Second Sunrise

by Aimée Thurlo

  Could he take a chance and try to find an ally? Diane had already been through a lot with him and seen more than he could hope to cover up, and he’d only known her a few days. It was obvious she was intelligent and motivated, but was she just interested in advancing her career?

  It couldn’t be just that. She was still sticking with him and certainly what happened tonight was not a career maker. There were too many things about this case that could never become public, not without destroying her credibility completely. There was, however, one thing that might keep her playing along with him, at least for a while . . .

  The safe house he’d had ready for several weeks was only a mile farther down the road, which ran parallel to the Rio Grande to the west. The dry, harsh Robledo Mountains were across the river, and he could see Cerro Robledo, the highest point, as if it were daylight outside. His night vision was about the only special ability Diane hadn’t noticed already.

  Just how ready was she to hear about real-life vampires, he wondered, and what would she do if he laid it all out for her? Perhaps the best strategy would be to let her discover it on her own, a bit at a time, so she wouldn’t freak out entirely.

  Turning off his headlights, he continued another half mile, driving slowly and watching for traffic ahead and behind the vehicle.

  “How can you see?” Diane asked, leaning forward and trying to see beyond the hood of the car.

  “Trust me a little longer.”

  Just past a curve in the road, Lee slowed and quickly wheeled into a narrow graveled lane past a solitary mailbox on a post, fall brush on both sides intermingled with cottonwoods and other bosque vegetation he didn’t know by name. The road made a ninety-degree turn and ran alongside a wide levee for another hundred yards, then turned back to the right and crossed a large irrigation ditch over an old timber bridge with split-log railings.

  Hidden beneath and within the cottonwoods was a low adobe-style home with a two-car attached garage. Reaching under the seat. Lee brought out a garage-door opener. They entered the garage next to a several-years-old dusty black Ford pickup, and Lee turned off the engine as the door closed behind him. It was pitch-black in the garage, no overhead light had come on.

  “Here we are. Unless we’ve all of a sudden run out of luck, we can stay here as long as necessary. Not even the Bureau can find us here unless we want them to. I’ve leased this house through an assumed name and the truck is registered under that identity as well.” Lee reached past Diane and opened the glove compartment, grabbing a flashlight and switching it on.

  “Use this to find your way until I get to the light switch.” He handed it to her, then got out, walking over to the door leading into the house, and turning on a light switch. A fluorescent fixture over a workbench came on.

  She looked around the inside of the garage. Except for the pickup truck and the police cruiser, the room was empty and there were no windows. The air was dusty, stirred up by the opening of the garage door. “You don’t get out here very often, do you?” Diane said, walking toward the door he’d just opened.

  “I stop by while patrolling this direction at least once a week to empty the mailbox and check the house. Always at night. Nobody has ever seen me here, that I know of, at least as a state patrolman.” Lee unlocked the door and stepped into the house, a modern structure probably less than ten years old, and they passed through a small laundry room into a hallway that led to the interior of the house.

  A light was on in the living room, and a radio was playing country music. I here was an old sofa and a TV, and a small kitchen table with two chairs. All the appliances looked relatively new. The curtains were floor length, and lined so that little if any light could be seen outside. The illumination came from a table lamp on a timer. Diane looked, noting that the radio was also on the timer.

  “You have it set up to look like somebody’s here in the evenings. When does the radio shut off? Ten P.M.?” Diane looked around and noted a thin layer of dust on everything. “This is some kind of safe house you’ve put together, isn’t it? I think it’s time you answered the rest of my questions.”

  He turned off the radio. “Let’s have some coffee. While I’m brewing a pot, you might want to reload your spare magazine. There is plenty of ammunition hidden inside the broiler. Get out the .45 ammo for me, for my backup pistol, if you don’t mind.”

  “You’re always ready for a war, it seems, Lee. Is that your real name anyway? Just who or what are you, and why am I risking everything, not just my career, by coming with you?” She looked in the broiler of the gas oven, and sure enough, there were two boxes of nine-millimeter ammunition and one of .45 cartridges inside a larger plastic storage box.

  “Coffee first. And from now on, whether you decide to stick with me on this or not, make sure you always have plenty of ammunition. There are some other things you might need, also. I have another one of these hidden here. You can take it.” He reached into his boot, pulling out a slender, razor-sharp double-edged commando dagger.

  “That’s not a knife, it’s a sword, and I carry a backup pistol anyway. Quit jerking me around. Every time I ask you a critical question, you change the subject. The coffee is brewing now, let’s have some answers along with it. Just who are you, really, besides State Police Officer Leonard Hawk, born April 29, 1976?”

  Lee looked at the attractive young woman leaning against the kitchen counter, pistol at her waist, and knew that one way or the other, he’d have to tell her something. For the first time since Annie came into his life, someone knew a hell of a lot about him. He could lie, but with all the evidence she’s quoted to him before the attack, it would have to take a really credible story. She’d never believe a lie, and unfortunately, the truth sounded even stranger.

  “What the hell. I’m going to tell you the truth now, even if I’m screwed. Just remember what you’ve seen already tonight before you decide I’ve gone off the deep end, and brought you along for company.”

  “Don’t expect me to believe a word of it. I still don’t accept the skinwalker crap; not really. But try me anyway.” Diane was using her bad-cop tone now.

  “Well, believe it or not, I am State Police Officer Lee Nez, and I’m not really missing and presumed dead. Have you ever worked with a really older man?’

  Special Agent Diane Lopez sat there, her coffee getting cold, as Lee told her about that March night in 1945, about encountering the ambush of the army convoy, losing his trainee, killing the attackers, and burying the box containing the secret weapon, then encountering the “dead” Hans Gruber again.

  She was still listening, though her jaw had dropped a little, so Lee told her about being near death, his blood being mixed with Gruber’s, then being turned into a vampire and healing within minutes. He described how he’d tricked Gruber. By then, her eyes were wide open, and she sipped her coffee absently, shaking her head.

  “It still sounds like a movie-of-the-week plot to me, but maybe I’ve stepped into the Twilight Zone for real. Okay, if I believe this load of crap you’ve been telling me, and you knocked the guy over the edge of the cliff, why didn’t this so-called vampire die from the fall?”

  “I didn’t know it then, but unless key fatal injuries take place, it takes a lot more than a fall off a cliff to kill a vampire. Since I didn’t want to remain a night walker, I left what I thought was a dead body and hurried to find a Navajo medicine man. The next evening, when I could safely go outside, I decided to double-cheek and make sure Gruber was really dead. That’s when I realized what a dumb-ass mistake I’d made. Me was gone, under his own power.” Lee went back to get himself another cup of coffee.

  “Got anything stronger to go into that coffee?” Diane looked hopefully toward the cupboard.

  Lee nodded. “Above the sink.”

  Diane retrieved an unopened bottle of cognac from an upper cabinet, and poured an inch of the fiery liquid into her coffee. Lee came over, set down his cup, and she added the same to his.

  “I’m still ha
ving a hard time swallowing this, and I’m not talking about the coffee. When did you tell the army about that secret weapon? Was this supposed to be part of the atomic bomb set off at Trinity Site a few months later—if I remember my New Mexico history correctly,” Diane said.

  “That’s where things get complicated, and what leads me—us—into the situation that we’re in now. I was trying to track down Gruber, and I ran into him the next evening. Actually, he shot me while I was chasing him on a motorcycle, and I ended up in an irrigation ditch north of Socorro. He got away, and I have no idea where he went after that.

  “I was assumed to be dead, and had trouble establishing a new identity until the war ended. I kept looking for Gruber, but ran out of time and money,” Lee continued. “I couldn’t remain Lee Nez, there were too many questions I couldn’t answer, and it was hazardous for me to be outside for any length of time during the daytime—though admittedly I can stay out in the sun a lot longer than a vampire.”

  “What about the missing plutonium or uranium or whatever it was?”

  “It was all hushed up with a cover story. The dead soldiers were explained away as having died in a vehicle accident, along with my rookie partner. The bodies of the German agents, well, they never existed officially or unofficially as far as I could learn. They were buried and forgotten. My police cruiser was found and returned to the department, and I was listed as missing, presumed drowned. I never did find out who told the Germans about the nuclear material and the timetable for the convoy, but it had to be a traitor working behind the scenes.”

  “So what eventually happened to the box all those men died for?” Diane poured herself another finger of cognac without the coffee.

  “The military scoured the area under the cover of a war game, but they never found it, and I sure didn’t know who to trust. It might have been a decoy to mislead the German agents, or the real thing, but whatever the case, the military still had enough plutonium and enriched uranium to make three bombs. They set the first A-bomb off at Trinity Site, as I found out after the war. It wasn’t until then that I knew why Gruber and his men had been willing to take so many risks.”

  Diane got up and started pacing, obviously trying to decide what to believe. She walked from the kitchen into the living room, back and forth through the archway. In a waste-basket she could see the junk mail he’d received as occupant or postal patron. Finally she returned to the kitchen. Lee hadn’t moved, he’d been watching, gauging her reaction to all this.

  “The photo of that woman, Annie something, that I saw in the newspaper article. Was that your wife?”

  Lee nodded.

  “Was she a vampire too?”

  Lee shook his head.

  “But she knew what you were—are?” Diane realized she was whispering at this point. She sat down at the kitchen table and poured herself more cognac.

  Lee put the dagger back into his boot scabbard. “I told her just before I asked her to marry me, though she’d already seen some of my abilities. But I don’t want to talk about that right now. We have more important issues at hand.”

  “Was she killed by the same kind of creatures that came after us and Burt Thomas last night? Skinwalkers, are they called?” Diane persisted.

  Lee nodded, swallowing to ease the lump in his throat that thinking of Annie always brought. “Their kind have been after me from the very beginning. They can smell vampires as different from other humans—maybe even sense the power, I don’t know. Being Navajo makes me especially noticeable to them, I think.”

  “Suppose I believe you now, or at least go along with this because it fits in with what I’ve seen. You said skinwalkers are all evil, something to do with what made them shape-shifters. Are vampires like that too, all evil? What about you?” Diane looked him straight in the eye. “You going to attack me next?”

  Lee shook his head. “Skinwalkers and vampires aren’t the same, though the changes are produced through the work of some kind of similar viruses, or something even more basic than that, passed through something attached to red blood cells, I think. But from what I’ve learned, which isn’t, admittedly, a whole lot, it seems that vampires aren’t much different from the people they were before, except for the physical characteristics you’ve already noticed about me, and the fact that they have to avoid direct sunlight.”

  “You always wear long sleeves and a cap, and those wraparound sunglasses. Is that enough protection?”

  Lee shook his head slowly. “I’m only half vampire, thanks to the Navajo medicine man who was in a position to help me. I use a lot of maximum-strength skinblock, cover up, and work basically at night. But even a full day outside, if I’m careful, won’t kill me. A full vampire can be outside for brief periods, maybe a half hour if he or she has on a lot of sunblock and is protected like me.”

  “You seem to eat like a horse, and don’t seem to have an ounce of fat. I thought vampires fed only on blood and weren’t really alive. You’re alive, aren’t you?” Diane reached over slowly and felt his pulse. His skin tingled at the touch, but he didn’t flinch.

  “I breathe, and my heart is beating, maybe a little faster that usual right now,” he said. “I even have a reflection. That blood-sucking, neck-biting, and long-fangs image comes right from Bram Stoker and Hollywood, though blood is particularly nutritious for us, like a quick energy food. I get mine from butcher shops, slaughterhouses, and ranchers, a little here, a little there. They think I use it in my garden as fertilizer. I told them it’s an old Navajo secret ingredient for growing corn.”

  “You have a vampire for an enemy. You said you shot Hans Gruber in the head, then later threw him off a cliff. Yet he didn’t die. If you’ll pardon me asking such a sensitive question, how do you kill a vampire? Cut off its head? What are those vital spots you mentioned?”

  “Decapitation is one way, and that’s the reason I carry the long dagger. You can chop up their bodies in other ways too, or destroy their heart so it can’t pump blood anymore and circulate the healing elements. Big wooden stakes actually work if they destroy the heart. Fire works too, if it gets hot enough to consume the body. Anything that will stop the heart or shut down the brain completely, like decapitation. We burn up a tremendous amount of energy, so I suppose you could starve a vampire too, a lot faster than with a human. But you’d have to have a strong prison. A vampire has tremendous strength.”

  “Even more than you? I find that hard to believe.”

  Lee shrugged. “I’ve only had to fight two vampires since I took on Hans Gruber. They came after me on separate occasions, and I managed to kill them both. One I shot several times, which rendered him unconscious, then I cut off his head. The second, well, I managed to get him toasted, literally.”

  “Sounds like a bitch. By comparison, the skinwalkers are almost a walk in the park—with wolves.” Diane looked at the .45 rounds in his ammo box, noting they were soft points. “Those bullets have a lot of punch up close.”

  “Not all skinwalkers use the wolf form. They’ve also attacked in the form of mountain lions or black cats such as panthers. The one who killed your partner was a jaguar or whatever. Those are the strongest animals for the weight. They’re fast and stealthy too, especially for solo work. When they take wolf form, they usually run in packs.”

  Diane sat there, thinking for a while, and Lee stared at his coffee cup. He still didn’t know how the night would end, now that he’d basically blown a cover he’d had for nearly sixty years. What would Diane do with all this information?

  Finally she spoke again. “Which brings us back to the original question, the one that I asked you a while back. The Navajo man you killed on the Reservation, Johnny Tanner. Was he a skinwalker?”

  “Yes, and the wolves killed were his missing girlfriend and her sister. They died before they could transform back into humans, so they’ll never be found, naturally. Tanner had remained in human form to set up the car accident scenario. Now you know why I had to lie.” Lee shrugged. “If I’d have
told you the truth without you having seen what you did tonight, you’d have recommended me for the rubber-gun squad.

  “But that wasn’t the only reason you came to talk to me the other day, was it?” Lee crossed his lean, powerful arms across his chest, never taking his eyes off of hers. She was wavering, finally thinking outside the box.

  “No. But if all you’ve told me tonight is true, I think I know why you wanted to know about the German Air Force pilot. He’s really Hans Gruber, isn’t he?”

  “I think so. And if he is, I need to know why he’s returned to New Mexico after fifty-seven years. I have to find out if he somehow knows about me, or if he’s here to get the military cargo he tried to hijack so long ago.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Do you understand what’s going on now, Diane? I’m after a superhuman spy who may have killed many Americans, including a young cop with a wife and infant son, and an innocent civilian. I know we’ve had several wars since then, and the Germans are considered our friends and allies. But I don’t think Hans Gruber, if that’s who Major Wolfgang Muller really is, has come to New Mexico just to drop practice bombs and work on his tan.”

  Diane shook her head. “I’m still trying to comprehend the existence of vampires and skinwalkers. Give me a few hours to digest all this, and sort things out in my head, then I’ll tell you what I think.” Diane looked toward the front door, which was constructed of metal, and had two dead bolts. “Are we really safe here?”

  Lee nodded. “We could probably hole up here for days. Unless a den of skinwalkers lives just downwind, we’ll be all right.”

  “How far do skinwalker packs range? You said they normally only bother other Navajos?” she wondered.

  “I’ve never come across any Navajo witches outside of the Four Corners states, and only rarely off the Navajo Nation. Like most of the animals they change into, they’re territorial.” He stopped, then added with a wry smile, “It’s a problem that affects the Dineh, and that’s why for the past hall a century, I kept coming back to Navajo settlements to hunt them down. I owe my people that much for the help the medicine man gave me when I needed him. Skinwalkcrs have undermined my people for hundreds of years, maybe forever, if you believe the old stories, and I’ve helped equalize things a bit. They are the closest thing I’ve seen to pure evil since Hitler’s time.”