by Alex Archer
He was out of shape, his muscles deconditioned to the point his flesh felt like pudding to the touch. He could barely walk across a room without panting. But he weighed over three hundred pounds, and a supercharge of adrenaline lent strength to watery muscles. His momentum drove the older, lighter man back to slam his lower back cruelly against the metal rail.
Benigni's arms held Godin's trapped to his sides in a bear hug. His own strength surprised him. Ha! And so I best the vaunted mercenary and counterterrorism expert, he thought.
Godin snapped his head forward. His forehead smeared the monsignor's broad nose across much of his pie-plate face.
Benigni squealed as agony shot through his brain and eyes like an inquisitor's red-hot pokers. Tears streamed down his cheeks, hot as the blood that poured across and into his mouth and down his chin.
He felt the smaller man's body like a bundle of wire and steel rods, stooping down. Felt hard hands dig into the backs of his thighs.
Then, as Godin grunted once with effort, his jowl to the flab of Benigni's left side, the prelate felt himself dead-lifted. The soles of his Gucci shoes departed slick granite. Holding Benigni's soft, yielding bulk over his right shoulder like a sack of meal, Godin straightened his legs, upending the monsignor.
Benigni screamed in horror as he stared straight down into the almost black depths of the gorge. Then he was released, launched head downward like a crucified martyr. As the cold air's passage stung his cheeks and eyes he screamed and screamed for God to help.
Godin watched as the monsignor vanished from sight in the mist that boiled from the falls. He put his hands to the small of his back and stretched his body backward as a last thin wisp of scream echoed among alpine peaks. He was capable of dead-lifting far more than the obese prelate's weight, and had used proper form. But his muscles were not so durable as once they were.
Then he doubled over in a coughing fit. What the two huge, hard men and the one huge, soft man had not been able to accomplish, it did; it brought Father Godin almost to his knees.
He hung on to the rail until the fit passed. He dabbed moistness from his mouth with a handkerchief. He put it away without looking at it.
One more job done, he told himself. Doubtless two more will spring up in his place. Yet I can only do what one man can in the service of our Lord.
He checked his own wristwatch, a cheap digital that nonetheless kept time as serviceably as the miniature treasury Benigni had worn strapped to his fat wrist. Then he turned and walked briskly toward the hotel and the highway. He had a flight to catch from Zurich, back to Rome and a discreet rendezvous where he expected to receive the assignment that would cap his long, illustrious career.
And then I will have truly earned my rest, he told himself. But will I be allowed to take it?
Chapter 3
"Ms. Creed," the young Asian woman at the hotel's reception desk said. Her perpetually cheery demeanor had slipped slightly. "I'm afraid I need to let you know that we can't give you an option to renew your room after your reservation runs out the day after tomorrow."
The lobby of the new Ramada Inn on the south side of the small Española Valley town of Pojoaque was decorated in what Annja had come to think of as Southwest Typical. Rounded whitewashed forms hinted at adobe brick beneath – no matter what was really there – rich-colored tile and brass and smoked-mirror trimming were offset by the occasional horsetail-fern accent. It actually produced a pleasant, calming effect even if it had become something of a design cliché.
"Really?" Annja asked. "Why not?"
"We've had a run of new bookings," the young woman said. She had a round, pink face and wore severe black slacks and a white blouse with a bolo tie sporting a silver-and-turquoise sun symbol. "I'm afraid we've committed all of our rooms."
"Is something happening at one of the casinos?" The local Pueblos, clustered thickly in the fertile upper Rio Grande Valley, had already constructed several casinos, giant pyramids of neon and more faux adobe. In fact, the dig site a few miles north and east of the hotel lay on land owned by the San Esequiel Pueblos, who had earmarked the site as part of their own projected casino complex. The tribe would not permit the UNM team to camp on the land; hence the need to find rooms in nearby hotels. The rest of the group were lodged in a Days Inn down the highway.
"Oh, no," the desk clerk said. "They're pilgrims. And paranormal investigators. They're here about the Santo Niño."
"Santo Niño?"
"It means 'Holy Child' in Spanish," the helpful young woman said to Annja, who knew. Annja was fluent in the modern Western Romance languages of Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, as well as Latin.
"I see," Annja said.
"It's all over the Internet, you see. There've been sightings here for weeks. People have gotten really excited."
"Who or what is this Holy Child?" Annja asked.
"He's a little boy who appears standing by the roadside. He looks eight or ten. He's wearing some kind of funny clothes – they say totally sixteenth-century Spanish or something. People feel sorry for him and pick him up. He thanks them and warns them something terrible is about to happen. Then he vanishes." She leaned conspiratorially across the counter. "I even read that a Japanese family picked him up a couple days ago. And he talked to them in Japanese!"
"My," Annja said weakly.
****
Well, at least it's my room for a night or two more, she thought as she sat on the bed a few minutes later, freshly showered and wearing a white fluffy robe and a towel wrapped around her hair as she tapped at her laptop. With the dig winding down, Annja didn't have much holding her in New Mexico. Except –
She felt a strong sense developing that she needed to stay. She wasn't sure why. But she and her companions had seen that terrifying flying thing not two hours earlier. The fear it inspired still seemed to echo in her soul like the tolling of a distant bell.
And now this Santo Niño seemed to be resurrecting the classic vanishing-hitchhiker urban legend. Oddities seemed to be converging on this small area of New Mexico, which was plenty peculiar to start with. And Annja's life was all about strangeness, it seemed.
A few Google search words – "black giant bird anomalous" – took her quickly to a site for a movie from a few years back called The Mothman Prophecies. She hadn't seen it. She had little interest in supernatural stuff, being of a skeptical turn of mind. That site led her to a listing for an ostensibly nonfiction book by a man named John A. Keel, and then to a scattering of paranormal and cryptozoology sites. It was all the usual huffing and conspiracy theorizing. She skimmed for a while and then moved on to other subjects. It probably was just an eagle after all, she told herself.
A quick check of Snopes.com confirmed what she'd first thought. The tale the girl at the front desk had told her about the Holy Child played out pretty close to the classic vanishing-hitchhiker script. Except in those tales the eponymous prophetic hitchhiker wasn't a child in antique Spanish drag, but Jesus Christ, himself.
Strange, she thought.
She felt a rumbling in her stomach and leaned over to pick up an apple from a little basket she'd put on the bedside table. The Española Valley was famous for its apple orchards, and a fresh crop had just been taken in. The local apples were all they were made out to be, she had to admit, as she bit into one.
Next she did a bit of flash research into the Santo Niño stories. He was pretty much as the hotel clerk described him, with a gown and a cape and long locks flowing from under a slouch hat with a pinned-up front.
She read a couple of articles. It was definitely a strange apparition for the early twenty-first century – although if he was going to show up any-where, she had to admit northern New Mexico was just the place. It had a character unlike anywhere else she'd been in North America. It was a place where religious pilgrims walked on their knees at Easter to the sanctuary of the church at Chimayó, just a few miles beyond the dig site from where Annja had been working. And where lines of top-flight ph
ysicists drove hybrid cars or rode recumbent bicycles, making their own daily pilgrimage to Los Alamos National Labs not so far away to the west.
But Japanese tourists? There were Japanese Christians, indeed Japanese Catholics, Annja knew The Jesuits, austere, learned, ubiquitous and to Annja's mind, a little bit scary – they started out professedly as a conspiracy to take over the world, after all – had sent missions to Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Indeed, some authorities blamed the Jesuits and rumors that they were assembling an invasion force in the Spanish colonial stronghold of the Philippines, for Tokugawa Iyeyasu's closure of the country to outsiders. And the Philippines, Annja had just learned, was another locus of Santo Niño sightings.
But, come on. Japanese tourists?
She shook her head, letting the towel unravel and whip around her robed shoulders. Her damp hair tickled her neck and cheeks like seaweed strands. Closing the computer, she unwound off the bed and tossed the apple, now thoroughly denuded to the core, into a wastebasket. She realized she'd been up all night. She needed serious food, seriously soon.
Suddenly, her thoughts snapped back to images of the spooky sunset sighting, and the cold that probed through her that had nothing to do with the increasingly icy wind and falling snow. Unlike poor Alyson Simpson, she was anything but alarmed to find her companions on the dig had packed firearms. It wasn't uncommon, but some of the gun handling on display had been casual enough to disturb her. She wasn't sure guns would have been much use against the creature that had silently and effortlessly flown over them.
Twin voices clashed in her head.
Come on, it was only an eagle, said one.
It's good to have a magic sword on call, said the other.
"I'm hungry," she said aloud. She discarded the robe over the back of a chair and walked naked and glorious to the closet to pick out some clothes for dinner.
****
"There's no such thing as chupacabras," the lean twentysomething eating the Denver omelet said. He wore a scuffed brown bomber jacket over a white shirt with a pocket protector well stuffed with multicolored pens. He had a high, wide forehead and slightly sunken eyes with a tendency to stare. He sat back in his chair with one leg cocked over his knee. "It was a story made up for this Puerto Rican newspaper by a writer guy named Adrian something. El Vocero. That's the paper's name."
His bulkier friend with the backward ball cap grunted over his huevos rancheros. He was hunched forward with elbows propped on the table. "What's that got to do with the price of speed in Singapore?" he asked. With his moon face, black beard and black trenchcoat over T-shirt and jeans, Annja hoped he was deliberately trying to look like Kevin Smith playing Silent Bob in one of his own movies. Most of all she earnestly hoped he wasn't really Kevin Smith.
The little diner across the highway from the Ramada Inn wasn't a greasy spoon. More a trendy New Age equivalent. A tofu fork, perhaps, Annja thought. More faux adobe – she thought it was faux, anyway – and sand-pink-and-sage decor than the white shoebox with chrome and Formica of the classic American roadside diner. The food was good, portions were plentiful, and they didn't try to foist veganism on the paying customers. Although the customers did pay a tariff appropriate to the famously well-heeled Santa Fe tourist crowd.
Outside, the morning sun shone down on the parking lot and surrounding hills so hard Annja, seated in a booth by the window, half expected it to rattle against the glass. Even though the air was already winter crisp and shot through with the inevitable tang of piñon smoke, the light would sting unprotected skin.
The gloom of the evening before seemed to belong someplace else.
"I mean, we have to maintain a balance as monster hunters," the skinny guy said.
"I prefer the word cryptozoologists," the third musketeer said in a surprisingly high voice. Surprisingly because it emerged from a chest the approximate size and shape of an oil drum, wrapped in a black T-shirt with the publicity photo for a band on it. Their getup ran to black leather and pointy metal bits. Annja guessed they didn't do polka.
The man paused, assiduously stuffing a hamburger piled high with mushrooms, red onion and chopped green chili – at this hour of the morning she was impressed – into his mouth. The anthropologist in Annja made him a South Plains Indian of some kind, probably Kiowa. Or maybe a Pueblo or even Apache with Kiowa thrown in. He had incredibly thick and lustrous black hair drawn into a ponytail hanging down his vast back, and a tiny black ball cap perched sideways on his head.
"Whatever," the first man said with a shrug. Annja was surprised to see the three out at such an early hour. They were clearly science fiction fans, or a closely related genus. She'd always thought the earlier before noon they rose, the more strain it imposed on their nerd metabolisms. Apparently they were dedicated to their mission.
"It's important not to let ourselves get sucked in by every urban legend and showy hoax that comes down the pike. I'm just saying."
"But scientists reported seeing it this time," the bearded man said.
"Maybe. How do you know they were real scientists? Do you know the report was real? And anyway, I read rumors this morning that that Chasing History's Monsters chick was on the dig site. Doesn't that strike you as just a teensy bit suspicious?"
"The chick with the – " The big Indian held his hands cupped an imposing distance in front of his metal band.
"Naw," the David Byrne kid said. "The skinny, flat-chested one. The archaeologist."
The loud tink that startled Annja, she suddenly realized, had come from her melon spoon falling to the dish. She hunched her head between her shoulders and concentrated hard on studying the half-eaten cantaloupe.
I am not flat-chested, she thought, looking down at herself surreptitiously.
The three young men, who sat at a table not ten feet away across the maroon-tile floor, paid her no mind. She had her hair pulled back in a severe ponytail and hadn't slept and had huge, round Jackie O sunglasses on to hide the dark shadows under her eyes. On the whole she looked nothing like she did on her occasional television appearances, where a team of people insisted on fussing and painting her heavily with theatrical makeup. She always suspected they felt they were working with a blank canvas when they got their hands on her.
She glanced out the window. Away past the self-conscious Santa Fe – emulating facades of the strip mall across the road, the land sloped to a line of big trees whose gnarled limbs were thronged with tanand-yellow leaves. Ancient cottonwoods, they marked the course of the Rio Grande – the Big River. It was seldom considered that big by eastern standards, and had probably only struck the Spanish explorers as such after they'd been stumbling around the parched Upper Sonoran Desert for a few weeks. It, not the Rockies and their tributaries that ran alongside it, was the state's true spine.
Annja thought she might walk through the brushy wood alongside it for a while this morning. The dig was done for the year. The Pueblos had gotten wind of last night's adventure and wanted things shut down immediately.
The tribal council was maybe spooked, and definitely pissed. Annja wondered who had talked about the sighting.
" – think about the Mayan calendar," the bearded guy was saying when Annja let herself tune in to the conversation again.
"How do you mean?" asked his leaner companion, who had turned sideways in his chair with his legs crossed.
The bearded guy shrugged. "Well, in connection with this holy kid's prophecies. He's always forecasting doom, right?"
"But sometimes the percipients have narrow escapes right after he vanishes," the Kiowa-looking guy said. "Maybe he's just warning them."
The bearded guy shook his head determinedly. "There definitely also seem to be undercurrents of long-term doom."
"So what does this have to do with the Mayan calendar?" the third one wanted to know.
"It runs out in December 2012, right?"
The kid in the bomber jacket nodded. Warily, Annja thought.
"So maybe
that's what the holy kid is prophesying. The Mayan calendar runs out – time runs out."
The skinny guy had wrinkled his big, wide forehead like a shar-pei and was shaking his head. "I never quite got what's supposed to happen after the Mayan calendar runs out. I mean, what if it's like Y2K? Except instead of all the microchips that were supposed to break down and all, all the world's stone calendars don't work anymore. Hard to see the downside there."
"I read somewhere online that maybe Betelgeuse had gone supernova," the big Indian guy said.
"Hypernova," the bearded guy said.
"Hypernova, then."
"And that concerns us how?" the skinny kid asked.
"Well, it's, like, theorized this happened a couple hundred years ago. Supposedly the star shows signs of being unstable. Its spectra or something."
"But if it happened two centuries ago – "
"But, see, it'd take time for the explosion to get here. Even at light speed. You know how the Mayas made all these precise astronomical observations. So, maybe they noticed Betelgeuse was fixing to blow?"
"Wait," the skinny kid said. "This happened, what? Five hundred years ago? They predicted Betelgeuse would blow up two hundred years ago? Isn't that three hundred years in their future? I'm confused."
"Betelgeuse is 427 light-years away," the bearded guy said, forking up more eggs in salsa verde.
"God, you're a nerd."
"We're all nerds. Why else are we here in Snake's Navel, New Mexico? Anyway, wouldn't that mean, if the Maya made their calendar four – five centuries ago, Betelgeuse would've been blowing up more or less the same time?"
"Whatever," the Indian kid said. "The point is, supposedly they knew all these secrets of astronomy and shit. So what if they totally foresaw that the radiation from the hypernova was gonna hit Earth on December 12, 2012, when the Mayan calendar runs out?"
"Seems like kind of a long lead time for the holy kid to be predicting doom in 2012."
"Maybe he wants to give humanity plenty of time to prepare."
"What's humanity going to do about the blast wave from a hypernova hitting the Earth in 2012? Invent teleportation and leave? To go where?"
