The Weird Part 158

'Which will be?'

'I haven't got a t.i.tle for it yet,' he admitted. 'This. All of this. How they've changed.'

'That'll take some working-out,' I said.

He nodded glumly. 'Tell me about it,' he sighed. It was as if the change came as a personal affront to him. 'Breakdown of the old pack structures. Atypical response patterns in the presence of keepers and other humans. Complete lack of inter-species aggression. It's not natural.'

'That can't be a permanent behavioural shift, though?' I wasn't having that. 'We're not talking about the holy-rollers here, are we? And the lion shall lie down with the lamb?' As I said it, I remembered that evening by the lions' den. I'd thought the boy was a sacrificial lamb of his own appointing, another deluded Daniel driven crazy by too much Sunday school and animal-rights sermonising. Now, I didn't know what to think.

'I'm not sure it is a permanent shift, not in that sense, anyway. But suppose it isn't?' Manoj leaned back from the monitor, ran his hands through his thick black hair. 'That's almost worse, if you think about it.'

'How so?'

'Okay. We observe behavioural patterns in animals, which are the result of millions of years of evolutionary adaptation. Over the last three months, our animals here have demonstrated profound behavioural alterations, across all species, across all hierarchical relationships. Now, we either a.s.sume this change is a non-volitional response to external stimuli that is, they used to behave this way, and now they behave that way, because there's something in the water, or they all had the same sort of brainstorm, or whatever or else...'

'Or else?'

Manoj looked as if he was chewing a wasp. 'Or else what we're seeing here is a volitional behaviour shift.'

'You mean they decided to do it?'

'They chose, yes. That would be the other alternative.' I could see Manoj liked this option even less. 'According to that scenario, what we're seeing here would be interpreted as possibly the first recorded instance of altruistic co-operation across species towards a common, mutually desirable goal though what that might be, I have no idea. How could I? Now that sort of conceptualisation would require a level of self-awareness...' He broke off, lost in his own thoughts.

A movement on screen caught my eye. 'Hang on look there, at the lions. How many are there in those bushes?'

Manoj waved a hand in dismissal. 'Don't bother,' he said resignedly. 'You can't keep track these days. Five, six. Who knows?'

It was true. It was a wilderness in there. Once, it had been a jungle, cut into manageable chunks and fenced in with steel and gla.s.s. We used to stand by the windows and listen to the racket, the bellows of frustration, the mournful shrieks and howls. What this new thing is...it's hard to say. More than anything, it feels like the calm before the storm.

We're aware of the consequences, even if we can't fully understand them. Soon, these animals with their strange new behaviours, their disconcerting calm and uncanny self-possession, will be crated up and shipped to a dozen zoos across Europe. What happens if they replicate these new memes in their new surroundings? What if they pa.s.s them on?

Over and above that, there's a world beyond the bars. The starlings flock each night in ever-growing numbers above the compound, roosting in the trees as the animals below stare unblinkingly upwards, as if towards the stars, the old bestiary of myths and legends in the sky. Maybe the ancient fables don't hold water any more. Maybe a change has come upon us, and nothing's safe in its cage.

Little Lambs.

Stephen Graham Jones.

Stephen Graham Jones (1972) is an American writer of both stories and novels. His most recent books are It Came from Del Rio (2010) and The Ones That Got Away (2010). Jones has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and Black Quill Award, as well as a winner of the Texas Inst.i.tute of Letters Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in fiction. His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Weird Tales, and multiple best-of-the-year compilations. 'Little Lambs' (2009) is a perfect example of Jones at his chilling and slightly experimental best, evoking, as the story does, both weird cla.s.sics and more avant garde work from the likes of Mark Danielewski.

We're not supposed to walk through the structure, but for eight years we've been watching it from sixty-two feet away, too. Watching it on so many monitors and at so many wavelengths that sometimes you just want to step outside the bunker, see it with your eyes. Just to be sure it's real, that it's still there.

For reasons of security, our watch only rotates among us four.

The crewcuts we had when first a.s.signed to monitor the structure, they're grown out long and s.h.a.ggy like our beards. Our BDUs are folded in our lockers. The last inspection was thirteen months ago. We look Wyoming now. Like we know the winter, like the sound of frozen gra.s.s breaking under our boots, we don't hear it with our ears anymore, but feel it instead, in the base of our jaws.

Our eyes have gone hollow with longing, too, but we don't blame Wyoming for that. It's more like people with that kind of vacant, yearning stare, they're always drifting to Wyoming. The way the open lands undulate, writhe almost, it's a cadence that feels right to us. After a while, you feel the swells of gra.s.s in your chest, I mean. And the sudden drops. And your face doesn't change expression because of it.

The structure seems to fit out here too, like it's always been here.

There are no fences or warning signs around it.

The four acres it occupies is Bureau of Land Management land. In the distance we've seen antelope and sheep and, once, two bull elk, walking with their chins in the air, as if their swept-back racks were unbearably heavy. Two winters ago one of the sheep wandered in from the snow. It was wearing a diaper, because a rancher had pulled it into his trailer with him, to keep it alive.

I opened the first door of the bunker for it, but then Hendrikson took my forearm in his hand, shook his head no, maybe saved us all.

We don't know what's a trick, what's not.

The sheep finally walked away from the door, became a heat signature on our thermal monitor, a yellow-tinged splotch wending into the structure. But standing in the structure is no protection from winter.

What the structure is is rebar and iron girders and I-beams and chain-link. It looks like an unfinished project, like the funding fell through and now it's been abandoned, left to rust back into the earth.

This is why n.o.body stops.

How long we've been here is ninety-six months.

My daughter Sheila, she's about that old now. When my wife called to report her first steps, there were approximately fourteen relays between her voice and my ear.

I walked out into the night after that, no jacket.

The structure was a skeletal silhouette against the bright sky.

Since we started monitoring it, it's moved north-northeast exactly six and one-eighths inches. It doesn't displace the soil as it goes. In its track, the gra.s.s stands as if it's always been there.

On every spectrum we know to look at it with, it appears to be just what it is: iron and steel, the metal guts of a prison built in West Virginia in 1918.

The reason we're here is that, eight and a half years ago, that prison collapsed and killed all seventy-eight prisoners and guards sleeping inside it. The concrete walls just crumbled down on them, as if there was nothing supporting them anymore. Because there wasn't. It had been dreamed away.

Three months later, four Casper men were brought up on charges of killing their friend.

When they were arrested, they were in a bar. Only one of them was drinking. The other three were just sitting there, holding drinks as if they know they were supposed to be drinking them, but the ice or the gla.s.s or the alcohol, it all had all just become too heavy.

Their testimony was that they were collecting sc.r.a.p metal from some old place on BLM land, and their friend, an ex-lumberjack named Manny, he kept walking down all the halls trying to get an echo or something, and then he just suddenly wasn't there anymore.

Without a body to support foul play, or any kind of motive, or history of malice, the four men were never convicted. Instead, four different men were a.s.signed to watch a structure that n.o.body remembered, that wasn't registered at the county courthouse, and didn't show up on satellite photos as recent as four months before. The structure that would turn out to have the same floorplan as that West Virginia prison.

What Hendrikson thinks is that what the lumberjack did was turn just the right series of corners, like cracking a code, and that the next time he looked up, it was to a chunk of concrete falling down onto him. A whole ceiling of concrete.

Maybe.

The first time I placed my naked palm to one of the I-beams of the structure, I was crying.

Later I would watch a recording of myself in infrared, touching the I-beam.

On the recording, of course, there's no sound.

What I was saying, though, was please.

Some nights Ben forgets he's sleeping, and sits at the controls, his fingers running over the board.

Used to, we'd wake him, try to make him understand, but now we know he just recalibrates a lens or two then goes back to bed. And it's usually a lens that needs recalibrating.

For a while, Hendrikson had me believing I was doing that too, but then I tied my feet together with knotted-together socks one night, proved him wrong. Unless of course I retied them in my sleep as well.

Our commanding officer, Russell, he's tried to kill himself forty-two times now. We know all the ways to bring him back.

Because of Sheila, I've never tried to kill myself.

I think of that sheep in a diaper more than I should, though.

We don't know if it ever left the structure or not. Maybe, just on dumb animal luck, it stumbled onto that series of halls that the lumberjack did, and went to someplace warmer.

The next morning, anyway, the structure was unchanged.

And it's a lie that I've never tried to kill myself, of course. I just did all that before coming here. It's out of my system now.

The joke we still say is what we were originally told: that this would be a temporary a.s.signment. That relief's being trained as we speak.

My wife's name is Joella, and Maryann, and Wanda. Her face mixes with all the other girls I've known.

She's living with a guy off-base now.

She says she's sorry.

The one time I tried to run away, Hendrikson tracked me on satellite until I collapsed, and then he walked out with a sled and pulled me back, took my shift.

When I asked him why, he said it was because I was the life of the party, man, and then slapped me on the upper arm, cupped my shoulder in his large hand.

The northern lights with the naked eye are a curtain of light.

Your lips can turn blue, watching them, so that if you smiled, it would hurt. But smiling wouldn't be enough, either.

One of the ways Russell tried to kill himself was climbing as high as he could up the structure, and jumping off.

We nursed him back to health. Ben even gave him two pints of his own blood.

The structure moves so slowly you can only see its progress on paper.

It neither speeds up nor slows down.

If you get Hendrikson drunk enough, he'll explain it to you, the structure. How what happened was, one night some prisoner, probably a new one, he laid in bed all day just thinking about getting out. That that occupied his whole and complete mind. But he wasn't thinking rocket packs and helicopters or any of that. What that prisoner wanted to do was walk out. And, for that to happen, the prison would have to fall down around him.

Meaning, after he fell asleep, he somehow wished the prison gone.

Only he wasn't strong enough, or wasn't particular enough in his wish, or didn't word it right, or and this is what I think only metal of a certain age can be physically transported in a dream like that.

Of course this prisoner, what he really did that night was kill himself.

When Hendrikson tells this story, Russell leans forward on his cot and stares at him with his face turned half away.

Of the four of us, I'm the only one with a child.

The reason for this is Sheila was born after I was a.s.signed here, to a woman who was only my girlfriend of two weeks then. She's my wife now, yeah we were married on the telephone, and by mail, because the government wouldn't pay for her healthcare any other way but I don't know that she's ever used my name.

The pictures of Sheila, though.

I can tell which is which by how they feel.

The time Ben tried to run away, he was sleeping, so it doesn't count, I don't think, though he insists it does.

We got in a fight over this. It broke my nose.

Afterwards, we didn't talk for weeks, until, finally, just to prove himself right, he ran off into a blizzard.

Where I found him was curled up behind a shrub that was a sieve for the wind.

I held him to me until he was warm.

The northern lights on infrared are nothing. According to Russell, who saw them from the top of the structure, they're not what they seem to be, the lights, but he won't tell us anymore than that, even with vodka in him.

It doesn't matter, though. For the lights not to be what they seem to be they would have to be seeming to be something in the first place.

Ben knows I walk through the structure for twenty minutes each night, but if I pretend to be asleep then he doesn't say anything to me about it.

Whether he tells the others or doc.u.ments it in the log, I don't know.

The only thing we know for sure about the structure is that if you bolt a lightning rod to it, if you bolt two hundred lightning rods all over it, so it bristles, still, when the lightning finally comes months later, it'll strike our antenna instead, which is four meters lower.

This gives us faith that our watch is worthwhile.

Snow coats the structure like it coats everything in Wyoming, though. And we're not supposed to know this either you can cut it with a torch, just like regular steel. The gas and smoke that rose from it as we were cutting, we saved it in an upside down jar, and were going to keep it forever until Russell tried to kill himself one night by breathing it in all at once.

It didn't do anything to him.

It's embarra.s.sing to try to kill yourself and have it not work out, I think. But it's good to not be dead too.

Whatever part of our rations we don't finish, Russell always eats.

Whether he came from a large family or grew up poor or both, or whether this is another, longer suicide attempt, we don't know, and don't ask.

If you could somehow live off light, cut it up on your plate and fork it in, that's what I would want to do, I think. Not because it would taste good or be filling, but because a little girl, watching her father do that, she wouldn't say anything, would just watch, her eyes wide with wonder, and she would never forget it for however long she'd live. Which would maybe be forever.

What I don't tell Hendrikson, even though it's regulation too, and we've made promises besides, is that a few nights ago, walking through the structure during my shift, I saw a shape walking ahead of me. Not if I looked straight on, but he was there.