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

by M. G. Herron

  “Mother of God,” I said. “Cameron Kovak, stop right there! I will shoot you down.”

  It was a bluff. I only had one more XREP round in the shotgun, I’d left my sidearm in the office, and, besides, I literally couldn’t afford to kill him. When he took a step toward me, I pumped the action again, slammed the stock into my shoulder, and pulled the trigger.

  Kovak took the second round to the thigh and shivered as the electricity lanced into him but remained standing. He arched his back again, this time letting his mouth fall open as if he enjoyed the sensation, as if the drug he was ingesting was the electricity itself.

  Whatever he was on, it had to be something strong.

  He hissed again, like a cat. It was surreal, standing there on the top of an apartment building that overlooked downtown Austin, realizing I had just hit this man with two of the strongest non-lethal stun rounds on the market, only to be hissed at like a damn cat.

  The rain had begun to fall steadily, cooling my body. I felt a sudden weariness. The rain was coming down at an angle now, making it difficult to see, and even think. My thoughts slowed to a crawl, moving as if they were coated in molasses.

  Kovak’s tongue shot out, thick, black, and dripping with saliva. It cleared the nearly twenty-foot distance between us and slapped me right across the neck before I could react.

  The pain was blinding and instantaneous. Ten-thousand hornets converged on my neck and poked their stingers into my skin. I fell hard. The shotgun clattered to the rooftop and bounced away. As I hit the tar, my bleary eyes could just barely make out Kovak, who was now standing over me.

  How did he get there? I felt a pressure on my mind, like the worst hangover, or a very sharp, stabby kind of migraine. I tried to scramble to my feet, but my muscles wouldn’t respond to my mind’s command.

  “Why are you following me, Anderson Gunn?” His black tongue darted around and seemed to taste in the air like a snake’s.

  My mind recoiled. How did he know my name? Did he also know that I was a bounty hunter?

  “Ahh,” Kovak said. “I am twice pursued. I was not informed that this planet had any local agents of the Federation.”

  He leaned down and the black tongue slithered out again, tasting the air around me. This close, I could see how Kovak’s skin was stretched thin over his skull. The bones of his face seemed to be in all the wrong places. What I thought was broken, was actually terribly malformed. In the places where the skin was torn, I didn’t see blood, but a slimier, darker skin beneath it.

  As if the face of Kovak was merely a mask.

  A bolt of lightning split the scene, illuminating the underside of a mountainous cloud hanging low in the sky above me. Thunder rolled and Kovak shuddered, then spun toward the flash. He hissed again, louder and far angrier sounding this time. Something struck him and pulled him out of my view. I heard grunts and the sounds of flesh impacting flesh.

  The prickles on my skin came back in a tsunami of pain. A shudder of nausea hit me in the gut, and I vomited onto the rooftop, some of it dribbling onto my shirt.

  I was consumed with agony for an indeterminate amount of time. Then I felt hands on me. I tried to respond, to move, to do anything. I couldn’t manage it.

  My eyes flickered open and shut so quickly I barely registered the figures peering down at me. There was a white figure and a black figure. It was too dark to make out their faces.

  Something pinched my neck. A dull shiver coursed down my spine as lightning flashed in the sky again. I closed my eyes against the sudden brightness.

  Then the light faded, smothering my conscious mind.

  8

  When I came to, I was lying on my back in a dark room. My palms were scraped raw, and as I groped over the thin, dirty carpet beneath me, bits of gravel dislodged themselves from my skin.

  I heard a high-pitched muffled voice, which sounded like it was coming from the other side of a wall. A woman’s voice, followed by a beeping sound and the soft ticking of something mechanical. Another voice responded, muffled yet low.

  I tensed and looked around, trying to place myself. My bleary eyes began to focus as shapes coalesced in the darkness. The corner of a desk. A grimy window, blinds drawn.

  My window, I realized.

  I relaxed and remained on my back, assessing the situation. It still seemed to be nighttime. Except for the whispering voices, it was eerily quiet. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been out or how the hell I’d gotten back to my office, but when I tried to move, every muscle in my body screamed. It felt as if I’d been hit by a freight train.

  As memories of the strange altercation with Kovak began to return, I put my hand to my neck in search of injuries. My fingers came away wet and sticky—not with blood, I was fairly certain, but with some other gunk that was thick and warm to the touch.

  The door opened, spilling yellow light in from the hallway. I squinted as two silhouettes formed in the doorway and used the windowsill to haul myself shakily to my feet. If this was to be my last battle, by God, I was determined to die standing. I wiped the gunk on my jeans and used the window frame to stay upright as I fought off a wave of dizziness.

  “Guess he survived after all,” said the deeper of the two voices. He sounded disappointed.

  One of them switched on the office light and my eyes burned from the harsh fluorescent. I squinted harder as I fought to maintain my balance. My whole body tensed, on guard as I wondered who these people were and what they wanted with me.

  “I told you,” the other, a woman, said. Her voice seemed to whistle and buzz faintly with mechanical undertones.

  I must have rung my bell pretty hard on the rooftop. As I thought about it, the memory came back full force—a black tongue lashing out of Kovak’s open mouth, crossing the distance, and licking me a good one on the neck. The instant suffering I’d felt had been blinding and visceral, and even now the memory of it made my stomach turn.

  As my eyes adjusted to the light, the forms of the two people in front of me clarified. An albino man with long braided hair reached back and gently shut the door with one foot. He then crossed his arms and regarded me like a jockey sizing up a new racehorse. I did not like that look. It made me feel like a piece of meat about to enter the grinder. All the hairs along my arms and neck stood on end. I met his gaze, trying to act tough. In reality, it was all I could do not to vomit.

  “Be at ease, Anderson Gunn,” said the woman. She had skin the color of teak and flame-red knots of hair.

  I took a deep breath, steadying myself as I tried to get my bearings. This was undoubtedly the pair I’d spotted at the crater. I hated when anyone got the jump on me. “If you want to steal the tag on Cameron Kovak, you’ll have to pry it out of my cold dead hands.”

  “We are not here to harm you,” the woman said. Her hands were clasped in front of her. She gave me a placid smile then lowered herself to the ground and sat in a cross-legged position, gesturing for her companion to do the same. With a grunt of displeasure, he complied.

  I blinked. “Don’t you want the bounty?”

  They exchanged confused looks.

  “My bounty. My payment. For collaring Cameron Kovak.”

  “Ah,” the woman said. “I see. No, we are not here to take your money.”

  Something about their postures vented the steam out of my defensiveness. No one who intends a person harm sits cross-legged on the floor in front of them. I lowered myself onto the windowsill. It was easier to balance myself there with my back against something solid.

  “How do you know my name?”

  “It is written on your door.”

  “Oh. Right.” Idiot. My thoughts were still fuzzy. I rubbed at the goo on my neck again.

  The woman leaned over and grabbed an old towel from the gym bag under my desk. “You can wipe the salve off your neck if it is bothering you. Its medicinal properties have expired.”

  I took the towel and wiped my neck. My memory told me there should have been a laceration of some kind
there, but the skin felt smooth. “Uh, thanks. Does that mean you put that stuff on me?”

  “Yes. I also injected you with a Pharsei antitoxin to combat the swelling and prevent you from choking on your tongue. Humans, unfortunately, are not inoculated to the same gradient of offworld bacteria as we are.”

  “Wait...” I said softly. “What do you mean, humans?”

  The woman had a serene look on her face, as if she had plotted out, in advance, every word exchanged in this surreal conversation. Her companion continued to stare at me, unblinking, like a lizard. You know where else I’d seen that look? In the eyes of connected mob enforces, the type who enjoyed physical violence. Those were the eyes of a cold-blooded killer, with irises the color of dried orange peels.

  And then something clicked in my mind. Her words. The weird way her voice whistled and sang when she talked. The man’s reptilian stare. It all collided in my sluggish thoughts. I gripped the gym towel even tighter.

  The room seemed to zoom out as a chill washed over my body and my heart thundered in my chest. I got lightheaded and had to blink black spots away from my vision as I clutched at the windowsill and fought to remain upright.

  My mind flashed over this evening’s events. First, the large and inexplicable crater. Then, Cameron Kovak lashing me into unconsciousness with his impossibly long and apparently poisonous tongue. And now, these two, sitting in my office claiming they’d healed me, and implying that they were something other than…

  “Are you telling me you’re not human?”

  “We are not,” she said.

  My mind recoiled, repelled by the idea, resisting it. What this woman was saying couldn’t be true.

  “Prove it,” I said.

  Without hesitating, the woman held out her hand. Her red knots of hair brightened to a fiery orange and the white gym towel I’d been wringing nervously was torn from my hands. It floated across the room as it twisted into the shape of a bird and hovered three inches above her open palm, languidly flapping its folded cotton wings.

  “These creatures on your planet, what do you call them?”

  “Birds,” I whispered, my mouth suddenly dry. My eyes felt like they were going to bulge out of my head. It was one thing to see magic on a stage—quite another to feel it as an object is ripped from your hands by unseen forces.

  The man rose smoothly in a single athletic motion and took a step forward. I tensed and prepared to defend myself, but he stopped halfway across the room and held his hand out, palm up. Taking his smallest finger in the opposite hand, he wrenched it to the side. I grimaced as the nauseating crack of breaking bone and torn ligaments filled the small room.

  I leaned away, but there was nowhere in the tiny room to retreat to. He continued to stare at me with those creepy orange eyes, which, as I looked, writhed with motion, like a thousand tiny orange fish swimming around the circular ponds of his irises.

  My eyes were drawn back to his broken finger as it straightened itself with a crunch—the noise of the breaking bone playing on a record in reverse. My stomach lurched, and I had to clench my throat to keep the contents down. “Whoa.”

  “Anderson Gunn, it is imperative that you—”

  The dizziness returned, and black spots crowded my vision. “I... I...”

  I shoved past the big albino, grabbed the little plastic trash can, and hurled the contents of my stomach into it. It wasn’t much—mostly liquid at this point. A few dry heaves followed the initial wave. When the nausea had passed, I grabbed the towel-bird out of the air and wiped my mouth with it.

  “Who are you?” I demanded.

  When the man growled in warning, the woman made a sharp gesture with her hand that silenced him immediately. Good to know who was in charge here.

  “You can call me Dyna,” she said, unruffled and calm. “My partner’s name is Kilos.”

  “What are you?”

  “I will explain as much as I can.” The whirrs and chimes in her voice made beautiful and subtle music as she spoke. “First, I must ask you to answer a question. Can you confirm that you did see us at the crater?”

  I nodded. No reason to hide it. At least now I knew it hadn’t been a mirage. Oddly, my response seemed to confirm her commitment somehow. Her jaw set, and she barreled into another explanation in her academic, yet startlingly melodic voice.

  “That was the first time you surprised me. Less than zero-point-zero-one percent of beings are capable of seeing through a reflective photon cloaking field without the aid of assistive technology.” She thumbed at a small device clipped onto her belt. “You have a keen eye, and a naturally strong mind. I was quite impressed at how you tried to resist the Pharsei.”

  Part of me still didn’t want to believe, but the presentation of a logical reason—a device—for what I’d experienced was extremely compelling. As a bounty hunter, I had a fondness for clever little devices, and they didn’t sell this one at your average Army and Navy Surplus. “That little thing hid you from me? How is that possible?”

  “A reflective photon cloaking field works by manipulating the manner in which photons of light interact with a being’s visual organs. In other words, it creates an illusion that is not physical, but generated at the moment one perceives. Only a rare few are genetically predisposed to negate the effect. It is a useful skill to have.”

  If that was true, it explained why Gonzalez hadn’t seen them, and maybe how they had disappeared so suddenly, too. “One second you were there, the next you were gone.”

  “You must learn to control it.”

  I frowned. “What was the second time I surprised you?”

  Her tranquil smile widened into one of genuine pleasure. “When you pursued the fugitive to the rooftop where we found you.”

  “Lot of good that did me.” I took a breath and adjusted my seat on the windowsill as I regarded the odd pair. Dyna waited patiently as my mind raced. These two were strange. If they wanted to harm me, they’d have done so already. I wondered what their endgame was.

  “So,” I said, “Let me get this straight. You healed me, and then brought me back here. How did you know where to find my office?”

  “Earlier today, I hacked into the systems of your local constabulary in order to ascertain the location of your base of operations.”

  My eyes widened. “You looked up my license plate number, didn’t you?”

  Dyna nodded.

  “So it was you following me in the white Mercedes. I knew it.”

  “We’ve been following you longer than that.”

  “That’s unsettling.” I narrowed my eyes. “My door was unlocked earlier. Did you break into my office?”

  Dyna turned to look at Kilos. “You did not lock the door behind you?”

  He shrugged.

  She whispered fiercely to him in a language I’d never heard before. Her harsh tone along with Kilos’s blank expression and stiff posture told me he was being reprimanded. Not by a peer, either, but by his superior officer.

  Dyna turned back. “Kilos forgot to lock the door. Please accept our apologies. It will not happen again.”

  “Apology not accepted.” Note to self: install a deadbolt and secure this office properly. No matter how much it costs. “Why should I take you at your word after a stunt like that?”

  “Precisely because I make no attempt to conceal the truth from you now. We had to be sure you weren’t a threat, or another, dangerous offworlder like the one we pursue. We do not often encounter beings capable of piercing a cloaking field, even if only for a brief moment. It warranted investigation.”

  That was strange. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to ignore me?

  “What for?” I asked.

  “It shows potential. In fact, we could use the assistance of someone like you.” For the first time, she hesitated ever so slightly. Sensing resistance, I kept my mouth shut as she considered her words. “Amongst our people,” she finally said, “Kilos and I are known as Peacekeepers. We are employed by the Intergalactic
Federation of Lodi to track down criminal elements across the galaxy and bring them to justice. Earth is… not a Federation priority. As a result, if we were required to return, we would have had to travel for several weeks under a constant acceleration.”

  “You were trying to save yourself the extra trip?” Involuntary laughter bubbled up from my gut, shattering my focus. It was completely absurd. Yet, somehow, the mundane practicality of such logistical considerations grounded what Dyna was telling me in reality. Up until that point, I had continued to doubt her. In that moment, I began to believe.

  “Holy shit. You really aren’t human. So what does that make you? Aliens?”

  She wrinkled her nose. “If you must use a generic term, we prefer ‘offworlder.’ We call ourselves Lodian.”

  I’d never met Marsha Marshall, but I did believe that Austin’s resident paranormal investigator would be thrilled to hear this news. I couldn’t help but be excited about the idea myself. Also, extremely curious. It raised so many questions. Where did they come from? How did they get here? How long had they known about Earth? But right now, one question seemed more important than the rest.

  “Wait, are you asking if I’ll be your intergalactic snitch?”

  “What is a snitch?”

  “You know, a spy.”

  “Ah. From your perspective, I can see why you would feel that way. But no. You would be appointed as a local agent through official channels. Like any Peacekeeper, you would be charged with keeping the peace, making lawful arrests of Federation-registered beings as necessary, and generally enforcing Federation codes regarding non-interference on silent planets.”

  A light feeling bubbled up from the floor of my gut and my shoulders began to shake with laughter. If only Sheila Gonzalez could hear this! Me, an officer of the law? She would find that absolutely hilarious.

  The woman cocked her head. “What is so funny?”