‘And what did happen here, Martinez?’ Ethan asked.
‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Martinez replied.
A silence grew in the courtyard, and Ethan knew that Martinez was not about to divulge anything without first knowing to whom and why.
‘The truth is we’re not entirely sure yet why we’re here,’ Ethan said finally. ‘We have a handful of threads of information that don’t seem to tie up, but are all related to what happened here in 1996. We were hoping that talking to you might give us some insight into what’s going on.’
‘What other threads are you talking about?’ Martinez asked, now genuinely interested.
‘A missing paleontologist from Montana who found dinosaur remains that apparently scared the life out of him,’ Lopez said.
‘And media reports of a new mass extinction taking place all around us even now,’ Ethan added. ‘Something links all of these things and we think that you might know what it is, even if you’re not aware of it yourself. We just need you to tell us what happened here.’
Martinez seemed momentarily distracted, as though he were suddenly considering something that he had never thought of before. His eyes seemed haunted as he looked at Ethan.
‘I saw it,’ he said finally, his voice almost a whisper. ‘I saw it while it was still alive.’
‘You saw the creature that the three girls saw that night?’ Lopez asked.
Martinez nodded, one hand on his coffee cup as though for an anchor to reality as he spoke.
‘I was working with the military police,’ he said, ‘ranked a corporal at the time. We were called to an incident just on the edge of town that was said to be an aircraft crash of some kind. We’d expected to see the fire services or other emergency vehicles on the way too, but there was nothing, nothing at all. It was just us and a handful of military police trucks.’
‘The aircraft crash was a cover, then,’ Ethan said.
Martinez nodded. ‘We never saw anything like that, which is why that damned water tower is such a ridiculous construction: there were no craft, other than a local farmer who reported lights over his land the same night, which I did not see.’
‘But you did see the creature,’ Lopez pressed.
‘We drove into the scene,’ Martinez went on, ‘and as my men began interviewing the witnesses I followed their directions in the hope of capturing whoever had scared the girls. They were wound up pretty tightly, crying mostly as though they’d seen a ghost or something. I wasn’t too worried, but I thought that maybe some drunk had dressed up in a suit and was scaring locals, or similar. Then I smelled it.’
‘Smelled what?’ Ethan asked.
‘Ammonia,’ Martinez replied, ‘so much of it that my eyes watered and I could hardly breathe. It was as though a hundred drunks had urinated all over the sidewalk right there, but I could see no evidence of anybody else having been there. I drew my pistol at that point and managed to keep moving. The smell got even worse, and then it appeared and ran away from me. I only saw it for a few seconds, but in God’s name I swear to you I’ll never forget a moment of it in my life.’
‘What did it look like?’ Ethan asked, trying to remain calm even though his own curiosity was heightened now.
‘Like the devil,’ Martinez said, ‘just like the girls had claimed. ‘It’s eyes were wide and blood red and it ran in a low crouch, as though it were ducking under a bridge that wasn’t there. Its arms were long, three fingered, and it had only a tiny mouth like a slit. Its skin was gray, dirty, and it had no hair or ears that I could see.’
Lopez leaned forward on the table.
‘Any chance that it was a child in a suit or something?’
‘No,’ Martinez shook his head vigorously, staring at the tabletop as he replied but his mind clearly back in that alley decades before. ‘The physiology was all wrong, the limbs too long, the head too large, the feet the wrong shape. It wasn’t proportioned like a child, and the smell, oh God the smell. You couldn’t have got close to it without breathing apparatus, it was that awful. I practically was physically ill when it appeared.’
Ethan glanced at Lopez. ‘Maybe some kind of defense mechanism?’
‘Like an octopus squirting ink, or a skunk,’ Lopez agreed, then turned to Martinez. ‘What happened next?’
Martinez sighed, looked over his shoulder as though he was being watched.
‘That was when the dying began.’
***
XXXIV
‘The dying?’ Lopez echoed.
Martinez nodded, clearly still disturbed by what had happened all those years ago.
‘You have to understand that much of what I’m about to tell you was suppressed by the military and doesn’t appear on any official documents in the media or the government. Most of it remains only in the memories of those of us who were there that day.’
‘Tell us,’ Ethan urged him. ‘It might help us uncover what’s been going on out here, and if everything else we’ve heard is true it might help prevent some kind of major extinction event.’
Martinez nodded, aware now that his knowledge affected more than just his own life but those of countless billions of people around the world who had likely never even heard of what had happened in this tiny coffee town deep inside Brazil.
‘The key investigator who operated outside the military and was here within days of the events was a lawyer named Ubirajara Rodrigues. I spoke to him on numerous occasions after the event until I was ordered to remain silent by my superiors.’
‘They actively muzzled you over this?’ Lopez asked.
‘Yes, they silenced us all and made it very clear what would happen if we attempted to speak to anybody about the events, which is why I’m so concerned now about speaking openly about this and why I asked you to come here, where observation would be difficult.’ Martinez took a breath and went on. ‘The basic story that you have already likely heard is true enough: three young girls taking a short cut through a vacant lot on the afternoon of January 20th, 1996, came across a bipedal, humanoid creature that scared them so much they ran almost a mile away without stopping. What you don’t hear is that military police had already captured one of these creatures that morning in woods just three blocks away from where the girls had their encounter.’
‘There were more of them,’ Ethan said.
‘Yes, that’s why the military police were so quick to deploy for the rest of the sightings.’
‘How many were there?’ Lopez asked.
‘I’m not sure,’ Martinez admitted, ‘but the sighting in the woods was followed by gunshots, as witnessed by a man who was jogging in the area. He reported seeing soldiers march out of those same woods later with two body bags, one of which was moving about while the other was still. A third creature was reportedly captured that evening in the same area, but I don’t have a reliable source to verify that information. What’s interesting is that the following April, a similar creature was spotted near the local zoo, and in May a motorist spotted another creature on a highway to the east of town, while a possible seventh sighting was reported in Passos, a city to the north of here.’
‘Okay,’ Lopez said, ‘so we have multiple sightings but that doesn’t mean there were seven of these things running around the town, and you’ve heard of mass hysteria, right?’
‘Of course,’ Martinez snorted, ‘but the details of this case are what make it so different, because most of the initial reports came in independently of each other. Most of the incidents occurred in woods between the Jardim Andere and Santana districts, just east of downtown Varginha. Only a single street bisects those woods, east to west.’
‘So what marks this out as special?’ Ethan asked.
‘Because prior to everything that I’ve just told you, NORAD had tracked a UFO in the skies over Minas Gerais on January 13th and had notified the Brazilian authorities, who in turn notified the army base at Tres Coracoes, east of town. That morning, an ultralight pilot named Carlos Souza was driving north toward Belo Hor
izonte, about ten miles south of town, when he heard a strange noise. He figured there was something up with his truck and stopped, got out, and saw a cigar–shaped craft hovering to the left of the highway. He reported windows in the craft, a hole at the front and what appeared to be damage, a sort of crack, down the side from which vapor was coming out.’
‘Holy crap,’ Lopez uttered, and then blushed before the priest. ‘That’s a technical term we sometimes use.’
Martinez went on.
‘Souza followed the craft in his truck, until it went into a steep dive and disappeared into the woods. He continued to search for it and eventually found the wreckage, which was already being watched over by forty or so soldiers, with trucks, a helicopter, ambulance and several other vehicles.’
‘So NORAD actually works with foreign military to capture these things when they land?’ Ethan said.
‘That’s right,’ Martinez said, ‘and that in itself is one of the most perplexing facts about this case. When it comes to UFOs being sighted, politics apparently goes out of the window. It doesn’t matter whether the country you’re contacting is friend or foe: they get notified, immediately.’
‘What happened to Souza, and how can you know his testimony was true?’ Lopez asked.
‘Souza was spotted by the troops and hounded out of the site. He fled the area and stopped at a local restaurant to gather his thoughts. Before long, two men in civilian clothes but with military bearing and haircuts confronted him, told him a great deal of personal information about him, and warned him not to talk about what he’d seen.’
‘And he just decided not to talk to anybody?’ Lopez asked.
‘You have to understand that Brazil had spent twenty years under a military dictatorship that had only ended a few years before this event occurred. Most people were genuinely frightened when warned by military figures to stay quiet, and Souza himself had seen family members “disappeared” during the dictatorship. He stayed quiet for many months until he saw an article in a magazine about the Varginha event and realized that the cat was out of the bag and he could speak about what happened.’
‘And the couple on the farm who witnessed a UFO, you think that was the same object?’
‘Yes,’ Martinez agreed, ‘most likely, as their description matches precisely that given by Souza. Investigations at the time by local reporters unveiled a lot of military activity in the Tres Coracoes–Varginha area at the time, centred on the woods where the creatures were supposedly found and captured.’
‘What about other witnesses?’ Lopez asked. ‘Are there any reports of people seeing what happened who may also not have been able to come forward?’
‘Many,’ Martinez confirmed. ‘The original spotting of a strange creature came not from the three girls but reports that a wild animal had been spotted near the Jardim Andere district. Here in Brazil, all firemen are members of the military police and one of their responsibilities is the recovery of wild animals. Four of them were despatched to the scene of the sighting and found a man, woman and three young boys standing by a steep bank leading into the woods. They described the creature in great detail, and that the boys had been throwing stones at it to try to get it to move until the woman stopped them.’
‘And the firemen reported this, word for word?’ Ethan asked.
‘All of it,’ Martinez confirmed, ‘and it was all out in the open before the military could really begin to cover it up. The firemen followed the creature, and it took them two hours to finally corner and capture it, a task made extremely difficult due to the hilly terrain, dense foliage and the creature’s attempts to escape. Not to mention the stench of it.’
‘Ammonia?’ Lopez guessed.
‘It was terrible,’ Martinez confirmed.
‘You saw it again, with the firemen?’
‘Yes,’ Martinez confirmed. ‘Once we had captured the creature I radioed my commander and asked him to join us because, frankly, we were terrified of what we had found and didn’t know what to do with it.’
‘And what did you do with it?’ Lopez asked.
‘My commander arrived, and with him were a sergeant and two officers in an army truck. The creature was handed over, they left and we were told in the strictest terms never to speak of what had happened again.’ Martinez sighed. ‘The remaining sightings all followed ours, with several creatures being captured or killed during the course of the day and the following night.’
Ethan leaned forward on the table, his coffee forgotten.
‘You said something about people dying?’
Martinez nodded, haunted again now.
‘At around 6 p.m, after our encounters with the creature, the town was hit by a violent hailstorm, bad enough that it broke windows and windscreens and caused considerable damage to local buildings. During the storm, a military policemen spotted yet another creature in the Santana–Jardim Andere area near the woods. I was there when one of them was attacked by the creature as it attempted to flee. He died a month later.’
‘Marco Eli Chereze,’ Ethan said, and Martinez nodded. ‘He was infected with something.’
‘The autopsy reports were never revealed,’ Martinez explained, ‘and the military altered official documents to make it appear that Marco had never been on duty that night, even though I myself knew that he had been. But his story was not the only one where the government attempted to cover up what really happened here. One night in the May of that year, four men dressed in dark suits knocked on the door of the Silva home, that of the original three girls who had reported the strange creature in the vacant lot. The men made their way into the house and insisted on talking to the two sisters. The men never identified themselves but spent over an hour trying to persuade the girls to change their story and even implied they would be paid if they made their denials publicly on television. Afraid to object, the girl’s mother said they would think it over. The men left but told them not to follow them to try to see what kind of car they were driving.’
Ethan thought for a moment. ‘The girls never recanted their story.’
‘No,’ Martinez said with some pride, ‘they remained firm to their story and have done so ever since. Because of the publicity around their sighting, which was the only one that actually made the press, it would have been tough for the government to threaten them or carry out that threat as it would have leant further credence to the girls’ story.’
Lopez glanced at Martinez’ collar.
‘And you?’ she asked. ‘You left the military and joined the church?’
Martinez nodded.
‘I thought that an experience like that might have taken you away from religion,’ Ethan said.
‘I believe that we are all God’s creatures,’ Martinez said, ‘regardless of which planet we came from. Ultimately, it is up to each of us to make our choices over what we should or should not believe, but the one thing I lost all faith in was my government, the military. They lied, Mister Warner, repeatedly, and threatened those who did not comply. I have no idea whether they ever carried out those threats, but it would not surprise me to find out that they had.’
Ethan sat for a moment in deep thought.
‘We’re here in part to investigate recent sightings of more of those creatures. Do you think that they’re back?’
Martinez shook his head.
‘No, Mister Warner, I do not think that they have returned. I think that our government used the creatures that they captured to do experiments, and that Marco Eli Chereze was merely the first victim of those experiments.’
‘You said he was attacked,’ Lopez pointed out, ‘not experimented on.’
‘He was,’ Martinez confirmed. ‘And he died within a month from little more than a scratch. Something in that creature was toxic to us, to humans, perhaps to all life, and something as potent as that would be a powerful weapon in the wrong hands.’ Martinez leaned forward on the table, his voice lowering to almost a whisper. ‘There is an island, off the coast, where nobody goes
. It is said that only death resides there. Fishermen avoid it, and have reported seas filled with the corpses of millions of sea creatures and birds that fall out of the sky, stone dead.’
‘Ilhabela,’ Lopez said. ‘Birds falling dead out of the sky, bee colonies decimated, amphibian decline, it all matches up.’
‘You said that there are creatures being seen again, that they’re being experimented on,’ Ethan said. ‘How come they’re being seen here?’
Martinez continued to whisper as though his life depended on it.
‘They’re escaping from that island,’ he replied. ‘Some of them make it to the shore here and disappear into the forests. The problem is that the forests are constantly being cleared, and the number of places for the creatures to hide are getting smaller. It’s only a matter of time before whatever disease it is that they’re carrying takes a hold in the population here, and from there…’
Ethan nodded as he realized what Martinez truly feared.
‘Extinction level event,’ he said.
Martinez touched his finger to his forehead and then both of his shoulders. ‘If God wills it.’
Ethan sat back in his chair and glanced to the east, where he knew the endless shores of the Atlantic Ocean stretched into infinity to the north and south.
‘This island,’ he said, ‘is there a way we can get to it?’
***
XXXV
‘Oh, not again.’
The coast of Brazil was every bit as beautiful as Lopez had expected, and Ethan could see in her eyes that she was delighted to be working in South America. What she didn’t like was the battered looking aircraft sitting on the water before them, its white fuselage shining brightly in the sunlight in a way that helped to hide all the dents and scratches.
‘You’d better have a damned good reason for draggin’ me all the way down here, Warner! There were babes all along the beachfront in Antigua!’
Arnie Hackett’s grizzled head popped out of an observation bubble, one of two that flanked the PBY Catalina’s hull. The amphibious aircraft was like a gigantic version of the Icon A5 that Ethan had unfortunately destroyed back in Madagascar, a World War Two vintage airframe powered by two huge engines mounted atop her broad, straight wings.
The Extinction Code Page 23
