Chapter Ten
Until Coyote and Jolie returned, I had nothing to do but study the view. I spotted the muted gleam of the Cress Tech towers facing the butte. The closest of the towers was at least a mile away and the sunlight reflecting off the psychotronic diviner on top made the device shine like a metal button in the dusty haze. I counted eleven towers in one arc to the west and five more in another arc to the east. The towers were placed about a half-mile apart. The two arcs could be just the start of a large circle that had yet to be filled in. By my guess a total of twenty-four towers would be needed to complete its circumference.
I mused over what Cress Tech was using the psychotronic diviners for. They detected psychic transmissions, and years ago I had used one to find Phaedra.
And these? Did they detect our teleportation through the Sun Dagger?
I thought about that as I sat in the shade and waited for Coyote and Jolie to return.
And waited. One hour. Two. Three.
Coyote and I had been gone half an hour. Where did he and Jolie go? What if they got stuck at their destination? Or were they caught in a supernatural traffic jam inside the psychic plane?
The sun dipped toward the western horizon, and a long shadow bled from the butte across Chaco Canyon.
I heard Jolie laughing. Then a snicker from Coyote. A tote bag full of clothes flew from between the stone slabs and landed beside me in the dirt. Both of them emerged from between the slabs. Jolie wore a lime-green bikini and pink flip-flops. She carried a plastic hurricane cup with a long bendy straw. Coyote still wore his same clothes and palmed a half-eaten hoagie in one hand and a tallboy of PBR in the other.
Jolie perched her sunglasses on her head. Her eyes sizzled with excitement. “That was fucking awesome.” I could smell rum on her breath.
“The hell you go?” I asked.
She showed me the side of her cup where it said: Key West.
“We go to Pacoima,” I grumbled to Coyote, “for a quick lunch. And you take Jolie for happy hour in Key West?”
Coyote replied through a mouthful of sandwich. “Vato, what can I say? She looks better than you in a bikini.”
Jolie shucked her flip-flops and pulled her jeans, t-shirt, and jacket from the tote bag. She yanked them over her bikini and sat on the ground to tie her cross trainers.
The throb of an approaching helicopter echoed toward us.
Coyote straightened and swiveled his head to locate the sound. “We can’t let them find us up here.” He pointed to the side of the butte. “Go. Go. Get off this hill.”
My thoughts zinged to the towers and their psychotronic diviners. Our jumps through the psychic world must have triggered an alarm.
With me in the lead, we dashed off the top of the butte and slid down a chute between the stone columns along its face. When we reached the bottom, we’d have to scramble for a hiding place as far from the butte as we could get.
A Blackhawk appeared, cruising below us, prowling low and slow.
I braced my arms and legs against the sides of the chute. Jolie and Coyote piled on top of me.
The helicopter landed at the edge of the butte’s rocky skirt, a hundred meters from us, blocking our escape. Armed men hopped out and fanned from the machine.
These goons were as well equipped as Navy SEALs but I couldn’t say if they were military, or special police, or contractors. But whoever they were, I was sure they either worked directly for or answered to Cress Tech International.
The Blackhawk lifted into the air and flew off. The men shouted to each other and hustled along the slope, moving past in a loose formation that told me they didn’t realize we were here.
“Back up,” I whispered. We had passed a deep groove that we could retreat into. The drumming of the helicopter blades masked the sounds of rocks crumbling from the sandstone as we inched back up. The groove was about five feet deep and ten feet high, and we packed ourselves into it. Luckily, our side of the butte was in shadow that grew darker by the minute.
Another helicopter circled above.
“Shit,” Jolie whispered. “I left my stuff up there.”
“You Coyote?” I asked. “What about the beer can?”
“I crushed it and put it in my pocket. It’s worth money.”
A whole nickel. Perhaps.
For their troubles, the helicopter crews would find a tote bag, ladies flip-flops, and a plastic hurricane cup from Key West. Let Cress Tech try to make sense about how that stuff got up there.
The Blackhawks made pass after pass as twilight gathered. Laser beams from their chin turrets traced the ground. They landed repeatedly, dropped off ground teams, circled, landed at another spot, and picked them up to repeat the procedure along the ground surrounding the butte. For all the noise and excitement, the effect was very much Keystone Cops.
Since it looked like we might be stuck here for the night, we slowed our metabolisms to conserve energy. This would also cool our bodies to near ambient temperatures and reduce the likelihood that we’d be discovered by thermal viewers. We kept our sunglasses on to hide our reflective eyes at the expense of losing our night vision and the ability to see auras.
Another two helicopters arrived and doubled the chaos. One of the men in SWAT gear wandered along the bottom of the butte in front of us. He had slung his carbine under one arm and walked like he’d lost much of his enthusiasm. He halted before us and shined a flashlight along the stone columns. I tensed. We were maybe fifty feet above him, but should he spot us, I’d dive on him, hopefully before he could cry for help.
He swept the beam left and right, up and down. He turned it off, unzipped his pants, and took a whiz that was a bit too aromatic. He gave himself a shake, zipped up and strode away.
The helicopters kept orbiting. A half dozen Humvees arrived. They scurried over the ground, rocks popped from under their tires, dirt plumed the air, headlamps and searchlights swept in flaming arcs through the fog of dust.
Cress Tech was here because we had tripped an alarm. But their haphazard response told me they had been caught unaware. Maybe they were hoping for a minor psychotronic blip and we must’ve spooked them by gonging the alarm big time. I didn’t know what they expected to find—not us, for sure—and with typical macho thinking, they had dispatched lots of guns to greet the supernatural. Foolish humans.
The hours passed with glacial slowness, and we remained as motionless as the rock. Jerusalem crickets and beetles inched up our sleeves and pants, over our faces, and into our ears and nostrils. No need to flinch or scratch. We vampires spend a lot of time in crypts and are used to creepy-crawlies.
Finally, when the night was inky black and cool, the helicopters landed, the men climbed in and flew away. The Humvees drove off in a long dust cloud, a carnival parade of flashing lights and sweeping headlamps.
We waited and listened for stay-behinds. I piqued my ears for the scritch of Velcro, the creak of a boot on the ground, the metallic click from a gun. No sound except for the flapping of owl wings. I willed life back into my limbs, and we untangled ourselves. I beat the bugs from my clothes. Jolie snorted a centipede out her nose. Coyote munched on something.
We removed our sunglasses and panned the area for suspicious auras. Nothing but desert critters trying to make their living.
My watch read 4:40 AM.
“What now?” Jolie asked. Our side of the butte faced east, and if we lingered here, the morning light would fry us like chorizo.
“Home.” Coyote slithered over me, slid down the chute and let himself fall. He hit the ground running.
Jolie and I dropped after him. We sprinted over the rough slope and headed west. Using the cover of gloom, we weren’t worried about getting noticed as we ran fast as antelopes. If someone did spot us, then we’d be another one of those strange desert phenomena that New Mexico is famous for.
Coyote chose a path over the lowest ground between the two closest towers. Our auras glowed like paper lanterns. But if the psychotronic diviners did spot us, we’d be long gone before Deputy Dawg arrived.
Coyote scrambled over the edge of Chaco Wash, followed by Jolie, then me at her heels. He jumped from outcropping to rock and landed on the sandy bottom. Jolie and I followed him across the wash to a wall of eroded sandstone and layers of loose dirt, and we climbed up and onto the floor of the canyon.
A faint purple band outlined the mesa to the east. I announced, “Sunrise in a few minutes.”
We were making good time, but not good enough. The deadly rays of the morning sun would burn through our sunscreen and cook us. We needed shelter to survive the dawn.
Coyote quickened our pace. We ran across the desert like our hair was on fire because in a few minutes, it might be. Along with the rest of our bodies.
A glance over my shoulder revealed that the horizon behind us had warmed from purple to a burner-plate red. A bronze light settled across the tops of the hills and mesa to our front and over the summit of Fajada Butte behind us. We had maybe thirty minutes before the dawn sun charred us into undead cinders. My kundalini noir tingled in panic.
“What exactly is your plan?” Jolie asked, her aura bristling with spikes of worry. “Where’s the road we used yesterday?”
“Too far.” Coyote pointed to a draw up the side of the mesa. “That will take us home.”
The light had warmed to yellow and crept down the terrain surrounding us.
“Don’t think we’re going to make it,” I said.
Coyote’s aura flashed waves of concern, and he veered suddenly to the right. “There’s an old car that way,” he noted. “Should give us enough shade to survive.”
“Should?” Jolie asked. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“At most,” Coyote replied, “you’ll get a sunburn.” Then he mumbled, “Maybe.”
We ran past where the draw spilled from the mesa. A rusted ’46 De Soto appeared in the creosote and sage about a hundred meters to our front. The derelict hulk looked like it had been plowed into the dirt, the front end and wheels completely buried, its rounded trunk bulging from the ground.
I said, “Doesn’t look like much protection.”
“Have faith, ese.”
I spied something to my left inside the draw—my sixth sense pinged a warning—and I slowed to determine what it was. Two round objects were planted on thick wooden shafts midway up the slope, maybe fifty meters away and directly in the path Coyote had been headed for. The morning light seeped down the slope toward the objects, but at the moment they remained in shadow.
“C’mon.” Jolie ran back to grab my arm. “We’re wasting time.”
My sixth sense now rang at full red alert, but I couldn’t believe—I didn’t want to believe—what my eyes were telling me. My feet halted in mid-stride, my shoulders locked tight, and my hands clutched into trembling hooks.
I recognized the two objects as human heads. Female human heads. Rather, female vampire heads impaled on stakes. One head was caramel brown and topped with dense frizzy hair. The other was pale with angular features and a limp mop of platinum blond tresses. Their mouths gaped open and goo dripped from the severed necks.
The brown head belonged to Phyllis, my minder from the Araneum. The other belonged to her boss, Natacha De Brancovan.
Phaedra had left her calling card.