As he worked his way westward, he went higher into the hills, until the view behind him was a vast stretch of the Earth that disappeared into haze to the south, a wall of dark, flickering clouds to the north, and what seemed like infinity to the east. He felt a sense of the planet rolling through space, an ark on an endless journey, lost in the stars. Surely there was something good out there, too, some world or worlds where all was well.
Deep in the lost immensity behind him, he could see a column of smoke rising into the stillness before the storm. So the aliens had found a way to set Mac’s place on fire after all. Couldn’t be anything else. He thought of that wonderfully ramshackle house filled with fine paintings, superb equipment, and Mac’s many collections, and he thought that Mac was right about him: he was a cancer, a destructive element, bringing ruin and death wherever he went.
It hadn’t been necessary to burn Mac out, or even important. There was only one reason for it, which was purest spite.
As he drove on, negotiating every wrinkle of land he could find, he watched the oncoming storm, its face shot with lightning and boiling with angry clouds, and he asked himself a question he could not ignore and could not lay to rest, and certainly could not answer. The question was, “Who am I? Or what?”
He turned the old truck toward the storm, and went on.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
BY THE time Flynn reached Highway 17, the truck was laboring, and he was watching the temperature gauge climb toward its red line. If the truck stopped, he would be alone on foot. Even if the aliens didn’t take him, with his leg in this condition, he wouldn’t make it far. This land did not have room for the weak. If his vehicle failed him, he died. Simple truth.
He was still a mile from the dark line of the road below him when the gauge slipped into the red. He tried to drive fast enough to keep some air moving under the hood, but not so fast that he made the problem worse.
As he descended the escarpment that marked the western border of Mac’s ranch, the needle’s ascent slowed. Then it started to drop. But there was a long flat area at the bottom, and when Flynn had to step on the gas again, it almost immediately became pinned. The next step would be a blown hose and the end of the line.
He crept ahead, glimpsing the road from time to time. Was it getting closer? Hard to be sure. If he’d drifted into an angled approach, he could end up going miles more than necessary. The truck would not make it, no question.
He got another glimpse of the tarmac. The gauge was still pinned. The engine coughed and faltered and the truck shook. His leg hammered with pain.
With the truck protesting like an exhausted horse, he climbed a steepening bank. When he reached the top, he saw spread before him the long, empty strip of the road. A grateful wash of blood flushed his face as he turned onto the highway at last.
He began traveling at about forty, hoping that the breeze under the hood and the easier going would help, but the gauge remained stubbornly pinned, and the engine’s laboring became more pronounced.
The storm was now a great cliff of clouds looming across the whole northern horizon. Farther east, he knew that it would bring tornadoes, but out here in West Texas, the chief danger from weather like this was lightning and hail and the flash floods that would turn bone-dry gulches into raging torrents inside of two minutes. But Flynn had seen it before. He knew this hard land and its power, and respected it the way a man respects a snake, and loved it the way he loves the mystery of a mountain lion.
The lines these storms drew in West Texas could be very clear, and he watched the wall of rain coming straight toward him, a dancing haze swallowing the highway.
First, the truck was buffeted by a fierce gust of wind, and then the rain hit. He found himself peering into white, rushing nothingness. The truck’s old-fashioned electric windshield wiper did little good. At least the cooler air ended the overheating crisis.
The wound now involved pain so great that it made him woozy and nauseated, and caused him to scream between clenched teeth whenever the truck struck the slightest bump.
Thus far, it was looking like he’d escaped, and he was worried that this meant the others had not.
Slowly, the outskirts of Fort Stockton appeared, some houses naked in the naked land, then a Texaco station and a little strip of stores. There was a KFC with its big red and white sign collapsed into its parking lot. Farther on, there stood a Dairy Queen and a steak house with the kind of food that drew ranchers, who ate and told stories and laughed in good seasons, and sat silently in their booths in bad ones.
Like the rest of the region, practically every foot of this place held at least one memory for him. The saddlery where his dad had taken him to get his first saddle of his own; the church where his grandmother had been baptized, worshipped, and from which she’d been buried. Over a little farther, she and her people were in East Hill Cemetery, living in his memories, lying in the stark land, in the wind.
Finally, he saw the Rodeway Inn ahead. He pulled into a parking space near the office, stepped out of the truck and into pain so extreme that he had to clutch the door to keep himself from buckling at the knees.
He took deep breaths, forcing the agony down, forcing his body to function, his muscles to work. He walked into the motel. The clerk, behind the desk and watching a TV show on a tablet computer, looked up at him. He did not smile.
“You all right, cowboy?”
“I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I had some friends check in a while ago. A man and two women.”
“They didn’t check in. They stood in here and argued, then they left.”
What in hell could that mean? “Excuse me?”
“That fella got a call on his cell. Then he yells out, ‘The crazy bastards are burning down my house.’ A few minutes later, he leaves in a cab. Some air force officer from up at the base picked up the women.”
So they’d gotten one after all. They’d lured Mac back. He would be dead by now, poor damn guy. He hoped that he’d put up a hell of a fight. He thought, Good-bye, fare you well, you bastard. He choked back his feelings and pulled out his cell phone. Safe enough to use it now, unless they’d taken to invading towns in driving storms.
He called Diana. “You have reached a monitored voice mailbox. Please leave your message.”
“What the hell’s going on? Where are you?”
The next thing he knew, he was on the floor.
“Shit,” the clerk said. “I get ’em all.”
It took Flynn a moment to realize that he’d blacked out. As he got oriented, he fought to his feet. He clutched the counter. “I need a room.”
“You need a lot more than that. I’ve called EMS.”
“No. No EMS. I can take care of myself.”
“No, you can’t. I’m not giving you any room, either—you’re damn well at death’s door. What happened to you, anyway? You get yourself shot?”
A couple of EMS attendants appeared almost immediately. Flynn didn’t resist. He was slipping in and out of consciousness, and could no longer deny that he had reached the end of his tether.
He saw the gurney they were wheeling in, though, which made him strive to pull himself together. He willed the pain to concentrate just in the wound. He relaxed into the fire of it, allowing it to consume him and become part of him.
“I’m okay,” he said. Then, to prove that, he took a step. But he could not take another. “No, I’m not. You’ll need to move me.”
“What happened to you?”
“Got snakebit down near Marfa. Diamondback.”
They laid him on the gurney. One of them started setting an IV.
“I’m good. All I need is wound management.”
“That’s our call, fella.”
He let them set a fluids IV. “No dope,” he said, “I don’t need dope.”
“What treatment have you received?”
“Antivenin, I think.”
“You think?”
“A friend had some at his house. I don’t know its condition. I don’t think it’s working very well.”
“We’ll see.”
They rolled him into the wagon. He listened to the siren as the ambulance lumbered through the rainy streets. The next thing he knew, he was wheeled into a small emergency room and felt a nurse cutting off the leg of his jeans.
“Doctor!” she shouted.
A young Indian doctor came in immediately. He smiled. “Hello, I am Dr. Patel. What has happened here?”
“I got snakebit.”
He looked down at the wound. “No, this is not a snakebite.”
“The hell, it was the biggest diamondback I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m sorry, but this is not a snakebite.”
Flynn knew that but had not wanted to face it. He struggled to raise his head. He could see his swollen lower leg, purple ringed by angry red. “It was a diamondback fourteen feet long.”
“With a single fang? I don’t believe so. The largest go to seven feet long, anyway. There is something under your skin. Can you tell me what that is?”
“I’ve been driving on this leg for hours. I just need to sleep. A good sleep.”
“What is that under your skin? Can you remember?”
“I don’t know.” He had to get it out, but he couldn’t let this man do it. If he did, the object would be sent to pathology and be destroyed or lost or even end up on the evening news. It was unknown technology, and maybe a window into the mind and abilities of the enemy.
Was it transmitting or receiving, or doing both? And why do such a clumsy job of insertion?
The answer was obvious, and made him consider just leaving it where it was. They had anticipated that he would suspect there was something implanted in him. They wanted him to take it out and, when it was removed, imagine himself free. But he would not be free, because whatever was of real importance to them would be somewhere else in his body.
“I can walk out of here.”
“You can’t walk three steps. We need to get that thing out, and then the swelling will go down so long as there’s no infection. Now, can you give me a better idea where it came from?”
“I got snakebit, and afterwards it was there. That’s all I know.”
“You were not bitten by a snake, as I have told you. Now, I want to move you into the operating room and get this thing out.”
“Doctor, I—”
“Nurse!”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Call Dr. Francesco and get this man prepped. Left lower leg, foreign object.”
The next thing Flynn knew, he was being slid onto the hard, black table in the middle of an operating room.
“No general anesthesia,” he said as a nurse added a bag to his IV and a doctor in greens asked him if he was allergic to any drugs.
Before he could protest further, he felt the comforting hand of the drugs take him and hold him. Time began passing at a different speed. He was half awake and half asleep, and struggling with all his might to remain conscious.
He heard a voice say, “Jesus,” and saw two masked faces staring at each other.
“Careful,” he said, forcing his lips to form the words. “Don’t let it near you, don’t touch it.”
“He’s vocalizing. Take him deeper.”
“No. Do not. No.”
Then it was black, the voices were somewhere in the far away, and he could feel long periods of pressure against his leg.
He became aware of women shouting. “Errol! Errol!”
It was nice here. Warm. And he had not slept in days. Not in days.
“Errol, wake up! Errol!”
Who was this bothering him? The hell with them.
“Errol! Wake up!”
He saw a face filled with two brown eyes.
“Yeah?”
“We thought you were gonna sleep until Tuesday.”
He was in a hospital room, lying on the bed and hooked up to a vital signs monitor. There was an IV in his arm. Electrolytes only, he saw.
A nurse smiled down at him. “Who was JFK?”
The name didn’t ring a bell. He covered. “Who wants to know?”
“Look at the clock. Can you see the clock?”
“Yeah.”
“What time is it?”
“Three twenty.”
“Okay, we’re getting somewhere. What’s your name?”
“Flynn Carroll. Nobody calls me Errol. And by the way, JFK was President Kennedy.” He had also remembered that he was in a hospital in Fort Stockton and he needed to get out of here. He needed to reconnect with Diana and Gail right now, and he needed to take with him whatever the doctors had extracted.
“Doctor, he’s conscious.”
Now a male face peered down at him. Kindly, about forty, white guy. “I’m Dr. Francesco. I’m your surgeon. Do you know what we took out of you?”
“You put me under? I told you not to do that.”
“You went under on your own. You’re pretty wasted, Mr. Carroll. Now, what is that thing?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do we.” He raised the head of Flynn’s bed and held out a small white box. He opened it and held it so that Flynn could see. “Recognize this?”
There was a disk in the box, bright silver. In its center was a neat round hole.
He shook his head.
“You sure seemed to know something about it. You were yelling that something would come out of it. Despite the anesthesia.” He stared at Flynn, waiting for a response.
Flynn had no idea what to say.
When there was no reply forthcoming, Dr. Francesco continued. “Something did.” He picked up a lidded glass beaker.
In it, Flynn saw a wrinkled black object about two inches long. At one end was a mass of fine white threads, extended as if they were grasping.
“This thing was alive. Very alive. It struggled. It died struggling, as you can see.”
“Yeah, I see that.” Looking at the thing and remembering the voices talking to him, Flynn felt as deep an unease as he had ever known. This was very clearly a parasite, but also a piece of technology. Living technology. He was betting everything on the hunch that it was dead now.
“Where were you when you got this in you?”
“Like I told you, I thought I got snakebit.”
“The metal disk is obviously a housing for this proteinaceous material. You sure you’re not under some kind of exotic treatment, maybe experimental cancer treatment of some kind?”
“No.”
“Because what this disk looks most like is an implantable infuser. Something that delivers a continuous flow of—”
Another nurse came in and whispered to Francesco. She stood aside, shoulders hunched. Flynn could see that she was frightened, and that worried him.
“Well, it seems that your friends are here to pick you up. I’d like you to leave the proteinaceous material for pathology. The metal disk you can take with you, or we can discard it.”
“No, I need it all.” He found himself almost childishly relieved that Diana and Geri had finally come. He’d feared the worst for them. Now, if only he could get Mac to get the hell off that ranch and into his place in Menard, which would be safer for him, too—unless, of course, it was already too late.
The doctor placed both the disk and the small jar containing the mobile part of the system, or whatever it was, into a plastic bag, which he then sealed.
“If your leg gets hot and more tender than it is, or you feel nauseated or dizzy, get back in here. Infection’s what we worry about.”
An orderly brought in a wheelchair.
“Hold off, where’s my weapons? I had a knife and a gun.”
“They’ll be returned to you as you leave the facility.” The doctor slid his hands under Flynn’s arms.
“I can make it,” Flynn said. Standing on his own was hard but no longer impossible. The room whirled and he had to grab the bed railing, but he recovered himself.
&
nbsp; “Don’t walk on that any more than you have to, Errol, please,” the surgeon said. “You’ll open the stitches.” He handed him a prescription. “And take this with you. Take one a day, starting in the morning. Be sure to take them all.”
The nurses helped him dress in his shirt and jacket and the remains of his jeans. He could get a shoe on his right foot, but not on the left. It would take a day or so for the swelling to go down.
Working as hard as he could to walk normally, fighting back the pain as best he could, he headed for the lobby.
Diana and Geri were nowhere to be seen. He turned around to go ask where they were, and found himself face-to-face with an air security police officer who had obviously been standing beside the door he just walked through.
When he turned around again, he found himself confronting three men: a full-bird colonel in uniform, a major, and a civilian whose cold stare suggested that he expected trouble and was prepared to deal with it. The colonel wore a name tag—LEANDER.
“Don’t even think about leaving on your own,” Colonel Leander said. “We’re here to help you.”
“Who the hell are you?”
The civilian’s face crinkled into a smile. “I’m the boss you’ve never met, Flynn. Diana Glass reports to me.” The smile evaporated.
The air security personnel were right behind him now.
“Come this way,” Colonel Leander said. “Can you make it to the car?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“We can get a chair.”
With the SPs behind him, two armed officers beside him, and no gun of his own, he didn’t see a way out. Slowly, he made his way toward the vehicle, parked directly in front of the lobby doors.
“Somebody was supposed to return my weapons.”
“We have them.”
They helped him into the backseat. Colonel Leander sat on his right, Major Ford on his left, the civilian in the front seat with the driver, another air security officer.
“I repeat, do I have a choice?”
Alien Hunter: Underworld Page 14
