What Lives in the Static: Part 1
Angler Fish
Author’s note: Does this chapter look familiar? Fear not — you’re not seeing things/losing your mind/in a time loop (as far as I know)! After months of writing and feedback from other writers whose work I respect immensely, I decided to give the earlier chapters of What Lives in the Static a little update and will be releasing prior chapters once a week until we’ve caught up to the current story, after which they will return to monthly releases. Thank you for sticking with me!
The car wasn’t supposed to exit so soon. It wasn’t supposed to slow down as it passed a little nothing town, and under no circumstances was it supposed to tear across three lanes to get off the freeway before the town disappeared into the rearview mirror.
It absolutely, resolutely was not the time for a detour—not with the sun more than halfway through its daily descent toward the horizon behind both car and driver and at least another hour, barring the inevitable bathroom breaks, to go until the California–Nevada state line.
But the driver, Cass Sullivan—her above-average height and slender build (which was to say, gangly) frame folded over the steering wheel like an octogenarian—had never, not even once in all her twenty-eight years, let things like “should” or “supposed” or, indeed, even a scrap of good sense or self-preservation get in the way of a good story.
And this looked like it might make one hell of a story.
She pushed a piece of hair—a wavy thing hanging just above her shoulders, two-thirds peroxide-assisted dark wheat blonde, one-third dark ashy virgin brown (which she could probably pretend was a shadow root for two more weeks, max)—behind her ear, gold and silver hoops and studs haphazardly snaking their way up the cartilage, and yanked the wheel to the right with all the grace and gentility of a leash kid.
YOLO and all that.
She dropped her eyes—an unpoetic, DMV-approved “blue,” if she were asked to describe them—to her phone in a largely perfunctory ritual and looked at the tiny message icon. As expected, no red notification number stared back at her. No one, nowhere was looking at their phone, waiting for a “Made it!” text and a selfie from a nondescript roadside hotel. Which she told herself was freeing—exciting, even—and certainly not fucking sad.
And if she did have someone to ask her how she felt about such isolation—which, for the record, would defeat the purpose—she would say that she actually sort of liked it. Only she’d hit the consonants a little too hard in her attempt to sell it, and they would ask if she knew she was a bad liar. And she’d say that if she was, there’d be no point in saying that she wasn’t and they’d say they were just joking and what was she getting so upset for and—
Lost in her maladaptive daydream banter, she failed to notice that the highway hadn’t merely been clear or traffic-light—it had been empty. No RVs or semi-trucks poking along the slow lane. Not even a poorly hidden highway patrol speed trap.
She’d even failed to notice the inciting incident: a single streetlight flickering to life in the corner of her eye like a sparkling feather lure, drawing her attention to the faint silhouette of homes clustered in the dwindling dregs of deep orange sunlight.
“Town” was the first word her road-weary mind conjured to describe the sprawling suburb before her—the residential Stonehenge—but it was hardly sufficient, and accurate only if she squinted in the dwindling daylight. As her eyes adjusted, something much more like a vast housing development came into view. It was not unlike all the other soulless manufactured communities that cropped up inland, their plywood-cabinet model homes beckoning to millennials hoping to own just about any property before the grave, though decidedly more atomic ranch than middle-class fancy farmhouse.
The world, she’d been disappointed to find, was chock-a-block with such places. Hell, she’d spent the tail-end of her teenage years languishing away in one. It had always struck her, when she went—she refused to call it “home,” the place where her parents lived; it wasn’t Home, Home was far away and resoundingly gone—to visit or when she encountered such places in the wild, how interest seemed to slide off the peach stucco and identical mailboxes like wine off a stain-treated IKEA couch, how painfully, heartbreakingly boring they were.
This one, she was loath to admit, wasn’t like other girls.
It was deceptively large and clearly intended to allow people to live close but not too close to something far more important or interesting or dangerous. And it was not soulless; it had a soul, it was just the nature of it that Cass couldn’t quite suss out.
For starters, there were none of the usual deterrents employed against vloggers like herself, vanlifers, urbex junkies, regular junkies, or—far more callously—homeless people hoping to escape the elements, if only for a night.
There was no fence that she could see, no guard post, not a security patrol to be found for love nor money—not even an off-duty mall cop in a golf cart. In fact, there didn’t appear to be, nor did it appear there ever had been, any management or supervision of the site at all.
It was immaculately preserved, without so much as a single broken window.
If anyone had been in the car with Cass, she’d have explained how strange this all was—how most abandoned spots in fair-to-good condition almost always, inevitably, belonged to some shadowy Blackstone-facsimile real estate developer type sitting on the land until it was valuable, taking aggressive measures to discourage squatters or lawsuits. A classic play from the Scooby-Doo villain handbook, and one that she’d seen far too many times.
“I’d tell you how many buildings in your city are just waiting to be turned into soulless luxury condos,” she’d say to her imaginary companion—in her head, of course. She didn’t dare externalize the fantasy, lest all the other no-ones in the car hear her and laugh. And she was trying to seem so cool and so sane in front of her imaginary passenger whoms’t, she’d decided, was maybe flirting with her a little. “But telling you would only ruin your day.”
The passenger, of course, would take the meticulously crafted bait. They’d tell her they do want to know, tell them, tell them, tell them please. And she’d smile and say something witty and flirty back (pending) and regale them with tales of breaking into abandoned loft projects and tagged-up, half-finished boutique hotels in downtown LA.
They’d ask her if she thought they were haunted, and she’d make some very clever joke (also pending) about how the only thing the all-glass, vaguely phallic high-rises were haunted by was dogshit design.
Her imaginary passenger would laugh at that and swat her arm. They’d think she was funny and cool and a good storyteller, and maybe she’d think of something even better to push them into that rare sort of laughter that eventually just becomes a wheeze and a whine.
What that might have been, she couldn’t imagine. She tried her hand at a few puns (none of which were worth mentioning) before the knowledge hit: it didn’t matter anyway, because she was alone and there was no one to impress and, worse than that, she probably looked insane, having an eyebrow-heavy silent conversation with herself and a vague personification of her loneliness that she was apparently trying to fuck?
Trying not to think too much about it, she let her eyes drift out the window to the perplexing little patch of civic planning slowly unfolding in front of her 2015 jasmine green Subaru Outback.
Up close, the neighborhood had the appearance of a half-rendered video game—abandoned when the release date the developers had optimistically and prematurely announced at E3 the year prior came back to bite them in the ass. It looked about as though it had been copy/pasted from somewhere entirely different but no less neglected.
Row upon row of identical midcentury ranches dotted the deliberate and uniform streets, so similar that the idea of giving them each their own unique name landed somewhere between “pointless gesture” and “mean-spirited joke”—but that had not stopped whoever built the place from giving each curve in the road its own rusted green street sign with vaguely jingoistic, distinctly post-D-Day monikers: Victory Pl., Roosevelt Cir., Truman Rd.
A cynical part of Cass—which was larger than she cared to admit but smaller than she was worried it was—the part that caught the tail end of the second tower collapsing on KTLA on her way out the door to her second-grade picture day, and briefly had nightmares about Dick Cheney stealing her heart as a kid, wondered if there was a Red Scare Lane or a Hiroshima Boulevard.
Beyond the last stretch of homes there was a great inland sea of weeds, burned-out trees, and desert detritus, and beyond that—curiously enough—what looked like a paved, cracked strip of asphalt too short to be a road, even a fragment of one, and which could only be a landing strip.
Which, of course, really got all the cylinders in Cass’ nosy little brain firing.
She reached for her phone, curiosity narrowly beating cynicism, and pulled over to do some light googling.
abandoned towns california desert
suburb california empty
midcentury ghost town california desert
desert ghost towns
One of them had to get a hit, she was certain. And she might have been proven right—had there been any signal. Which, of course, was the one hole in her flawlessly slapped-together plan.
The town was devoid of a signal. Bereft of a signal.
Not a patchy signal, or a poor two-bar connection, or even—failing all else—the emergency-call-only purgatory that heralded one’s arrival to Podunk. Nothing.
“The fuck?” Cass finally said aloud, breaking the silence between her and no one.
She had seen cell towers only a few exits back. She was sure of it.
She rolled her window down to try to remedy the situation the old-fashioned way and shoved her phone—still loading her search results—out the window and upwards toward the sky, and as she waited, her arm getting sore in its fruitless appeal to the 5G gods, it occurred to Cass that she could not hear crickets.
In the distance, by the decrepit airfield and more-weed-than-asphalt landing strip, caught briefly by a glint of dying sunlight against something metallic, she could make out a figure slowly but surely ambling through the weeds that separated the strip from the furthest cul-de-sac.
There was a strange loping to the person’s gait—a hitch as they moved—their arm held at a strange and unnatural angle at their side. Her vision was close to nil with the distance, but there was a nonzero chance that the guard was carrying some kind of weapon and their attempts to either arm or hide it were affecting their posture and that was not a particular chance she wanted to take. She wanted to take no chances, actually, if she’d been asked.
Her eyes darted between the figure and her phone, her phone to the figure, and she was suddenly aware of how noisy simply existing was: her breath, the way her knee and ankle popped when she finally shifted her weight and stretched her right leg, the loud, angry grumbling her stomach released the second she let herself remember that she was hungry, the rustle of her flannel shirt. It was astonishing how loud it was to be a person. She froze, suddenly wondering if even her eyes made a noise as she focused them on the figure, imagining the sound of the night-vision goggles in Jurassic Park.
After a good long hellish moment, the figure began to amble to the right, along the edge of the perimeter, likely following an existing patrol route and she was sorely tempted to exhale or maybe even laugh at her narrow escape—how she managed to skate by without notice was a problem for Later Cass, but for now she could focus on making a hasty break for it.
And then—goddamn it, Cass—her body, betraying a fear her mind had not yet registered, let her fingers loosen just the slightest and she watched her phone drop unceremoniously from her hand. That might have been bad enough. She’d have taken a cracked screen, if the phone had had the decency to swan-dive toward the ground in relative silence. But she—just this once in her life trying to be proactive rather than reactive (the last time she ever would, lesson learned)—had made the genius decision to charge her phone rather than wait for it to die and search her bag frantically for a charging brick. And the charging cord proved to be its salvation, catching it mid-fall and yanking it back just enough to let it slam against her driver-side door with an unceremonious, weighty thunk.
Well, shit.
She reeled her phone in like a fishing line and whipped her head back up to where the security guard had last been.
Gone. The misshapen Podunk Paul Blart was gone. He was not where he had been, nor was he anywhere a person—most of all a person who had been moving at his previous speed with his previous gait—might have gotten to in the whole ten seconds it took Cass to pull her phone inside the car.
Her eyes scanned the neighborhood. The light was gone now. The sun had ambled across the sky all day and then seemed to have careened below the horizon with an almost unbelievable speed; she realized, as the thought surfaced, that she did not want to examine too closely how hyperbolic that observation had been, lest she have to admit that she had lost the light with an unnatural speed.
Something rustled the dry, wildfire-bait hedge that divided two homes merely one street away from her. Her stomach, having talked a big talk earlier, had now fallen silent, afraid to make a peep.
Perhaps the security was better than she’d given them credit for. And perhaps she was becoming a bit paranoid—she didn’t sleep well on the road, which always left her a bit umoored—and perhaps it was a trick of the light, and perhaps she had missed her last three bathroom stops trying to make the state line prior to her little detour and her bladder was bursting and painting all her observations with a frantic brush, but it sure did seem like the figure was moving a little closer, a little more quickly, and she was in no mood to find out exactly what it was they had at their side.
At the very least not without a camera rolling. If she was going to get tased in Bumfuck, Nowhere, the least she could do was make a good video out of it.
The figure’s head surfaced in the backyard of the home directly across the street from Cass, a few mere feet from the gate that opened into the front yard—which was entirely too close for comfort and, as Cass learned, the point at which a little dial in her head went from stay calm to fuck this directly into the sun. She jammed her key in the ignition, turning the engine over, and it made the type of sound an engine might make if engines could and did use exclamation points. Her driving playlist roared to life, but she had ceased to give a shit about discretion or silence and whipped around the cul-de-sac, her tires squealing, an unpleasant prickle of stress sweat in her armpits and a tingle of anxiety behind her knees.
This was very clearly a sign to get back on the freeway. This was the Universe taking out a billboard that said something along the lines of “keep it pushing, sister” in bright, garish colors—or worse, LED.
And Cass knew that, in theory.
And she absolutely tried to put it into practice—she really did. Upon exiting the neighborhood and finding herself back on the small local road she had taken from the freeway exit, she slowed down and dutifully looked for her on-ramp.
Unfortunately, this presented the new and unique problem of not being able to find her fucking on-ramp.
Here is where she’d have asked her imaginary passenger to take her phone and re-enter her destination to try to route her to the freeway entrance while she drove and kept an eye out. However, and far less helpfully, this was also where her imaginary passenger would hand her the phone back and inform her that she still did not have a signal—which she very much remembered having on the way in.
She drove far past where she remembered exiting, doubling back on herself, searching for some sign of her off-ramp—a little cartoon version of herself riffling through the old-school metal filing cabinets in her mind, searching for a memory of any identifying details, slamming the drawers shut with an angry clang when they failed to provide anything useful.
She tried the cell towers next, straining her eyes, staring into the horizon, looking for the telltale, too-perfect lines and angles of the man-made structures standing out against the distant hills, but it was a gas-wasting exercise in futility. There was nothing to be seen. The night was tar-black and just as eager to grab her and suck her in.
Cass, previously unaware she’d begun the nervous ritual, realized she had curled her bottom lip into itself, catching the meat of it between her front incisors and chewing anxiously. She made a very illegal, very wide U-turn on the small local road and continued back in the other direction.
She would have to go into town. The only working streetlights shone down on the road into it like a message from on high.
This was her only option, she told herself. This was not what she wanted, of course, but it was what she’d have to do. She was tired, after all, low on gas, desperate for a piss, hungry, and the town would certainly have a signal. No, this was the proper course of action.
She would take the local road that led from the neighborhood to the tiny cluster of commercial buildings, apartments, and a handful of doublewides—which, while the use of the term wouldn’t exactly hold up under much civic scrutiny, was certainly more of a town than the place she’d just come from. And she wouldn’t—shouldn’t—formulate a plan to find a hotel, get a room, sniff out the closest diner or dive bar, locate the most crotchety-looking patron, poke and prod them into complaining about whatever the hell was happening with that neighborhood and the weird security they’d hired to police and contain it, and finesse some local lore out of the townsfolk.
The problem, of course, was that as well as Cass knew that she shouldn’t do any of those things, she also knew that never once in her life had she met a sun that she didn’t want to fly too close to. She was a solar kamikaze Ovid never could have fathomed.
“Mr. President, a second Cass Sullivan has hit the sun.”