Alien Hunter: Underworld (15 page)

“Flynn, don't go and get yourself killed. I don't want Eddie coming around investigating or any of that shit.”

“Eddie's jurisdiction stops at the Menard city limit.”

“Well that Ranger friend of his.”

“Carter?”

“He'll be sniffin' my behind again, sure as the world. I don't like him around here.”

“Get in the house, Mac. You aren't even carrying a weapon.”

Mac strode out of the barn. He was angry as hell, Flynn could see that. He resented this additional trouble heading his way.

A low voice came, hardly more than a whisper. “Why are you doing this?”

Flynn's gun was in his hand, and he was turned fully around in an instant.

“You're on the side of your own enemy. Don't you get that?” The voice was behind him again, low and full of power, a soldier's voice. “Why do you think you're so fast? No human is born that way. You're like us, Flynn—you're one of us.”

There was no shot now, but there would be. In the end, there was always a shot.

“They control you with a code. Do you know your code? You do not, but somewhere, your controllers do. Think back, Flynn. Where did you get all that speed? You weren't like that when you were a kid. Flynn, they did this to you. And why do you think that thing—Geri, whatever they call it—looks like Abby?”

“I don't know.”

“She's not just sprinkled with Abby's genes, Flynn, she's full of them. They stole Abby, Aeon did. We're innocent, Flynn!”

“Morris is not innocent.”

“You've been tricked. They make you see their lies as truth, our truth as lies.”

“With my code that I don't actually have?”

“They send you number sequences, Flynn. Reading them changes your mind. You're nothing but a machine, just like us.”

Flynn gave no indication of just how disturbing those words were to him.

“Say no, Flynn! No to slavery.”

The voice was about three feet away, just behind him. He could turn and fire and probably take the speaker, but how many others were back there?

“We were waiting for you here because we knew this was where you'd come. Because we think like you do, and you think like us. In the end, Flynn, they will not stop with you. In the end, your whole species will be the slave of Aeon, and all because you made the wrong choice. It's that big and that personal, Flynn.”

He turned and fired, and the horses screamed and a hole appeared in the wall of the barn, but no alien lay dead before him.

“Flynn!
Flynn!
”

It was Geri, running across the corral, her hair flying in the moonlight.

He went down the ladder, and she threw herself into his arms. Her body was warm and fit just like Abby's had fit, and her hair smelled of corn silk just as Abby's had, and he bent his face into that scent, and hated himself for it.

The voice had been right about one thing, which was that his shooting practice had succeeded far beyond his expectations. Not only that, but he was also, in every respect, faster than he had ever been. If he really looked at himself, he was not even close to the man he had been just a couple years ago.

It really could be that this had been done to him.

But that was not the larger question here. The larger question was, how did whoever had been talking to him know all those secret details about his life?

Was he really alone in his own mind? How could he know? He could not.

He returned to the house with Geri, and what was left of the night passed uneventfully. The dogs were quiet, Snow Mountain roamed on his own, the horses slept in their stalls. Before dawn, the moon set. Later, the eastern sky began to spread with a sharp, pure orange, a low line of light on the distant horizon.

Toward dawn, Flynn had gone to sleep in one of Mac's luxurious guest bedrooms, a half sleep, as he never went deep, not anymore. He was brought back to full consciousness by cries of rage so extreme that they were almost inhuman.

He jumped up, barely aware that Geri had been sleeping at his side, and ran out into a shining wash of dew.

Mac came toward him, coming up from the kennel. In his arms was the slumped form of a dog, not a mark on it, but as dead as an autumn leaf. Mac's face was covered with tears, his eyes sheened with the wet of shock.

“My dogs!” he shouted. “They killed my goddamn dogs!” He glared at Flynn, his eyes sparking.

“I'm sorry.”

“Talk about bad news! You're worse than cancer, you are.”

“I know it.”

He dropped the dog at Flynn's feet. Flynn looked down at the dead face, the sleek black head, the lips pulled away from the teeth as if the creature had known what was coming. The eyes were blue. They were human eyes. He thought, perhaps, that they had once been the eyes of a child.

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

FLYNN HAD
insisted that Diana and Geri move to the basement. Lupe and her husband, Carlos, were not thought to be under threat, so they were sent into Marathon and told to stay at a hotel. Flynn and Mac rode in one of his old pickups, looking over possible sight lines. If the disk showed up, now that he knew what to hit, Mac was going to take a shot.

As they moved about in the truck, looking for a good lie, Flynn thought long and hard about what had been said to him.

“Do you notice anything different about me, Mac?”

“Better shot.”

“I mean, in my personality?”

“Do you have one? I hadn't noticed.”

“Sour grapes, thank you. I'm just—I don't know. I think that I'm faster than it's possible to be. I'm not normal anymore, Mac. I'm no longer interested in even trying to capture aliens. All I want to do is kill.”

“You think you've been messed with?”

“Possibly.”

“You bring this up with Her Grace?”

“She wouldn't let you go down on her, I gather.”

“Nope, I'm still being punished for Cissy. She was a teenager, Diana keeps reminding me. She won't let it go.”

“Cissy didn't look like any eighteen-year-old I ever saw.”

“You tell Di that. Pisses her off more.”

“Brother, I carry a cyanide capsule. If I decide that I've been turned into some kind of machine—a battle robot or whatever, I'll bite down on it.”

“If I was you, I'd throw it out.”

“I already did.”

“Such a drama queen. I never will figure out why Abby married you.”

Abby was there between them, always. They were still brothers, though, and Eddie, too. “I think maybe I know where I was changed. I have no memory of being at that particular facility, but games can be played with memory. I think somebody has been communicating with me via a number code, the same somebody who did whatever they did to enhance my physicals. Calling me to come in.”

“You a robot now, too? A fighter robot fighting other fighter robots? Sounds like the makings of a million-dollar video game.”

“Not funny.”

“Go get whoever these jokers are who're trashin' your style, and beat the shit out of them till they clue you in on whatever the hell's up between them and you. That's what I'd do.”

They were about two miles out, at the end of a long rise, close to one of the radar units. The ranch compound swam in the light.

“Okay,” Mac said, “if it came over the house now, I could get a shot into it.”

“We're too far away.”

“Nope. I could take the shot.”

They drove on, heading back toward the compound. Mac thought of the aliens as being confined to the night, and that was indeed when they were most active, but Flynn knew better. Flynn watched the skies, searching the blue glare for any sign of a metallic flash.

“You don't need to have this fight, you know.”

“They want it, Mac. They've chosen ground.”

“Would be my damn place, Mr. Rich Boy. What about that house of yours?”

“They don't like towns.”

“Then let's go to town. We'll hole up in your place.”

“How long?”

“Aw, shit, I don't know how long. As long as it takes.”

“There's sixty miles of road between here and the interstate. If we try to leave, we will meet them somewhere on that journey.”

“In broad daylight?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Anything else I need to know but don't?” His tone was bitter.

“Probably a lot I don't know, either.”

They arrived back at the compound.

“Jesus,” Mac said.

Flynn got out of the truck. “Diana! Geri!”

They stood on the screen porch that shaded the family room of the old house. “Want some lemonade? We made some.”

Flynn went in, followed by Mac.

“You're supposed to be downstairs,” Flynn said.

“And you're supposed to be doing what? Certainly not riding around totally exposed in a pickup truck, because that does not compute, Flynn. What in hell were you doing?”

“Looking for good lies, so Mac will get a shot if they show up over the cabin.”

“That is a classic example of little-boy planning. Where are you going to sit, in a tree fort?”

“Yes.”

Geri came into the room. She was wearing a long pink cocktail dress. The silk caressed her, flowing over her like cream.

“Where in the world did that come from?” Flynn asked.

“The bedroom closet. It's well equipped with clothing, it seems.”

“Cissy Greene's stuff,” Mac said. “There's also a box of hand grenades back in there somewhere, if anybody wants to carry one.”

“Hand grenades won't help.”

“If you're about to get captured, they sure as hell will. Boom. Done.”

“I like my lemonade,” Diana said as she poured herself another glass.

She left the room and came back with her iPad. “Your Wi-Fi working?”

“I think so.”

“Still the direct satellite uplink?”

“Yeah, given that the nearest cable box is over in Marathon or up in Menard.”

“Uplink's pretty insecure, but I'll see if our network will let me on.”

There came another voice, soft and low, right in Flynn's ear: “We're here, Flynn, inside and out. Come with us or we'll kill you along with the others.”

A blaze of agony pierced his right calf muscle. He, who was practically impervious to pain, had to choke back a scream.

“Hey, man, are you okay?” Mac asked.

The voice came again, more confident now, sounding just as if somebody were speaking to him through an earbud. “Did that convince you? Because we can do much more.”

Flynn could see, in the corner of the kitchen by the refrigerator, a slight shimmer in the air, as if heat were rising from a point about four feet above the floor. Whether they used hypnosis or some sort of technology, the aliens could make themselves very hard to see.

Now he felt movement between his shirt and jacket, so stealthy that it seemed no more than a breeze.

Before the invisible alien whose hand was slipping toward the butt of his gun could so much as touch it, he drew it, turned, and fired. In apparent slow motion, Geri's eyes widened. He watched her face distort and saw her lips opening as she began to scream. Mac and Diana were much slower, and were just beginning to react, their brows knitting.

The alien flew backwards across the kitchen and splattered against the wall, bringing down a cabinet full of crockery. But before that happened, Flynn had fired again, this time toward another of the shimmers.

The bullet smashed into the wall. No contact.

“Get down!” he shouted.

The three of them seemed to move like snails, slowly drifting toward the floor.

An alien leaped onto his back. Shrieking like a banshee, it wrapped him in its steel arms. He felt the fire of a claw slicing toward his carotid. He got his gun behind him and in front of the alien's body, and fired in the only direction he could, which was almost straight up.

The alien flew into the ceiling, where it exploded into pieces, then came down in a shower of cork tiles and purple blood.

In two great strides, Flynn was in the living room, but saw nothing.

Returning to the kitchen, he found chaos still developing. Geri was on the floor, covered with debris from above, Diana was hunched over her iPad, trying to protect it, and Mac had grabbed a knife and thrown it so hard into an interior wall that it was embedded up to its handle. In other words, he'd missed.

With little more than a grunt, Flynn went outside. Dew still sparkled on the trees. Dew, or as it was known around here, West Texas rain.

He searched the area of the compound visible to him, the electronics shack, the barn, the washhouse, and the smokehouse. He saw nothing. The sky was also empty, but with something that could go forty thousand miles an hour, that meant little.

He circled the house, staying close under the eaves, looking for anything that might lead him to more aliens. As he was coming back around to the kitchen, passing under one of the spreading live oaks, he heard a door close. It was soft but clear enough to make him certain that it had not come from the house.

The electronics shack.

He sprinted over to it, but all seemed quiet. He watched a couple of buzzards wheeling. When he'd been working toward his private pilot's license, his dad advised him, “Watch the buzzard. The buzzard knows the sky.”

“Nothin' up there,” Mac said.

“Buzzards everywhere except overhead.”

“The disk can be invisible? I've worried about that.”

“They can hide it in clouds. They can use camouflage that reflects the sky behind them. But there will always be flashes from its surface. They may be small, but they will be there. In other words, your kind of thing, with your eyes.”

“I'll need to stand off from the house. Well off. The more sky I can see, the better my chances.”

A tendril of smoke came into Flynn's field of view. When he followed it down to its source, he saw that the electronics shack was on fire. If they lost it, they lost contact with the outside world, and that must not be. He ran toward it.