As though I had crossed into the land of the dead without having the good manners to die first, I slowly drifted spirit-silent along the starlit street, seeking some sign of Orson.  So profoundly hushed and lonely was the night, so preternaturally still, I could easily believe that mine was the only heart beating within a thousand miles.

Washed by the faint radiance of far nebulae, Dead Town appears to be merely sleeping, an ordinary suburb dreaming its way toward breakfast.  The single-story cottages, bungalows, and duplexes are revealed in no detail, and the bare geometry of walls and roofs presents a deceptive image of solidity, order, and purpose.

Nothing more than the pale light of a full moon, however, is required to expose the ghost-town reality.  Indeed, on some streets, a half-moon is sufficient.  Rain gutters droop from rusted fasteners.  Clapboard walls, once pristine white and maintained with military discipline, are piebald and peeling.  Many of the windows are broken, yawning like hungry mouths, and the lunar light licks the jagged edges of the glass teeth.

Because the landscape sprinkler systems no longer function, the only trees surviving are those with taproots that have found some deep store of water that sustains them through California's long rainless summer and autumn.  The shrubbery is withered beyond recovery, reduced to wicker webs and stubble.  The grass grows green only during the wet winter, and by June it is as golden and crisp as wheat waiting for the thresher.

The Department of Defense doesn't have sufficient funds either to raze these buildings or to keep them in good repair against the possibility of future need, and no buyers exist for Wyvern.  Of the numerous military bases closed following the collapse of the Soviet Union, some were sold off to civilian interests, transformed into tracts of houses and shopping centers.  But here along California's central coast, vast reaches of open land, some farmed and some not, remain in the event that Los Angeles, like a creeping fungus, should eventually cast spoors this far north or the suburban circuitry of Silicon Valley should encroach on us from the opposite direction.  Currently, Wyvern has more value to mice, lizards, and coyotes than to people.

Besides, if a would-be developer had placed an offer for these 134,456 acres, he would most likely have been rebuffed.  There is reason to believe that Wyvern was never entirely vacated, that secret facilities, far beneath its increasingly weathered surface, continue to be manned and to carry out clandestine projects worthy of such fictional lunatics as Doctors Moreau and Jekyll.  No press release was ever issued expressing compassionate concern for the unemployed mad scientists of Wyvern or announcing a retraining program, and since many of them resided on-base and had little community involvement, no locals wondered where they had gone.  Abandonment, here, is but a refinement of the sophisticated camouflage under which this work has long been performed.

I reached an intersection, where I stopped to listen.  When the restless moon rolled out of its covers yet again, I turned in a full circle, studying the ranks of houses, the lunar-resistant darkness between them, and the compartmentalized gloom beyond their windows.