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

by M. G. Herron

  “Different kind of dangerous.”

  I made believe I was thinking it over before saying, “Let’s do this.”

  I didn’t like wax statues or novelty gift shops, so I never had any reason to go into this place before. I figured it was just some tourist trap, hardly even worth my time. It faded into the background of the city. Come to think of it, that would also make it the perfect cover. Like many things I’d seen tonight, it was hidden in plain sight. Even this late, the gate was drawn aside, and the place was still open. We walked up a couple steps and went inside.

  The whole store smelled like incense and was brimming with oddities. On one shelf, miniature sharks swam in a solution of formaldehyde. Next to the dead fish, a rack of keychains hung in the wan light—rows of alligator claws, eyeballs of varying shapes and colors, even a few vials filled with a red liquid which was clearly supposed to be blood. Too thin for human blood. Probably fake.

  Probably.

  I swallowed, hoping it wasn’t the blood of some offworlder. I had a moment to wonder if Pharsei blood was red like that, but then I peeled my eyes away as Vinny moved deeper into the gift shop.

  I’d been around the country several times chasing fugitives, and several more times for my own amusement. The place looked like any of the thousands of novelty gift shops across the United States. Worn wooden floor. Low ceiling. Shelves overflowing with cheap trinkets. They were always located near a cultural nexus of some kind. A dozen in Salem, Massachusetts, sold witch trial and Wiccan paraphernalia. There was another outside of Area 51 with a different kind of vibe, a few more in Roswell, of course, and a strangely famous one near Hooper, Colorado called the UFO Watchtower. I read about that one on Marsha Marshall’s blog.

  I’d always just assumed these sorts of shops represented capitalism at its worst—even people peddling worthless doohickeys could make a good living if there was a market for the junk. Now, I wondered if there wasn’t something else I’d been missing.

  Vinny made his way through the store, unconcerned about the racks full of Keep Austin Weird! t-shirts and the Sasquatch statue in the corner. No clerk was in sight, but against the back wall stood a glass booth next to a metal turnstile.

  Behind the glass sat a man wearing a turban. As I got closer, I saw that it wasn’t a man at all. It was a doll in a machine like the one from the Tom Hanks movie, Big. A name was scrawled in stylized letters across the top of the glass. Though faded and chipped with time, I could still make it out: Swami. The doll’s hand rested on a crystal ball.

  A clerk came out of a staff room behind the cash register. His eyes were narrow slits and he reeked of marijuana. “Sorry man, no more tours tonight.”

  “We just want to look at the displays,” Vinny said, handing him some cash. “We’ll be quick.” The guy shrugged and gave us two tickets. Vinny handed one to me, and then we made our way through the turnstile and into the winding halls of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

  Every inch of this part of the museum was covered in more oddities, each with a label and an explanation. Crammed into these narrow halls, I saw everything from a purported man-fish, to wax statues of Siamese twins, from suits of armor to Fiji Mermaids to dreamcatchers made of real scalps.

  Past the mounted head of a Jackelope, past the shrunken heads and plaster casts of Big Foot’s footprints, past the Elephant Man and a preserved fetus of Siamese twin piglets—creatures, if I were to believe Dyna, with offworlder inspirations—we came to another barricade.

  Vinny ducked under it.

  “Where are you going?” I whispered.

  “Come on.”

  We rounded a corner and went through another door. This time we emerged into a stone-paved courtyard with a pirate’s skeleton in the corner beyond a crumbling half wall, beneath a staircase that lead upstairs to another section of the museum, or maybe an apartment.

  “Here we are,” he said, guiding me toward a trap door in the floor of the courtyard. Pushing his fingers into a crack in the wall, something clicked, and then he was able to haul the trap door open.

  Below us loomed a long staircase bathed in amber light. The walls were lined with dozens of signs bearing warnings, many in languages I recognized… and several in scripts I didn’t. There were Roman, Chinese, and Cyrillic characters… Spanish and French and Italian. Then others that seemed like nothing more than strange geometric symbols. There were red stop signs, yellow warning signs, and white and black biohazard signs.

  The ones I could read didn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

  Monitored by CCTV.

  Authorized personnel only.

  Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.

  “Deterrents,” Vinny said, shaking his head. “Not that he needs them.”

  I swallowed.

  When Vinny strolled casually down the stairs, I followed, shutting the trap door above me. We must have gone down the equivalent of four flights of stairs—maybe more—before we came to the bottom.

  A narrow hallway dead-ended in a reinforced steel door. A small sliding window was centered in the upper half of the door, prohibition-style. Through the metal, a rapid bass line thumped.

  In spite of the hammering of my blood through my temples, I felt my lips turn up into a wry smile. This was better than any speakeasy I’d ever been to. Austin’s hipsters would have eaten this up if they knew where to find it.

  Vinny caught my expression and shook his head. “Why are you smiling? You’re crazy, you know that?”

  He stepped up to the door and rapped on the metal—two quick knocks. The small window cracked open and a voice from inside said, “Password.”

  Seriously, he actually asked for a password. My smile widened.

  Vinny put his hand out for silence and responded in a language I didn’t recognize. The words were lilting and smooth, like Latin, but unlike any Latin I’d ever heard. The window slammed shut. A moment later, a bolt slid away, the door opened, and the full range of the music washed over us.

  I didn’t have words for what I saw next. The chamber beyond was so long I couldn’t see the opposite end. The ceiling soared upward, making the hallway seem claustrophobic by comparison. Bass from the music galloped through my chest. The only source of illumination came from triangular lights set into the wall at regular intervals. They shone in both directions, throwing shafts of shifting blues, yellows, pinks, and greens over the crowd.

  As far as my eye could see, groups of offworlders gathered in pockets. Some sang and danced. One group congregated around a wire cage holding fistfuls of cash clutched in variously-shaped hands, watching two tiny lizard-like creatures rip into each other with razor claws. There was a section of gambling tables with groups of offworlders holding circular cards. Most, however, just stood around, socializing and drinking. Every hundred feet or so, the dance floor in the middle of the space was broken up by an oval-shaped bar. It appeared even aliens needed a place to let loose at night.

  “Welcome to Harbor,” Vinny said. “The Gatekeeper’s club. Here, offworlders are allowed to be themselves, free from Federation oversight and regulations that keep them hidden up there.” He thumbed up at the ceiling.

  Vinny stepped inside and nodded at the bodyguard, presumably the man who’d asked for the password. As I crossed the threshold, I looked up, and where a man’s head ought to have been, I saw the drooling heads of three black bulldogs, all attached to a single massive trunk of a neck. The rest of the bodyguard was shaped like a linebacker, and his shoulder muscles rippled beneath his shirt. The dog-heads sniffed after me, and I tried to ignore the sound of snapping teeth in my ear as we moved past.

  To our left, a young assembly of humanoid aliens with blue skin surrounded a chest-high table that was filled with sand. They hooted and hollered, cheering on one of their species who was slamming the point of a sizzling red blade into the sand over and over again, each time drawing closer to the edges of his fingers. Bills and coins were being thrown on the table in two different piles
, with a table manager calling out the bets as they fell. Each time the blue man struck with his blistering crimson knife, a geyser of smoke curled upward from the point of impact. After fifteen or twenty impeccable strikes, with the bets piling up, he finally misjudged his movement and directed the blade straight into the back of his hand. With a scream, he jerked the knife out and clutched his injured hand to his chest. About half the group whooped in victory. Ignoring his pained cries, the table manager swept up one pile of bets, and paid out the other.

  “I know how easy it is to get lost in here. Stick with me,” Vinny said, grabbing my arm and pulling me away. “Come on.”

  In the next section, rows of deep leather booths hosted dozens of small gatherings of six to twenty aliens apiece. These beings were like nothing I’d ever seen. And they weren’t hiding down here. They were out in the open, tentacles and claws and fins waving merrily, with body shapes I didn’t even know how to describe all undulating in time with thumping electronic dance music.

  This was more fascinating to me than the few disguised offworlders that I’d seen above ground. They made even the most eccentric characters in Austin seem tame by comparison. When Vinny turned to be sure I was still following him, I noticed that he, too, had dropped his disguise.

  I blinked, and my jaw fell even farther open as I took in his true form. Vinny’s skin was the same tan color as before, but now it was covered with a fine fur and his elongated snout had sprouted thin gray whiskers.

  I shot Vinny the knowing impish grin of a comrade in arms. He may look different than I expected, but that didn’t change my estimation of him as a person. As far as I was concerned, Vinny was a standup guy. He’d taken a risk bringing me down here, opening himself to whatever his offworlder associates might think to see him palling around with some human. Whatever we were about to get into, it was good to know I had a friend at my side.

  “So,” I said, leaning close to him, “where’s this Gatekeeper of yours hiding?”

  “The thing about the Gatekeeper,” Vinny said, nose twitching, “is that he can be anywhere.”

  “What does he look like?”

  Vinny shrugged. “Today? Who knows? But he always has a kind of… aura about him. You’ll know when we find him.”

  Vinny took me deeper into the club, skimming the edges of different groups of offworlders as we searched for our mark. Because the place was crowded, I bumped into a few, ending up with some kind of gelatinous slime on my shirt on more than one occasion. I kept apologizing and made sure they knew I wasn’t trying to be rude—but more than a couple of them made it clear they wanted to clobber me. It was only due to Vinny’s quick reactions and apologetic insistence that they didn’t try.

  All manner of creatures filled this place Vinny called Harbor, some towering over me, others only as tall as my knee. Some smelled like garbage. Others smelled like roses and looked like a homeless man’s overflowing shopping cart. There were even a few humans, too—or at least, offworlders who hadn’t dropped their disguises. It was hard to tell.

  Against the wall, a lanky fellow who looked like a giant green orchid lounged, bathing in a shaft of color-changing light. Leaf-like fronds protected a tangled root system at his center, which in turn dipped into bucket-shaped shoes that sloshed water on the ground each time he moved. A tall six-armed insectoid being with a cylinder strapped across his back, bearing at least two drinks in each hand, was walking by Green Orchid when he slipped in the water and dropped his drinks, shattering glass everywhere. Enraged, Six-Arms swung the cylinder from his back and blasted three burning holes in Green Orchid’s leafy body. I stared in horror as half a dozen of the three-headed guard dogs piled onto Six-Arms, dragged him toward a dark corner, and beat the snot out of him.

  It wasn’t our fight, so Vinny and I averted our eyes and moved toward a more tame-looking group with fewer visible weapons. There, I fell into an awkward conversation with a Lilliputian-size girl. She had pink skin and a cold fire for hair. She even let me put my hands in the flames, which made her giggle uncontrollably. After talking to her for a few minutes, Vinny grabbed my sleeve and pulled me away again. He led me to a corner, and it became apparent that although the room extended another few dozen yards or so beyond the booth, the seating ended here. This was effectively the back corner of the room.

  Being the corner booth, the bench wrapped in a semi-circle around a wooden table that could seat at least twenty. Sitting in the booth was a radiantly beautiful human woman surrounded by an eclectic bunch of offworld flunkies. The dynamic was immediate and impressive. Although the woman was lithe and small—not to mention completely naked—she had a kind of… presence about her. A star quality. Her eyes shone with an electric blue light.

  Those at the table drank and talked in hushed voices, but they all seemed to defer to the woman, glancing surreptitiously at her. A large, colorful tattoo covered her right shoulder and upper arm. Her raven-dark hair cascaded well past her breasts. Overall, it left very little to the imagination.

  I didn’t realize we’d found our mark until Vinny put one hand to his forehead and bowed across the table at the woman.

  “Greetings, Gatekeeper.”

  12

  Hello, Vinkalathis,” the Gatekeeper said. “Are you here to borrow money again? I heard you stopped frequenting the Jel’ka track.”

  The obviously male baritone that boomed from the tiny, naked woman’s mouth gave me goosebumps. As did her glowing jack-o’-lantern eyes.

  “Ah, no—I mean, I did,” Vinny said, casting an embarrassed glance in my direction. I politely pretended not to notice.

  The offworlders around the table, attuned to the Gatekeeper’s every movement, immediately took notice and scooted away, draining from the booth as they made themselves scarce or suddenly needed drink refills. Only three remained—two standing between us and the table, twins of the three-headed bouncers we’d passed at the entrance, and one more lounging in the booth, a lean young man of maybe eighteen, with a pretty face and a vapid expression. The loud music thundering overhead and the sudden absence of flunkies provided a nearly private bubble for our conversation.

  “Would either of you care for a drink?” the Gatekeeper asked.

  A waiter appeared behind us with a metal tray bearing two highball glasses filled with some kind of bubbly cocktail. I waved the waiter off, not wanting to risk dulling my wits. Or getting roofied. I had already hit my capacity for fun new surprises tonight, thank you very much.

  Vinny picked up a glass and took a polite sip. I doubt he even tasted it. His nose was twitching terribly, and he stared at the ground more than he looked at the naked woman across the table.

  “Very kind of you to offer, Gatekeeper,” Vinny mumbled.

  “And who is your friend?” she asked. Her deep voice was the chill kind of friendly now, polite and easy but strung with menace.

  “Anderson Gunn,” I said. “Bounty hunter.”

  When she stood gracefully, Vinny flinched and took half a step back, spilling some of his drink. The light in her eyes seemed to vibrate, as if dancing with excitement.

  Her naked form was incredibly distracting, but I heeded Vinny’s earlier warnings and stayed on my guard, closing my dry mouth and averting my eyes. The Gatekeeper threw back her head and let out a charming laugh.

  “A new human, Vinny? My, my. Did you have the pleasure of popping his cherry?”

  “Uh, not exactly…” Vinny said, his whiskers twitching.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I’m right here.”

  “Humans do not often find their way into Harbor, and if they do, they don’t remember much of anything the next day. When did you learn of us, Anderson Gunn? When did you realize you weren’t alone in the universe?”

  “Oh, it’s been a few years,” I lied. “Pangozil make the best pizza.”

  A twinkle literally freakin’ glimmered in her eyes. “Not long then, I see. You must be burning with questions.” The Gatekeeper stepped nimbly onto her chair, then onto t
he tabletop. I immediately wished she hadn’t. At the sight of the black heels strapped to her feet—the only thing she wore apart from her long dark hair—blood began rushing to my face and… other regions of my body.

  “Am I making you uncomfortable, Mr. Gunn?” The Gatekeeper chuckled, and as she did the woman’s eyes flashed a deep, glowing blue, sparking into a cold fire.

  “A little bit.”

  The Gatekeeper sashayed toward me and hopped down off the table with a lovely display of lean muscles and soft flesh. As she hit the ground, she stumbled. Instinctively, I put my hand out so she wouldn’t fall.

  That’s when I realized it was a trap.

  She grabbed the hand I offered and pulled me close, running her fingers over my chest. The mixture of emotions and hormones coursing through my system at the press of soft flesh against me was enough to make any warm-blooded man lose control. Luckily, I wasn’t so soft or foolish as I’d once been. I gathered my self-control, let go of her hand, and pushed her gently away.

  “Okay, cut the crap,” I said. “I didn’t ask for a striptease, and I’m not paying extra for it.”

  The Gatekeeper glanced over at Vinny, expression unreadable. Then her eyes narrowed, and the corners of her lips rose into a predatory smile.

  “I like him,” she said. “Insolent and bold are two of my favorite qualities in a person. Since you haven’t bored me yet, you may ask me what you came to ask.”

  I tapped my toe as I pretended to think about it. “The Gatekeeper… what kind of a name is that?”

  “I find names to be cumbersome,” she said. “If I told you my name was Nancy, and tomorrow Nancy no longer had these… assets, would it still be me? Hardly. Titles are better. Titles are transferrable. They come with a power that transcends the pith of a name.”

  “I still don’t get it. Where’s the gate? All I see are a bunch of drunken hooligans in an underground night club.”

  “Watch it,” she snapped. Her voice cut through the roaring music and her eyes flashed. “We do not know each other very well. You would be wise to mind your tongue when you are standing in my house.”