Windkill

The gloom made walking to the rail yard hazardous. Brock stumbled and caught himself with a hand to a sapling. The vegetation was not the problem; it was the rubble strewn across the floor of the valley that made walking a chore. Everything from rotten timbers and bricks to pieces of steel and machinery impeded quick progress to the rail yard.

At least there were no mosquitoes. Contending with the pests while filming was more than Brock thought he could take. He leaned against the sapling and looked at Paulie. The cameraman was huffing as he carried his heavy load of camera and batteries. Paulie saw Brock resting and sat down, then reached into his shirt pocket for a smoke.

“Where the hell is the train yard?” Paulie groused between lighting his cigarette and gasping for breath.

“Don’t know.” Brock eyed the surroundings. This place felt bad. It was like they were being watched every step of the way in the valley. He half expected to see people standing in the shadows, instead there were only trees and sage grass hiding rubble. “Hard to believe this place was full of buildings.”

After a year of working with Brock, Paulie knew the reporter was not the imbecile the rest of the staff teased continually. Brock thought creatively when the director wanted him to follow the script, but he had a hell of a nose for the news. More than once, Brock had raced off to catch a story that had nothing to do with ghosts. He called it a nose for the business and that nose had earned them both a few extra dollars more than once. For the moment Paulie was experiencing a side of Brock he had never seen. The big reporter acted like he was afraid to admit his fear.

“Why don’t we head back to the camp and get a map?” Paulie suggested helpfully.

“They’d love that,” Brock raised an eyebrow. Any delay in the filming would draw spiteful comments and weeks of annoying reminders about the simplest of tasks. “No. We can’t be far from the rail yard.” He straightened and studied the woods. To the north, he thought he saw huge mounds partially hidden in the trees. They had to be the remains of the ammunition bunkers that crossed the valley at its widest point. The rail network once ran from the factories to the bunkers, then to the rail yards, one east and the other on the west side of the valley. If the blast had spared the rail tracks, it would have been easier to find the yard, but most of the steel rails were gone. Perhaps the people of the surrounding towns had taken the steel for themselves.

“Why don’t you stay here and rest,” Brock kindly suggested. “I’ll go find the yard and come back for you.”

“Deal,” Paulie watched his friend make his way slowly into the woods. It was hard to believe they were still in America; this valley was so far from the rest of civilization that it seemed more at home as a set for a movie. That a catastrophe of this size had occurred and there were few people alive who remembered it just seemed odd.

Not that civilization was all that far away. The nearest town was only six miles away, but the intervening ridge was a better wall than millions of miles of space. And the reputation of the valley, Paulie corrected himself, was the reason for the isolation. The people they had interviewed in town yesterday wanted nothing to do with Windkill. A few kids displayed false bravado with the camera, but the adults treated the subject like a modern-day curse.

Not that Brock hadn’t broken through the ice surrounding the topic and gained a few good interviews. The man was good. He listened to the people and found leads to more information in the blandest of sentences.

Paulie watched the reporter as he walked further away, slowly making progress while watching the woods like a deer during hunting season. They should have seen some of Anthony’s people by now. The special effects men were usually all over a location in the hours before a show, setting up the stunts to be interpreted by the victims and audience as ghostly activity. They always seemed to have a beer for Brock and a pop for Paulie.

The show was like that; the people gravitating to either end of a spectrum. Some stayed near the high-class humor of the director, while others knew they were the foot soldiers and expected nothing more than to be given direction and left alone. The director’s trailer was like the First-Class Section of the Titanic, while the rest of the bums stayed out of sight, hidden behind the scenes below decks.

Checking the ground for bricks or steel, Paulie lay on his back and looked through the trees at the gray sky. His imagination conjured a fireball that soared aloft, so huge that it was unseen in its entirety. If anyone in the valley had been alive to see the sight, they would have died from the heat of the flames as they roiled skyward. He shivered, the sight a little too real to be comfortable. They probably never even had time to scream.

“Hey,” a familiar voice shouted.

Paulie sat up to see Brock standing a short distance away. The relief on the reporter’s face would have been comical if Paulie had not just indulged his imagination.

“Don’t do that,” Brock walked to Paulie. “You scared the hell out of me. I thought you might have walked off or had a heart attack.”

“You’re cheerful,” Paulie climbed to his feet.

“I’m not kidding,” Brock lowered his voice as he got closer top the cameraman. “This is not the place to fool around.”

“Did you find the rail yard?” Paulie brushed aside the concern and focused on their job.

“Yeah, it’s about two hundred feet that way,” Brock gestured over his shoulder with a thumb. He grabbed the battery bag and motioned Paulie to follow. They walked silently, but Paulie knew Brock was still upset. The reporter was on edge.

“We should talk to Dolan,” Paulie huffed after a few dozen yards. “Maybe he knows what the deal is with this valley.”

“I don’t need Dolan to tell me we should not be here,” Brock walked, his voice subdued. “I get a bad feeling about tonight’s show. If I were a betting man, I would tell you to have your gear ready for some excitement.”

Paulie groaned aloud. That was the same sort of thing Brock had said so many times in the past before the shit hit the fan.