by M. G. Herron
I heard a terrible thud as the Peacekeeper’s body struck the edge of the roof, then tumbled over the edge with the beacon in his arms.
Elekatch roared.
“No!” Dyna shouted.
She brought another wave of force to bear on the Pharsei. Elekatch took the hit broadside this time and turned it to his advantage. With incredible dexterity, he used the inertia to launch himself over the opposite side of the building.
Dyna and I both rushed to the roof’s edge in time to see Elekatch use his tentacles to glom onto the glass and cartwheel out of sight. Kilos was nowhere to be seen.
“Where did they go?” I asked.
Without so much as a word, Dyna sprinted back toward the stairwell. I helped Gonzalez to her feet.
“You’re welcome,” she grumbled.
“Time for thanks later,” I said. “Come on. We’re not done with that freak yet.”
22
I leaped down a flight of stairs and whipped my body around to take the next.
“What was,” Gonzalez panted from behind me, “that mutant freak?”
“Definitely a freak! Mutant? Maybe,” I responded without looking back. My focus was stuck on the stairs below me. “That thing killed Cameron Kovak.”
“No,” Gonzalez insisted. “We had multiple sightings of Kovak after the crime scene investigation closed.”
“Are you sure it was Kovak?”
“I—it—it had to be…” Gonzalez trailed off, half because we were still rushing down the stairs, and half because she was struggling to reconcile what she’d seen with her expectations of reality—the same way I had been up until Vinny took me to see the Gatekeeper. Gonzalez would get there. Eventually.
Jumping down the last flight of stairs, I finally cleared the door leading to the back alley. I searched around for Dyna and Kilos, trying to orient myself, but didn’t see either of them.
“Dyna!” I shouted as I crossed into the empty street.
Two crowds had been pushed back to the intersections at either end of the block and were now swarming against lines of hastily-strung police tape. Simmons was at one end managing the crowd, but he couldn’t be in both places at once, and the opposite side was getting too curious for their own good. Onlookers started ducking under the tape and gazing up at the Frost Tower, pointing and gesturing around for… well, for who knows what they’d seen. But they looked slightly panicked, as if they, too, had seen something they couldn’t explain. I sympathized.
Now, where was Elekatch hiding?
I swept the crowds and the shadowy corners for him. Nothing but rubbernecking civilians. In hindsight, Frost Tower had obviously been a ploy to draw us in and get the beacon unlocked—a sleight of hand that we’d fallen for. I realized, with a sinking feeling, that these Peacekeepers were as fallible as I was… as fallible as any human. I’d been relying on them to make the right decisions. To do the right thing.
What had I been thinking?
It was high time I started relying on myself.
“Simmons,” Gonzalez shouted, cupping her hands to her mouth. “Where’s our backup?”
He looked over his shoulder at her and gave a helpless shrug.
“Damn them,” Gonzalez muttered. “I’ve got everyone else’s back the second they call, even though I’m on a murder case. But when I need help, they take their sweet time getting here. You find that mutant freak. I’ve got to help Simmons.” She hurried toward the unmanned crowd at the opposite end of the block from Simmons, leaving me alone in the middle, scanning the sheer, ominous walls of the buildings surrounding us.
Could Elekatch hide among a crowd? I peered into the masses at both ends, looking for anyone with loose, hanging skin, or anything else that felt off. My heart skipped a beat when a blonde woman appeared at the back of the crowd—I could have sworn it was Anna. But then she was gone a second later, swallowed in the gathering of people.
Focus, Gunn.
Dyna was still nowhere to be seen. Neither was Kilos, although I was almost certain he’d fallen off the roof in this direction. Come to think of it, I’m sure that’s what the onlookers were searching for—they saw something fall off the roof, too. But between the police tape cordons at either end of the street, there was nothing except street lamps and…
Wait. There.
In front of a parking garage, a streetlamp stood next to a parking sign with a nearly imperceptible radius around it. The only reason I noticed it was that the angle of the parking sign seemed slightly off from my perspective, like the light was being bent around it with hidden mirrors. What was that saying about how sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic?
I crossed the empty street, trying to walk casually. It didn’t take long for both Gonzalez and Simmons to become occupied with pushy spectators. When they did, I stepped into the mirage.
The scene was gruesome. On this side of the illusion, the sign itself was lying in the gutter, and the green metal sign pole was sticking straight up out of Kilos’s midsection right beside the black burn mark. His pale fur-covered skin was matted and flecked with slick, bright red blood. The beacon lay at his side, webbed with cracks like shattered safety glass. The glow that had once emanated from it was now gone, replaced by a dull gray.
“Mother of God,” I whispered.
Dyna was kneeling at his side. I approached slowly, careful to keep a respectful distance.
I cringed as Kilos moved. He was still alive. My heart began to hammer in my chest.
“Don’t let Elekatch get away,” Kilos said, his voice wet and grating.
“Shh,” Dyna said, placing her finger against his lips. “Don’t talk. I’m going to get you off this thing.”
She turned just enough to see me standing there behind them.
“Gunn—I need your help.”
I stepped closer, crouching on the other side of the cat-like Peacekeeper. He turned away from me.
“Stop,” he said. “Both of you stop. You’re wasting time.”
His words were stunted and filled with pain.
“Can’t he regenerate?” I asked quietly to Dyna.
There were tears in her eyes. “I don’t know. I think he punctured one of his hearts.”
“He has more than one? Geez, Fluffy, I didn’t think you had a heart at all.”
Kilos laughed weakly, choked, and coughed. He spat a wad of blood onto the pavement near his head.
“He needs both hearts to regenerate—it’s part of the Kilgar’s physiology. If I had a PhysRec chamber…”
“You don’t have time,” Kilos insisted.
A struggle at Detective Simmons’s end of the street interrupted our conversation. When Simmons tried to break up the fight, someone stepped out and grabbed the cop, yanking him into the knot of people.
While he was preoccupied, two others separated themselves from the crowd and ducked under the police cordon, walking quickly into the street. My vision was blurred by the cloaking field surrounding us, so it was hard to tell, but even despite that, I noticed how the man in front kept his face shielded under a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, and that he walked with an awkward, unnatural gait.
The hair on the back of my neck stood straight up when I noticed that the woman behind him was wearing a polka-dotted dress. Anna clutched her purse in her hands and was staring stoically ahead.
“Anna!” I called.
She glanced around, her terrified face suddenly filled with hope. When she didn’t spot me, her expression crumbled into confusion.
“Dammit,” I muttered. “She can’t see me.” I drew my Kimber from my belt again.
Kilos grabbed my ankle with a surprisingly strong grip.
“Gunn,” Dyna said. “Wait.”
That’s when I saw that Anna had what looked like a thick boa wrapped around her neck. One of Elekatch’s slimy tentacles. The two broke into a stilted run toward my truck, which was still parked crookedly in the commercial zone across from the Mexic-Arte Museum, a mere fifty yards f
rom where I was now standing.
“I can make the shot.”
“Even if your aim is true,” Dyna said, “one shot won’t take him out. She’s only safe as long as he knows you won’t risk her life. If you attack now, he will surely kill her in order to escape.”
My mind raced back across the day—Anna showing up at my office. Our walk to the pizza place and our lunch together. Following her when she snuck off to meet Marsha Marshall…
When did he find out about Anna? Had Elekatch been watching us the whole time?
When they reached my vehicle, Elekatch tossed off the hat, reached out several more tentacles, and with a wrenching metallic sound ripped off the door.
“Aw, come on!” I shouted.
Anna went into the cab while Elekatch discarded the skinsuit and jumped into the truck’s bed. His weight came down on the lockbox, bending the lid out of shape. That’s when Gonzalez noticed and drew her gun.
“Cameron Kovak!” she yelled. “Freeze!”
“No! Gonzalez, don’t!”
Shaking Kilos’s weakened grip from my ankle, I ran out of the mirage and into Gonzalez’s line of fire, causing her to blink and lower her weapon.
“Don’t shoot.”
The engine of my F-150 roared to life behind me.
“He’s getting away!” Gonzalez said.
The truck barreled at the crowd from which Elekatch and Anna had just emerged. People jumped aside and the truck passed through, taking the police tape down with it. One or two bystanders bounced off the hood of the truck, and the mob erupted in chaos. The tires squealed as Anna peeled around the corner.
I ran back to where Dyna and Kilos were hiding. Dyna had somehow managed to sever the green pole a few inches above Kilos’s chest.
“I require your assistance,” Dyna said, her voice high and sharp.
I nodded and rushed to Kilos’s side. Together, we lifted him off the pole and carried him into the nearby parking garage. The mirage was centered on Kilos, as the device was at his waist, so the illusion came with us, revealing a pool of dark, shiny blood and the severed end of the parking sign on the sidewalk where we had just been. Gonzalez stopped and stared at it for a moment, the color draining from her face. Then she followed the trail of blood splatter into the parking garage.
Police sirens whooped from the far end of the street.
“Gunn, you have to get them out of here,” Gonzalez said.
“Go!” Kilos snarled. “Leave me.”
“Sheila, we need your car,” I said.
Glancing at the police cruisers pushing through the multitude now, Sheila’s face twisted up. Then her jawline hardened. She nodded. “Follow me.”
Dyna exchanged a few soft words with Kilos. As we stepped away from him, he disappeared and all I saw were the painted lines outlining the no-parking zone in the corner where we’d left him. He was shielded again behind the reflective photon cloaking field.
“Is he going to make it?”
“I don’t know,” Dyna whispered. “But I didn’t chase that monster across the galaxy to let him get away with it. This is personal now.”
“Hurry,” Sheila said.
We followed the detective to her unmarked black SUV. I climbed into the passenger seat, and Dyna got in the back. Simmons spotted us and waved frantically as if he needed help. Ignoring his shouts, Sheila drove forward. Using a button on the dashboard, she flashed her lights and used a siren to whoop our way through the chaos. The cops in the cruisers we passed cast us bewildered expressions—both Sheila and I stared stone-cold ahead, refusing to make eye contact. The radio crackled, but Sheila flipped it off.
“You sure about that?” I asked.
“I’m already going to catch hell for this. No reason to make it worse by trying to explain myself right now.”
My heart sank into my stomach. Elekatch had his slimy tentacles wrapped around poor innocent Anna, and now I was going to be responsible for a black mark on the otherwise impervious record of Detective Sheila Gonzalez, a woman who was loyal to a fault and the daughter of the city’s most beloved Police Chief.
I gritted my teeth. If I could do one thing to redeem myself, it was to save Anna from Elekatch, and launch that oversized sea urchin back into deep space where he came from. There would be ample time to sulk and wallow in my bottomless guilt later.
I forced my gnawing doubts away—doubts about Anna, about Sheila, about the shady deal I’d made with the king of the alien underworld—and focused on the road.
23
“That wasn’t Cameron Kovak, was it?” Gonzalez asked.
She drove south across the river, gripping the steering wheel with both hands, loosening and tightening her fingers repeatedly.
“No, ma’am,” I said in a sober voice.
The intersection at Barton Springs and First Street was crammed with a pileup of cars. A minivan had been flipped onto its side. Three other vehicles were parked in the middle of the intersection at odd angles with bent bumpers and fresh dents. Someone popped the hood of an old Cadillac, releasing a column of smoke.
Gonzalez maneuvered around the accident, at one point pulling the SUV up onto the curb and cutting through the Whataburger parking lot to get by.
“Can someone tell me what the hell is going on here?” Gonzalez finally said.
I grunted. “I think Anna’s leaving us a breadcrumb trail.”
“The blonde woman?”
I nodded. “Annabelle Summers. My CPA.”
“Seriously?”
I tried, unsuccessfully, not to squirm in my seat. “We went on one date and I’m not even sure it was a date.”
Gonzalez gave me the side-eye.
“Can we focus on finding her, please?”
“Okay, okay.”
We continued south, following the trail of automobile carnage in tense silence. Several more minor accidents dotted First Street. Thankfully, no one appeared to be seriously injured.
“I could have sworn that was Cameron Kovak back there for a second,” Gonzalez said.
I shook my head.
She swallowed, her face pale. She kept her eyes fixed on the road. “What was it, then? Some freak science experiment?”
I glanced into the back seat. Dyna sat with her hands in her lap. Her mouth was drawn into a thin, grim line.
“You don’t really believe that, do you?” I asked.
“Then what? There has to be some explanation.”
“If I tell you the truth, will you promise to believe me?”
Gonzalez nodded.
The look on Dyna’s face made it clear she disapproved, but I didn’t care. I took a deep breath and blew it out. “An alien named Elekatch killed Cameron Kovak and is walking around in his skin.”
Sheila looked at me. Then she burst out laughing. When she could finally speak, she said, “Aliens?”
I gave Gonzalez my best glare, but she just snorted, slapped her hand on her leg, and kept laughing. We coasted to a stop at the next intersection.
After ten or fifteen seconds of this, she finally noticed that neither me, nor Dyna in the back seat, were laughing with her. Slowly, with her chest heaving and her eyes wet, Gonzalez managed to calm herself. She swallowed, swiped her arm across her mouth, and heaved a great sigh.
“Sorry. It’s just—” She shook her head. “Of all things.”
“Are you done?”
Suppressing a giggle that threatened to rise up out of her belly, she nodded. “You’re serious, aren’t you? I mean, I can’t believe that, but you truly think you’re telling me the truth?”
“Deadly serious,” I said.
She shook her head but fell into silence.
South of the city’s core, the breadcrumb trail petered out. We drove another five or six miles through back roads, running on guesses.
“So, what now?” Gonzalez said.
“Well, the perp always returns to the scene of the crime,” I offered. It felt like a stretch, but I’d run out of ideas.
“Have you tracked down many alien fugitives?” she asked, obvious mirth twinkling in her eyes.
Unbelievable. Even after everything she’d seen, she still didn’t want to believe it. No wonder aliens continued to live in Austin, unbothered and unnoticed.
“Dyna,” I said, turning around in my seat, “can you track Elekatch, like you did at the power plant?”
She shook her head. “He’s putting a great effort into shielding his mind from me. I can tell that he’s in the area, but nothing more specific.”
“Gonzalez, can you get a trace on Anna’s cell phone?”
She made an unhappy noise in her throat, but placed a call to the police station nonetheless, and let me read Anna’s phone number off to her.
After she hung up, Dyna said, “Your female friend is quite resourceful.”
“Uh, thanks?” Gonzalez replied.
“Do you all carry these tracking devices with you? As an agent of your local constabulary, you should not allow yourselves to be so easily located.”
“Let’s worry about that another time,” I said.
“Trace is up,” Gonzalez said, handing me her phone with a map on the screen.
“Turn left at the next intersection.”
She hit the gas and we charged down a narrow two-lane road. I scanned the tree line for any sign of Elekatch. A half-mile later, we passed what looked like it could have been a chunk of my truck’s bumper lying in the middle of the street.
“I guess I needed a new bumper anyway,” I said wryly.
“Still the same old Andy,” Gonzalez said, “hiding behind a wall of humor.”
Her words struck a chord with me. “Say, Dyna, do you think we could give Sheila a crash course in your mental wall protection technique?”
“It took a virtual simulation and several painful encounters with Elekatch to teach you what little I was able to impart. She will not learn quickly enough.”
“First of all, I’m right here, so stop talking about me like I’m not. Secondly, what are you guys talking about?”
