All the Wrong Moves (3 page)

“Minimize your movements,” All Bent warned. “The gimbals respond to the slightest . . . Wait! Lieutenant! Don’t lean forward like that!”

His frantic shout came too late. One slight bend at the waist and I was kissing the floor. It took the combined efforts of my entire team to haul me upright again. I swear to God I heard EEEK snickering.

“Minimize,” the Harrison rep reiterated. “Just
think
about moving.”

I got the hang of it. Eventually. Still, I spent a full day banging around the test facility, making sure I could interpret the data EEEK bombarded my visor with, before I ventured outside.

Bumping into walls and instrumentation stands was one thing. Dodging cacti and twisty-limbed mesquite was another. My first foray in the great outdoors left me cursing and the sadistic robot I was strapped into grinning from ear to composite ear.

Did I mention I’m a little stubborn? I hung in there. Not that I had much choice. The test parameters called for a twenty-mile run. In full combat gear. Carrying a sixty-pound pack. Someone—me, unfortunately—had to complete the run before FST-3 could write our field test report and stuff EEEK back in his crate.

I do know my limitations, however. No way I was ready to go full battle rattle for twenty miles. Not with the temperature hovering around 110 in the shade and the August sun so vicious that not even the scorpions would come out to play. Girding my loins—literally and figuratively—I managed two miles at a springy trot. The following day I upped it to five. Before I extended the distance much farther, I decided to test EEEK’s low-light optics and terrain-following sensors.

I set the launch time for two A.M. My team of dedicated professionals protested vociferously, but I held firm. The high desert cools off at night, you see. Not a whole lot this time of year, but enough to make the run semi-bearable.

So come two A.M. I encased myself in composite and took off. I headed south this time, toward the periphery of Fort Bliss’s three-point-four zillion acres of test range. I sure as heck didn’t want to head north. Although my team coordinated all its activities with the Fort Bliss Command Post, there was always the possibility those guys might forget to mention a little thing like a night firing exercise of a Patriot missile battery.

No missiles streaked through the star-studded sky. No explosions lit up the horizon, near or far. I moved slowly at first, getting a feel for EEEK’s night vision capability. To my relief, he had eyes like a bat. His infrared imaging enhancement clearly illuminated hazards like clumps of spiny cholla and cracks in the hard-baked earth.

It also illuminated the odd-shaped hump ahead long before I picked up its stench. When the stink did hit, I figured I’d come across a dead coyote or mule deer. I was moving fast by then, too fast to swerve, so I decided to bound over the carcass and keep going.

Bad decision. Reeeeally bad.

I misjudged the distance in the dark and the springy foot pedal that gave EEEK its bounce caught on something, pitching me forward. Just in time, I threw my weight backward. The gimbals kept me upright, for which I’ll be forever grateful. I don’t even want to
think
what would have happened if they hadn’t.

“What the hell . . . ?”

Gagging at the noxious stink, I lifted my visor to see what had snagged my foot and found myself staring down into the bloated remnants of a face. It took me several stunned moments to realize a second corpse lay sprawled almost atop the first.

I was up to my ankles in putrefying human remains.

CHAPTER TWO

WHEN my traumatized brain kicked back into gear, I let loose with a screech loud enough to wake the dead. Not these dead, thank God. Decaying flesh spewed as I kicked free of the ribcage that had snared EEEK’s foot pedal.

“OhGodohGodohGod!”

Shrieking, I lunged a good fifty or sixty yards before I thought to lower the visor and whip around to scan the darkness behind me. No ghostly figures had risen up from the desert floor to give chase. No poltergeists flew through the night air in my direction.

Still, I stumbled another dozen yards before I could bring myself to halt EEEK’s forward momentum. Wrenching one hand free of the control glove, I grabbed frantically for the radio clipped to my belt.

“O’Reilly! Cassidy! Anyone! Come in!”

“Speak to me, oh Goddess of Gadgets.” O’Reilly punctuated his reply with a jaw-cracking yawn. “Whazzup?”

“I just stumbled over some bodies.”

“Huh?”

“Bodies.” My voice rose perilously close to another shriek. “Like in
dead
people!”

“Jesus!”

I heard a loud thump that I guessed were his chair legs hitting the floor. The thud came nowhere near matching the volume of the hammering inside my ribcage.

“Call the county sheriff,” I got out. “Give him my coordinates.”

“Will do. Want us to come get you?”

Hell, yes, I wanted them to come get me! I had opened my mouth to order the entire team to pile onto ATVs when I remembered I was supposed to be a lean, mean fighting machine.

My notions of officership are still a little hazy around the edges but even I recognized that I wouldn’t present a sterling example of a leader if I turned tail and ran—as I very much wanted to do.

“I’ll stay at the scene until the sheriff arrives,” I said with immense reluctance. “Just get him out here fast. And notify the Command Post at Fort Bliss of the situation,” I added belatedly.

I wasn’t sure who exercised investigative jurisdiction over putrefying remains on a remote patch of government range cut by two county roads. At this point, I didn’t really care.

O’Reilly confirmed the coordinates transmitted by EEEK’s built-in GPS and promised to get on the horn immediately. It didn’t occur to me until after I’d signed off that whoever or whatever caused the death of these two people might still be in the vicinity. I grabbed the radio again, but common sense intervened.

Lord knows, I’m no expert on decomposition. My only previous experience with the dead was at my grandfather’s funeral. In keeping with my family’s long-standing tradition of loser-ship, Pop had passed out at the wheel of his semi after downing the better part of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I was about four or five at the time, and my mother insisted I had to file past his coffin. I remember thinking Pop looked like Play-Doh.

These guys were way past Play-Doh. The desert sun had baked them to mush, so they must have been dead awhile. Or so I reasoned. Erroneously, I later found out. Seems searing heat speeds up the process of decomposition.

I didn’t know that, however, and trusted my flawed logic enough to unstrap EEEK. He would require some cleaning when we got back to the test site. I would require several Valium. In the meantime I had nothing else to do but wait.

EEEK’s presence proved oddly reassuring as the minutes ticked by. Moonlight glinted on his frame, and the faint beeping of his computer gave me the sense I wasn’t out here with only two corpses for company.

I should tell you that even without the corpses, the desert gets darn spooky at night. Clouds moving across the moon throw eerie shadows on the baked earth. The sagua ros and mesquite take on sinister forms.

Then there are the noises. The first time a burrowing owl belted out its shrill, up-and-down warble, I almost wet myself. Moments later one of his buddies popped out of its hole and answered the call.

The thing about night sounds is that once you start listening for them, you hear them. All kinds of sounds. As if to challenge the owls, another songster piped up. It ran through a whole scale of notes, repeating them over and over until I was gritting my teeth.

I knew what it was. A western mockingbird. Despite a distinct lack of interest from the rest of the team, Pen—Dr. England—insisted on sharing her encyclopedic knowledge of the flora and fauna native to the north Chi huahuan Desert with us. I could hear her nasal whine in my head, droning away, almost as obnoxious as that mockingbird.

I was contemplating hurling a rock at the irritating warbler when a scuffling sound reminded me the night belonged to more than just birds. There was Pen’s whine again, going on about gophers and kangaroo rats and sand foxes and—quick grimace here—hooded skunks, badgers, duck-billed bats, and Mexican gray wolves.

And coyotes. I couldn’t mistake their distinctive yipping. The cries echoed well off in the distance at first but gradually moved in. With a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, I remembered Pen’s terse admonition not to leave any trash lying around at the test site as the scavengers will eat anything, dead or alive.

When an excited yip sounded in the vicinity of the bodies, bile spurted into my throat. I had to force myself to my feet and climb aboard EEEK so I could peer through his visor. An instant later, I wished I hadn’t. Gagging, I yanked up my radio again.

“This is Spade. Where in blazes is the sheriff?”

“On his way,” O’Reilly assured me. “May be a while yet, though. His vehicle isn’t equipped with GPS. We’re vectoring him to your location.”

A shadow of movement sent another sour spurt into my throat. I swallowed convulsively. “What . . . ? What about the Fort Bliss Range Patrol?”

“Also on their way.”

That left me, several owls, one mockingbird, the bodies and a pack of coyotes. I signed off again and debated my next move. No way I was getting between flesh-eating scavengers and their late night snack, but I couldn’t just stand there.

After considerable internal debate, I picked up a rock and heaved. I’m no Dan Marino or Brett Favre. The missile thudded to earth well short of its target. Desperate now, I resorted to shouts and arm waving.

“Beat it! Scram! Shoo!”

It was the shoo that finally cleared the fog in my head. How stupid was that? How stupid was
I
? EEEK was designed to amplify and extend human extremities. I couldn’t throw worth crap, but he could. Weighting my pockets with rocks, I strapped myself in, powered up, and let fly.

THE sheriff arrived just after dawn. His black-and-white raised a plume of dust a half mile long. I climbed atop a small rise to flag him down.

He wasn’t alone. Accompanied by a deputy, he rolled out of the car, settled his straw Stetson low on his brow and squinted through the fast rising heat waves.

“Lieutenant Spade?”

“You were expecting maybe Madonna?”

The sheriff’s brows straight-lined under the brim of his Stetson. His deputy’s shot up.

Tough. I was in no mood for nice after hours spent chasing off coyotes.

“I’m Roy Alexander.” The sheriff hooked a thumb at his sidekick. “This here is Tom Bartlett.”

Sheriff Alexander was lean and rangy, with deep crevices carved in his weathered face. Bartlett was a younger version of his boss without the creases. Both men shifted their glances to the right.

“You want to tell me what that is?” Alexander drawled with another hook of his thumb.

“That is an Ergonomic Exoskeletal Extension.”

“Come again?”

“My team tests inventions for the Department of Defense. This is one of them.”

The curt reply had both sets of brows working again.

“Look, I’m tired and thirsty and totally creeped out.” That was the closest I could get to an apology. “The bodies are over there.”

The two law enforcement officials had obviously gone this route before. In what appeared to be a well-established routine, they extracted a jar of mentholated petroleum jelly from their vehicle and smeared a generous dollop across their upper lips, then each tied a handkerchief over their nose and mouth. Deputy Dawg retrieved a digital camera. The sheriff pulled out a roll of plastic evidence bags. Both men snapped on latex gloves. Only then did they approach the bodies.

I stayed put.

Despite their precautions, the first good whiff made the sheriff gag. Deputy Dawg tossed up his cookies. The officers scrutinized the scene for a scant few moments before beating a hasty retreat.

“Critters been at ’em,” the sheriff commented as he swiped his face with the handkerchief. “Bones and body parts are scattered all over the place.”

I hesitated a moment or two before making a reluctant admission. “I might have had something to do with that. I was aboard the exoskeleton, testing its night vision capability and moving at a good clip. I slogged through the bones and, uh, stuff before I realized what it was.”

Deputy Dawg scrunched his lips. I wasn’t sure whether it was an expression of sympathy for a really unpleasant experience or exasperation that I’d messed up his crime scene.

“What about those rocks peppering the area?” the sheriff asked. “They your doing, too?”

“A pack of coyotes stopped by for a visit.”

A hint of sympathy entered Alexander’s eyes. “You’ve had quite a night, Lieutenant.”

“And I’m feeling every minute of it.”

“How about we get you some water and sit in the shade while you tell me the exact sequence of events?”

THE Fort Bliss Range Patrol arrived next. Two cops, one military and one civilian, both coated with dust from their long drive. The county coroner followed hard on their heels. His ambulance jounced over the rutted earth while I was rehashing my nocturnal activities to the Range Patrol.

The coroner and his assistant had come prepared. After conferring with the sheriff, the doc and his tech sprinkled liquid onto two surgical masks.

The masks must have proved more effective than mentholated jelly, as they waded right in. The rest of us watched from a safe distance while the tech did his thing and the doc wielded a pair of long-handled forceps.

“One of them has a wallet on him,” he called out through his mask. “It has an ID in it. You want to examine it now, or wait till I finish?”

“Now,” Alexander shouted back.

Nodding, the doc dropped the object into an evidence bag. His assistant delivered the bag to the sheriff, who examined the ID for all of ten seconds before letting out a long, low whistle.

“Take a look at this.”

Deputy Dawg and the two Range Patrol officers crowded in. I peered over their shoulders but couldn’t see what the excitement was all about.