an antenna you already have, let's
say."

White set the cup down on the table without
taking a drink from it. He couldn't explain the feeling he had—it
wasn't anger, it wasn't fear exactly, but he was having to steading
his shaking hand anyway. He felt like he was on the cusp of some
moment too big for him to see fully, and he was about to plunge
headlong into destiny.

He resolved then to tell Black something he'd
not told a soul in the world. He hoped Black might know its
meaning.

"Five years ago," White began, "I saw what I
thought was a falling star shoot across the sky and land in the
desert just outside town. I was curious, and it was a slow night
like was usual back then, so I went out to track it down.

"But what I found out there that night wasn't
a rock. I saw a man emerge from the wilderness. He said he was just
coming from Los Angeles, and I gave him directions and sent him on
his way. And you know what that man was?"

"Wayne Cole," Black responded, grave.

"I didn't tell anyone what I had seen," White
continued, "Because my wife had recently passed on and I was
drinking more than I should've been, and I didn't want people to
start thinking I wasn't fit for my post anymore.

"Pretty soon, I'd convinced myself I imagined
the whole thing. Never paid it much mind after that night. Until
now. But now it's clear to me that things around here only really
started to change after that night. That our fortunes reversed.
That I first heard your name, and that the Lotus Boys showed
up."

He looked around the plaster-walled hideout,
taking in the sheer oddity of its existence. "And now I find this,
this place, this secret chamber of yours," he continued. "And
you've got strange writing on your desk that looks like it's from
Mars, and I realize you've been operating here right under my nose
this whole time, and I want to know what in the good green fuck is
going on in my city. And who in the fuck you are, Mister
Black."

Black took a moment, perhaps to allow White
to fully absorb what he was saying. He took a drink from his
teacup, then responded: "The answers to your questions, Errol, lie
in the bottom of that cup."

White took his eyes off Black long enough to
contemplate the cup. He hadn't come all this way for nothing. He
hadn't dreamed of that doorway for nights for nothing. No matter
how little sense it made, he knew he had little recourse but to
take the leap of faith.

He put the cup to his lips, and knocked it
back in one go.

He wiped his chin, and set the cup down on
the desk.

His head began to spin, and a lightness
filled his chest.

Then he began to cough.

The cough turned to a hack, and he realized
he could not breathe. His throat was seizing up.

"You
poi—
poisoned—
" He
tried to complete the sentence, as though at least accusing Black
would grant him a final moral victory.

But Black's face filled with fear and
confusion. He rushed over to White's side as the sheriff fell to
his knees, and tried to shake him into cognizance.

"No, not poison," Black said. "Tell me what
you're feeling. What's happening? What's wrong?"

But White could no longer speak. He felt like
his ears were filling with fluid.

Then the fluid broke, and his ears filled
with something else.

Music.

He tried saying as much to
Black. "
Music. I hear—
"

The walls were closing in around him. He saw
only Black's startled face, and a moment later, that, too, was
gone.

Afterword.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this
first issue of
Bridgetown
, and I’d like to take a
moment to give you a view for the lay of the land.

First, let me say a few words about where the
idea for the book came from. Every story begins with a little
kernel—just an image, maybe, or something someone once said that
was the right kind of evocative—which set off an exploration in the
creator’s mind. In this case, it was the mental picture of a bunch
of Jeep Wranglers tearing through the Old West, gunslingers
exchanging shots with each other from aboard their machines. I
liked the thought. It was just askew enough in a way that appealed
to me. I began to investigate the implications of that moment—where
did the Jeeps come from? Was it a cargo cult kind of thing, or did
they have the means to produce and understand this technology? What
would an Old West with cars mean for the geopolitics and business
of the era? To the price of oil, for instance?

Apart from that, I had this separate
hypothetical that was tugging at me. If you were separated for five
years from those closest to you, during which time they naturally
grew closer without you, how would the whole lot of you deal with
it upon your return?

When I put those two ideas
together, I had the seeds of
Bridgetown
. But there was a lot more
to be done before the story would come into its own. Working with
my friend and writing partner Alex Moskowitz, I spent a few weeks
in early 2010 breaking the story. Originally, our goal was to write
a feature-length screenplay centering on the increasingly violent
story of Jesse, Susanna, and Wayne’s outsized egos. But it was a
tough nut to crack. Too tough, and too byzantine. Our ideas grew
and grew, like vines creeping up the sides of a Southern gothic
mansion. The story seemed to suffocate itself. Clearly, it was far
too big for the economy of a two-hour running time and the
necessarily terse prose of the screenplay format.

I put the story, which we’d
been referring to alternately as
The
Magnificent 4x4s
and
Of Guts and Glory
, away for a while.
I finished school in spring of 2011 and went on to start a career
in Los Angeles media production. I took the daily Metrolink train
into Glendale, where I worked at DreamWorks, and spent my rides
back and forth writing. The Cole Brothers’ story was, by 2012,
settled enough into my memory that only the important broad
brushstrokes remained in my mind. It was as though the mere passing
of time had done the legwork of trimming the outline down for me,
and I could begin to write. Prompted by Alex’s cousin Sara, who I
was living with, I decided to tackle it as a prose
novel.

So that’s the story, in
immediate terms, of where
Bridgetown
came from. But as to why
it is what it is? I’ve lived in the American Southwest my whole
life, having been born and raised in the suburbs of North Orange
County outside of Los Angeles. Stay within a twenty-minute radius
of my hometown, and you’d see little more than the history-free
manicured sprawl and arterial freeways you’d expect. But venture
any farther east, or an hour and a half to the north, and you
realize that underneath all that post-war development, you live in
a wilderness. A frontier so mighty and fundamentally inhospitable
to humankind that it is little changed from how it must have looked
when my European ancestors first “discovered” it centuries ago.
It’s a place where bizarre rock formations, shaped by eons-long
processes, cast monstrous shadows over highway-side outpost
communities. Where stories of Bigfoot and UFOs seem to weave
together into a local folklore, perhaps fueled by peyote and cheap
beer as much as by an imaginative need to explain a general
creeping unease. And why shouldn’t these stories thrive here? Out
in these places, there can be little sense of control over one’s
domain. Everything is ripe with mystery.

This sense of the unknown has long worked its
way into the mythical subtext of the Southland’s local expression.
Some of my earliest and most vivid formative memories took place at
Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. In both these places, hollow
man-made mountains house eerie, stalactite-filled caverns that
bubble with a sense of Technicolor life in their plaster bowels. No
doubt Devil’s Peak owes as much to Knott’s Calico Mine Ride as it
does to the actual, awesome mesas of the American Southwest.

Mysteries run deep, too, in Bridgetown.
Susanna and the Cole Brothers have only begun to probe them. Jesse
seems to be the only one of the three willing to investigate why
they traveled back in time in the first place. There’s clearly more
going on with Black than he’s yet given up—what were his crimes for
which he was made human? Who had the power to force him into
mortality? Were they the ones who made the rabbit-hole at the heart
of Devil’s Peak, and for what purpose was it originally built?

Will Susanna at last get the recognition she
deserves, or is she destined to be consumed by a time and ideology
that disregards her contributions to society? Will Wayne be able to
hold onto the woman he loves? Does he truly love her, or does he
only have room in his heart for his own glory?

Has Sheriff White met his end? And what will
happen to Bridgetown, now that the town has been fractured in two
by the warring brothers and their respective armies of support?

We’re only one issue in, folks. There’s still
a lot left to tell in the story of our trio, to say nothing of the
entire world they will have left in their wake once they are little
more than dust.

Thanks for coming along for the ride. It
means a lot.

Giovanni Iacobucci

About the Author.

GIOVANNI IACOBUCCI is an author and media producer
in Los Angeles. He’s been building a sprawling saga for years, of
which
Bridgetown
is only the first part. He is the founder
of Modern Mythos Media, a digital media imprint for narrative
artists interested in telling compelling stories. ModMyth’s daily
habit is
LA Revivalist
, where the
team shines light on what’s going on in the Los Angeles independent
cinema scene.

Connect with the author online:

Website:
http://www.modmythmedia.com

Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/gioiacobucci