Her aura bristled with alarm. "And just how are you going to get into the trailer?"
"I'm not sure. But it shouldn't be very complicated."
"Just foolish and dangerous?"
"Wouldn't be any fun if it wasn't. I can drop you off someplace safe if you like."
Wendy shook her head and grinned. "I haven't been tagging after you all this time just to wimp out now."
"Good. I could use a copilot on this kamikaze mission." I turned off the interstate and proceeded to Highway 93. The road curved and rose up the hill and then straightened on the plain leading to Rocky Flats.
Far ahead, a confusion of flashing lights collected alongside the road.
"We're just in time," I said. "There're marshaling the convoy. Wendy, unfasten the convertible top."
She reached up and unsnapped the latches holding the convertible top to the windshield. The front end of the convertible top frame vibrated for a second against the windshield. The cold wind blasted in and ballooned the fabric. With a great rip, the frame collapsed backwards and banged against the trunk lid.
The oncoming lights grew brighter.
I willed my fingernails to lengthen into talons. Clenching the steering wheel, I pressed on the accelerator. The wind whirled into the driver's compartment. The broken frame flailed violently, and one by one the metal struts broke apart. With a final rip, what was left of the convertible top tore free and fell behind us on the highway.
An unmarked white Suburban streaked past. Then a Humvee, with a bar of flashing lights fixed to the roof.
The next vehicle was as imposing as a locomotive, certainly a semi pulling the white trailer.
"Scoot your foot over and step on the gas pedal," I shouted to Wendy.
She turned her body at an angle and her shoe nudged my foot off the accelerator.
With my hands remaining on the steering wheel, I drew my legs up and squatted on the driver's seat. "Give it more gas."
"Like this?" She flexed her leg. The engine grunted and the Dodge surged forward.
I held tight. "Yeah, like that." I peeked over the windshield. Frigid night air blasted my face and hands. The headlights of the semi tractor fused into one brilliant comet flying at us. Adrenaline flooded my body. My nerves felt raw, as if my skin had been peeled back and sensations shot directly into my brain.
"Now take the wheel. Keep going straight, and as fast as you can."
Wendy grasped the steering wheel. "Felix, you're a goddamn menace."
"At least I'm not boring." With my left hand on the door and my right against the edge of the windshield, I cocked my body. The massive grill of the semi rushed at me.
"Don't look back. Don't slow down," I shouted to Wendy. "The guards will be too busy with me to chase after you. Take care. I'll see you later."
Shoving back against the seat, I sprang through the air. For an instant I glided free and then smashed against the radiator grill, hitting hard with as much grace as a squirrel about to become roadkill. My brains rattled inside my skull. My feet scrambled to catch the lip of the front bumper. The truck swerved from side to side as if the driver had sensed my impact.
The Humvee preceding us slowed and closed the gap. Gravel kicked up by its tires pelted me. A roof hatch opened and a helmeted guard in combat gear appeared. He trained a spotlight on me. The circle of white illumination caught me splayed across the radiator grill. I was the center circle of a bull's-eye. I clung to the radiator, glowing in the glare of the spotlight, my clothes rustling in the wind whistling past.
The guard in the Humvee took aim with a submachine gun. The red thread of a laser beam shot from beneath the gun and quivered on my face, like death's finger tracing against my cheek.
I clambered over the hood just as a spray of bullets stitched into the radiator, venting jets of steam.
The driver of the truck and his guard became pie-eyed with shock at seeing me. The guard leaned to one side and flipped open a gun port in the right side of the windshield. I grasped the windshield wipers and hauled myself tight against the windshield, out of his line of fire.
The guard on the Humvee fired again. His bullets scratched the armored glass about me. I snaked over the windshield and lay atop the roof.
Two bullets punched from inside the roof and exited inches from my face. I stabbed my claws through the roof, tearing the metal, and peeled the roof back. A long burst of automatic fire shot through the void.
A pause. The guard had to be reloading. I looked into the hole I had made. The guard shrank away in terror and whimpered like a puppy. His hands clutched at a fresh magazine. I seized the guard by his collar, lifted him out of the cab, and tossed him screaming over my shoulder.
I slithered into the cab and bared my fangs to the driver.
He hollered into his radio microphone and groped for his holster. With my right hand, I grabbed him by the throat while my left hand twisted his wrist until he yelped in pain. The truck weaved across the road, left and right.
I reached around him, popped the door open, and shoved him out. Grasping the rim of the big steering wheel, I straightened the truck's path. Waves of steam curled from the punctured radiator.
The guard in the Humvee let fly another burst that pinged harmlessly against the thick windshield.
Chortling with glee, I accelerated and rammed the rear of the Humvee. The Humvee careened back and forth across the highway. The guard flopped in the hatch like a sock puppet before dropping inside. I rammed the Humvee again. It swerved, tipped on two wheels, and rolled over.
The temperature gauge on the instrument panel sprang into the red zone. I had perhaps a minute before the engine seized.
Up ahead, the Suburban spun around. In my rearview mirrors, another Humvee raced closer to box me in.
I flicked off the headlamps and running lights. I veered to the right and smashed the darkened semi and trailer through a barbed-wire fence bordering the road.
Using vampire vision, I navigated around the largest of the big rocks littering the plain. The truck bellowed as it crashed over the treacherous ground. The trailer groaned on the fifth wheel. I dropped into low gear and flogged the engine, dragging us through the snow.
The transmission started to grind. The engine whined. The tachometer redlined. The truck bogged down and stopped with a wheeze and a grunt of steam.
I kicked open the door and stood on the running board. The Humvees were a half-mile away, picking their way around the stones that had pummeled my truck. Searchlights washed over the glistening snow.
I had but a few short minutes to find out what was hidden in the trailer. Unfastening a pick ax lashed to the back of the cab, I dropped to the snow and hustled to the trailer. A padlock the size of a clay brick held the rear doors. I jammed the thin end of the pick head between the lock and the hasp. I twisted the pick and turned until the handle broke.
A gentle tap—like the tripping of a bomb fuse—whispered from behind the doors. The stink of polyurethane and isopropanol farted into the air. I sprang upward and landed on top of the trailer roof. From under the rear of the truck, out shot streams of foam the size of railroad ties. The streams snaked on the ground and melted a swath through the snow. The foam set and hardened. To anyone caught in it, it would be like getting doused with instant-setting concrete.
Just to make sure that no more surprises waited, I stamped my foot on the roof of the trailer. Nothing happened. I jumped up and down once. Again, nothing happened.
Certain that this booby trap had run its course, I dropped from the roof and balanced on the knots of hardened foam. I grabbed the pick head with my bare hands and twisted again, grunting, and flexed my legs to get better leverage.
The padlock cracked apart. I flung the pieces aside and unbarred the doors.
A second metal door protected the cargo. The seal of the Department of Energy warned me not to proceed.
Stop me.
This door I grasped by the hinges and tore it loose. I stepped over the threshold
and into the deepest secrets of Rocky Flats.
Chapter 30
I ENTERED AN ARMORED VAULT. Six black boxes the size and shape of coffins were lashed with cargo straps to platforms on the floor trunnions. Along the left and right walls stood black metal drums marked with radiation symbols and placards announcing Hg-209, red mercury. Were these the boxes and drums the RCTs discovered just before they first became contaminated and then went sex crazy?
I stepped between the first two of the black boxes. A pair of metal shipping bands secured each of the lids. I chose a box and plucked at the bands with my talons until each band snapped apart with a twang.
Poised on the edge of my destination in this mystery, I hesitated, out of apprehension that what lay in the box was either nothing but disappointment, a hoax perhaps, or the kernel at the heart of the darkest of conspiracies. Could this be proof of the spaceship, the Roswell UFO, as the vânätori had claimed?
In the distance, the flashing lights and headlamps of the convoy escort flicked across the snow. I didn't have much time before the security force closed upon me.
Breathless, as if reaching into a lion's cage, I raised the lid. The aura about my hands changed from orange to yellow, exactly as it had earlier in the presence of Dragan's red mercury. Startled and suddenly afraid, I closed the lid. Thankfully, my aura returned to orange.
The effect seemed temporary. In any case, since I might already be contaminated, there was no point in stopping. I raised the lid again, and again my aura turned yellow. And the more I opened the lid, the farther the color change progressed down my arms.
The auras of the contaminated RCTs had turned an identical hue when the nymphomania took hold. Just as before, when Dragan had brought the vial of red mercury close to me, an electric twinge now shot along my spine and down to my crotch, filling my groin with a pleasant warmth. I couldn't help but smile despite my apprehension.
I pushed the lid up until it locked in the vertical position. Inside the box rested a large transparent tube filled with a viscous liquid. Floating in this liquid was a wizened, blackened corpse the size of a German shepherd. The corpse had an unusually large head, a plain oval face, a tiny slit of a mouth, two even tinier slits on the bump of a nose, and a pair of enormous almond-shaped eyes.
A gasp escaping my throat startled me, and I realized that I was so stupefied by what I'd seen that I had forgotten to breathe.
Dark cloth overalls covered most of the body, but whether the suit was extraterrestrial in origin or had been provided by humans to protect any modesty, I couldn't tell. The body emitted no aura. This creature was long dead. An inventory tag dangled from the collar. The liquid had bleached the writing but I could still read "509th Bombardment Group, Roswell Air Force Base," and the scrawl of a long-forgotten colonel together with the date, "7 July 1947." This thing in the tube could only be an alien. An EBE. An extraterrestrial biological entity.
Holy shit.
I withdrew my hands and the yellow aura effervesced for a moment. I closed the lid. The aura around my hands and arms changed back to its usual orange. The warmth in my crotch dissipated.
So everything was true. A chill made me shudder. Earth's creatures weren't alone in the universe. I craned my head back to stare at the trailer ceiling and wonder about the cosmos beyond. We were but dots on a miserable speck of a rock tucked into an insignificant corner of the galaxy.
Disgust with humanity overwhelmed me. We had finally made contact with an alien civilization and this was the best reception provided, to hide the visitors? Why the secrecy?
Angrily, I turned to the second box, broke apart the shipping bands, and opened the lid. Inside rested metallic forms in fantastic shapes, all of a uniform pale color like the dull side of aluminum foil. There was nothing whose function I could recognize, though every piece had this attribute in common, thin conduits about the diameter of a pencil running through them. I grasped one long shape the size of my arm. The surface was hard and unyielding. The shape felt warm, as if heated, and was surprisingly lightweight. The glow of my hand's aura changed from orange to yellow. I dropped the piece and in reflex wiped my hand on the edge of the box, once again relieved when my aura returned to its normal color.
On the inside of the lid I read a warning label. All the conduits had been purged of Hg-209 with high-pressure steam.
The red mercury in the drums had come from the UFO, which the federal government had no doubt dismantled to learn the aliens' technology. By now I was convinced that exposure to the radiation from these aliens and their spaceship was what had caused the nymphomania.
I was about to close the lid when I noticed an object of a darker color buried in the tangle of aluminum-hued metal. Risking more exposure to the yellow glow, I reached back into the container and pushed aside the other pieces.
The object had what looked like two handles jutting from opposite sides of an open-ended square box, its width about the size of my two fists held together.
I grasped one of the handles and lifted. The object was also made of metal but of a heavier density and cool to the touch. The dark color was like the blued steel of a gun. The glow around the object was faint and didn't affect me as had the other piece.
I held the object by both handles and looked through the box. Inside were layers of clear glass or crystal in assorted shapes, stacked together to form a display of some kind. The object didn't look like a weapon. Perhaps it was a gun sight or a camera. I turned the object over and saw a round notch on the bottom, the logical place for an attachment point. The object had no buttons or switches, so I couldn't guess how it worked.
I put the object back in the container and closed the lid.
Turning my attention back to the interior of the trailer vault, I inventoried the containers. They contained enough volume to hold the wreckage of a small airplane. How large was the original ship? Was there more debris somewhere else?
What a tragedy. The government had proof of intergalactic visitors and was going to dispose of the evidence as if it were yesterday's trash. It was like a chimp finding a telescope and, not knowing what to do with it, burying the telescope in the dirt.
Could this secret go even deeper? Were there more alien bodies? Perhaps a survivor kept prisoner, much as a vampire like myself would be if captured by the humans. And had there been more alien contacts after this crash?
A helicopter roared overhead. A searchlight scanned around the back end of the trailer. I retreated behind the boxes and waited to see what happened. The helicopter sounded as if it was landing nearby. Rotor-wash blasted snow into the trailer, then settled, then blasted again as if the helicopter had landed and taken off right away.
Someone approached. A yellow glow illuminated the open end of the trailer.
My kundalini noir buzzed with energy. A second yellow glow? From whom? From what? I glanced to the boxes around me. I was aware of the three nymphomaniacs initially contaminated and the material in this vault. Who else would glow?
"Felix," called the intruder. The voice I instantly recognized as that of my friend Gilbert Odin. "You're safe for now. It's just you and me."
Gilbert? What was he doing here?
His tall frame came into view behind the trailer. Large eyeglasses sat on the bridge of his nose.
Incredibly, a brilliant yellow aura surrounded him.
I had to repeat the astonishing discovery to myself.
A brilliant yellow aura surrounded him.
I realized this was the first time I'd ever seen him without my contacts.
I waited for him, confused and stunned by his yellow aura. My own aura grew more intense, and the hairs on my neck and arms stood up in alarm.
Swaddled in a puffy down parka, Gilbert strode in his over-boots across the muddy tracks the semi had plowed through the snow. The cackle of radio traffic came from a receiver strapped to his shoulder. "Come out," he reassured me. "It's over."
"What's over?" I shouted. Anger displaced my confusion. Did he mean
I was caught? If so, he was mistaken. I pressed against the steel wall of the trailer vault. Gilbert's yellow aura wouldn't make a difference—like any cornered beast I'd kill anyone or anything blocking my escape.
"I'm supposed to negotiate your surrender," he said.
Gilbert had better have another plan if that was the case.
"Come out," he repeated.
"Like hell," I yelled back. I wasn't about to get into the open and let a sniper measure my skull with the crosshairs of a rifle telescope. "You want to talk, you come in here."
"All right," Gilbert said. He climbed over the back end of the trailer. His aura looked like a boiling froth, signaling anxiety and fear. Good, he had much to fear from me.
I searched beyond him and looked for the telltale auras of any companions lurking in the darkness. He was alone. Easy prey for vampire hypnosis.
Gilbert stood and his large body filled most of the doorway. The thick, almost overpowering, odor of cabbage seeped from him. As he straightened up, he turned down the volume of the radio he carried. His right arm suddenly extended and in his hand he held a device that looked like a pistol—bronze-colored, open sights, and a pointed muzzle with rings around the barrel. The way he aimed it at me was proof enough that it was a weapon, something futuristic. Buck Rogers meets Dirty Harry.
His aura tightened close around his form. An occasional spike of heated emotion lashed out, like a flame shooting from a bed of coals. By reading his aura I could tell that he was trying to remain calm and keep panic from overwhelming him. Gilbert may have had this strange yellow aura but he still reacted emotionally like a human.
But not a human. Every nerve of mine pulsed and readied me for the attack. Not yet comprehending what I suspected, I waited for a moment before daring to say, "You're one of them. An alien."
Chapter 31
FELIX, WHY WOULD YOU say that?" Gilbert tilted his weapon. "It's the blaster, isn't it? Well, I knew better than to use bullets against you." He leveled the gun. "Step out here where I can get a good look at you."
The Nymphos of Rocky Flats Page 21