Its crew remained hidden behind the canopy, and I didn’t see anyone leaning out a side window. The helicopter was the same color as the Blackhawk from yesterday, a green so dark that the machine seemed to be in shadow no matter what angle you looked at it. A sensor turret on the chin made jerky movements to lock on each of us as if taking snapshots.
The Sea Dragon roared overhead and blotted out the sun. Its shadow flashed across the ground. Rotorwash swept the dirt. I tipped my head and covered my face. When I looked back up, the helicopter was receding from us, its shadow hurdling over the ground beneath it.
Jolie brushed dust from her face and jacket. She shouted to Coyote. “What the hell was that about?”
He didn’t break stride or reply.
Jolie picked up a rock, threw it, and it ricocheted by his feet. “Hey, I’m talking to you.”
Coyote kept his pace at a relentless trot.
Jolie picked up another rock, then dropped it. “Why is he such an asshole?” She turned to me. “What do you think is going on?”
“I’m guessing Cress Tech.”
“What was the helicopter doing?”
“A survey of some kind. Didn’t you notice the strange equipment hanging out the sides of the fuselage?”
“Survey? For what?”
“Something psychic.”
“Is that a guess?”
“Pretty much.”
“Don’t know about you,” she replied, “but I don’t like risking my ass for a bunch of goddamn guesses.”
“Me either. But it seems somebody, and by that somebody I mean Uncle Sam, is paying Cress Tech buttloads of money to do psychic research here. First the towers with the psychotronic diviners, then the armed helicopter response team. The chopper that just flew by is the biggest one in the Navy inventory and keeping it in the air ain’t cheap.”
The CH-53 shrank into the distance. The appearance of the big helicopter made me consider worrisome thoughts.
Human awareness of the psychic world was limited to glimpses revealed in dreams, synchronicity, premonitions, and out-of-body experiences—all fleeting and unreliable. Say the word psychic and most would reply with charlatan. Psychic phenomena remained as mysterious to us as electricity was to the Romans. But if the government unlocked the secrets of the psychic world, what then?
“You’re being quiet,” Jolie said. “What’s on your mind?”
“Nothing good. Since I know humans all too well, I’m gonna say the military helicopters and heavily-armed guards pretty much cinches that the government takes the psychic world real seriously. Harnessing psychic power could be much like the invention of the electric light bulb, radar, computers. Once humans figure out how to access and control the psychic world, then the bean counters and lawyers will get to work.”
“That’s fucking scary,” Jolie replied. “If that happens, then when you dream, expect to pay for access to the psychic plane like paying for an Internet connection, plus all the related bullshit. Paranormal pop-up ads. Subconscious spam.”
She shaded her brow and scanned the horizon. A Cress Tech tower materialized in the distant haze.
“Remember Phaedra’s sketches?” Jolie asked. We had found the drawings in her home soon after she’d disappeared. “She had drawn the psychic plane as an enormous room lined with doors. She could see and project her thoughts through those doors. What if it’s possible for someone to physically travel through them?”
I answered, “Coyote did a lot of strange disappearing acts when we were together in Los Angeles. One time he opened my car door and dropped into traffic. I was sure he was gonna get trampled by the cars behind me, but when I looked back, he was gone.”
Jolie turned towards me. Her eyebrows arched over the tops of her sunglasses.
“Later,” I continued, “renegade vampires blew up Coyote’s pickup—hoping to get me—and instead incinerated him. Or so I thought until three days later, when he showed up in the back seat of my car, famished and covered in soot. After mooching a meal and beer, he disappeared again.” I snapped my fingers. “Just like that. I had looked away for a second and then he was gone, like he’d never been there. Nothing left except for discarded burrito wrappers and empty bottles of Löwenbräu.”
“And don’t forget Marina’s disappearing act,” Jolie added. She stared at Coyote. “So it’s no wild leap to say they know how to transport through the psychic plane?”
I knew he was listening. I talked loud to engage him. “What worries me is what if the government also finds out how? I don’t know much about psychic powers, but what I’ve seen scares the hell out of me.”
“No shit,” Jolie added. “Don’t forget Phaedra’s mind blasts.”
Coyote stopped abruptly, faced us, and scowled. “You two pendejos sure talk a lot. And you’re forgetting about another bunch of culeros fucking things up.”
Jolie and I halted. Who?
“The aliens.” Coyote scratched his crotch and resumed his run. “And you’re right about me being in a hurry. Vatos, it’s a race against catastrophe.”
Jolie and I stared at Coyote as he trotted away. We were now close enough to Fajada Butte that against the horizon, the rocky formation looked as big as my fist.
I thought back to what he had just said. Aliens.
Great.
Or course I knew that at some point our operation involved the aliens. After all, they held Carmen captive.
But the whole cabronada—the aliens, Phaedra, and Cress Tech—pivoted around the psychic world.
About the only thing I could piece together—from my experience with Coyote’s Houdini hocus-pocus—was that access to the psychic world might open shortcuts between points in deep space.
We reached the narrow dirt road we’d been on yesterday. Thin clouds of dust blossomed to the south and to the northeast. I wondered—but not too much—about what had happened to the Texan and his Porsche sedan.
We came across a barbed-wire fence with a placard from the National Park Service that warned against trespassing onto Fajada Butte. Coyote levitated to scale the wires like he was walking up steps and dropped to the other side. Jolie bent her knees and sprang over the fence as if her legs were super Pogo sticks. I followed Coyote’s less athletic example.
He glanced to the sun, put his hand up as if to gauge the sun’s height above the horizon, and then checked his Rolex. He started running with Jolie and me at his heels.
A quarter of a mile farther, we scrambled down Chaco Wash and up the other side. Fajada Butte loomed before us, imposing and portending mystic secrets, like another Mt. Sinai.
In Spanish, fajada means banded, and the eroded columns of stone that made up the face of the butte resembled a tall band or a girdle. A sloped skirt of dirt and rock circled its base. A lop-sided dome with a flat-topped crown topped the summit.
“How tall do you think?”
Jolie raised her sunglasses and squinted. “At least three hundred feet.”
Coyote read his watch and ran faster. Jolie and I sped behind him.
We reached the bottom of the rocky slope and veered to the right around the southern side of the butte. Coyote picked up the pace. Normally his attention drifted like a leaf in the breeze, and it disturbed me to see him so focused. We were obviously on a schedule, but for what?
“Hey Coyote,” Jolie blurted, “what exactly is the hur—”
I elbowed her and shook my head. Don’t bother.
Coyote bounded over the rough ground and talus with the agility of his namesake. He paused at the bottom of the butte only long enough to again read his watch, then turned his ball cap around and shimmied up a crack between the hundred-foot-tall sandstone columns like a caffeinated lizard.
After the long hike I was ready for a break, but I wasn’t going to let a wizened five-hundred-year-old vampire put me to shame.
Something smacked my head. It was Jolie using me for a springboard to leap high into the gap between another set of columns.
“C’mon
, Felix. You’re moving like an old man.”
For humans, a free climb between the eroded sandstone columns would’ve been very dangerous but thanks to vampire levitation, we easily skittered upward.
Once above the columns, we scrambled up the rocky, rounded slope to a tall step of sandstone, climbed that and arrived at the base of the butte’s crown. We were treated to a spectacular high-rise view of the basin—a sprawling blanket of beiges with stripes of olive and viridian—with Chaco Wash unwinding to the northwest and south, and the mesas to the east and north marbled in reds and grays. At the southern end of the wash where it curved around a mesa, the ancient Chaco Ruins looked like tiny, broken rectangles made of dirt.
Coyote didn’t slow for sightseeing. He scampered toward the crown to approach three sandstone slabs set parallel and edgewise against the broad face of the rock wall. He cut another nervous glance to his Rolex.
He ducked into a shaded gap between the slabs and the wall, pointed to me, and beckoned with a quick pump of his arm.
I crouched beside him, Jolie looking over my shoulder.
Two spiral petroglyphs had been carved into the rock wall at waist level. The small one on the left was maybe four or five inches in diameter. The other was larger, at least a foot wide. Both carvings were well eroded and projected a prehistoric eeriness. A vertical blade of sunlight shining between the slabs sliced across the right side of the larger spiral.
Coyote pressed his hand against the center of the larger petroglyph and skipped his fingertips across the spiral grooves as if counting. He spread his hand and held it under the sliver of light, his palm flat against the rock. He looked at his watch and ordered, “Quickly, vato. Put your left hand on mine.”
Confused by what he was doing, I hesitated. “What?”
He slapped his hand against the petroglyph. The light crept across the knuckle of his index finger. “Do it now!”
Extending my arm, I leaned over him and placed my hand over his.
He looked at Jolie. “We’ll be right back.”
Back from where?
The sliver of light draped across the back of my hand and warmed my skin. The light grew brighter, brighter still, and I blinked.
Coyote pushed up from under me. Cars honked all around us.
We were at the corner of a busy street and an interstate on-ramp.
***
Chapter Nine
I stood straight, paralyzed in disbelief. One second I was in New Mexico, on top of Fajada Butte. And the next …
I took in the landmarks. An auto body shop straight ahead. A plain, rather ratty, two-story apartment building across the street. Behind me, the signs on the closest lamppost said: Van Nuys Boulevard, and Westbound Ramp for the Golden State Highway.
Pacoima, California.
California was where I had first met Coyote, in a parking garage not far from here. For an instant, it felt like the years between then and now had gone poof. An astonished glance at my watch told me that only minutes had passed since I last checked the time.
Coyote dropped his sunglasses into a chest pocket of his denim jacket. His tapetum lucidum glowed a supernatural red. I was about to offer a spare set of contacts to hide his vampire eyes when his irises miraculously dulled to a very human dark brown. His ball cap was still turned backwards and he rotated the cap by the bill to shade his face. “You hungry, vato?”
“Did you move us through the psychic plane?”
“Explanations later. Right now, let’s eat. Vamanos.” He pimp-strolled up the sidewalk past the jumbled mosaic of commercial signs and storefronts that lined Van Nuys.
I took a hesitant step forward, still not convinced that the world around me was real. A low-rider blasting the percussive beats of reggaeton cruised by. The air reeked of car exhaust and warm asphalt. If I was imagining this, it was a pretty damn good dream. I eased into my stride and caught up with Coyote.
We passed a Catholic Church surrounded by an acre of parking lot. Then hoofed past mom-and-pop restaurants, nail salons, cell phone stores, fast food joints—the usual mishmash of American suburban sprawl.
At Laurel Canyon, we hustled across the street toward a carneceria-liquor store. A turquoise-colored awning shaded the front door, and an electronic buzzer announced our entrance. The air carried the heavy, humid smell of raw meat. Coyote headed through an aisle with shelves of canned beans and chili on the left and cases of beer on the right. A row of glass cases packed with ice and slabs of beef and pork lined the back wall. I stopped to replace my sunglasses with contacts.
A heavy-set man with a Pancho Villa mustache stood behind a case. He did a double take at our approach and hustled around the case toward us, his thick mitts wiping stains on a butcher’s apron. “Oye, Coyote. Long time, compa.”
When was Coyote last here?
“Yeah, I’ve been busy,” he said.
The butcher lifted an eyebrow.
“Tu sabes,” Coyote explained, “going here, going there. Gathering material for my novel.”
Laughter rumbled in my gut, and I strained so hard to keep from guffawing that my belly hurt.
Coyote shot me an especially dirty stink-eye. He then introduced me to the butcher—Gustavo.
“Here for lunch, Coyote?” he asked.
Coyote smiled. “Símon.”
Gustavo backed up a step and plucked a receipt tacked to a corkboard. “First, you gotta settle up your tab. Nineteen fifty.”
Coyote pointed to me. Having resigned myself to the fact that I’d become his personal ATM, I reached for my wallet. He asked, “How about two cups of boar’s blood and six pork tamales?”
“The total then is thirty one bolas,” Gustavo replied.
I counted out the bills. Gustavo took the money and disappeared through a swinging door into a back room. He returned with fresh tamales in a Ziploc bag and two Styrofoam cups with plastic lids.
Coyote took the receipt and mumbled something about “for tax purposes.”
Gustavo bid us goodbye and tended to the customers queuing behind us. On the way out I bought a six-pack of ice-cold Carta Blanca.
I found a table around back between the service entrance and the Dumpster. After upending a couple of plastic crates to use as chairs, I brushed cigarette butts off the table. Couldn’t say much about the ambience but we had privacy. Coyote pulled the tamales out of the Ziploc and stacked them on top. I shared the opener on my scout knife so we could crack open our beers.
“Isn’t Gustavo suspicious that you’re a vampire? Who else would order blood?”
“Nah. He just thinks I’m a little weird. Imagine that.” Coyote guzzled a Carta Blanca.
“Start explaining how we got here.” I removed the lid from my Styrofoam cup. Steam curled from the warm blood. I peeled the cornhusk from a tamale and dipped it in the blood. “You could’ve told me we were about to teleport.”
“Don’t tell, show. Right, ese?” A grin wormed onto his face. “That’s something I’ve learned from writing my novel. Besides, if I would’ve told you, you wouldn’t have believed me or understood how going from there to here works.” While Coyote talked, he was chomping on his second tamale and starting another beer.
“I still don’t understand, but I believe.”
Coyote wiped blood from his chin and licked his fingers. His second beer was already a dead soldier. “Then we’re halfway there.”
“So you understand how this teleportation works?”
“Claro. Remember when you and Jolie were discussing Phaedra’s drawing?” So Coyote had been eavesdropping.
I replied, “The one of a giant room lined with doors?”
He dunked a third tamale into his cup of blood. “What we just did was go from one door, across the psychic plane, and through another door.”
I shucked my second tamale. “How did you know where we were going?”
He upended beer number three and chugged. He put the bottle down and burped. “I used the Sun Dagger.”
“
The petroglyph we put our hands on? That’s its name?”
“Now. It’s been called lots of things by lots of different people.” Coyote returned to chewing, drinking, and swallowing.
“Then that petroglyph was a portal?”
Coyote shoved the last of his third tamale into his mouth. He chewed as he talked. “Portal?” He chuckled and spit bits of bloody tamale. “You’ve been watching too many scientific fiction movies.”
“Then what would you call it?”
Coyote tipped the Carta Blanca to his lips and greedily emptied it. He set the bottle aside and grabbed a fourth and held it in his hands, his eyes focused faraway. He brought his attention to the present and shrugged. “Portal, I guess. It opens into a tunnel, ese. A tunnel that’s always shifting through space. One end is on top of Fajada Butte and the other moving around.”
I imagined the tunnels as wormholes, a darling topic of quantum mechanics and science fiction. I recalled that Coyote had kept referring to his watch before using the Sun Dagger. “And depending on the time, the other end opens to a different location?”
“You got it, bro.” Coyote reached for the fifth Carta Blanca.
I snatched the bottle for myself. Since I had paid for lunch, I deserved at least two beers and two tamales to his four of each. “How do you know the schedule?”
“I got it figured out.”
“And you’ll show me?”
“In time.”
“Why didn’t we bring Jolie?”
“You know how it is when you bring a ruca along. I wanted this to be just us vatos.” Coyote leaned into his chair and unbuckled his belt. He stuck both hands inside his pants and scratched. “You bring a girl and you gotta act Miss Manners and shit.” He fastened his belt and sniffed his fingers. He grasped the last bit of my tamale. “You gonna eat this?”
“Not anymore.”
He dipped the tamale into my cup of blood.
“You can have that too.”
Coyote smiled. “Thanks, vato. You’re a decent camarada.” He munched the last of the tamale and slurped the remaining blood from both cups.
I cleared the table and pitched our trash into the Dumpster. Coyote started for the sidewalk.
Rescue From Planet Pleasure Page 6