Once, the story went, there had been biologists on the Forgotten Coast, in numbers so great that the ground shook in the aftermath of their passage. Eager men and women who without warning bestrode the terrain like conquerors, sent by the government and funded by money that came in the form of buried gold bars that could not decay or devalue like the money kept in banks. Which is why, the conspiracy theorists at the Village Bar claimed, the biologists had been so stooped and weighted down when they arrived. Their packs had been full not of supplies and food but of gold.
That the force or forces that had sent the biologists to the Forgotten Coast wanted the biologists to be ungoverned by barter, isolated, free of the sense of neighborly responsibility that had held the Forgotten Coast together for so long.
That the biologists had been complicit, aware of their role, which was important, Old Jim believed. They had to be complicit if the folks in the Village Bar were to keep telling the story. Because if they weren’t complicit, telling the story meant the story would at some point peer back and condemn the teller.
In their initial explorations, the biologists, clad in their yellow gloves, carried out a series of ever more arcane rituals. They plucked clumps of native grasses from the mud flats with a finicky precision, tweezered scraps into vials. They shoved bits of bark mottled with lichen into tiny metal boxes. Jars small and large allowed them to sample strange aquatic species like crayfish and mudpuppies.
At night, they slept in space-age sleeping bags that looked at times like the vanguard of an alien invasion: shimmering silver cocoons against the dark green of tree islands and the golden wash of reeds and the drab gray-brown river mud pocked with the holes of fiddler crabs.
The decision to conduct an initial survey and then, later, bivouac inland had been made by someone higher up. Someone remote who thought a permanent location on the beach “would seem to flaunt,” according to one biologist in their diary.
(The diary, retrieved, had been gone at by beetles and rot, and in the searing shades of green, the watermarks that seemed more like records of tidal patterns, it had the look of an object in a museum exhibit. Old Jim had run his hand over the roughness of that faux coastline more than once as he read the faded pencil marks, before he’d thought, almost quaintly, of contamination and put the journal back.)
None of the locals ever did get a straight answer about why the biologists had been sent, this much Old Jim knew from the files, because it had been ordered that no straight answer ever be given to “those people.” But perhaps that didn’t matter, either, for most of the locals had always seen the government as an invading hydra. The “slid-off” answer, as one local called it, only reaffirmed the long-held suspicion, the desire forever gestating in them: to be left alone, left to whatever state of dissolution and decay or, yes, peace they aspired to in that wild and beautiful place.
In the transcripts, Man Boy Slim—a rickety thin twenty-year-old local, with, at a cursory glance, a distinguished career at that time of stealing hubcaps and hunting deer out of season—made many claims about the biologists. For example, he claimed to have seen a biologist “leap into the air and catch a dragonfly with his teeth,” so delicate this maneuver that the lithe biologist spit the insect unharmed into a jar, where it vibrated a confused blurred emerald, unsure of what had happened.
Already, almost from the start, the biologists were changing from something human in the eyes of the locals into something uncanny. One day, a local would be walking down a weed-strewn trail on the Forgotten Coast, glimpse a biologist from the corner of their eye, and not be sure of what they had seen.
Nothing that happened next changed people’s opinions in its particulars, as far as Old Jim could tell.
In addition to equipment and supplies, the biologists had brought a kind of burden with them to the Forgotten Coast, and it was with a sense of relief that they prepared to release that burden into the marshes before setting up a base camp.
That this burden had been imposed on them could be sensed in how they spoke about the process of transporting their unwieldy subjects to the release site. That they, in this one particular, shared an affinity with the locals, in not knowing how the burden had been imposed, despite the attached documents, the apparent bona fides of the burden’s university sponsors.
“We could not wait to be free to conduct our general explorations,” Team Leader 1 said, while Team Leader 2 observed that “Megafauna always catch the eye of journals, but I would rather observe the bubble fortresses of the crayfish on the mud flats, because we know so little about their ways.”
For, within a week of arriving at the Forgotten Coast, the biologists would release the alligators they had brought from one hundred miles south into the local ecosystems. This plan would not be common knowledge to the locals for some weeks, for reasons unclear to Old Jim. When it did, the county sheriff spared the expedition a visit, only dissuaded from issuing some kind of ticket, or even warning, by the presentation of so many federal government permits. Or as Man Boy Slim put it, “Quills out, folks. The biologists went quills out over those alligators.”
But the locals had a wider, more practical objection to the experiment than just how it had been withheld from them.
“There must be ten thousand alligators up here already,” Man Boy Slim’s friend Drunk Boat said in disbelief, when word did finally get out. “There must be a hundred million alligators up here. Already.”
“Drunk Boat” was Man Boy Slim’s nickname for the Village Bar’s alcoholic poet in residence—a man of letters who had not been above a bit of night poaching with a flashlight and, of all things, a handgun. (Old Jim had read up on Man Boy Slim’s file by then, and his nod to an obscure French poet didn’t surprise him. Despite initial impressions, Man Boy Slim had a fine academic record, with a college emphasis on English before he had dropped out from lack of funds.)
As far as the biologists knew, the four large, fifteen-year-old alligators had been captured in the wild. But in the margin of the files, that place where a separate truth often flourished, Old Jim read a shorthand on the alligators that gave them a different origin. Three had been plucked fortuitous from roadside zoos and the fourth—the largest female, “code name Smaug”—came from some prior Central experiment. The university sponsor did not exist.
While under anesthetic at the release location, the alligators were fitted with an adjustable soft harness that the experiment notes promised “had the necessary give and pull to not be slipped nor pose a hazard to the reptile.” The harnesses had been attached to a thin but strong rubber-coated wire that led to a radio receiver embedded in a spinner and that attached to a bobber. When the battery ran out, the spinner would power the tracker in the bobber by the reptile’s movements through the water and, erratically, by the wind when the beast hauled itself onto land.
One stated goal was to field-test cutting-edge equipment, while the primary purpose consisted solely of seeing if the alligators would, via wetlands and interconnected waterways, return to their prior locations. How, then, did bodies understand the landscape? How did minds flourish or wither, still tuned to a distant frequency?
“In other words, could these reptiles be reintroduced to areas of scarcity and be expected to remain there?” Team Leader 1 posed the question, paraphrasing from the brief imposed upon them, itself a kind of “cover.” “What kind of site loyalty has such a beast? What stressors in a new environment might evoke site loyalty? Would what might be called ‘cultural mutations’ need to occur in addition to what we might call ‘normal’ adaptations?”
This suggested a life of the mind to Old Jim that he found disturbing, but Central’s only scribble in the margin of the transcript noted that Team Leaders 1 and 2 had formed a “close bond” during training.
Surely this information was irrelevant?
Some in the Village would later call the four alligators the Cavalry, despite what happened next. In the fierce and abiding imagination of the Forgotten Coast, the Cavalry remained forever and eternal, still roamed the swamps and marshes. Still lived on in more than memory—cherished yet feared, such that many an unexplained “incident” in later years would be attributed, perhaps comfortingly, to “the Cavalry.”
The day of the release, the biologists gathered on a raised berm at the edge of a lake that fed into swamp landward and marsh seaward, a liminal place that held a brackish kind of fresh water, neither one thing nor the other.
It was bright and breezy, with tree swallows darting through the blazing blue sky. The drugged reptiles had been outfitted with their gear and constrained by containers that resembled huge, long coolers with removable wire-mesh tops and collapsible doors in the front. Nothing in the expedition’s official journals hinted at errors or false steps in the release, but Team Leader 2 would later write in her journal that “The moment felt fraught, tense, of greater importance than the actual purpose of the release.”
Team Leaders 1 and 2 must not have thought the release important enough to record via video footage, in the context of their other work. The team’s medic alluded to “some still shots,” which did not exist in Central’s archives. But, no matter, someone had secretly hidden a grainy surveillance camera on-site, and, even more valuable, the biologists’ journals allowed a seemingly accurate reconstruction.
The process only went smoothly for the one once named Smaug but renamed the Tyrant at Team Leader 2’s insistence, the harness no impediment. The Tyrant ran-slithered in all her ten-foot glory down to the water’s edge and disappeared almost in that same instant, as if the water were as much a portal as blessed release.
Firestorm followed with some complications of timing between final fitting of the harness and releasing the door mechanism via a “deconstructed wire coat hanger”—these “1 followed by 2” operations happening, as far as Old Jim could tell, at the exact same moment, so that there had been a possibility of disaster, despite success—and the disappearance of the reptile into the water so immediate that he did not begrudge the biologists their relief.
Who could blame the biologists for ignoring the alternate universe in which Firestorm had struggled loose and ravaged bodies until the blood sprayed and sprawled across the mudbanks in waves? Yet, there had been blood, “some minor cuts, dealt with on-site.” The Medic, quoted in the official report.
Old Jim also noted a margin scrawl in the Medic’s record books that “all possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.” The ink color differed from the rest of the page, so perhaps the scrawled note had occurred much later, and in his panic during the disaster of that future time … the Medic had accidentally written it on the wrong page.
Battlebee and Sergeant Rocker fared less well. The former refused to leave his glorified cooler, appearing disoriented, and the latter became harness-entangled, despite the assurances, and had to be tranq’d and prepped again later that afternoon, by which time most of the expedition had been “drinking.”
But what did that mean? Drinking what? Had there been some other impairment also in play?
A glitch in the surveillance tape slowed down their steps, so the biologists appeared to have choreographed a slow retreat, a slow surrender, and then reassembled running, only to part ways again in waves, branching off in opposite directions across the berm. The grainy stick figures appeared tiny against the immensity of wetlands and sky. If not for the glitch, Old Jim would have thought they had been running from something.
Finally, Battlebee made an exit by making an entrance. Sergeant Rocker, though, snapped and skittered sideways toward his well-wishers with such ferocious intent that the biologists fled again, even as one amongst them, Old Jim couldn’t tell which, circled the beast while calling out what sounded like an absurd “Here, kitty, kitty!” That couldn’t be right, could it? (The video ended there.)
“Hilarious,” some prior analyst at Central had written as a note. But it wasn’t hilarious. Both this moment and the drinking registered as disquieting, out of place with the discipline one would expect at the start of a scientific expedition. He also distrusted the amount of redaction surrounding the alligator experiment in the archives. It signified a growing level of circumspection, like peering through mist come up over black swamp water, even as he continued to glide forward, unable to see what lay to both sides.
But then, too, there was the assurance, the confidence, in the accounts of the biologists as remedy to allay suspicion. Because Sergeant Rocker, too, had then taken to the waters and disappeared, the biologists using their tracking equipment to make sure they could follow the alligators in their new lives.
The Tyrant kept to herself, while the others remained in close proximity, for a while. None, at least overnight, seemed inclined to leave the area, and by the fourth day, Team Leader 1 put the most junior member of their party on the task of monitoring moments that might include a full day of basking in the same stretch of mud.
On day six they found Firestorm’s front leg, bobber wire wrapped around it, the whole prominently displayed on a mudbank with deep boot prints suggesting poachers. There was, one biologist wrote, “a bathetic or pathetic quality to the paleness of the leg, enraptured in the evidence of our experiment, lost so far from her home. I wept for an hour, but do not know if this was an appropriate response.”
(No, Old Jim did not believe it was an appropriate response, even as he himself wept at odd hours, for his own reasons, down in Central’s archives.)
Battlebee turned up dead and bloated and white, with a chunk ripped out of him postmortem by some creature, possibly Sergeant Rocker, speculation being that stress and the anesthetic had been too hard on him. Postmortem examination revealed stomach contents that included fish, a turtle, mud, and, inexplicably, a broken teacup.
She had also been pregnant, “a fact that surprised us,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “given her credentials identified her as a male,” amid some general confusion: “To be honest, I cannot now remember when we first took this project on, when we first encountered these subjects. The heat here is abysmal.”
Sergeant Rocker opted out of the project by shedding his harness in the water near the tent of Team Leader 1, indicating, as she absurdly put it, “A politeness on the part of Sergeant Rocker in keeping with his personality when I knew him best. I felt this loss much more deeply than expected.”
This sentimentality toward an alligator seen as an obligation just days before weighed on Old Jim, although he could not put a finger on why. Nor did he understand why the alligator experiment registered with the biologists in their reports as a great success, and they would even reference it with a kind of beautiful, all-consuming nostalgia when the mission began to sour. The myth of competence, perhaps. The myth of persistence. The myth of objectivity.
Perhaps, both he and the biologists would have been wiser to focus on how Sergeant Rocker had turned into an escape artist, for the harness was intact and still latched, with no tears anywhere. So how had the alligator possibly gotten free? Old Jim kept seeing the biologists by a trick of faulty video running away from the release site, only to re-form in their drinking circle.
He replayed the video so often that it became a disconcerting mess of light and shadow, of pixelated disembodied heads and legs and shapes that leapt out and sharpened, only to become subsumed into the past.
“All possible measures were taken but nothing could be done.”
Or had the outcome been exactly as intended?
In the late spring, a week after releasing the Tyrant, the biologists established permanent headquarters in the ruins of a ghost town that had once pretended to be a county seat. Even in those parts, rife with poachers, anarchists, and pot growers, it was remote.
An aerial view would have barely registered the ruins of the buildings under the tree cover, but to the west lay the end of the estuary, to the east an improbable wildflower meadow petering out into mud flats, to the south more marsh, leading to the sea, and to the north an impenetrable bramble of palmettos and blackberry bushes.
The estuary held Dead Town like an open hand that could close into a fist at any time.
The biologists arrived at this remote location via kayaks, a flat-bottomed boat with more robust supplies gliding dutiful behind. A row of old rusting automobiles like huge burly beetles stacked three high would have been their welcoming committee, there by the muddy riverbank, beyond which a double row of unruly swamp oaks led to the town.
Even after the biologists had planted an ironic flag at City Hall and taken their machetes to the worst of the vines choking Main Street, the expedition did not feel comfortable there. “The sounds of birds in these ruins are muffled and we cannot tell the origin except with difficulty, given the odd acoustics.”
Old Jim wondered whether the biologists had second thoughts, there on Main Street. About their mission. About their choice of careers. To end up in such a derelict place, in the process of sinking into the ground at a rate of an inch per year. To live amongst the intense nocturnal shrieking of insects and the vagaries of crumbling walls.
Nor was everything as promised in Dead Town. A year earlier, the biologists had been told, a filmmaker had used Main Street to shoot scenes for an indie film, “a fever dream shot in the sticks,” and this meant some limited access to electricity. But, in fact, nothing worked, the outlets corroded, and they discovered that the emergency generator was just a shell, with one biologist noting that “the gutted interior contained nothing but half-deflated party balloons.”
A replacement generator arrived, a week later, along with fuel—from a Central drop site, Old Jim noted, with a raised eyebrow. By then, the biologists had removed the balloons from the old generator and disposed of them. The sight had caused anxiety, not laughter, and a sense of what one biologist called in her diary “some kind of joke that wasn’t funny.” Old Jim felt the balloons stank of provocation.
But by who? Fate? A sadistic swamp god?
As soon as the biologists occupied the ghost town, the locals started calling it Dead Town or “the deads town,” as in “you’re dead to me,” after some phantasmagoria adored by Drunk Boat. The biologists never questioned the name Dead Town but almost immediately referred to the place they lived in as Dead Town as well.
Perhaps they thought it an ironic joke of some kind, perhaps they, in their private moments around a campfire too hot for the season, understood how absurd it was to call dead a place so alive with insects and plants and fungi. Perhaps signs and symbols held no power over them.
The biologists established a perimeter, put up white canvas yurts at the tree line that bordered the wildflower meadow, made bonfires at night, found clean drinking water … and then they began to roam. Widely. An “invasive species” across a new migratory range, as observed, again, by Man Boy Slim. The yurts, as he described them, were like some vanilla variety of the flourless cakes at a local bakery, which had the novelty of a dusty model-train track running up high, near the ceiling.
Putting up the yurts signaled a kind of initial caving, Old Jim thought. A sign that they knew Dead Town wasn’t ideal as base camp, despite their orders. Every last one of them erected where the sea breeze breathed its last before dropping off into a stillness that incubated humidity and palmetto bugs and mosquitoes.
A silent rebellion that stretched the limits of authority, under the guise of processing their finds as quickly as possible—to have these “field stations,” as the official report called them, which were actually a form of physical relief from the environment for the biologists.
To process these “finds,” to be well and truly named, which were just parts of the Forgotten Coast that the locals had known about for years and that had not needed the formality of the kinds of names that the biologists wanted to give them.
It irked the locals who liked birding to be in pursuit of a rare vermillion flycatcher, only to gaze through binoculars … at what turned out to be a biologist wearing a red bandana, staring back through her own binoculars.
“They get in the way,” Man Boy Slim claimed, to little disagreement in the bar. Telescopes. Microscopes. More advanced and profane sensors that defied Old Jim’s understanding. Metal boxes with blinking lights, into which the biologists funneled swamp water.
By then, “peculiar instruments” had become a stand-in for “peculiar people” in the bar transcripts—Man Boy Slim and his allies at odds with others as to the intentionality of it all. A good-natured brawl, forgiven through beer, between the faction who thought the biologists fools and those who labeled them capable of harm, and thus the more formal “Rogues.”
By then, the biologists had become embedded in Dead Town, their fate and the fate of Dead Town interwoven, as if they were not an expedition at all, but an outpost, preparing for an assault from some unknown force.
Amid all the debris in the files, the term “Rogue” made Old Jim take notice, because the idea of a Rogue on the Forgotten Coast wasn’t “a scoundrel or dishonest person” but the more neutral idea of an outcast or stranger. A Rogue, in the parlance of the Village Bar, required keen attention not because a Rogue always intended harm, but because a Rogue might not understand the harm it could cause. This ambiguity bothered Old Jim, even has he understood that the Forgotten Coast had always been a reliquary for Rogues of some kind.
Perhaps worse, though, in Old Jim’s estimation, how the Village Bar idea of a “Rogue” had only permutated into a term of art for Central after the biologists’ expedition, as if the Forgotten Coast had colonized the corridors of power over time without Central realizing it. Where the danger in that lay, Old Jim didn’t know, just that it felt dangerous, like a counter-op or potential double agent.
The stranger who became the Rogue, and would not give the locals a name, appeared in early summer, after the biologists had become established at Dead Town. To those tanned and sun-blessed people, the stranger appeared whiter than the rabbits. As the translucent quality of the skin of some geckos reveals the beauty of a beating heart, so the face and arms of the stranger suggested a kind of vulnerability. He looked to the Village Bar regulars so pale as to have come “posthaste from some extreme northern country,” although his accent read local. Otherwise, he was physically nondescript.
The man wore a rumpled blue blazer over a once-crisp light blue dress shirt, the top two buttons missing, with slim tan pants ending unexpectedly in sturdy military-issue boots. As startling, given his overall affect, was the camo-colored pack he had with him, which also read army. The blazer had a rip in one elbow and a tired, defeated quality in how it fell across his shoulders.
At first glance, Drunk Boat dubbed the stranger Sad Sack, but Man Boy Slim amended that to Bad Slack, B.S. for short, before some communal subtext settled on “Rogue” with a capital “R” instead.
He said nothing, framed in silhouette by the door as wiry and thin, surpassed in this regard only by a local arborist who resembled an angry jockey and shimmied up trees like an indignant squirrel. Except the Rogue wasn’t angry and he favored his left leg. Everyone recognized his walking stick as the one left at the start of the lighthouse trail loop as a courtesy.
“He made a sound,” Drunk Boat observed later. “A sound like … like a whimper … but a whimper of, well, relief … and astonishment.”
Man Boy Slim demurred that he’d heard no such sound, but Drunk Boat persisted. “Like a man on a long mission who has come home? Except no one knows him here. It was strange.”
Yes, Old Jim thought, everyone could see that the stranger was strange. Sometimes, when perplexed, Drunk Boat didn’t sound that poetic, like it was a fancy hat he wore most of the time and shared with Man Boy Slim on occasion.
When the pale stranger said nothing but ordered a beer and sat in the back, it took a while for the rest of the bar to regain a certain equilibrium.
“He brought in a smell with him,” Sally the bartender noted before closing that night. “Not like the sea or the marsh. More … electric. Like … a singe of lightning? I don’t know now to describe it. Like, if you touched him you might get a shock.”
No one touched him. He seemed untouchable, created an aura of space around him that discouraged conversation. But not gossip.
“He stole a stick,” Charlie said. “He stole the lighthouse loop stick.” Young Charlie often walked the loop, on his days off from his fishing vessel.
“To him it was just a stick and he needed a stick, and we can find another stick, can’t we?” Drunk Boat said, in reluctant defense, and then ever more inebriated and illogical camaraderie.
This line of defense seemed to be met with skepticism, or even the mutterings of open rebellion about how easy it actually was to find the perfect walking stick. With an agitated undertone, however, as if talking about the stick was easier than grappling with other questions about the stranger.
Then Man Boy Slim waded in and described the stranger as “an out-of-work magician, looking to create a new act out of you-all.” A wide gesture, repeated at lunch the next day, that encompassed the Village, including Charlie.
“A thief,” Drunk Boat said. “A thief of our time, talking about nothing when we could be conversing about something.”
What something did he mean?
But that was the moment the tension went out of the bar about the stranger—just an out-of-work magician—and, for a couple of days, none of the locals paid the stranger any mind when he came to the bar for a quiet sit-down and a glass of water.
That’s what the Forgotten Coast was for, wasn’t it, Drunk Boat and Man Boy Slim and Charlie said, a bit sentimental. “To lose yourself. To love to live to be whatever you can be.”
So, for a time, the Rogue did nothing but become the kind of semi-regular who sat quietly in the dark part of the bar, said little, had a beer or two, and left. Offering up nothing of himself, so that no one knew where he had come from when he walked in, or where he went home to when he left.
Harmless.
But Old Jim knew. He knew the stranger was a Rogue, and he was inclined to consider this Rogue an agent of sorts—a person who, in Central parlance, would come to mean the familiar unfamiliar, “one who knows us but is not us.”
A kind of slant rhyme connecting who he was to what espionage was.
Such a person moved against the pattern of tides, of stars, of seasons and, in that sense, was not bound by the idea of Time as experienced on the Forgotten Coast.
Such a person was dangerous.
For dead people, or “the Deads,” as they began to be called in the Village Bar, the biologists stopped often in their labors that summer to curse about the heat and humidity, which, when overheard, surprised the locals, because it was such a human thing to do. That Drunk Boat at night, in the distance (while up to unspecified activities), could sometimes see the bobbing headlamps of the biologists “well out to sea, so to speak,” mystified him as much as “if faery lights had swept down low above the marshes.”
Perhaps to create a distraction from the conditions, the biologists had accelerated their tagging of so many living things—and the hours across which they spread such endeavors. “A vast human migration across the face of the Earth,” Drunk Boat said, downing a shot, for the moment the bar’s sole authority, Man Boy Slim having gone into Bleakersville to fix his car. “Unnatural—and without relief.”
No one disagreed, for the scope had expanded almost without a will in place to drive it. The biologists cast nets for tiny fish in shallows. They set net traps for small woodland creatures. They took fine nylon nets and created capture zones for songbirds, often running aghast to the rescue of what they themselves had endangered, for a songbird was a terrible curse: unpredictable and angry and easy to harm.
How fragile those wings, those beaks, heads to the side, small bright eyes staring up at the aliens that held their bodies in half-closed fists. The birds came from far north, guided by a complex knowledge of magnetic fields and the stars. Their brains had a coiled density twice that of humans. They only lived six or seven years, on average.
At the zenith of their powers that July, the biologists’ boot prints outnumbered the tracks of deer and raccoons on the mud flats. The blue caps from tranq darts became a common sight alongside empty beer cans and shotgun shells. The sun shone at their backs and the sea wind was in their faces and their bodies glistened with sweat, with the nights full of laughter and good cheer at the end of a hard day’s work—or with the work just beginning. Their labor was a rhythm and their labor was a pact and their labor continued, unbroken.
The biologists’ sleep was long and deep in their mosquito-proof yurts, and the sounds out of the night did not frighten them, and they did not dream, for they lived within a kind of dream already, doing what they had trained for their entire lives.
It would have been mid-July when the first anomaly occurred, a week after the Rogue appeared, and almost a month before the luck of the biologists could be said to have worsened exponentially. A biologist taking samples on the mud flats in front of the wildflower meadow encountered the rabbit first. She had been chosen for the mud work because her slight frame protected her from being mired up to her knees. But, also, she had a rare knack for navigating that landscape, far greater than anyone else on the expedition.
Watching her spindly form from afar, Team Leader 2 would marvel at “how she manages to seem like an insect using the tensile pressure of the water’s surface to glide across, well, in this case, the mud.” Old Jim flagged her as “the Mudder” in the files, a shorthand he employed now from habit. When he had an interest in a person. Besides, they should’ve called her that.
Intent on begging mud into one last vial and placing it in her backpack, the Mudder started at an unexpected crunching sound to her left, just out of her peripheral vision, pivoted on her haunches, and fell on her ass when she saw the source.
A large white rabbit with bloodshot red eyes calmly ate a fiddler crab, crunching on the carapace, gulping it down, and starting on another. The rabbit had a starved look about it, a gauntness under the tangled fur splashed brown.
The matter-of-fact way the rabbit ate the crab unnerved her, the Mudder wrote in her journal, as much as the presence of the rabbit itself. Ragged pink ears edged with matted white fur twitched in multidirectional ways as if receiving data from radio waves.
“The eyes focused on me with what I can only call indifference or even contempt,” the Mudder wrote, but then changed her mind: “The rabbit stared through me, as if its eyes could not focus or it was intent on some sight behind me. No, that’s not right, either. I just know it was not natural.”
This page was water damaged along the left-hand side so another sentence read either “both so still and in constant motion” or “but so still in its consistent motion,” the rest of her reaction lost.
Trying to right herself, the Mudder instead wound up on all fours facing the rabbit, while the rabbit continued to eat crabs alive. The rabbit might first crush the crab’s carapace with one solid paw before feasting, the soft insides pushing out from the shell, or just crack the carapace with its teeth.
While the crabs let the rabbit devour them as if mesmerized, as if the rabbit registered as an inanimate object. That just happened to be killing them.
The pink workings of the rabbit’s mouth as it crunched crabs to death, the inner hint of rows of sharper teeth than she would have expected, sent her into a panic and the Mudder jumped to her feet, to no reaction from the rabbit, and ran for safety. Less a water strider now than a freaked-out teenager in a horror movie.
Halfway to the safety of the meadow, the Mudder hit a hole disguised by mud, foot held long enough for the Mudder to scream as she twisted her ankle, falling heavy into the sucking mud, there to shout for help in between shrieks of pain. By the time Team Leader 2 heard her, she was trapped up to her knee, the other leg flashing white against mud riddled through with crab holes like rough pores.
By the time they pulled the Mudder to solid ground, to the waiting Medic, Team Leader 1 noted, “All of her sample vials had been broken, costing us a day of work.”
“The rabbit still just sat there, unfazed,” Team Leader 2 noted, its teeth busy with the job of rendering down one carapace after the other to the flesh beneath, while the eyestalks of the crabs, for as long as they were able, watched their own death with only mild interest.
Old Jim read over the transcript of the Mudder’s conversation with the Medic more than once. It felt wrong to him—or maybe the word was “estranged.” Estranged from what had happened, or perhaps this was how you talked about something in the aftermath. Something peculiar, unsettling.
MUDDER: He has a camera.
MEDIC: Who has a camera?
MUDDER: The rabbit.
MEDIC: Is there something in the corner of your eye that you cannot get out?
MUDDER: Just a fleck of mud. Just a speck.
MEDIC: I have some pills that will calm you down.
MUDDER: I don’t need pills. The rabbit had a camera on a strap around his neck.
MEDIC: Did he also have a pocket watch? Was he late for an appointment?
MUDDER: I could smell an odor, damp, or electric, or … and it seemed shabby, old, like a cat that’s stopped grooming … and then the eye, the eye … was like a camera … but it was wearing a camera.
MEDIC: Your ankle will be fine.
MUDDER: It was eating fiddler crabs. Do rabbits eat meat? No, I know they don’t.
MEDIC: There’s no reward in the risk.
MUDDER: My ankle will be fine. I’m sure of it.
MEDIC: Your ankle will be fine. I’m sure of it.
Team Leader 2 chose to believe the Mudder, that “something, perhaps a camera,” had been around the white rabbit’s neck. Although, it could have “just been an ornate collar,” as if the “lagomorph had been a pet.”
No evidence other than the evidence of the Mudder’s close observation supported the claim of a camera, for when they had looked out over the marsh in the aftermath of rescue, the rabbit that had been so very visible and so very still … was gone as if it had never been there.
“Escaped pet” continued to be the leading explanation in the yurts, as the biologists took a break from their endeavors to wait out the heat until the late-afternoon shadows, along with an urge to dismiss the rabbit as anomaly. One insignificant data point. It was just a rabbit in the wrong place, according to Team Leader 1, and likely it would die out in the marshes or be eaten by a predator.
The Mudder was heard to complain, drinking only water, but lots of it, that they “didn’t know what they were talking about,” for they hadn’t seen the eyes. The eyes. They hadn’t heard the crunch. They hadn’t seen how the crabs refused to acknowledge their own peril. That the rabbit was a predator. (The Mudder had put the fiddler crabs under the microscope in the absence of the creature that made them interesting, but found nothing unusual.)
To distract from the Mudder’s intensity, perhaps, the biologists, at the urgings of both team leaders, returned to a favorite after-work routine, although this too ended in puzzlement. The biologists had found an upright piano in Dead Town, an excellent brand, and the Medic fixed it up enough to play at dusk, by flashlight.
A battered, off-key sound by all accounts, something to wake the ghosts lying in wait in the graveyards now buried under acres of vines or submerged in wetlands. The white rabbit incident turned routine into compulsion, this playing of the piano. They could ignore the mosquitoes, the lingering heat. Some of them could even dance to it.
But about half an hour in, the night began to play their piano music back at them, from across the meadow and the mud flats. “A weird echo,” Team Leader 1 noted. “A strange effect of water and distance.”
The sound had an unsettling clarity. The dancing ended abruptly and the conversation, and then the sound of the piano, and then, mercifully, the doppelgänger of the piano stopped playing as well. Which left the biologists standing there holding their cups of beer, staring out into the darkness at … what?
“For that moment,” Team Leader 2 recalled, “we felt as if we were the experiment. That whoever had let loose the white rabbit was also responsible for … this … ghost.”
Perhaps they deserved that moment of dislocation for disturbing the silence of Dead Town. But from the Village Bar transcripts, Old Jim knew this was a prank played by Man Boy Slim, who had thought of it because it amused him to make owl sounds so real that owls would hoot back during mating season. Which also served to prank Old Jim’s own memories, because his boss at Central knew Old Jim loved a good upright piano. That on their overseas missions, in the long-distant past, Young Jim always checked out the bar or hotel lobby, vain hope, that they might have one he could play.
But how much time would someone need, to pull off such a prank? What other motivation might you have? To kayak or canoe halfway upriver, with the rest of the way perilous through thick clouds of biting flies—and then to know a location well enough to hunker down in the dark in the marsh, amongst the sleeping alligators, to play back the biologists’ own music at them, thready and altered as an inexplicable haunting rising from the very mud.
“The best part is I waited a couple of nights, so I was playing back at them what they’d played the night before,” Man Boy Slim said, as he related this in semi–sotto voce to a select circle in a corner of the bar, “almost the same, but just a little different. That must’ve messed with their heads, for sure.”
Man Boy Slim implicated himself in many another incident with those words, because Old Jim didn’t think he had crept up to Dead Town on a lark one night. Old Jim thought Man Boy Slim had bivouacked there for days, and maybe he didn’t even have a broken-down car in the shop. At the very least, Old Jim began to think Man Boy Slim must have become obsessed (was this too strong a word?) with the biologists.
Like a child, but also it’s true that Old Jim smiled with a grim satisfaction reading that part of the transcript. A kind of homegrown, unknowing revolt against a clandestine Central project they would never know about. Although, perhaps subconsciously, instinctually, they guessed.
That something was off, and would only get worse.
By the middle of August, there came a subtle shift of colors and textures, a drop in humidity, and new strength to the sea breeze, even so far remote inland. The biologists had by then abandoned the piano for fear of the odd echoes.
There had been no further sightings of a white rabbit, nor did they speak of it, but now the Tyrant’s tracker came to life. “If it wasn’t scientific, I would say the alligator has fixated on us as the source of its discomfort and dislocation,” Team Leader 1 wrote. For the Tyrant—who Old Jim came to see as a kind of double agent—roamed ceaseless, even during the day, did not rest or falter, and often seemed to shadow their new encampment. This was unforeseen, the proximity, that rather than a return south, the Tyrant would still “be in our lives,” as Team Leader 2 put it.
The meadow became riotous with butterflies, bees, and wasps feasting on a perfumed wildness of goldenrod, milkweed, blazing star. So thick and tall that the biologists reluctantly cut a swath through the meadow to reach the fiddler crabs that had become the Mudder’s primary subject of study.
Only the slight chill in the deep bronze light of late afternoon told the greater truth: This bounty would fade soon and deaden into fall. There was a falseness to the richness, Old Jim sensed, in the wistful way the biologists wrote about it.
With the change in the weather, the lives of the biologists changed, too. They shifted from collection and cataloguing to analysis and sporadic forays into experimentation. A kind of gaze turned inward, bringing with it some other quality, hard to define. “The red-tinged eye of the lighthouse shining out distant at dusk seems both comforting and utterly unfamiliar,” Team Leader 2 wrote, in a passage expressing homesickness.
Over time, the biologists came to feel that something was not quite right with their expedition. Even Team Leader 1’s obsession with “inefficiencies” and “better ways of being productive” felt like a tell. That there was influence or coercion, invisible both to the naked eye and to their instruments. The recording of their experiments in notebooks were driven into the paper with a sharpness that sometimes left holes from the pencil lead.
It was the natural order of things, Old Jim knew, that the biologists may have had suspicions left unvoiced long before this point. Because once voiced they might take the form of accusations or irrational fearfulness. They may have, each of them, throughout the summer, almost spoken up, almost raised concerns, only to think themselves, as the Mudder put it, “unreasonable, paranoid, or imagining things.”
Yet once they halted in their relentless cataloguing, recording, reporting … wasn’t there so much to give them pause? Hadn’t one, in the wet slurp and roll of a glinting dark body glimpsed for just a moment in a natural canal, had to impose a species name on what could not, could never, be intuited from such a glimpse? Wasn’t the prickle of unease crawling up the back of their necks tied to some actual shadow in the night? Some distant muttering while they slept?
Drunk Boat called it, roughly in the same month, in a different context, “the null effect—to create a something from the nothing in the darkness, the mind betraying you every time.” This directed with a nudge at Man Boy Slim, of “the way the human imagination fills in the gaps.”
But Man Boy Slim didn’t respond to Drunk Boat, appeared diminished or “somehow finished,” as Sally put it to Drunk Boat in a candid moment later.
“Well, that movie we decided to see, it was enough to put anyone off their feed,” Drunk Boat said in Man Boy Slim’s defense, sounding not at all like a poet.
(Old Jim stared at that line in the transcript for a very long time, trying to parse it. Thinking it meant something. Making a note to check the movie theater schedules for the era, if such still existed.)
Man Boy Slim abruptly changed the subject to speak eloquently of the trials and tribulations of the summer tanagers headed north once more.
The way the vines of poison ivy and cascading native grape turned yellow and there would be days of gray skies with no rain, lending the marshes a dull pallor that made them unfamiliar to the biologists, who had not yet experienced that season, in that place.
In the end, it was the choked, choking sound of their field generator dying that coaxed the biologists’ darker thoughts, their self-betrayal, to the surface. The terrible, coughing death of the generator that, in its throes, seemed almost human or perhaps inhuman, but nonetheless something alive. It rousted them in the night from their sleep and at first none could identify the source. To most, it sounded like an injured beast that had crept in amongst the tents, come to harm them.
The generator dying: a usual kind of failure that existed in the mundane world of maintenance. Except, the biologist in charge of the generator was unsure of the cause. The mold he found inside the casing had not advanced far enough and the natural sabotage practiced on them daily by their surroundings could not be the cause. That the mechanical failure rested on a part deliberately broken or that had failed to register as factory defect.
This left Team Leaders 1 and 2 with a white rabbit, an echoing piano, and a cognitive bifurcation between sinister and non-sinister explanations, with, as would become typical, one clinging to the mundane and the other opting for the sinister and ordering a perimeter guard around the yurts.
Yet how could they guard against what could enter the mind? For, with the generator broken, the world lived on with “a strange silence,” as the Mudder put it … and one by one the biologists found also absent a notion or hooked question that had hidden wormlike between skull and brain.
The biologists’ journals were riddled through with this worm. The absence felt “more like loss than like freedom.”
“I am unmade from what I was meant to be.” Scrawled in the margin of a listing of the weights of banded birds, types of parasites, irregularities in blood samples, the mutation in coloration from the norm.
“I’ll be more comfortable in the dark.” How hard they had fought the researcher, how their heartbeat had felt against the half-closed palm of a trembling hand.
“It is deadly cold and the fire in the fireplace has gone out.” Part of an entry on the mapping of wildflowers to pollinators, to accompany a killing board with pinned bee and wasp species.
“Nothing holds us back now.” From what?
They craved the generator’s hum, but they feared its return. Were they not themselves regardless? One organism might peer out from another organism, but not live there. A piano might be played at one time, but the sound might reach them at another time.
Even as the Medic, contemptuous of the perimeter guard, worked feverishly to fix the generator. There came consistently in his entries the biometrics of the expedition, with little editorializing. All had elevated heartbeats except for the Medic, who took his own vitals, Old Jim noted. All exhibited heightened stress, which caused the Medic to conclude that they should “take steps to lower the levels.”
Generator repair appeared high on the Medic’s list of “steps,” and soon enough the generator once more coughed back into life.
Three biologists, according to Team Leader 1, had protested the return of the generator. Three biologists had in belligerent fashion attempted to stop the Medic from flicking the switch. Three biologists had seemingly then fallen back in line and voiced no further concerns.
“We genuinely understood the concerns, but not the method of expression,” Team Leader 1 wrote. “We intend to restore morale by proving that the fears are unfounded, that the uncertainty is behind us now.”
That Team Leaders 1 and 2 had had to put down a mini rebellion within their ranks to allow the generator to come back online signaled to Old Jim a situation more volatile than suggested by prior events.
But the night after the generator’s repair, the first skeptic donned a contamination suit and waded out into the marsh until something fast and large took him—or this was the consensus. In the morning, the buoy of his red helmet lay bobbing, garish but gentle, against the mud flats. The generator droned on.
When the Mudder was sent to retrieve the helmet, she found no head within, nor any trace of the man who had worn it.
At no point during the rest of the expedition did the biologists find any trace of the man. Nor did they speak much of his disappearance. Nor did they pause in their return to their tasks, not even long enough to hold a memorial in absentia. Nor was there ever any investigation.
It felt to Old Jim like a false beacon, meant to distract. But from what?
“Diaz, Armando, 27, wetlands ecologist, missing, presumed dead of natural causes,” read the line item in Central’s files, along with details of the cover story and payments to his family.
They had become twenty-three, the twenty-fourth passing out of history as easily as an alligator sliding into the water.
At some point, wandering the half-empty cathedral of Central, lost in the archives, Old Jim began to focus on what he thought of as the “Mystery of the Medic and the Mudder,” chaining them together only as fellow anomalies at first, and their brief moment of connection at the twisted-ankle nexus. Because during those months the Medic never left the Dead Town base camp and the Mudder left it the most.
Surveillance footage showed her sneaking off five or six times, three of which coincided with her abrupt appearance at the Village Bar hours later, in the evenings. There to have a beer or two and then to disappear into the night, only to reappear in Dead Town before dawn. Old Jim could sympathize—he too would have snuck off from that dour and dire camp, even if leaving for short periods had disorienting effects on most of the biologists.
There were a number of ways to die in the dark traversing that stretch of wetlands, even taking care. Referring to maps of the area, Old Jim had timed it and the Mudder could not have turned up at the Village Bar as quickly as she did without help. It didn’t take a detective to guess the source of that help: Man Boy Slim, who appeared in the Village Bar either before or after the Mudder all three times. And who had been spying on the biologists for weeks.
So at some point, perhaps, the Mudder had surprised Man Boy Slim in the bushes with his piano sounds and blackmailed him or convinced him in gentler ways to pick her up for some R&R in this little green boat he had, then take her back.
At the time, Central either missed it or thought nothing of it, given the two-week lag between taping and the tapes being switched out, brought to Bleakersville, and sent on to Central. And perhaps it did mean nothing but a fling or a friendship or a way to blow off steam.
But Old Jim had also noticed that twice the Mudder’s presence coincided with the Rogue in the back of the bar. This fact nagged at Old Jim, even in his hollowed-out state, sitting in Central’s bland cafeteria before a group session, contemplating pureed soup with a side of oyster crackers. It even agitated him, a welcome distraction from so much he disliked about the detox process.
Old Jim could discern no contact between Rogue and Mudder the first time, but the second time the Rogue came up to the bar and leaned in next to where the Mudder sat on a stool, to give the bartender his beer order.
Rewinding the tape a dozen times in a basement stinking of cigarette smoke, water dripping from the ceiling, Old Jim couldn’t be sure that the Rogue spoke to the Mudder. But if he were a betting man, he would have liked the odds that the Rogue had whispered something to her—and that she responded with no more than a word or two. Before the Rogue retreated to his table in the half shadow of the back of the bar, having successfully turned his body such that the camera did not reveal his face.
Curious, the fifteenth time he watched it, that Old Jim turned his attention to Man Boy Slim sitting at the end of the bar, who snuck glances at the two of them. His left boot tapping on the brass footrail. Tap-tap-tapping. Did he just have to use the bathroom or did something make him nervous?
Did the Mudder and the Rogue make him nervous?
That this possible communication between Rogue and Mudder occurred three days after the generator had been fixed struck Old Jim as possibly significant, although he could not articulate why.
Drunk Boat and Man Boy Slim continued to hold court as ever, apparently unaware or uncaring of the generator issues over at Dead Town. Talk turned to “the Conflagration,” as Drunk Boat put it, a bonfire party being held by the lighthouse in November. Man Boy Slim went off on a riff of how they must construct a marshmallow worthy of the roasting. This made Old Jim smile, receiving gladly the warmth of their cheery comfort and reassurance. In how they looked forward to the future of the holiday season and their most cherished rituals … even if that season lay in a far-distant land the biologists on the Forgotten Coast might never reach.
As for the Rogue, he had still not registered anywhere in “the system,” had been such a perfect, best-behaving self as a RUSO, “ritualized unidentified sitting object,” as Drunk Boat put it, that even he had stopped editorializing about the stranger.
Still, Old Jim had continued to scour newspaper and police reports from the era, for the Village and the nearby towns of Hedley and Bleakersville. There was little enough, and because police reports and newspaper clippings hadn’t been in the files, Old Jim felt now like he was snooping or prying. Yet still he did it. (He found no applicable movie listing for the time Man Boy Slim had seemed haunted, when he’d seen something with Drunk Boat that disturbed him.)
Traffic stops for DUIs, car accidents, a man shot another man over the “trespasses of a pig.” Fishermen fined for catching bass out of season. A death threat against the mayor of Bleakersville. The stealing of chickens. The “misplacing” of horses. All these typical and slightly atypical activities occurred while the biologists grew insular and peculiar in their enclave in Dead Town.
Nagging at him, yet another question: Why had Central bugged the Village Bar? He had no easy answer. But, perhaps, the impulse suggested already an uneasy awareness of some other force besides Central operating on the coast. That something in the myths of the coast, what washed up there, compelled such surveillance.
The heavy suppression and redaction in the files, the sense of not wanting to name a nexus of concern, for fear of calling it forth.
Amid all this sea wrack, the excesses and mundanity, the heavy fog of the moment, what none of them—him, the locals at the Village Bar, the biologists—could divine correctly was Time.
Not so much the passage of time, with which the locals were well familiar, as the way in which past, present, and future collapsed into each other. The mind became confused by the intermingled layers and whether the portents were ill or benign. Because so much on that coast, humid and hot and closed off, decayed sprang to life decayed sprang to life. The eye, misled, did not know what was truly and forever dead. The eye did not know where to focus, could not tell what might next be resurrected.
Did a pivotal event or conversation begin in the present or did it begin a decade earlier at the start of a friendship, only to end with an upturned table and a drunken punch while the house band played in the back? Was the faint sound of the cranes headed north—silver and ethereal and cloud-distant—happening now, or was that another season and the sky held merely the memory of their passage?
By then, too, post-generator, the storms had begun to come up the coast, so that, in time, Dead Town would become an island, cut off by flooding even as the generator, given new life, droned on, oblivious. The days would become elongated, compressed, hard to gauge and hard to hold on to.
Soon enough, the Village Bar would be boarded up and empty, but for one “loose shutter that kept banging against the window”—Drunk Boat joking that it was a good description of Man Boy Slim, to a scowl, as they shared a last round before the place went dark. Old Jim, traveler from the future peering down at the past, would become more and more cut off from the Village Bar gossip, the locals too concerned about storms becoming hurricanes—“horrorcanes,” as Man Boy Slim called them—to worry about the biologists. To worry about anything other than when to evacuate, when to hunker down.
The surveillance camera on the outside of the bar would become a ceaseless record of the banging shutter—over and over, the transcripts continuing as if unhinged, as if the person listening at Central had nothing better than do than to continue typing “[shutter bangs].” Shutter bangs shutter bangs shutter bangs.
Until it became meaningless, and then, once again, held meaning.
The fifth night after the rebirth of the generator, an all-encompassing susurration came from the sky over the biologists’ yurts, and by the light of a bright half-moon and reflections off the clouds, they could see countless ragged, darting shapes, headed north over Dead Town.
At first, no one could identify exactly whether it was birds or bats, until the dislocating truth occurred: both birds and bats, of the same mind, a kind of confusion of tongues and wings. The chittering of the bats as they darted in clusters this way and that, trying to avoid the birds, the alarm cries of the birds of all types, from raptors to swamp sparrows.
“I had never seen such a thing, only read about it,” wrote the Mudder. “It was beautiful and obscene and dislocating, but most of all the odd oily sheen of … scent from all that effort above us, it wafted down and even seemed to coat the ground. Their panic, their labor. I felt an embarrassment in witnessing, and a shame— as if I were the cause of their flight.”
On the ground, a vibration and then a clatter and a pounding of hooves upon the ground as white-tailed deer charged out of the marshes, stampeding around the yurts and forcing the biologists inside for shelter, followed by the sometimes indistinct, sometimes raucous sounds of smaller mammals: raccoons, opossums, skunks, and in amongst their number bobcats, coyotes, foxes, oblivious as to who was predator and who was prey. Revealed by shaky flashlights stuck out the doors of yurts, the two expedition rifles raised in defense, but the animals only cared to scramble north as fast as they were able.
The yips and growls and whines and the other sounds, “the sense,” as the Mudder put it, “of a great wall of flesh passing through by land and by sky, the thickness of that, is indescribable.” By her estimations, it took more than thirty minutes for the sky to clear, the trembling of the ground to subside.
When the birds, the bats, the animals had passed through but for stragglers, the silence they left behind felt ominous to most. All was so very still except for the faithful rumbling of the generator and “the panicked sound of our own breathing.”
“It felt, irrationally,” Team Leader 2 wrote, “as if the wildlife had rejected us—had rejected our methodologies, and refused any longer to be sampled or catalogued, or subjected to even the least intrusive experiments. It felt as if the entire reason for the expedition had abandoned us and thus we had no rudder, no anchor, no reason to be. That we did not belong here.”
To Old Jim’s astonishment, reading the files as he waited on the results of his psych evaluation, the Medic described the night’s events as “a lessening of dead weight. A great relief,” as if the sheer wealth of wildlife had been oppressive, and joked that “a bird can be a bat, a bat can be a bird, that’s just the way of things now.”
The Medic noted that “a deteriorating sense of self has fled in the night with the mass panic.” But Team Leaders 1 and 2 felt differently and focused on reassuring the rest of the expedition at an emergency meeting held in the aftermath, around 1:15 a.m. Illuminated by flashlights and a small fire outside the yurts, the ground churned and cracked by stampede.
This was a natural occurrence sometimes before a storm, Team Leader 1 reminded the others. It had been well-documented as a phenomenon and thus was no outlier, and if the shock of it still resonated, that was the difference between an account on a page and experiencing it in real life. They should be thankful to witness such a rare event and to “learn from it.”
Talk turned to evacuation, despite the ambiguity of the weather reports. “There’s no reward in the risk of leaving now,” the Medic said, somewhat cryptically, Old Jim thought.
The conversation petered out, mostly from fatigue. Or a kind of peer review pressure bearing down, as if on some level, each member of the expedition knew that, in some form, they were being read, or would one day be read, as Old Jim read them now. That none wanted to say the wrong thing and, as a result, did not know the right thing. (None could know they would never be read again, in the usual way.)
The next day the white rabbits appeared, in great numbers, all over Dead Town.
The rain or the rabbits? Which came first or did they arrive together? “Drops like dew, a haze, the most delicate mist,” the Mudder called the approach of the storms. “Like a kind of veil across our eyesight.” Soon it would be hard to see two feet ahead in the torrential downpour, but this outcome would have seemed distant to the biologists that day, and of little consequence compared to the other arrival.
For the rabbits had the opposite effect of appearing all too real, and in such quantity, overnight, unreal. Team Leader 1 noted, “In their initially placid aspect, dotting the slope leading to our yurt, dotting the meadow, dotting the cracked concrete of the main street of Dead Town … they unnerved because one felt that they had always been here, and that they belonged here. That it was our conception of what belonged that had been wrong. That we did not belong, somehow.”
Old Jim wanted, across the years, to implore the biologists to pack up and run, ahead of the storm. To cease operations and observations. To join the stampede of animals. To heed the echo of the piano that now came to the biologists in the gloaming of dusk. How casually some noted in their journals that this phenomenon had occurred for several days, even though Old Jim, by means arcane and archival, determined it began the day of the rabbits’ arrival, with seemingly no Man Boy Slim hunkered down in the reeds to make it happen.
The rain on the yurts by that first evening, as the biologists adjusted to the presence of the rabbits, had already become a thready message that danced off and on across the rough canvas surface. It would have been a percussive presence above the biologists’ heads as Team Leader 1 told them, after dinner, that she suspected “the locals of having a laugh at our expense,” although in her journal later, adding the cryptic margin note “beware of falling stars.”
Where would the locals find what appeared to be hundreds of white rabbits? How would they afford to buy them? How would they have so stealthily transported them to Dead Town and left them there? Mundane questions to quarantine the strangeness, to not think beyond certain boundaries, beyond which lay … what?
Team Leader 2, at cross-purposes with her partner, suggested a counter-experiment, a rival expedition. Or a “foreign entity,” as she put it, although what did “foreign entity” mean back then? What could it mean?
To Team Leader 2, it meant: “Some other team of biologists conducting invasive species research. Some other team of biologists conducting invasive species research in our territory.”
But as the Medic was quick to point out, and with which Team Leader 1 agreed, they had no record of any such governmental survey in the area. They had no other indication of such an effort. Yet still this theory of a rival expedition gained credence amongst the biologists, perhaps because it still accreted some logic to it—like a solid bait on a hook that only over time begins to flake away into the water, to dissolve in the absence of a fish, into nothing.
Team Leader 1 then steered the debate toward communications and a plan of action. She would ask their superiors about what to do, and in the meantime the biologists would continue their experiments while “allocating some time to capturing and caging as many rabbits as possible.”
In the Village Bar, just three days before the banging shutter, Man Boy Slim had found out about the rabbits from Charlie, who, from his boat, through binoculars, had discovered the rabbits in the marsh adjacent to Dead Town, if not the extent of the invasion.
“They’ve set loose lab rabbits that have been altered, look unnatural, and spook every other living thing,” Man Boy Slim said in a tone of voice that contained, if rewound a few times, a hint of reproach, but also a powerful unease. Man Boy Slim’s theory covered up some other knowledge that made him fearful. Neither did there come back at him from his friends any of the customary jokes or bravado, just a “least of what they’ve done” from Drunk Boat.
No one in those discussions (key words in the files: rabbit, bunny, white [incl. plurals]) gave a wink or nudge-nudge to indicate complicity or foreknowledge, although Old Jim had become frustrated with how little footage corroborated the audio, so that he could not glean tone from visual clues.
But one thing was certain by then, on that first day the rabbits took over Dead Town: The Rogue no longer haunted the Village Bar. He had moved on, changed his base of operations, and to the patrons of the bar, it was as if he had never existed at all.
After dark that night, some observed that the invasives shed a slight phosphorescence against the pall of night. “Their quivering bodies as they foraged at dusk appeared like luminous smudges of ghost,” Team Leader 2 wrote, uncharacteristically poetic.
This became a contested observation, an opinion shared by only some of the expedition, and not by Team Leader 1. But most agreed that, from the start, they “congregated in tight proximity after sunset,” so that the rabbits took on the appearance of “wide swaths” or “rags” of white that in their “persistence of movements similar to shoals of fish” seemed to “glide across” the dark ground, to and fro, back and forth.
What pursued them, or what they pursued, no one could tell.
By the second day of their appearance, the white rabbits began to make the biologists’ experiments useless or difficult to conduct—distraction, disruption of the landscape, destruction of the (plant) subject matter. They had some of the Old World look of hares, as cottontails did on the Forgotten Coast, along with the elongated stride of a hare. But the whiteness remained a stark reminder of aberration. It manifested in all of them. Too many of them. All of them.
“This continual shock of unnatural color”—for nothing else presented truly white in this soggy backcountry, except the pale underbelly of a dead alligator. This made explicit, as the Mudder put it, “by contrast with the tannins that give the water a dirty, red-tinged finish.”
The Mudder pushed back against the assertion that the rabbits had become an obstacle: “The others say that the rabbits throw off our work, make our work impossible. But what is our work, exactly?”
Yes, what was the work? What would the work be now? Old Jim suspected that only the Medic truly knew.
The biologists once more observed, this time en masse, the feasting of the rabbits on fiddler crabs, which in this time of their mass migrations over the mud flats had begun to cross Dead Town in waves.
“The visceral experience of the sound of the rabbits—so many rabbits—crunching down on crab carapace unnerved many of us. The relentlessness of the sound throughout the day seemed to interfere with the essential signal of the mission.” This from Team Leader 1, although the Medic noted something similar in his physiological observations.
“The essential signal,” like the residue from the piano echo, a mass psychological unhingement. To Old Jim, there lay a wealth of analysis in the issue of sound and the expedition—enough to become its own forensic science project.
But the effect, by the afternoon of the second day, was anger and frustration directed at the rabbits, with any speculation as to how the rabbits had arrived in Dead Town petering out as “pulse” or “impulse” in the journals. Instead, the text and subtext became: “How can we rid ourselves of this affliction?”
This anger became funneled into “the plan,” as far as Old Jim could tell, and Team Leaders 1 and 2 were unable to provide a more productive context or distance from the issue. With this failure, Old Jim felt the expedition had descended into the danger of what he would term “a leaderless state,” or a leadership that catered to the anxieties of those being led. Even as the Medic continued to calmly, and with little extraneous comment, chart the declining health of their vitals.
The morning of the third day, the biologists hauled out all available cages, from those that would hold one rabbit, to those that might hold up to a dozen. Large enough buckets with lids that locked, meant for aquatic samples, came into play. Butterfly netting, mist netting for songbirds—some felt that this gauzy material could be thrown over rabbits to capture them. Debate fizzled out over turning the yurt half packed with supplies into a rabbit holding pen.
But when the biologists attempted to capture the rabbits, the creatures moved with an almost uncanny ability for avoidance, anticipating the biologists’ moves. Sometimes with hissing sounds or a clacking of their teeth that distracted their attackers as “not like a lagomorph”—or the rabbits stood their ground, snarling, suggesting infection with a pathogen like rabies.
This tactic, too, proved effective in thwarting the biologists. A species acting unlike, or in opposition to, the normal habits of that species put the biologists at a loss. On a very deep level, it confused them. Nor had they any military training or experience with mass extermination to prevent disease.
A rabbit that did not run away was, in some ways, not a rabbit at all. A belligerent rabbit had, in a sense, already broken contain and escaped the range of their intent.
“They seemed both afraid and unafraid, could be docile and aggressive and docile again—the same animal,” Team Leader 1 wrote. This, in a section that detailed frustrating attempts to extricate the tiny cameras that graced the necks of perhaps one in ten rabbits.
If the biologists had a worrying lack of concern about the cameras, perhaps the sheer numbers of rabbits so overwhelmed that they had no critical faculties left to devote to the subject.
Even Team Leader 1’s observation distorted reality, seemed to be skewed by the inundation. The rabbits did not fear humans in any context, Old Jim believed, including his review of the limited video footage. They simply brooked no interference, by a variety of means. The biologists never asked themselves if the rabbits had their own mission to complete, but this thought haunted Old Jim continually in the cafeteria, eating meat loaf or dry chicken breast. Thinking about the crunching of crabs.
When the biologists did manage to capture a rabbit, it lunged to bite with those teeth that had feasted on crab flesh, with a devilish accuracy. Caged, the rabbits thrashed and thrashed, physically in agony at entrapment—terrible to watch, organisms trying to smash themselves to bloody rags to escape. Banging shutters banging and banging, and no way to stop them but to give in to the storm. All while the cameras around the rabbits’ necks at times appeared to click, to blink, to record, to process …
If not for all that had come before, this situation might have simply engaged the biologists’ feelings of “humane and ethical treatment,” of “respect for specimens,” as fuel to find the energy for release. But, in fact, Old Jim noted, what it did was hollow out that concern, so that afterward it no longer existed in discernible quantities.
Empathy slid toward expediency, but not before the biologists released the most frantic rabbits and attempted to sedate others with the longest needles at their disposal, to limit contact. Protocols continued to be abandoned or ignored in the confusion, as thirty cages in a yurt would vibrate with the scrabbling panic of fifty spasming rabbits, turning white fur red with self-inflicted injury against the wire.
Jabbing, jabbing, jabbing, here and there, everywhere, upending cages as they hurried amongst the creatures, no logic to needle reuse or even dosages. Even as, starting from the center, the cages receded from their terrible juddering as if from some ground zero event, until the outer cages fell silent of the thrum and shaking. While the biologists continued to jitter and ping in their ceaseless banter and chatter, which felt like a disguise to mask a rising sense of horror.
Nor did it reflect poorly on the biologists that so many, even heavily protected, leapt back out of the way of a lunging rabbit, from a terror of infection, contamination, invasion. “I feared they would find me on all fours, eating the crabs raw on the marsh flats, no signal left within me.”
The footage the Medic took shook so much, nothing was comprehensible except as blur and vibration, and, sometimes, the wild, rapidly blinking eye of a biologist up close, panning back, a syringe in hand with the dimensions, at that perspective, of a spaceship about to crash-land.
Even the orderly intent in the disorder of this approach became further compromised as, due to either mistakes or expediency, the biologists broke open two boxes of an experimental sedative meant only to be used on seabirds, and instead of putting the rabbits to sleep, it imposed an overwhelming clarity and sharpness—such that they would stop thrashing but then begin to “chatter at high volume” in a “directed and hostile way.”
There welled up from the rabbits, then, what Old Jim thought of as a “competing signal,” and it appeared to harm the biologists in some physiological way, for the Medic advised them to leave the yurt, discontinue the effort, and regroup. Although even outside they could still faintly hear the group call from the rabbits.
“I did not like how they stared at me,” the Mudder wrote, as the reason why she had abandoned her duties in the yurt long before the use of the experimental sedative. And, perhaps, why she then continued to instead catalogue the progress of the rain, “which we have gotten used to, but which has increased in severity.”
Team Leaders 1 and 2 reconsidered “methodologies of containment” from the steps of crumbling City Hall, hoping, perhaps, by the change in scenery to provide some relief from the visceral experience of the yurts and cages. While also brainstorming ways to retrieve rabbit cameras, which might hold further insight as to their containment or control. (This again, Old Jim noted, a way of rationalizing the cameras, rather than considering their essential nature.)
As Team Leader 1 noted that they had neither “sufficient quantities” nor the will for “bullet to the brain solutions,” Team Leader 2 personally handed out ice-cream sandwiches, a surprise treat, reminiscent of summer camp, that they had been hiding in amongst frozen flounder and ray specimens in the deep coolers, as a reward before their winter break.
“What does it mean that the Tyrant now eats these rabbits? How might this affect the environment?” This from the junior biologist tasked with monitoring the tracking device.
Which had begun to malfunction, a harbinger of a growing problem with the camp’s electronics in general. Sometimes the tracker showed the Tyrant nowhere, the dot disappearing. Other times, the dot had bifurcated and the Tyrant existed in two places at once, with no visual confirmation possible to determine the true sighting from the phantom. But on three occasions, the Tyrant had erupted from the water on the meadow side of Dead Town to devour a rabbit that foraged too close to the reeds.
“The Tyrant’s behavior now differs from before, as if the rabbits have switched on within its brain some impulse or organizing thought that had lain dormant,” the junior biologist had noted in the records. “This ‘activation’ appears centered on this encampment.”
Neither Team Leader 1 nor Team Leader 2 had an answer for the junior biologist, nor the patience. Instead, for a time, the question silenced all discussion and they loitered, standing in a semicircle to eat their ice cream in silence, a scene rendered somewhat macabre by the grainy black-and-white footage and the coldness of Old Jim’s table at the viewing area in Central’s basement.
“Tomorrow will be better,” Team Leader 1 said, after they had finished the ice cream.
But it wasn’t.
By the third afternoon, the rabbits had eaten the wildflower meadow down to nubs, so that the wide expanse looked as if someone “had given it a bad shave,” the Mudder wrote, accompanied by a washed-out photo that showed how the marsh and estuary beyond could now be seen from the yurts. To Old Jim, the meadow resembled a field of wheat after the harvest. He could almost smell the straw-hay freshness, soon to fade into a staleness he associated with horse barns.
The white lumps of rabbits dotting that bereft landscape felt fake, false, added later. The sand and the marsh flats beyond, the islands of palmettos, the hint of the sea in the distance … all of this impossible to coexist with that foreground. And yet it had coexisted, for a time, as startling as if skulls had appeared in the wet marsh.
By the fourth afternoon, purple thistles had, with preternatural speed, “even for speedy growers,” sprung up throughout the fallow meadow. The landscape appeared almost alien, with the dull brown of flattened dead wildflowers such a stark, neutral backdrop to the bodies of the rabbits and the vivid purple explosions of the thistle blossoms and their multitude of tall green stalks.
The meadow had a wet, boggy texture now. The rabbits, fur ruffled and stained, would not touch the thistles but foraged on the remnants of what they had already destroyed.
The biologists’ emergency comms had failed, even though the generator rumbled on. Old Jim knew Central’s surveillance cams had begun to fail as well. Privately, Team Leaders 1 and 2 expressed concerns that “something about the rabbit cameras is interfering with our gear, perhaps even the Tyrant’s tracker. Some electrical impulse or competing channel.”
The rain had intensified to a steady downpour, even if the sun could sometimes still be seen, as was common in those parts. Weather reports gleaned from a battery-operated handheld radio differed on where and how the worst of the storms would hit, whether it would get worse or subside.
That evening, Team Leaders 1 and 2 announced that an order had come down from on high, “By arcane means?” the Mudder muttered in her journal, for no one except possibly the Mudder herself had left the encampment. How could a message be sent out and a reply received?
Team Leaders 1 and 2 claimed that the order was to herd any rabbits not in the meadow to the meadow and “dispose of them there, with the discretion to then withdraw from Dead Town to a more secure location farther inland,” should the storm intensify.
It became clear, as Team Leader 1 outlined the logistics of the plan, how they would encircle and “nudge or otherwise coerce” the rabbits to the meadow … that, in the end, they would use flamethrowers to incinerate as many rabbits as possible, with outliers “disposed of by hand,” which meant, more than likely, knives, as they had few guns.
The “flamethrowers” were propane-fueled “super weeders” the biologists had been meant to test as a means of controlling invasive plants by disrupting their cellular structure, with the flame “applied a foot or so above the ground and the roots,” but also for controlled burns to encourage “renewal of the native seed bank.”
The flamethrowers were still in their boxes, as they had been reserved for Phase 3 of the expedition, in the late winter. The propane tanks fit strapped onto the back of the wearer while the weeding apparatus awkwardly curved from the back around to the front. The handheld spigot looking both infernal and as innocuous as a sprinkler head.
The last reliable weather report indicated a lull in the rain the next morning, giving the expedition “a small window of opportunity” to kill hundreds of rabbits with fire.
“What current weather reports? Even the radio has stopped working,” the Mudder noted, underlined twice, which Old Jim again determined to mean Team Leaders 1 and 2 were flying by the seat of their pants, given the disruption of electrical devices.
Science and logic had given way to mere hope, prayers, and blessings. This applied, as well, to the actions of the evening, when, too wired to sleep, Team Leaders 1 and 2 debated, privately, what to do about the cameras in Team Leader 2’s yurt. They had retrieved two ancient cameras from around the necks of rabbits that appeared to be intact and functional. Many were not.
The attendant chatter Old Jim found incomprehensible, a kind of proof that the cameras represented an uncanny bewilderment to the biologists that they wanted to channel into the technological or logistical realm, rather than acknowledge it. A denial reinforced every time they returned to trapping and killing rabbits without knowing what the cameras meant or might one day mean. Because they had reached their limit.
Team Leader 1: “We decided to view the footage together to ensure an objective viewpoint on what we saw. And that we would only view the footage once and then preserve the cameras against the weather and prepare to have them sent on later to our superiors.”
Team Leader 2: “I thought something in the video might provide insight into the rabbits, and might in that case affect our mission in the morning.”
But from Old Jim’s perspective, some other impulse motivated them or coerced them. Standard protocol would have meant bagging the cameras and sending them to a Central proxy immediately. Team Leaders 1 and 2 had no way to make a copy. If viewing the footage destroyed the footage, a distinct possibility given the condition of the cameras, only their eyewitness impressions would remain.
“The cameras were so delicate—the straps we had cut, the tiny micro point of the lens, the screen a little larger than an overseas postage stamp.” So small, in fact, that Team Leader 2 had the idea to view the screen through a magnifying glass. Destabilizing: the mysterious quality of the underlying mechanics of the cameras.
The body of the first camera had a slurred quality consistent with having passed successfully through ancient flame and had an acrid scent. It took some time to find the recessed button in the chassis that played the video. Team Leader 2 expressed anxiety about this delay, asking Team Leader 1, who ignored her, if they should abandon the idea.
But the few seconds of video showed grainy footage of other rabbits and then “a flash of light that ended it.” Team Leader 2 noted that playing the video made the camera “feel soft and rubbery in her hand,” as if the mechanism inside was in danger of malfunctioning. She feared “it might fall apart like old rubber.”
With perhaps more confidence but more care handling the camera, they watched the second video. They noted that the video lasted three minutes and twenty-one seconds. They noted that it did not include rabbits. They noted that it did not include scenes of Dead Town. That it did include images of them both, “with close-ups of our faces,” but declined to describe what these scenes consisted of or in what context a camera attached to a rabbit at ground level had been able to show “close-ups” of their faces.
“At first, we thought we had hit the recording option and then playback,” Team Leader 1 wrote. “But then it seemed more like, for lack of better words, a kinetic viewing that included us. As if the camera observed us and some internal program knew that we, specifically, were using it. We did not feel comfortable continuing the experiment.”
The experiment? When had it gone from archival to … experiment? At what point in the viewing had Team Leaders 1 and 2 realized they had made a mistake?
Old Jim sat back in his chair in the archives to contemplate that statement. Team Leader 1 appeared to be saying that the video was anticipatory of being viewed by unauthorized personnel, like some kind of psychological weapon. That, in a sense, the video was looking in at them in a distorted way? Like a crystal ball or a two-way video system? No, not like that at all. But like what?
And if the Medic had viewed the video, what would it have shown the Medic?
Nothing about the cameras or their fate made it into the next briefing, which focused on the extermination phase. Nor at any point in the future of the expedition did Team Leader 1 or Team Leader 2 mention to the other biologists that they had viewed the camera footage.
So that next morning—the operation overseen by two people who were romantically involved, who may or may not have viewed unsettling footage the night before—the ten biologists with training on the flamethrowers donned their gear, including protective garments and the tanks, so they looked like sad fumigators fighting some futile war against the landscape.
Under a gray sky and gathering drizzle, the rest took up metal lids and mosquito netting and knives and the two rifles and everyone joined those already on the far edge of Dead Town to drive the rabbits toward the meadow.
“Meat for ages. Meat for miles,” the Medic enthused in a boastful fashion, next to his usual physiological readings, which had begun to devolve into observations “from the outside.” Many of the expedition members had stopped allowing him to monitor their vitals, poke and prod them, perhaps as a vote of no confidence.
With a kind of relief later that afternoon, Team Leader 1 noted “the cessation of operations,” with little other details. What Team Leader 2 admitted “could have been a nightmare” was “pulled off without a hitch.” This included “destruction of foreign paraphernalia,” which meant the cameras.
The rabbits, by all accounts, had let themselves be herded, with little resistance, to the meadow, to join the rabbits already gathered there, until, surrounded by the flamethrower wearers, the rabbits “were effectively liquidated, as humanely as possible.” Although Old Jim doubted a scenario existed in which “humanely” could have played any part as a description.
Soon after, the biologists retreated to their yurts, for the rain came down by dusk in such obliterating rage that the water seemed intent on hiding “any hint of a crime,” the Mudder wrote. That there would be no trace of the rabbits in the memory of the world. So that, as the Medic might have put it, “we can get back to our vital work.”
No one, even the Mudder, made direct comments in their journals about the day. No footage existed, as all comms save a Central surveillance camera on Main Street had malfunctioned and gone offline permanently. Another layer of information stripped away. He was left with what the journals told him from this point on.
Journals rescued from layers of dirt, green with moss.
Journals with pages torn and ripped and bloody.
“Did not move or register pain as they burnt and died. Did not try to run. Did not care. Did not. Would not. Could not.” Found, finally, buried in Team Leader 2’s journal, in the margin of an entry from the early spring, when the locals had thought the biologists were burying gold bars.
Old Jim’s terrible, unthinkable thought: Had the rabbits kept on eating, crunching down on dead crabs even after their fur had crisped into ash? Even after their hearts had burnt away or exploded from the heat?
That night, the weather changed and the storm became a hurricane and evacuation no longer possible. The biologists would have to wait it out in Dead Town.
That night, too, Team Leader 1 authorized the dumping of “a number of severely damaged, nonfunctioning rabbit cameras into the marsh.”
Old Jim did not like the idea of the cameras mingling with the substrata, with the detritus at the bottom of the estuary. To be pulled apart over time, to molecule by molecule become part of the Forgotten Coast.
Even if that was the fate of every living thing.
In the morning, the biologists awoke to the sounds of a great rending and tearing of flesh that they did not at first understand. Some anomaly of the winds brought by the storms, lashing against the trees and reeds and bushes. Some vestige of a bad dream welling up again.
But as the sound continued at an unhurried yet amplified pace, flurries of rain welling up, dying away, and welling up against the dull gray horizon … as the crackle and tear of it, the crispness to some listeners, the moistness in others, it caused a mass hysteria.
As did the stench of burning from the dead meadow. For there, upon that blackened, blighted field shorn now of any vegetation but for some stalks of thistles, the half-torched corpses of the rabbits lay slumped in a confusion of flesh and bone and parody of sculpture—in blackened clumps still steaming while flashes of white remnants of fur like tattered flags flashed through the gloom as a reminder of what they had once been.
But memory was not needed, for a hundred or more new rabbits, be-muddened and brazen, grazed there now. And what they feasted upon was burnt and crackling flesh. What they ate were their dead kin, and they ate them as methodically and calmly as their predecessors had eaten the fiddler crabs.
At the sight, a handful of biologists vomited into the grass around the yurts, into the mud, the weeds. Others seemed “almost catatonic,” according to the Medic. The chewing of gristle, the gentle yet firm way some of the rabbits held the charred heads of their meal and, wrenching with their teeth, pulled strips of skin and meat from the skulls. How, in several accounts, the charnel-house stench released felt like a physical blow.
“You did not want to be there. You didn’t want to be anywhere, ever again.” “My head will never be right again.” “I felt the presence of the Tyrant in their feasting, as if the rabbits had become the Tyrant.”
But the Mudder wrote only, “The worm eats its own tail. Will the worm die of it?”
Into the void, Team Leaders 1 and 2 issued forth from their yurt, noticeably shaken, and ordered a new advance. “A final advance.” Although rain might hamper their effort, the flamethrowers would still work well enough to “do the job,” and other weapons could be assembled and “we can finish this once and for all.”
There must have been some resistance, some sense that a war of attrition might end badly, as the biologists had already performed what they had assumed would be the “final advance” the day before. Even the Medic urged caution, that “now we have time to evaluate perhaps a better course of action.” Two accounts also noted that the Medic was uncharacteristically emotional that morning. “He was yelling at us, all these half-familiar phrases, like he was whipping a horse in a race”—just, perhaps, not toward a finish line endorsed by Team Leaders 1 and 2.
But what course of action was better, Team Leader 1 shouted at the Medic. They had waited too long as it was, and now they simply had to get on with it. Only one or two others objected to the plan. Mental reserves at new lows. No better solutions available, depleted by the generator incident, the piano music, the course of events.
Shutter bang bang shutter shutter bang bang shutter.
The biologists advanced, shuffling and exhausted and lonely in their duty, to the edge of the meadow, in three cascading 8-8-7 rows, the second two rows meant to expand out to the sides like a human fence to block every last rabbit from escape …
… and from the other side a glimmering figure arose from the reeds and water and distance. The rain came down forceful enough now that the figure appeared so slight that there occurred a silvering effect “the drops like fish scales, a shield around the figure,” Team Leader 2 wrote later, in almost illegible handwriting, like “ethereal armor.”
No real identification of the figure could be made, and at first neither Team Leader 1 nor Team Leader 2 assumed the figure posed a threat. Perhaps they thought the missing biologist had come back or a local had decided to check in on them with the hurricane imminent.
Team Leader 1 held up a hand, palm out to indicate “pause,” a motion to hail the stranger, to perhaps usher this person out of what would soon be a kill zone. To protect this person against the wide and deep intent of the biologists to exterminate whatever remained alive between them and the figure. As the rabbits continued to eat the dead, amongst the burnt sour smell of bone and charred flesh, and there came, far distant but radiant, the ardor and anchor of the lighthouse lens expressed as a shining out across the expanse to reach even them, so remote.
But the Rogue did not halt. Instead, the Rogue shouted words at them—for Old Jim believed the figure was the Rogue, even if he was alone in this—and by these words the biologists knew the figure to be an enemy, that and the elastic, flailing speed of his approach, sheathed and stained by the raindrops and yet slipping through and between, this unseeable form with the shrieking voice.
The pause of the biologists became a faltering in their advance. They faltered with their flamethrowers and gutting knives, their flare guns and hooks and hammers. They faltered in their hearts. Because they knew not what they looked upon. Just a man. Just a man, surely. Shudder bang, bang shudder went the videotape from the Village Bar now, wracked by vicious winds. Shudder bang went the biologists, wracked by doubt and dismay.
What word did the Rogue utter? Was it “exhilaration” or “acceleration” or “exhalation”?
The one word they all agreed upon: “Stop!”
At the beginning the Rogue shouted, “Stop!”
The sky had turned a strange and oppressive oval of gray with black around the edges, like a sagging eye, enflamed, “some impossible intensity of red.” As the wind forced the rain to lash them, and the white rabbits, soaked, still gnawed with their teeth and scraped with their claws at the flesh of their dead burnt brethren. The smell welling up as of a terrible spell cast upon the world—of decay, of smoldering, the piled meat of fiddler crabs gone bad, and the stench of some other musky animal lancing through.
This they experienced in a way almost ecstatic and otherworldly as the Rogue’s screams became overwhelming to the biologists. As if the words, in some heightened register, drew forth the meaning of the smells in a way they had never before understood, and with this came a resentment, beyond measure, of their situation. The onrushing of the rain, the Rogue, and the word “Stop.”
Perhaps on another day, the biologists might have just … stopped. Laid down their weapons. Retreated to the encampment and sank into whatever simple comforts remained available to them. There, in the yurts or in City Hall, to await the Rogue’s approach and to parlay with him. To let talk and accommodation be the only part of valor.
But something in the “Stop” after so much had gone wrong, so much in general awry, made “staying the course” more comforting, it appeared from the journal accounts. A feeling that later became meaningless, worthless, as if a heated need to take and hold territory had, too late, fallen away.
And so, with their own roar muffled and choked off by ever greater torrents, in their waders and boots, in their raincoats and waterproof hats, clasping their flamethrowers and improvised killing weapons, the biologists now charged forward across the meadow toward the Rogue. Toward this inexplicable, pitiless, gaunt figure in the gloom. This fugue, this affront, this threat, this little nothing who had commanded them, without authority, to stop.
“It felt pure,” one biologist would write later. “It felt so very right.” That whatsoever the biologists should face there, as they slipped and slid, that they should “hold the line,” and achieve, finally, some sort of victory. Never surrender.
Perhaps in the face of their aggression, the great shout that arose from them as if an army charging the ramparts of the enemy, the biologists expected the Rogue to come to a halt in surprise. To slip in the mud, to pivot with one hand on the ground for support and disappear back into the marsh. Or even to put his hands up in surrender, outnumbered and outgunned.
But he did not. He did not. The Rogue instead raged across the blackened field toward them, screaming out more words, screaming and roaring phrases, and if he too almost lost his footing, went askew, righted himself, it was from how the power of his intonation careened him off-balance, how those words proved almost too powerful for his body as they cleared his lips. How the words disfigured him, to the few biologists who thought to look up from negotiating the mud to try to view his face.
“He was a signal. His face was a shining light.” “There was nothing I could see of him, ever, but slivers.”
There filtered through the biologists’ recollections a sense, too, that as the Rogue traveled toward them the distortion of the rain formed a silvery wall. That the Rogue lay behind the wall, or that the wall shivered and trembled forward with him, and that the meadow had widened and lengthened until, despite the charge, they remained miles away from him, and yet so intimate, held by the intensity of his regard.
With this sense of separation of the Rogue from the landscape came also a puzzling yet deep feeling of grief, of shame, that made the biologists weep as they stumbled in their advance yet kept shambling forward, Team Leader 1 urging them on in frenzied mimicry of the Rogue.
The biologists had reached the white rabbits and did not care or notice that they trampled blackened corpses and living creatures both, weapons slack at their sides like a muscle memory that was amnesia, this onrushing surge toward the Rogue behind his veil of silver. Nor did the living rabbits care if they were trampled.
At this point, too, the Rogue’s singing or shrieking or shouting changed in pitch and tone and there descended upon the biologists “a slowness” no one understood later. A deep, churning slowness, as if they moved through air as heavy as that around the Rogue appeared light. So that every pump of legs against the mud and yellowed grass, the small bodies of the rabbits, feet disappearing reappearing, ground out into moments of obscenely meticulous detail—the flutter and upkicking of the mud onto each other, the spatter, the jostling of shoulders in close quarters as they fell into each other, the flecks of sweat on the lips that, in their microscopic precision, bore no resemblance to the rain pouring down their faces.
The plastered hair like that of “hyperreal statues set upon the plain,” fated to stand motionless in mid-motion, and on some distant day crumble into dust.
Now the Rogue seemed both very near and very far, and through the drumming rage of the rain came, miraculous, the unmistakable song of birds from a place where the sun must still shine and where none of this could possibly be happening. And yet, too, several noticed that the lighthouse had stopped shining out, that the rest of the world had fallen away except for the blackened meadow across which Team Leader 1 led the charge.
Now the Rogue kept opening his mouth wider and wider and the words came out louder and more brutal above the downpour. These words blazed into flame upon leaving the Rogue’s mouth. These words could not be extinguished by the rain. These words rose and permeated and cascaded outward and around the Rogue—even as the first wave of biologists surging against that “fey weaponry” crumpled, fell to their knees, slid down on the gurgling mud as if they could evade the fire “that called our names” … except it kept calling and each time the desolation within became more final and complete.
“The fire of his words had cloaked him in flame and now rushed out to all sides.”
The second wave of biologists came up behind, to break upon the first, down in the mud, crawling, until desperate hands formed fists to grasp at the clothing of those already subsumed—to slow their own headlong rush into the widening bog of dead rabbits, dead flesh, the mud, the rising water, and the third wave after that, so none could stop their “onrushing onrush” … and there they lay, grappling with each other, weapons long forgotten, a few struggling to stand, crying out in distress, while those with propane tanks for flamethrowers pawed, frantic, at the straps on their backs, unbalanced by their burden and panicked by it.
And still the Rogue ran through them, like an avenging angel, but avenging what, they grieved, and his voice, that close, rippled out not as a fire but as some kind of visible sonic boom in a circular wave that smashed through whatever it touched, and, caught by surprise in their struggles, the biologists fell again into the mud, to “get low, to escape to the sides” and suffer not “the blades of this new thing.”
The wave became “like blood,” became “physical” and broke over them, became them, choked and bathed them, “smelling like open wounds and too lost to escape it, but to have it linger in the body, to bind us and even to froth out of our mouths like the sea, to be drowning while on land.” Ahhhhhhh there came the sounds of a groveling madness and a texture like mangled dead baby birds, neither skin nor feathers, and also “something smooth and shiny that infiltrated the pores, metallic and sour, and left no trace behind but remained nonetheless, unable to get out.”
Days passed in that state. Or minutes. Or “nothing nothing nothing.”
How the wrongness made them clutch their heads but they could not get the wrongness out. How the sounds built and vibrated and spun and unspooled and in all ways made of them taut twine and elastic stretched to its utmost. To feel attenuated and so thick all at once. To be abomination and unable to cast off the shame of that.
Their heads were filled with wild things and evil things. Their heads were filled with nails and pus. Their heads were filled. They would never remember the words the Rogue used. They said the words sounded “familiar.” They had heard the words before, but not in that combination. They had heard the words but not in the same context or intonation or the same kind of light or darkness or they could not recall what was different, why it was different and yet the same, no they could not, please stop asking the question. “Please stop asking. Please stop asking.” Please. Stop.
Although after, all were untouched and no sign remained of what had passed through them, and perhaps into them. On the horizon, the lighthouse had become a “pillar of electric green,” spilling a fuzzy, rapturous light between fissures of rain.
And still, without relief, the Rogue ran forward and kept running forward, knives emanating from his mouth and blood and light spreading out from him on all sides. Until he disappeared once more, into the wall of rain behind them, and they could no longer see him nor hear him. Nor feel the weight of that presence.
The lack, which they had not recognized as weight, undid the biologists further, so that those handful who had risen toppled once more and there came over all a malaise and sadness that forced them to be still, to be silent, to gather their limbs into themselves and become as small as they could become, to cease their cries and their weeping.
To lie there as if dead in the devastation of the Rogue’s passing.
Yet the rain did not stop but intensified until none could see the other but only “feel a hand on a shoulder” or “a foot kick out.” The wounded timelessness of these moments so deep and frayed and faded that it left a kind of “smoldering watermark on the soul.”
The bones that had come free in what once had been the meadow belonged to the ancient cemeteries and so now the biologists lay freely amongst those bones, amongst the centuries, unable to understand how they had gotten there, to so commingle, and of all the horrors of that, came this perverse comfort: That to be there, almost as floating, in the deep mud, vision blanketed in gray, lying atop and amongst those bones felt natural and right and pure.
Staring at the scarred and occluded sky, mottled with a deeper darkness that matched the darkness that had leaked into their heads, rain runneling the contours of the face and the body left to burrow deeper into the bones and layers beneath, without any terrible, pointless urge to rise, to rise up in the aftermath of the inexplicable.
No one could say how many hours had passed, nor if any of them would feel whole ever again. No one could remove the image of the Rogue from their minds, though one, later, might try with a stab of scissors to the eye, interrupted in this task by three others not so much “for his sake but for ours.” No one could get the words to leave them alone, at first like a swarm of biting flies and then as a presence standing always behind them, so that if they turned at the wrong time, it would devour them whole.
So they did not look back much, or go out into the dark, even if they carried the dark within.
Some insisted, too, that as they had lain in the mud, the Tyrant had followed in the Rogue’s footsteps, obscuring them with the crawl of its body as it bathed in the spray of blood emanating from the Rogue. That the Tyrant had passed over and under and through them. Crushing them under those smooth and shining scales into the mud and dead rabbits and shells of crabs.
That the roughness of experience and age of the alligator’s chiton left bruises on those it had dug beneath and shuddered to the side and with a sense of being peeled away or pushed out of a tube, as if they were glutinous, impermanent, not human. The Tyrant oblivious to their presence and this, somehow, the worst part: that the alligator had no desire for their flesh but instead remained loyal only to the Rogue, joined in purpose by some vision the biologists would never understand.
That the great, the yellow, the armored eye had “discarded us as easily as if tossing a rag doll into the marsh.” Receding into a nothing that became just another part of the charred plain. Judging, because how could it not judge? How could they not, now, in this extremity, feel themselves judged.
The aftershocks faded. The rain did not stop, but the sun shone through a hole in the black clouds to illuminate stricken faces, each lit differently by shadow and by light, so that some registered more as silhouettes than people.
Some began to stagger back to the yurts, most on all fours, as if reluctant to stand should the Rogue return. A few croaked out the names, querulous, of friends, of colleagues. A handful spoke the names of dead loved ones, as if they might now be found amongst the more ancient bones, in the aftermath of the expedition.
At City Hall, the biologists found, after a head count, that they had left two dead in the meadow, killed of no visible wound but fear. But also missing: Team Leader 1, Team Leader 2, the Medic, and the Mudder. And because their bodies could not be found, the remaining biologists chose to believe that it had been the Tyrant who took them, dragging them one by one or two by two in its great jaws, down into the deep water, to drown them there and open them up and devour them at the beast’s leisure.
For that was fitting. For that was what they deserved for the straitjacket of the harness, for releasing the Tyrant out into a foreign land, disoriented and lost.
Also dead: the generator, so thoroughly sabotaged as for it to feel personal, the blunt yet intricate details of that damage—the completeness of how the generator could never again fulfill its function—spoke of rage and brought the image of the Rogue back to them, against their will. Made of them nothing but receptacles for further terror.
For what if the Rogue should return? This possibility assailed them every moment of the aftermath.
Nothing changed the next day, or the day after that, or the day after that. The rain slaughtered the land and the lightning cracked open the sky and sheets of water eroded the estuary banks so that the earth crumbled away from the shore and the rusted heap of automobiles tumbled into those waters, some carried away at the high point of the flood to be found later upended sticking out of the marsh in places where they could not easily be retrieved and so remained for decades, rusting into the reeds. Others found their way into Dead Town, haphazardly and sometimes “parked” upside down on Main Street.
The meadow disappeared under the water, too, and the biologists, in shock, in trauma, gave no account of whether they had time to bring the bodies of their fallen comrades to higher ground and bury them, or if those bodies drifted out into time and distance. The biologists, now seventeen in number, moved like sleepwalkers, clutching what belongings they had thought to take from the yurts and moving into Dead Town to take shelter on the flat roof of City Hall, with the waters still rising.
Some huddled in the stairwell, which, due to a quirk of overtaxed gutters, still poured water down upon them. They had not slept for twenty-four, thirty-six, forty-eight hours. Their supplies had been winnowed by water submerging most of the yurts. None of their comms worked and they had no way to call for help. Nor, looking out across those lands where the Tyrant lurked, a way to send anyone for help.
“We could only wait it out,” the young biologist responsible for the Tyrant’s tracker wrote in his waterproof journals. “Our provisions dwindled, even risking reprovisioning from the sinking yurts. Our potable water supplies are low, and we fear the swamp water. We fear the return of the figure. We fear the Tyrant. But we are so tired it is difficult at times even to feel fear. We want to be dry and somewhere else. Our dreams come so strange now.”
Only three biologists still kept records. Only three to describe these dreams, and yet Old Jim noted a chilling consistency, as if the Rogue held them in thrall still.
In these dreams, the meadow had “become some other place,” ill-used by “constant battle.” A weird green-gold light came from the horizon, framed by the cleft between two mountains. An army of “scientists and psychics” struggled “across a plain of sand and bones toward the light.” Grim-looking men and women, “who looked like veterans of some longer conflict.” Oxen pulled war wagons. Soldiers labored to fix the wheel of a catapult. A leader upon a draft horse. Their style of dress was archaic; they wore leather armor and many had crossbows slung across their backs. The army’s numbers were so great that “ranks of ten stretched to the horizon” and the light. The army fed itself into the cleft between the ridges, ever advancing, ever disappearing into the distance.
All three claimed to see figures “stitching their way” through the undergrowth outside of Dead Town, and that these figures wore “old-fashioned armor and helmets and some rode upon horses.” But these figures had no faces, only the toothed hole of a lamprey’s open mouth, endlessly circling a limitless gullet.
“There came the distant sounds of conflict, but always at some vast remove.”
But for the Dead Town expedition an end to the dreaming was soon to come. For the remaining remnants of journal entries—what Central recovered of them—recorded a confusion beyond imagination, a descent into a vast internal void, a kind of babbling nothing that Old Jim could not read more than a paragraph of at a time. These dangers to themselves and others. These psychotic breaks. Hints of references to murders, of mutilations, cut off from everyone and everything except what did not bear thinking about. Who could know what on the page had been real and what imagined or outright hallucination. All Old Jim could be sure of is that the biologists’ sense of time and reality had been obliterated and put back together differently—and that this had harmed them beyond repair. The flooded yurts were found burnt to the ground by the biologists’ own hand. Their tattered flag at City Hall had been ripped from its pole and torn to pieces.
By the time Central’s rescue mission reached Dead Town, the rain had stopped, and by that time, too, the rest of the expedition had died of causes both natural and unnatural.
As for the Rogue, little more information could be gleaned from any of the accounts. Just an impossible still shot from a surveillance camera on the northern edge of Dead Town. Water stains from the rain had distorted the photograph and the unnatural light that haloed the figure appeared to have no source, but must have been a quirk of the infrared inversion.
The Rogue existed forever suspended in mid-step, one boot almost blocking the view of the camera, and the forced perspective rendered his gaunt body preternaturally forceful and looming—but looming away from the camera, toward the backdrop. He had a bag over one shoulder and the boot farther from the camera had an insignia or symbol smeared by the rain.
Old Jim probably misread a sense of haggard satisfaction or accomplishment from the set of the Rogue’s shoulders, but it was an impression he could not shake.
What had the Rogue’s motivation been? In Old Jim’s report later, from which he withheld many things—less from a need to hide than a need to think about it first—he identified stealing the cameras and destroying the generator as the objectives. (The generator had been the first of its kind for Central.)
This did not feel like an original observation to him, and being ordered to issue a report felt to Old Jim like a test … that Central would compare his “results” with the general consensus before judging him fit to return to field operations. Had all the rest been an extravagant psyops pyrotechnic display? And couldn’t the Rogue have destroyed the generator under the cover of darkness and found some less disruptive and ultra-visible way to collect the rabbit cameras? If it were a mission of a sort, why had he been all alone? Shouldn’t there have been some evidence of a support team? (And the thought Old Jim buried deep, to protect his own sense of well-being: What if all of it—every last bit of it—had been part of some incomprehensible, gargantuan, obsessive, and obscene Central experiment, including the Rogue? No, this could not be. This must not be.)
And what had the Rogue muttered in the Mudder’s ear?
Because the Mudder still puzzled him, even if that puzzlement lived as much in the condition of her journal as in her moment with the Rogue. The journals of all the rest had suffered spectacular fire and water damage, smears of ink, tears, missing pages. But the Mudder’s journal, two decades on, maintained a pristine appearance, save for the green moss spread across the lower half of the cover and faded into just a texture but with the illusion of life. Inside, the only disconcerting element remained her use of green ink, which made the words appear organic at first, like the moss.
The handwriting, while it quivered and oscillated at times (betraying a tremor?), held admirable to a steady, centered standard. In fact, the field entries mustered a kind of steel in their calm and precision, as she relentlessly recorded fiddler crab data long after some of the other biologists had been reduced to a gibbering delusion. True, that tidiness and precision did not mean anything. It could be repression of panic, of fear, of anxiety, of turning away from the reality, except …
The Medic had been picked up by Central “at an agreed upon exfiltration spot” and Team Leaders 1 and 2 were found hiding in a motel room in Bleakersville, taken to a secure location, and interrogated. Only the Mudder had never been found. At least, such a capture had not made it into the files.
If this fact filled Old Jim with the unfamiliar emotion of hope, it was because in all ways the Mudder’s journal suggested someone with a plan. Someone so adroit that they could walk across ground that was uncertain for most. Someone who might have used the Rogue as a distraction to disappear, never to be found again. Someone who had already colluded with the locals to sneak out of Dead Town to the Village Bar. Perhaps she had escaped the wreckage of it all in a way that even Old Jim could not.
Yet the Mudder’s journal held no mention of the Rogue, and after the blip of a “tell” around the subject of the generator, only her observations of the rabbits were of interest.
Take, for example, her assertion that “the rabbits are not rabbits,” which she clinically expanded on to assert that if an organism “acts against its essential nature, it must be a mimic—perhaps to avoid being prey or, as in this case, to disguise that it is a predator. You might then alter your methods of containment or eradication, or slow your efforts long enough to develop a greater understanding of the context.”
But the expedition hadn’t altered or slowed their efforts long enough. And what did it really mean if a rabbit was not a rabbit?
And what had that meant to the Rogue?
The official account from Central put forward an audacious and stomach-churning lie meant to minimize, to absolve: The expedition had been lost at sea during the hurricane, having attempted to leave in their boats and been washed out to sea.
An absence rather than an all-too-corporeal presence was less easily contested, and who would contest it anyway? “Bodies unrecoverable.” A story aided by Central tampering with the selection process, so the biologists had been chosen, in part, for their lack of connections to the world. The lack of parents. The lack of siblings. The lack of strong, close friends. The lack of all the normal things that perhaps were less normal than people who had them thought.
“A clear and present threat exists,” read the note atop the top-secret summary file. “Open-ended. Existential. Confirmation via uncanny op. Nature of same: Unknown. Initiating entity: Unknown. Priority: High.” Yet, it had taken twenty years for the threat to manifest again.
In the Village Bar later, before the inevitable discontinuation of surveillance, Man Boy Slim was heard to say, “They just left. They all just left.” Drunk Boat commented on the fickle, ephemeral nature of outsiders. Yet their banter had a subdued quality, and it seemed none of them visited Dead Town thereafter, and Man Boy Slim in particular grew snappish at mentions of the place. Some things were best left alone. Some things did not bear further scrutiny.
This sense after viewing the surveillance, too, of being infected by the very thing Old Jim had been brought in to analyze, even though he could not articulate what that thing might be.
A few weeks after the hurricane, the red suit of the disappeared biologist washed up in the estuary by Dead Town. A crumpled, empty figure amongst the eternal reeds, swiftly removed by Central. The Dead Town site had already been cleaned up, wiped of any other trace.
Of the Rogue: no sign, no sightings at all.
As if he had never existed. As if Old Jim had spent his time at Central chasing phantoms and dark faery tales. As if none of it had ever happened.
(And, perhaps, it hadn’t.)
(At least, not in the way Old Jim thought.)