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 wal
l. 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.
“What the hell, Flynn—oh, Jesus!” Mac followed him, running just as fast.
As Flynn reached the door of the shack, he threw himself into hard reverse. He stood looking at the biggest diamondback he’d ever seen. The snake lay in a great, heaping coil spread across the two wooden steps that led up to the door.
Mac came up beside him. “Goddamn, shoot it. You got the pistol.”
“It’s not real.” He plunged toward it—and it snapped its head forward and struck him below the knee. It dug its fangs into the soft tissue above his ankle, and he felt the white-hot pulse of venom as it surged into him. Still, he believed that it was hallucinatory and bulled his way ahead with the snake hanging on to his leg, its outrageous fourteen-foot body whipping behind him like a drunken evil flag.
As he threw open the door of the shack, a sheet of electric fire flared in his face, and all the equipment started sparking.
Mac headed in. “Flynn got snakebit!” he yelled as he pushed past.
“Don’t go in there!” Flynn grabbed him.
“My whole setup—”
“There’s millions of volts being pumped in there. Same thing that burned Elmwood down.”
“There’s also three hundred grand in equipment in there.”
“Help me, I think I really am snakebit.”
“Shit, the thing’s still on you, man!”
“I said help me!” As he spoke, he reached down to yank the snake off him—and felt his feet dragged out from under him.
In the next instant, he was being drawn feetfirst upward into the air. Above him, the snake hung with its maw open wide and full of swirling fire. His leg was practically screaming with pain, the snake now rising with him. He drew his gun and emptied it upward, but to no avail.
He shouted to Mac, “Rifle! Use your rifle!”
In the crazy upside-down world he was dealing with, he saw Mac run over to the pickup and start positioning himself in its bed.
Then there was a shudder, and his head was enclosed in something that smelled like sweat and flesh. Arms. But whose?
There followed a struggle, the disk pulling, the person who had enclosed his head pulling back, and the snake writhing and struggling, the whole furious body of the thing twining around him, pulsing, and the head going like a crazed piston, hitting his leg again and again and again.
Every few minutes, a shot rang out, but the disk remained low overhead, a shadow with a spinning fiery heart, seemingly unaffected.
He got a hand on the snake and ripped it off, and saw the whole prehistoric length of the monster go whipping and swarming up into the disk.
An instant later, he hit the ground harder than he’d ever hit anything before. He lay stunned, trying to get the world to stop whirling and tumbling. The electronics shack belched sheets of fire.
“Flynn! Flynn! Come back to me, Flynn, come back to me!”
It was Geri. She’d saved him.
“They’ll start again any second—get the hell out of here!”
She pulled him to his feet. His whole left leg was burning; he’d never felt anything like it. Then they were inside, and he dropped down onto the kitchen floor.
Mac abandoned his effort and followed them.
“Snake,” Geri said, her voice echoing faintly from the far side of his pain. “Mac, do you have any antivenin?”
“First-aid kit. Pantry, top shelf.”
“We’ve lost the uplink!” Diana wailed. “We’ve lost the uplink!”
Flynn was dizzy. He’d gotten a serious snakebite, and if he was going to survive, he would have to organize these people, give the right commands, make them do what they needed to do.
He saw Mac then, looming over him, staring down with frightened eyes.
“Don’t you die on me, brother.”
“Fine, hit me with the antivenin.”
He didn’t feel the prick of the needle, but knew it had gone in from the fact that his leg began to tingle as if it had lost circulation and gone to sleep. The world was whirling, Diana and Geri swirling past like figures on an out-of-control carousel, and Mac with his needle and his knife, working like a furious grandmother.
“Get downstairs,” he managed to gasp. “This is not over.”
His leg would not work, and he found himself using Geri’s body as a crutch. A strange memory came to him, of embracing her in the dark sheets of night, and the moon had blessed their union, and they had been happy, laughing happy, in the small hours.
She smelled like Abby, she kissed like Abby, in bed her body against his felt like Abby’s. “She’s full of Abby’s genes,” the voice had said.
She was crying now, and he told her to stop. “I’m a Texan—we like to get snakebit, it’s good for us.”
She shook her head, her hair flowing back and forth across her face like a curtain.
“I think I got plenty of antivenin in him,” he heard Mac say, a voice echoing in a distant world. “He’s a strong damn cuss. What you gotta worry about is what happened inside that disk, once they got that snake in their lap.
“We gotta cool him off, ladies, or he’s gonna start having seizures.”
“Did you get it?” he asked Mac. The critical question.
“Get what?”
“The disk. Did you get it?”
“Hell no, I didn’t get it.”
When they were kids, they used to range across the countryside with rubber snakebite kits
in their pockets, and reassure each other that they really would use the tiny razors inside to cut deep x’s in one another’s ankles, and then suck out the blood and the venom.
There was a boy called Carl Meston, who had been bitten by a coral snake. He’d hardly felt it and gone on playing football. While riding home from the game, though, he stopped breathing, and died on the corner of Plains and Elm, his face black and a cop frantically giving him mouth-to-mouth. Another boy, whose name Flynn had forgotten, was bitten by a diamondback and lost a foot.
“Okay,” Mac said, “come back to us. There’s enough antivenin in you to make a horse dance.”
“Will he be all right?” Geri asked, and he heard the tremble of real fear in her voice.
“Dunno. That much venom, they’re liable to just croak, and there isn’t one damn thing you can do about it. Flynn’s a tough bastard, though—right, Flynn?”
“Tough bastard, that’s right. I need a glass of water.”
Diana brought him a bottle of Evian from the bar, which dominated one wall of this very luxurious basement. He took it and drank the whole thing down in a gulp. She went to get more, but Flynn said, “Not yet. If I flood myself with water and my sodium level goes too low, I won’t be able to metabolize the antivenin. I can’t see my leg, but it feels like a blimp full of lead.”
“There’s some swelling,” Geri said.
“Blackness around the wound?”
“A little.”
He knew what that meant. Necrosis. “Cut it out.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mac, cut it out. You know how.”
“It might run deep.”
“No matter how deep it runs. I’d like to hang on to the leg as long as I can. For life, preferably.”
Mac turned on the gas fire and burned a knife red in it. “Okay, buddy. Somebody give him something to chomp on—this is gonna smart.”
It didn’t smart; it hurt in the way that profound torture hurts, with bright waves of pain flowing through his body, up to the top of his head and down to his feet again and again, back and forth, a whipping tide.
Nobody had anything for him to bite down on. In any case, he had no intention of screaming, although it was a serious temptation.