Rogue Angel: The Chosen

by Alex Archer

  The shirt collar tore away in her hand. She flew backward out of the cab as white light dazzled her eyes and the most terrible crack of thunder she had ever heard drove sound from her ears. She rolled over and over backward at least three times before coming back to something like self-awareness. She was sitting on the wet asphalt with her back to a concrete lane barrier, her hair hanging like fresh-dredged kelp in her face, clutching a sorry half circle of sodden, once-white cloth in her hand.

  She smelled gasoline. The little Toyota cab blazed quite merrily in the downpour. Tendrils of black, black smoke undulated out of the windows and grew together into an imposing black stalk that kept growing to meet the low-hanging, lead-colored clouds.

  Annja steeled herself to charge the wreck. She could not permit the innocent driver to burn to death if she could help it.

  Then she noticed the flame-wrapped silhouette behind the wheel lacked a head. The rocket grenade had apparently struck the post of the driver's door, right beside the windshield. The jet of incandescent copper it spewed, meant to cut deep into the entrails of a tank, had decapitated the man far more efficiently than a guillotine.

  ****

  The police called it a random terrorist attack by Moro separatists. Since she had seen nothing beyond the flash and smoke of the RPG launch, they were even more eager to see her leave the country than the Mexican cops had been. No doubt they feared she might sue them for psychological damage.

  She cried halfway across the Pacific. When she did manage to drop off to sleep, she kept waking up sweating and shouting from visions of the little cheerful man, his word flow unkindly cut off, burning to death.

  Another victim of her quest, her curse. Another innocent she could not save.

  ****

  Annja was so dragged out that after disembarking at LAX, to the unspoken but unmistakable relief of the flight crew, she didn't think to turn her cell phone on until she had cleared customs.

  The phone rang moments after she turned it on.

  "Annja? This is Doug. Where the hell have you been?"

  "About there. What do you want, Doug? I've had a long day."

  "Long day? It's what, not even noon there?"

  "Whatever. You wanted something?"

  "Where is it?"

  "Where's what?"

  "Your proposal for a show on the stuff going down in Mexico, of course."

  "Mexico?" She blinked. Was Chasing History's Monsters branching into true-crime or terrorism stories?

  "Mexico. New Mexico. Old Mexico. Wherever. Where Santa Fe is."

  "That'd be New Mexico, Doug. It's in a little country called the United States. Have you heard of it?" She was grateful for the enveloping blanket of sheer numbness that insulated her.

  "Well, where's my show?"

  "I don't know how to break this to you, Doug, but I don't think your audience is going to go for a nine-year-old kid dressed up like the baby Jesus as a monster."

  "What? What are you on about? Hello." She heard the sound of nail clicking against the phone.

  "Stop that, Doug. I hate when you do that," she said.

  "I'm only talking about the biggest monster flap to hit the States in forever. I'm talking about this snowboarder who got mauled to death in the mountains out there by, lemme check my notes – what his terrified friends described as 'a giant black apelike being with glowing red eyes.' A freakin' ape, Annja. With glowing red eyes! This is television gold."

  "Shit," she said.

  "Annja? Are you okay? You never cuss."

  "No," she said with a shudder.

  "Well, jump right on that bad boy. I expect to see my e-mail inbox filling up with killer red-eyed ape data ten minutes ago."

  "I'll do what I can for you, Doug," she said, "after I get some sleep."

  "But – "

  "No, Doug. Sleep, then ape. Or no ape." And if you throw that bimbo Kristie in my ear I'll reach through the phone and rip your tongue out.

  "Whoa, whoa, calm down. Annja, sweetie, would I do that to you?" Doug said.

  Did I actually say that out loud? she wondered. She almost cared.

  "We're all good. Go get some sleep, Annja, honey. Then the ape. Deal?"

  "Deal."

  "Still friends?"

  "Still friends, Doug. If you hang up now," Annja said.

  The phone line went dead.

  Chapter 16

  Albuquerque

  "Please don't take this the wrong way, Annja," Byron Mondragón said, squeezing a teabag into his cup by holding it in his spoon and wrapping its string around it. "But you look as if the world is weighing you down."

  She showed him a wan smile. "That's the nicest way anybody's ever told me I look like hell, Byron. Thank you."

  She took a tentative bite of her chile relleno. It was a whole roasted green chili pod, stuffed with cheese and batter-fried. It was very good.

  "So tell me something, Byron," she said when she finished a mouthful. "How is it possible for the infant Jesus to be wandering the Southwest helping out Japanese tourists? Even if it is his ghost, he was a full-grown man when he died."

  "You have to consider the notion of timelessness. It holds that spiritual elements, just like God Himself, are timeless. So Jesus is at one and the same time everything he was – an infant, a child, a man crucified, a man-god resurrected. He's just as much an eight-year-old Jewish kid as he is sitting at the side of God the Father. I admit, I do have to wonder about Jesus appearing in costume from twelve hundred years after he died," he said.

  "Still – " He gave a little laugh. "You really have to figure that if Jesus is what they say he is, he can appear any way he likes."

  "True." She stirred her refried beans meditatively with her fork. There was something in the notion of refried beans that struck her as somehow just wrong. It didn't mean they didn't taste good, though.

  "Of course," he added, "that doesn't mean the Santo Niño everybody's seeing is actually Jesus. I'm just pointing out that in Catholic belief Jesus exists outside of time. So it could be him, sure. I'm not saying that it is."

  "Who or what do you think the Holy Child is, then?"

  He only smiled.

  "Are you a Catholic?" she asked, to mask her frustration.

  "I was raised that way. It doesn't mean I'm one now. Or that I'm not." He grinned mischievously. It struck her that if she was going to paint a faun, he'd be her model.

  "But your paintings are mostly on religious themes," she said.

  "That's an idiom I know. If anything, it's a sign of laziness, not anything profound."

  "Why the Santo Niño in particular?"

  "He seems handy for me to use to say some things about mankind, his relationship to the universe, the infinite. That kind of thing," he said. "Not that what I'm doing has any direct connection to what's going on in the state right now. Or anybody else's concept of the Holy Child, really. He's my current favorite subject, not necessarily what the paintings are about."

  "What are they about?" Annja asked.

  He shrugged. "Sorry. I don't feel comfortable talking about it any more than that. I feel like, if my paintings don't speak for themselves, I'm not doing my job. I'm not that good with words, anyway."

  He's so innocent, she thought.

  Outside the window a guy in a worn olive-drab army jacket, with a brown weed-patch of hair, stood with his back to one of the big windows and slowly raised hands in fingerless gloves out to his sides. He looked as if he were either supplicating Heaven or mimicking crucifixion. Neither the cars zooming past on Central nor the students eating at the tables on the other side of the big window paid him any heed. For some reason it gave Annja an eerie feeling.

  Things just have me susceptible, she thought. She still had no idea who was after her. Besides Father Godin, she thought. And maybe Garin Braden. And perhaps even Roux. She shook her head. She had other mysteries to solve at the moment.

  "How about these other sightings?" she asked him. "All these bizarre creatures. Do you h
ave any insight on them?"

  He turned sideways in the booth seat and crossed his legs. The question seemed to agitate him. "Why would you think I would?" he asked.

  She shrugged. "I don't necessarily think you do," she said. "I'm just grasping at straws here. I wanted to get your, you know, your unique perception."

  "I don't really know much about it. I don't really pay much attention to the news. I know from listening to my friends that people are seeing some scary things. And that poor kid got killed in the mountains north of Santa Fe, and now there seems to be some kind of media blackout about it."

  That was, Annja thought, perhaps putting it mildly.

  After getting back to her motel room not too long before midnight the previous night, she had collapsed straightaway into bed and slept almost around the clock. When she woke she couldn't tell from the media that anything resembling Doug's phone account to her of the evening before had ever happened at all. The local TV news program Annja put on talked about the death of the snowboarder as an accident.

  When she logged on to her computer, after a shower and a restorative cup of coffee brewed in the little machine by the sink in the bathroom, she found a site linked to by Google News that spoke in terms of the state police investigating what they called "possible foul play." Yet when she clicked back to it several minutes later to recheck some details she found a new story claiming an accident.

  Interesting.

  Only by turning to alternative new sources was she able to find any mention at all of the killer-ape theory. It seemed a party of four – three young men and a woman – had been about to call an end to a day's snowboarding in the vicinity of an eleven-thousand-foot Sangre de Cristo peak called the Dome when something set upon them and killed one of them. Though none of the others was within a hundred yards of the victim when the attack occurred, at sunset with windblown snow screening the scene, all apparently agreed the attacker was an eight-foot-tall being, black, shaggy and vaguely humanoid. Despite the distance all three of the survivors spoke of seeing its horrible red eyes as it looked at them. Two of them recounted hearing its cry, which one described as sounding like screams and another like a baby crying.

  The three survivors apparently fled several miles on foot before finding a signal to call 911 on their cell phones. Santa Fe County sheriff's officers who responded said the snowboarders were pale, hyperventilating and almost unable to speak from terror. The initial investigation was complicated by the fact that the attack seemed to have taken place just across the county line. After some back and forth between the neighboring sheriff's departments, the New Mexico State Police were called in.

  ****

  The afternoon was actually warm as Annja walked back to her car. The only free parking space when she'd arrived to meet the artist had been a block and a half south of Central on Cornell Drive

  . The street was lined with little shops and apartments in somewhat shabby Southwestern stucco. And parked cars.

  She found the image of Father Godin's grinning face coming back to mind. Why? she demanded of herself. She just kept thinking about him – his easy charm. His equally easy competence. The fact that he'd treated her with respect, not as if she were a little girl in a man's world, despite being totally an old-school European.

  He knows my secret, she reminded herself forcibly. Not to mention the fact that he tried to kill me.

  She had done some Internet research on him. It turned out he was quite notorious. He had a fascinating history. None of it was exactly confidence inspiring. Some was actively scary.

  Still, Godin's smiling, homely yet charismatic face was far preferable to the image that hovered around the edge of her awareness, always looking to push inside, like a horrific specter at a banquet in a yarn by Poe or Lovecraft. The sight of that poor man burning in his own taxicab. Even if he was already dead.

  Her phone rang. With a sigh of relief she flipped it open to her ear. "Annja."

  "Ms. Creed? This is your doctor friend."

  "Doctor?" she echoed, momentarily blank. Her first response was that this was a call from some fan of the show who had cadged her number somewhere. Maybe he offered Doug twenty bucks, she thought unkindly. She almost broke the connection then.

  Almost. But the voice sounded familiar. Where earlier it had been jovial, now it was gruff.

  She stopped walking. "Dr. Co – "

  "Yes. Please. No more names. No questions. It is imperative that you listen. Will you?" Cogswell's voice sounded strained.

  "Yes, of course."

  "I have not been altogether open with you, I'm afraid. There is no more time for subterfuge. There may be no more time at all. Forces beyond your expectation are on the move. They may pose a danger to all humanity. They pose a highly specific danger to you. Do you understand?"

  Her first response was to laugh. Cogswell was probably just a sad old monster crank, lonely and looking for a little drama to liven the aimless winding down of his life. Except – she clearly was the object of a conspiracy, of entirely deadly intent.

  "Yes," she said.

  "The sightings – you must study the sightings. Carefully, Annja. You have a scholar's mind. Treat them as puzzle pieces. Find how they fit – wait. Damn."

  From the rush of wind into the phone it sounded as if he had turned his head momentarily away. He must be calling from a pay phone, she realized.

  "Time's up," he said. "Seek the center, Annja Creed. Seek the – no! Damn your eyes, take your hands off – "

  The connection died.

  She stood there staring at the razor-thin flip phone in her hand. "A hoax," she said aloud. "Just theater."

  But however much her mind wanted to believe that, her heart knew it lied.

  Chapter 17

  What Annja gathered was a premature heavy snowfall had laid a thick blanket of white over the low mountains surrounding Chimayó. Through breaks in thick cloud, the stars shone brightly enough to make the snow seem to glow.

  She was still a good mile from the sanctuary when she started to see cars parked along the sides of the road. She had already come well off the beaten path here. Chimayó was solidly up into the lower reaches of the Sangre de Christos and not, from all indications, anybody's idea of a metropolis.

  She parked the rented Honda on a shoulder of the road that was relatively flat and seemed to have a fair amount of bunch grass beneath the snow. The temperature was well above freezing and not likely to drop much, given the low ceiling of cloud. She had no desire to have her car bog down in mud – especially if she had to make a speedy getaway. She'd found herself having to do that with distressing frequency these days. The roots of the tough grass would tend to bind the soil and keep it from swallowing the car whole if the snow started to melt.

  She got out. The air was surprisingly cold, especially after the mellow autumn afternoon she had left behind in Albuquerque. Her breath puffed out in clouds.

  She made a face at the pine trees standing around with snow gleaming on their boughs. She had not brought a proper winter coat to New Mexico with her. Just days before the dig ended she had been working in shorts and halter top, and it was still flat-out hot. Even with a T-shirt and a long-sleeved flannel shirt on over it, her jacket was not likely to be terrifically warm. I'd better get moving, she thought.

  Cars were rolling past her steadily if not very fast. A fair number were coming back the other way, cruising slowly, evidently in search of places to park. She chose to walk on the pavement, preferring to check behind herself frequently and moving off the road when vehicles approached rather than trying to slog along the snow-covered shoulder. Especially since that picture-postcard snow could hide all kinds of nasty pitfalls and snags to trip her or twist her ankle.

  Striding briskly, she came around a forested ridge to see a double line of red taillights in front of her, with some flashlights waving a few hundred yards down the nearly static line. State police or sheriff's deputies were turning cars back. Apparently the sanctuary grounds wer
e full enough already.

  Other people made their way on foot around her.

  Byron had filled her in on some curious details about the sanctuary. Aside from the chapel devoted to the Holy Child, where the faithful came to offer baby shoes and slippers, there was a pit dug behind the church. The blessed dirt was alleged to have healing properties. It had the miraculous character of never running low no matter how much was dug out. Annja suspected that was the sort of thing Dr. Lauren Perovich had been talking about when she enumerated reasons she loved living in New Mexico.

  Byron had also told her of friends of his who came from the hills up here, who had served as altar boys. They'd been told to go and fill the hole with fresh sand when nobody was around. It appeared to be a semiopen secret. Yet each Easter attracted thousands of pilgrims to the sanctuary. Some walked from Albuquerque or farther away, others from Santa Fe – on their knees.

  Approaching the police checkpoint, she felt a shiver run through her body that didn't have anything to do with the cold. Byron had told her that pilgrims were gathering for a memorial for the unfortunate snowboarder. They were also gathering out of fear from all the strange sightings.

  As Annja got closer she could see the church was a conventional enough looking building in the Spanish Colonial style. It had a pitched roof flanked by two little square towers with belfries. A four-foot adobe wall surrounded it. An adobe-arched gate led into the courtyard. Its simplicity reflected the relative poverty and isolation of the area during the church's construction in the early 1800s. Yet, made of the local soil itself, with timber from local trees for its bones, it gave the appearance of strength, of enduring as the tiny community it served itself endured in the face of time and neglect and endemic poverty. As well as the encroachments of the modern world.

  The light of candles danced above and among the gathered throng like fireflies. The effect would, under most circumstances, have put Annja in mind of a rock concert. But something about the mood of the crowd, the way everyone spoke in low, hushed tones as if in a church instead of outside it, gave it a far different feel.