They were all alone on the road when the day had made a rather abrupt decision to end.

Just a few minutes ago it burned deep and bright, gold and crimson above the dusty asphalt, then it consulted its watch and figured that it was way overdue for a break.

A low, hot wind picked up the sand and blew it into the windshield of the van. Far ahead, light lingered over the horizon as they pulled over and stepped outside to bask in the last rays of the dying sunlight. The sky hanged heavy above them, clouds floating over their heads like cheap halloween decorations, pink and white and silver.

The air felt static and dense. The empty valley fell into a gaudy veil of dusk, and the dessicated ground cracked under Amanda’s feet. There was one last flash of light through the clouds, an almost instant drop of temperature, and nothing.

The sun had set.

“Are you feelin’ it, drummer?” Martin asked, and closed the van’s doors, but didn’t lock them.

“It’s closer.” Amanda nodded, kicking a stone under her foot. “Which is interesting, considering we are literally in the middle of nowhere.”

Indeed, all around them was nothing but the road, and the sand surrounding it; a small hill there, a weirdly-shaped plant here, a bog standard Californian desert.

“You point, I drive.” Martin shrugged.

“If we’re here,” Gripps said, “might as well take a look. Flex our feet.”

“Admire the view,” agreed Cross.

“Punch a cactus!” suggested Vogel helpfully.

Beast reacted strongly to the last proposition. She signed something incoherent and ventured out on a search for a strong punch-worthy candidate.

“Fine,” Amanda gave in. “Let’s go for a walk in a desert at night hoping that I get another vision.”

They had spent the last few months driving across the Americas, six persons in a van with no goal in mind, lead by Amanda’s Hunches. She didn’t come back the same from Wendimoor; this became apparent a few days after she parted ways with Dirk, Todd and Farah.

Whatever power of prophecy she had before, now she had double. It’s like the keyhole she was peering through before had been widened to a window.

Strange tales, narratives in picture came to her in dreams. They would wake her up in the middle of the night, gasping and shaking as the van rolled smoothly across empty roads, head full of tiny shreds of existence, puzzle pieces that didn’t fit together in the slightest.

She didn’t need pararibulitis attacks to have visions anymore, she could summon them at will. It was excruciatingly difficult at first, but now required no more than half an hour of concentration. They were still fast and flashy, far too jumbled up to make any sense of them, but they followed a pattern.

And the current pattern was: death. Death and decay and destruction of all, reality falling apart and cracking like this very desert soil, shattering into dust with no chance of putting it back together again.

It wasn’t coming fast, but it was coming. And as far as she was concerned, she was the only one who was aware of it, and that made her responsible for figuring it out and doing something about it.

Not that she knew what one could possibly do about it. All that she was capable of was tracing the pieces from one vision to another, following a hair-thin thread of images that she saw more than once.

She was in charge now. She was the boss. And she hated it - even when she got the final word on where to stop for dinner - but she had no other choice.

So they had spent the last few months going where her intuition was telling her to go, every subsequent vision leading her to the subsequent location.

This time, it lead her to the outskirts of the Death Valley. She found that rather fitting.

The Rowdy Three set out and spread out across the desert like a pack of house cats that have found a crack in the fence and were drunk on freedom but stepped cautiously all the same. Gripps and Cross had discovered a discarded shoe that served as a home to small family of gerbils, and Martin traced a line of steps that were probably left by a coyote.

Vogel had a target picked out of him by Beast and was now hacking at the dried out cactus with his golf club, a maniacal glee in his eyes. Beast jumped up and down, switching from signed curses to epithets of excitement in her native language.

Despite having a seemingly perfect understanding of English, Beast preferred signs to words, and communicated mostly in a mix of made-up sign language and gestures. It was a bit of a learning curve for the Rowdy 3, but they managed.

Amanda’s feet brought her somewhere less than remarkable. A shoulder-tall hill, more of a lump of soil than a proper part of landscape, sticking out from the ground far from the road. Amanda circled it. This didn’t make the hill any more interesting. She poked at it with her boot, but this too produced no effect. She sat down near it, frustrated and cross at her own mind. Her mind was telling her that the hill was important, but conveniently forgot to elaborate in which manner it was important, leaving her even more cross and frustrated, and now with sand in her jeans.

She dropped backward, expecting to fall into the sand - and felt the back of her skull collide with a solid wall of metal.

*

Vogel and Beast were on the verge of destroying every dead cactus in a two mile radius when Amanda called out and they rushed for help.

Martin was there first, followed by Cross and Gripps. They caught Amanda on her knees, digging desperately through the sand with her bare hands. Without even attempting to ask for an explanation, they all joined in, and soon six pairs of hands were digging, nails hitting metal.

Less than ten minutes later, a door was uncovered. A door in a solid cylinder of metal sticking out of the ground, covered, evidently on purpose, by a layer of desert sand. Were you to find yourself nearby, unexpectedly out of petrol or with a flat tire, you would never have found it, probably because you wouldn’t even know to look in the first place.

But Amanda did know to look. And now they were standing in front of a metal door, cut into a metal cylinder, in the middle of a Californian wasteland.

She scratched at the door until her nails found the outline of some button, which, upon pushing, turned out to be a kind of a door handle. She pushed it further, then pulled. The door opened.

“Guys,” Amanda said, “we’re gonna go in, so, can you please not smash things? I know it’s fun but after that time in Walmart, I would kind of rather not fish for mug shards in my underwear. Just like, ask before you smash, okay?”

They all nodded in agreement.

“Right.” She took a flashlight out of her backpack and shone the light inside of what appeared to be an antique elevator. “Let’s get ourselves stuck in another dark hole.”

*

Six figures stepped into the dim space of the elevator, and six walked out a mile down, blinking, staring wide-eyed in all directions. They had found themselves in a sort of a man-made cave, about the size of a football stadium, with a ceiling that started tall at the entrance but ran into the floor at a steep incline at the opposite end.

It was bathed in an oily orange light that came from grimy lamps, the likes of which you’d expect to find in a vintage horror movie version of Frankenstein. The air felt stiff and stale. It left a taste of mold in your mouth and made you ever so slightly concerned about oxygen levels.

The floor was littered with wood shavings and packing peanuts, so it was impossible to walk across it without producing a meaty crunch. In some spots, you could see florets of mushrooms, though what these mushrooms consumed (or what consumed them) was unclear. Apart from the mushrooms, the only living thing they could find was a spider.

On further inspection, it was discovered that the spider was actually dead. This was rather upsetting to more than one member of Rowdy 3.

On the whole, the cave was thoroughly unremarkable, and also thoroughly abandoned, with unclear origin and unclear purposes and actually quite a lot of dead spiders.

There was also a gleaming white object about the size of a shed right in the middle of it.

Amanda approached it almost on tiptoes, unsure of whether she was even allowed to. The thing looked elegant and bulky at the same time, like a modern, slick-line state-of-the-art wagon of the Moscow metropolitan. It had no windows and no markings on its side, and it rested in a shallow congealed puddle of some dark, slightly menacing liquid.

“Our van is cooler,” Vogel said to Martin and Gripps, and made Amanda smile.

She came nose to stark absence of a nose close to the mysterious object and began to circle it in search of some button or doorknob. It had neither, but it did have a key sticking out of its side - a normal stainless steel key, complete with a unicorn charm hanging off the keyring.

She turned the key. Something clicked deep inside the object, and the door swung open with significant force.

Amanda blinked. She was rather hoping the key would get stuck and she would have the excuse for leaving the place at once, but the weird wagon, having its own ideas of what were supposed to happen, had inconveniently forced her to carry on.

Soon the entirety of the Rowdy 3 was exploring the mysterious object from inside. As it turned out, the wagon contained a variety of unidentifiable tech junk of all shapes and sizes, as if several computers, cameras, and washing machines have been murdered and gutted, their body parts scattered on the floor. The piles obscured a large trapdoor in the middle of the room, barely noticeable, and sealed shut.

Amanda left the boys to poke the piles of scrap and wires and made her way towards her only point of interest in the wagon - a screen carved into the wall, a pale glow emanating from it. She had never seen such a screen before in her life. It seemed to have depth and dimension to it, like you could reach your hand into it. She tried to. It was solid glass.

On the screen, a few symbols swirled and rotated - symbols that she took for Arabic letters, but were in fact nothing of the sort. She poked the screen and the swirling letter disappeared, replaced by a blue background and a list of words spelled in those same unknown symbols. She picked a line at random, and suddenly the screen expanded, revealing several different panels of buttons, switches, and dials, and with a pitch black splash in the middle, blinking with stars.

She didn’t dare touch anything else.

Instead, her hand found the back of a large armchair, puffy, and covered in a glossy, leather-like material. She rotated it on its axis and turned it towards her, mind blank. She took a seat… and at once, her head was filled with images.

A sycamore tree. A black cat sitting on the roof of a shed, licking its paws. Two men sharing a drink in a small office. An operating table and a surgeon’s gloved hand. Starry sky, ever so slightly off. A huge building engulfed in flames. The slowly turning circuits of a music box. Dirk. Dirk’s face. Dirk’s face, his eyes staring right at her.

She jumped up from the chair and gasped. Martin was by her side at once, holding her with one arm, rubbing her shoulder encouragingly.

“Another brain movie, drummer?” he asked once she had caught her breath.

She nodded silently.

“Guys,” she said, steady on her feet once more. “Back in the van. We’re going north.”

*

They closed the wagon’s door. They came back up the way they came, and closed that door shut as well, and tried their best to bury it with sand. They returned to their van and sat, and Martin poured some tea from a thermos, and poured some whiskey into the tea as well, but kept the spiked version for himself without offering it to others.

Gripps, Cross and Vogel played cards according to ever-changing rules, which allowed them all to win and lose simultaneously. Beast had uncovered her box of Found Things, in which she collected various trinkets and souvenirs of their travels. Most stayed in the box forever, but some would later turn into bracelets or van decorations. Into the box, Beast unloaded: a piece of a dry cactus, a chunk of quartz in a funny shape, and a unicorn charm, with the stainless steel key on a keyring still firmly attached.

“What did you see?” Martin asked, sipping his alcohol-infused tea.

“The usual nonsense.” Amanda shrugged. “There was a, uh, something to do with a hospital I think, and possibly a cat. I just really remembered Dirk.”

“We’re paying the agency a visit. Settled,” Martin said. “And to hell with whatever that was we stumbled into.” He paused. “It gave me the absolute creeps.”

Amanda laughed briefly. It gave her really quite strong creeps as well.

“Coming from you, that’s quite validating,” she said.

“Could be a Black Wing thing,” Martin supposed. “Could be some stupid secret base with a stupid control center inside.”

“Control center?” Amanda repeated. “Oh you mean that wagon. Nah.” She shook her head. “Nah, dude. I think that was like,” she frowned, not quite believing herself, “I think that was a part of a spaceship.”