Darkwind: Ancient Enemy 2 (26 page)

“But you don’t believe that.”

“No. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Why change their culture so drastically in such a short time? Why leave such defensible cities to build a new society in wide open spaces in the desert? Why not just go back to the older cities they had built before in Chaco canyon and other places? Most archaeologists cite weather or drought or other similar reasons, but to me they don’t seem justification enough to just run away from everything so quickly.”

“So what was your theory?”

“I didn’t really have a clear one yet, but I didn’t want to go along with the accepted theories just because everyone else was. That’s what I was looking for … some kind of proof.”

“What do you think now?” Cole asked her.

Stella was quiet for a moment. She stared out the windshield at the truck stop diner in the distance. The few patrons inside looked warm and comfortable inside at the tables, plates of food and cups of coffee in front of them. They looked safe.

“I think this … this
thing
has been around for a long time. I think it might sleep for certain periods of time and then it wakes up … maybe it sleeps for decades or even centuries. But when it wakes up, I think it feeds for a certain period of time. I think this thing has been in many places in the world, at least in this hemisphere. There may even be others like this one. It might live in a different dimension, a time and space that we can’t understand, like a fourth or fifth dimension.”

It looked like she might be losing Cole a little, but she went on. “I think at various times in history it has attacked people … maybe even whole civilizations and cities. I think it took what it wanted, maybe even wiping out whole groups of people, and then it rested again for a period of time.”

“Any chance of publishing your theory now?”

She looked at him and then burst out laughing. She knew he’d meant it as a bad joke, and it really wasn’t that funny, but she couldn’t help laughing until tears rolled out of her eyes. After the emotional rollercoaster she’d been on, her mind felt scrambled and it felt good to laugh. “I just might,” she finally answered.

Cole looked out the window again. She studied his face in the darkness. “What are your plans after … this?” she asked him.

He looked at her and sighed. “What do you mean? If we survive?”

Stella didn’t answer, but it was what she was asking.

“After the bank robbery, after Trevor paid Frank back, I had planned on us going down to Costa Rica. Get him away from bad elements. I bought a place on the beach there years ago … nothing special, but it’s paradise to me. I’ve got a friend named V.J. who owes me some big favors. He can get me some new IDs so I can get on a plane.”

It sounded like Cole had it all figured out.

“But that’s
if
we survive this,” Cole said in a low voice.

“Yeah,” she answered. “If we survive.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“Try to get some rest,” Cole told her in a low voice. He sounded sleepy. “We’ll take off in a few hours.”

Destin, Colorado

S
pecial Agent Palmer was trapped in the nightmare again.

It was the same dream he’d had before, the one where he was inside a massive warehouse full of furniture and appliances, and hallways and rooms that looked like they belonged in houses. It didn’t make any sense, yet within the dream it seemed to make perfect sense; it seemed so real … like the only reality there was.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been trapped inside that endless building but it seemed like he’d been there for such a long time now. He had worked his way up and down the same wide hallway he had walked through before, peering into the rooms set up with furniture and décor like they were showrooms. Windows that looked out onto the world let in a dull sunlight, like the light at the end of a cloudy day. He could escape out those windows, but somehow he knew he wouldn’t be able to get them open or break the glass.

Besides, he knew he had to keep moving down the hall. He needed to be somewhere …

Then he was at the metal sinks again … a massive pair of sinks situated in the middle of all of this furniture and appliances for as far as he could see.

And there, not too far away, was an office built into the middle of the furniture. The office looked even more out of place among the sea of furniture than the sinks did.

The water was running in the sink, and he was holding something soft underneath the faucet, washing it, being careful with it.

“Hey!” the man from the office yelled at him.

Palmer looked down at his hands, at the unidentifiable piece of flesh he was carefully rinsing off. He watched the dark blood drain from the soft flesh and his hands, the blood swirling down into the drain, becoming pink from the dilution of the water.

The man from the office stared at Palmer, leaning back in the same old decrepit office chair, the springs screeching in protest at the angle of the man’s posture. His eyes were wide with shock, his mouth agape, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His lips trembled and his hands gripped the armrests of his office chair, clawing at it.

“He’s coming!” the man said, his voice a shuddery whisper … yet Palmer heard him so clearly like you do in dreams.

“You have to run. You have to run right now. He’s coming for you and by God, believe me, you don’t want to see him. You don’t want to see what he really looks like.” The man’s voice rose higher and higher, becoming a yell, then a scream of panic.

Heavy footsteps thundered from the hallway.

Palmer looked away from the man in the office towards the other end of the vast room, back to the wide hallway he had walked down only moments ago (or was it hours ago now). The sun was setting now, night falling so quickly across the land out there, smothering out the daylight like a giant blanket.

A man was approaching from way down the hall, hidden in shadows. But it wasn’t a man … it was a coyote … and then a spidery thing … and then a man again … constantly changing.

A growl, and then more thudding footsteps …

He was coming!

Palmer had to run! If he didn’t run right now, that thing was going to catch him.

He turned and ran through the furniture, dodging around armchairs and loveseats and dining room table sets and end tables stacked on top of each other. He darted around a line of old refrigerators that looked like they’d been brand new in the early nineteen fifties. He bolted past armoires and dressers with mirrors attached to them.

In one of those mirrors Palmer caught a glimpse of the thing right behind him, reaching for him with a spider-like leg that was somehow changing into a tentacle dripping with slime. Each sucker on the underside of the tentacle had tiny rows of rotating sharp teeth.

Palmer woke up, stifling a scream as he sat up in bed.

For a second he couldn’t remember where he was. He had an overwhelming urge to jump out of bed and bolt for the door.

He had to run … that thing was coming.

Palmer’s heart thudded in his chest and panic squeezed his lungs. He groped in the darkness beside him, looking for the familiar end table from home where the lamp was, where he kept his gun beside him while he slept … and the bottle of vodka.

His fingers found the lamp, an unfamiliar one. It took a few moments for him to find the light switch, but then he did.

The lamp lit up the room, driving back the darkness in a second.

He was in a motel room. He was in Destin, Colorado.

It was just a nightmare. The worst one he’d ever had. It wasn’t just what he’d seen in the nightmare, but also what he’d felt … an utter hopelessness. Why run? It would just hunt him down and find him. He couldn’t outrun it forever and it would never stop chasing him.

Palmer got up and paced around the room. He only wore his underwear and a white T-shirt. The shirt was soaked with sweat even though the room was chilly because he hadn’t turned the heat down real low when he went to bed.

Everything was coming back to him now. He’d driven back to Destin to get a motel room since the only hotel in Cody’s Pass was now a crime scene. It was late as he drove back down the snowy roads that wound through the mountains between the two towns. Debbie had already booked a room for him at a place called the E-Z Rest Motel on Sixth Street. He was checked in by a bored clerk who hardly spoke to Palmer.

He’d picked up a sandwich from an all-night fast food drive-thru, wolfed the burger and fries down, and then drank a few nips from his bottle of vodka which now sat right beside his service pistol on the end table next to the bed. The lid was on the bottle of vodka, but he was still glad he hadn’t knocked it over while fumbling for the switch on the lamp.

His heartbeat and breathing were finally back to normal. He grabbed the remote control for the TV and pressed the power button. He found a news channel and left it there with the sound down low. He checked the time on the alarm clock: Four o’clock in the morning.

He lay back down and tried to go back to sleep, but he wasn’t so sure he was going to be able to.

Instead, he propped his back up against all of the pillows on the bed and stared at the TV.

Southern Colorado

B
efore the first lights of dawn broke the eastern horizon, Cole was back on the road. He’d slept two and a half hours and felt like he needed more, but he was too edgy to sit still in one place for too long. He knew it would only be a matter of time before some puppet of flesh approached their truck.

Stella woke up for a few minutes when he started the truck—actually, she jolted awake.

“You can go back to sleep,” he told her as he pulled out of the diner parking lot, following a semi-truck out onto the road.

A few hours later in Cortez, Colorado, Cole pulled into a Wal-Mart parking lot.

Stella woke up as he looked for a parking spot close to the entrance. It was a twenty-four hour Wal-Mart, but it wasn’t too busy at this hour.

“What are we doing here?” Stella asked.

“I need to get a few things,” Cole told her. “I’ll get us a few more drinks and some snacks,” he said. “I won’t be long. Just keep the doors locked. Keys are in the ignition.”

She stared at him and he could read her eyes: You’re really ditching us this time.

He didn’t bother arguing with her. He’d told her enough times that he was going to see this through to the end, he didn’t know how else to convince her now.

The Wal-Mart wasn’t crowded at all when Cole entered and grabbed a cart. He felt a little funny walking in this store with all the security cameras around; here he was, one of the most wanted men in Colorado right now walking around in a department store.

He didn’t want to take too long in here. He headed right for the clothing section first. He bought some baseball caps, new coats for all three of them, a better pair of gloves for Stella (ones that actually fit her). He bought another set of clothes for David and a big shirt for Stella and another one for himself. They could all use a change of clothes.

Next he bought a small cooler so they could carry some drinks with them instead of stocking up at gas stations and drive-thru lines at fast food joints.

For his last purchase he would need to go to the tech section of the store. There he bought the cheapest Smart Phone they had and then he asked the guy working there to sign him up for one of the cheapest services. He only needed the service to work for one phone call. He paid for the phone at the tech counter with a stolen credit card he’d gotten from V.J. before the bank robbery job, and then he paid for the rest of his stuff at the checkout line using cash from one of the packs of money.

Five minutes later he was out in the cold air again and walking to the pickup truck. He was relieved not to see cop cars racing down the parking lot aisles, screeching to a halt in front of the store, cops jumping out and aiming guns at him.

Maybe they could really make it down to the Navajo Reservation.

“Everything okay?” Cole asked Stella when he got back inside the truck. He set the cooler in the back and handed some of the bags to Stella.

“Didn’t see any cops,” she told him.

David was sitting up in the back seat, knuckling sleepy bugs from his eyes. “Where are we?” he grumbled.

“He’s alive!” Cole said.

That got a smile out of David. “I’m hungry,” he whispered.

“We’re going to get you something to eat right over there,” Cole said, pointing to a McDonald’s in the far corner of the massive parking area.

“What are these?” Stella asked, looking through the bags.

“I bought us some coats, hats, and gloves. Also an extra shirt for each of us.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“I wanna see,” David said and Stella handed him a gray coat that looked like it might be a little big for him.

Cole started the truck and pressed the button to lock the doors. He turned the heat up one notch and then he picked up the cell phone and dialed a number from memory.

The phone was ringing in his ear and he hoped to hell V.J. was going to pick up at this early morning hour.

“Hello?” V.J. croaked into the phone.

He had woke him up.

“V.J.!” Cole yelled into the phone.

“Who is—” A pause as V.J.’s mind came fully awake. “Wait a minute, is that you, Cole?”

“Yeah. Sorry I woke you up.”

“Naw. It’s okay, man. What’s up?”

“I need a favor.”

“Yeah, I figured that.”

“I’ve got a throwaway cell phone and I need it scrambled so it can’t be traced. I also need it beefed up. Top of the line service. We’re going to a … a rather remote area.”

“What? Costa Rica finally?”

“Yeah. Eventually. But we have to go somewhere else first.” He glanced at Stella who wasn’t abashed at watching him while he talked on the phone.

“Look, I’ve got some money in that account that you know about,” Cole told V.J. “Clean it out … it’s yours.”

“That’s a little generous for what you’re asking.”

“Well, I think I’m going to need a few more favors from you down the road. You know, before Costa Rica.” If I live that long, he thought.