Tailed

by Brian M. Wiprud

  The ground jolted under our feet, and we all went to steady ourselves.

  “Something moved in the ground!” Vargas bawled.

  Gabby moved closer to the base of the mound, confronting Fowler. He stood over her like some chieftain about to make a human sacrifice.

  “Tetta rickto lest nova peti vum!” she yelled, undoing her robe and letting it fall to the ground.

  “Eww,” Nicholas whined, turning away. “Why does she have to take off her clothes? She never did that back in Skunkville.”

  “Revva sopa wotto! Revva sopa wotto! Revva sopa wotto!” I didn’t need a translation—Fowler was clearly invoking the spirits to rise up as he stood in the cold shadow of the surrounding hills.

  Whatever was in the ground, it shifted again—you could feel that it was large. Huge. Powerful. It felt like the ground was about to open up under our feet.

  I took a few strides and clambered into the back of the half-track, scrambling up next to the machine gun turret where there was something to hold on to. If the Tupelca ancients were going to take me, they were going to take me with nine tons of rusty armor plating. Nicholas and Vargas were suddenly next to me—if nothing else it was a good vantage from which to watch the unfolding clash between Fowler and Mom. Like two sorcerers crossing wands.

  There was a loud yawning sound like that of a waking giant; dust clouds exploded behind Fowler, along with a burst of light that framed him in an immense and ominous shroud. Could he really be summoning up spirits? Was he causing this the way I caused the twister at the truck stop?

  What I’d thought was just a crazy, skinny old man was now the silhouette of Mephistopheles on steroids. Fowler broke into one of his howls.

  And then from the growing sandstorm on the mound behind him emerged a flash of silver. It started as a black horizontal curve and steadily grew into a glittering hump like the rising crest of a wave. The ends of it stretched out farther and farther to either side as it rose. It was a very smooth, long curve, but to the right I noted what looked like a fin. There were lines along it that looked structural, almost like long, thin panels. When it was as wide as a crosstown block, it began to taper back in as the belly emerged. I realized then that it sort of looked like the giant blue whale model at the Museum of Natural History, except clad in chrome and six times as large.

  There were no propellers, there were no rotors, there were no jet engines; aside from the storm of sand and earthy thunder pounding out from the hillside and beneath our feet, the colossal chrome whale rose silently behind Fowler. Light shone from beneath, reflecting brightly—but this was eclipsed by a sudden fountain of what looked like lasers. The lights formed a grid pattern on the bottom of the whale, but the beams ricocheted in our direction so intently that we had to shield our eyes.

  “Fracka fricka moota itta ipsa croon!” Nicholas gasped.

  “Fracka fricka toto dip ipsa croon,” I agreed.

  “Don’t you guys start!” Vargas scolded. “This weapon, does it work? It looks loaded.” He pointed at the machine gun. Before I could shrug—I was too busy gaping at the floating chrome whale—Vargas pounced on the gun, opening the breech, checking the ammo box.

  The lustrous leviathan cleared the top of the mound. It could have been a disc—from our vantage it was hard to tell. But my sense was that it was oblong, flat but cigar-shaped. How could something so huge, so massive, rise up so effortlessly? The technology, I marveled, must be so incredibly advanced.

  In her long white braids and eighty-year-old birthday suit, Gabby was undaunted, shouting her incantations and throwing sand in the air. Another old animist practice.

  Well, I never believed in UFOs, but seeing is believing. What else could this thing be? Unless there had been some quantum advance in science, this thing wasn’t from the third planet. And this saucer had been buried in the mound, which meant that it was all true. The Tupelca were aliens, and this was their craft from all those eons ago. Maybe Fowler’s medallion was being used to channel the spirits from him into the ground, like a transmitter. Or like a remote car starter or garage door opener. Or some whacked-out UFO bullshit like that.

  I reflected on Two Shirts and his demonstration with the magnets, how the power of one went into another.

  But I took a moment to do a vuka check. I didn’t sense anything coming out of me. My pronghorn wasn’t anywhere around, and I was still alive, so that meant my vuka hadn’t been released. I didn’t feel any evil, cannibal, werewolf Tupelca spirit clamoring out of my soul to join the other four white geckos in their interplanetary spacecraft.

  The quake from Thor pounding his anvil shook the earth ever harder. As the shimmering colossus rose, it became impossible to look directly at it because of all the light refracting off the bottom. Through the cracks between my fingers I could make out Gabby’s tiny bent form immersed in the quills of light, like she was walking into the kingdom of the divine.

  I heard a mechanical ratchet in front of me, from Vargas’s direction. Then another. A very distinct sound familiar to war buffs and Rat Patrol aficionados alike. It was the sharp clack-chuck of a machine gun being cocked.

  When I tried to fire the gun, I hadn’t cocked it.

  Battle ready, the scoutmaster and Chicken of Death bellowed: “¡Reloj, bastardos ajenos!”

  Nicholas and I harmonized: “What’d he say?”

  Vargas swung the gun toward the source of the light, to the right and over Gabby’s head. Like a zoom lens, my eyes focused on his meaty brown finger curled over the ridiculously small trigger.

  “He’ll hit Gabby!” Nicholas ducked under the gun mounting ring and grabbed Vargas’s arm.

  The gun spat daggers of fire with the unforgiving chop of a jackhammer shattering concrete. Tracer bullets, the kind that glow, spat in a stream up toward the ascending craft. Hot empty shells clattered to the floor, and the spent metal clips that linked the shells were jumping around all over the place. There were loud sparks and pings on the craft, and I heard a few ricochets.

  Thor’s pounding and the fifty caliber’s blasts combined in a cacophony that made me cover my ears instead of my eyes.

  Nicholas grabbed Vargas by the shoulders and pulled him from the gun, and as he did so the gun’s barrel tipped down and pointed at Fowler. I was still averting my eyes from the stinging rays of light, but stole a glance up at Fowler.

  Atop the mound in his glory, arms raised with the medallion dangling, I could swear I saw the daggers of flame, the tracer bullets, pass right through him.

  The steady rise of the chrome whale slowed slightly, but it kept rising.

  I detected a line hanging from the side. A rope? On a UFO?

  I saw Fowler’s silhouette turn, grab the line, and wrap it around his arm.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Nicholas yelled to Vargas over the storm.

  Vargas was indignant. “If I am the first to capture a UFO, I will be quite rich and famous, no?”

  Nicholas gave him a derisive shove. “You could have killed Gabby.” But his concern gave way to curiosity as we watched the craft rise. The laser lights tracking it flicked off. Thor rumbled to a sudden stop.

  Without the fanfare of the light show, Gabby looked a lot less bold. Naked and shivering in the cold gully, she stood uncertainly before the mound.

  “Gabby, for Christ sake, put on your robe and get away from there!” Nicholas shouted.

  She shrugged in agreement and tiptoed back to where her robe lay in a heap in the sand. She donned her cassock and trotted over to the half-track.

  The dust storm from the craft’s ascent simmered to an end. The relative quiet of the desert wind hissing through the sage and scrub filled our ears.

  But in the distance, behind us, bouncing off the hillsides, thumped chopper blades.

  Someone was coming to join the party.

  From below, we could now see that the titanic craft was square in back with fins on either side of the bottom. In front it was rounded to a small point. In the center of th
e underside was some sort of rectangular attachment the size of a car. This attachment was obviously mechanical, fitted with both black and reflective surfaces in irregular shapes.

  Sunlight hit the hump of the gleaming whale as it cleared the hilltops, light mirroring back down onto the far hillsides in a shimmering white line. Emerging fully from the purple gloom of the valley, it glimmered like a rising celestial body, with a small, demented wolfman dangling from a rope underneath.

  The thump of the chopper blades wavered, getting louder. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Suddenly from behind us, a blue USAF helicopter blasted overhead. It arced out over the mound, slowed at the apogee of its turn, and shot back toward us.

  We covered our faces with our forearms to block the effects of the rotor-induced sandstorm as the helicopter settled deftly in the gully downhill from the half-track.

  Two goons in black jumpsuits and black-visored helmets appeared and trotted toward us holding automatic pistols. Right behind them was Colonel Lanston.

  “Stand away from the gun!” Lanston pointed her pistol at Vargas, and the streusel man slowly raised his hands and ducked out from the gun pulpit.

  “Out of the truck. Now!”

  We obeyed her, and were soon arrayed—covered in dirt from our struggles—on one side of the half-track. Gabby in her druid’s robe. Nicholas in a dusty brown tweed suit. Vargas in a mud-smeared “Gold’s Gym” T-shirt and Boy Scout shorts. Me in four Dinoland sweatshirts. This motley bunch wasn’t so much Rat Patrol as some ludicrous reality program: Survivor: Alien Days.

  The two helmeted goons kept their guns trained on us as Lanston craned to look up at the ascending craft. When she turned back to us she was livid.

  “You idiots,” she spat.

  “Look, Colonel, it’s not our fault that Fowler—” Nicholas began.

  “Fowler! He’s the biggest pain in the fucking ass of all of you. Do you have any idea how many years we’ve had to put up with him? Do you know how many times I put in a termination order on him only to have it rejected?”

  “Excuse me.” I cleared my throat. “Did you happen to notice the UFO over there? It just came out of the mound right here in front of us.”

  She glanced up at the craft, squinting this time.

  “Is that Fowler up there?”

  We nodded.

  “Shit.” She stared at the ground, a look of regret chiseled into her brow. “We couldn’t saturate this place with troops. It would have drawn too much attention. But we don’t and now look what happens. The bozos are all here.”

  I cleared my throat. “Uh, now that the cat is out of the bag, do you mind telling us what it is?” I jabbed a finger skyward.

  “Yes, I do mind.” She squinted bitterly. “It’s my job to keep assholes like you people from places like this. We spend millions upon millions to keep that waste dump Area 51 in the news, Roswell and the Aztec site, too, so all the conspiracy freaks will leave this place alone. We arrange for little sightings of strange lights to keep the simpletons fixated, we donate money to UFO festivals and wacko research projects, TV shows, and movies. We practically created the whole goddamn conspiracy theory to mask sightings of our projects so there won’t be any serious compromise of our national security interests. Anybody takes a photo, it’s just some kook and another hoax. Which brings us to today—we plan the launch of one of our most important projects for the one day when every UFO nut is at the Alien Days festival way north of here, staring in the wrong direction.”

  “But for all our efforts, there was just one person, one nut job—Fowler—who latched onto this and wouldn’t leave it alone. Literally! Look at him. Damn it to hell. I should have just drilled him myself years ago.”

  “Is it from outer space?” Gabby’s gray eyes widened expectantly.

  “You know what I am, honey? I’m a psychologist.” Lanston looked more like an angry beast. “My job is to try to make you and all the other dipshits believe this alien nonsense, so that all the sensible people dismiss it. The power of selective reasoning always wins out. We wanted people to believe in little green men to draw their attention away from what we’re doing.”

  “I always thought they looked like emaciated Pillsbury Doughmen.”

  Lanston just shot me a hard look and continued.

  “Fowler is psychotic. He thinks he’s a werewolf, for Christ sake. Or as we say in psychoanalytic circles, he’s a clinical lycanthrope. He thought he was becoming that animal, just like a Tupelca, to steal the souls of his victims so he could come here and reunite with ancient spirits. We knew this white gecko thing was coming, and that the white geckos meant Fowler was headed here. He recruited those fez-wearing sad sacks by showing them the ravings from your grandfather’s fraternal charter and got them to drag you all the way out here in that dry-cleaning truck. All so they could go to another fucking planet and be immortal. And now Fowler has you all believing in this Tupelca fantasy, too. We hoped to head him off, not have it come to all this.”

  “No.” Gabby shook her head. “It was us. My husband and I turned Fowler into a werewolf many years ago.”

  “Is she your mother?” Lanston looked exasperated and waved the gun at me. “Must be, because she says things almost as stupid as you do.”

  “So if that’s not a UFO, then what is it?” Vargas waved his hands in the direction of the saucer. “It is huge, and it lifted off without any means of propulsion that I could see. It was like…antigravity.”

  “And we have Einstein over here.” Lanston sneered at Vargas. “When you four were young, at your birthday parties, did you all get UFOs?”

  Her audience shared a puzzled reverie.

  “Did you get antigravity orbs?”

  She still had us stumped.

  “Maybe you got balloons?”

  “You expect me to believe that’s a balloon?” Gabby complained.

  “We told the public it was balloons a long time ago, but nobody believed it. It’s a high-altitude airship. It’s part of a missile defense system, the Aerospace Relay Mirror technology to direct lasers to shoot down missiles. So there isn’t any antigravity involved, just helium, nitwits. Same extraterrestrial technology that made your birthday balloons float in midair. We’ve been using a lot of metallic balloons, ever since the fifties. This one is extra reflective to deflect any errant laser pulses.”

  Put a stick up my rear and wrap me in cellophane—I felt like an A1 all-day sucker. I had stared at the rising airship and made the brilliant deduction that it was a UFO, because what else but a UFO could rise so effortlessly? Deductive reasoning? I believe they call that inductive reasoning. Seeing what you expect to see, making what you experience fit a template. It’s the fuel that fires the imaginative engines and propels conspiracy theories.

  Watch out for the con.

  I looked over at Nicholas, who had been uncharacteristically quiet during this harangue. A first glance would tell you he was just hanging back, but I could see him calculating. His eyes were darting from the guns to the half-track to the nearby rock…he was thinking one move ahead.

  “Señorita Lanston? Are we under arrest?” Vargas had his hand half raised. “Because I have to go to the bathroom.”

  She ignored him. “All this Tupelca nonsense came to people in dreams, passed one generation to the next. There is no empirical evidence for any of this story, and there are no five vuka pots buried in the ground here that had the spirits of five geckos in them. There’s an airship hangar in the ground here. Fowler’s story is bullshit, do you all understand that?”

  Like a troop of truants, the four of us looked at each other and mumbled in the affirmative.

  “Are you sure you understand? There is nothing here other than a top-secret weapons launching facility. Fowler set up his archeological dig here on the far end of our bombing range and we kicked his ass out of here to build an installation, not hide a UFO. You: are there any Pillsbury Doughmen here?” She pressed her gun to my chest.

  “No! No…�
�

  “You? Do you see any UFOs?”

  Vargas stared down at the gun on his chest. “No. I implore you, I really have to pee, please…”

  “And you two…” She waved the gun at Nicholas and Gabby, like she couldn’t decide which to press the gun against. “You see any Tupelca, vukas, or spirits around here?”

  They shook their heads.

  “What was that?”

  “No!” they said in unison.

  “Good! Very good.” She looked genuinely relieved, then turned to go back to the helicopter. But the goons stayed where they were.

  Retreating, she said to them over her shoulder:

  “Kill them.”

  chapter 27

  Kill them.

  You never quite get used to hearing those words, no matter how often you hear them. You do, however, get better at reacting to them. For instance, my reaction used to be to try to laugh it off. Surely this must be a jest of some kind.

  That didn’t work so well.

  My reaction had improved, though it’s tactically so subtle that most people fail to appreciate its cunning: I freeze up like Moosehead Lake in February. You could have knocked me over with a dandelion when she said those words—just by blowing the seeds in my direction. Hey, at least I’ve learned not to speed things up by making snide remarks. And I wasn’t making any sudden moves that could get me in Dutch, either.

  Fortunately, others—like Otto—had more proactive reflexes. But he was no doubt somewhere hitting on trailer park girls by the limpid blue waters of the Desert Winds Motel swimming pool. I hear they now have color TVs, too.

  Kill them. Why? Not because we had discovered some secret government liaison with aliens, but because we had discovered that there was no secret liaison with the government. It was worth killing us to insure the UFO theories lived on to protect their secret projects.

  The goons took a few steps back and raised their pistols. Lanston was all the way down at the chopper, climbing in.