If there are people looking for me in Dulce, they’ll probably recognize me, my face programed into their minds. Or something. As little as I understand how the nanites work, I understand the Others’ abilities even less.
Dulce is a small town tucked into a valley, surrounded by mesas, including Archuleta to the north. Bathed in the orange light of the setting sun, the landscape looks a little more like Arizona, but the number of trees, both standing and fallen, change the rocky terrain into something otherworldly. Most of the homes are single-wide trailers surrounded by flat fields and punctuated by the occasional ranch.
There are a few nicer homes in town along with some loosely packed businesses. The distance between buildings gives me time to scrutinize each, and the people hustling from air-conditioned vehicles to air-conditioned businesses. After just a few minutes, it’s clear the majority of the population is American Indian, a fact I confirm a moment later via the nanites. Eighty-eight percent of the population are members of the Jicarilla Apache tribe.
Spotting nothing out of the ordinary in town, I start to relax. My eyes drift toward a church building where it looks like the four percent of the population that are Caucasian must be having a potluck dinner. That’s when I notice the sign outside. ‘Dulce Latter Day Saints Meetinghouse.’ What are the odds that there would be a Mormon church smack dab on the 37th parallel, right in the Others’ backyard?
Pretty high, actually, if Joseph Smith brokered a deal with the cryptos.
I make a sharp right turn away from the building, taking control of the vehicle from the nanites. After manually driving a few blocks, eyes more on the rearview mirror than the road, I let the nanites continue their course through town while researching a place to hole up for the night. As much as I’m eager to kick down the Other’s front door, they seem to be a nocturnal bunch, and I’d rather not have to face off against a UFO. The Tesla pulls into the Wild Horse Casino & Hotel before I’ve decided that’s the place to go. A prepaid reservation confirmation appears on the Tesla’s screen, under the name Scott Smith.
“Uhh,” I say to no one. “Okay. Thanks…I guess?”
The vehicle parks and the door locks snap open.
Are the nanites intelligent? I wonder, and then I ask, Are you intelligent?
No response, which is a relief, because I don’t really want a consciousness residing inside me.
I sit in the car for a moment, wondering what story I’ll give them to explain why I don’t have any ID, when someone knocks on my window. I flinch at the sound, expecting to find a mob of torch-wielding, Others-controlled cult members. Instead, I’m greeted by a tall American Indian wearing a beige Stetson. The window descends before I can push the button or instruct the nanites.
“Are you Scott Smith?” the man asks.
I wonder if the nanites somehow included special instructions along with my prepaid reservation, perhaps basing their actions on my subconscious thoughts and concerns long before they reached the forefront of my mind. Conjuring as much confidence as I can, I say, “Yeah.”
He smiles at me like we’re old buds, says, “Get out of the damn car,” and levels a large handgun at my face.
40
“Next door on the right,” my captor says. After removing my firearm, he led me from the car to the casino’s interior without raising an eyebrow from the staff or patrons milling about. Anyone who looked in our direction simply smiled or nodded at the big American Indian behind me, somehow not seeing or registering the gun in his hand.
The facility is a sprawling single-story maze decorated in southwestern sensibilities. Lots of horses. Exposed beams. Muted pastels and adobe textures. I wouldn’t call it fancy. More homey. In some ways it reminds me of Sheba’s brothel, though I’m guessing that the only teats displayed on the bedroom walls come in sets of four and belong to a cow.
“Here,” the man says, just in case I didn’t understand what ‘Next door on the right’ meant.
I stop in front of the door, and point to a keycard lock on the door, the indicator light turned red. “It’s locked.”
“You can open it,” he says.
Assuming the lock is for show, or broken, I grasp the solid metal knob and turn it. The lock indicator turns green and the door swings open. “I hope your other rooms are more secure.”
The humorless man motions me inside the room with the gun leveled at my midsection. If he did shoot me down, it would be a long, painful, bleeding-out kind of death. But I don’t think that’s what he’s got planned for me. Not yet, anyway.
I pull up short when I see what looks like a typical hotel room suite with a queen-sized bed, a small lounge, and a kitchenette. A single step back takes me far enough out of the room to see that there is no room number on the walls to either side of the door, or on the door itself.
“You’re not a perv, are you?”
“In,” the man says, pushing the weapon against my side.
Risking my life to disarm the man would put Jacob and Isabella at risk of never being rescued. My odds of finding and liberating them are already slim, but they drop to absolute zero the moment a bullet lodges itself in my gut.
The room is comfortable and clean. Pretty standard. But the décor doesn’t match the rest of the hotel. There’s more of a modern vibe. The paintings are digital. Lots of sharp lines. Fractals. The TV is a large wall-mounted flat panel. Looks expensive. The fridge is fairly large and new.
“This your personal space?” I ask and cringe on the inside when the door shuts behind me.
“On the bed,” the man says.
“Look,” I say, turning around, “I don’t know what you’re into, or who you think I am, but if you take this any further, it won’t go well for you.”
The moment I speak the words, I remember that I’m not entirely powerless here. I can summon the police—though I’d rather stay under the radar. I can upload the hotel’s security footage of the gun-wielding behemoth escorting me into the bedroom to YouTube. But again, there’s the radar problem. I can drain the man’s bank accounts, or bribe him by filling them.
But what’s his name?
“What’s your name?” he asks, following the same line of thinking as me. “Your real name.”
“Not sure I want to tell you that…” I’ve got one eye on the man and one viewing the casino’s personnel records. I don’t find him in the list of employees, each of which has a photo ID. Expanding my search to local media, I find several photos of the man accompanying articles about the casino, most of them very positive humanitarian stories. Seems he’s an upstanding member of the community. His name appears under each photo. “…Kuruk Moore.”
The fact that I know his name doesn’t faze him. “Sit.”
This time I obey and am relieved when the big man, whose name the nanites reveal means, ‘bear,’ pulls the chair out from under the desk and sits opposite me. “Your name.”
“Not going to happen,” I tell him.
He mulls that over for a moment and then seems to resign himself to not gathering that piece of information. “Where is Dénzhóné?”
“I’m not sure I can even pronounce that,” I say, trying to lighten the man’s mood. His online profile is not that of a killer. Unless he’s really good at covering his tracks, he’s a good man. “Wait…what does that name mean?”
“It’s not really a name,” Kuruk says. “It’s Apache for beautiful.”
I can’t help but smile. While so much of Lindo was a mystery, some of his true self shined through, including his opinion about his good looks. “I knew Denz…”
“Dénzhóné.”
“Right. I knew him as ‘Lindo.’ And Steven Cruz.”
While the name Lindo has no effect, Steven Cruz surprises the man and makes him tense. The gun rises toward my head. “Who are you with? Them?” He motions his head in a direction I think is north.
I’m not positive who he’s talking about, but I see no danger in laying everything but my identity on the table. The man
clearly knew Lindo, and if his reaction isn’t phony, cared about him. “Are you talking about Aeron?”
The man’s trigger finger slips into position.
“I’m not with them,” I blurt. “Or them.” I motion in the same direction, which the satellite map provided by the nanites reveals is north, and directly toward the Archuleta Mesa. “Lindo…Steven…was my friend.”
“I know all of his friends.” Gravelly emotion sneaks into his voice.
“Do you know about Marta?” I ask. “About Isabella?”
Kuruk stands, emotion welling. “Where is he?”
Afraid the man will put a bullet in my head, I decide to employ the golden rule of novelists around the world: show, don’t tell.
Reg’s paranoia works to my benefit. Not only did he have security cameras everywhere, but they also uploaded everything to a server. I point to the TV when it turns on. “Best if you see for yourself.”
Kuruk glances at the screen, but doesn’t react until the inside of Reg’s warehouse is displayed, showing myself and Lindo together. Suspecting that my host knew Lindo and likely called him a friend, I decide blunt honesty is called for. “The Others tracked us to a gun dealer in Arizona.”
“Why?” he asks, sitting again and shifting the chair to face the television.
“We liberated a handful of children,” I say, and when that gets his full attention, I leave no wiggle room for what we’re talking about. “Hybrids.”
“Where are they now?” he asks, his concern shifting from Lindo to the children.
“Safe,” I say, not quite ready to trust him.
He gives an understanding nod.
“Most of them,” I add. “They took one of them. I’m here to get him back.”
“Get him back?” Kuruk nearly falls out of his chair. “There is no coming back when the Others have you.”
Before I can answer, the screen shifts to a new camera angle revealing the store’s interior as bullets punch through the wall, creating beams of sunlight. Kuruk watches as we put up a fight, as we struggle against the machine gun’s might, and as Lindo drops in a cloud of red.
The gun lowers to the floor, and then drops. Kuruk removes his hat and puts a hand to his mouth as tears slip from his eyes. Lindo was more than a friend to this man. The video switches to an exterior view, revealing the collection of men shooting us, and then all of them being enveloped in a ball of fire courtesy of my flare. Back inside, the video shows my return to Lindo, our brief exchange and then the touch of our heads together, Lindo’s passing, and my confused, stumbling retreat.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “You two were close?”
“Forty years,” Kuruk says, wiping his eyes. “That’s how long I’ve been helping him.”
Kuruk can’t be more than fifty. Why would Lindo partner with a ten-year-old? Unless… “He freed you. You’re a hybrid.”
“There are more of us than you know,” he says. “Why did he choose you? To receive them?”
“He was dying,” I tell him. “I don’t think there was much of a choice.”
“The nanites could have survived outside of him,” he says. “Could have gone anywhere. To anyone he instructed them to. Including me. So why you?”
I replay the memory in my mind, the nanites making it perfect and just as painful. The TV’s view switches, showing the view through my own eyes. Holy shit, I think, my gut twisting at the realization that I can watch my memories…any memories in perfect clarity. My subconscious hijacks the TV screen, showing Kailyn. It’s the first time I saw her. Sundrenched, wearing tight shorts and a white blouse that revealed her shape when the sun struck it just right. She’s dancing with friends, entrancing me with the sway of her hips. My eyes linger, and then move up, locking onto her blue eyes as she returns my stare.
And smiles.
At the time, I felt my heart swell like the Grinch’s.
Now, it breaks.
Grunting, and clearing my throat, I wipe my eyes and focus my thoughts.
Show Lindo. Show Lindo. At the warehouse.
The image shifts back to Lindo, but is frozen, like I’ve paused the memory.
“Who was that?” Kuruk asks.
“My wife,” I say. “She’s…” I can’t finish the sentence, but I don’t think I need to.
Kuruk puts a meaty hand on my shoulder. “Dénzhóné once told me that memories were part of what made his gift such a burden. I always thought he meant his lack of memory. About his life before. But now…I think this might be what he was talking about. Every memory, good or bad, relived with the same freshness as the day they occurred.” He motions to the television. “Even the fondest memories can hurt.”
“I’m starting to think Lindo is fond of saps,” I joke. We both laugh and wipe our eyes.
“You might be right,” he says, and turns to the TV, waiting for the memory to replay.
Lindo, on his deathbed, looks me in the eyes with an intensity I didn’t notice at the time. “After all this time, I didn’t feel brave enough to face them head on until now. Until you. You’re the liberator the Taken have needed all along. Like Moses to the Israelites, you’ll set them free. Will you do that?”
“I will,” I say in the displayed memory.
“You don’t seem the type of man who commits to things of which you’re not capable,” Kuruk says. He might respect Lindo’s decisions, but he still doubts my ability. And rightfully so. I know I should, but whatever tweak Jacob made on my emotional state has yet to fade.
The screen shifts between memories, taking us back to the moment I clung to Jacob’s arm as he was being pulled skyward toward a UFO.
“You’ll find me,” Jacob says. “They can’t stop you now.”
“They are stopping me now,” I shout back.
“They’re just delaying the inevitable.”
I watch the view through my own eyes as I try to pull Jacob in again. “What are you doing?”
“Saving you,” Jacob says. “You can’t save us if you fall from the window.”
“Right here,” I tell Kuruk. “I felt something in me change. I felt more confident than I have any right to be.”
The memory playback continues. “I’ll find you,” I shout.
“I know,” Jacob says, and then Kuruk and I watch as the boy is pulled up toward the UFO. That’s where I kill the TV feed, wary of what else my subconscious will decide to display.
“This is when Lindo decided to help you?” Kuruk asks.
“Not exactly,” I say. “Not until after I killed one of them.”
“Killed one of who?”
I motion my head toward the north, indicating the mesa and the inhuman things that reside within. “One of the Grays. And it won’t be the last.”
41
When Kuruk lets out a resounding belly laugh, I relax. As close as the big man and Lindo might have been, they clearly didn’t share the same opinion when it comes to killing Grays. “I wish I could have seen that.”
I instruct the nanites to keep the memory of my fist penetrating the automaton’s cranium private, thinking, Don’t you dare. “It was actually pretty horrible.”
He nods, sobering a little. “They don’t usually let themselves come into contact with people not under their control. Was this before or after…” He waggles his finger at my head.
“Before, and after. Lindo had given me some protection, but they’d been disabled by an EMP.”
“Then you have encountered Aeron.”
“A few times,” I say.
Kuruk leans back in the chair. “You must have a serious constitution. Resisting telepathy is difficult without the nanites. Most people are lost before they realize someone else is in their head.”
How I resisted the Gray’s mind invasion isn’t something I want to rehash right now, so I redirect the conversation somewhere more useful. “Do you know the way in?”
“The way in?”
“To the mesa,” I say. “The Others’ base.”
“I�
�ve been living here for thirty years, right under their noses, watching the skies and observing their movements. They come and go at night, but they just ffft—appear in the sky.”
“You think they’re what, teleporting?”
“Tele— No. They’re flying dark. And...probably moving through the mountain itself.”
“Intangibility,” I say. “Yeah, that’s way more believable than teleportation.”
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, my comment would have sounded more like mockery and less like a joke. But it does make sense, both because I know the technology exists, and because despite all the amateur searching over the years, no one has found any outward sign of an entrance. Which I suppose could simply be that those who do, disappear or have their memories wiped clean. Either way, we don’t know how to get inside.
Or back out.
“Far as I know,” Kuruk says, “the only way in is to make your own door.”
“Like the Green Berets attempted in the 1960s.”
“And I think you know where that got them.” Kuruk lets out a long sigh. “Look, no one knows the resources you now have at your disposal, and understands what you can do, more than me. I’ve helped ferry more than a hundred children out of this hellhole, most of them being transported by people who made deals with those devils.”
“Trancers,” I say, and then realize that wasn’t Lindo’s term, but Reg’s. “The people the Others speak through.”
He gives a nod and then continues. “I’ve had my share of close calls, but I’ve never been caught, because I work in the shadows.”
“You sound like Lindo,” I say, and before I know what’s happening, the TV comes to life again, showing Lindo on his deathbed once more.
“After all this time,” Lindo says. “I didn’t feel brave enough to face them head on until now. Until you. You’re the liberator the Taken have needed all along. Like Moses to the Israelites, you’ll set them free. Will you do that?”
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