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Authors: Jay Bonansinga

BOOK: Twisted
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Something pale and indistinct loomed in Grove's peripheral vision, and Grove's heart leaped into his throat. “
What the fuhhhh—”
He yanked the wheel. The car zigged across the parallel lane, and Grove shot a glance through the passenger-side window. At first he thought another vehicle was trying to pass him on the right—
on the shoulder, for God's sake!
—and then he realized it wasn't a vehicle at all. It was a great white whirlwind of dust, rising up from the sand hills a hundred yards away, coming at him like that old Warner Brothers cartoon character, the Tasmanian Devil, only
this
one was a thousand times bigger, the size of a massive pyramid in the shape of a funnel cloud.
“Ulysses? You okay? Ulysses!”
All at once the sound of Maura's voice in his ear, as well as the sound of another car behind him honking furiously, made the white whirlwind abruptly vanish, and Grove uttered something inarticulate under his breath as he steered the Geo back into the proper lane. He swallowed hard, realizing instantly that he had gone into a temporary trance state and had seen a vision, and just as suddenly as it had appeared, it had disappeared. Grove took deep breaths, steadying himself, clenching and unclenching his cold, sweaty hands around the steering wheel.
Maura's voice was in his ear again. “What happened? What's wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing ... just a little wind. It's getting a little dicey up here.”
“Probably ought to think about pulling over, don't ya think? If it's getting that bad?”
“I'm fine, Maura, really ... I'm all right,” Grove lied, breathing deep breaths and gripping the wheel. It had been months since he had experienced any significant visions. In fact, in the weeks before De Lourde's death, Grove had thought that perhaps he was over them. But the truth was, deep down, a part of him knew he would never be completely free of the damned things.
He had been having visions, off and on, his whole life. Sometimes in dreams. Sometimes during dizzy spells or these weird temporary “fugue” states that afflicted him during moments of stress or physical exhaustion. His mother, Vida, a tough, spirited Kenyan woman who had immigrated to America when Grove was only a toddler, had always attributed Grove's visions to some mystical source. According to Vida they were prophesies, portents, glimpses of the future or some message from the spiritual realm.
But these dusty whirlwinds were not mere figments of Grove's overheated imagination. He remembered seeing these weird white storms as a kid, just after his thirteenth birthday. Visiting Africa with his mother and uncle, he had returned to his birthplace that summer: Kibuyu, the small Kenyan village on the Ethiopian border. They stayed there for a week, ostensibly to teach young Ulysses his heritage, but on a deeper level, it had terrified him down to his bones. It wasn't merely the brutal, primitive nature of the town—part village, part military base, Kibuyu had become, after decades of draught, a refugee camp of baked mud houses and goatskin tents. It was also the weather, and those strange early morning phantoms known as “dust devils.”
Formed when the savage sun first beats down on those arid, poorly conducting desert plains, dust devils are basically ten-to-twenty-foot-high whirlwinds of sand that travel with a macabre jerking motion across the barrens. They look like ghosts, especially the small ones, which are alarmingly
human
-sized funnels of swirling, gauzy white cobwebs. They're self-perpetuating, too, which adds to their haunting quality. Grove witnessed one travel through a wire fence and over the backs of emaciated cattle before vanishing
into
the side of a broken-down thatched barn.
But why now? Why today? Why had the dust devil reared its eerie, diaphanous head in Grove's imagination? Was it because he had cut off his medication? Or was there a deeper reason it had loomed for one brief, thunderstruck instant outside his window?
“Listen,” Grove said finally into the wireless. “Here's the thing. I need you to head back to the professor's place. Dig up anything you can find on this Yucatan expedition.”
“What am I looking for?”
Grove took a deep breath. “I don't know ... anything and everything. Names, places.”
After the most agonizing pause Grove had ever heard, the sound of Maura's voice returned. It sounded almost tender in his ear. “Watch your back, hotshot ... and your front and sides, too.”
 
 
Grove made it across the North Carolina border by ten, which meant he was an hour ahead of schedule, which was good, because he was so tired by that point he could barely keep the Chevy on the road. Between the wind shears and the mounting rain, not to mention the virtual whiteouts from passing semis, driving had become nearly impossible. Grove's eyes burned. His head felt as though it were filled with concrete. Soon he realized if he didn't stop and rest, he would never make it to Goldsboro.
He found a suitable spot under an overpass about fifteen miles south of Fayetteville, in the shadows of sacred Civil War battlefields, the surrounding hills still haunted by General Sherman's bloodiest campaign. Grove pulled over to the shoulder and put on his emergency blinkers, then put his seat back all the way. He set the alarm on his watch to go off in an hour. In the steady white noise of rain and strafing winds, he was fast asleep within minutes.
Without the tether of his medication, the recurring dream ran amok in his midbrain in full Technicolor, more vivid than ever before.
7
The last voice the elderly Kenyan woman had expected to hear that morning when she answered the phone was that of her son; but on a deeper, unconscious level she had also been expecting this call,
dreading
it.
“Are you not well,
Mwana?
Where are you?” She snubbed out her cigarette in an oyster shell on the dust-coated yellow windowsill.
Vida Grove had been standing at the kitchen sink in the rear of her little Chicago bungalow, skinning sweet potatoes with a rusty metal peeler, an L&M filter cigarette dangling from her lips. She wore a housedress and slippers, and her ashen skin had the leathery, scuffed color of a tortoise. To the neighborhood kids up and down Lawrence Avenue, she was the old, feeble African crone, the crazy lady with the weird outfits. But if you looked closer, all her delicate eccentricities were belied by the diamond-sharp glint in her ancient eyes.
“Mom, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine,” said the harried voice on the other end, the sound of it nearly drowned by a rushing noise that reminded Vida of a thousand Hoover vacuums.
“Then why must you need to know this thing?” she asked. “Why with so much urgent need? What is wrong? Something is wrong. I can hear it in your voice.”
The voice said he was sorry, but he didn't have much time right now to talk, he was catching a plane in a few minutes, and he just needed to know this one thing, and he promised he would call in a couple of days and explain everything.
“But why, Ulysses?”
After a brief pause the voice said: “I've been having this recurring dream. It's so real, Mom. In the dream I always start out in total darkness, and then I'm pulled toward this strange light. Now I realize what it is, I'm dreaming of my own birth. It happens. Sometimes people remember their own births in their dreams. But the really weird part is, in the dream, when I'm finally born, there's this tremendous noise and light and—”
The voice cut out for a moment, and Vida said, “
Mwana
? Are you there?”
“—and then I'm lifted up by the
tabibu
, this midwife, and I see the sky. I see this horrible black sky. I know it's just a dream, Mom. But this one feels different, vivid, like a memory. People
do
sometimes have memories of their own birth. Was I born outside, Mom?”
A long pause.
“You
were
born outside, Ulysses,” she finally told him. “We had troubles with the generator. So many bugs. But yes, the sky could have been the first thing that you saw.”
“What was it
doing,
Mom?”
Vida frowned, confused. “I do not understand.”
“The sky. What was it
doing
? Was there a storm? I know it sounds nuts, but I need to know if I was born in a cyclone, a hurricane. Or was it just a dream?”
A sudden cold feeling of dread trickled down Vida's swayback spine, and she chewed on her lip for a moment, thinking about how to answer. In all her years of motherhood, the question had never come up—even on the rare occasions that she had talked about his birth. She had told him about her diabetes, and the doctors telling her that her child might not make it. She had even told young Ulysses about the Sudanese fortuneteller who had said the boy would grow up to be a prophet, and would walk with world leaders. But she had never mentioned the vision of a whirlwind that had stricken her. To this day, she was not certain whether that strange and horrifying dust storm that had appeared out of nowhere was real or imaginary.
Semiconscious at the time, Vida remembered seeing it at virtually the same moment her baby had crowned. In a daze of pain and excruciating pressure, she had cried out, bug-eyed, gazing off at the distant white twister on the horizon, coming straight for the village, coming from the distant border of Ethiopia. Later, she reckoned that she was simply hallucinating from the pain and emotion of giving birth to her first and only child, but right then, as the
tabibu
rooted out the writhing, bloody, caterwauling infant from her womb, the village had started levitating on the swirling winds. Clothes flapped and whipped and flew off clotheslines. Animal-hide tents were ripped from their moorings, swirling up into the sky. Chickens scurried in all directions, many lifted up into the chaos as though filled with helium. And it had come out of
nowhere
—as though it were heralding the arrival of this new, still nameless baby boy. The
tabibu
finally wrapped a swaddling cloth around the newborn and ushered both mother and child to the relative calm of their small shack of a house, where the whirlwind finally seemed to dissipate. But now, many years later, a dream had shown Ulysses the same storm. The gods had shown him the vision for some reason that Vida would never be able to understand. “Yes, it is true, Ulysses ... in a
way,”
she finally said, gazing out the window at a crow lighting on a telephone wire. “You
were
born in a kind of a storm.”
“What do you mean, Mom—what
kind
of a storm?”
In a low voice Vida told him the whole story—her weird spontaneous vision of chickens floating through the air, and the sand forming bizarre shapes. She didn't tell him what had happened immediately after the phantom storm ... she didn't tell him any of
that
part of the story, the strange and troubling events that
followed
the dust devil.
“Mom, thanks ... thank you,” his voice said at last when she had finished her story. “Listen, I gotta go. My plane just arrived. I'll call you next week. I promise.”
“Wait, Ulysses, wait.”
“What, Mom?”
She chewed her lip some more. “Whether you are born in a storm or not ... what difference does it make?”
After a long pause the voice said, “I promise I'll call you next week.”
“
Mwana
—”
“I gotta go, Mom. I love you. Thank you. Take care of yourself.”
The line clicked.
Vida stood there for a moment, holding the phone like a dead bird in her hand. Then she carefully replaced the phone on its wall cradle. She thought about what her son had said, the disconcerting tone in his voice, and she thought about where he said he was:
North Carolina.
Filled with a vague, inexplicable dread, Vida went into the living room and turned on the small, portable TV set that sat on her imitation oak bookcase. She flipped through the channels until she found the cable weather channel. It wasn't long before they were showing a graphic of the eastern seaboard, the familiar Day-Glo spiral of Hurricane Eve now within a hundred miles of Cape Hatteras.
“Dear merciful Allah,” she uttered under her breath, putting her ashy brown fingers to her lips.
 
 
Ulysses Grove slid his cell phone back in his pocket and watched the battered Jeep Cherokee approach through curtains of hard, steel-gray rain. He felt woozy from the catnap, and a little dizzy with nerves. Why had he bothered calling his mom? It was just a dream, for Christ's sake—why had it bothered him so much?
His trench coat collar raised and buttoned against his neck, his eyes stinging from the razor-wet winds, Grove started pacing under a corrugated tin awning that fronted a deserted hangar on the edge of Seymour Johnson Air Force Base. To Grove's right was the labyrinth of rusted-out Quonset huts and hangars that made up the eastern edge of the base. To his left, the vast crisscrossing tarmacs of weathered runways, looking ghostly and shapeless in the rain. It was a miracle that Grove had gotten past the guard shack on Highway 117. A flash of an inactive bureau tag and some fancy talking had gotten him through. Just barely.
Now he watched the Jeep coming toward him from the north, down a pea-gravel road that wove through a copse of thick live oaks shrouded in fog, about a hundred yards away and closing. Grove knew it was Kaminsky from the tangle of instruments on the vehicle's roof, the fog lamps, the satellite dish, the barometric instruments like the gleaming works of a great Rube Goldberg machine.
“The people you meet at air force bases,” Ivan Kaminsky hollered out his window as the Jeep pulled up to the deserted hangar.
“How much time do we have?” Grove asked as he circled around the front of the Jeep.
“Not enough! Get in and do exactly as I say, and we might even get airborne!”
Grove got in and Kaminsky gunned the Jeep before the passenger door was even shut.
The four-wheeler lurched past the hangar, made a hairpin to the right, then started down the rain-slick access road that ran along the remote runway. Gales of rain hammered down on the roof. Grove bounced around on the passenger seat, ignoring the empty bottle rolling around at his feet, or the odors of dried sweat and stale cigar smoke thinly veiled by sickly sweet wintergreen deodorizer.
In his booming Russian accent Kaminsky explained that there were only five planes on the eastern seaboard that he would even consider flying into a hurricane, and two of them belonged to NASA and thus were off-limits to a cowboy like Kaminsky. Of the other three, one was a tricked-out U2 spy plane hangared in Alexandria that belonged to the CIA, and one was a retro-fitted DC-8 down in Miami that belonged to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and one was here—a Lockheed WP-3 that had seen better days. Kaminsky would have preferred the U2, but he had burned too many bridges at the company, and besides, Goldsboro was closer to the epicenter.
“What's the problem with the Lockheed?” Grove asked, gazing out the window at the standing water on the pocked runways, the surface dimpled by the wind.
“Suffice it to say it is old,” Kaminsky said, a crooked little smile creasing his salt-and-pepper beard. “The less said the better, I think.”
“Just get me up there, and get me into the eye,” Grove murmured.
His voice had lost much of its vigor.
 
 
Due to rapidly changing weather conditions on the eastern seaboard, Maura had to hustle through security in Atlanta in order to catch the last flight south that day. The plane pulled away from the Jetway at around eleven o'clock that morning, just as Hurricane Eve was crossing international waters north of the Bahamas. By 12:30 p.m.—right around the time that Grove was climbing into Kaminsky's rickety Jeep—Maura's flight was entering southern Louisiana airspace.
Just before landing, as the airliner careened through furious turbulence, a portly businessman sitting next to Maura muttered something about another tropical storm developing off the southern coast of Jamaica.
“They're callin' her Fiona,” the fat guy drawled out of the side of his phlegmy mouth, as though he were imparting some dirty little secret. “Can ya believe it? Sixth goddamn hurricane in two weeks, and they're saying it might very well be headin' straight for N'awlunz.”
Maura felt a tension headache pressing on the back of her eyelids. “Did they say when it'll hit?”
“They don't know shit, as usual, but I'll tell ya this, if it's another big one, I'll betcha Bush'll be down there the next day in a rowboat.”
The big man laughed so hard he spewed spittle across the seat back.
A few agonizing minutes later, Maura was on the ground at Louis Armstrong International.
She went through the same ticket agent that she had used the night before, and the stately black woman jokingly asked if Maura was trying to rack up enough free miles to get to Hawaii. Maura managed a feeble laugh and explained it was “her boyfriend's fault,” which sounded strange coming off her tongue, but on some level it was the truth. She was doing this for love. And also for something a little thornier, a little more complicated—and maybe even subconscious—tweaking her, driving her to step back into Grove's macabre circus.
Call it naked ambition.
She still remembered how it felt to sell something like “The Unexplained Plagues of Ancient Climate Change” to
Discover
magazine. That piece put her on the map as a science journalist. Not only had
Discover
put her article on the cover, but the offers had started rolling in for assignments and speaking engagements. She had never bothered to follow up on the climate change piece, but she would always remember the feeling that it brought her. The only other time she had felt anything even remotely like that was back in Alaska last year when Ulysses Grove had first seen a connection between the death pattern of the Mount Cairn mummy and the Sun City Killer's modern victims. Immersing herself in that world had been like a dangerous, addictive board game. It had brought her a temporary excitement, even euphoria, followed by a long period of agony, capped off by a near-death experience.
She hoped she could avoid that last part this time.
 
 
“There she is, the old whore,” Kaminsky blurted from behind the wheel, squinting to see the massive shape dead ahead of the Jeep. Ahead of them, out of the curtains of rain, a ghostly shape had become visible at the end of the runway. The huge aircraft sat off by itself, tethered to the pavement like a great beast captured in battle. Other than the enormous antenna housing rising off its forward cockpit like the horn of some prehistoric rhino, it looked to the untrained eye like an ordinary—albeit
mammoth
—prop plane. In fact, as Kaminsky pulled up to its tail, Grove found himself marveling at how
unremarkable
the thing looked.

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