“I’ll miss you so much.” Blossom wept as they separated. “Too bad it had to end this way. You were the best ever. The next time I rub one out, it’ll be for you.”
I winced and blinked hard to get that image out of my head.
“I won’t forget you either,” Carmen replied. She started out. “Adios.”
Blossom stood aside. “Au revoir.”
We entered the passageway. The door behind us closed. We followed the lights to the cargo compartment. At our approach, the ramp lowered.
Fresh air and the aroma of sage washed over us. We proceeded down the ramp.
My kundalini noir grew warm from a comforting flush of energy. My aura sizzled, my fangs extended, and my arms flexed from the surge of rejuvenated power. Carmen and Jolie’s auras burned bright as mine, and I caught them examining their hands as they clenched and unclenched their fists. Felt good to be home.
At the bottom of the ramp and when we stepped outside the saucer’s cloaking shield and onto terra firma, the saucer disappeared from view as quick as the snap of my fingers. I slowed my steps, cognizant of the sand crunching beneath my boots. My kundalini noir melted a bit, the way my heart did (before I was undead) when first returning home from my army training—basic, advanced, and airborne. After months of suffering through heat, humidity, cold, fatigue, and the nonstop attentions of inventively cruel NCOs, I had welcomed the familiar embrace of home. Jolie and I had survived an odyssey through a world as fantastic as anything from the Land of Oz.
I pulled my cell phone and my watch from my jacket pockets. The phone was dead, but the second hand on my watch jumped to life. It read nine twenty-three, which I knew was way off. I jammed the phone and watch back into a pocket.
The hairs on my arms suddenly rose on end. Carmen and Jolie’s hair fluffed. A hum started behind us, and we halted and turned in place to watch the saucer leave.
But of course, it remained invisible. Regardless, we all waved—seemed the appropriate thing to do. The saucer beeped back.
Another wave of static electricity prickled our skin. The air gusted as the saucer passed unseen overhead. Then my hair flattened and my skin and muscles relaxed.
“Now what?” Jolie asked.
“We head to Coyote’s,” I answered.
We continued to the top of the rise. Carmen stopped suddenly. She remained still. I wanted to ask what was the matter but I got the sense she didn’t want to talk so I kept quiet and waited for her lead.
From the apex of the hill and looking south we could see the chaotic glow of Farmington, brilliant under an umbrella of stars. Random lights from scattered farmhouses punctuated the gloomy landscape. Closer in, tiny red auras quivered in the scattered weeds, then darted away; rabbits and mice scampering for safety.
Carmen shot a glance in their direction. She inhaled deeply, closed her eyes and rubbed her face. Her aura faded to a dull orange, spotted with red. “I’ve been gone so long and so many terrible things have happened to me. I was kidnapped by the aliens and held as a slave. I’ve seen so many chalices commit suicide or murdered. Moots, poor thing, was only trying to save her people.”
“But she had to die,” Jolie said, “or we wouldn’t have escaped.”
“I know,” Carmen replied. “Our survival depended on so much treachery.” Her voice trailed off. Second by second her aura brightened until it became a fiery orange. She started walking down the hill. “But the show must go on.”
We broke into a fast walk, then a trot. We traversed the rising and falling ground until we reached a second rise overlooking the state highway. Pairs of headlights shuttled along the lonely north-south road. Though none of us said it, we all had the same idea. No way we were walking back to Coyote’s place, not when we could ride.
After cresting the rise, we followed the low ground to the highway. We paused in a gully. Jolie shed her jacket and pistol harness and handed them to me. She kept one of her .45s and tucked it into the back of her jeans.
She and Carmen climbed out from the gully and onto the highway shoulder. When headlights approached from the north, the two tossed their hair. Carmen arched her back to emphasize her chest while Jolie cocked her hip to show off her world-class nalgas.
I stayed in shadow, my revolver at the ready.
The vehicle slowed and parked on the shoulder. The headlamps of an older model pickup dazzled around the curvy silhouettes of two hot vampires.
If the driver thought he was about to score, he was in for a surprise.
***
Chapter Forty
Carmen and Jolie greeted the driver of the truck with their most syrupy we-luv-you-long-time voices. They advanced toward him and got lost in the dazzle of the headlights.
A red halo rippled from the cab. They had zapped the driver good. A door clicked open, springs creaked, the bed gate clanked, then was slammed closed. A door shut. After that I didn’t hear anything except for the rattle of the idling truck engine.
The horn blared and Jolie yelled, “Felix, get your lazy ass over here.”
I scrambled out of the gully. The passenger door of the 70’s model Jimmy was propped open. Jolie was behind the steering wheel, Carmen in the middle of the bench seat, the long gearshift bouncing from side-to-side and knocking against her knees. I slid onto the threadbare blanket covering the seat. A pine tree air freshener dangled and danced beneath the rearview mirror.
“Where’s the driver?” I asked.
Carmen wiped droplets of blood from her lips and winged a thumb out the back window to the bed. “After a steady diet of the same four chalices, he was a nice change. Been a long time since I’ve had Southwestern.”
Her victim lay heaped under a tarp. His aura stewed on a low burn of post-orgasmic contentment, courtesy of her endorphins.
I crowded against Carmen and rested Jolie’s jacket and pistol harness on my lap. Jolie had tucked her .45 between her legs. I was reaching for the door when she released the clutch and stomped on the gas. The Jimmy lurched forward and gained speed, shaking the entire time like it was held together with duct tape and wire. We drove with the windows open because the interior smelled like the musty bed in a cheap motel. Riding in this junker brought a sense of déjà vu. The first time I had met Coyote he drove a similar jalopy pickup so it was fitting that I was heading to see him in this beater.
Carmen turned on the radio and twisted the tuning dial to sample the slim pickings this early morning: ¡Canción Mexicana!, evangelists hyperventilating about the End Times, back-to-back infomercials promising a fortune in no-money-down real estate. She settled on a forgotten favorite, Coast-to-Coast AM. I was hoping this would be a broadcast about alien abductions, vampires—something suitably paranormal and known to me. The guest was instead some weirdo yapping about time travel and his involvement in a secret government project (naturally) where he had been teleported back to Ancient Egypt. He sounded convincing enough until he argued that the pyramids were actually built using robots from Atlantis. When he mentioned that “fact,” Jolie and Carmen exchanged a look that said could be.
The truck clattered and clacked through Farmington. We needed gas and stopped at an all-night convenience store south of town. After all we’d gone through—the psychic jump to D-Galtha, surviving the Nancharm, escaping in Blossom’s flying saucer—the experience of using a credit card to pay for gas jolted me with its mundaneness, like I’d never left. I topped off the tank in gratitude to the driver. Not that he cared, as he floated somewhere in happy land.
Jolie coaxed the truck to the highway.
Now that we were on Earth, we had our superpowers back … and our vulnerabilities. I checked the time stamp on the gas receipt—3:28 a.m.—and set my watch. None of us wore sunblock, and if we were caught in the open at dawn, we’d fry like chiles rellenos. I mentioned this and added my reassurance. “Worst case scenario aside, we should be at Coyote’s place well before sun up.”
Red and blue lights flashed ahead. A tremor of worry radiated through t
he cab.
“You were saying something about worst case scenario?” Jolie quipped.
“Let’s not wet our pants,” I replied. “The lights could be a police cruiser pulling someone over—”
“Or something else,” Jolie shot back. “Phaedra?”
Carmen remained still and closed her eyes. “Not her.”
The closer we got, the pulsing glow grew and grew to reveal not one set of emergency lights, but several.
Jolie took her foot off the gas and engaged the clutch. “I don’t like this. Should I turn around?”
They would’ve seen our headlights approaching for miles. “Too late now,” I answered. “If we turn around, we’ll draw more attention to ourselves.”
Things had been going so smoothly. Our auras sizzled with increasing apprehension.
Carmen turned the radio off. She placed her hand on the dashboard and stared at the lights.
“What about the guy in the back?” I gestured to the truck bed.
“We’ll wing it,” Carmen answered.
A pair of SUVs with Border Patrol markings blocked the highway. Traffic cones funneled the road into a single lane between the cruisers. Two military-style Humvees were parked parallel on the shoulder. Four men stood outside the funnel of cones, their bodies shimmering from the red and blue lights. Our headlamps blazed off the reflective stripes on their safety vests.
Jolie doused our lights. We slowed to a crawl. My kundalini noir thumped to the frantic, menacing beat of the flashing emergency lights.
The vests on two of the men said Border Patrol. The other two wore generic tactical uniforms: cargo pants tucked into suede boots, Kevlar helmets with night-vision goggles attached to the brims, reflective vests stretched over equipment ammo magazines and radios. All of the men cradled either M4 carbines or MP submachine guns. If my nose wasn’t detecting Cress Tech pork, it needed recalibrating.
Their red auras simmered in boredom. These guys had no clue about our true identities. Hopefully, if we didn’t get close enough for them to see our eyes, we could creep through the roadblock using hypnosis.
Then a third Border Patrol agent walked from behind a Humvee. Her aura glowed orange. Vampire!
My anxiety heated up several notches. Vampires were everywhere. Rather we were everywhere before Phaedra’s insurrection. Why was this vampire here? Her aura shined cool, like running into us was no big deal.
But it was a big deal. Other than us three in the truck, and Coyote, the only vampires we’ve seen lately belonged to Phaedra. I studied this vampire’s aura and couldn’t get a read. Was she foe? Friend? Neither? Did the other Border Patrol agents and the Cress Tech guards know she was a vampire?
Jolie reached between her thighs and adjusted the .45. I swept the harness from my lap and let it fall out-of-sight to the floor. My jacket was unzipped and my arm tensed to snatch the .357 magnum. Even moving at vampiric speed, a gunfight against all this firepower wouldn’t end well.
The vampire said something to her human counterparts. They took positions to block us and let her advance alone to the driver’s side of the truck.
“What do I do?” Jolie whispered.
“Smile,” Carmen advised. “Let your inner light show.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Jolie groused out the corner of her mouth. She crooked her right arm and rested it inside the open window.
The vampire Border Patrol agent bent down to look at us. Our naked vampire eyes let our tapetum lucidum burn like road flares, but hers remained dark in comparison, meaning she was wearing contacts. Conversely, we could read her aura but she couldn’t read ours.
She wore gold oak leaves on her collar and was certainly the senior officer of this little roadside fiesta. “Are you all American citizens?” The question seemed ridiculous considering our circumstances.
Jolie, Carmen, and I replied in unison, “American citizen.”
The vampire continued with the Border Patrol drill. “Anything to declare?”
“Nope,” Jolie answered.
“What’s with the roadblock?” I asked.
The vampire replied with a very noncommittal, “Homeland Security.” She tipped her head toward the truck bed. “Who’s your friend?”
“Another American citizen,” Jolie explained. “We’re giving him a lift home. The three of us are his designated drivers.”
The vampire laughed, stepped back, and waved to the other agents. “Have a safe trip.”
They stepped aside to let us pass. Jolie turned the headlamps back on and away we drove.
When the emergency lights shrank to embers in our rearview I finally let myself relax. “I got a ten dollar bill for the one with the best explanation of what just happened.”
Jolie was also watching in the rearview. “Fuck if I know.”
“Carmen,” I asked, “any ideas?”
“Only that she let us go when she could’ve given the order to shoot,” Carmen said. “That puts her in the plus column. Here’s my guess—something new has stirred up the pot.”
With what? Neither Jolie nor I could follow up. We traveled south on the highway, beneath a canopy of stars even more numerous than my questions about our future.
After another ten miles, Jolie pulled against the steering wheel and panned her head from side to side. “How close are we to Coyote’s?”
I scanned the desolate landscape. “Beats me.” We had approached Coyote’s home only once from this highway and that was during daylight. Even using vampiric night vision I wasn’t able to spot any familiar landmarks.
I glanced worriedly at my watch. A quarter after 4:00 a.m. If we didn’t get to Coyote’s soon we’d have to get creative about finding shelter from the morning sun.
The night exploded with wings and feathers. I shouted in surprise. Crows swarmed in front of us, shining in our headlights like twirls of black metal.
Jolie slammed on the brakes, and the truck rocked to a stop. The flock of crows teemed around us.
“What the hell are they doing?” I asked, nervous. Me and these birds never got along.
The crows began to circle the truck. The entire flock peeled away and headed straight down the highway. The line of flapping wings glistened in the bright fan of our headlamps. At the point where our lights faded, the stream of birds hooked left and disappeared into the gloom.
Jolie and Carmen stared wide eyed. One of them gasped, “What the hell was that about?”
Crazy-ass birds. Messengers and spies of the Araneum. Phaedra had made it a point to massacre any that ventured close.
The engine’s rumble echoed in the stillness. Jolie put the truck in gear and started forward. My nerves had sharpened to needles and my eyes took in every detail.
The crows returned. The three of us shrank from the windows, unsure of what the birds were up to. They orbited the truck, skimming close before peeling off again to follow the road. They made another left turn at the exact spot they had before.
Jolie drove until we reached a gap in a fence at the left where a dirt road intersected the highway. “They’re showing us the way to Coyote’s.”
I chuckled. “Didn’t think those feathered pests had the smarts.”
Something pinched my right arm, hard, right through the leather sleeve. A crow bolted from the window, and it cawed, the corvus equivalent of a derisive laugh. I rubbed where it had bit me. Fucker.
Jolie veered onto the narrow, bumpy road. Dust churned in the glow from our headlamps. A crow stood in the dirt before us. When we approached, it flew off.
“Keep going,” I said.
We continued far enough to see another crow waiting in the road.
“Cut the lights.”
Jolie switched off the lights. Without the truck’s headlamps interfering with my night vision, the terrain ahead sharpened into greater detail. A row of red lights followed the road. Like all living creatures, the crows had auras, and they were usually dim red. But they had somehow boosted their psychic energy so their aura
s shined in the murk like a string of red Christmas lights. I didn’t know the crows had that ability but I’ve learned never to underestimate the tricky winged bastards.
Jolie continued down the line of crows and drove fast enough to keep us bouncing in the cab while the Jimmy made noises like rocks tumbling in a steel drum. Our human passenger thumped and rolled in the bed but remained asleep.
The line of crows climbed up the side of a mesa.
“Now I recognize the road.” Jolie craned her neck to look upward. “Coyote’s house is on top.” She halted the truck and turned off the engine. “No way can this bucket of junk make it.”
Pistol in hand, she climbed out. Carmen and I slid out from my side.
“What about him?” Carmen pointed to the human.
Jolie said, “He’ll wake up in the morning and wonder how the hell he got here. I’ll bet it won’t be the first time.”
She asked for her jacket and pistol harness. She shrugged them both on, cocked her head—let’s go—and started up the road. The three of us broke into a fast trot.
The crows acted as if they didn’t notice us, but when we got within fifty feet they’d leap upward and their auras would fade until they were practically invisible.
We made good time climbing the roller coaster of a road. When the crest of the mesa came into view, I caught the scent of coffee. Jolie and Carmen smelled it too, and we slowed to a walk.
Carmen sniffed. “Is that AB Negative?”
“Fresh, arterial AB Negative?” Jolie added hungrily.
The fragrance filled my nose. My mouth watered.
“Hey, vatos!” The voice hailed from behind us.
We spun about.
Coyote grinned from inside the ball of a bright orange aura. He leaned on a wooden crutch and a crow sat on his shoulder. He said, “Arrgh,” and shook an open Thermos, the source of the coffee-blood aroma. He shifted weight to his good leg and waved his crutch at us. “I was getting old waiting for you guys, and look at me, I’m already older than this pinchi mesa.” He capped the Thermos and shoved it into my hands. “Make yourself useful, cabron.” He shrugged the shoulder with the crow and it flew off. Coyote lowered the cane and hobbled toward us. Jolie and Carmen made way.
Rescue From Planet Pleasure Page 24