“Goddamn you, Lou,” MacKenzie muttered beneath his breath. He picked up his Tabasco—sauced Bloody Mary—his “hacking fuel”—and swallowed a gulp. Well, less than a hundred pages to go. Even if there were a few more field trips in the next few days, if he pounded out twenty pages today while Manning and Scarborough pored over those computer files, he’d be able to squeeze out a few pages every day for ten days, and then lock himself up with a couple bottles of Popov, some limes, and lots of Snappy Tom mixer, and bash out the rest in a couple of days. By this point, he could write Immolator books in his sleep—but he found that he was farming more and more out to other professional writers who needed extra money and were willing to put aside a few weekends from their regular work to grind out some tasty and manly violence. It was a damn shame about Lou Hilton—Lou was a good writer, and the Immolator books that he wrote burned with the snap and authority of the Old Pyre-lighter himself. But Lou just wasn’t a very fast writer.
MacKenzie sipped at his drink, enjoying the bite of alcohol after the kick of hot peppers, and then commenced to tap at the keyboard and get his hero out of the Nicaraguan jungle. It was a sad and moving scene—to survive the long trek, Harry Diggs had to abandon one of his prized weapons, a Peacemaker Colt. MacKenzie smiled to himself as he described the touching, manly scene of a man abandoning a gun. Yep, there wouldn’t be a dry eye in the house.
MacKenzie paused for a moment, and took another drink. He was near the end of the chapter, and he wanted to power his way through at least a page or two of the next one before he stopped for some lunch. The thing he’d learned pretty quick about writing day after day was that you had to prime the pump for the next foray into prose consciousness. A cold start on a chapter or even a scene was the hardest thing. MacKenzie had learned to write books like a chain-smoker smokes—light one from the fire of another, don’t get outta that fuckin’ chair till you’ve got the next one cookin’. It was a variation on Hemingway’s rule to leave a little water in the well to start the next day’s draw, and it helped keep that darkest dread away from MacKenzie’s door: writer’s block.
MacKenzie drank the last swallow of his Bloody Mary and grinned at the monitor. Yep, he may be the despair of Alcoholics Anonymous, but he’d copped their motto and bent it to suit his needs. “One day at a time” became “One word at a time.”
Harry Diggs was nearing the end of a chapter, hacking away at a boa constrictor with a dull Swiss army knife, when MacKenzie heard the sounds from below. They weren’t huge sounds, but his ears were good, and he recognized the sounds of the back door opening, and closing. Funny, because Scarborough and Lieutenant Breasts had gone to the airport just before he’d sat down at the word processor, and weren’t due back for another hour yet. Maybe something had gone wrong.
MacKenzie hit a function key—Fl0, since it was the Word Perfect program he used—and saved the new paragraphs. He got offline and went downstairs for a look-see. Everything looked fine downstairs. He checked the back door. Locked. He looked out into the driveway. Manning’s rental car was still gone.
Must have been his imagination, he decided. Still, as long as he was down here, maybe he should get another drink. ... He nixed the idea immediately. A little vodka or beer singing through the brain greased the wheels of his writing machine; too much jammed them. The day he was too drunk or too hung-over to sit down at his IBM and write was the day he quit drinking. And since he had no desire to quit drinking, he exercised iron control on the stuff. Instead, he poured himself some coffee and went back up the stairs to finish off that monster snake.
When MacKenzie stepped back into his office, he immediately saw a man, sitting in his typing chair. The man wore a silk suit, and his hair was cropped short. There was a Band-Aid on his brow, and a sprinkling of acne scars colored a livid red against the man’s fading tan. But the most distinguishing characteristic was the H-K Automatic that the man held in his hand. The H-K was probably the finest modern handgun that money could buy. Efficient, accurate, reliable, and very, very deadly in a skilled marksman’s hands. After his initial shock passed, MacKenzie looked up into the man’s eyes, and he saw something even more chilling than a skilled marksman with a superior weapon.
He saw a professional killer, who enjoyed his work.
“Good afternoon. You must be Captain Eric MacKenzie,” said the man, flexing his shoulders a bit beneath the silk. MacKenzie could see taut, well-hewn muscles flow—this guy worked out.
“What the hell are you doing in my house? You want me to call the police, or should I kick your butt out myself?” MacKenzie yelled, his outrage at the trespass overwhelming his sense of danger.
“I’ve just been reading your little masterpiece here,” said the man, tapping the computer. “Fun. Oh, I added one little line that I really dig: ‘The snake strangled the Immolator to death and swallowed him whole.’ You like that, MacKenzie? I do.”
MacKenzie started toward him, and the man waggled his gun in warning. “Hey, dude! Are you blind? I can connect your belly button with your spine with this little gun here! And don’t you think I can’t—or won’t—shoot.”
“Fuck me ... You’re with the goddamn government, aren’t you? CIA, I bet. Those assholes. I was right. We are onto something here. That farmhouse business ... it did tug some bigwig’s nuts, didn’t it?”
“Look, I’m not here to explain anything, Mr. Author. I’m here to do a job, and if you care to help me out, maybe the snake won’t swallow you.” The man eased out of his chair. “The files, MacKenzie. The Blue Book files you so stupidly kept. Where are they?”
Yes, that was it, then. The files. They’d triggered a nerve deep in the Great Monster, and its reflexes were much faster than MacKenzie had expected.
“So, there must be more correct information, more problem addresses in my notes, huh?” MacKenzie casually stepped forward a few paces.
“None of your business, man. So tell me, where are the files?”
“Those old cabinets over there, fella. They’re in the second one from the left. Say, why don’t you just take lunch now and I’ll parcel-post them to you, huh?”
The man looked over toward the cabinets MacKenzie had indicated and the author knew that he was going to lose his chance at his big story if he didn’t do something quick. Frustration overcame common sense, and he tossed the hot black coffee directly into the man’s face.
The man screamed, and fired his gun, but MacKenzie was already dodging, ducking down and then firing his girth directly into the man’s midsection. The force of the blow knocked the man back hard against the computer table, and his wrist hit the top of the IBM, knocking the gun out of his grasp and onto the rug.
MacKenzie was able to get one good roundhouse against the trespasser’s face, before the man’s superior training took over. He shot out a leg, and pushed MacKenzie; the bigger man tripped and fell. But not before grabbing two handfuls of silk jacket, pulling the man down with him.
Over and over they rolled, and when they stopped, they traded hard, stunning blows to one another’s faces and midsections. For a moment, MacKenzie was on top and had his meaty fists around the man’s neck. As MacKenzie squeezed, he thought he had the man—but then rock-hard sinews snapped into action, and MacKenzie was heaved over and flattened on his back, like some wrestler slapping the mat. The man did not stop to fight more; he scrambled for the rug and his gun.
MacKenzie caught the man’s foot and desperately held on. But the man kicked him in the face, sprang over, scooped up the gun, and trained it on his opponent.
Painfully, MacKenzie got to his feet, holding his hands up in surrender. “Yo! Great fight, pal. You’re the winner and champeen.” He coughed, exhausted. “Couldn’t let you go without at least a little tussle, huh?”
The man’s pockmark scars glowed a livid red as he stood up.
“Fuck you, author!” He turned and fired a slug into the IBM, and another into the hard disk.
It was worse than any blow. “Shit! I got a nov
el in there! I didn’t have any backups!”
Sparks snapped and sputtered from the computer. The man spun on MacKenzie, his silk jacket belling with the action.
“Yeah, Mr. Author. Well, let me just deal with your troublesome software too, then.”
He fired a round into MacKenzie’s midsection.
The shock kicked MacKenzie back a yard and a half. He felt as though someone had split him in half with an axe. He went down hard onto the floor, with a splatter of blood; blackness came oozing down on his mind like dead, cold rain.
When he came to, he realized he was spitting up blood. He took a deep ragged cough, and everything rushed back. There was the sound of falling papers and clanking drawers. MacKenzie craned his neck painfully around and saw the man in the silk suit dumping the files from the cabinets—all the cabinets—into one large pile in the center of the floor.
“No,” croaked MacKenzie. “Stop!”
He tried to crawl forward, but the pain instantly severed his action.
“Oh, you’re still alive, huh?” said the man, dumping one last handful of paper into the huge pile. “Just as well. You get to watch a little pyromania in action.” The man looked around, and spotted the large lighter on the coffee table. He picked it up, twisted off the flint and wick head, and dumped the lighting fluid over the papers. “A little foretaste of hell, you asshole!”
The man took out a book of matches. He lit one, then flared the other match heads with the small flame. The light washed a diabolical glow across the man’s tight little grin as he held the flames above the mound of paper.
“My mother always told me never to play with matches, Captain MacKenzie. And as you can see, she was quite right.”
With a laugh, he tossed the flames down onto the drenched pile of paper. With a whoomph, the fluid ignited, coughing up a gasp of heat and conflagration.
MacKenzie watched the pyre grow with horror, forgetting his pain.
The man stepped from behind the bonfire he’d created. “There we go! That should take care of the files. And now to take care of you!”
He aimed his gun, and MacKenzie thought, Jesus Christ. I should have had that Bloody Mary after all.
The man in the suit squeezed off a bullet squarely into MacKenzie’s big chest.
The last sound Captain Eric MacKenzie heard before he again dipped into unconsciousness. was the second-floor’s First Alert fire alarm screaming to life.
Chapter 28
When she came in on the 11:54 Braniff flight to Iowa City, Diane Scarborough found her father waiting for her along with a woman dressed in air Force blues, whom Dr. Scarborough introduced as a Lieutenant Marsha Manning. Diane, not merely unafraid of intuition but wholeheartedly accepting her own, liked the woman immediately and sensed a kind of romantic friction between her father and the officer. But she was far too immersed in her own troubles to take much note of either of them.
“Dad, we’ve got to talk,” she said.
“Well, we’ll have lunch and you can say what you want Diane. You can trust Lieutenant Manning. She’s shown me that I can trust her.” He smiled at the woman. “Within certain limits.”
The Air Force officer nodded curtly. “I’m overwhelmed.”
Scarborough took them to a nice roadside tavern, dark, with a nice electric fire in a pseudo early American hearth to match the pseudo early American interior decor. They ate thick hamburgers, which could have been cardboard as far as Diane was concerned. She took two bites, and nibbled at the cole slaw and french fries that came with the meal while she talked.
For Lieutenant Manning’s benefit, she explained what she had experienced over a week before. Scarborough had explained the situation to Manning already, and the woman appreciated the problems that Scarborough had with it—but she wanted to hear Diane’s version anyway. Diane then described their visit with the psychologist, and the results of the hypnosis sessions, all of which was news to Scarborough.
“Hoover Dam?” he said, his voice tense with total disbelief. “Why the hell do they want to meet you at Hoover Dam?” He shot an upset glance at Manning. “Not that I think ‘they’ are more than some faulty neurochemical spark in Diane’s hippocampus.”
“Dad, I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I just know that that’s what I remember.” Her face was drawn and her color was pale. “So will you just listen and stop interrupting?”
“You really aren’t being fair, Ev,” said Marsha.
Scarborough shot her a scathing glance, but quieted. She was right. And he respected the way Manning was able to stand up to him despite him. He just grunted and chewed on his hamburger.
Diane said, “You were right about the police, Dad. There’s no real proof that Tim was kidnapped. They say to give it a day, and then call if he hasn’t showed up. I’m telling you, though, I know that Tim was abducted ... and not necessarily by aliens. I just feel it in my heart.”
“You see my dilemma,” said Scarborough. “`Abducted by aliens’—it’s like a line from a comic book or something. Not real life.”
But Manning paid no attention. “Intuition isn’t always right. As your father points out, Tim Reilly is a young man, and young men do go on escapades.”
“No, not Tim! Dad thinks he’s just some drunken Irishman, but he’s wrong. Tim’s a smart man. He may not exactly have the most solid reputation yet—but he’s destined for a real solid career of helping people. Dad, Tim has done a lot of fine things that you don’t even know about. He’s a good, honest, worthwhile person!”
Scarborough sighed. “Okay. Assuming all this—what can I do about it?”
“I thought you could answer some questions, maybe. I don’t know ... that’s why I needed to talk to you. Assuming that the aliens didn’t take Tim ... “
“Easy assumption!” said Scarborough.
“And assuming that he’s not on a bender or whatever—which I know he’s not ... Then there’s no real reason anyone would want him! That I know of, anyway. But I was thinking on the plane ... our experience with this UFO was unique. There might be people who want to know more about it ... or people who don’t want us to spread the story.”
“That doesn’t pan out,” said Scarborough. “Why would they take Tim? You’re the one who claims to remember meeting the saucer people.” The last two words almost stuck in his throat.
“No, wait a minute,” said Marsha. “Diane, where were you before you went to stay with your girlfriend?”
“A really long yoga class.”
“Did you stop by your apartment at all?”
“Just for a few minutes in the afternoon.”
Manning tapped Scarborough on the shoulder. “Could be that they wanted Diane and couldn’t get her. So they settled on Tim.”
“Tim knew where I was!”
“Maybe he wouldn’t tell them.”
“But if they could kidnap him ... they’d be ruthless enough to torture. And ... oh my God.”
“Ladies, ladies!” said Scarborough, arms lifting in supplication. “Please, this isn’t some cheap spy movie! This is real life! Diane, why would anyone want you because of a UFO experience you had? There’s absolutely nothing like it in the annals of UFO investigation! My God, even the fabled Men in Black just make empty threats!”
“It’s logical, Dad! It makes sense!”
“Down to a point. And that point rests on damn shaky ground. Look, Diane. You stay with us this evening. We’ll go back down to Kansas together tomorrow. If Tim hasn’t shown up, we’ll notify the FBI. We’ll get his apartment dusted for fingerprints; we’ll do everything forensically and humanly possible to find him. And no matter what happens, I will personally look into your UFO experience.”
Diane seemed satisfied enough, so they left it at that.
They heard the fire sirens miles away.
As they got closer, they saw the smoke rising in a tilting black column from past the trees.
When the rented Chevy Cavalier pulled off the highway onto the road to th
e house, there could be no doubt—Eric MacKenzie’s house was on fire.
Two bright red old fire trucks from the local volunteer fire department stood by the burning house. Firemen in steel helmets and thick coats were pumping streams and gusts of water onto a smoldering roof, where flames chewed at blackened shingles. The acrid stench of burnt wood hung in the air as a stunned Everett Scarborough jumped from the car and started toward a knot of gathered men, supervising the firefighting. Let him be there, thought Scarborough. Let Mac be okay.
But he could see no red—haired man amongst the group.
“Stay here,” he told the women.
Halfway there, though, he heard a faint voice calling his name. “Scarborough! Ev! Over here ... behind the tree.”
Some thirty yards from the side of the house, far from where the firemen doused the flames, there grew an old oak, blooming now with a wealth of spring leaves. In the shade, by the thick bole, Scarborough could see a form sitting, with his back against bark.
Closer, he recognized the red hair. “Mac! What the hell are you doing here! What happened to the house? I—” And then he saw the blood. “Jesus, Mac!” He stared down at the man, whose entire front was matted with dark red.
Captain Eric MacKenzie was staring off as though watching the water spouts draping over his burning home, but then Scarborough could see the faint glazing of those eyes. His left hand was hooked around a bottle of Glenlivet Scotch.
“Mac, I’ll get help!”
“Have to-talk-to you,” the words were halting and filled with pain. “Can’t-last-“
“Uncle Mac!” The horrified words came from behind him. Scarborough turned and saw his daughter behind him, staring at the man by the tree with horror and disbelief.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 32
