Immune (4 page)

It did not take him long to find what he was looking for. Priest's frozen corpse had been wrapped in a body bag and encased in a thick plastic box. Having been thrown open by the force of the impact, the case had spilled the body onto the overturned equipment that lined the wall of the refrigerated truck, a wall that now formed the floor.

Jack unzipped the bag, scanning the contents with his flashlight just long enough to satisfy himself that it contained the autopsied corpse and severed head of Carlton “Priest” Williams before zipping it closed once more.

Tugging the body bag clear of the wreckage, Jack glanced at his watch. 01:18. Time enough for one last task before departure.

Jack withdrew a needle from his robes as he moved back to where he had positioned the corpse of the driver and the guard. Then, attaching first one Pyrex tube and then a second, Jack extracted a vial of blood from each of the two corpses.

Making one final circuit of the area to ensure he had not overlooked anything, Jack returned the sword to its spot at his waist and tossed the body bag containing Priest's body over his shoulder. By the time he made his way back to retrieve the AK-47 rifle, Jack could hear the helicopter engine winding up on the ridge above the highway.

High above, stars spilled across the moonless night sky, the Milky Way pointing a trail back toward the waiting chopper. With a deep breath, Jack hitched the corpse higher on his shoulder, then moved out, his powerful legs propelling him up the steep slope and into the darkness beyond.

For every one of his forty-seven years, Tribal Police Sergeant Jim “Tall Bear” Pino had lived here on the Santa Clara Indian Reservation. For more than half of that time he had been a tribal policeman.

It was hardly normal procedure for non-tribal police departments to call Indian police on things that were not considered Indian affairs. But Yolanda Martinez, a 911 operator for the Espanola police, was his third cousin by marriage, and she had sounded spooked.

Always, when they were children, Yolanda had come to Tall Bear whenever she needed help or reassurance. He had been the big brother she never had. While the years had sent them their own families and their own paths to travel, Yolanda and Tall Bear had remained close. Tonight, a dread premonition had made Yolanda call him and play the 911 recording over the line.

Although the Espanola Police had several squad cars on the way, Tall Bear was on duty and he was closer to the intersection described in the call. Tall Bear's tribal police cruiser was a Jeep Cherokee that had traveled country that most people thought only a man on a horse could reach. While he would never win any road races in the vehicle, it allowed him to use roads across tribal lands, which shortened the distance to his desired destination.

Crossing one last cattle guard, the Cherokee's wheels spewed a cloud of dust as Tall Bear left the dirt road to climb up onto the pavement of New Mexico Highway 30. There was no traffic tonight, and he did not switch on the police light bar atop the vehicle. No use broadcasting his imminent arrival.

As he rounded the bend in the highway from which the junction of Highway 30 and Highway 502 were visible, Tall Bear discovered the reason for the complete lack of traffic. A small line of cars and trucks were stopped at a roadblock just west of the road junction.

Switching on his flashing police lights, Tall Bear maneuvered the Cherokee around the waiting traffic, through the Y intersection, and west along Highway 502. The roadblock consisted of a couple of unmanned construction barriers with blinking orange lights. Perhaps a hundred yards beyond the barrier, at a bend in the road, the lights of a police vehicle cascaded through the woods.

Odd. Even the local police departments never set up haphazard roadblocks such as this. There should at least be one deputy manning the point where traffic was blocked.

Tall Bear eased the Cherokee off the highway, around the barriers, and then back onto the pavement again, moving the vehicle forward much more slowly now. If his black hair had not hung to his waist, it would certainly have been standing straight up on his head. He was close enough now to see the flashing police light bar in the woods to the side of the highway clearly, but he could see no other vehicle lights.

Why didn't the police car have on its headlights and parking lights?

As he angled the Cherokee toward the spot, Tall Bear got the answer to his question. There was no police car. The flashing police light bar had been connected to an automobile battery and hung from a tree branch to make it appear that a police car had pulled into the wood line.

Suddenly, the night air seemed to take on a chill that had not been present moments before. The 911 message had said there would be death here. As he stared at the flashing light bar in the tree, Tall Bear believed.

Leaving his own police lights flashing, Tall Bear grabbed the heavy flashlight from the floorboard, touched the handle of the 45-caliber revolver that hung in its holster, strapped to his side, and moved into the woods. Within seconds, he was away from the lights, moving west, parallel to the highway, a shadow among the shadows.

As a small boy, Tall Bear had worshipped his grandfather. The old man had taught him to hunt and fish, not with rifle and pole, but in the old ways of their people. His grandfather had instructed him to read trail sign, to understand what the earth said with each bent blade of grass, with the sudden silence of the insects, with the faint smells that hung on the breeze.

So few of the young people cared to learn the old ways now. They had been seduced by the call of the white man's world, lulled by the lethargic drone of the television, hunting only on an Xbox. But Tall Bear had stayed true to his ancestors, passing the old knowledge to his own sons. Here in the dark woods, as he moved silently among the trees, the voices of the ancients whispered to him.

The curve in the highway swept Tall Bear beyond sight of the roadblock, although a flicker of police lights lit the tips of the tallest trees. Continuing westward, the smell of cordite brought him to a halt. Someone had been blasting, although this smell was different from the dynamite used by road crews. It wasn’t gunpowder either.

He was close now. The scent of spilled diesel told him that much. From high up on the ridge above, the sound of a helicopter rose in volume as it passed overhead before banking away to the north.

Tall Bear stepped to the edge of the road, trying to catch sight of it, but if it was up there, it must have been flying without lights.

Now that he had stepped out of the wood line, Tall Bear could see a light shining up into the trees from the far side of the road, no more than a hundred feet from where he now stood. It was a headlight.

Crossing the highway, Tall Bear moved more quickly now. Whatever the danger, there had been a wreck and the possibility that someone lay injured in the wreckage pulled him forward.

As he got closer, the extent of the accident became clear. A truck had left the highway at high speed, its momentum wrapping the cab around a tree, sending the overturned trailer sliding past the cab in a motion that had almost ripped it free of its moorings.

In the indirect lighting provided by the one surviving headlight, Tall Bear saw two people, kneeling facedown to the ground, less than twenty feet from the mangled cab of the truck. They were not moving.

"Hey, are you hurt?" Tall Bear yelled as he ran toward them, flipping on his flashlight as he ran.

Two faces stared back at him, eyes reflecting in the moving beam of the flashlight, a sight that brought him to a stop, weapon drawn. The heads sat side by side, at least five feet separating them from the kneeling bodies.

The silence of the night draped him like a blanket. Tall Bear did not bother to switch off the flashlight. If this were a trap, he would already be dead. No. Not a trap. This was a message.

His pulse still pounding from the initial shock of the scene, Tall Bear reasserted his self-control. Death was, after all, no stranger to him.

Moving forward once again, Tall Bear allowed the flashlight beam to sweep the bodies before returning to the two heads, each of which had a bullet wound in the forehead. As he passed the bodies, he stepped around the large pool of blood that had spread out from the twin torsos of the murder victims. The initial spurt of blood had spewed out several feet, but the heads themselves sat on the ground beyond the furthest extent of the splatter.

Moving methodically now, Tall Bear noted the small details: The bodies were in military uniforms, both wearing side arms, military issue 9mm Beretta pistols. The torsos had been ritualistically positioned so that they knelt in the manner of Muslims at prayer oriented due west instead of east, heads facing back to the east, five feet past the bodies.

The bullets had passed through the foreheads out the back of each head, although one of the exit wounds was much more massive, having blown out a significant portion of the skull.

What bothered Tall Bear had nothing to do with the way the corpses had been arranged. It had to do with where they died. It was all wrong.

Moving back to the cab of the truck, Tall Bear climbed up onto what was left of the running board and leaned inside. The force of impact had shattered the windshield. Shining his flashlight around the back of the truck's cab, Tall Bear found what he was looking for. Blood and bits of brain matter splattered the seats and rear wall. Within seconds, he located the holes where the rifle slugs had punched their way out of the cab after exiting the heads of the victims.

The sense of wrongness now had a reason. Both men had been shot in the head, right here in the cab of the truck, shot in the head by a high-powered rifle that had splattered parts of their brains around the truck's interior. How then, when they had been pulled out of the truck after it wrecked, had their hearts still been beating powerfully enough to provide full arterial spray when they were beheaded?

The chill bumps that rose along Tall Bear's arms and neck had nothing to do with the temperature of the night air. What was it that the Arabic-sounding voice on the 911 tape had said? Something about making sure to take a blood sample of the dead men before the federal authorities arrived on the crime scene.

The sound of police sirens snapped Tall Bear out of his reverie. That would be the boys from Espanola. If he was going to do something, it had to be now.

Jumping down from the truck cab, Tall Bear pulled a small round can of Copenhagen Tobacco from his pocket, suffering a momentary pang of regret as he dumped the contents of the nearly full can on the ground. Then he strode back to the spot where the corpses had spewed their life's blood into the dirt. Ignoring the Navajo aversion to touching a corpse, he scooped some of the blood into the can, then replaced the lid and slid the can back into his pocket.

As he stood up and turned to walk back toward the highway, Tall Bear stepped on the small spot where he had scraped up some of the blood, leaving a bloody boot print in its place.

Since he was about to be kicked off a crime scene that was outside of tribal jurisdiction, it bothered him very little to have disturbed such a small amount of evidence. No doubt, the Espanola Police would find some satisfaction in noting that the Indian cop had screwed up.

As Tall Bear reached the highway, the leading police car screeched to a stop beside him. Feeling the Copenhagen can in his pocket, Tall Bear had the uneasy premonition that he had just involved himself in something that felt like very bad medicine. It was going to take a powerful Ghost Sing to clear his mind to the point where sleep, once again, came easy.

"Hello?" Heather's head poked through the open front door of the Smythe house, followed immediately by the rest of her body.

"Hi, Heather," said Mrs. Smythe from the living room. "Mark and Jennifer are in the garage."

"Thanks."

As she stepped into the garage, Heather spotted Mark and Jennifer huddled together in the workshop area, peering intently at the cold fusion apparatus.

Mark spotted her first. "Hey, Heather. Get over here and take a look at these readings."

"Why? Is something wrong?" Concern colored Heather's voice as she moved around the workbench that held the tank.

Peering over Jennifer's shoulder at the laptop’s flat-panel display, Heather’s concern faded away. "It looks good to me," she said.

"That's just it," said Jennifer, her fingers flying over the keyboard, bringing up a scrolling display of recorded data. "It might be a little too good. The National Science Contest is next week, and I'm afraid this project is going to stand out as something a group of high school kids might not have been able to pull off."

Mark rolled his eyes. "In other words, Jennifer’s worrying about nothing again."

Ever since they had each tried on one of the four headsets they had found on the alien ship, the three friends had experienced radical changes. Somehow, the metallic rings had formed a connection between their minds and the ship’s computer, activating portions of their brains that had previously been dormant. And those changes to their brains and neuromuscular systems had remained, even after the headsets had been removed.

For Heather, the most pronounced effect was her savantlike mathematical abilities. She could glance at a pebble and know that its volume was 4.3583 cubic centimeters. The same applied to her ability to manipulate the most complex mathematical equations. The answers were just there. It was nothing short of magical.