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Page 7.
 Mack awoke minutes later, lying on his back on soft damp soil, with pain around his right eye, as if the blow had splintered the bony edges of the orbit. His nose had been mashed painfully, and someone had laid a thick, absorbent cloth smelling of disinfectant over his face.
He sputtered and sat up. He held the cloth to his wet nose and uttered a groan of protest. Holding his fingers up, he saw dark liquid on the tips—his nose blood.
"Don't get any ideas," said a powerful looking man with short dark hair, wearing a flight suit but no helmet. "Don't try to get up or I may have to shoot you."
Mack detected an indefinable accent. He heard two or three persons arguing, one of them female. From the frantic tone, he guessed they wouldn't have time for niceties, and might just save time by plugging him with a quick bullet or two—or whatever flew out of those complex, spidery black weapons two of them carried with an upraised arm.
He rolled over onto his side and dabbed his nose. He caught a glimpse of the hovering craft. Several bodies had been dragged onto the river bank, each with large dark spots that smelled like charred flesh and might be partly blood. The half-torso still hung out of the wrecked craft.
"We kill him—here—now." The man's voice radiated at Mack from behind, as if he were looking at Mack while saying it.
"I have data on him. We need him," said a female voice. He looked over his shoulder. The woman dangled her helmet in one hand and the data tablet in the other.
"We have to take him with us," said a second man. "Naria is right."
They put their heads together and mumbled excitedly. At one point, Mack thought he heard one say Carly. Couldn't be. His dear, sweet wife, a public school nurse—what could she possibly have to do with this nightmare? He must have heard wrong. He felt a surge of adrenalin, a desperate urgency to get home to his wife.
He tossed the towel aside, sprang to his feet, and sprinted down the road.
He was going uphill at a slight grade, and left the fog behind.
As he rose above the little river valley, and the reedy swamps on each sides in the meanders, he came into a clearing.
The desert road was bright enough to see small boulders, as well as big ruts, so he was able to maintain a good running clip.
A bright light sprang up behind him, illumining the area.
He veered off the road and continued running in light trees and balls of scrub. He had been a jogger most of his life. He had good wind, and went into long-distance mode.
The ground rose and fell, and he kept up the pace. His breath sawed raggedly, and his boots pounded the ground.
The light behind him faded.
The air was cool and clear, with stars twinkling rapidly in a fast-moving Santa Ana wind high up. He hadn't caught anything on the weather news about a Santa Ana Condition, but he'd grown up in San Diego, and knew the signs. The air had an aching, disturbed sense. It was downright chilly at night. Days were sunny and hot, with bone-dry air whipping around in strong winds. He thought of Carly, and wished he could call her to warn her to lock the doors, but he'd lost his phone. He hoped she was okay. He could picture her smiling with rouged lips as she made his tuna sandwich. And he'd lost the sandwich, dammit! He wasn't hungry anymore, but he loved that sandwich because she had made it, and he loved her, and felt saddened by its loss in the inferno of the car.
What am I thinking?
He felt light-headed. His jacket was open, and his shirt was wet. He touched his nose and felt wetness—he saw dark liquid on his fingers. His nose was bleeding again. By all rights, he should stop and lie down. That was it. Lie on your back with your head tilted back. He didn't have time for that now. He had to get away from these people, whoever they were. Maybe Leo and the boss were somewhere nearby. They could call in the Border Patrol, the Navy, the Marines, the Sheriff, Tribal Police from the reservations…there was enough fire power in the area. Could he get away far enough and long enough to join up with some of them? That was the question.
Have to try. Have to try. Have to try.
He made it a mantra, reciting it silently in his head as he lifted one foot, then the other.
Down, up, left, right, down, up, left, right…
He was a machine, pumping through the dry, cold air that smelled of creosote and lavender, mesquite, all the subtle hardy aromas baked all day. Even the sand and the stone here had a warm, almost nutty smell like the inside of an oven. It was, after all, Anza-Borrego, one of the hottest deserts on earth. With that jumble of thoughts crashing around in the dryer of his thoughts, he tripped over a small agave plant and went sailing, head first, head over heels, into a small canyon.
His head luckily only rolled on sand, and he brushed innocuously against boulders that could have been fatal if he'd hit them with his head. He was in a cleft about 30 feet deep. From the shape of it, it looked like a pair of ancient sand dunes sculpted within the thirty to ninety foot-deep bays of a primordial ocean that had covered most of the U.S. Southwest. Giant sharks the size of moving vans had once swum here, devouring prey the size of a pickup truck.
Mack rose to his feet in the silence and darkness, and started charging up the other side. He was going at a good clip. He glanced back and saw only darkness. He heard nothing. This was good. He started running hard as soon as he hit the flat land above.
A ship size of a city block rose up from behind.
Its underside was steely and gleamed with a faint golden light.
It was covered with lights, windows, bays, doors, ladders, coils of cable rolled up and fastened for travel.
It had a head the size and shape of one of those long ago sharks.
The nose of the vehicle was black and had bluish-white running lights that shone ahead like headlights.
He was framed in a mess of fine, darting beams of light.
The ship made a sighing, hissing sound, like someone breathing. It gurgled faintly, like someone breathing underwater. Its engines had a deep, shuddering quality, almost silent, but Mack could feel the power in them. He fell and rolled over onto his back. He put his hands up defensively as the bright lights closed in on him. He felt the ship's throbbing in the ground all around him. He remembered a description an old-timer had once given in a TV interview in black and white, of seeing the Zeppelin Hindenburg fly overhead in the 1930s. Her engines made this slow, throbbing sound:
wobb… wobb… wobb… wobb…
He glimpsed eight or ten nacelles making a similar pulsing noise. As the ship descended over him like a manta ray, a twin hatch opened up and darkness closed over him.
He curled into a ball and yelled a defiant curse as the doorway descended over him like a giant mouth.
The ship's lights were like eyes, its nose like a shark's. They had him.
He smelled something that must be an anaesthetic gas, a faintly nauseous mix of lime and melon aromas—and he went blank.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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