Cold Winter Sun

by Forder, Tony J.

  ‘What were you expecting to find?’ Terry asked as I took a few thirsty gulps from my bottle, no judgement in his voice.

  ‘I’m not sure. Some kind of production, maybe. Meth. Drugs of some kind. Something that Vern might have inadvertently come across and been chased off the land over. I genuinely did not expect to find this… barren, inhospitable scrubland.’

  The shot arrived a split second before we heard it.

  Something cut the air between us, and a cloud of dirt erupted in a sandy-grey puff about five yards to our left. The snap of the supersonic rifle shot hit our ears right after. We must have both immediately sensed the direction from which the bullet had travelled, because the pair of us took a couple of steps across to shelter behind a standing red stone each.

  ‘Did you see the flare?’ Terry called out.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  I set my Bergen on the floor, unzipped the largest compartment and withdrew a short-stock AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, with a thirty-round magazine already in place and good to go. I knew Terry would be doing the same from behind the stone that now stood to my six o’clock. Just as I knew that he would use this opportunity to step in and take over the tactical aspect from hereon in.

  ‘Fire a burst in the general direction on three,’ he said, loud enough for me to hear but not forcefully enough for his voice to travel more than a few yards. ‘I’ll look for muzzle flashes if he returns fire.’

  I set the stock against my shoulder and licked my lips. Set my feet, sliding them from side to side until they felt firmly dug in. I wasn’t about to step out from cover, merely lean out and squeeze the trigger for a couple of seconds so as to attract attention. The one thing I did not want to do was to become unbalanced and stumble out into the open.

  ‘Ready,’ I said.

  Terry counted off. On three I did my job. I ducked out and back in before anyone could possibly react and get off a shot of their own. My weapon was not supressed, so whoever had fired at us would hear it even if the volley of bullets went nowhere near them. In response I heard two loud snaps of gunfire, at which point Terry sent back half a magazine in three easy bursts. Safely tucked behind the monoliths, we waited for the echoes to fade away and the land around us to become still once more. It seemed to take an age before the sound of gunfire could no longer be heard.

  ‘Whereabouts?’ I asked Terry, keeping my voice low. On these plains, with a prevailing wind, I knew my voice could carry for some distance.

  ‘A hundred yards or so. Roughly two o’clock.’

  ‘That was a rifle, yes? And he missed us from that distance?’

  Terry made no reply. Before he could – if he was even going to bother – a cry came from the gunman’s approximate position high up on a rise, somewhere amidst a scattering of bushes and boulders leading up to a much steeper climb.

  ‘Hey out there! I know you can hear me! Need some help here!’

  The voice was weak and a little throaty.

  ‘Yeah, what do you need?’ Terry called out.

  ‘I been shot.’

  ‘That can happen when you fire on people without knowing what they’ve got for you in return.’

  A few seconds ticked by before the voice came again. This time the guy sounded as if he might be in pain. ‘Yeah. I guess I really didn’t think it through. I coulda hit you if I wanted. One of you, at least. Didn’t want to do that, though. I aimed to put one across your bows. I want you to know that.’

  ‘He’s bullshitting,’ I said over my shoulder. ‘Either of us steps out to go up there and he’ll have us in his crosshairs.’

  Terry’s only response was silence.

  ‘Whoever you are,’ I yelled, ‘you can forget it. We’re not about to fall for that.’

  ‘I… I understand. I shot first, so you have every right not to trust me. But I ain’t trying to fool you. I’m shot and I’m too busy holding my goddamned leg together to use my rifle again.’

  ‘That’s easy enough to say. How do we know you won’t take one of us down if we come over there?’

  ‘I guess you don’t. But right now I ain’t even looking your way. I have my back jammed up against a boulder and I’m sitting here trying to keep from bleeding to death.’

  Our voices bounced back and forwards off the rocks, a ghostly sibilant whisper in the air as they faded away to nothing. I felt as if I needed to keep him talking.

  ‘Look at it our way. You could still be bluffing, looking to even up the odds. How about you throw out your rifle?’

  ‘I could do that, sure. I can reach it if I need to. I toss it in the air back over my head I’m sure you’ll see it fly, hear it clatter on the rocks behind me. But how you gonna know I ain’t got another one?’

  I nodded to myself. ‘That’s a good point. You see our dilemma?’

  ‘I guess.’

  I lowered my voice again. ‘What d’you think, Terry? You want me to draw his fire again?’

  Still nothing from behind me. I turned to look back at him, but the tall standing stone hid him well. I thought about it a little more. A man has a rifle he ought to be able to hit a person walking at a steady pace from a hundred yards away. The first shot had been in the general vicinity, but way off the mark if either of us had been the intended target. The other two hadn’t made an impression anywhere near us. Perhaps the voice from across the way was genuine. Maybe the man really hadn’t shot at us, only shot near us. And maybe he was leaking blood on New Mexico soil right now.

  ‘Tell you what,’ I shouted out. ‘Toss your rifle anyway. That’d be a good start.’

  Silence.

  Terrific. Now neither of them were responding.

  ‘Terry!’ I hissed. I picked up a small rock and tossed it towards the foot of the monolith. It jumped and skittered along the floor. ‘Hey, you fallen asleep back there?’

  When his voice eventually came, it was loud and strong, and it originated from behind a rise of rocks and boulders about a hundred yards away at roughly the two o’clock position.

  13

  His name was Dale Everest. ‘Like the mountain,’ he told us, in case we weren’t clear.

  While Everest and I were calling out between us making arrangements for some half-arsed surrender and rescue attempt, Terry had as usual been getting the job done. Using the noise Everest and I were making as cover, and the time it took for the back-and-forth as a distraction, Terry had edged backwards from the red monolith, crabbed across to his right, before snaking his way around in a wide arc up and around the rocky hillside on which Everest had perched himself.

  When Terry called out he told me to get the medical kit over there because the man he had shot was in trouble. Which I could see was true, the moment I came over the rise lugging two lots of kit and laid eyes on them both. The large calibre bullet had taken Everest an inch or two beneath the left hip, and had sliced a deep and messy gouge out of his flesh, leaving a bloody, pulpy groove of gore and torn tissue. It looked raw and painful as hell. I tried keeping the instinctual wince off my face, but failed miserably.

  The man talked all the while as Terry administered first aid in his usual methodical field-treatment manner. Everest kept apologising for trying to scare us away by shooting, insisting that he would never have actually aimed his rifle in our direction.

  ‘What the hell are you doing all the way out here anyway?’ I asked. ‘And why did you even want to scare us away? It’s not as if there isn’t enough land for us all.’

  Everest looked up from the patching of his wound, fixing me with slits for eyes. He looked to be in his sixties. A tall, slender man with a fluffy white cloud of hair behind each ear, and a short beard of the same. His flesh was bronzed like a surfer’s, with ribbons of hard, taut muscle running through it. He looked as fit as the dog the butcher’s dog trained.

  ‘I could ask you two boys the same thing,’ he said, his voice cracked and dry. ‘You sure ain’t here for the scenery.’

  I squinted at him.
‘Hey, Dale. You shot first, so you get to answer first. Deal?’

  After a moment or two he nodded. ‘I thought you was a couple of saucer ghouls. I figured a shot coming your way would make you think twice about sticking around where you weren’t wanted. That’s usually all it takes.’

  ‘You’ve shot at people before?’

  ‘Shot near people. Sure.’

  ‘Saucer ghouls?’ Terry said, still intent on perfecting his bandaging skills.

  Everest gave a nod. ‘That’s what we call these oddballs who come out here looking for scraps of UFO. They don’t give a damn about the craft itself, nor the incident or the history of the place, only what kind of buck they might make if they find something to prove it was real.’

  ‘So what are you here for? And why do you want to scare everyone else away?’

  ‘I’m out here in protest.’ He held his head upright and struck a pose of pride. ‘I been coming out here ever since they closed the place down to the public. Something as unique an event as a UFO crashing to earth ought to be celebrated. At the very least acknowledged and made available to all of us. Instead, piece by piece they’ve taken it away. First the military turned their backs on their own men who made statements about the craft, then the men in suits made sure that everybody else involved was either bribed, beaten or humiliated into taking back their statements. You had all these experts talking about what was found, only for another bunch of experts to say how the others were all just plain wrong. Got so’s the incident became something to mock, to sneer at others about. Through it all, though, there was the crash site itself for folk like me to come and visit.’

  ‘Folk like you?’ I said. ‘Are you a believer, Dale?’

  The man winced as Terry pulled the bandage tight, but he threw some spirit into the look he gave me. ‘Damn straight I am. I wasn’t born yet when it happened, but my daddy was and I’m here to tell you that Neil Everest was the most down-to-earth man God ever saw fit to put a breath into. Never missed a week at church, never told a lie in his entire life. If my daddy says he saw the craft then he saw the craft. If he said he held a piece of it in his hand and it was about as light as a feather, then I guarantee he held a piece of it in his hand and it was as light as a feather.’

  I nodded, not quite knowing what to say. I glanced away from him for a moment and for the first time noticed a couple of items leaning up against a boulder about ten feet or so away. One was a satchel type bag that I guessed held some food and water amongst other supplies he might need out here. The other was a metal detector. I shook my head and turned back to Everest.

  ‘So those who come out here hunting for relics are saucer ghouls,’ I said. ‘What does that make you, Dale? I see your detector over there.’

  The old man glared back at me but said nothing at first. Moments later, his temper appeared to get the better of him. ‘It ain’t the same thing at all. Those… parasites are only here to find something they can make money out of.’

  ‘And what are you looking for?’

  ‘Same thing, different reason. I want proof. I want something I can put in the museum and stick it to all those know-it-alls who say people like me are messed up in the head.’

  The way he said it sounded genuine. Maybe I’d misjudged him.

  ‘Okay, you made your point. Just seems a little odd you coming out here to do that, even going so far as to fire off warning shots at strangers.’

  He jerked his head, indicating the sloping path behind him. ‘Take a look at what’s over that ridge,’ he said. He hissed through his teeth as Terry completed his work.

  I moved past them both and made the short climb. It was tough going, and once again I had to admire Everest’s energy and determination. As I stared down over the hill I saw for the first time a group of buildings. There were four mobile home type cabins, two of them joined together to form a double-wide. Behind them stood a line of portable toilets. Sitting around them were several vehicles and what looked like a tall oil well derrick. No people that I could see, but whatever the place was it looked to be in its infancy.

  ‘Frackers,’ Everest explained once I had scuttled back down the hillside. He was wincing badly, and had lost some colour from his face. ‘This land ought to have been secured for the people as a monument to our history, and instead they sold it off to a bunch of frackers who only want to raid it and destroy it. Next thing you know we’ll all have flames blasting out of our faucets, and poison in our drinking water.’

  ‘Looks like they’re doing their best to hide the fact, too.’

  ‘Yeah. But I been filming them. They ain’t started fracking yet, and if I get my way they won’t ever get the chance to.’

  Now the tearing down of anything remotely connected to the crash site made sense, as did the new technology at the side of the highway. Not the manufacturing and dispersal of drugs, as I had suspected, but greed in another form. A more legal one, albeit strongly opposed. I could not see how any of it had anything to do with Vern, though.

  Meanwhile, Terry had finished administering his medical expertise and declared his patient good to go. ‘That’ll hold you for a while, Dale. The shell took a chunk out of you, but left nothing of itself behind as far as I can tell. Still, you’ve got yourself a large and ugly wound there, and you’re going to need it checking out by a doctor. You’ll need stitches and antibiotics to prevent the spread of infection.’

  The old man cursed and threw his hands in the air. ‘How in the hell am I going to get myself to hospital? I’m shot, damnit!’

  Terry looked up at me. ‘I guess we could take him.’

  I did not like that idea. ‘Dale, do you have anyone we could call on your behalf? Someone who could meet you back on the highway and take you the rest of the way to hospital?’

  Everest raked his nails down one side of his cheek. ‘I’m not sure. You shot me, why can’t you take me?’

  ‘See, the thing is, Dale, you’re going to have to explain that you got shot and then the police will be called in. As I understand it, that’s mandatory here. Now, given you fired first and ours were in retaliation, I think we’d be okay on that score. The problem for us is that we’re not exactly supposed to have these weapons. So if we take you in, it creates a big problem for us. One we’d rather avoid if at all possible. Especially as you created the situation in the first place.’

  ‘I guess there may be someone. In fact, it could work out quite well if the person I’m thinking of is available. You boys are gonna have to help me back out to where we can pick up a phone signal, though.’

  ‘That we can do,’ Terry told him, still on his haunches by the side of the old man. He patted one of his wiry arms. ‘We’ll get you back to our Jeep, drive you to the highway and then we’ll find ourselves a signal. By the way, how did you get out here?’

  ‘Truck,’ Everest said. ‘I parked it back a ways, on the other side of the valley there. Must’ve taken a different route in to you two boys.’

  ‘Okay. I guess it’ll be safe enough out here until you can get it back. Let’s get this show on the road. Now, me and my friend here are going to get our things together, hook our backpacks on, then we’re going to create a kind of human hammock with our hands and arms for you to sit in while we trace our way back to our vehicle. It’s going to be slow going, Dale. Bumpy, too. I’m sorry to say, but it’ll also be painful for you. We’ll make sure we have plenty of rest and water breaks along the way. You up to that?’

  The old man gave a twisted smile. ‘Well, I’m more up to that than I am being left out here to die, so let’s do it.’

  I met my friend’s gaze as he stood up straight. ‘What did we get ourselves into this time?’ I said, allowing myself a chuckle and a weary shake of the head.

  His sardonic smile was all the reply I needed.

  14

  I wasn’t keen on going back to Roswell, but the woman who drove out to collect Dale Everest convinced us that if we were looking for UFO aficionados, there was no better place
in the entire world. Not even the Extraterrestrial Highway up in Nevada out near Area 51.

  Sixty-year-old Delta Vigo was as lean and spry as a woman half her age. When I first saw her jump out of her truck I thought Everest had to have been wrong when he told us all about the woman and her father. But when she moved up close I could see all six decades in her eyes, though she moved with a fluidity and grace that belied at least three of them. I smiled when I noticed a bumper sticker on the truck that had on it an image of a cartoon figure holding a metal detector standing above the words ‘I’d rather be dirt fishing’. I hoped she was in it for the same reason Everest was. There were also several eco-type stickers, and I assumed she felt the same way as Everest did about the fracking that would soon be going on out there.

  The way Terry and I were told the story of their friendship, Delta’s father, Jorges, was a sky watcher who added fuel to a young Dale Everest’s fiery interest in UFOs. Jorges claimed to have been eighteen when the craft crash landed on the Foster homestead in June 1947. He also claimed to have seen it hurtling down to earth and skimming like a stone across the prairie. Said it sounded like dynamite going off every time the thing hit an outcrop of rocks and blasted through them. Everest and Vigo had stayed in touch down the years in between, and Dale sounded very pleased with himself when he announced Vigo’s daughter as a life-long compadre.

  ‘What in the hell have you done this time, Dale?’ were the first words out of Vigo’s mouth. She dipped her head in greeting at me and Terry as she strode by us to where Everest was lying stretched out on a bed of dry grass. We had parked up off the highway a little, keeping ourselves out of view of any passing police vehicles.

  Vigo squatted down to check out the old man’s wound. She turned her head to look back at us. ‘Where did this old fool find another two younger fools to take up his cause?’

  I smiled at her. ‘Oh, we’re not on his side, believe me. Your friend here took a shot at us while we were minding our own business.’