Alice Isn’t Dead. Joseph Fink
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after this new Thistle Man. He crossed the empty road, desert wind blowing hot down the street divided by a planter of yellow flowers and waxy leaves grown with borrowed water, and the Thistle Man stomped over them. The two of them crossed a massive parking lot, almost completely empty, and entered a Vons.
The swish of the door opening, the swish of the door closing. Quiet warm darkness replaced by blaring light and air-conditioning, and the murmur of music designed to shop to. There was no sign at all of her quarry. Or perhaps she should think of him as her hunter. Cautiously she walked past the aisles. There were no customers, only the lines of logos receding into a vanishing point of dairy refrigerators. Back again along the aisles. Where were the customers? Where, even, was the staff?
She turned a corner in frozen foods and there he was, only a few feet away. Back turned. His shoulders bouncing like he was laughing, but the sound was more like a man drowning, thick, desperate gasps. He shouted, no words, just sound, then back to gasping. A Vons employee, the first other person she had seen, turned the corner on the other end of the aisle, saw the man, and immediately walked away. Keisha retreated a few aisles down, trying to stay out of sight.
Now that she had caught up to him, she realized that she didn’t have any clear idea of what her plan had been. Once again, she had pointed herself in the direction of trouble without thinking through the consequences of finding it.
But the Thistle Man did not turn. He stopped gasping and thrashing and started walking again. Every few feet his right leg would give, like it had no muscle or bone, and his entire body would stoop to the side and then unsteadily lurch its way back up with his next step. She stayed on the opposite ends of the aisles, tracking his movement. He circled the store once and then went back out the exit, never looking around him, although she didn’t know whether that meant that he hadn’t seen her or that he didn’t need to.
Out in the parking lot, he got into a car, a silver Toyota a few years old, relatively clean. As it had happened, she had left her car in this same lot, because it was central to a number of the businesses she had been going to. But the lot was big enough that she still had to sprint at least a quarter of a mile, trying to reach her car in time to follow him. Keisha turned the key and only a faint cough happened and she thought, No, no, no, I’ve come this far and I won’t have the world fail me, and she turned the key again, relieved to hear the unsteady whine of the starting engine.
The Toyota turned left out of the shopping center and she followed. She tried to keep a distance between them, but few cars were out in a town as quiet as Victorville, and so it was hard not to be visible. At first they were surrounded by strip malls, but then the right-hand side of the road fell away to desert, where the darkness was near total. In the distance, some sort of factory, all glow and smoke. Sweating, breathing human beings on a night shift inside that factory, and on every side of them, darkness and sand.
They hit a T intersection and made a left, past the bus station. A bus was pulling out, on late-night departure to who knows where. On the other side of the road was the Route 66 museum. A museum to road tripping, to distance, to how big and spread out America is. As Keisha drove, in order to distract her nervous mind from what she was actually doing, she thought about how her country was a place defined as much by its distance as its culture.
Sand drifts on the road. They were fully outside of town now. Stacks of boxcars. An outpost of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Wires emanating from it, almost invisible against the sky, carrying the lights to Hollywood, the air-conditioning to Malibu. Here there was no glamour, only the machine.
They turned again. A road called Gas Line Road that intersected a block away with Powerline Road.
And finally, a military airport. Barbed wire and hangars. They drove along the fences. The road was completely empty, and so Keisha switched off her headlights and drove only by watching his car and trying to mirror its movements. It felt dangerous, but also somehow restful and quiet, like swimming underwater. In the dark, with the thrum of the engines, she could almost let her natural anxiety fade into an undercurrent that wouldn’t intrude on her thoughts.
The Toyota slowed, put on a blinker (signaling to whom?) then turned through a hole in the fence into the airport. The hole was rough, with wire hanging loose around it, looking innocently accidental, but was also exactly wide enough for a car.
A small plane came in for landing, and as she drove toward the entrance, she watched the entire landing happen. Red lights blinking their way down, and then finally touching earth and she realized she hadn’t been breathing, and then she hit the curb and screamed.
Keisha stopped the car on the road, undecided for a moment, but then made the turn. If he noticed her, he noticed her. She had gone too far to be able to make any other decision in that moment. She was always afraid but did what she needed to do.
As she passed through the fence, a shape loomed down at her from the dark. She swerved instinctually, fishtailing for a moment. The shape was huge, with a snub-nosed face and weird shadows crisscrossing from light passing through the fence. She squinted as she drove around it and saw a broad wing, like an arm reaching out for help, and she understood. A passenger jet, a double-decker giant, designed for international flight. Company name painted over. The plane was silent and earthbound.
Her eyes adjusted, and she saw there were more of them. Line after line of retired jetliners. No sign of any other car. She drove slowly past the skeletons of flight. At this point, with her engine coughing loudly in this silent graveyard, she had given up any hope for the stealthy approach. Now it was likely he was stalking her. It would be so easy for him to circle around behind. Perhaps that was his intent on leading her to this place. Perhaps she had driven willingly into a Thistle murder site. She passed under a wing, and its elongated shadow lingered over her car.
Under the belly of one of the planes, she thought she saw movement, and she turned the car toward it. The machines around her had avoided disaster again and again only to end up here, in this desolate place, grounded forever. The omen was not lost on her. All luck runs out eventually. Otherwise it wouldn’t be luck.
Keisha opened her window so she could hear the night. The night sounded only like her car and like the wind. Some of the small port windows on the airplanes had been knocked out. She thought about what the inside of these dead airplanes must look like. All fixtures gone, only hollow metal filled with moonlight and rattling in the wind.
When the brake lights came on, her mind didn’t have time to react but her body was already slamming her foot down. The belt went tight as her car gritted to a stop on the gravel. The Thistle Man’s car was a hundred feet or so in front of her. It was idling. Waiting for something. She switched off the engine, got out, and left the beater behind, running across the hardpacked dirt. The night beyond his Toyota shifted, and she realized that what she had thought was sky was a high wall, and a gate was opening in it. She couldn’t see what was on the other side. The Toyota pulled through, the gate slid closed behind him, and the wall became invisible again against the hills.
The wall was featureless, except for a small sign by the gate. It was understated, even elegant, more like a sign for a fancy restaurant than US military property. The sign said THISTLE. She put her hand on the fence, and it was cool, even in the hot night. She tasted sour acid in her mouth and took her hand away. There was something terrible behind this wall, and despite herself she needed to know what it was. She circled around it, but the wall was unbroken, well maintained, and clean. A lot of money and time had gone into keeping whatever was inside this wall hidden. Giving up instantly on the idea of scaling the smooth expanse, Keisha looked around for another option and saw a nearby hillside that appeared to rise above the wall. She had to crawl under the fence to get to it, and the wounds from the skylight in the police station opened up again. Her shirt went wet with blood, and this mixed with the dust into a red paste that covered her as she scrambled her way up the hill. The brush was thick and thorny, but she picked her way