was why Sasha found herself serving as both the post-midnight jock and
the general manager and why Doogie Sassman worked eight hours of
overtime per week for regular wage and never flexed his tattooed biceps
in protest.
By no means continuous but nevertheless frequent major building
projects of a high-security nature were undertaken on the grounds of
Fort Wyvern by military contractors whose laborers were reportedly
sworn to secrecy and remained, for life, at risk of being charged with
treason for a slip of the tongue. According to rumor, because of its
proud history as a center of military training and education, Wyvern
was chosen as the site of a major chemicalbiological warfare research
facility constructed as a huge selfcontained, biologically secure,
subterranean complex.
Given the events of the past twelve hours, I felt confident in assuming
that more than a scrap of truth underlay these rumors, although I have
never seen a single thread of evidence that such a stronghold exists.
The abandoned base offers sights that are, however, as likely to amaze
You, give You the creeps, and make You ponder the extent of human folly
as anything You will see in a cryobiological warfare laboratory. I
think of Fort Wyvern, in its present state, as a macabre theme park,
divided into various lands much the same as Disneyland is divided, with
the difference that only one patron, along with his faithful dog, is
admitted at any one time.
Dead Town is one of my favorites.
Dead Town is my name for it, not what it was called when Fort Wyvern
thrived. It consists of more than three thousand singlefamily cottages
and duplex bungalows in which married active-duty personnel and their
dependents were housed if they chose to live on base. Architecturally,
these humble structures have little to recommend them, and each is
virtually identical to the one next door;
they provided the minimum of comforts to the mostly young families who
occupied them, each for only a couple of years at a time, over the
war-filled decades. But in spite of their sameness, these are pleasant
houses, and when You walk through their empty rooms, You can feel that
life was lived well in them, with lovemaking and laughter and
gatherings of friends.
These days the streets of Dead Town, laid out in a military grid,
feature drifts of dust against the curbs and dry tumbleweeds waiting
for wind. After the rainy season, the grass quickly turns brown and
stays that shade most of the year. The shrubs are all withered, and
many of the trees are dead, their leafless branches blacker than the
black sky at which they seem to claw. Mice have the houses to
themselves, and birds build nests on the front-door lintels, painting
the stoops with their droppings.
You might expect that the structures would either be maintained against
the real possibility of future need or efficiently razed, but there is
no money for either solution. The materials and the fixtures of the
buildings have less value than the cost of salvaging them, so no
contract can be negotiated to dispose of them in that manner. For the
time being, they are left to deteriorate in the elements much as the
ghost towns of the gold-mining era were abandoned.
Wandering through Dead Town, You feel as though everyone in the world
has vanished or died of a plague and that You are alone on the face of
the earth. Or that You have gone mad and exist now in a grim solipsist
fantasy, surrounded by people You refuse to see.
Or that You have died and gone to Hell, where your particular damnation
consists of eternal isolation. When You see a scruffy coyote or two
prowling between the houses, lean of flank, with long teeth and fiery
eyes, they appear to be demons, and the Hades fantasy is the easiest
one to believe. If your father was a professor of poetry, however, and
if You are blessed or cursed with a threehundred-ring circus of a mind,
You can imagine countless scenarios to explain the place.
This night in March, I cycled through a couple of streets in Dead Town,
but I didn’t stop to visit. The fog had not reached this far inland,