Mycenea, N.M.

Episode 18: LOTUS SODA

The first step, as in all things, is getting there.

The man who runs Mycenea doesn't live in town. Nor does he live on the craggy mountains surrounding it, or in the flat-packed dead earth around Jimmy's hollow.

He lives as far away as he can: on the outskirts. The badlands.

You don't blame him. If you lived here--and you might have lived here, the sensation is like a kidney stone in your brain--you would live on the fringes, too. Definitely as far away from the madness as possible.

You three set out in the Army Jeep and roll east, towards the scrub flats. The heat is rising, and you pass around a flask of tepid water together as you struggle not to look back. 

There is something in the sky.

The thing hovering in the rear-view mirror is vast and silver, standing sentinel over the cliffs behind you.

Don't look at it.

You don't know if the great flying machines, the Foo fighters and the gremlin lights, actually bring the not-men. What you do know is that they're interlinked. Gravitating to one attracts the other, as surely as a magnet pulls metal filings with a strange, invisible greed. There is no getting away from the Pandora's meat-locker you've opened, but there is no going back towards it, either. To return is to invite further scrutiny, further torture.

There is no way left, but forward.

The landscape goes from arid and rocky to arid and empty. Scrub-brush and small sand dunes don't stop the car--not a miniature tank like this one, fresh from its African or maybe Italian adventures in the war. Jimmy's wearing a broad Panama hat with a white cloth over the back of his neck, to beat the sun. You can't help but smirk at the sight: even immortals, it seems, fear a bad sunburn.

It's high noon when the soda bottles start showing up.

The first one's lying on a dune, its glinting shape pulling your eye and making you flinch in a refracted sun-glare. Its innocuous glass seems to mark some unseen line: Abandon all soda, ye who enter here. A tiny, fluted colossus. Guarding the path.

Soon, more appear. Strewn on the sides of the almost-invisible road, they lay in ditches and gulleys, many worn by erosion into primitive chunks of translucence. The label has not survived on most, but a few are fresh... relatively speaking.

The word LOTUS is stamped on each one.

You don't ask about the bottles, and CeeCee and Jimmy don't offer anything up. It could be a dumping ground, you suppose, some forgotten waste where an old company puked up thousands of defective products. But you don't think so.

There's a solemn look on your companions' faces. Something like grief, that old kissing-cousin of disgust. This is a profane, sacred place--a burial ground, though for what you cannot say. 

All you know is, there must be a really big pile of bottlecaps out there somewhere.

There... on the bald, scalding horizon. Something bigger than a soda bottle is out there, something which sits unmoving and brilliant-silver in the sun. Something roundish, an enormous metal pill. There's a tremor of fear as you approach it, convinced it's a new trick. Another fat, silver lure waiting to bait and tempt men into contact with the unknown... and then the torture, the sleepless nights that come with the unknown. But those crafts never land--to land, see, would be to erase the mystery. Touching the mundane earth? That's too far for them. Too close to mundanity.

As you get closer and the heat-waves sizzle around you, sweat rolling and drying up in the blazing noon, your eyes match the oncoming shape to a word.

That thing... it's an Airstream trailer.