Ancient Enemy Box Set [Books 1-4]

by Lukens, Mark

“Ronnie called in from Cody’s Pass,” a woman’s voice said from the mic. “There’s something strange going on at the Mountainside Inn. A car crashed into the lobby.”

  “We got some more pressing matters here at the moment,” Sheriff Hadley said. “Get Freddie to—”

  “There’s a lot of dead people there,” the woman on the mic squawked. “At least three so far. Mutilated. One of them is Travis Conrad, the kid you were looking for.”

  Sheriff Hadley and Palmer locked eyes.

  “We need to get there,” Palmer told him.

  CHAPTER 34

  South of Cody’s Pass, Colorado

  Cole pulled the SUV off the road into a wooded area that was hidden from the road. He wanted to keep this vehicle off the road for a little while, and he needed some time to gather his thoughts.

  It was dark all around them and he had the lights off. He had all the doors locked. It was getting cold, but not too uncomfortable just yet. He’d told Stella that they needed to wait a few hours before finding another vehicle, wait until it was later. He already had an idea of a place where he would find one.

  David was still asleep in the back seat.

  It was risky sitting here in the dark near the woods. After what they’d seen tonight, Cole knew that the thing following them, the thing Stella called the Ancient Enemy, could pop up at anytime and anywhere. But if they were spotted by police, chased by them, then it would be over. They wouldn’t be able to get David back down to the Navajo Reservation; they wouldn’t be able to get him to a shaman. Once David was in police custody, he would be a sitting duck for that thing. It would find someone to kill David, it would frighten some person badly enough with what it could do to people, and that person would snap and kill David.

  He couldn’t let that happen.

  *

  Stella sat in the passenger seat and stared out the dark windshield. She glanced around at the side windows every few seconds. She couldn’t help being nervous out here, but Cole was right—this was better than being caught by the police. At this point the police might be shooting to kill. The keys were in the ignition, dangling there.

  But maybe the vehicle wouldn’t start, she thought. Then she pushed that thought from her mind. She tried not to think about the Ancient Enemy at all. Maybe it could follow their thoughts, maybe even read them. She tried to think about something else.

  They were in Bruce’s Chevy Tahoe. Bruce the salesman, who had been so friendly to them when they were standing by the vending machines, the man who had seemed so lonely, like he just wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, the man who was dead now.

  Dead because of her.

  She wondered if Bruce had a family. Kids of his own. There were a few suits of clothes on hangers in the back seat, a dark blue suit and a black one. They covered one of the back windows. The rear of the SUV was filled with boxes of samples of whatever he’d been peddling.

  They were quiet for a moment as they sat there. Cole had his seat leaned back, one foot up on the dash beside the steering wheel, stretching his leg out. He stared out at the darkness beyond the windshield, lost in thought. He had one of his pistols resting in his lap, ready if he needed it.

  “What was that back there?” he finally said.

  Stella didn’t answer.

  “Are there more than one of those things?” he asked, looking at her. He kept his voice low so he wouldn’t wake David up.

  “I … I don’t think so,” Stella said. “I think all those things are part of the same … the same organism.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems that way to me.”

  “But maybe there are a lot of those things and they’re like …” He seemed to be struggling with the concept for a moment. “Like they’re all connected together through their thoughts.”

  “Like some kind of hive mentality?”

  “Yeah. Like bees or ants are all separate creatures, but they operate with the same goal. But this would be way more—”

  “More complicated than ants or bees,” she said, nodding like she understood what he was trying to say. “It’s like the pieces of this thing can split off and do things separately, but then all the pieces can come back together as a whole any time it wants to.”

  “You saw those things crawling out of Trevor, Jose, Frank, and the others at the cabin when it was burning, didn’t you?”

  Stella nodded.

  “They seemed to be changing … like changing their form. They were like giant insects for a minute, then like some kind of thing out of the ocean, then like something I’ve never seen before. And they crawled out of those bodies, and they joined together. And then … then they were gone.”

  She nodded. She remembered.

  “And today at the hotel, when I shot at them, they just … just disappeared again like they’d done at the cabin.”

  “The air seemed to actually warp around them when they disappeared,” she reminded Cole. “Like it had altered the space around it, the very molecules.”

  “This is like science fiction shit,” Cole said. “Something you’d see in some kind of horror movie about aliens from another planet.” He thought for a moment. “You said something about aliens before when we were at the cabin. Do you think this thing could be some kind of alien?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. It could be. Who knows? The Navajo, along with many other southwestern Native Americans, have stories of Star People that came down to Earth, supernatural beings. Some of these Star People are actually in their origin stories. And there are many who believe that cultures have been visited by aliens many times in the past.”

  Cole shook his head in frustration and looked out the window. “How the hell are we supposed to fight an alien … something from another planet?”

  Stella glanced into the back seat and looked at David. He was still curled up on his side and sleeping deeply. She had covered him up with one of the suits that Bruce had hanging up by the back door. She was glad to see David getting some sleep now.

  She looked back at Cole who was still staring at her in the darkness. She could see his breaths fogging up in front of him. It was beginning to get pretty cold inside the vehicle. “I just wanted to say … to say thank you for saving us. You could’ve run if you wanted to back at the motel. You were already in this truck; you could’ve just kept on driving.”

  “I told you I wasn’t going to run out on you.”

  “Yeah. And I’m sorry we ran out on you.”

  He just stared at her, waiting for an explanation.

  “I was just scared,” she said.

  “I know you find it hard to trust me,” Cole said. “I understand that totally. I’m a criminal. But like I told you back in the cabin, I’ve been trying to change my ways for a while now. The only reason I was at that bank was because of my brother. I wanted to do this one last job so he could pay Frank off.”

  She nodded.

  “I’ve been trying really hard to change my ways,” he told her. “And I’m still trying very hard.”

  “I know.”

  He smiled and nodded as he started the truck. “Okay. Now let’s go steal another truck.”

  CHAPTER 35

  Cody’s Pass, Colorado—The Mountainside Inn

  Everything was turning to shit pretty quickly for Special Agent Palmer.

  He stood in the lobby of the Mountainside Inn, which now had a gaping hole where the lobby doors used to be. Shattered glass and twisted pieces of aluminum framing lay scattered on the lobby floor and outside in the drop-off zone of the parking area. And right in the middle of that wreckage lay Travis Conrad’s body, twisted and run over. He had a gun near him, a gun that was registered to his dead father, a gun that had apparently been fired recently. He also had a severed finger in his shirt pocket—a finger that Palmer was willing to bet was a perfect match to the missing finger on his mother’s hand.

  There were two other bodies in the lobby—the cler
k whose bottom half wasn’t lining up at all with his top half, and the remains of one of the guests, a man named Bruce Goldman. It looked like Bruce had fallen into a meat grinder and then was pulled out before the machine was able to turn him completely into hamburger. Bruce’s vehicle was missing from the parking lot, a 2012 Chevy Tahoe. It was most likely the vehicle that had been used to the smash through the lobby doors and run Travis over.

  There were no answers here to these murders, no reason for them, no obvious method of how two of them had been done.

  And there were a few other things making all of this much worse for Special Agent Palmer.

  Number one: there was a growing group of reporters, journalists, and camera operators gathering outside in the early evening beyond the police tape. Their vans were parked in the parking lot, cameras raised up on poles on top of the roofs, lights set up. Attractive male and female reporters clenched microphones in their hands with their local news station logos on them, and they all wore practiced grim expressions on their faces. Some of the reporters were from the local paper and the nearest TV station, but a few of them had come down from Denver. And there were probably a lot more of them flying in at this very moment. Palmer wasn’t sure where all of these people were going to stay because the town’s hotel was now a major crime scene.

  Someone had already leaked this story to the press. Maybe it was one of the cops at the burnt cabin, or maybe even one of the firefighters, someone willing to take a few hundred dollars in exchange for this swarm of reporters invading their small town.

  Number two: Sheriff Hadley was still in shock. He stood in front of Travis Conrad’s body. He wasn’t the only one who was traumatized; all of the local cops on the scene stood around with the wide-eyed look of shock in their eyes, like they were trying to navigate through a world they couldn’t understand anymore, a world they never could have imagined.

  Three: Palmer had called Alonzo Johnson and Susan Dorsett, the lead forensics technicians down at the New Mexico sites. They had tested for DNA evidence, and they had plenty from the victims, but nothing from a perp. No animal or human DNA whatsoever. No blood or skin samples, no clothing fibers, not a single hair. It was like those people down there had been killed by something invisible … by something that wasn’t there.

  And here was number four … his ringing cell phone. It didn’t take Cardenelli too long to hear about these murders on the news and/or an internet report. Thank God Cardenelli had only heard about the murders here in Colorado on the news and not the ones in New Mexico yet. Palmer was surprised those details hadn’t been leaked to the press yet, but he thought that maybe the Navajo didn’t want a ton of reporters and cameras trampling across their land, so they weren’t willing to sell themselves to reporters so quickly or cheaply.

  Agent Palmer answered his phone. It was the third time Cardenelli had called. Cardenelli had already left two voicemails threatening bodily harm if he didn’t call him back right away … he couldn’t ignore his boss any longer.

  “What the hell’s going on down there?” Cardenelli yelled as soon as Palmer answered his phone.

  Hello to you, too, Palmer thought, but he didn’t think his superior would appreciate his sarcastic sense of humor right now.

  “I’m not exactly sure yet,” Palmer answered Cardenelli’s question.

  “What do you mean you’re not sure? I’ve got the TV on and there are reports coming in about mass killings down there in two small towns. Something about a cabin fire and missing bank robbers …”

  “Yeah, I’m still trying to piece it all together.”

  “I’d like to know what the hell you’re doing there in the first place. You’re supposed to be investigating the dig site in New Mexico. You know, the place I told you to go to!”

  “Forensics has taken over down there, and I left Agent Klein in charge of questioning—”

  “Leaving Klein in charge is like letting a dog try to hump a football.”

  “These murders are all connected,” Palmer told him.

  That shut Cardenelli up for a moment.

  Palmer continued quickly before his SAC started yelling at him again. “A woman named Stella Weaver was the only person missing from that dig site. And a nine-year-old boy named David Bear was missing from the other murder scene in Iron Springs.”

  Agent Palmer summarized what had happened in the last twenty hours, telling Cardenelli how Stella’s vehicle was found behind the burning cabin near Cody’s Pass, a cabin with more mutilated bodies inside, which included the owner of the cabin and four out of the five bank robbers who had committed the crime a few days ago in Cody’s Pass. He then explained what he and Sheriff Hadley had found at Nora Conrad’s house (he left out the part about Nora Conrad’s dead husband lying in the middle of the living room floor with a bullet hole in his head).

  And now he was here at the Mountainside Inn where three more bodies lay, including Nora’s son Travis Conrad.

  “Is this some kind of … of spree killing or something?” Cardenelli asked him, his tone a more reasonable speaking voice now.

  “I really can’t find much of a motive to the killings down in New Mexico. Nothing seemed to have been taken except for Stella and David. If these bank robbers are the ones who killed all of those people down in New Mexico, then I don’t know why. I don’t know why they would take their time slaughtering a Navajo couple and a group of archaeologists, and then take a woman and a child and steal a vehicle, rush up here to rob a small bank in Cody’s Pass, and then kill each other at a cabin during a snowstorm and leave most of their money behind. I don’t know why the last bank robber left would kill several more people in a house, cutting two of them up, and then come here to kill three more.” He took a deep breath after the long sentence.

  Cardenelli was still quiet, still listening.

  “All I know now is that one of the bank robbers, Stella Weaver, and David Bear are all still unaccounted for,” Palmer said. He glanced over at the forensics team crowded around the remains of Bruce Goldman’s body like they weren’t sure where to begin with it. “We’re going to look at the security video here and question some people in town. Somebody has to have seen one of these people. One man couldn’t have done all of this here,” he said in a low voice.

  “Listen,” Cardenelli said. “I want you to keep a lid on this.”

  “Got it,” he answered, but he had another idea.

  “Get this under control down there before those reporters run away with this story.”

  “Yeah.”

  Palmer hung up his phone. He stood there and watched the forensics team and the cops in the large lobby for a moment. He ran through what he’d just said to Cardenelli in his mind. And no matter how many times he ran different scenarios in his mind, nothing made much sense. It was like he was missing major pieces of the puzzle.

  A monster.

  Captain Begay’s voice popped into his mind. Skinwalkers and ancient enemies. Palmer knew that those kinds of stories and legends were part of Begay’s culture, but Begay was also a cop and he needed to look for a logical explanation for what had happened.

  And there had to be a logical explanation. People wanted to believe in monsters because they didn’t want to believe that their fellow human beings were often the true monsters, the real bogeymen that crept along in the darkness and hunted their own species, the creatures that did unspeakable things to their fellow humans just for the pleasure of it.

  Palmer took the pack of breath mints out of his suitcoat pocket and popped one into his mouth. It had been several hours since he’d taken a sip of vodka, but he couldn’t take a chance that any of the reporters might catch the scent of it on his breath. Cops would keep his secret among themselves, they might resent Palmer for his weakness, but they would uphold the blue code of honor and not rat on one of their own. Reporters were another matter altogether.

  He walked out of the lobby towards the police tape and barricades in the distance. They had set the barriers so far awa
y purposely because the lobby was well-lit and now visible at night to the high-powered cameras the press had brought with them. At least the emergency vehicles and forensics vans were blocking much of the glass wall of the lobby now.

  As Palmer approached them, the reporters crowded towards the barriers like dogs excited about a possible treat.

  “I want to make a quick statement,” Palmer said as cameras were aimed at him, lights were shined in his direction, and microphones were thrusted towards where he stood a few feet away from the stretch of police tape. Two police officers were nearby in case this mob got out of control.

  “I’m not taking any questions right now,” Palmer said as cameras flashed. “I just want to let you know that right up front.”

  Palmer knew Cardenelli was not going to be happy about him talking to press right now, but he was out of options. He wanted to get the word out about Stella and David.

  “We’re looking for two people of interest,” he told the reporters. “They are not suspects at this time, just people we want to talk to. I don’t have any photos of them with me, but I will get some sent to you soon. One of these persons of interest is a woman named Stella Weaver. She’s twenty-nine years old. She’s an archaeologist who works out of Arizona State University. She was last seen driving a white Chevy Suburban truck with New Mexico plates. She may be traveling with a child, a nine-year-old Navajo boy named David Bear. If anyone out there has seen these two, or talked to them, in the last few days, we’d like to hear from you. Thank you.”

  Palmer turned away from the mass of reporters. He could already hear the questions fired at him even though he’d already told them that he wasn’t taking any questions.

  “What about the bank robbers?” one of the reporters barked.

  “Does the fire at the cabin have anything to do with this?” another screamed at him.

  Palmer ignored them as he walked back up the steep incline from the parking lot to the Mountainside Inn that stood up on the hill in the darkness. The police and emergency lights were shining, the blue and red lights were flashing, the lights bouncing off of the woods in the distance.