Chapter 12
Garth rubbed his right temple as he scanned the report on the missing skyfighter. Like the other five that had been shot down in the Lubbock sector, the craft was riddled with holes from a high-caliber machine gun.
“Whatever primitive weapon these humans, or human, are using, Yvonne, it is highly effective.” He sank into his chair and stared at his science officer, who stood before his desk.
“The weapon was a machine gun of approximately fifty caliber,” Yvonne replied. “However, it was not directly responsible for either the pilot’s or co-pilot’s death.”
She pulled a folder from beneath her arm and passed it across the desk. “Here’s the preliminary report from the medical staff. It basically says the co-pilot died from head injuries sustained in the crash, despite the bums covering fifty percent of his body.”
“And the pilot?” Garth opened the folder and glanced at it.
“The bums were responsible for his death.” Yvonne snorted, a sound that was closer to a hiss. “However, the injuries weren’t caused by the skyfighter burning.”
“Get to the point. I haven’t time for playing games.” Garth scooted to the edge of his chair and rested his arms on the desk.
“The point is that the pilot was killed and burned with one of our pistols. The co-pilot’s corpse was burned by
similar blasts. It was an attempt to make it appear that both deaths resulted from the crash,” she answered. “My guess is that their own weapons were used.” “Their own weapons?” Garth’s gaze returned to the crash report. He found a paragraph he had overlooked. Both the pilot’s and co-pilot’s side arms were missing from their holsters. “It seems that someone left out a small detail of their charade.”
“If I may make another educated guess, I would speculate that the pilot of the human aircraft was not alone in the plane.”
“Hmm.” Garth noted that the shock troopers who discovered the wreckage found no signs of human activity about either the airplane or the skyfighter. “Any specific reason for this conjecture?”
“This.” Yvonne bent down, lifted a leather bag from the floor, and placed it on the desk.
“A woman’s purse?” Garth hefted the bag and eyed it. “The shock troopers found this stuffed beneath the copilot’s seat on the downed plane,” Yvonne explained. “I think it’s easy to put one and one together and come up with the answer. The human co-pilot was a female who survived the crash, entered the skyfighter, and killed our two men. She then escaped on foot. Tracks are easy enough to erase in sand. It would have taken little effort on her part.”
Garth nodded while he upended the purse and dumped its contents on the desk. “Pens, pencils, a comb, brush, and cosmetics—all normal for a human female. But nothing with which we might identify your human copilot.”
“There’s this.” Yvonne dug into a pocket of her white lab smock and pulled out a black wallet. “This was found in the purse.”
Garth arched an eyebrow when he accepted the billfold, but made no comment. He could allow Yvonne her dramatics as long as she continued to produce results.
Opening the wallet, Garth thumbed through an assortment of credit cards and photographs. His pulse doubled! Staring at him from out of a thin plastic envelope was the human bitch who had cost him his left hand!
Fingers trembling, he slowly went through the remaining photographs. A pleased smile twisted his lips. There on a driver’s license issued by the Texas Highway Department he found the answer he sought—not only a name, but a color photograph! The family resemblance was incredible.
“I want this photograph enlarged and distributed to every pilot who flies over the sectors between Dallas and Lubbock.” He slipped the license from the wallet and handed it to Yvonne. “Most of all I want this woman, this Sheryl Lee Darcy. If your theory' is correct, she’s alone and on foot. See that she is found and brought here, Yvonne.”
“Yes, Commander.” The Houston Mother Ship’s science officer pivoted and strode from Garth’s office.
So the bitch’s offspring still lives! Garth felt the hunter stir within his breast. And soon she shall bear the child I had planned for her mother!
Chapter 13
Lightning walked across the sky. Twisted legs of living fire, actinic arcs danced on the southern horizon. As though in chain reaction, new bolts shot northward, giving birth in turn to another wave of sizzling energy until the unbridled electricity disappeared on the northern horizon.
A grinding rumble, like the sound of mountains colliding in midair, barely reached Rick Hurley’s ears before another barrage of spidery bolts lit the sky.
“Damn!” Charlie Scoggin tugged the collar of his shirt high around his neck as a moist gush of wind ripped across the plain. “We’re in for a frog strangler. No more’n half an hour away.”
Thunder rolled and the sky went blue-white, lightning illuminating a churning front of clouds that approached from the southeast. Rick squinted in an attempt to find the tops of the massive monsters. He couldn’t.
The fiery display provided just enough light to ignite his imagination. The thunderheads that filled his mind’s eye loomed upward to the very boundary of heaven itself. Another gush of wind sent a shudder quaking through the jeep. He shivered with the realization that his imagination might not be that far off target.
“Son of a bitch!” Charlie cursed again. He shook his head when another series of lightning bolts raced from horizon to horizon. “We’ve got to stop and get the top up on this thing.”
He halted the jeep. The flash of his brake lights was all the signal the convoy of pickup trucks behind him needed to grind to a standstill.
“Sheryl Lee, if you wouldn’t mind, pass the word to the others to double-check the tarps covering their cargo,” Charlie said. “Last thing we want is for that storm to ruin all we’re haulin’.”
The redhead nodded and swung out of the jeep to trot back to the line of pickups. Doors creaked open as drivers stepped down to recheck the ropes that lashed tarpaulins on top of the beds of their vehicles.
Rick’s attention turned to the task at hand, aiding Charlie as he unbundled the canvas top and stretched the accordion of metal and fabric over the jeep. Once it was in place, the two secured a series of snaps that anchored the top to the jeep’s body.
“Won’t keep all the water out when that mother of storms hits, but we’ll stay ninety percent dry,” Charlie shouted over the now howling wind. He waved Sheryl Lee back to the jeep. “Guess we can’t ask for more’n that.”
“The storm will make it harder for the Visitors,” Rick answered, climbing into the jeep.
Throughout the preceding day, he had heard the whine of sky fighters streaking through the West Texas skies. Since the journey to Dallas had begun two hours and forty miles ago, he had spotted the alien crafts on ten occasions, their daylight-bright searchlights flooding the ground below them.
He had noticed Sheryl Lee’s and Charlie’s eyes dart to the beams that sliced through the night. Although neither said anything, he knew that their thoughts were the same as his. The Visitors were looking for something, and the odds were that something stemmed from the discovery of Wanda Sue and the skyfighter Charlie had shot down.
“Might hinder the lizards; then again it might not.” Charlie helped Sheryl Lee inside, then held the canvas-flap door on the passenger side while she zipped it closed. He circled the vehicle and ducked inside, zipping his own door closed. “One thing I can tell you: that storm ain’t going to help us one damned bit. Going’s been rough enough without having rain and wind to contend with.”
Charlie understated their progress over the plains, Rick thought. Rough didn’t begin to describe the snaillike pace at which they crawled over the endless gullies and ravines that time, wind, and water cut into the land east of the Caprock. Twice the winch on the back of the jeep had been employed to pull trucks up inclines too steep for them to climb under their own power.
Four times Charlie’s route had take
n them across highways, but never along one of the ribbons of concrete and asphalt. Roads were far too dangerous for travel with so many Visitor ships around. The desire for speed gave way to self-preservation; the convoy cut its own trail across rugged, open country, a route made doubly treacherous by the fact they ran without lights.
“Give ’em a flash and let’s see how much ground we can cover ’fore the flood hits.” Charlie switched on the ignition while Rick dug a flashlight from the toolbox and gave a quick flash behind to signal the others that they were under way again.
The jeep’s fabric cover obscured most of the fireworks lighting the heavens ahead of them. Still, Rick saw ragged legs of lightning dance downward to tickle the prairie with their fiery touch. Had it not been for the rain held in those mountainous clouds, he was certain flames rather than water would be the problem confronting the caravan.
“Mother of God!” The profanity burst from Charlie’s lips. “Here it comes!”
There was no mist, no preliminary drops of tentative rain. A solid sheet of water struck the jeep, sending a quake through the vehicle’s frame.
Charlie’s left hand snaked out and found the wind-shield-wiper knob and pulled and twisted it to high
speed. The rubber blades raking against glass did little. The instant they swept away a sheet of water, another deluge washed over the windshield.
“I can barely see two feet ahead of us!” Charlie eased his foot from the gas pedal. The jeep crawled rather than rolled.
Rick couldn’t see the two feet Charlie claimed. Even pressing his forehead against the canvas door’s plastic windows did nothing to increase visibility. All he saw was rain.
“We could stop and wait until it passes,” Sheryl Lee suggested.
“That could be hours!” Charlie’s voice came like a low growl. “If we stop here, we’re sittin’ ducks for those snakes fly in’ overhead.”
“Better than drivin’ blind into a gully.” The redhead’s tone attempted to soothe the old man’s frustration. “I don’t want us gettin’ killed, not when you’ve found a way to get the supplies into Dallas.”
“I think she’s right, Charlie,” Rick added. “We can wait and see if the storm lets up.”
Charlie nodded, giving in without further protest. He tapped the brake several times to make sure that those behind saw his signal. As the jeep rolled to a stop, he lifted his arms and hooked them over the steering wheel. “We’ll give it a half hour or so.”
Rick studied the veteran fighter pilot as the older man sat there, shoulders slumped and eyes focused on the torrents that washed down the windshield. For the first time since the young Californian had seen the man drive up in the jeep while they crouched behind the trunks of bushy mesquites, Charlie Scoggin looked old.
“Another fence, Surfer Boy. Your turn.” Sheryl Lee scooted around in the jeep’s seat, smiled sweetly, and
batted her eyelashes in mock innocence before handing him the wire cutters.
“Something tells me I should have kept closer count. This five-for-you, one-for-me mathematics of yours is a bit lopsided,” Rick grumbled as he stuffed the cutters in a back pocket.
Swinging around as Charlie drew the jeep to a halt, Rick unzipped a rear opening in the vehicle’s canvas top and slid out feet first. The soles of his shoes settled on rain-soggy ground, and he stood. And got a face full of mesquite limb for his trouble.
Growling a string of profanities that would have made a seaman blush, he pushed three other bushy limbs aside and made his way around the jeep through the pelting rain. In the darkness, the storm clouds having obscured the moon’s faint light, he found the wire fence barring their progress with only a minor nick to his left thumb from one of the nasty pointed barbs.
“Damned bob wire! Should’ve kept the open range!” he growled, imitating Charlie’s grumble when they had encountered the first in a series of twenty fences three hours ago. “Bob wire! Christ! You’ve only been in this godforsaken state for two days and you’re talking like them. Bob wire—it’s barbed wire!”
He sheared through the first strand of wire and cursed again. Not only was he picking up a Texas accent, he was talking to himself. The profanities he spat when he cut the second and third strands were for life in general and the twisted quirks it had neatly provided. Quirks that jerked him away from Los Angeles and hurled him down here in the middle of nowhere, sloshing ankle deep in mud while a man who kept a World War II fighter plane in his garage led a modem wagon train across the plains.
Gathering the springy coils of wire from the ground, he dragged them safely to one side so that the jeep might proceed. Charlie didn’t stop as he passed through the severed fence. Rick had to trot after the jeep and throw himself through the back opening.
The ludicrous situation would have made a perfect plot for a Cary Grant adventure-comedy, he thought as he toweled his hair to merely wet rather than soaked on a work rag he found tossed in a comer of the back of the jeep. While his clothes remained soaked, at least water wasn’t dripping into his face.
Sheryl Lee’s decision to wait out the storm had been the correct one. After twenty minutes the wall of water slackened to a simple downpour. Moving out at an average speed of ten miles an hour, the old fighter pilot had somehow managed to keep the convoy on a generally easterly heading while avoiding the creek after creek that had raged with flood-swollen waters.
“I think 1 see stars up ahead.” Sheryl Lee leaned forward and pressed her face to the windshield. “Think this is finally clearin’?”
“Best pray that it is. We’ve got to make Palo Pinto or Parker County before sunrise,” Charlie said. “That is, if we want to find enough timber to hide these pickups under durin’ the day.”
Rick remembered the road map Charlie had shown him before the trek began. Both counties he mentioned were directly west of Fort Worth. Charlie had explained that the Brazos River cut through the two counties and that forested areas grew near the river. It was these forests, the Cross Timbers region, that would conceal the caravan from the Visitors during the day.
A splatter of water on his left hand drew the young resistance fighter’s attention to the opening he had left unzipped. Reaching for the flapping door of cloth and plastic, he groaned. A plaintive horn sounded from the line of trucks behind them.
“Sounds like one of the trucks is in trouble, son.” Charlie braked and turned to Rick. “Want to go give it a look-see?”
Rick swallowed the disgruntled reply that danced on the tip of his tongue. Swinging back out the open flap of canvas, he trotted through the rain. He found the problem three trucks beyond the fence he had just cut. A two-tone Dodge pickup rocked back and forth with its right rear wheel up to the axle in mud. There was no way the driver was going to rock the vehicle free of the entrapping mud.
Rapping on the hood as he approached the truck’s cab, Rick waited until the window rolled halfway down before saying, “We’ll have to push you out of this. Can one of you climb out and give me a hand?”
“Right with you, young feller,” Emmett Voss’ voice came from the cab’s interior darkness. “Netty, take the wheel. Gun it when I call out.”
The cab door swung open, and Emmett stepped out while his wife slid behind the wheel. Together he and Rick walked behind the truck to brace themselves at each side of the tailgate.
“On three, Netty,” the rancher called to his wife. “One . . . two . . . three!”
Rick threw back and shoulders into the task. The track’s motor raced; the pickup inched forward and abruptly rolled from the mud hole. Simultaneously, Rick’s feet flew out from under him, depositing him facedown in the mud.
A misadventure-comedy, he corrected his earlier evaluation of the eastward journey while he pulled himself from the muck and turned his face to the sky to let the still-falling rain wash away his mud mask.
Four hours after the storm struck, the clouds abruptly vanished, leaving a sky sprinkled with the brightest stars Rick had ever seen stretching over
head. The rocky, ravine-ridden terrain that had slowed the caravan’s pace to that of a turtle gradually flattened to rolling prairie. Or what had once been rolling prairie. Now most of the land through which Charlie drove was wheat fields.
At least what Texans call wheat fields, Ricky mentally grumbled. Ankle-high stalks covered the land for as far as he could see in all directions. He had seen movies and pictures of wheat fields, wind gently rippling across them so that the vegetation looked like a sea of golden brown. These stunted shafts came closer to being cultivated weeds.
“This all used to be cattle country,” Charlie said. He had gradually brought their speed up to twenty miles an hour as the terrain grew more hospitable. “Back in the late seventies a new type of wheat was tried out and it took to this semi-arid climate. Even the big ranches put a portion of their acreage in wheat. Sort of a hedge against the fluctuating cattle market.”
“With luck the open fields will cut down on the flat tires,” Sheryl Lee said, her gaze surveying what terrain was visible in the darkness.
“That would be a godsend,” Rick replied with a weary sigh.
Jagged rocks had claimed two tires while the pickups maneuvered through the ravine country. Rick tried not to think about the rest of the tires on the trucks. Tread was wishful thinking on at least five and almost ancient history on four others. Auto parts, even something as common as tires, were rare in a region where constant skyfighter patrols cut off supplies.
“We can expect fairly easy goin’ until we hit the Cross Timbers region.” Charlie twisted in his seat to stare out the plastic window at the rear of the jeep. “Only thing botherin’ me is the trail we’re cuttin’ through these fields.”
Rick’s gaze followed that of the older man. An icy shiver worked up his spine. Two highly visible ruts marked the path the jeep sliced amid the wheat stalks. Seven trucks would widen and deepen the ruts. If the airborne Visitor patrols they sighted earlier had indeed been searching for them, the trail would be a dead giveaway to their route.
V 11 - The Texas Run Page 9