Alien Crimes

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  “Come on—which is it?” Kling asked. Cravath didn’t see the difference. But then, he wasn’t a cop.

  THE END OF THE WORLD by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  THEN

  The air reeked of smoke.

  The people ran, and the others chased them.

  She kept tripping. Momma pulled her forward, but Momma’s hand was slippery. Her hand slid out, and she fell, sprawling on the wooden sidewalk.

  Momma reached for her, but the crowd swept Momma forward.

  All she saw was Momma’s face, panicked, her hands, grasping, and then Momma was gone.

  Everyone ran around her, over her, on her. She put her hands over her head and cringed, curling herself into a little ball.

  She made herself change color. Brown-gray like the sidewalk, with black lines running up and down.

  Dress hems skimmed over her. Boots brushed her. Heels pinched the skin on her arms.

  No spikes, Momma always said. No spikes or they’ll know.

  So she held her breath, hoping the spikes wouldn’t break through her skin because she was so scared, and her side hurt where someone’s boot hit it, and the wooden sidewalk bounced as more and more people ran past her.

  Finally, she started squinching, like Daddy taught her before he left.

  Slide, he said. A little bit at a time. Slide. Squinch onto whatever surface you're on and cling.

  It was hard to squinch without spikes, but she did, her head tucked in her belly, her hair trailing to one side. More boots stomped on it, pulling it, but she bit her lower lip so that she wouldn’t have to think about the pain.

  She was almost to the bank door when the sidewalk stopped shaking. No one ran by her. She was alone.

  She flattened herself against the brick and shuddered. Her skin smelled of chewing tobacco, spit, and beer from the saloon next door.

  She had shut down her ears, but she finally rotated them outward. Men were shouting, women yelling. There was pounding and screaming and a high-pitched noise she didn’t like.

  If they found her flattened against the brick, they’d know. If they saw the spikes rise from her body, they’d know. If they saw her squinching, they’d know.

  But she couldn’t move.

  She was shivering, and she didn’t know what to do.

  NOW

  The call didn’t come through channels. It rang to Becca Keller’s personal cell.

  Chase Waterston hadn’t even said hello.

  “Got a problem at the End of the World,” he’d said, his usually self-assured voice shaky. “Can you get here right away? Just you.”

  Normally, she would have told him to call the precinct or 911, but something stopped her. Probably that scared edge to his voice, a sound she’d never heard in all the years she’d known him.

  She drove from the center of downtown Hope to the End of the World, a drive that, in the old days, would have taken five minutes. Now it took twenty, and the only thing that kept her from being annoyed at the traffic were the mountains, bleak and cold, rising up like goddesses at the edge of Hope.

  Hope was a mountain city, but its terrain was high desert.

  Vast expanses of brown still marked the outskirts of town, although the interior had lost much of its desert feel. By the time she passed the latest ticky-tacky development, she hit the rolling dunes of her childhood. Even though she had on the air-conditioning, the smell of sagebrush blew in—full of promise.

  If she kept going straight too much farther, she’d hit small windy roads filled with switchbacks that led to now-trendy ski resorts. If she turned right, she’d follow the old stagecoach route over the edge of the mountains into the Willamette Valley where most of Oregon’s population lived.

  The End of the World was an ancient resort at the fork between the mountain roads and the old stagecoach route. At the turn of the previous century, some enterprising entrepreneur figured travelers who were taking the narrow road toward the Willamette Valley would welcome a place to spend, rest and recover from the long dusty trip.

  Now bumper-to-bumper traffic filled that wagon route, which had expanded to a four-lane highway. Hope actually had a real rush hour, thanks to expatriate Californians, retired baby boomers, and ridiculously cheap housing.

  Chase was rebuilding the resort for those baby boomers and Californians. For some reason, he thought they’d want to stay in a hundred-year-old hotel, with a view of the mountains and the river, even in the heat of the summer and the deep cold of the desert winter.

  Becca steered the squad with her left hand and fiddled with the air conditioner with her right, wishing her own car was out of the shop. No matter what she did, she couldn’t get the squad car cooled. Nothing seemed to be working properly. Or maybe that was the effect of the heat.

  It was a hundred and three degrees, and the third week without rain. The radio’s most recent weather report promised the temperature would reach one hundred and eight by the time the day was over.

  Finally, she reached the construction site.

  Chase had set up the site so that it only blocked part of the ever-present wind; as a consequence, the dust billowed across the highway with the gusts.

  The city had cited Chase twice for the hazard, and he’d promised to fix it just after the Fourth of July holiday. It looked like he’d been keeping his word, too. A huge plastic construction fence leaned against the old building. Graders and post-diggers were parked on the side of the road.

  Nothing moved. Not the cats Chase had been using to dig out the old parking lot, not the crane he’d rented the week before, and not the crew, most of whom sat on the backs of pickup trucks, their faces blackened with dust and grime and too much sun. She could see their eyes, white against the darkness of their skins, watching her as she turned onto the dirt path that Chase had been using as an access road.

  He was waiting for her in the doorway of what had once been a natatorium. Built over an old underground spring, the natatorium had once boasted the largest swimming pool in Eastern Oregon. There was some kind of pipe system that pumped water into the pool, keeping it perpetually cold. In the natatorium’s heyday, the water had been replaced daily.

  Behind the natatorium was the old five-story brick hotel that still had the original fixtures. No vandals had ever attacked the place. Even the windows were intact.

  Becca had gone inside more than once, first as an impressionable twelve-year-old, and ever since, part of her believed the rumors that the hotel was haunted.

  She pulled up beside the natatorium dooi^ in a tiny patch of shade provided by the overhanging roof. She got out and the blast-furnace heat hit her, prickling sweat on her skin almost instantly. Apparently the air conditioner had been working in the piece-of-crap squad after all.

  Chase watched her. His lips were chapped, his skin fried blackish red from the sun. He had weather wrinkles around his eyes and narrow mouth. His hair was cropped short, and over it he wore a regulation hard hat. He clutched another one in his left hand, slapping it rhythmically against his thigh.

  “Thanks for coming, Becca,” he said, and he still sounded shaken.

  The tone was unfamiliar, but the expression on his face wasn’t. She’d seen it only once, after she’d told him she wanted out, that his values and hers were so different, she couldn’t stomach a relationship any longer.

  “What do you got, Chase?” she asked.

  “Come with me.” He handed her the hard hat he’d been holding.

  She took it as a gust of wind caught her short hair and blew its clipped edges into her face. She slipped the hard hat on and tucked her hair underneath it, then followed Chase inside the building.

  It was hotter inside the natatorium, and the air smelled of rot and mold. She usually thought of those as humidity smells, but the natatorium’s interior was so dry that it was crumbly.

  The floor was shredded with age, the wood so brittle that she wondered if it would hold her weight. Most of the walls were gone, the remains of them piled in a corner
. Chase had gutted the interior.

  When she had been a girl, she had played in this place. Her parents had forbidden her to come, which made it all the more inviting. The rot and mold smells had been present even then. But the walls had still been up, and there had been some ancient furniture in here as well, made unusable by weather and critters chewing the interior.

  She used to stand inside the entrance with the door open, the stream of sunlight carrying a spinning tunnel of dust motes. When she closed her eyes halfway, she could just imagine the people arriving here after a long day of travel, happy to be in a place of such elegance, such warmth.

  But now even that sense of a long ago but lively past was gone, and all that remained was the shell of the building itself—a hazard, an eyesore, something to be torn down and replaced.

  Chase’s boots echoed on the wood floor. He led her along the edges, pointing at holes closer to the center. She wondered if any of his employees had caused the holes, walking imprudently across the floor, foot catching on the weak spot, and then slipping through.

  He was taking her to the employees’ staircase in the back. When they reached it, she saw why. It was made of metal. Rusted metal, but metal all the same. Someone had recently bolted the stairs into the wall, probably under Chase’s orders. A metal hand railing had been reinforced as well.

  Chase looked over his shoulder to make sure she was following. She caught a glimpse of something in his face—reluctance? Fear? She couldn’t quite tell—and then, as suddenly as it appeared, it was gone.

  He went down the steps two at a time. She followed. Even though the handrail had been rebolted, the metal still flaked under her hand. The bolts might hold if she suddenly fell through the stairs but she wasn’t sure if the railing would.

  The smell grew stronger here, as if the mold had somehow managed to survive the dry summers. The farther down she went, the cooler the air got. It was still hot, but no longer oppressive.

  Chase stopped at the bottom of the stairs. He watched her come down the last few, his gaze holding hers. The intensity of his gaze startled her. It was vulnerable, in a way she hadn’t seen since their first year together.

  Then he stepped away so that she could stand on the floor below.

  The smell was so strong that it overwhelmed her. Beneath the mold and rot, there was something else, something familiar, something foul. It made the hair rise on the back of her neck.

  “That way,” Chase said, and this time she wasn’t mistaking it. His voice was shaking. “I’ll wait here.”

  She frowned at him, and then kept going. The floor here was covered in ceramic tile, chipped and broken, but sturdy. She wondered what was beneath it. Ground? Old-fashioned concrete? Wood? She couldn’t tell. But the floor didn’t creak here, and it felt solid.

  A long wall hid everything from view. A door stood open, sending in sunlight filled with dust motes, just like she remembered. Only there shouldn’t be sunlight here. This was the basement, the miraculous swimming pool, the place that had helped make the End of the World famous.

  She stepped through the door.

  The light came from the back wall—or what had been the back. Chase’s crew had destroyed this part of the building.

  The basement of the End of the World was open to the air for the first time since it had been completed.

  That strange feeling she’d had since she reached the bottom of the stairs grew. If the basement wasn’t sealed, then the stench shouldn’t have been so strong. The old air should have escaped, letting the freshness of the desert inside.

  Some of the heat had trickled in, but not enough to dissipate the natural coolness. She stepped forward. The tile on the other side of the pool was hidden under mounds of dirt. The pool itself was half destroyed, but the cat that had done the damage wasn’t anywhere near it. She could see the big tire tracks, scored deeply into the sandy earth, as if the cat itself had been stuck or if the operator had tried to escape in a hurry.

  They had uncovered something. That much was clear. And she was beginning to get an idea as to what it was.

  A body.

  Given the smell, it had to have died here recently. Bodies didn’t decay in the desert—not in the dry air and the sand. Inside a building like this, there might be standard decomposition, but considering how hot it had been, even that seemed unlikely.

  She’d have to assume cause of death was suspicious because the body had been located here. And then she’d have to figure out a way to find out whose body it was.

  She was already planning how she’d conduct her case when she stepped off the tile onto a mound of dirt and peered into the gaping hole, and saw—

  Bones. Piles of bones. Recognizable bones. Femurs, hip bones, pelvic bones, rib cages. Hundreds of human bones. And more skulls than she could count.

  She rocked back on her heels, pressing her free hand to her face, the smell—the illogical and impossible smell—now turning her stomach.

  A mass grave, of the kind she’d only seen in film or police academy photos.

  A mass grave, anywhere from seventy-five to a hundred years old.

  A mass grave, in Hope. She hadn’t even heard rumors of it, and she had lived here all her life.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Chase said from the stairs, “I couldn’t agree more.”

  THEN

  The screaming sent ripples through her. She couldn’t complete the change. She couldn’t even assume the color and texture of the brick.

  Tears pricked her eyes. Tears, as big a giveaway as her hair; her fingers, her ears. Somehow, when she stopped the spikes, she stopped all her abilities.

  Or maybe it was just the fear.

  A door squeaked open, then boots hit the sidewalk. Polished boots with only a layer of black dust along the edge. Men’s boots, not the dainty things Momma tried to wear.

  She tried to will the shivering away, but she couldn’t.

  She couldn’t move at all.

  Not that she had anywhere to go.

  She could only pray that he wouldn’t look down, that he wouldn’t see her, that she would be safe for just a little longer.

  NOW

  Becca stared at the hole. She couldn’t even count all the skulls, rising like white stones out of the dirt. Not to mention the rib cages off to one side or the tiny bones lying in a corner, bones that probably belonged in a hand or a foot.

  She couldn’t do much on her own. But she could find out where that stink was coming from.

  She turned around and headed for the stairs.

  Chase tipped his hard hat back, revealing his dark eyes. “Where’re you going?”

  “To get some things from my evidence bag,” Becca said. “You’re not going to call anyone, are you?” he asked.

  She stopped in front of him. “I can’t take care of this alone. You should know that.”

  He leaned against the railing, that assumed casual gesture that meant he was the most distressed. “This’ll ruin me, Becca. Half my capital is in this place.”

  “You told me no good businessman ever invests his own money,” she snapped, mostly because she was surprised.

  He shrugged. “Guess I’m not a good businessman.”

  But he was. He had restored three of the downtown’s oldest buildings, making them into expensive condominiums with views of the mountains. Single-handedly, he’d revitalized Hope’s downtown by adding trendy stores that the locals claimed would never succeed (yet somehow they did, thanks to the “foreigners,” as the Californians were called) and restaurants so upscale that Becca would have to spend half a week’s pay just to eat lunch.

  “You knew I’d go by the book when you called me here,” she said, more sharply than she intended. He’d gotten to her. That was the problem; he always did.

  “I thought maybe we could talk. They’re old bones. If we can get someone to recover them and keep it quiet—”

  “How many workers saw this?” she asked. “Do you think they’l
l keep it quiet?”

  “If I pay them enough,” he said. “And if we move the bones to a proper cemetery.”

  “Is that what you think this is?” she asked. “A graveyard?” “Isn’t it?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “It was so far out in the desert when this place was built that it’s possible—no, it’s probable—that the memory of the graveyard got lost.”

  “I saw at least two rib cages with shattered bones, and several skulls looked crushed.”

  His lips trembled, and it was a moment before he spoke. “The equipment could have done that.”

  But he didn’t sound convinced.

  “It could have,” she said. “But we need to know.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  She looked over her shoulder. That patch of sunlight still glinted through the hole in the wall. The dust motes still floated. If she didn’t look down, the place would seem just as beautiful and interesting as it always had.

  “Because someone loved them once. Someone probably wants to know what happened to them.”

  “Someone?” He snorted. “Becca, the pool was put over a tennis court that was built at the turn of the twentieth century. No one remembers these people. Only historians would care.”

  He paused, and she felt her breath catch.

  Then he said, “This is my life.”

  He used a tone and inflection she used to find particularly mesmerizing. Once she told their couples therapist that with that tone, he could convince her to do anything, and that was when the therapist told her that she had to get out.

  “It’s a crime scene,” Becca said, knowing that the argument was weak.

  “You don’t know that for sure, and even if it is, it’s a hundred years old,” he said.

  “Then what’s the smell?”

  He frowned, clearly not understanding her.

  “This is a desert, Chase. Bodies buried in dirt in a dry climate don’t decay. They mummify.”

  He blinked. He obviously hadn’t thought of that.