Rescue From Planet Pleasure (11 page)

Chapter Sixteen

Night would provide cover, so we got ready to leave at dusk, which would give us plenty of time to cross Chaco Canyon and reach the Sun Dagger on schedule.

Jolie and I fortified ourselves with blood and coffee. We cleaned our guns and checked our ammunition to the beat of ’80s hits blaring from the radio. Marina studied her reflection in the mirror as she touched up her make-up and tied and retied a camouflaged bandana around her head.

Rainelle remained in the shed holding vigil over Coyote. When I mentioned earlier that Phaedra might return, Rainelle replied that the native spirits would protect her. I didn’t know what the little dancing Kachinas or the skin-walkers could do, but this was her people’s magic so I left it at that.

The rubbing of the Sun Dagger lay on the coffee table. I’d studied the picture so much that its image was practically etched into my retinas. Assuming the best, we’d arrive on D-Galtha—the easy part according to Marina. But she wouldn’t accompany us. Couldn’t leave Earth, she insisted. A condition of her curse.

Jolie and I would be on our own when it came time to find Carmen on D-Galtha.
How?
Then return home.
How?
And what was D-Galtha like? Would the aliens simply let us take her? How effective would our guns be against the extraterrestrials? Maybe we’d be better off bringing flowers and
pan dulce
.

And then there was Phaedra. Waiting for us now and when we returned. Which raised more questions than what I wanted to mull over.

Marina wore Coyote’s gold Rolex on her wrist. “Let’s go.”

Jolie and I followed her out the back door. Cool night air washed over us. We stared at the shed where Rainelle was with Coyote. I wondered if we should interrupt to say goodbye.

The shed door opened. The ritual dance music spilled forth, the volume low. A green mist rolled over the threshold.

Rainelle walked out, clad in a loose coat and a knit cap. The Kachina with feathers appeared behind her and now it—he?—was as tall as me. He halted at the doorway, watching us, shuffling in place and shaking his arms to the muted rhythm.

Rainelle waded through the green mist to approach us. The door closed, hiding the Kachina and silencing the music. Rainelle looked at me and Jolie. “What’s the plan?”

The answer seemed obvious, but I replied anyway, “Go straight to Fajada Butte.”

“Knowing that Phaedra might be waiting?”

I stroked the carbine. “We’re ready.”

“I’m sure Phaedra is thinking the same thing. Why not throw her a curve and go the back way?” Rainelle dug a set of keys from her coat pocket. “We’ll take my truck and approach from the south.”

That would be on the first road we’d taken to the butte, the one where we’d abandoned the Porsche.

She winged a thumb to the shed. “The Kachinas will take care of Coyote until I return.” She walked to her truck to where it was parked by the gate. She opened the driver’s door. “Pile in,
comaradas.
”

A bird fluttered overhead and landed on the rain gutter of the doublewide. A crow. A red aura swirled around its body. At the far corner, another tell-tale aura from a crow.

Crows are not nocturnal, so I figured these birds were on a mission for the Araneum. But the Araneum was in tatters. Since I became a vampire, I learned to expect bad news anytime a crow shows up. I studied their ankles for a message capsule but saw none.

“What’s up with the crows?” Marina asked.

Jolie replied, “Maybe they’re wishing us good luck.”

I added, “Or
adios.
”

Rainelle got in the truck and started the motor. Marina and Jolie squeezed themselves into the passenger’s side. I let the truck out through the gate and climbed into the bed. I sat against the back of the cab and watched the crows as they watched us.

We proceeded to the rim of the mesa. Chaco Canyon yawned before us, a forbidding dark expanse. At this distance, Fajada Butte was but a finger-shaped smudge in the faraway gloom.

Stars filled the immense dark bowl of the sky. To the west, a fading band of blue highlighted the horizon. Pinpoints of light crawled along the distant highway to the faraway towns. The moon just started to rise above the eastern hills.

Rainelle turned on the headlamps and drove the Ford along the edge of the mesa. Our lights fell across the narrow, twisting road gouged across the forbidding rocky slope. Along the way down I bounced like a bead in a rattle. The truck’s springs groaned when we bottomed out at the base of the mesa. Rainelle muscled the Ford along the road to the highway where we turned south. A sign said: Crownpoint 15 miles. Since this was my second trip through these parts, I should have recognized the surroundings, but we were in the middle of high desert that stretched into more high desert. Thirty miles in any direction and it would look the same.

Tonight was our one shot to rescue Carmen, at least in this century. Then if we got her home, we still had Phaedra to contend with. Coyote had said that only Carmen could defeat her. How? In my first dealings with Phaedra, she hadn’t hesitated to use a mind probe to harass me. Now she was quiet. Why?

We turned east on Navajo Service Road 9 and our tires rumbled on the rough pavement. After a few minutes, Rainelle slowed. I peeked around the edge of the cab. A yellow flashing sign blocked the exit toward Fajada Butte. Rainelle flicked the high beams to illuminate the sign.

ROAD CLOSED

Dusk to Dawn

By order Dept of Homeland Security

Area patrolled by Cress Tech Intl.

This was no surprise. We’d tripped their psychotronic alarms twice already so it was about time they sat up and paid attention.

Rainelle drove forward, knocked the sign aside, and followed the road up a shallow incline. A yellow glow flashed on the reverse side of the slope. We topped the crest and saw that the glow came from the hazard lights of a Humvee straddling the road and facing our direction. Search lamps on its roof flicked on, dazzling us. Two silhouetted guards marched into the cone of illumination until they were sandwiched between the search lamps and our headlights. Their red auras burned with irritation.

Rainelle halted fifty feet from the Humvee. She and Jolie climbed out.

Jolie whispered, “Felix, stay down. I’ll handle this.”

One of the guards cradled an assault rifle. The other shouted, “Turn off your headlights! Stay in your vehicle!”

Rainelle and Jolie walked toward them, slowly, arms relaxed at their sides.

The aura of the guard doing the yelling flared with anger. “Stop right there! Couldn’t you read the sign?”

Rainelle answered, “
No hablo ingles.
”

She and Jolie stopped close to the guards. Jolie mumbled something because both guards turned their heads toward her.

The eyes of one guard widened. His aura flashed like a strobe. Jolie turned to the second guard. His eyes widened and his aura also strobed.

Stunned by vampire hypnosis, the guards swayed like reeds. Jolie approached the first guard, clasped him in her arms and fanged his neck. His aura calmed and Jolie pushed him into the cab of the Humvee. She repeated the procedure with the second guard and returned with Rainelle to the pickup.

Jolie wiped her mouth. “Tasty stuff. Nice notes of bourbon.”

“Could have asked for my help,” I replied.

“Next time.”

They climbed into the truck. Rainelle gunned the engine. She drove around the Humvee and up the road. We shimmied over the washboard, the ride just as jarring as I remembered from our abortive try in the Porsche, but the Ford handled the bumps and ruts like a tank.

Rainelle slowed, and I glanced around the cab. A buck mule deer emerged from the dark murk before us, maybe thirty feet away, eyes blazing. Rainelle halted the truck.

The deer’s body began to flatten while his legs stretched. His eyes shriveled to points and vanished. He morphed into a hide of skin stretched over a framework that resembled a leather tent on stilts.
Skin-walker!
And probably Yellowhair-Chavez.

His aura shimmered like light reflecting on water. The head was now a simple flap of skin lacking eyes, or mouth, or ears, or anything else. Just a grotesque flap swinging to-and-fro. Behind him, Fajada Butte loomed like a blunt spike.

Rainelle said, “This is far as I can go in the truck,” and we all climbed out. She pointed to the right. “There’s a path that will take you to a gulley that leads to the butte.”

The skin-walker shifted weight and adjusted his long, bony legs. He radiated power like a dynamo.

“Quite a lot of supernatural whoop-ass,” Jolie noted. “I’d give good money to see Phaedra take this fucker on.”

I turned to Rainelle. “Any chance we can persuade him to follow us to Fajada Butte?”

She shook her head. “That’s your fight, not his. He’s here to protect me.” She glanced at the skin-walker and back at us. “Those guards miss their radio checks and someone will come looking. I better go.”

She hugged Marina, then Jolie. I got a wave.

Rainelle got back in her truck. She swung the front end around, tooted the horn, and rumbled south. Van Halen blared from the radio. I looked for the skin-walker and all I saw was a deer sprinting into the night.

Marina said, “There are still miles of desert ahead, but you should get to the Sun Dagger with plenty of time to spare.”

“You’re not coming with us?” Jolie asked.

“I’ll meet you there. You don’t need me to slow you down.”

“What are you talking about?”

Marina smiled. “I’ll see you on top of the butte.” Her body began to fade, becoming transparent, then
abracadabra
, she vanished.

Jolie and I stared at the empty space. New Mexico was full of surprises.

We proceeded down the path and picked up the pace to a fast jog. The gulley widened into a ravine with a broad, flat bottom. We passed one of the Cress Tech towers, which meant we were a mile from the butte. As far as I knew, the detectors needed a blast of psychic energy to trip the alarm, so our mere presence shouldn’t register. Good. We didn’t need any more interference from the government’s goons.

A bluish light darted through the shrubs along the side of the ravine. Without breaking stride, I readied the carbine.

“Don’t shoot,” a voice warned. El Cucuy leapt over the bushes.

I relaxed my grip on the trigger. “How’d you find us?”

“Marina told me to expect you.”

I was about to ask when and how and realized these local supernaturals must have their own unearthly Internet.

We climbed out of the ravine and onto flat ground that rose toward the butte. From this vista I could see across the canyon floor. To the west, a quarter of a mile away, a fan of green and white light shimmered.

Jolie pointed. “Phaedra.”

If we could see her, she could see us.

The ground trembled. All around Phaedra, spouts of earth showered upward, each revealing an orange aura. Vampires. So many that they appeared like a glowing rash spreading against the landscape. Had we proceeded on our original route, we would’ve run straight into them. Rainelle’s gambit had worked. We had sidestepped Phaedra’s trap.

We sped up and continued toward the butte.

“Pity,” Jolie’s fangs glistened, “I was looking forward to a good brawl.”

El Cucuy stopped suddenly. Four vampires emerged from the folds in the ground between us and the butte. Talons and fangs extended, they charged us.

Without hesitation, I blasted one. Levered the Marlin. Blasted another. The silver/depleted-uranium slugs ripped into the vampires like a pickax.

El Cucuy spread his arms and snagged one, scooping and crushing him in his grip. The vampire snarled and snapped at the boogieman but his fangs only skipped across the metallic hide.

Jolie had drawn a .45. She fired, and the remaining vampire’s head exploded.

El Cucuy tossed his mangled victim aside. “Keep going. Don’t let them bog us down.”

These vampires were outliers, put here in case we scored an end run around Phaedra’s main force, which we had. They may have been used to intimidating humans but they were fodder against us. No doubt new vampires eager to win Phaedra’s approval. Their job was simple. Slow us down until her army could envelop us.

I plucked two rounds from my cartridge belt to top off the Marlin. I aimed at the main force. At this range, I could only hit a big target, but if I fired into a cluster of auras, I was certain to hit at least one vampire. I picked out a group and squeezed off a round. An orange splash from an erupting aura let me know I had hit my mark. I fired again and again. Two more splashes. The group scattered to save themselves.

Phaedra held position behind a phalanx of bloodsuckers, out of range. I tried a shot anyway, hoping for a lucky hit. I missed.

“They’ve stopped advancing,” Jolie announced.

The vampires hadn’t just stopped but were retreating. I gave a snort of ridicule. We’d beaten Phaedra without much of a struggle. Maybe this was a good omen for the rest of our adventure.

At this distance, Phaedra was a green and white spot. I tracked her as she moved toward a Cress Tech tower.
WTF?
Her aura brightened like she was stoking a fire. A plume shot from her, splattered against the top of the tower, and shrouded the psychotronic diviner in sparks of psychic energy. She was punching the Cress Tech panic button. If she couldn’t stop us, then they could, or at least slow us down. For all their gung-ho bravado and military hardware, there were being played by Phaedra.

My elation sank back into unease. I glanced at my watch. 11:27 p.m. Less than twenty minutes to reach the Sun Dagger. It had taken Cress Tech an hour to respond the first time we’d tripped their alarm. Yesterday, less than thirty minutes. My legs churned with renewed urgency. I could sense the jaws of disaster begin to close.

Jolie and El Cucuy raced ahead, Jolie nimble as a doe, El Cucuy galloping like a two-legged horse. Looking back at Phaedra, I saw that she was gone and that her army of vampires was shrinking.

We sprinted over and around the large rocks on the slope skirting the butte. The tall cylinder of mountain towered before us. Jolie bounded against the face of the butte and scrambled up through a chute between the stone columns. El Cucuy jumped behind her, then it was my turn. The chute narrowed like the neck of a funnel.