Rescue From Planet Pleasure

by Mario Acevedo

  I fished a tube of sunscreen from my jacket pocket and smeared the soothing lotion on my skin. I passed the tube to Coyote who gooped the sunscreen on and then tossed it to Jolie. She slathered her face, neck, both hands, and tossed the empty tube aside.

  I asked Coyote, “How did you know about this place?”

  “Me and a girl used to sneak down here for, you know, some hootchie-cootchie,” he answered.

  “Rainelle?” Jolie asked.

  “No. Some ruca who worked at Los Alamos. On the bomb. You know.” Coyote made the sound of an explosion.

  “You dated a nuclear scientist?” Jolie pressed.

  “Don’t act surprised,” Coyote replied in an insulted tone. “Brainy chicas dig me.” His voice deepened. “According to the Pythagorean theorem, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides.” His voice returned to normal. “Not sure what that means, ese, I was never good at geomagraphy. Besides, she is long gone. Muchos años.”

  We remained quiet, bunched together like dogs in a cage.

  Jolie broke the silence, “Coyote, you can teleport on your own, right?”

  “If you call it that, Símon.”

  “Then why didn’t you teleport us out of danger?”

  “Unless there’s a portal, each must access the psychic world on their own. I could’ve teleported myself but I didn’t want to leave you behind.”

  “Fair enough,” Jolie said. She scooted under the trunk lid, lay on her back, and cocked a leg. “Everyone ready?”

  “Go for it,” I replied.

  She kicked the trunk open. Sunlight dazzled us. My kundalini noir hitched from so much sudden brightness.

  Jolie crawled out, stood, and dusted herself. Coyote emerged next, then it was my turn. A momentary panic whisked over me, a worry that we might have misjudged stepping into the sunlight too soon. But the air was morning cool and fresh. We were safe.

  I climbed out of the trunk. “What about Phaedra?”

  “She’s steps ahead of us,” Jolie replied. “She knew we were here and she knew what route we’d take back from Fajada Butte. How?”

  We both looked at Coyote.

  He said, “There is much that she knows, and much that she doesn’t.” Spikes of anxiety pistoned in and out from his aura’s penumbra.

  “What’s that mean?” I asked.

  Coyote’s aura formed a doughnut-shaped halo around his head. Two red beams shot from his eyes through the hole. “Phaedra is using the psychic plane to spy on us. She knows we’re going to use the Sun Dagger against her, but she doesn’t know how.”

  “Neither do we.” I pointed at Jolie.

  “In time, vatos.” Coyote’s eye beams disappeared and the halo melted into his aura.

  “And just as worrisome,” Jolie offered, “what about your mom and Rainelle?”

  His aura started pistoning the spikes again. Jolie and I swiveled our heads as we swept our sixth sense like radar beams across the landscape. Nothing suspicious pinged back.

  Coyote slammed the trunk closed and flung handfuls of dirt over the car in a half-hearted attempt to make it look as if we hadn’t disturbed the location.

  We started up the draw and paused where the vampire heads had been. Nothing much remained, just ash piled around the bases of the stakes.

  “Did you know them?” she asked Coyote.

  “Only Natacha,” he answered. “We weren’t friends.”

  That was no surprise. She was a real ball buster from the Araneum, an icy blonde so cold she could probably chill beer in her cooter, and I couldn’t see her chumming up with Coyote.

  “She’s the one who ran me out of the Araneum.” He kicked her ashes into the surrounding dirt and continued up the draw.

  Jolie yanked the stakes from the ground and threw them into the desert, where they clattered on rocks and bounced out of sight.

  “Why the mind fuck?” she asked. “Why stake Phyllis and Natacha and show her cards? If Phaedra intends to knock us off, why not wait and catch us by surprise?”

  “She’s toying with us,” I answered. “And as far as mind fucks go, I give this one an A plus.”

  “Or maybe Phaedra is waiting,” Coyote said. “Maybe she knows about Carmen. Maybe Phaedra needs to make sure she can kill us all at one time.”

  “That’s reassuring,” Jolie replied.

  “Phaedra has weaknesses.” Coyote started walking up the draw.

  Jolie and I fell in behind him. “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like her fear of you. And Carmen. That fear will make Phaedra overplay her hand.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Coyote stopped and turned to face me, his wrinkled eyes smoldering with feral determination. “Vato, have faith. Otherwise lie in the dirt like a turd and wait to be stepped on. Jolie and I will continue. Right, chica?”

  She nodded.

  “Entonces, sigueme.” He resumed climbing up the draw.

  I felt like Coyote had placed a dunce cap on my head. Jolie and I trailed after him, the three of us hopping from rock to rock until we reached the rim of the mesa. Wisps of smoke twisted from Coyote’s home and the neighboring buildings a quarter mile away. Everything peaceful. Everything quiet. Tranquil. A jarring juxtaposition in the wake of our recent brush with the discovery of Phaedra’s gruesome souvenirs and our near escape from the murderous dawn.

  We trotted across the mesa—Jolie and I panning the seemingly infinite vista—anxious, concerned that a trap or bad news waited. Maybe Phaedra had also attacked Coyote’s mom and Rainelle.

  As we got closer to the houses, the dog began to bark. A metal rake skritched the ground. Rainelle’s Ford pickup came into view where it was parked on the north side of the doublewide.

  Jolie slowed and dropped behind to provide cover—just in case.

  Goats bleated. Chickens clucked. The dog barked. A cat meowed from behind the fence. The scene was so homey we should’ve burst out singing “Old McDonald Had a Farm.”

  Coyote’s posture wilted as if the night’s misadventures had at last caught up with him. Lines of fatigue strained Jolie’s face, and I was sure I looked just as worn out.

  The skritching stopped and Rainelle appeared from behind her home, a rake propped on her shoulder. “Welcome back.” She stopped at the fence, stared, and studied our weary faces. “You okay?”

  “Why shouldn’t I be?” Coyote answered.

  That’s the dilemma of bringing humans into the circle of the supernatural. How much do you tell them?

  She asked, “Cafe con sangre?” the question making it obvious that she was used to his evasive replies.

  Coyote rewarded her offer with a smile and added, “Have you seen La Llorona?”

  “Your mother?” Rainelle quirked an eyebrow. “She has a name, you know.”

  Coyote scoped the area around the house. “But have you seen her?”

  “She was around last night.”

  “Was El Cucuy with her?”

  “Don’t think so. Why?”

  “Todo está bien?”

  She quirked her eyebrow again. “What are you getting at?”

  “Nada. Let’s go inside. We’re hungry.”

  “Well you can stay hungry,” Rainelle replied, “until you tell me what’s going on.”

  Coyote hunched his shoulders and let them drop as he sighed. I could practically hear his thoughts: viejas, como chingan.

  “There is trouble?” she asked.

  He nodded. “I don’t want to worry you, querida.”

  “Anyone comes here for trouble,” she brandished the rake like it was a club, “I’ll break their heads.” She relaxed her stance. “Just tell me what to expect.”

  She turned to enter the doublewide from the back door. Coyote led Jolie and me through the kitchen entrance. We stowed our sunglasses and our auras were finally calming into a steady orange glow.

  Within a few minutes, Rainelle was working an espresso machine that sputtered and spewed stea
med blood into our coffee. Breakfast around the living room coffee table: omelets and fry bread, smothered in pig’s blood. Afterwards, Jolie and I cleared the table and washed dishes. Rainelle stepped out back and resumed raking the backyard.

  Jolie had stripped off her jacket and her pistols hung in their shoulder holsters within easy reach. I took her cue and tucked my Colt into the front of my jeans before I shrugged out of my jacket.

  Coyote brought a small cardboard box from the room with all the junk. He set the box on the coffee table and opened it. Nested inside crumpled newspaper was a psychotronic diviner not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes. He set the diviner on the table.

  The body of this diviner appeared to be constructed of stainless steel plates welded together. A four-sided pyramid the size of a large olive sat on top. The pyramid was made of sheets of clear quartz, and inside the pyramid stood a pink quartz crystal no bigger than a pinto bean. Coyote flicked a brass switch at one corner of the box. Nothing happened.

  He closed his eyes and raised a hand toward the diviner. The pink crystal emitted a faint glow, and the diviner beeped.

  “It’s working,” I told him.

  He relaxed his hand and opened his eyes. The glow faded. “This diviner is not very sensitive. But if Phaedra is nearby and she uses her powers, we’ll get a warning.”

  Coyote returned to the kitchen and poured himself a glass of Jameson. He sipped the whisky and studied the diviner.

  Jolie took a shower, then it was my turn. As I washed off the grime and scraped away the layers of makeup and sunscreen, my muscles turned to rubber and I looked forward to a nap. Rainelle provided clean clothes she scrounged from the extra room.

  Jolie and I slept in the living room, she on the sofa, me on the floor. Late in the afternoon, Coyote woke us. He had set a shoebox filled with papers next to the diviner on the table.

  Jolie stretched and got up. She walked into the kitchen and returned to hand out straws and 500 milliliter bags of chilled blood. I fanged a hole in a Type B Positive and inserted my straw. I parked myself next to her on the sofa.

  Coyote sorted through the shoebox and withdrew a handful of papers in assorted sizes and types that he smoothed flat on the table. Some of the pages were from motel notepads, others were torn from spiral notebooks, and others were the backs of crumpled receipts or loose sheets of copy paper. All were covered in ink scrawls and sketches. Coyote arranged the papers before him and raised his hands in a proud gesture. “There you have it.”

  I glanced from scrawl to drawing to scrawl. “Have what?”

  Coyote pointed to the confused mess with both hands. “How you’re going to bring Carmen Arellano back home from outer space.”

  ***

  Chapter Twelve

  Jolie and I studied the papers Coyote had arranged on the coffee table. I tried to decipher the writing. Most were illegible chicken scratches made with a ballpoint pen or a pencil. Plus a black Sharpie. Highlighters. Crayons! I recognized a few letters but the words could’ve been English or Spanish. And some of the writing looked Chinese or Korean or Balanese. Hebrew? Maybe ancient Mixtec. Perhaps Martian?

  The sketches were just as confounding. Lots of circles and lines and squiggles.

  Coyote watched, arms folded, nodding like he was pleased that I understood what he had planned … which I didn’t.

  Jolie hunched forward from the sofa and squinted. Her forehead wadded into confused wrinkles. “What exactly are we looking at?”

  Coyote fanned his hands. Isn’t it obvious?

  Jolie plucked a drawing of The Sun Dagger and held it up. “Let me guess.” She waved her other hand over the table. “All this explains how to use the Sun Dagger?”

  He smiled, his thin cracked lips forming an uneven crescent around his crooked, yellow teeth. “Simple, no?”

  “Which can only be used during the day?” she asked.

  “Why would you ask that?” he replied.

  Jolie reached for my knee and squeezed, though I’m sure she would’ve rather rolled her eyes and screamed in frustration.

  Coyote stroked his chin. “I see that I lost you.” His voice became very Ivy League, clenched-jaw professorial. The aura over his head formed a mortarboard complete with tassel. “Invoking the Sun Dagger takes one from place to place along the edges of the psychic plane. To do so, we need the rays of the sun, either directly or reflected.”

  I recalled last night’s moon. It shined from the sun’s reflected light. Not quite full though certainly bright enough to cast a dagger of light across the petroglyph. I said, “We’ll use the light of the moon to orient ourselves on the Sun Dagger.”

  Coyote’s mortarboard morphed into an exclamation mark. “You got it, vato. It’s transcendental astral physics.” His accent returned to barrio Chicano. “In two nights, the Sun Dagger will line up with D-Galtha.”

  “Which is what?”

  “Where you two are going.”

  Following Coyote’s reasoning was like chasing a chicken through a labyrinth. “Is that the planet where Carmen is being held prisoner?”

  Coyote rifled through the papers and picked one with a sketch of a circle with an X marked over it. He jabbed at the X. “She’s right here.”

  “D-Galtha? Is that a planet? A spaceship?”

  “It is where you’ll find Carmen.”

  Realizing this was all he would share, I pressed forward. “How do you know?”

  Coyote put the paper back on the table. “Long ago, and I mean, long, long ago, un hechicero guajiro—”

  Jolie interrupted, “A who?”

  “Medicine man. Shaman,” I translated.

  “Sí,” continued Coyote. “He was the one who gave me the name coyote, saying that if I was to survive la conquista, I had to be as clever and tricky as my animal tocayo. Said that I wouldn’t be able to get by forever on my good looks.”

  “Wise man,” quipped Jolie.

  “He taught me about the world beyond what we can see or touch. He showed me las puertas, the portals, into the psychic plane.”

  Coyote reached into the shoebox and withdrew a large folded paper. He spread it open. It was a charcoal rubbing of the Sun Dagger.

  He cleared a space on the table and laid the paper flat. He gestured to me and tapped his finger at a point on the spiral. “Felix, put your hand here. La derecha.”

  I extended my right hand.

  He grasped my wrist and tugged my arm, forcing me to get off the sofa and walk around the table to stand beside him. He said, “Spread your fingers,” and adjusted the placement of my hand on the upper left quadrant of the spiral. “You must put your mano exactly like this.” Reaching behind his ear, he produced the stubby remnant of a pencil that had been crudely whittled to a point and traced around my hand.

  Coyote made a whisking motion, indicating that I remove my hand and sit back down. He leafed through the papers until he found one with a list of numbers. He wrote along the bottom of the paper. 12:22:00.

  “This is the exact time you must put your hand on the Sun Dagger.”

  “At night, yes?”

  Coyote jotted a.m. beside the time. He frowned suddenly, looked back at the list of numbers, scratched out the number he’d written, and wrote a new time. 11:43:00 p.m.

  I stared at the number. “You sure about this?”

  He leaned back and crossed his legs and his arms. “Símon. It’s very technical. You summon the portal at the wrong time, boom, you’ll find yourself on Jupiter.”

  Jolie asked, “And you’re going to show us how to use the Sun Dagger?”

  Coyote sighed. “I’ll teach what I can. It took me years of experimenting con el guajiro just to find the doors. And many more years to open them. And still more to learn how to enter and navigate the psychic plane.”

  “Experimenting?”

  “With peyote. Much of it.” Coyote’s eyes crossed, then swiveled in opposite directions, spun a few times, and finally aimed straight. “Fortunately, it didn’t affect
me at all.”

  “Of course not,” I replied.

  Jolie asked, “What if we miss the time?”

  “Not good.” Coyote grimaced. “It’ll be another one hundred and thirteen years before it aligns again.”

  “How do you know Carmen is on D-Galtha?”

  “I was in the middle of one my beautiful peyote dreams,” Coyote turned wistful, “when I heard Carmen’s voice.”

  “You know her?”

  “No. But I heard this voice and I recognized it as hers.”

  I asked, “You recognized the voice of someone you didn’t know?”

  “Vato, when you’re tripping on peyote, anything is possible.”

  Fair enough.

  “Tonight we’ll practice with the Sun Dagger. Nothing fancy. Just a quick spin to Alpha Centauri and back. Dress warm.”

  “We rescue Carmen and then what? How can she stop Phaedra?”

  “Even I have to wait for that answer,” Coyote replied. “But once she is back here, then Phaedra must fight the four of us.”

  “What do you know about D-Galtha?”

  Coyote turned glum. “Only that it is a dangerous place guarded by the most dangerous aliens in the galaxy.”

  “Naturally,” noted Jolie.

  “What about Cress Tech?” I asked. “We return to Fajada Butte and shoot through the psychic plane again, won’t we trip their alarms?”

  “I’m sure of it, ese. But like I said, tonight we’ll go on a quick trip. We’ll be on and off that pinchi rock before the Cress Tech helicopters and their pendejo guards get a clue.”

  “I’d like to know how close the government is to unlocking the secrets of Fajada Butte.” My job as an enforcer for the Araneum was to protect the secrets of the supernatural world. Once humans learned how to enter the psychic plane, then it wouldn’t be long before they discovered what shouldn’t exist. Vampires. Werewolves. Ghosts. La Llorona. El Cucuy. Fairies. Then humans would do to us what they did to the dodo birds, the passenger pigeon, and most of the Native Americans.

  “Carmen first,” Coyote replied. “Then we fuck with Cress Tech.”

  He called for Rainelle. No answer. He got up and looked out back. He returned to the living room, appearing confused. “Her truck is here.” He read his Rolex. “Past eight. Time for dinner.”