by M. G. Herron
She looked at me for answers, but I shook my head.
Dyna answered this time. “You are about to come face to face with a dangerous criminal offworlder known as a Pharsei. Members of their species are vile and dangerous and manipulative. Furthermore, they have evolved psychic abilities that can be quite debilitating and invasive if you do not know how to resist them. It requires a muscle—so to speak—that your species does not often use.”
She seemed to connect the dots. Her skin blanched. “The migraine I got on the top of Frost Tower—is that what you mean?”
“That is correct,” Dyna said.
“Nasty stuff,” I said. “If we run into him again, just stay back far enough that he can’t hurt you.”
“Like hell,” she said, this time more out of reflexive disagreement than any desire to run into danger.
“You don’t have a choice,” I said. “You’re completely exposed when you’re in his range. I can only barely defend myself long enough to pull the trigger. When we find him, our best chance is for you to get back and shoot from cover.”
“You know as well as I do that the effective range on my weapon is only fifty meters. And it won’t do much damage at that range.”
I ground my teeth. She was right. I had other equipment that might help us, but it was in my truck, and Elekatch had that. “You watch our six, then. Make sure he doesn’t sneak up behind us.”
She glared at me but seemed to see the tactical sense in what I was saying. Her phone beeped in my hand.
“It says we’re here.”
Gonzalez scanned the road as we drove. “It’s only accurate up to about a half-mile—fortunately there are plenty of cell towers in this area.”
“Try turning right. Wait. Stop. Stop!”
She slammed on the brakes, and Gonzalez practically tumbled out of the cruiser. I jogged back down the road and bent toward something giving off a dull glint in the sunlight.
Although the screen was cracked, Anna’s brightly colored case had saved her phone. I tapped the screen, and the device came to life, showing me the messaging app. It displayed a single, unfinished text message that caused my blood to run cold.
I swallowed. Back in the car, Gonzalez and Dyna both leaned over my shoulder as I read the words out loud.
“It says, ‘going south ship wall art a mural? Gunn I’—that’s it.”
Gunn I…
She had been texting me. Hadn’t even had a chance to hit send before whatever happened, happened. Elekatch must have noticed what she was doing and thrown the phone out the window. Her phone began to vibrate. I thought it was an incoming call, but then I realized it was my hands shaking. I closed my eyes. It should have been me in her place. Anna didn’t do anything to deserve this.
“This message does not seem logical,” Dyna said.
“What do you think she was trying to say?” Gonzalez asked me.
I forced myself to think. “The first part, ‘going south’ makes sense, but we already knew that from the accidents.”
“Ship,” Dyna said. “Must refer to his missing starcraft. Kilos was not able to locate it.”
Gonzalez pursed her lips. She was still struggling to process the alien references.
“That makes sense,” I said. “As for wall art, I don’t know of any notable graffiti spots in Kyle or Buda. Maybe there’s some kind of mural there, like Anna suggested?”
Gonzalez pulled back onto the road as I racked my brain. The ranch land around us looked familiar, and not just because I knew Austin and the surrounding area so well. Alongside the road, power lines were strung from pole to pole.
“Wait a minute. Sheila, aren’t we near the crater?”
She looked around. “Yeah, actually, I think you’re right.”
“Maybe he did return to the scene of the crime.”
The crash site wasn’t hard to find. Not ten minutes later, Sheila pulled off the road next to the same stand of trees I had parked under when I’d first gone to investigate this strange crater.
I located the new wooden pole along the string of power lines. The cracked pole that had been lying nearby was now gone, but nothing else seemed to have changed since I was last here. There was no sign of my truck. Without a word, I got out of the SUV and led the other two back through the woods.
I reached the edge of the crater and peered into it. The fine layer of ash had been washed or blown away. It was just churned Earth crisscrossed with footprints, now.
“They’re not here,” I managed to say through gritted teeth. “No ship that I can see.”
Gonzalez crossed her arms and looked around. Dyna’s eyes went blank as her attention seemed to go somewhere far away.
My eyes burned as sweat streamed into them. I wiped my forearm across my brow, only to have more sweat drip down from my head. It was late afternoon now. The roads were quiet. Everyone was at work. I could see the trailer park across the field, and wide-open ranch land to our right beyond a barbed-wire fence.
If I were a murderous, savage, mind-pushing alien, where would I hide my spaceship?
Something about the trailer park across the field jogged my memory. The slant of the roofs, or perhaps the arrangement of the houses in the neighborhood. It was a jumble of trailers, not a uniform development, drawn out in a horseshoe shape.
“Hey, Gonzalez. That trailer park over there… isn’t that where Kovak’s mistress lives?” I didn’t realize it last time we were standing here because I only went to talk to her later that night, after driving around for a while.
She glanced around, taking her bearings from the road. “Yeah, I think you’re right. I canvassed the neighborhood after the crater appeared. Remember, I told you that a few of the residents said they thought they heard a noise? But we never found a cause of any kind, no meteorite or evidence of explosives.”
My heart began to beat faster. I nodded along. “I didn’t give the skank ho much thought after she denied seeing Kovak—convincingly, I might add.”
“Skank ho?” Gonzalez bristled at the insult. I could see that her rule-following soul just itched to correct me. “Don’t you mean Patricia Wallart?”
Gonzalez looked up. We locked eyes, both of us instantly knowing what the other was about to say.
“Wall art!” I said, as the same time as she yelled, “Wallart!”
Dyna was already sprinting around the crater and across the field before Gonzalez or I had fully processed what we’d just realized. I broke and ran after her, Gonzalez striding alongside me. Annabelle’s words about trusting your intuition rang in my memory. I should also have trusted Mrs. Kovak’s intuition that her husband was still cheating on her, but it was too late to regret that now.
Leading us by fifty yards, Dyna leaped nimbly over the rusty, warped chain-link fence surrounding the trailer park.
The silence was pierced by a sudden, desperate shriek of abandon.
24
I vaulted the chain-link fence at the same spot Dyna had gone over, yet I came down much less nimbly than she had, stumbling and catching myself against a metal utility box built on a slab of cement between two homes. Barely an arm span separated the trailers.
Adrenaline surged through my system. Sweat ran down my neck and back. Anna’s scream came for the second time, shrill and full of vigor. Then words of protest drifted on the wind.
“Stop!” Anna cried out. “Put me down, you slimy son of a—”
A heavy thud sounded in my chest. At first, I thought it was my heart thumping, but then it came again, a deep, booming, otherworldly noise.
I straightened as Gonzalez hopped over the fence and came up beside me. “What was that?” she asked.
“Dyna,” I said grimly. “Engaging the enemy.”
“We need to help her.” Gonzalez drew her sidearm from the holster at her hip.
“What we need is more firepower.”
Like Gonzalez, my first thought was to run straight in the direction of Anna’s screams and whisk her away to safety. But
I’d faced Elekatch enough times to know I was outmatched by him in melee combat, at least in terms of brute strength and speed. If we ran in blind, we’d just get Anna hurt.
Peering carefully around the trailer in front of me, I searched the gravel road. It was the middle of the afternoon, and most of the residents seemed to still be at work or at school. Only a few cars and trucks were parked nearby. My heart leaped into my throat as I saw what I was looking for. My truck. Parked in the middle of the street, bumper missing and with more than a few new dents in the grille and hood, but otherwise still intact.
“Come on!” I said.
Crouching, I doubled back and made my way along the shabby, unfenced backyards, dodging tricycles and kiddie pools behind the closely packed trailer homes. Gonzalez followed. A few houses down, a small, mousy woman sitting at a picnic table gasped when she saw us. She quickly crushed her cigarette in an ashtray, and hurried back inside.
I kept moving, focusing on putting one foot in front of another. Another two houses down, we came parallel with my truck. It was abandoned in the middle of the gravel street that bisected the trailer park. The driver’s side door was ajar on the opposite side of the vehicle. A faint ding-ding-ding came from it, alerting me that the engine was still running. I hurried to the edge of the street alongside another trailer.
By now, about a dozen people had wandered out of their homes to gaze in the direction of the screams and thumping noises. A group of grungy-looking guys held beer cans dangling from their fingertips. One woman was inspecting my truck, eyeing it speculatively, as if judging how much she could make on the parts.
Another thunderclap swept through my chest, gone as quick as it came. A moment later, a piece of severed tentacle soared through the air and slapped wetly onto the F-150’s windshield.
Several startled gasps rose from the gathered bystanders.
It was now or never.
Gritting my teeth, I sprinted around the truck and grabbed a crowbar I kept under my seat. Moving to the back again, I jumped into the bed and made my way to the lockbox mounted against the cab. Its lid was smashed from where Elekatch had put his weight on it. Luckily, he seemed to have been too distracted directing Anna and running from us to look inside.
Gonzalez clambered up next to me as I used my keys to open the padlock. I shoved the crowbar under the lip of the compromised toolbox’s lid, then leaned into it, levering it with my weight. The lid didn’t give. It was made of quarter-inch steel, mangled and stuck shut.
“Together?”
Gonzalez put her hands on the crowbar next to mine.
“One, two, three!”
We both cranked our weight onto the crowbar. I cringed against the high-pitched grating as the lid of the toolbox open to reveal a canvas duffle bag and the hard plastic carrying case for the rifle.
“Finally, some luck.” Reaching into the duffel bag, I pulled out the rifle case and shoved it into Gonzalez’s arms.
“Are you familiar?”
She cracked the case and glanced inside. “Of course. Twenty rounds?”
“That’s right.”
I handed her another box. She stared down at this one.
“These are—”
“Illegal? I know. You can arrest me tomorrow if you need to, but for now, they’re our best bet.”
“Dios mío.”
“Get to a rooftop—far enough away that slug-face won’t see you. He can only mind control you if he knows where you are, so don’t tell me where you’re going to go. Wait until I get Anna clear, and then use the explosive bullets to blow his brains out.”
She swallowed.
“He’s a big bastard,” I said, “but he hurts like the rest of us.”
“Okay.” She nodded. Gonzalez had always been there for me when it counted, despite our penchant to butt heads and argue. She’d always stepped up when I needed her to. I trusted she’d do the same for me now.
I opened the box of explosive bullets Gonzalez held and shoveled half of them into my front right pocket.
Gonzalez lumbered upward, so she was standing in the bed of the truck, rifle case in her arms. “Gunn…” She hopped down. “Gunn, heads up!”
A large object plummeted from the sky and smashed down on the truck’s hood, making it buck like a bronco. I was tossed unceremoniously to the ground. The two-and-a-half-ton truck bounced on its wheels, the suspension protesting loudly. Gritting my teeth, I struggled back to my feet, the left side of my face aching with pain. I spat out something hard—a tooth—and tasted copper.
“Go!” I shouted.
Gonzalez dodged back behind the row of trailers where we’d been lurking moments ago and vanished.
I turned and raised my voice. “Was that really necessary?” I demanded. I blinked as Dyna took a deep breath and sat up on the hood of my truck. Her hair shifted colors erratically, from white to red to black. Her clothes were stained with dirt, torn, and covered in garden mulch. Rage burned hot in her eyes.
“Let us finish this,” she snarled.
I hopped into the truck. Dyna crouched on the hood as I shifted into drive. The gravel road curved slightly to the left, and I goosed the truck forward.
As I came around the bend, I spotted Elekatch, greasy and black like tar. He stood fifty yards ahead, where the road curved back to the left in the second arm of the horseshoe. His many-limbed body was stretched out, holding one struggling form down on the ground, and towering over another in the doorway of a double-wide trailer. The once-tidy garden had been turned into churned earth from the struggle, but I still recognized the uprooted sunflowers and succulents.
That made one of the two people struggling against Elekatch, the mistress, Patricia Wallart. She stood slack-jawed, arms hanging down like a zombie in the doorway. Elekatch had her so firmly under his control, I doubt she even knew she’d been taken. Her wild, red hair stuck out at all angles, as if she’d been wearing a hat… and then it hit me. This was the same woman Anna had met with downtown! Was Patricia Wallart actually Marsha Marshall?
I had to shove the thought aside. The other figure, short and blonde, kicked and screamed and raised hell against the tentacles wrapped around her legs.
Annabelle.
Braking quick, I ratcheted the truck into reverse and flew back twenty or thirty yards to where I’d found my F-150.
“I’ll flatten him with the truck,” I said out the window to Dyna. “Get Annabelle and Ms. Wallart out of harm’s way.”
Dyna, crouching on the hood, extended a hand behind her, then vaulted into the air, using the weight of the truck as an anchor to propel herself upward. She soared like an acrobat, cutting across the distance effortlessly.
I floored the gas. Rocks kicked up from the gravel road as the wheels spun. I rapidly gained speed. Coming around the corner again, I held the pedal down with conviction.
Dyna descended hard and fast, clobbering Elekatch with her fist. His body twisted with the impact, and Dyna used the momentary advantage to put up a hand and send Patricia Wallart flying backward like a rag doll through the trailer’s open door. Anna tried to wriggle free, but Elekatch managed to keep a hold of her around her right ankle. She tripped and hit her head against the ground.
I gritted my teeth but didn’t take my foot off the gas. “Come on. Come on!”
Elekatch recovered quickly, lashing out at Dyna with his free limbs. Dyna skipped back and deflected his blows.
I was closing the distance. Fifty yards. Forty. The speedometer needle climbed up to a vertical position.
“Move!” I shouted out the window. “Anna, move!”
Anna glanced up at the truck. I was close enough now that I saw terror written plainly on her face. Folding over like a yogi, she sank her teeth into the tentacle holding her. Elekatch’s extremity convulsed, went rigid, then released her and pulled away. Spitting the taste out of her mouth, Anna scrambled to her feet and took two steps before diving into the neighbor’s yard. Dyna waited until the last second to blast herself in th
e opposite direction, just clearing the nose of my truck. The force of Dyna’s movement kept Elekatch pinned against the trailer’s metal wall.
At ten yards, my truck bounced over the curb, its front end lifting a foot or two off the ground.
“Eat steel, fish face!” I howled.
At the last moment, I realized I had forgotten to buckle my seatbelt.
I slammed into the giant alien squid and plowed him through Patricia Wallart’s double-wide trailer.
Laminate siding bent inward, wood splintered, plaster cracked. My head whipped forward and slammed into the steering wheel. The world spun and when it settled, I was looking at the inside of Ms. Wallart’s living room.
“Argh,” I groaned, pushing myself back. Warm blood washed from my nose into my mouth. Inside the trailer, an oblong metal object ran the length of the living room. It was sleek, silver with a blue tint, and tapered to a point at one end, like a giant bullet. On the near side, a fin ran the length of the… ship? Was that a ship? I couldn’t imagine how it had gotten in there.
I didn’t have more than a second to contemplate it. A roar emanated from the Pharsei’s vicious, razor-sharp maw. Elekatch was pinned between the metal object and the grill of my truck. A rancid blast of hot breath washed over the cracked windshield and in through the open windows. He lunged forward, smashing through the glass with a bloody tentacle, shifting both the ship and the truck with his massive weight as he twisted to unpin himself. The cut glass lacerated his long slimy limbs as he fought, but he showed no signs of giving up. A tentacle yanked the windshield out of its frame.
As I ducked and rolled out the driver’s side door, I was suddenly glad I’d forgotten the seatbelt.
“Hey, Elekatch!” I yelled as I came to my feet. His beady yellow eyes were already locked upon me. I drew my Kimber, clicked off the safety, and aimed it up at him. “Eat lead!”
I unloaded three rounds straight into his face. Two of the bullets ripped holes in his cheeks. Elekatch took the shots like they were love taps. I think I even saw him smile. He bucked and shoved the truck aside. It bumped into the ceiling as his large body slithered and squirmed out from under it.