Doomtown
Eric Williams
The topo map was a mess, a fourth-generation photocopy with at least six different generations of annotations scratched onto it. More recent USGS maps skipped the spot, like all Nevada Test Sites, leaving a big blank nothing on the maps. But, before it was redacted from the landscape by the DOE or the AEC or the Illuminati, whoever, the Crowley Quadrangle had been mapped in 1938, and that’s the vintage we were using to sneak over Elephant Peak, down into Levy Valley.
We weren’t the first. Like I said, our copy of the map had a lot of history to it. The test sites had always attracted the curious, borderlands types exploring atomic psychogeographies. We were just the most recent and, if we succeeded, the most daring.
The sun was sharper at 7,000 feet, high overhead and washing out the little pass we were hiking through. I could feel it slowly cooking Tim and me as we consulted the map.
“See,” Tim was saying, holding the map close to shield it from the hot wind whistling through the rocks. “We come down here, past this little wash, then over that boulder field—that’s the way Ricardo went, at least.” He traced the purple marker recording this attempt in ’86 by the famous urban explorer Jimmy Ricardo. “In his write-up, he said there was an old gravel track left behind for construction, leading to an observation area.”
I nodded, and pointed at the salt flats.
“We hit that,” I said, “and then strike north across the playa here, hugging the toe of the fan, right?”
“Ricardo said he saw buildings across there with his binoculars,” Tim said, folding the map carefully and putting it back in his pocket. “And that can mean only one thing!”
“Doomtown, USA,” I said, wiping the sweat from my neck.
#
In the 50s the Government sequestered a long track of southern Nevada, more than a thousand square miles of the basin-and-range that they then proceeded to destroy in a variety of inventive nuclear apocalypses. You could see the mushroom clouds from the tallest hotels in downtown Vegas; they became quite the tourist attraction apparently, atomic cocktails on the 50th floor bar, watching a preview of the end of the world. They dropped bombs continuously, a hundred nuclear tests a decade, all the way into the test ban treaty (and beyond, if the strange seismicity recorded in the basement of UNLV meant anything). They lined up trucks and tanks, WWII vintage, and dropped nuclear bombs on them to see how they’d take it. They dug trenches downwind and filled them with soldiers and, when that got to be a little questionable, sheep and goats and pigs.
And they built the doomtowns.
Little popup patches of Anytown, USA, knocked up special order in the dry Nevada desert to explore the effects of nuclear explosions and fallout on American towns. From the declassified reports, they put some thought into it. Downtowns complete with shops and theaters, libraries, police and fire departments, all circled round by the then-new models of domesticity, the suburbs, tract upon tract of identical or near-identical little houses. Schools and churches, roads complete with frozen traffic—trucks hauling fake produce to the empty markets where no one would buy it, buses and cars and bicycles. And these little burgs, all named Doomtown, were peopled with still, silent mannequins, plastic moms and dads and little Billys and Sallys, barbequing or reading the newspaper or doing homework, oblivious of their fates.
Because, as soon as everything in a particular Doomtown was just right, they were smashed by the biggest, most petulant kid you can think of: the United States Armed Forces.
Some were vaporized by an airburst right overhead. Some annihilated from below by a subterranean explosion, or burned to poisonous dust by an adjacent fireball. There were high-speed cameras installed all over them, and you can find the videos online, watch the paint peel off a house before the shockwave crashes into it, turning that little starter home for an artificial GI and his young wife into matchsticks.
When they destroyed one, they built another—always something new to learn about destruction. And when the testing stopped, the last Doomtown was left behind, just like everything else, all the bunkers and the heaps of twisted metal and the craters full of radioactive glass, just sitting there, dead-eyeing the Nevada sky.
And we were going to find it, and visit Doomtown.
It had been Tim’s idea. He’d come into my dorm room one day last semester, high as a kite, eyes wild, big toothy grin on his face.
“Derek,” he’d said, pounding his fist on the wall. “I’ve got an idea for spring break!”
We’d gotten pretty big into urban exploration, partly out of natural inclination, but also on account of our academic careers. Tim was into urban design, all about radical architecture and the city as a machine for living in, while I was majoring in human geography, the symbiosis between people and their environments. We were both seniors at UNLV, had been inseparable since freshman orientation, and had done a fair bit of urban exploration (or trespassing, as some called it) in and around Vegas, sneaking into old casinos before they were demolished, crawling through the guts of a hotel under construction, running around the tunnels under the city. We were always eager for more adventures, bigger and better, and had gotten into the habit of planning our spring breaks around them. Our last one was down in Waxahachie Texas, sneaking into the half-finished and long-abandoned superconducting supercollider down there, a big half-donut of a damp concrete tunnel sunk into the ground south of Dallas. That had been a good one—the pictures and the write-up we did afterwards got a lot of hits on our psychogeography page. Now, with our last spring break coming up and both of us looking at grad school on opposite coasts, we had been wracking our brains for something big, something special. And Tim had been inspired.
It was, in many ways, the ultimate psychogeographical site—an artificial town meant to be the ideal of the American dream, built out in the middle of nowhere specifically to be destroyed. I mean, come on, that’s gold. And the challenge of getting out there! We’d commit a felony just stepping over an imaginary line at the base of the mountain. Then a hike through the unforgiving Nevada desert to get there, and at the end, a radioactive ghost town! Plus, it’d never been done before. Oh, sure, Ricardo found the bleachers in ’82 and wandered the other test sites in ’86, while the UCLA guys had found some of the trucks they’d melted in the 50s. The Twin Cities crew had done the south end of the range pretty good in the mid-90s, but that was all well-known stuff, observation towers and labs and everything; I mean, at one point, people had been meant to be able to get to those. We were going off the map, physically, mentally, spiritually, atomically.
#
The boulder field turned out to be a lot harder to get across than we’d expected. Elephant Peak had dropped a lot of rubble. Huge slices of the mountain had been rolling down the hill for millions of years. It was slow going, and we didn’t get to the edge of the playa until almost sundown. The salt pan, flat and mud gray, stretched out to the horizon, and we decided to camp there for the night.
“This is as far as Ricardo got, in ’86,” said Tim, staring out across the playa. “Apparently,” he turned and waved at the graveled patch behind us, “this was a staging area, and he thought there were supposed to be buildings here.”
I turned and looked, but there was nothing but rock and wind and the pinpricks of stars in the darkening sky.
“Temporary stuff probably, if it was for observation,” I said, getting out the propane burner. “Take a look around, if you want; I’ll get supper going.”
When I called him back for soup he’d found some old nails, vintage 50s, and a few fragments of dried-out planks, but that was it. Interestingly sparse finds, up there. I mean, you camp in the desert west, you almost always find old beer cans or tobacco tins, the signs of ranchers or hunters, no matter how far into the backcountry you go. But here, where the threat of atomic contamination still loomed in everyone’s mind, there was nothing but what the army had brought in.
We ate and smoked a joint, enjoying the dusk and the cooler temperatures. It’d be cold once night really fell in on us, that time of year and that elevation.
While I set up my tripod and the camera for a long moonlit exposure, Tim stood right at the edge of the playa and scanned the far side with his binoculars.
“See anything?”
“Nah, too dark,” he said. “Ricardo said he saw buildings from here, though.”
“Atmospherics must play hell out here with the optics,” I said. “But maybe we’ll see something in the morning?”
I set the camera timer, and we climbed into our sleeping bags. Between the long hike and the weed, we were both out pretty quick.
#
While Tim fixed breakfast I checked my pictures.
“Hey, got some good ones,” I said, scrolling through the digital SLR’s view screen. The playa was silvery under the half-moon and the stars bright and sharp as Christmas lights. “Real nice one of the moon here I think—” I stopped and squinted.
“What’s that?” asked Tim, stirring the powdered eggs.
“I don’t know, look at this?” I said, walking over. I scrolled back a few, and exchanged the camera for a cup of coffee.
“Looks great,” he said, “what’s the deal?”
“Keep going forward.”
He pressed the button—more moon, more playa, twenty minutes between each exposure, the moon hopping across the sky, the stars slowly drifting, the playa anchored and unchanged. “I don’t see anything—whoa.”
“Yeah,” I leaned over his shoulder and looked again. “What the fuck is that?”
Across the playa in the picture, right on the horizon, was an eerie, glowing patch of light. I looked up and faced the direction the camera had been pointed, and Tim did the same.
“Right over there?” He nodded north, across the flat.
“Yeah, on the horizon.” The glowing haze in the picture was bright enough to wash out the stars, its light a strange mix of green and blue and yellow, different colors in different patches, all grading into each other.
“Man that’s weird,” said Tim. “Camera must’ve fucked up.”
“I mean, could be, but look.” I pressed forward on the display, and another long exposure shot, pristine and dark as the others, came up.
“So whatever it was lit up and faded in a single shot,” said Tim.
“Whole thing happened in the twenty minute window of that one exposure.” Tim went back to the odd one and zoomed in. We both gasped.
They were faint, just slightly darker than the glow engulfing them, and we couldn’t get a very clear image, but they were there.
Buildings, some big, some small, boxy structures standing tall in the desert night, swamped by ethereal light.
We hurried to the edge of the playa. Tim scanned the horizon with his binoculars, while I shielded my eyes with my hand and squinted.
“Nothing,” said Tim. He handed them to me and I looked. Just the long dry lakebed, gray mud as far as the eye could see, pinched between the walls of the mountains on either side. No buildings at all.
“How far is it?”
“On the map, twelve miles, north to south. Doomtown was built on the other side, but I don’t know how close. No more than a mile, I reckon.”
“And Ricardo said he saw it from here?”
“Yeah,” he took back the binoculars and looked again. “But he sure as shit didn’t say he saw them glowing.” He lowered the binoculars and looked at me. “Headlights do that?”
“Ah, no?” I said, shrugging. “I mean, I’ve caught ’em before on long exposure shots, that’s not what they look like. Besides, there’s no roads. This place is abandoned. You don’t think there’s patrols or anything?”
“This deep in, nah,” he said, shaking his head. “Maybe it’s a good omen, the gods smiling on us—shit’s already weird, and we’re not even in Doomtown yet!”
We packed up, caching some water in the north-facing shadow of a boulder, and started north, across the playa.
#
Crossing the playa was like walking across the surface of a mirror—the sun overhead, the reflected heat washing up from below. We sweated it out though, leaving two long lines of tracks across the flat featureless crust of the dry lakebed, hour after hour. It was two in the afternoon, the heat of the day, when we got clear of it and finally saw Doomtown, the city at the end of the world.
Even expecting it, there was a dreamlike quality to seeing it there, pretty little houses all in a row, cul-de-sacs and asphalt and front porch swings. We were entering through the suburb side of the simulation, and it was bleakly cute. I took a lot of pictures, and Tim sketched in his pad as we walked.
“Holy shit,” he was saying, grinning at everything. “Look at that!”
The houses had once been painted, and in the occasional sheltered corner you could see hints of color—pink and sea green and boxcake yellow, but most had been bleached white by time and the crystal winds off the playa. There were doors with no knobs, windows with no glass, giving the little white houses a look from afar like a row of bleached skulls.
We walked up the porch of one of the houses, and knocked. It was a lonely sound, and it made me shiver.
“So,” said Tim, opening the door to peek inside. “This doomtown was built for, I think, Project Augustus. It was part of the last round of aboveground tests, if I recall. Relatively small bomb, and we’re pretty far from ground zero. They were interested in dispersal, things like that.”
“What do you think the background here is?”
“Well, it was seventy years ago. I wouldn’t eat anything you find on the ground, but I imagine we’ll be okay. A year’s worth of dental X-rays probably, nothing more. We’ll spend the night and head back before we hit twenty-four hours. Should be fine.”
The house we’d chosen to look around was a little boring, actually, and after the frisson of a small family home in the middle of nowhere wore off, we went out to find weirder scenes. A few blocks in we came across a car, really just the frame of one, the interior completely gone. It was an old Plymouth, the paint stripped by the desert. Tim was going on about Levittowns and the architectural history of post-WWII America while we walked, and I was taking pictures, when we turned a corner and saw our first mannequin.
She was pushing a baby cart along one of the sidewalks towards us, frozen in mid-step. The remains of her dress were just ragged, bleached strips, faded and hanging on only where they’d caught on some angle or seam in her plastic body. Her face was blank, but when we got close you could see the empty, lifeless features of her idealized patrician face, thin lips faintly smiling, a sharp but shapely nose, wide-set eyes. Her baby cart was little more than a metal frame now, the plastic all worn away, and it was empty. We circled her a few times, and then took each other’s pictures with her, arms slung chummily over her shoulders.
We spent the next few hours searching houses, finding more elaborate scenes the closer to the center we got. In one house there was a backyard picnic, dad at the grill, kids in the grass, arms raised in some approximation of play. Mom was inside, in the kitchen, hands in an empty sink in melancholic pantomime of a 50’s hausfrau, working while the family played. She’d probably have welcomed a bomb.
In another house the father reclined in an easy chair, smiling dumbly at a blank wall while his tiny plastic offspring lay on the floor. The mother here was in the back yard, looking across the fenceline towards another mannequin, a man pushing a lawnmower. Domestic intrigue, we mused, salaciously.
I took a lot of pictures, kids gathered in a circle in a back yard, a mannequin staring forlornly out of an upstairs window, a mailman in faded blue confronting a mailbox, forever. A mannequin couple out for a stroll, their plastic skin grown brittle and cracked; which one would crumble first, the man or the woman? It was all ridiculous and phantasmagoric, this silent town in the desert and its plastic citizens. A church stood on a corner, nondenominational of course; Church of the Bomb, Reformed, I guess. It had a steeple and big double doors and inside, much to our delight, there was a service taking place, a plastic preacher at the lectern, a scattering of supplicants in the pews. We ran up and down the aisles. We gave sermons, thundering about the end of the world.
As the afternoon wore on, we left the suburbs and made for the center of town. There were more blocks of houses, but we hurried past, stopping only to high-five any mannequins we saw. When we finally got to the downtown, we stopped and marveled at the scene.
Downtown Doomtown was picture perfect—brick storefronts and shops and a clock tower. There was a traffic cop in the town square to keep everything flowing neatly; they’d even put a whistle around his plastic neck.
“A hot night in Doomtown,” I said. It was busy, many more mannequins had been gathered here. The general store was packed; they’d need to call up more cashiers for sure, given the way the housewives prowled the aisles. There were more half-cars here, too, with mannequins stuck in them, a few families but mostly couples and, in a car pulled back into an alley, there was a risqué little scene: two mannequins sitting close together in the back seat.
But it was the movie theater they’d built that was the real gem. There was a line to get in, twenty mannequins long, one in a ticket booth. Inside in the lobby, the mannequins were in remarkable shape, their clothes mostly intact and still vibrant, men in suits, women in dresses. There were wigs still on them, too, brittle with age but still there, and paint still clung to their faces, red lips, brown eyes, lashes even. They were, like all the mannequins, tall and willowy; it was a town of models, the women with waspish waists and long elegant legs, the men broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped. A pair of moviegoers looked over the menu at the concession stand, while a family sat in a dusty plush couch against the wall.
There were ushers in the theater, all in cute little uniforms complete with pill-box hats, one for each door. There were ten or so mannequins sitting in theater seats, waiting for the show to begin. They’d built a stage and had painted the back wall white, like a screen, and had put in an emergency exit too.
“Holy smokes,” said Tim, his arms on his hips, shaking his head. We had mounted the stage and were looking out over the patrons in their seats. “They went all out; I expected some brick boxes, a few people, but this? They did it! They made Anytown, USA!”
“I wonder what it was like, building all this? Who set up the mannequins? Were there guidelines? How’d they decide who to put where, and why?”
“Must’ve been nuts,” said Tim. “‘Join the Army, do set design!’”
Evening was deepening by the time we finished with the theater, the first few stars peeking out overhead. We crossed the street and I got another picture of the long line for the movie, then we strolled to the traffic circle, tipping our hats to the cop as we jaywalked boldy in front of him.
“Where should we hunker down for the night?” I asked.
“Someplace without any mannequins,” said Tim. “They’re fine in the daylight but I don’t think I want any staring at me all night.”
“Should we head back to the edge of town?”
“Let’s look in there,” he said, pointing to the police department on the end of the main street. It was a good call. The small building was empty of cops and furniture. Other than the booking desk it was a wide-open floorplan, perfect for camping.
After supper we set up the lamp and went over the day’s sights, Tim checking his notes and adding some final touches while I went through my pictures. I’d taken hundreds, the first flush of excitement pushing me to try and document it all. I flipped through them quickly, squinting down at the little screen. The first sight of the town from the playa, the houses all in a row, the first street, that car, the first mannequin we saw and her baby cart, then me and her, then Tim and her, and—
I stopped and went back to the first shot of her, just her, and the baby cart. Then, slowly, I went forward, me and her, Tim and her. And I stopped.
“Hey, Tim,” I said. “Wanna see something spooky?”
“Oh man, alone in the wilderness in a town built for atomic tests full of mannequins? Do I ever!”
He got up and walked over.
“Watch this,” I said. “Watch the house over her right shoulder, okay.” I pushed the buttons, first picture, second picture, third picture.
“Holy shit!” he gasped.
“I know! Fuckin’ freaky, right?”
“Lemme see.” He grabbed the camera and went through them again. “Where’d it go!?” he wailed and laughed.
What we’d seen was this: in the first two pictures, over the mannequin’s right shoulder, there was a little two-story house, and in the window there was a mannequin, staring out in our direction. In the third picture, when I’d switched places with Tim, that mannequin was gone.
“Crazy that we caught it, just after it fell over.”
“Man,” said Tim, shaking his head and going back to his notes. “That’s how internet shit gets started, weird pictures like that.”
I laughed and kept scrolling.
And then I had to stop again. I’d taken a picture of the mailman mannequin we’d seen when we first approached him. That picture was of his left side, and showed his left hand extended towards the mailbox, clearly visible. Then, when we’d gone down the block, I’d stopped to get a big shot of where we’d just been, including in the not-too-distant foreground, the mailman. I zoomed in on him.
His right arm was up, extended towards the mailbox.
I didn’t say anything, just kept scrolling.
The two men talking in the back yard, facing one another. Three pictures further down the roll, a shot of the same yard from the house behind it, on another block. The two mannequins were facing the camera now.
Ten pictures after that, there was another mannequin that disappeared from a window. In one picture, a pair were standing in their living room, facing away, then in the next, a shot of the same living room, they were gone.
A couple dozen pictures after that, a mannequin appeared in a window that had been empty, one shot before, staring down the lens of the camera.
I felt lightheaded and a little sick. I looked up. Tim was still in his notes. I looked back down, swallowed, and kept going.
For a while, it seemed like I’d imagined it. Lots of nice, normal pictures of buildings, streets, and single shots with mannequins in them, but no duplicates to show anything unusual. It was cheating, but it made me feel better. When I got to the theater pictures I started to feel nervous again, but my luck held—late in the day and I must’ve been getting tired, because I only took single pictures of the scenes. The line outside, the ticket office, the lobby, the ushers, the stage from the back, the audience from the stage, Tim doing his impresario routine.
And then we had gone outside, crossed the street, and I’d taken another picture of the front of the theater, showing the long line again.
There were different mannequins in it this time. I stared hard at it, then went back a dozen pictures, then forward again. Actually, the line had moved up, by about six people—the sixth in line, a man in a ragged, wind-blasted suit, was buying his ticket in the latter picture, and two spots behind him there was a woman mannequin, bleached skirt and no top but missing an arm, who had been the eighth person in the first picture. The last person in the earlier picture was now in the middle of the line, and there were new mannequins, lined up, waiting their turn.
Tim thought I was mistaken when I showed him the pictures, but after each one, pointing out the similarities and the differences, he accused me of playing a prank on him. We argued, and when I pointed out that we hadn’t been apart, except for once when I went to take a piss behind a house, he grew quiet. He tried to argue it into nothing, but I kept going back to the scene outside the theater.
“It doesn’t make sense Tim,” I said, my voice higher and louder than I wanted it to be.
“No, fine, it doesn’t.” He swallowed, and then shakily rolled a joint. He lit it, exhaled, and then nodded. “No, it doesn’t make any fucking sense.” He handed it to me, and I puffed.
“Fuck it, come on,” he said, standing up.
“What?” I asked.
“Let’s go, back to the theater.” He walked purposefully towards the door. “Bring that fucking haunted camera too,” he called as he disappeared. I scrambled after him. He was walking hard, and I followed him. We crossed the traffic circle and went up Main Street. The half-moon overhead offered only faint light, and we’d left our headlamps back at our police station camp, but we walked down the middle of the road, not saying anything.
There was no line in front of the theater.
#
We went a little crazy then. Tim ran, first to one side of the theater then to the other. He looked up the dark alleys on either side, and yelled into them, shattering the still night.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Who’s here!?” There was no answer. I just started taking more pictures, not really seeing what I was shooting, just flashing away convulsively, walking slowly in a circle.
“Hey, goddammit Derek,” he said, standing in front of the theater. “Enough with the fucking camera, you’re killing my night eyes.” He turned in circles too, and leaned towards the lone mannequin in the ticket office. “What the fuck is going on?” he hissed at it, then took a swing, knocking its head clean off.
“Tim, I think maybe we should go?”
“What, where? Back across the lake?” He was angrier than I’d seen him before.
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I don’t like it here anymore.”
“Someone’s fucking with us, is what’s happening,” he said. “Someone must live here.”
“What?”
“Squatters,” he said. “Anarcho-primitivists, off the grid types.”
“The fuck do they eat, Tim? Mannequins?”
“I don’t know,” he said, waving his hand around. “Preppers, probably brought a hundred years of dried food when they came in. And they’re trying to scare us away.” I laughed, a little too shrilly.
“This ain’t fucking Scooby Doo, man,” I said, grabbing him by the arm. “Something weird is happening, and we should leave. I don’t give a fuck if its doomsday Mormons or fucking ghosts or the goddamn Loch Ness Monster! We should go!” Tim kicked at the ground and walked in a few more circles, puffing on the joint.
“Okay,” he said quietly. “Okay! You’re right. We’ll cut out. C’mon.” We started down the street, leaving the theater behind, passing in front of the drug store, the grocery store, and crossing the wide sidestreet we’d come up earlier, leading from the suburbs to the downtown. I was looking back, at the theater, so I didn’t see that Tim had stopped, and I ran right into him.
“Fucking Christ,” I heard him hiss, and I looked down the street.
It was completely blocked with mannequins, three or four deep and across the entire street, wall to wall, facing our direction. In the front, I recognized the mailman in his faded blue uniform.
We ran, pure terror pushing us. We went by the traffic circle; the cop mannequin was gone. We ran up the steps and into the shadow of the bank. The tellers we’d seen earlier were also gone. I was gasping for breath, and Tim was looking side to side, like a hunted animal.
“What do we do?” I whispered.
“We get our stuff,” he said, looking down the silent, empty street. “We’ll die out there if we try and cover thirty miles back to the road without any water. We get the water, and then we go straight out.”
“Not the way we came,” I said, almost begging.
“No,” he shook his head and looked pale. “We sure as fuck aren’t going back through the town; I don’t even want to go across the playa. We’ll make for the front, hug the alluvial fans, and get to the pass in Elephant Peak from this side of the salient.”
I nodded, thankful, and we moved, trying to stay in the shadows out of the moonlight.
Once, I stopped him and pointed up at the apartment building on the far side of the street. The moon shone full on it, and the pale bodies of two mannequins in two different windows shone brightly, looking down on us. We shivered, broke cover, and ran for the station.
#
The packs had been torn to shreds; sleeping bags, blankets, spare clothes, all ripped apart, food opened and scattered, and the bottles emptied, all our water splashed against the walls. We stood there, stunned. The wind whistled through the open windows that fronted the faux police station, and we shivered.
“We’ll go around the outside of the town,” said Tim, quietly. “Then straight across the playa. We left water on the far side, we’ll be okay. We get there, get the water, and go over the mountain in the morning.”
I nodded dumbly. There wasn’t much else to do.
We stepped outside and turned east, towards the mountains and the far end of Doomtown, but then we quietly slinked back indoors. Like the previous street, that way was blocked by a silent line of mannequins.
We crouched behind the brick front of the police station. I felt a lethargy coming over me, a kind of deadening resignation pressing downward, dulling my mind. Tim shook me.
“Derek, c’mon,” he said. “We have to get out of here, and we have to do it now. They’re boxing us in, but we can get through one of the alleys.”
“That’ll take us into the suburbs,” I said, horrified.
“Sure,” he nodded. “But there it won’t be so easy to keep us pinned in. We’ll cut through yards and break out. If we get out of town and in the open, we’ll be fine, okay? We’ll be fine.” I nodded. “Now let’s go.”
We darted outside; I couldn’t tell if the line of mannequins had moved closer; maybe I didn’t want to know and didn’t really look. We ran towards the central traffic circle, turning up the first alley and then, with a scream from both of us, scrambled back into the main street. In the dark we’d almost run into a line of mannequins at the far end of the alleyway, their pale plastic limbs reaching for us. They were still, and utterly quiet, but they had been waiting for us. We ran to the next alley—there the mob of mannequins was closer, farther up the dark side street than their fellows in the previous alleyway. We looked back. The line at the end of the street had almost advanced to the police station.
“Theater,” said Tim.
“What?” I rasped.
“The emergency exit,” he whispered in my ear. “It’s at the back, near the stage. The building goes all the way through the block, and that door would put us on the other side of the alleyway. If we can go through there, we’ll come out behind them.”
As we ran I saw he was right: they were coming up the side streets. Glancing into each alleyway I saw them populated by more mannequins, each group closer than the last until, next to the theater, they were practically out in the street. We gave them a wide berth, feeling their cold plastic eyes on us. We ran straight, then made a mad, sudden dash into the theater. The lobby was empty, the theater doors were closed. It was very dark. Only the feeble moonglow seeping in through the glassless windows provided any light.
“It’ll be pitch dark in there,” I whispered.
“The flash,” he said, pointing at the camera.
“I’ll go first,” I said.
“I’ll be right behind you, don’t stop for anything.”
Our hands hovered over the handles. I felt my heartbeat. We swung them wide, I pressed the button on the camera, and we saw the theater, packed, each seat full. There was an usher near the door, and in the flash he seemed to lunge towards us. We screamed and ran down the aisle; I felt hands in the dark, grabbing out, grazing my shirt or pants, struggling to hold us. I hit the button again, another flash, bright and stark. This time the heads of the mannequins were turned towards us. I heard Tim shouting. Another flash, the mannequins in the first row had risen from their seats. We were almost there. Another flash, I screamed and bowled into a mannequin that was suddenly standing in the aisle, felt its cold arms around me, shrieked with terror and swung the camera to smash against its plastic head. Another pair of hands lifted me, dragged me. I swung at them too, and Tim screamed in pain. The theater was filled with sounds, whispered shuffling, the noise of furtive movement. The door opened and moonlight poured in. I ran. Tim was already outside, holding a hand over his eye. He’d been the one to pick me up, and I’d caught him with an elbow.
But we were outside. Tim’s plan had worked. We were behind the mannequins in the alley now, and they were all turned away from us. We’d done it.
We didn’t say anything, just ran. Over my shoulder, as the door swung slowly shut, I saw a plastic arm stretch out to hold it open.
#
Lungs burning, legs shaking, sweating with terror and exertion, we made the edge of town. They chased us, but we’d broken through and they couldn’t catch up. They were in the yards though, or on the front porches of the houses. Some were at the windows, and if we looked back they were all out in the streets, following us. Once we had to dig deep to sprint through a thick group of them, hugging the back wall of a house before we got away onto an open street. And then we were beyond the edge of town, somewhere to the east. Half-mile to get to the playa on the south end, but we’d escaped Doomtown.
We stopped and sucked air. I threw up. Tim looked like shit with his black eye. I had scratches, ragged deep ones on my arms and scalp, left behind from long plastic fingers. I wiped my mouth on my sleeve. Tim had his hands on his knees. We looked back towards the buildings. It was midnight.
The glow started softly in the middle of town, a lambent green light, faint and sickly. Then it grew, stretching out, engulfing downtown. We covered our eyes it was so bright, but it kept spreading, filling the streets, surging like the tide to lap against the suburbs. It was green and blue and purple, and it swam with patterns and currents, licking against the night overhead. We watched it through squinting eyes as it rose into the sky, a column of light, building up and then, silently, spreading outward in a roiling mushroom cloud. Then it faded, and everything was dark and still.
We didn’t see any more mannequins after that.
#
We walked all night, getting to our water cache a little after dawn. We drank deep, then passed out, waking towards the afternoon. We’d have to hike in the dark to get back, but it seemed like the best course of action. We crossed the boulder field, and then went up the pass at Elephant Peak. We picked our way slowly in the dark; it took more hours than it would have in daylight, but we evetually got down and saw the car where we’d left it on the side of the road, three days ago. Shakily, we got in, cranked it, and drove towards Pahrump.
My phone got reception an hour into the drive. I brought up the internet, patiently waiting for the slow connection to catch up. It finally did, and I looked up “Project Augustus.” There wasn’t much, but I did learn this: when they detonated the last bomb, they’d done so at midnight, on the dot.
