Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  “Nope.”

  “I saw tracks in the dust on the side of the road,” she said. “It looked like heavy vehicles had come along the path. Lots of them. Recently. But if you don’t have livestock, then I guess they weren’t cattle trucks.”

  Hapsel’s smile, if anything, got wider, and he nodded as if reflecting on something fascinating she had said.

  “What might cause those tracks, Mr. Hapsel?” Jennifer pressed.

  The old man gazed out over the dry fields and sipped his lemonade. At last, he turned back toward the house and called, “You got that glass yet, Ella? The lady will be parched.”

  His wife emerged almost at once with a tall glass that, after setting down the phone in her other hand, she filled from the pitcher and then handed the glass to Jennifer.

  “You’ll just have time to drink it before they get here,” said the old woman, pleasantly.

  “What?” asked Jennifer, the glass half way to her lips, her eyes flashing from Mrs. Hapsel to the phone and back. “Who?”

  The old woman turned and gazed back along the dirt road, shading her eyes with one hand.

  “See?” she said. “Here they come now.”

  Jennifer got awkwardly to her feet and followed Mrs. Hapsel’s gaze to where a black SUV was barreling along the road towards them, churning up orange dust in a long, billowing cloud behind it. She turned an anxious look on the old man in his rocker.

  “Drink up,” he said. “They’re generally not as hospitable as we are.”

  41

  TIMIKA

  Location Unknown

  TIMIKA MARS AWOKE SLOWLY, HER SENSES RETURNING bit by bit, hearing first, then smell, then touch, and finally sight. The process took several, unnatural minutes. It took all that and more for her mind to guess that she had been drugged.

  And restrained.

  Just before her eyes opened, she tried rolling onto her side, aware that she was lying on her back on a cool, hard surface, her upper body slightly elevated. She could not move. It was another few minutes before she realized that this was the result of something other than her body’s strange lethargy. Her wrists were anchored at her sides to whatever she was lying on, and when she tried to flex them, she felt a flash of muted pain, as if some of her skin had been rubbed raw.

  Her memory returned, but only in bits and pieces. She’d been driving along a deserted Pennsylvania road in the dark. There were trees and road markings. She recalled a nagging anxiety about what would come out of the woods.

  No, she amended. That wasn’t it. She’d been worried about being followed. That was it. She had been … somewhere. There was something just out of reach of her mind, something as dark as the forest she’d been driving through, but when she reached for it, it slipped away. And now she was …

  Here.

  Her eyes were open but her vision remained blurry, unfocused. There were monitors with lights that strobed or blinked periodically on either side of her. She had a sudden recollection of being fourteen, when she had been playing outside for eight hours in a hot New York summer and had collapsed from dehydration, hitting her head on the curb. It was the only time she’d ever been hospitalized, and the first time a doctor had hinted that she could stand to lose a few pounds. She hadn’t thought of it for years. The vividness of the memory distressed her, like she’d somehow gone back to that day, waking groggily to find herself an inconvenience who had brought this on herself.

  She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again, and this time the room came into sharper focus.

  It was not the room in the hospital where she had woken up.

  The machines were similar, but the room itself was blank and white, more like an emergency surgical operating room. Or a lab.

  Something in her stirred with unease.

  You were driving through trees. The car. Something about the car.

  Some kind of accident?

  No. The car had stopped. Then there’d been a light. All around her … from above.

  God.

  She tried moving again, testing to see what she could feel, whether there was numbness, or an absence where a limb should be, but felt only the tension in her wrist again, the discomfort edging into pain. She looked down at it, her head swimming. A thin nylon strap, like a zip tie, was looped around her hand on the proximal side of her thumb and then through the metal slats of the gurney, or whatever it was she was lying on. The skin looked pink and swollen as she twisted it. The act focused her mind.

  She was still wearing the same clothes, though her jacket was missing. Tubes and wires snaked around her. Some were clustered between the cups of her bra, stuck in place with sticky pads that rose and fell as she breathed. One seemed to actually go into her left arm. An IV, she thought, dimly, trailing from a bag of colorless fluid on a stand. The room itself was hexagonal, like the cell of a bee hive, the floor matted with some dark rubbery substance, the walls white to waist height, then a broad stripe of dark, smoky glass she couldn’t see through. What looked like a door, without a handle or knob, was set in the wall to her right. Her head was filled with a strange white noise, part static, part layered harmonics, almost music that did not seem to change, no matter how she moved her head. As she looked around, still too sleepy and confused to be truly scared, two monitors set into the wall, above the band of dark glass, began to flash with a bright, unsettling light, an uncanny, poisonous green.

  Gradually, she registered that this was somehow connected to her waking. And now the smoky glass was not quite as opaque as it had been. There were shapes on the other side of the glass, two, possibly three, barely visible except when they moved. She wanted to think they were people, but something in the shape of their heads …

  The fear that simmered unrecognized within her grew hotter, more urgent. She uttered a low moan, but she heard nothing but the strange ambient sound that coursed through her skull.

  “Who are you?” she tried to say. “What do you want?”

  Her lips felt rubbery, her mouth dry, but that didn’t account for how distant and muted her own voice sounded. Something had happened to her. It was still happening. She clamped her teeth together, then tried again, this time working her jaw until she caught a little fold of her cheek between her teeth. She pressed down hard, and the pain worked on her mind like the ache in her wrist had. She tasted blood, but she could feel her body coming back to life, brightening, fading, then brightening again. She bit down, and a slow pulse of energy rippled from her toes to her knees, pelvis, torso, shoulders. She felt it in her arms where, apart from the restrained wrists, she had the most freedom of motion. She stirred, and it was like rousing a sleeping animal. Fear and anxiety were momentarily replaced by something else: anger, hostility, rage. …

  These were good things, she thought, as her brain fought to control what it had awoken. They might keep her alive.

  “WHAT isss youra Na-em?”

  The sound was suddenly all around her, arcing out of the static as if the voice were coming from the machines to which she was connected. It was terrifying, a strange, slow hiss that blurred the oddly accented words together, distorting the sound, rolling it like waves so that each sound faded in and out without ever truly beginning or ending.

  She gasped, but said nothing coherent, and a moment later, the strange, unearthly voice came back.

  “WHAT isss youra Na-em?”

  “My name is Timika Mars,” she answered, though she could barely hear herself. “Where am I?”

  There was no reply, only the strange oscillation of sound that was almost music in her head.

  “Where were you going?”

  It was clearer this time, though the distortion was as before, with the same curious foreign lilt, as if the speaker were not using his mouth.

  His, she thought, struck by the pronoun her mind had offered.

  Yes. The voice, for all its strangeness, sounded male.

  The light behind the smoked glass seemed to brighten, and the figures beyond moved, shad
owy and unreal. Their heads were too large, elongated. Thoughtless with dread, Timika fought with her bonds, pulling back and forth where she felt the zip tie snag against the underside of the table.

  “Where were you going?” the voice demanded again, the same flat tone, the inflection all wrong. It didn’t feel like she was hearing it. It was just there, in her head, like it came from deep inside her own mind.

  “I don’t remember,” she said, fear making her honest. “I was driving through a forest. I had been to see … someone. An old lady. But I don’t know …”

  She stopped as more pieces of memory slotted into place. The Hollows, and a dead man called Jerzy, who had once been a prisoner …

  Like her.

  She fought the zip ties once more.

  “Do nottt struggle,” said the voice. “You will become injurrred.”

  The last word had three syllables. Someone who did not speak English fluently.

  Someone. Yes.

  Because the alternative was too terrible to acknowledge. She continued to pull at her wrist ties, raising her whole body from the reclined table and shaking it, thrashing her head and shoulders as much as her restraints would let her. She felt the blood run from her right wrist and, glorying in her rage, because it felt so much better than the skulking terror which would otherwise overwhelm her, roared her defiance. Still, her voice sounded muted and far away, but as she twisted her head violently one way then the other, something popped out of her right ear and landed on her chest.

  An ear bud with a thin yellow wire.

  She stopped thrashing and stared at it, anger lessening as logic took over. The voice was not in her head. It was being piped through to her from outside. With that, some of her fear abated. This was not metaphysics. It was communication. She forced herself to think, to analyze.

  That was what she was known for, right?

  The thought came to her, a piece of her past that she’d forgotten, and with it came a word she knew: Debunktion.

  Yes. That was who she was. That was what she did. She dismantled fictions and fairy tales, cheats, ruses, hoaxes … But then the lights in the strange hexagonal cell dimmed, and silently, awfully, the door panel she’d almost forgotten slid aside. The three strange figures were watching her. And now one of them was coming in.

  She saw the gangly gray frame, the long, impossible fingers, the bulbous head with the vast insect eyes, and all her former terror returned, blotting out any sense of who she was, leaving only a mad dread of what would happen next. It moved gracelessly, a shuffling, shambling step, and though it angled its head to one side, then the other as it considered her, it moved awkwardly, turning its whole body in the direction it was, as if it couldn’t see well.

  Timika’s eyes flashed around the room in search of salvation. As she did so, she wrestled with her restraints, tugging, stretching, making the underside of the tabletop into a saw. Now that one ear was free of the headset through which they had been speaking to her, she could hear her own panic, the wordless grunting exertion, the labored breathing, the cringing, whimpering dread as the creature came near her.

  Creature was wrong. She knew what she was looking at, even if she couldn’t bring herself to say the word. Anybody would. Certainly anybody who had spent years mocking every account of these X-Files extras.

  It came closer, its cautious, shuffling steps suddenly the only sound in the room, reaching towards her, its long fingers so terrible, so …

  Alien.

  And there it was. Her brain finally uttered the word, and it acted upon her system like adrenaline.

  Alien, she thought again.

  “Alien,” she allowed, like it was the beginning of a spell, a magical, talismanic word. And suddenly she was still, her heart rate a fraction slower, breathing a little less ragged and heavy, looking directly at the creature who had, she thought, hesitated, as if something had passed between them. Then it moved again, stooping to the side of the bed. It was inches away now, close enough to touch. Its long, slender fingers groped under the side of the bed and pulled out a metal side table, arrayed with gleaming surgical implements.

  Timika’s horror returned, but it was different now: specific, rational, no nameless dread of the unknown implications of a universe she’d never accepted. This was different. This was surgery.

  She roared and fought and tugged wilder than ever, though even as she did, she noted the strange way the alien had to rotate its whole body to look at what it was doing, like a far-sighted woman peering over her spectacles as she tried to knit. Suddenly the tie on her right wrist snapped free and her hand, bloody at the pulse point, swung up in a wild arc, pulling at the zip tie. The release sent her arm flailing, catching the creature lightly on the side of the head.

  It staggered, disoriented, gazing around the room as if there might be someone else there, and in that instant Timika reached back to the side table with her now free hand and came up with a scalpel. She swept it across the tie on her left wrist, then sat up, tugged the IV from her arm and reached for her ankles. The alien had turned back to her now, and its careful deliberation was gone. It slammed one rubbery hand across her chest, trying to pin her down, but it was clumsy, and the head didn’t turn with any speed or flexibility, still oddly blind.

  Revolted by the creature’s touch, Timika shrugged it off, jabbing at it with the heel of her left hand as the right cut her ankles free. The flesh of the alien’s head was spongy. Her hand seemed to sink into it before hitting anything solid. Again, it didn’t seem to see the blow coming, and it staggered back, she thought, more in surprise than because she had hit it particularly hard. Still sitting on the bed, she pulled her legs up, pivoted around and caught the creature with a firm two-footed kick in the middle of its chest that sent it sprawling.

  Again, its movements were ungainly, unnatural, as if it were unused to moving around, at odds with its own physical form. One splayed hand tried to catch itself against the wall and failed, the hand bending in weird, irregular ways, as if there were no bones in the long fingers. Timika stopped at the door, still holding the scalpel’s little half-moon blade out in front of her, staring at the alien and its strange hands.

  Rubbery … glove-like hands …

  She forced herself to look at it. It wasn’t unconscious, but it couldn’t get up, and it writhed for a second before she put one foot on the small of its back and pinned it to the ground. She checked the door. The others hadn’t come yet, but they would be watching. She stooped to the one at her feet, reached down with her free hand and traced the almost imperceptible ribbon that ran down its spine from neck to waist. She pressed and teased at it with her fingertips until the rubbery fabric parted to reveal …

  A zipper.

  42

  JERZY

  Parque Teyú Cuare, Argentina, October 1946

  BELASCO CRIED OUT AND DROPPED TO THE LEAF-STREWN floor. I stepped instinctively behind a tree, dropping the useless rifle and shrugging out of my backpack. Behind me, Ignacio, eyes wide with shock and horror, threw himself down into the underbrush behind a fallen tree.

  It wasn’t just Hartsfeld—assuming that was his real name—shooting at them from the Nazi jungle compound. The diplomat was still framed in the soft light of the doorway, but one of the high shuttered windows had kicked open, and from inside, a machine pistol had opened up. The flash was too bright to look at, but I could hear the bullets thrumming through the air, tearing through leaves and pocking into wood and loamy earth. There would be more coming, but in the near total darkness, I didn’t dare move. The tree I hid behind was not quite as wide as my body. It had smooth, gray bark and waxy leaves. Even if I didn’t move, a lucky shot could find me.

  I stooped to my fallen pack, untoggling the cords that held it closed with fumbling hands, and rummaged through the cans of food and books and folded T-shirts. Surely, Hartsfeld couldn’t have gotten to the sidearms we’d taken from the Kitchener?

  Come on …

  I found the heavy automatic
at the bottom, but not the spare clip.

  Seven shots then.

  Dropping the pack, I crawled back to the tree, turning against it with my shoulder to reduce my profile. There was another crackle of gunfire from the window, but Hartsfeld seemed to be holding his fire, looking to make his shots count.

  Belasco groaned in the darkness. I had no idea how badly hurt he was. He was also the most exposed and closest to the door. I cocked the slide on the .45 and clicked the safety off as I sighted on the arch. Catching the distinctive shadow of Hartsfeld’s arm as it extended, the squat pistol trained on Belasco’s head, I fired.

  The .45 sounded like a cannon in the night, a round deafening blast compared to the smaller caliber weapons the Nazis were using. In Hartsfeld’s cry of pain, I heard a hint of panic. There was a pause in the shooting, and then garbled voices calling to each other in German from inside the house. We weren’t supposed to be armed.

  I took the opportunity. Turning to where Ignacio had peered up from behind the mossy log, I gestured with one hand.

  Stay down.

  Then I sprinted twenty yards for the doorway, meeting it with the weight of my charge just as it was about to latch closed. I slammed into it and sent Hartsfeld sprawling on the other side. He’d dropped his weapon, and his arm was bleeding. As he started to get up, I kicked the counterfeit Nazi hard in the face, and he went down again.

  I was in a small gatehouse that gave onto a small courtyard, paved with stones and concrete and lit by a yellowish floodlight in the center. Across the courtyard was a pair of two-story buildings accessed by doors and shuttered windows, and one three-story tower. I peered around, and another submachine gun opened up from the other side, sending a wild spray of bullets that zinged and sparked against the stone so that I ducked back under the arch.

  At least two more shooters then. Possibly more.

  A light snapped on in the tower, a searchlight, hard and bright, sweeping the courtyard, searching for me. It was a long shot, but I sighted along the barrel of the .45 and fired once. Twice. The light shattered and died, but I was down to four rounds.