Ground Zero (The X-Files) (11 page)

He had shaved this morning for his weekly trip into town, though the grizzled old whiskers could barely punch their way through his tough cheeks anymore. He didn’t bother wearing gloves; with the

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several layers of calluses on his hands (calluses that penetrated to the bones themselves) gloves would have been redundant. His squash-blossom silver-and-turquoise belt buckle was so large it could have been used as a coaster for cold drinks; it was one of his most prized possessions. McCarron rode into the don’t-blink-or-it’s-gone town from his outlying ranch no more often than once every seven days to pick up his mail. There were limits to the amount of human companionship one man could stomach. The door creaked as it always did when he stepped inside the General Store. He moved his left boot over by one floorboard so he wouldn’t step on the loose plank.

“Afternoon, Oscar,” said Fred, the store owner. His elbows rested on the countertop, but other than shifting his gaze, Fred didn’t move a muscle.

“Fred,” he replied. It was all the greeting he could manage. A man who was eighty years old couldn’t afford to change his public personality this late in life. “Get any mail this week?”

He had no idea what Fred’s last name was. He still considered the shopkeeper a newcomer to the area, though Fred had bought the General Store from an old Navajo couple a full fifteen years earlier. The Navajos had run the store for thirty-five years or so, and McCarron had considered them part of the landscape. Fred, on the other hand…well, Fred he still wasn’t too sure about.

“We’ve been waiting for you to come in, Oscar. You’ve got the usual junk mail, but there’s a letter here from Hawaii. Postmark says Pearl Harbor. Imagine that! It’s a package. Any idea what it is?”

“What it is, is none of your damn business,” McCarron said. “Just get me my mail.”

Fred levered himself off of his elbows and 91

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disappeared behind the counter to the small post office and storeroom in the back. McCarron brushed his hands down the snaps of his denim shirt and pants, knocking the whitish desert dust away. He knew everyone else called them “blue jeans” these days, but he hadn’t gotten used to thinking of them as anything other than dungarees.

Fred returned with a handful of mail, junk newspapers, solicitations, advertising circulars, a few bills, and no letters. Nothing interesting—except for a medium-sized padded manila envelope.

McCarron took the stack and deliberately flipped through the junk mail first, driving back his own curiosity, knowing it would fluster Fred to no end. The junk mail always did a good job of starting his campfire when he slept out under the stars every Thursday night after coming into town. Finally, he held up the padded envelope, squinted at the postmark:
Honolulu, Hawaii
. The package bore no return address.

Fred leaned over the counter, cracking his big knuckles and blinking his brown eyes eagerly. His cheeks sagged on his lantern-jawed face. When he got a little older the shopkeeper would have jowls like a bulldog’s. “Well, aren’t you going to open it?” Fred asked.

McCarron glared at him. “Not in front of you, I ain’t.”

He had never forgiven Fred for his blatant indiscretion two years back of opening one of McCarron’s packages when he was a day late coming into town. It had happened to be a boxed set of videotapes, the old
Victory at Sea
series, one of McCarron’s favorites. He had always been fascinated by World War II.

Fred had been scandalized, not because of the subject matter of the tapes—McCarron suspected the old store owner had a few girlie films hidden back in 92

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his own house behind the store—but because Oscar McCarron had ordered the tapes at all, thereby exposing the secret that the old man actually had a television set and a videotape player. That went completely against the rancher’s carefully cultivated image of living off the land and scorning all modern conveniences. Back at his own ranch, McCarron kept an outhouse in plain sight of the main building and had a pump out front for water that came up pure and sweet from the White Sands aquifer. But in truth, he had modern bathroom facilities inside the house, electricity, and not only a TV and VCR but also a large satellite dish hidden back behind the adobe main house. He had purchased all the equipment up in Albuquerque, had it brought down and installed without telling anyone in the small town. McCarron enjoyed keeping up his

“old codger” image, but not at the expense of his own comfort. Fred had indeed kept his mouth shut over the past two years, at least as far as McCarron could tell, but he would never forget the offense.

“Awww, come on Oscar,” Fred said. “I’ve been waitin’ all day for you to come in just so’s I could see your smiling face.”

“Ain’t that sweet,” McCarron said. “Next thing, you’re gonna be asking me to marry you, like one of them California faggots.” He slapped the padded envelope unopened on the top of his junk mail and tucked the pile under his armpit. “If the package contains anything that concerns you, I’ll be sure to tell you next time I come in.” He turned and ambled back toward the door, intentionally stepping on the creaking board this time.

Outside, the still-hot afternoon sun had turned a buttery yellow as the light slanted toward the black lava teeth of the San Andres Mountains.

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The palomino whickered when she saw him and stamped her foreleg, impatient to be off and trotting again. Seeing no one else out on the sleepy street, McCarron allowed himself to break into a smile of delight. The young mare was so eager. She seemed to love these pack trips even more than McCarron did.

His curiosity burned within him to see the contents of the mysterious envelope. But his pride wouldn’t allow him to show any outward interest, not within sight of the General Store, where Fred was probably even now peering at him through the fly-specked windows.

He untied the horse and mounted up, stuffing the mail into one of the saddlebags before he rode off down the street, and then headed east overland into the sprawling open desert of the White Sands Missile Range.

Through long habit, McCarron found the loose gate in the barbed-wire fence that ran for hundreds of miles along the government-owned wasteland. He slipped the wire loose and led the palomino through the fence, fastening the gate behind him.

He fingered the bent but laminated old pass card that had been issued to him so long ago that every one of the original signers had died years ago. Oscar McCarron’s right to go onto the missile site hadn’t been questioned for several years now, not even by the hot-rodding young MPs who loved to roll over the dazzling gypsum sands in their all-terrain vehicles, as if they were surfers in dune buggies going to a beach party. But McCarron had a deep respect for authority and for the government itself, after all Uncle Sam had done for him.

Besides, he didn’t want to mess with patriotic 94

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young enthusiasts who were willing to defend even such a desolate wasteland against foreign invaders. That kind of mindset was something you didn’t play around with. McCarron rode toward the low craggy foothills. The desert was stark and flat, like a huge stretch of Nebraska sprayed with weed killer, then plopped down inside a ring of volcanic mountains. The bleakness somehow had made it an appropriate place to have hosted the world’s first atomic explosion. Oscar McCarron’s family once had owned all of this land, a worthless swath of New Mexico, not good for ranching or even mining, since it was devoid of desirable minerals and ore. But back in 1944 the Manhattan Engineering District had expressed a passionate interest in the land—and McCarron’s father had been only too happy to strike a deal. He had sold the spread for a small price, but still far more than it was worth.

The government paid extra when McCarron’s father agreed to allow them to doctor the Land Bureau documents, removing his name from original ownership, keeping the land transfer secret so that it would show on archival documents that the government had leased it from a fictitious ranch family, the McDonalds.

The government and its Manhattan Project engineers had erected farm buildings and a windmill, concocting a story of the McDonalds who had lived at the Trinity Site. Only later, after the Trinity atomic bomb test in July 1945, had McCarron understood the reason for such secrecy. The nuclear detonation had taken place in what would have been the landowners’ backyard. But reporters and, much later, protesters never located the mythical McDonalds. 95

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McCarron’s father had driven another hard bargain as part of the deal. It was during the bleakest part of World War II, when the Germans seemed to be making great strides toward global conquest and the Japanese Empire was sweeping the Pacific Rim. American soldiers were dying in record numbers. McCarron’s father had not wanted to count his young, strong son as one of the casualties. He had exchanged the land in a secret transfer in order to make his son forever exempt from military service.

Also, because he loved the land despite its seared countenance, he and his family were guaranteed permanent access, if they chose to visit. Because that had meant so much to his father, dead these thirty-four years now, Oscar McCarron had made it a tradition to spend at least one night a week out in the open, reveling in the solitude under the vast desert skies on the land they had once owned.

The palomino enjoyed the desolate landscape, and without encouragement from McCarron, broke into a trot that gradually gave way to an all-out gallop as the energetic horse stretched her muscles, leaping over low basalt outcroppings and pounding across the baked hardpan. McCarron had his favorite camping spot, and the palomino knew full well how to get there.

They reached the bowl-shaped depression with daylight to spare. Hardy lichens spattered the black rocks, showing off their vitality with a display of bright colors. Gypsum sand filled the depression, as if a hot blizzard had cascaded across the desert. A sinkhole between the rocks cradled a small, pure pool from a spring that bubbled up, filtered clean through yards of fine sand.

McCarron went first to the spring and took deep gulps of water, which was cool from being in shade all day long. He swallowed the sweet wetness, not

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wanting to waste the water in his canteens. The palomino nudged his shoulder, urging him to hurry. But McCarron took his time, enjoying the water before the palomino could slobber all over inside the spring. Then he let her drink her fill.

He unsaddled the horse and tied her to a gnarled stump. He went out with his hatchet to chop up some of the dead mesquite brush and haul it back to his makeshift firepit. The fire would burn hot, crackling and popping into the night, filling the still air with a rich aromatic smoke. Taking his mail out of the saddlebag, he held the mysterious padded envelope for an extra second, then decided to let the curiosity tickle his belly a little more. Oscar McCarron got few surprises in his life these days. He rolled up the advertising flyers and junk mail and placed them under the chopped mesquite wood, then lit the fire with a single match, as he usually did. The twigs were so dry they practically ignited themselves. McCarron unrolled his blanket and thin sleeping bag, then got out the cooking utensils. Looking up into the sky, he watched a shower of stars spray across the deepening darkness, the swarms of bright lights twinkling with a diamond richness that city dwellers never saw in their light-polluted skies.

As the resinous flames blazed bright and hot, McCarron finally sat back on his favorite rock, took the padded envelope, and tore it open. He dumped the contents into his callused palm.

“What the hell?” he said, disappointed after his hours of anticipation.

He found only a scrap of paper and a small glassine envelope filled with a powdery residue, some sort of greasy black ash that squished in his fingers as he pressed the envelope. A scrap of paper also fell

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out, displaying a message inked in precise razor-edged letters.

“FOR YOUR PART IN THE PAST.”

No signature, no date, no address.

“What the hell?” he said again. “For my part in the past of what?”

He cussed at the horse, as if the palomino might somehow be able to give him an answer. The only thing of significance Oscar McCarron could think of having done in his entire lifetime had been an accident, a coincidence of fate—having owned the land on which the Trinity Test had taken place. He did feel deeply proud of that part in his country’s history, helping to spark the beginning of a nuclear age that had ended World War II and prevented those bloodthirsty Japanese from conquering half the world. That single successful atomic test had, in effect, begun the Cold War, leading to the development of more powerful superweapons that had kept the Commies in check. Sure, Oscar McCarron had been proud of his part in all that…but it wasn’t as if he had actually
done
anything.

What else could the mysterious message mean?

“Some crazy nutcase,” he muttered. With a rude noise, he tossed the note and the package of ash into the crackling mesquite fire.

He unbuckled his food pack and pulled out a can of chili, which he opened with a handheld can opener. He dumped it into a pot, which he hung from a tripod above the flames. He took out his special treasure, plastic zipper-lock bags of jalapeños and fresh-roasted Hatch green chilis, which he added to the mix to give the bland, commercialized recipe a little more bite.

As the food simmered, he listened to the utter quiet, the absence of birds or bats or insects. Just the desert silence, an opaque stillness that allowed him

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to hear himself breathe, hear the pulse in his ears, hear his own thoughts without being disturbed by a chatter of background noises. He let his eyes fall closed as he inhaled deeply of the stinging spices in the sizzling chili. The palomino snorted and whinnied, breaking the silence.

“Awww, shut up,” McCarron said, but the mare blew loudly through her nostrils again, stomping from side to side as if afraid of something. She tossed her head, sniffing and snorting.