Desert Assassin

by Don Drewniak

  “Yes, the Army.”

  “Finally, and I’m sorry to bring this up, but when is your landlord due to make his next visit?”

  “Six o’clock tomorrow night.”

  “Perfect,” he thought.

  He then placed a second call. “General, this is Bill.”

  “Goddammit, where the hell have you been?”

  “The Sudan and Uganda.”

  “If you needed to kick ass, why didn’t you come back?”

  “The pay was better and you damn well know where I was.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Williams laughed.

  “What do you need?” asked the General.

  What he asked for was delivered before the appointment with the lawyer.

  A few minutes into the meeting, Williams knew the lawyer could be trusted. All that was needed to effect the transfer of the property was quickly put into motion.

  Looking at Landry, he said, “You now have, if you want it, a job at Kirtland starting next Wednesday. It’s entry level, but it should provide you with more than enough to live on, and it comes with full medical coverage.”

  Obviously stunned, she asked, “A job at the base? Why are you doing this?”

  Williams pushed back against his chair, clasped his hands behind his head and paused. “Mary, I’ve just returned after spending two years in the Sudan and Uganda. I witnessed atrocities that are beyond belief, including genocide on a scale that defies imagination. Women and children raped and slaughtered. I don’t want to see innocent people suffering here.”

  Both Landry and the lawyer remained silent.

  What Williams did not reveal was that he most often had been powerless to do anything about the atrocities. He was now in a position to help a woman living in despair through no fault of her own. If he failed to help her, he knew he would live to regret it.

  After a full minute passed, he turned to the lawyer and said, “I’m sure Mr. Marchand will make all the necessary arrangements to find you a decent place to live near public transportation to the base. Isn’t that right, Mr. Marchand?”

  Understanding that Williams had the power to get Landry into Kirtland Air Force Base in what had to have been a matter of hours, he knew what his only answer had to be. “Of course,” he said.

  “Mary, is this satisfactory to you?” asked Williams.

  When finally able to speak, she simply said, “Yes.”

  Noting that she was on the verge of tears, Williams asked her to give him a few minutes alone with Marchand. As soon as she left the room, he placed an envelope on the lawyer’s desk and said, “I believe you will find this will more than cover all your expenses and fees. Help her to open up both a checking account and a savings account at the credit union on the base. Secure her fifteen thousand. There is an extra thousand in the envelope for Mary to use to get herself ready for Kirtland. Bill me if it’s not enough. You will receive a fax tomorrow which will detail everything you will need to know to get her processed into the base. I will call both of you next week. Thank you for your cooperation and your expertise.”

  Williams stood up, shook hands with Marchand and left the room.

  Mary was standing by the secretary’s desk in the next room. He walked up to her and said, “Marchand will handle everything. I will call you tonight to make sure you are okay with all of this, and I will check with you after your first day of work.” He gave her a brief hug and walked out of the office.

  Williams was standing inside of Mary’s room at quarter to six later that day. The door was locked. There were four pieces of junk furniture in the room – a bed, wooden chair, nightstand and three drawer bureau. The faded gray painted walls were chipped in numerous places, while the ceiling was water stained in the two front corners. Everything in the bathroom belonged in a junk yard. He tried not to think about the existence she endured while living there.

  Shortly after six, he heard footsteps outside the door and watched the door handle turn. A loud knock followed. He slowly walked to the door, opened it, stepped out and grabbed the landlord by the neck with his left hand and pulled him into the room.

  His victim was well less than six feet, thin and in his fifties. He had no chance against his attacker. Williams released his grip and slammed his right fist into the landlord’s stomach. As he started to fall, Williams once again grabbed him by the neck while delivering a crushing right hand which shattered his victim’s nose. Blood spurted out in all directions. Unconscious, the predator dropped to the floor.

  After pulling a wallet and a set of keys out of the landlord’s pockets, he left the room, closed the door and walked slowly toward his SUV. Two teenagers, wearing baggy pants, expensive looking sneakers and showing heavily tattooed arms, were standing at the far end of the building. Williams stopped, turned and faced them. In plain sight, he pulled out what proved to be over six hundred in cash from the wallet along with everything except the credit cards. After stuffing what he pulled from the wallet into a pocket, he walked slowly toward the two would be thugs, holding the wallet shoulder high in his left hand. He stopped fifty feet away and pressed the unlock button on the landlord’s car remote. As Williams knew would happen, lights flashed on and off on a nearby Lincoln. He tossed both the keys and the wallet in the direction of the teenagers, turned around and walked back to his Pathfinder.

  Seated in the SUV, he looked at a sprinkling of blood stains on his shirt. “Dammit, Williams, you were sloppy,” he said quietly. There was no way he could imagine the circumstances in which he would next find himself spattered with blood.

  After a change of clothing at the hotel, he called Mary and asked her to meet him in the lobby. She in turn asked if he could give her ten minutes. When she came to the lobby, Williams was pleased to see that she was dressed in new clothes. She tried to speak, but it proved to be impossible. He put his right index finger over his lips, handed her an envelope and said, “This is a refund from the landlord. Enjoy Kirtland.” He hugged her and said, “Good-bye.” She squeezed his two hands.

  Williams checked out of the hotel the next morning, visited several stores and then headed toward his new home. After reaching the property and unloading his SUV, he decided to visit a diner located several miles to the south. Having entered New Mexico after passing through El Paso, he had seen the uniquely named diner shortly before stumbling upon what was to become his new home.

  Twelve minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot of Killer Two’s Diner for the first time. It was two in the afternoon. The diner was empty. He walked in and proceeded to slowly check out all the memorabilia. After sitting down at the counter, he called out, “Where’s Killer Two?”

  The big man stepped out of the kitchen, walked up to the counter and asked in return, “Who wants to know?”

  Williams stood up, extended his right hand and said, “You ever hear about Kowalski’s trip to Japan with Haystacks Calhoun?”

  Killer Two all but screamed, “You know about the mailbag?”

  Williams nodded.

  The two men proceeded to recount what they had heard about the infamous mailbag episode. While the details were somewhat different, the endings of both versions were the same.

  According to legend, Kowalski and Calhoun had traveled with nine other wrestlers by plane to Japan in the early 1960s. The plane flew from Los Angeles to Hawaii and then from Hawaii to Japan where the wrestlers were scheduled to put on a number of exhibitions.

  Calhoun, at a reputed 601 pounds, was a prodigious eater and supposedly had bowel movements which were few and far between. However, when he did go, he made up for lost time. During the second leg, he needed to take care of business. Unfortunately, he couldn’t fit in the lone lavatory at the rear of the plane.

  The need became an emergency. One of the wrestlers dumped the contents out of a mailbag which was located in the galley. The galley was in the center of the passenger section with openings on both sides. Calhoun went into the galley to use the mailbag, while two wrestlers held
up blankets covering the openings as best they could.

  Minutes passed and then a series of loud noises, almost explosions, could be heard emanating from the galley. The two guardians tried to hold their positions, but gave up after a valiant effort. Dropping the blankets, they raced to the back of the plane.

  True, half-true or false, it didn’t matter. Williams and Killer Two laughed to tears after comparing versions of the legendary flight. Finally composing himself, Killer Two said, “Whatever you want, it’s on the house.”

  Not wanting to take advantage of his new found friend, Williams settled for a hamburger and black coffee. While he was eating, Killer Two sauntered over to the counter. “You know how Calhoun once beat Killer by cheating?”

  “No,” said Williams as he prepared himself for more entertainment.

  “Killer used to drive between most matches and always had a tennis ball with him. He’d steer the car with one hand and squeeze the ball with the other one. He would switch hands back and forth. After doing this for a few months, he developed a super strong grip. This is how he invented the claw hold. Mainly he’d jam his thumb in to the stomach of his opponent causing big time pain. “Once he became famous for using the claw hold, he began to be asked if it would work on Haystacks given the amount of fat protecting his stomach. When the two were matched up, Killer got Haystacks on his back in the center of the ring. Getting on his knees, he dug his thumb into the blubber so hard that he started to scream.”

  “Who, Calhoun?”

  “No, no, Killer. Finally, he pressed so hard that Haystacks passed gas. The smell was so bad that Killer almost passed out. Haystacks rolled over and pinned him.”

  When Williams stopped laughing, Killer Two said, “How about some pie for desert?”

  Williams thought about it and replied, “I think I’ll pass on it.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  HAVING RETURNED HOME FROM HIS TRIP to buy the Geiger counter, Williams turned his attention to the photos. He uploaded them to his laptop and began viewing the meteorite. If nothing else, the close to spherical shape made it a most unusual find. There were no meteorites in the photos he had looked at online that were close to being round. All were irregular in shape.

  There was more. Several of the zoom shots showed what appeared to be a thin, vertical five to six-inch crack. There was a small spot at the bottom of the crack which didn’t appear to be part of the meteorite.

  It had been a long day. After completing the examination of the photos, he went to bed earlier than usual and without the customary Merlot/doo-wop enhanced stay on the porch.

  He woke up early the next morning. Following a shower and breakfast, Williams added a wooden box to the contents of the jeep. If the Geiger counter showed the meteorite not to be radioactive, Williams planned to bring it back to his garage.

  Although he was trained to keep his emotions in check at all times, he could not help but feel a rush of excitement as he drove back to the meteorite. Having read that only one meteorite, found in Japan, was known to have any measurable radioactivity, he knew the chances of this one being dangerously radioactive were almost nil. Nevertheless, his years in the military demanded he take no chances when dealing with something out of his sphere of expertise. He walked slowly from the jeep with Geiger counter in hand to the meteorite. Nothing. “Good,” thought Williams.

  Turning his attention to the spot, he was uncharacteristically startled. It was still quite small, but was visibly larger than what the photos showed it to be a day earlier. Beyond that, it appeared to be a very thick, dark red liquid which was imperceptibly leaking from the base of the crack.

  He sat in the sand no more than two feet from the meteorite and stared. As the coming days would confirm, he fortunately resisted the temptation to touch the spot. Bringing the meteorite back to the garage was no longer a consideration. Williams continued to focus on the spot for nearly two hours, primarily to see if he could detect any expansion or movement. He didn’t. However, several times he had an eerie feeling that the spot was aware of his presence.

  Four days passed with Williams making early morning, noon and late afternoon visits to the meteorite. The spot continued to expand at an agonizingly slow pace. Most intriguing was that rather than dropping directly down into the surrounding sand which was three inches below the bottom of the crack, the spot retained a near perfect coin shape, seemingly clinging to the meteorite. When it finally reached the sand, it kept the circular shape as it began to spread on the surface.

  On the morning after the sixth day following the discovery of the meteorite, the spot was approximately seven inches in diameter, no more than a quarter inch thick and the top of it had pulled away from the bottom of the crack. No more of the liquid – if that was what it was – could be seen oozing. No longer a spot, two days later what was best described as being a disk was situated entirely on the sand surrounding the meteorite and was an inch removed from it. Williams was now convinced he was dealing with a life form.

  Once the disk began moving on the sand, Williams increasingly began to wonder whether he should attempt to destroy it. To do so, however, would be to destroy what might be one of the greatest discoveries of all time. It was at this time that he also began to think about contacting his former girlfriend, Alice Fay Henderson, and the General.

  Two more days passed. The disk was several feet removed from the meteorite and headed directly toward the nearest vegetation, a clump of desert grass no more than two feet away.

  When he returned to the house that morning, Williams found on the front steps what he had been waiting to be delivered, a package containing a camcorder with an advertised battery life of twelve hours. He raced back to the disk, set the camcorder four feet from it and hit the record button.

  Instead of afternoon repair work, he opted to put himself through a longer than usual two hour workout. Following the workout, he showered and then searched the internet to read as much as he could about exobiology. That occupied him until late afternoon when he retrieved the camcorder. The disk had closed the gap by an additional six inches and appeared poised to reach the grass the next day.

  The evening was spent watching the video taken by the camcorder and trying the figure out how the disk, or “Thing” as he began to think of it, managed to move. He conjured up the name remembering having once watched on a late-night television show the 1951 science fiction film, The Thing from Another World, which came to be known simply as The Thing.

  It was back to the meteorite and Thing shortly after dawn. He wasn’t surprised to see it had picked up speed during the night and was only four inches away from the clump of grass. The grass occupied about a four square foot area. He set up the camcorder and waited. Thing reached the grass two hours later.

  Williams, who prided himself on being ready for any eventuality in any situation, was totally unprepared for happened next. Initially, Thing slowly rolled over a few blades of grass, flattening them in the process. It stopped. The small section of grass disappeared. Thing seemed to swell slightly. Then it suddenly picked up speed, as if energized by the grass. Within ten minutes, all the grass had been flattened and had vanished in the process, seemingly ingested by Thing which swelled to the shape of a dome close to five inches in height. It stopped with nothing appearing to happen for the next hour.

  Thing continued to remain motionless. Williams left the camcorder running and went back to the house. He returned twice, and both times found that Thing hadn’t moved. With the sun about to set behind the distant mountains, he gathered up the camcorder and returned home for the night.

  Needing to decompress after what he had witnessed during the day, Williams spent close to three hours slowly sipping Merlot and listening to doo-wop. Trying to analyze what was happening and to figure out a course of action, he speculated as to what might happen if Thing encountered a small animal, an insect or a large arachnid such as a tarantula or an emperor scorpion similar to one he had tangled with in Africa. Instinctively, he
knew what the result would be.

  Questions by the dozens flashed into his consciousness. What the hell was it? Where did it come from? How did it survive what must have been thousands, millions or even billions of years trapped in what was then a meteoroid? Did it possess intelligence? Of what was it composed? Left unchecked, how big could it get? On and on came the questions. With them came no answers.

  Williams didn’t know whether he was relieved or disappointed the next morning when he found that Thing hadn’t moved during the night. He set up the camcorder, watched for a few minutes and then left as it remained stationary. Three trips later, including one at dusk, nothing had changed.

  “Perhaps,” he briefly thought, “the grass somehow poisoned Thing.” He quickly dismissed the thought. He wondered what would happen if he poked Thing with a stick, but decided that was not a good idea.

  Back at the house, Williams put together a tuna salad for dinner and then spent his porch time once again trying to make sense of what was happening.

  Thing began to flatten slowly three days later. When it had finished, it was over nine inches in diameter with only a slight increase in thickness. Looking at the transformation, Williams pondered whether Thing’s flattened shape was its natural one or whether it was caused by Earth’s gravity. It certainly did not seem to be an efficient one with respect to travel. If its species, if indeed there was one, existed on another planet, chances were that the planet’s gravity was much less than that of Earth. But, then again, if it had hundreds of tiny legs, perhaps the shape was well suited to its survival there – and possibly on Earth. Also, what was transpiring within it while in the dome shape? Obviously, it used the grass to increase its size, but what else?

  Nearly forty minutes after it had fully re-flattened, it began moving in the direction of another clump of grass about four feet away. It was also the nearest vegetation. Williams decided it was time to act. He drove back to the house and returned with a four-foot long two-by-four and placed it directly in Thing’s path two feet from the grass. As soon as he did so, Thing stopped. Ten minutes later, it started up again, but at an angle which would allow it to go around the right side of the barricade. Williams was impressed not only by the change in direction, but the increase in Thing’s speed. No longer imperceptible, it was moving along as would the slowest of snails.