The Smiley-Face Witches

  She tiptoed past Newton’s sleeping bag but he wasn’t sleeping. Instead, she found him hunched over his laptop.

  “Didn’t ya get any sleep?” she asked.

  He tapped the bucket beside him. “Kept getting airsick.”

  “Wish ya woulda told me,” she said. “Woulda tried harder to keep her level.”

  “That’s alright,” he said. “I kept busy,”

  “Doing what?”

  “Gathering intel on the Botkins.”

  “What kind of intel?” she asked.

  “Ain’t much out there,” he admitted. “But at least I figured out what language they speak.”

  “Morse code?”

  Her quick and ready answer left him deflated. “Yeah…How’d ya know?”

  “Guessed,” she said.

  “Anyway, I’m just brushing up…Just in case we need to...”

  “You know Morse code?”

  “A little…”

  “Where’d ya pick up Morse code in this day and age?” she asked.

  “Computer camp,” he said. “They didn’t assign it or anything, just got bored and started messing around with it on my own.”

  “Seems your full of all kinds of useless information,” she said. “What else don’t I know about you?”

  “The snap on my Nike Pro Combat Loin Guard broke and I can’t get out.”

  “Guess that turns your loin guard into a chastity belt,” she said, “though I reckon we all saw that coming.”

  Spider finished his sandwich and opened the hatch built into the deck.

  “You been putting your trash inside there this whole time?” Susan asked.

  “Yeah…”

  “Ya know what’s down there?” she asked.

  “No…”

  “The bladder tanks,” she said.

  Spider swallowed the last of his sandwich. “What’s that mean?”

  “That’s where they keep the helium,” Susan said.

  “Oh…Maybe we should move one of the trunks over it so that door don’t open by accident,” Spider said.

  She didn’t think that could happen, but helped him slide the trunk over the hatch, anyway.

  “We still on course?” Spider asked.

  She pressed her face against the Umbraprojector’s periscope. “I’ll let ya know directly.”

  The machine’s focused beam traced Drew’s yesterday shadow across the two-lane interstate, the disembodied silhouette following the road’s curves and undulations in perfect synchronization.

  She leaned back and puffed out her chest, satisfied she’d convinced them of the gadget’s effectiveness. “Almost like goin’ to a drive-in, hain’t it?”

  “What’s a drive-in?” Spider asked.

  “Never mind,” Susan said. “Not sure there anymore of ‘em left, anyhow.”

  Spider resumed his watch, taking charge of the periscope again. “Yeah. Yeah, guess you were right about the machine. But where those other shadows coming from?”

  ***

  The black choppers appeared at six o’clock, closing the distance in no time. They zoomed past the Moonclipper with ease, wobbling the airship in their wake.

  Grady reached across Clementine’s lap to steady the yoke. “Dude, keep her level!”

  The cockpit door flew open and Clementine could tell by the look on Lazy-Eye Susan’s face they were in trouble. She tried to let Susan into the captain’s chair, but was countermanded.

  “Your reflexes are a damn sight better than mine,” Susan explained, “And y’all been playin’ video games for a lot longer than me. Time to cash in on them skills.”

  The lead chopper buzzed them again, close enough to force Clementine to pull hard to port. “What do I do?”

  Grady couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Dude, ya pull over!”

  Clementine shot him a look but Grady didn’t back down. “Ya flunked driver’s ed! You crashed into a ship, a ship on dry land!”

  The ship wasn’t a ship but a parade float decorated like a Spanish Galleon. The float’s parking break came loose and the ship hit her, but she didn’t have time to argue the case on a technicality.

  She grabbed the yoke and pushed down, sending the airship into a steep dive.

  “Where we goin’?” Grady shrieked.

  “Down there!” Clementine answered. “We’re gonna have a hard time against the choppers in the open!”

  Grady waited for Susan to lead the mutiny, but she backed Clementine all the way.

  “Her instincts are right,” Susan said, “our best bet is playin’ hide in seek in the canyon.”

  Grady swallowed hard. One look at the narrow gap and he knew they’d never fit. “Pull up!”

  “Shut-up and keep navigating,” Clementine ordered.

  “Go up! Not down!” Grady yelled. “We ain’t gonna make it!”

  But she slipped the Moonclipper into the rift, and the choppers fell in behind them.

  Grady closed his eyes but was more afraid of not seeing what they were going to crash into. Orange sandstone walls whizzed by, and the slightest twitch would end their trip before the choppers could.

  “Got an idea!” he said. He grabbed hold of the navigator’s yoke and unlocked the red trigger button. The contoured controls felt solid and substantial, not like the Xbox controllers he was always breaking.

  “What are ya doing?” Clementine shouted.

  “Trust me,” he said, and squeezed the trigger.

  The airship’s pod ignited, spitting tendrils of blue electricity forward. Crackling current scorched the passing rock face, scouring their windshield in a wash of sand and pebbles.

  “Where are the wipers?” Clementine shouted.

  The debris coalesced into a cloud behind them, choking the lead chopper’s air intake. His rotor sputtered and the helicopter peeled off.

  “Got ‘em!” Grady said.

  Susan tamped down their excitement. “Nice work, but they won’t fall for the same trick twice!”

  ***

  Newton picked himself up off the tilting deck. “What’s goin’ on up there?”

  Susan staggered past him and pulled Spider away from the periscope. “Help me turn this gizmo around.”

  Newton undid the Umbraprojector’s straps while Spider held the guide rope.

  Susan spun the machine’s gimbal around and jammed her face against the viewfinder. “Time raise the dead!”

  Spider strained to keep the guide rope taught. “What dead?”

  “A little to the left,” Susan said. “A little more…too far…back.”

  “This thing is getting heavy!” Spider shouted.

  “Got it!” she said, and pulled clear of the Umbraprojector.

  Spider eased the machine into the opening and let go of the rope. “What dead?”

  She pointed out the controls built into the machine’s base.

  Newton read the labels beneath the buttons. “Rewind, play, forward, pause, and stop. Like a VCR.”

  “Ya forgot one,” she said.

  The lettering on the last button was worn away, making it harder to read than the others.

  “Reverse. How’s that different from rewind?” Spider asked.

  Susan balanced herself against the bulkhead to counter the airship’s sudden pitch. “What’s the opposite of shadow?”

  “Light?” Spider said.

  And then Newton figured it out. “All those snapshots caught Drew’s shadow…but we grabbed the light casting his shadow, too.”

  His explanation only confused Spider more. “So?”

  “Light bounces off something and your eye catches the rays,” Newton said. “Focuses ‘em on your retina like a lens…”

  Spider nodded. “Yeah…”

  “The retina changes the light into information your brain can read,” Newton said. “The photos have all the information we need to project Drew’s image right into their cockpits, or whatever.”

  And then it clicked for Spider. “T
hey’re about to see a ghost.”

  “Couldn’t have said it better myself,” Susan said. She aimed the lens at the chopper’s windshield and flipped the switch.

  ***

  They couldn’t see the apparitions materializing inside the chopper’s cockpit, but they could pinpoint the exact moment the pilot did.

  The chopper pitched and yawed, manically buzzing back and forth inside the narrow canyon until scraping rock.

  Black smoke flowed from the jagged wound, finally forcing the disoriented pilot to veer off for good.

  Clementine leveled them off. She checked from side to side but didn’t see any more choppers. “Is that it?”

  Grady double-checked but didn’t see anything either. “Dude, there all gone.”

  Clementine gave him her told-ya-so face and eased back on the yoke.

  Newton was first through the cockpit door, Spider right behind him, exchanging high-fives with pilot and navigator. Even Lazy-Eye Susan offered her congratulations on a job well done, but turbulence cut their celebration short.

  “What is that?” Clementine asked.

  Malevolent black clouds appeared in a line across the opposite horizon, bleeding through the sky like ink.

  “Storm?” Grady said.

  Static danced through the billowy puffs, charging each particle with current. The clouds flashed, parted by a luminous rift stabbing through the heart of the swirling vapor.

  “Don’t look like no storm I ever seen,” Susan muttered.

  Ozone saturated the air inside the cabin and Clementine felt the hairs on her arms rise. “What the…”

  Jagged purple lightning forked toward them, carving the sky into halves.

  Clementine mashed her feet against the pedals but they didn’t stop, they spun toward the lightning instead.

  Susan climbed past Clementine to get to the controls. She yanked the thrust levers all the way down but the gray highway arced across their bow faster than she thought possible.

  Grady caught a glimpse of the metallic blur hugging the road between blinks, jetting past them fast enough to leave a ghostly green trail in its wake. “Monocycle!”

  Clementine jerked the yoke to port but wasn’t quick enough. The airship’s left rear rotor scraped the curved gray strip, sending them spiraling out of control.

  Susan got to her feet in time to see the orange mesa zooming toward them. “Hang on to your hats! We’re gonna crash!”

  But they were already upside down by then and knew as much.

  CHAPTER 13

  Molly would have dismissed the headlights in the side view mirror as routine the day before, but now she tensed in anticipation. She waited for the car to pass the Winnebago before slumping back into her seat.

  Old Man Hoyt shot her a disapproving scowl from behind the wheel. “Don’t be so antsy.”

  “Can’t help it,” she said. “If it wasn’t for the school’s bedrock foundation to protect us from the blast…I don’t even wanna think about it.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Can’t help it,” she said.

  Neither could he. He’d spent the majority of his adult life roaming Bixby’s halls and seeing it reduced to cinders around him wasn’t something he’d forgive or forget.

  Molly wiped the condensation from the window. “We gotta be close…”

  “We are,” Hoyt said.

  “How close?”

  “Close,” he said.

  “You sure you’re reading that thing right?”

  Hoyt patted the scanner mounted below the CB. “After your boyfriend…”

  Molly raised her hand to cut him off. “No--Not my boyfriend.”

  “Sorry,” Hoyt said, “anyway, after he pinpointed the song’s frequency, tracking the broadcast source was no problem.”

  They passed the sign marking the Colorado-Utah border. They’d put 1720 miles between them and Ohio, and the gray interstate kept coming at them in long, sloping stretches, breaking like waves before rising up again.

  Molly cracked the window and let the cool air in, bringing the smell of rain with it. “I remember coming out here on vacation when I was a kid.”

  He tapped his buzzing hearing aid. “What?”

  “Vacation,” Molly said, a little louder this time. “We went to the Grand Canyon one summer. Then when I was in college I came out here for skiing. You ski?”

  “No…Used to hunt.”

  “Skiers?”

  “Only when they’re in season,” he said.

  She broke into a fond smile. “My dad used to hunt ducks.”

  “Used to love to go out in the duck blind early in the morning,” Hoyt said. “If you got out early enough, you’d catch the sun rising over the hills and you’d see the shadows growing across the lake. It was like pinpointing the exact moment when God flipped on the light switch.”

  Hearing him describe the sunrise reminded her of her dad—without the stream of profanities and racial epitaphs.

  She turned up the scanner and listened to the voices fade into each other. “It’s strangely beautiful…”

  “If you say so,” Hoyt mumbled. “Won’t be easy to dance to.”

  She laughed. “No, it won’t be.”

  “Can I ask you a question?”

  “You just did,” she said.

  “Then here’s another one,” Hoyt said. “What do you think you’re gonna find when we get to the end of the rainbow?”

  “I don’t know,” Molly said. “But that song was playing before both the Alabama and Texas sites were hit. And I’ll bet it was playing at Bixby right before the walls came down.”

  “Everywhere Dick Frost was,” he muttered. “But who ya suppose is behind all this?”

  She didn’t know, but that didn’t stop her from answering. “Terrorists?”

  “Why do terrorists blow something up?”

  “For attention?” she said.

  He agreed. “Terrorists blow something up for attention. But what’s the point of blowing up a school? Except for Bixby, they’ve been in small, out of the way places and empty--knock on wood.”

  “Then what?”

  “If the targets aren’t political, then they have to be tactical.”

  “So what do we know?” she said. “Someone’s targeting schools. What do the schools have in common?”

  “Dick Frost.”

  “Right, but he’s MIA,” she said.

  “But they’d have to know that.”

  She conceded the point. “But then what else ties the schools together?”

  “Enzyme Seven.”

  She considered the implications of what he was suggesting. “You think he ran his little experiment at those other schools?”

  “Dick Frost took calculated risks,” Hoyt said, “And I’d bet he spread his risk to minimize his losses.”

  “Then they’re not tracking him,” she said, “They’re tracking Enzyme Seven. Someone is wiping away any trace of Project Chimera.”

  The scanner signal faded and for a second Hoyt thought he’d blown a fuse. “Just had this thing serviced.”

  “Get it back!” Molly said.

  Hoyt fiddled with the dials but the signal faded in and out.

  “Get it back!”

  “What the hell you think I’m trying to do?” He tried a while longer, but the signal was gone.

  “Now what?”

  “Relax!” he said. “We got the source pinpointed.”

  She took a moment to compose herself. “Sorry, just kinda…”

  “Forget it,” he said.

  The commotion roused Ivan from his sleep. He stumbled into the cab, stretching and yawning. “How much further?”

  Molly stifled her laugh. “What is that, hamster or guinea pig?”

  The fur parka was the warmest coat he had. “Gets cold in the desert at night. Plus, this coat has practical advantages. If I have to, I can just blend into the scenery like a bear or something.”

  “You look like a t
oilet seat lid cover,” Molly said. “The only place you’d blend in is in my Aunt Carol’s bathroom.”

  They crested yet another hill before the interstate sloped into a shallow valley.

  Hoyt pulled over to the side of the road and parked. “Signal says that way.”

  Tire tracks winding through the scrub brush disappeared into the foreboding flats, beckoning them forward into the ominous scenery.

  “Last chance to turn back,” Hoyt said.

  “We came this far,” Molly said.

  Hoyt shifted into drive. Going off-road made for a bumpy ride but the scanner’s insistent beeping meant they were headed the right way.

  They drove in silence for a few miles before Molly grabbed her phone and hit record. “The rugged scenery seems strangely foreboding in the dark, gloomed by the lonely blue foothills in the distance. The closer we…”

  “The brakes!” Ivan shouted.

  Hoyt pushed Ivan’s groping hands away from the steering wheel.

  “Hit the brakes!” Ivan shouted.

  Hoyt mashed the pedal.

  The brakes locked and the Winnebago fishtailed.

  They slammed forward before whiplashing backward again.

  The RV stopped and nobody moved, nobody said anything for a few seconds.

  “Everyone alright?” Hoyt whispered.

  Molly’s eyes shrank back to normal. “Fine.”

  “Back-up,” Ivan said.

  Hoyt shifted into reverse and eased the Winnebago back from the edge of the cliff.

  ***

  Ivan grabbed his camera, crawling as close to the edge as he dared, and panned across the valley below.

  “Sandcastle City,” Molly announced. “Like the album cover.”

  They’d excavated the ruins out from the valley’s center, exposing an enigmatic alien cathedral the size of a city block. Black water flowing through connecting channels reflected the high desert moon, adding an ethereal blue glow to the pale sand smoothed into arches, spires, and vaults.

  The Old Man stuck his head over the edge, straining to make out the details. “I remember reading something about this in National Geographic. They dug it up back in the Twenties. They called it the American Atlantis.”

  “How come I never heard of this place before?” Molly asked.

  “Some tribe sued to stop the dig,” Hoyt said. “They got tied up in court or something. Think a dust storm buried everything again in the Thirties.”

  “Who built it?” Molly asked.

  “Indians, Egyptians, or Mayans,” he said. “The eggheads couldn’t agree. I think maybe that’s why they didn’t bother digging it back up again.”

  The architecture didn’t fit the profiles of any of the cultures he’d listed, but Molly wasn’t there to play archeologist. “Let’s get one in the can.”