Dreams: A Trio of Flash Fiction Tales Read online

  Down Deep

  It led us to the middle of the desert, a flat expanse of hard-packed earth baked to an orange-red crust. A blazing sun had just begun to fall behind far off mountains, staining the craggy peaks what it occurred to me at the time to be the crimson of dried blood, but then, for a city detective wandering out into the desert, everything looks dry and lifeless. 

  The shimmering heat rising up from the dirt kept us in the dark about what we'd eventually come to, hopeless that it would be anything but another dead end. But then, suddenly, the tiny dot to mark a building that we'd aimed toward when we'd veered off the dusty strip of gray that provided the only cracked and crumbling highway through the valley, bloomed out before our eyes, aching with the unaccustomed squint of strangers under the cutting desert sun, to reveal a shallow crater. 

  The dirt uncovered an uneven foot and a half below the topsoil by what looked to be a lumbering - if patient - hand had a darker quality to it, a brown tint that teased at the possibility of fecundity, but the dense clay's texture made it clear that this was only a tease. It stretched away in front of us, maybe three quarters of a mile in diameter, and looked as roughly circular as one might expect from such a project meticulously worked manually. Only the semi trailer close to the edge of the depression nearest to us, and poorly shimmed in an effort to bring it level against the broken earth within the vast hole, had proven tall enough to be seen from the highway. A low, rough wood shack sitting some distance away, close to the approximate center, seeming ready to fall over at the first breeze, and a modest, dilapidated mobile home rusting somewhere indeterminate between the other two landmarks, had been impossible to spot, hidden at day by mirage, at night by dark, and all times by remoteness, unless...

  Unless someone had spotted it from the air. A helicopter, or a plane passing low overhead, maybe a private flight, or some rich eccentric, cruising out in a hot air balloon, the rising desert air an ideal means of gaining altitude before setting off for a long distance, a distance that might net him a world record.

  I looked at my partner, my friend, the only man I trusted to watch my back, Errol Rist. This lead could be panning out, but that also meant we'd be walking into the lion's den. He hefted his shotgun, nodded toward the tractor-trailer; it was the structure closest to us. I drew my piece, a little snub-nose revolver, my thumb tugging back the hammer with practiced ease.

  We padded quietly as we could down the side of the crater and closer to our goal. Getting nearer, the reason for the dilapidated look became more obvious: it had been spray painted a matte dusky orange to try and blend it in with the ground and rock, which might have been effective if someone had kept up on it. As it was, wind driven sand had begun to blast off the camouflage, leaving the bright stainless steel beneath to shine through and wink at cars on the highway.

  We moved around it, and up to the trailer's closed double doors. The sun at our backs - instead of in our eyes - was a welcome change, but turning away from the rest of the crater, and whatever could still be lurking in those other two buildings, made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Rist and I readied ourselves on either door, then ripped then open, thrusting our guns before us. Nothing dangerous, or even living, waited for us on the other side, but that didn't mean there wasn't something in that trailer to see.

  Billowing clouds of chill air poured out in a fog from the open aperture. I swallowed down a retch from my parched throat, was thankful for the lens of my glasses clouding up from the refrigerated trailers cool air as I turned away. Rist rested his shotgun up on his shoulder, his lips drawn back over clenched teeth in a grimace. "Dammit," he whispered. I slid the spectacles off my face, delicately pinching the bridge with the thumb and forefinger of my left hand, unwilling, as I was, to holster my weapon to free up my right, and tucked them away into my breast pocket. Letting out a slow, deep breath, I raised my eyes to Rist's back, then to the atrocities in the cold, narrow space in front of him, and followed inside.

  We'd have to check if some shipping company had reported a refrigerated truck missing recently when we got back to civilization. Someone who hauled boxes of frozen pizzas or those bags of mixed veggies. Or maybe packaged chicken or beef cuts, careful sliced up, prepared, plastic wrap sealed tight over neatly arranged pieces of meat. Hopefully with those little pads at the bottom, under the unappetizing fat tucked away from public view, to soak up whatever excess fluid might leak out of the lean, butchered muscle.

  Somehow the thought of so much carefully parceled meat being the rightful occupant of that space made the human abattoir we found within easier for me to deal with. The floor was crusted brown and littered with scraps. Some were anonymous lumps of pink, or curled-up little strips of a deep, dark red that suggested nothing more sinister than a sloppy hand at work. Even the occasionally telling, recognizable shape could be denied, pushed away as merely a coincidental lookalike, the mind finding pattern and meaning out of habit. 

  There was no such comfort with which to console oneself when confronted with bits of meat still hanging from rib cages. You couldn't fool yourself that some trick of the light made a strip of discarded and dirty paper into the elegant length of curves that flow from brow to cheek. Humans - people - had been cut up, and the remains stored here. Under the series of naked bulbs set in the ceiling, one could not fail to identify the tight bundle of delicate little folds as an ear, the curve of smooth white as a thigh bone, the glossy bands of tendons stretching across gaps dotted with jutting nobs that made up an ankle. Even chopped apart, broken asunder, or with layers peeled back, the familiar shapes asserted themselves. Each detail was preserved obscenely in the cold, clean slices from a blade, lumps of organs, preened of their tough connecting tissues, sprays of red on the walls when muscle not quite thoroughly drained of blood was torn from the bone...

  I stayed at the front of the trailer, covering Rist as he stalked to the back wall, picking his way among viscera and bone. I was letting myself get spooked, distracted; I clenched my teeth hard, blowing out explosive breaths through my nose. I needed to stay sharp, objective. Not get lost in the gnaw marks on skinned fingers. Not lose my edge to bones shattered to scoop out smears of marrow.

  Rist reached the last few sizable lumps at the far end, the last few spots where someone could conceivable be hidden. He frowned, and his untouched facade revealed the slightest of cracks as the corner of his mouth twitched up in a repressed express of disgust, making him appear to sneer for a split second. Looking up, he caught my gaze, and shook his head. The speed of his pace as he followed me out told me he wouldn't be fighting me about wasted time if we stopped for a cigarette. Once we were out.

  I was waiting to shut the doors, as softly as possible, as soon as he cleared them. Taking my time fiddling with the locking mechanism to cover up the shake in my hands, I heard the musical ring, flick, ring of Rist's lighter working and turned with a hand digging in my pocket to see him blow a deep drag down at the ground between us. “Probably hitchhikers.”

  I found the object of my search and put the cigarette in my mouth, began patting for a light. I nodded to his suggestions while I turned up lint, bullets, notebook, everything but my damn matches.

  He let his smoke dangle on his lips, talked tight-lipped from the corner of his mouth as he flicked and proffered the flame of his lighter to me, “Drifters, vagabonds. People no one would miss.”

  I puffed, got the tip glowing. My nod of agreement became a sign of gratitude. No chance that I would've wasted words on giving thanks at that point; I had a more immediate need for that breath. Errol seemed to understand.

  I inhaled deep, talked smoke. “Couldn't've gotten that many out here, though. Must've been making trips into town.” I thought of my wife, sending me out late at night to the all-hours grocery for milk, or creamer for the next morning's coffee. A food run. A giddy laugh tickled at the back of my throat, but I took a fast, hard drag, kept my composure.

  “Hmm.” Rist nodded, agreeing, and flicked a
half-spent smoke away, leaving a spiraling trail of gray vapor hanging in the air for a moment. I took one last draw on my own cigarette and dropped it, crushing it out with the tip of my toe. My partner brought his shotgun up, held it at the ready with both hands. I pretended not to notice him, kept my head down as I made a show of popping out the cylinder, removing the shell I'd spent when things went nasty out on that dock, spun it, and flicked it up, snapping it back in place. I looked up at him, and we turned to the small mobile home rusting in the setting sun to see what fresh terrors waited for us inside it.

  This time Rist shifted his gun to his left hand, stood off to one side with his right on the door handle, and gingerly turned it as I wrapped my off hand around my wrist and the bottom of my pistol's butt, steading my aim. l nodded to him. He flung it open and I moved to cover the room inside, my aim darting left, right, but it proved to hold no more threats than the trailer, though with more mundane decoration.

  We relaxed, climbed up the single step into the