Culture Shock: A First Contact Mystery Thriller (The Gunn Files Book 1)

by M. G. Herron

  I grimaced, knowing she was merely speaking the truth I hadn’t wanted to acknowledge this morning. I should have been offended that Alek had sent her to pry into my private business, but I wasn’t. I only felt a sense of relief, mixed with the cold fire of shame.

  Feigning nonchalance, I emptied my pockets onto an open corner of the desk—the only remaining flat surface not occupied in the tiny office—topping the pile with my handgun, still holstered. Then I grabbed a beer from the mini-fridge and cracked it open, buying myself a second to think.

  Finally, I said, “I just got a little behind on my payments, that’s all. I can handle it.”

  Annabelle wasn’t just a pretty face. She was also the accountant of record for all of Alek’s business interests, and she was damn good at her job. As a result of Alek’s friendship, she had given me some financial advice in the past, helped me set up some accounting software, that sort of thing. If I could have afforded to pay her what Alek did, I would have. And trust me, she was worth it. But that wasn’t the only reason I hadn’t asked for help. The idea of someone else rifling through my bank accounts and bills, digging up memories and dredging up all the difficult choices I’d had to make since mom’s funeral put me on edge.

  Still, the idea of working on my finances with this job on my hands nauseated me. If she wanted to help, and Alek was offering… what kind of ungrateful oaf would I be to refuse?

  Something else occurred to me, like the snap of an unseen ship’s sails passing in the night.

  “Say, how did you get in here, anyway?”

  “Alek gave me his spare key.” She picked up a pewter bottle opener keychain from which a single key hung. Definitely Alek’s. I’d given him a spare ages ago, just in case I ever got locked out. There has to be one person you trust to have your back. Him sending Anna without telling me was his gruff way of having my back in another way.

  “But the door was unlocked,” Annabelle added. “I thought you left it open for me because Alek told you I was coming.”

  “He didn’t.” I narrowed my eyes. “Are you sure it was unlocked?”

  She glared at me from under one arched eyebrow. “I’m sure.”

  I glanced back at the door. “I locked it when I left.”

  “It was open when I got here.” Annabelle shrugged, then shuffled the bills and typed something on the computer. Narrowing her eyes at the pile of things I’d placed on the desk, she lifted a crumpled piece of white paper from the pile and smoothed it out. My heart sank as I realized that it was the note from my landlord. I closed my eyes and drained half the beer.

  “Aw, hell, Gunn,” Annabelle said. “You should have said something sooner.”

  “It’s not your responsibility,” I said. “I told you, I just got a little behind. I can handle it. Once I find this Cameron Kovak, I’ll be caught up in no time. More work will come in after that. It always does.”

  She set her jaw and started typing on the laptop. I waited, swinging the beer can between two fingers and tapping my foot.

  “Your expenses have outpaced your income for months, Gunn,” Anna finally said. “There was a windfall from a couple years ago—before we set up your accounting system, remember?—that was keeping you afloat. What happened to that?”

  “It was a business loan,” I said.

  She looked around the tiny office, then quirked her eyebrows up ever so slightly.

  “I took out a loan to expand the business, but I never got around to it. It was right around the time my mom died.”

  “Oh,” she said. She went back to typing on the computer.

  “Okay, now one more thing,” I said. “How did you get that old thing working?”

  “What old thing?”

  “The laptop. It had that blue screen of death-thingie.”

  “It worked fine. Sometimes, that just means you have to restart it.” The way she laughed could have melted stone. “Did you try turning it off and on again?”

  “Guess not.”

  A distracted look came into her eyes, as if she had suddenly lost interest in the conversation. As I came around the desk to see what she was doing, she tabbed away from a browser and back into the accounting system and pointed at it. “So, wait, where’d the money go?”

  “What was that?”

  “What? Nothing.”

  “Let me see,” I leaned down over her shoulder and switched back to the browser.

  Annabelle’s cheeks heated up in a rosy blush.

  “Huh,” I said.

  It was one of those web 1.0 sites, all black with flamboyantly colored fonts—greens, yellows, and neon blues. Flashy graphics. No cohesion at all.

  A banner across the top read: Weirder Than Weird, and beneath that, “Marsha Marshall’s investigations into, supernatural, paranormal, and unexplained phenomena.”

  It was the blog run by Austin’s local investigator of weird, the blogger Marsha Marshall. Austin hosted its fair share of UFO enthusiasts and lovers of the occult, but Marsha was their patron queen. Most of the people I ran with, including Alek, thought she was a crackpot. I did too, most days, but I kept tabs on her like I keep tabs on all the odd things in this city. Never know when she might stumble on a strange fact that might help me out one day.

  Marshall’s writing covered things that many of the mainstream news sources ignored or laughed off as nothing more than kids’ pranks. She had a flair for sensational headlines and was very passionate about conspiracy theories. There were reams of pages buried in the back of the site about Area 51, Roswell, and the supposed nuclear fallout shelter beneath the Denver airport. She’d mapped UFO sightings all across Texas.

  Today, my assignment—and Detective Gonzalez’s murder case—was being featured prominently. A distant and blurry photograph of the crater where Dale Edwards had died spanned the top fold of the page. Below that, a dizzying array of colorful headlines and other graphics.

  I gave Annabelle a wry look out of the corner of my eye. She looked defensive for a moment, and then offended. “What?” she scoffed. “Don’t tell me you’ve never read this blog. I saw the URL in your browser history, which is the only reason I clicked on it, to be honest.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Annabelle jutted her chin out. “Some of her ideas are really compelling. Take this thing today. That crater didn’t just come out of nowhere. KVUE initially misreported it as ‘ditch.’ Then they said it was a hole dug to bury new power lines. First of all, the power lines there are strung overhead. Secondly, power lines, in a hole that deep? Come on.”

  I felt obligated to play devil’s advocate. “Some of her explanations are compelling. That doesn’t make them the truth.”

  “You think she’s a liar?”

  I shook my head, chuckling. “I didn’t say that. I think Marsha Marshall believes every word she writes on this blog. But wishing it were so doesn’t transform her wild theories into undeniable facts.”

  “You can’t deny that something spooky is going on in this case. Kovak was a lineman—a power line worker, right? Since he went missing, there have been all sorts of brownouts and power outages in the city.”

  “That’s because of the heatwave. Power outages are completely random, or at least correlated to specific problems the power lines in that area are having.”

  She crossed her arms. “Did someone at the power company tell you that?”

  “Well, no, but—”

  Both of her eyebrows shot up again. This girl could use those expressive eyebrows to tell a story without words. She shrugged again, as if to say, fine.

  I knew what fine meant. Especially in that tone of shrug.

  “I can appreciate some of Ms. Marshall’s ideas,” I said, trying to win Annabelle back over to my side, “but sometimes I think she goes a little too far.”

  Her brow furrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “You remember last year when farms in Kyle started reporting an unexpected string of cattle deaths? The news said it was mad cow disease or something, but al
l anyone wanted to talk about is how Marsha Marshall thought it was chihuahuas.”

  “Chupacabras,” Annabelle corrected me. “What’s so crazy about that?”

  “Well, for starters, these chahupacabras ain’t real.”

  Annabelle gave me a look that told me she thought I was a simpleton. I could just imagine that she was thinking, Bless your heart. Instead, she said, “Do you believe in God, Anderson?”

  “Of course. I’m a Texan.”

  “Have you ever seen God?” She looked at me like she’d just discovered a cure for cancer.

  “Can’t say I have.”

  “Just ’cause you ain’t seen something, doesn’t mean it don’t exist. You know what does exist?” She lifted the stack of overdue bills and waved them at me, with the late rent reminder from my landlord on top.

  I sighed and sat down on the desk next to her. “Okay. Just give it to me straight. How deep am I in the hole?”

  We went through each of my bills and accounts together, checking my statements and doing cash projections and a bill payment schedule. She was a saint. Her expertise and cool depth of knowledge made me feel like I was back in math class in middle school, trying to wrap my head around basic variable equations that everyone else seemed to pick up on so much quicker than I had. Math was never my strong suit. But it did help to make me realize that it was possible to dig myself out of the hole. Even though I was tired from the evening’s events, I couldn’t help but feel a deep gratitude toward her.

  When we reached the end of the pile, I drained the dregs of my beer, crushed the can, and pitched it into the little plastic trash can in the corner to join the other dead soldiers that had accumulated throughout the week.

  “It’s a good start,” Annabelle said.

  I nodded. “Thanks. I mean it.”

  “You bet.”

  The music outside had gotten louder. I tapped my foot to it as my mind wandered back to Kovak—or, more accurately, to the tag on his safe return. I had to find him if I wanted to keep the office—if I wanted to have a shot at hanging on in this business. The thought of going back to a normal nine-to-five put a sour taste in my mouth. I hadn’t had one of those in over a decade, and I didn’t plan to start now.

  Annabelle stood, stretched her arms over her head. Her midriff peeked out just a bit, revealing a green, studded bellybutton ring. In the small, cramped office, my hands were only a few inches from the soft curves of her hips. Her white shorts barely went halfway down her milky thighs.

  “Wanna grab something to eat?” Annabelle asked.

  I cleared my throat and maneuvered up and away from Anna. “I really should pack for tomorrow. It’s gonna be a long day.”

  She smiled with her lips pressed together, but I saw her shoulders slump, ever so slightly. I swallowed a curse. Talk about bad timing.

  “Raincheck?”

  A smile lit her face.

  “I know the best pizza joint in town,” I said. “My buddy owns it.”

  “I’d like that. You know, I—”

  Just when I was ready to start panicking that I’d asked Alek’s CPA on a date, the overhead lights in my office went dark, and there was loud pop just outside the office. Annabelle ducked, and I jumped to put my body between her and the window. Grabbing her wrist, I yanked us both down into a crouch.

  Crawling to the wall, I peered through the grimy window pane. People poured out of the bars. Those immediately below me were protecting their heads with their arms as sparks from the blown streetlamp rained down. I scanned the street. Except for the headlights of cars, it was pitch black in both directions. Power must have gone out on the whole block.

  “Are you going to tell me this is just another brownout?” Annabelle demanded.

  On the street, a dark-haired figure sprinted into view, toward downtown. He ran with an awkward loping gait that looked more beastly than human. His clothes were ripped and ragged, the exposed skin on his forearms streaked with black marks—scars, or possibly exposed wounds. As he passed beneath my window, he turned and looked up at me.

  “No way,” I breathed.

  I almost didn’t recognize Cameron Kovak—it seemed like his skin was stretched over his frame. His mouth was spread into an unnaturally wide grin, pink gums glistening as if someone was pulling his lips apart with invisible fingers. But his hair was dirty blond, his ears overly large for his face, and he had the same birthmark at his temple that he had in the photograph Alek had given me—a splash of lighter-colored skin you couldn’t mistake. I may not have been very good at math, but I had a damn fine memory for faces. Despite the lunatic-asylum-smile, that was him all right. Whatever had happened to the man, I was sure that was him.

  “I knew you’d come around to my way of thinking,” Annabelle said.

  “No, it’s not that, it’s…”

  There was another series of pops as more street lamps exploded in the direction Kovak had just passed. Someone let rip a sharp scream. The voices of those gathered below rose in a crescendo as confusion broke out along the street. Yet more people spilled from the bars. Sirens wailed in the distance, slowly converging on my street.

  “Stay here,” I said to Annabelle as I reached under the desk and laid my hands around the barrel of the 12-gauge shotgun. I kept it here, loaded with Taser XREP stun rounds in case of emergencies just like this.

  “In your dreams,” Annabelle said. “I’m coming with you.”

  “No, you’re not. Kovak is too dangerous. Lock the door behind me.”

  I turned and ran from the office without waiting for her to reply.

  7

  The sidewalks were thick with half-drunk party-goers. Fortunately, no one noticed the shotgun I held down at my side. Gunmetal gray blended into the dark denim of my jeans in the lightless night, and everyone was too busy hurrying back to their cars or staring at their phones trying to figure out what was going on to pay attention to me.

  Jogging through the pack of cell phone zombies, I searched the crowd for any sign of Kovak. He had been moving damn fast, but how far could a drug addict go before running out of fuel?

  Once I passed beneath the interstate and moved into the downtown core, the crowd grew even thicker. The windows of every building were black. The street here was blocked off from vehicle traffic, as usual for a Friday night, but since the power was out, people who would usually be packed like sardines into the bars now filled the street instead.

  Fortunately for me, a dense crowd and confusion provided enough cover that none of the cops on duty saw me open-carrying a weapon into their midst. Even though I was legally licensed to carry it—and even though the rounds were non-lethal, extended-range electronic projectiles—if a cop stopped me it would require a long explanation, and in all likelihood, I would lose Kovak’s trail completely.

  As I searched the crowd for the man, I saw something no one else seemed to have noticed. A line of string-lights along a rooftop patio remained lit and seemed to be flickering in a sequence—not randomly, but toward the top of a swanky-looking office building a block up on my right. I squinted at the roof and noticed a burst of amber sparks blooming into the air. The source of the sparks lay just out of my view.

  Pushing my way through the crowd, I managed to enter the building through a side door in the alley. The lobby was deserted and in total darkness. I skipped the elevator and went straight to the musty-smelling stairwell.

  It was doubtful this stairwell got used very often, except maybe by some of the more health-conscience tenants. Trudging up all six flights was challenging with my steel-toed boots, but I was glad I still wore them, even though I was now drenched in sweat under my shirt and jeans.

  I reached the top only slightly breathless, and paused for a moment, gathering my wits. The door was open just a crack. I lifted the shotgun in both hands, and used the barrel to nudge the door wider to reveal a tarred rooftop dotted with air conditioning units, condensers, and satellite dishes.

  I really did consider calling Detectiv
e Gonzalez at that point and waiting for backup. I didn’t have a partner, and if Kovak was armed, I could be putting myself in a bad position.

  But Gonzalez had made it clear how she felt about helping me out. Besides, I’d been in bad positions before. I couldn’t chance losing the tag on this skip just because I was afraid of a little rooftop scuffle. I was armed. I was ready. And—call it pride or call it stubbornness—my very livelihood was on the line.

  I pushed the door open slowly. My head and hand were pelted by something cold and wet. I jerked back, and then felt a bit embarrassed when I realized it had just begun to rain. Stepping outside again, I peered around the corner, shotgun braced against my shoulder, until I spotted a lone figure silhouetted against a shower of bright orange sparks arcing up from the roofline. Kovak leaned out over the edge of the roof, appearing to be reaching for the arching electrical discharge.

  “Hey!” I shouted, hoping to talk the man out of what appeared to be a suicide. The whole “dead or alive” thing with bounties is only true in old movies—if Kovak killed himself, I wouldn’t see a single dime. “You don’t want to do that!”

  He spun around and hissed at me. Actually hissed. A pair of deep-set, yellow eyes stared out of a bruised and scarred face. It was Kovak all right. But something had really messed him up. His face looked to be broken in several different places. Thunder rumbled in the distance.

  “Cameron Kovak,” I said. “I need you to come with me. Whatever happened to you, it’s not your fault. I can get you help.”

  The man dropped to all fours and launched himself to the other side of the building in a motion that was beyond human. I pumped an XREP round into the chamber of the shotgun, took aim, and fired. The projectile found its mark, center mass, and sent five hundred volts of electricity straight into his abdomen.

  Kovak twitched for a couple seconds, and then let out a primal scream, his back arching as he stretched his arms up. The man should have been on the ground, writhing in pain or even paralyzed. Instead, the electricity just seemed to piss him off. He grabbed the XREP round where its prongs had pierced his shirt, ripped it out of his skin as if it was an annoying bug, and crushed it in his hand, letting the circuitry and plastic pieces crumble to the rooftop.