Tailed (20 page)

Only the small left headlight worked, and not very brightly. But the starlight did a fair job of lighting up the pale desert, and I saw Wilco trot up next to the driver's side, tail wagging. I opened my door. He leapt into my lap and clambered into the passenger seat.

The noise from the truck was even more horrendous when it moved. The engine valves rattled furiously, and it handled like a mobile bottling plant with four flat tires. First gear was extremely sluggish, and it wasn't until I ground it into third gear that I felt I wasn't driving through mud. The vibration from the treads in the rear resonated through all the armor plating so fiercely that Wilco kept skittering down onto the floor no matter how hard he tried to brace himself against the seat. From the way the gas and clutch pedal lurched around, I guessed a lot of the extraneous vibration was due to shot engine mounts. My hands were going numb from the rattle transmitted up into the steering wheel. But all this was a good thing. Anybody within a couple mile radius would definitely hear me coming, which I hoped would obviate anybody shooting at me by accident.

And let's face it—come sunup, without water, I'd be in deep trouble out there. I was already thirsty, and if making tracks with this rattletrap could help find civilization or just shelter before sunup, I was ahead of the game.

The line of junked vehicles ended abruptly as I shifted into fourth gear. The valley was splayed wide before me with the track curving gently to the right toward a gap between two buttes. I stuck my head out the window and tried to look back at the shooting gallery, but all I could see was my contrail of dust. Yup, anybody watching from the air or high ground would easily spot me.

There was no windshield and the cold air nipped at my eyeballs. I grabbed the swaying goggles from the hook on the dashboard and had a heck of a time putting them on and steering straight.

Wilco finally found a position from which he couldn't be vibrated, his front paws on the dashboard and his rear wedged into the corner of the seat. I was secretly pleased, of course, with his discomfort, and that his usual sly glances my way were now replaced by a general look of alarm.

The sky to the east was brightening ever so slightly as we reached the buttes, and the track passed between them in a slow descent through a narrowing canyon. Larger rocks from the canyon walls lay in my way, and at first I tried to avoid them, but then I tried hitting a few just to see what the old warhorse could handle. The intermittent crash of boulders into the rolling bottling plant had the added benefit of jolting Wilco from his new stance and onto the floor again. He'd probably bite my fingers off for this, but I was holding out hope that having the upper hand for a while might instill some parity between us.

Around a curve, the canyon walls plummeted and another valley opened below us—we were spilling from one valley down into another. I killed the headlight, depressed the clutch, and we stopped with a screech of brakes sharp enough to split a coconut. In the combined glow of the moon and the eastern sky, I could make out the pale track winding through the shrubs. But I could also make out something else below, a pattern on a knoll to one side of the track. Another shooting gallery of some sort? A target? There were a series of straight lines on the ground, in what seemed a random geometric pattern.

I searched the sky for aircraft. Nothing. I would have killed the engine and taken a better look and listen, but I didn't want to risk the half-track not starting again.

I was about to proceed but something was bothering me. A sense of foreboding. Like I'd been there before, and something bad had happened. So I did kill the truck's engine.

Surprisingly, I got what looked like a sigh of impatience from Wilco.

I opened the truck door and hopped down onto the ground. The desert seemed impossibly quiet without the rumble of the half-track, and behind the gentle whistle of the breeze through the sage I could still hear the bottling plant echo in my head. I climbed into the back of the truck, shooed Wilco from the passenger seat, and ducked into the machine gun turret. I wanted the higher vantage to study what lay ahead, so I put an ammo box onto the seat to stand on. What was it about this place that was so familiar? This had the feel of a recurring dream, one in which you knew a monster was beyond a door. But in the dream you never opened the door.

Nothing moved below that I could see, but I felt vulnerable. The machine gun was cold, and as I tried to move it again to one side, I got to wondering whether it worked. A fifty-caliber machine gun would go a long way toward making me feel less vulnerable. Of course, I'd never fired any gun larger than a twenty-two as a kid. Then again, I'd never driven a half-track before.

I stepped down off the ammo box and unbuckled the lid. Empty. I popped a couple of others strewn around the back of the truck before hitting pay dirt: an ancient chain of fifty-caliber shells. I always thought they came in cloth belts, but this one was held together, shell to shell, by metal clips.

All over America people toss their fridges curbside, making sure to remove the doors so some kid might not climb in and suffocate—but out here they leave whole boxes of fifty-caliber shells right next to a machine gun. Well, I guess they didn't exactly expect Spanky and the gang to traipse by way out here.

The ten-year-old boy inside welled up again, the tingle of Christmas morning buzzing my brain.
Cool.

There was a bracket attached to the left side of the gun that was clearly intended to hold the ammo box—same size. So I lifted a spring-loaded tensioner of some sort and slid the ammo box into the bracket, letting the tensioner rest back onto the shells. The tensioner seemed designed to keep the chain of shells from leaping wholesale from the box when the gun yanked on them.

I laid the end of the belt into the breach with one shell aligned with the barrel, then I closed the breech.

There was a short handle and trigger at the rear of the gun that seemed ridiculously small in proportion to the rest of the thing.

I'd be lucky if the thing fired at all. In fact I'd be lucky if the barrel wasn't rusted and the thing didn't blow up in my face. Mindful that the gun might explode when I pulled the trigger, I hunkered down before giving the trigger a squeeze.

Nothing.

I opened the breech again, and it all looked right as far as I could tell. But what did I know? And what were the chances the thing would work, anyway? I was lucky that the vehicle even started. And that I figured out how to double-clutch.

Having given up on the gun, I took to scanning the knoll below again.

Nothing stirred. My sense of foreboding was telling me to try to determine who it was before approaching. There was no way of determining that without sunlight. No way was I sneaking all the way down there in the dark on foot for a look-see.

And I was both thirsty and tired. So I climbed down and got back into the truck cab. Stretching out onto the seat for a little shut-eye seemed a capital idea if I could manage it. I was still wired, but knew I needed rest. I'd try to snooze until dawn, when I could see what was ahead a little clearer. I had no reason to think I was being pursued, and hopefully Wilco would give some kind of indication that someone was approaching.

But I felt a little vulnerable with no roof and the windows all open around me. A closer examination of the window areas revealed flip-up armor plates with small portals in them. Made sense. In battle without them, anybody sitting in the half-track would be Swiss cheese when the bullets started to fly. So I heaved the hinged steel plates into place and bolted them there. The interior seemed a lot more secure with the window armor in place.

“Bark if you hear anything, OK?”

Wilco shot me a glance that was all expletives—I don't think he'd forgiven me for the bumpy ride. He was curled on the floor on the passenger side—I think he was enjoying residual heat from the truck engine. I put on another Dinoland sweatshirt, reserving the other space for a pillow.

I stared up at the stars, thinking to myself that I'd probably not be able to fall asleep, but that just resting my eyes and body would be of some value. I guess I underestimated how tired I was because next thing I knew I was out.

And dreaming.

chapter 24

I
awoke huffing and puffing, as though I'd been running, the images from my sleep stark, sharp, and terrifying. The meaning of my dream was unclear but unsettling. People and places were out of context. As was I. Where in the hell was this place? I sat up in the truck cab, squinting into the dawn-lit blue distance through the small gun portal in the windshield armor. The sky was bright but my perch and the valley below were still in deep shadow.

It came back to me: Dinoland, wrecking yard, half-track. My guess was I'd slept for about two hours. Even though my chest was warm from wearing three sweatshirts, my feet were freezing.

I climbed down out of the cab, unsteady, stamping my feet to warm them. I swung my arms, which were cramped from being folded under my head. With nothing to drink since the day before, the arid mountain air had rendered me parched, and my tongue was like sandpaper. Physically, I felt alien to myself, like some kind of robot that had rusted overnight.

And on top of it all, I was still gripped by the murky panic that woke me. What was it I'd been dreaming? There were lots of fractured pieces, dark images, angst.

There was a huge temple of some kind, ancient, but it was near Angie's and my apartment in Manhattan's west teens. There was an earthquake, and we'd looked out at the temple from the backyard to see an erupting volcano. People on the street were running, and there was fire in the sky. It was night, and we couldn't see in the subway because the power was out, but there were a lot of people. I held Angie's hand, we had to keep moving, to be safe, to get away, I wasn't sure. But the subway gave way to a cave, one that had subway ads on walls lit by torchlight. Then not ads, but posters.

Posters of five white geckos, in a circle, nose to tail, like those on Draco's cape and Fowler's medallion.

“Garth, you're freaking yourself out!” I croaked aloud as I paced between the half-track and a nearby cliff face. My throat was so dry I sounded like an old man.

No, we weren't trying to escape. The crowd in the subway was moving toward some place. To find someone. To find something, some people, to catch some people.

God, I was thirsty. Like a TV jumping back and forth between two channels, my mind flicked from dream to reality to dream…which was which?

To kill them. We had hatchets of a kind I'd never seen before. They looked ancient, made crudely of stone and leather and wood. I said to Angie:

“Are we going to kill them?”

But the hand in mine was no longer Angie's, but Gabby's.

I wondered if there was any water in the valley down below.

I don't remember what she said, but it was in her eyes. The killing glee was in my mother's eyes.

I said, “Mom, I don't want to kill them.”

I had to have water soon.

I could see Gabby's visage by the torchlight, the wrinkles and creases of her face stark, wriggling, and sinister. Swarming all around us were featureless throngs of people—no, they'd morphed into coyote people, with muzzles and panting tongues—moving around us in the same direction. Gabby was standing before me in the torchlight, and I could see my possum Arnold in her arms, looking up at me with those innocent, shiny black eyes.

Gabby said: “In doing so, you killed him.”

I stopped pacing in front of a cliff. The dark miasma of my dream dissolved and the rock face before me came into focus.

Sun clipping the top of a far mountain set the stone before me ablaze in a fiery mantle.

Stained onto the glowing rock, faintly, was the shape of five white geckos. Nose to tail. In a circle. Same as on Draco's cape. Same as on Fowler's medallion.

Vatic as any oracle, the five geckos on the rock face were as formidable as the heads of Cerberus snarling at Hades's gate.

This was where my grandfather Julius Kit Carson came with the other four.

This was where the vuka spirits moved into them and began this legacy.

This was where the Tupelca and
El Viajero
meant to extract the spirit.

This was where I would die.

And I'd helped them bring me here
—I'd gone along with Norman and his pals, and then I'd traveled across the desert to place my own neck on the chopping block.

I was utterly alone, terror-stricken.

Escape. Run
.

I found myself in the half-track barreling down the hill, my eyes blurred with tears of abject panic as I stared through the gun portal, my brain addled by a lack of moisture, my ears filled with the cacophony of the half-track's cold, clunky mechanization. I glanced at the passenger seat. Even Wilco had gone.

My hysteria wasn't helped by the tableau ahead—it was the mound, all right. The one I'd seen from above with the geometric shapes was now plainly a disused archeology dig. Fowler's archeological dig from years back. There were wooden surveyor's stakes, with broken strings tangled in the tumbleweeds and surrounding sage. Gashed sifting screens rusted off to one side next to some sawhorses, and a heavy wooden table was flipped over, various rusted spades and shovels almost covered by the blowing sands. And in the middle of this detritus were half-filled trenches, long and rectangular.

Maybe there would be a puddle of water somewhere?

I veered the half-track to one side of the mound and down a gully.

And slammed into the back of a parked car.

chapter 25

I
nto a parked car? The sky reared up before me: I drove over it.

Thrown from my seat, I heard the treads thrumming on the car's roof. The half-track almost flipped over on its side as I lost control.

But the truck slammed to the ground upright and I bounced back into my seat.

Through the portal I saw someone standing about fifty feet ahead.

White hair. Pale palm held up to stop me. It was a woman in what looked like a monk's cassock.

It was Gabby.

I ratcheted back the hand brake. The truck fish-tailed in the soft sand. The engine bucked, the rear treads faltered, the engine quit. Stalled.

Gabby? Reality or dream?

Stopped, I found myself in a cloud of dust, unable to see anything, coughing from inhaling sand into my already dry lungs. I tried to restart the truck, but the engine wouldn't kick over.

Blue dawn fought its way through the sandstorm, and a portal of gloom opened before the windshield.

Gabby was still there. And she was walking toward the half-track. I was terrified of my own mother, if the spectre even was her.

“Garth!”

That was Nicholas's voice. I was afraid of the image of my mother, but the sound of my brother's voice was like the clouds parting after a hurricane.

“Nicholas!” I wheezed. I clawed at the door, trying to find the handle and a way out, and in the process released the window armor, which hinged open and slammed the side of the truck.

Nicholas's faced appeared in the window next to me. As usual, he was wearing a tweed suit and thin tie, even out here in the desert.

“For Christ sake, you idiot! Look what you did to the rental car! What am I going to tell Avis? Garth? Ack!”

I threw my arms around his neck, sobbing for dear life.

“Garth, it's OK, stop it, you're hurting me…you're worse than Otto, now stop it.”

“Nicholas!” That was Vargas's voice. “Is he OK?”

“I don't know…I think he's having a panic attack,” Nicholas said as I choked him in my half nelson of panic. “Help me get him out of this goddamn thing. What is this?”

“A half-track, I believe,” Vargas intoned.

Those were the last words I heard until I came to, minutes later, on the ground, Gabby, Nicholas, and Vargas kneeling over me.

The sky behind them was the solid royal blue of early morning, and they were almost in silhouette.

“He's dehydrated, you can see that, can't you?” Gabby said this to Nicholas, then noticed my eyes open. “Vargas, hand me the water.”

Gabby poured some bottled water into my parched lips and I could literally hear the membranes sucking up the moisture. I grabbed the bottle from her and sucked the contents down in two long gulps, collapsing the plastic bottle.

“More,” I gasped.

“If you drink too fast, you'll get terrible cramps.” Gabby wagged a finger at me. “Where's Wilco?”

“Gabby,” Nicholas began with a sigh, “let's not get into that. Garth, you didn't really have Wilco with you, did you? Like you said on the phone?”

“We're at the mound, where the dreams happen, the five white geckos, we have to get away.” I could barely get the words out fast enough—I was afraid the ancient spirits would reach up through the ground like zombies and pull me under.

“Calm down. The state police caught those three Tupelca bozos walking along the road. Otto got the van away from them and came to help you guys but you ran off into the desert, so he and Angie got to the cops.”

“You are safe now, Garth.” Vargas's dramatic Latin inflection came with a squint of wisdom that would have made Ricardo Montalban proud. “They caught the three killers, the crazy Tupelca who kidnapped you. You are safe now, with us. Would you like a cheese curd?”

He held out a package of the white waxy squiggles, Milwaukee ambrosia. I mechanically took one, and it squeaked like a balloon animal as I chewed. Even though I was still thirsty, I realized I needed the salt, too. I took another. It was then that I managed to focus on Vargas's attire. He was again in his scoutmaster shorts, and a bright orange gym T-shirt.

I took in the sight of the three of them: Yoda, Simon Templar, and Montezuma's answer to the Eagle Scout.

“He needs herbal tea, not cheese!” Gabby looked exasperated. “Yes, Garth, you're safe now with us.”

Nicholas grimaced, mumbling: “Be a lot safer if our rental wasn't totaled.”

“Gabby, what are you doing here?” I was deeply puzzled.

“I contacted Nicholas about Fowler. Once you told me he was involved…well, I began to worry. Someone had to deal with him, and since I cast the spell on him I have the ability to control him. I called Nicholas and he had a private jet…”

“Private jet?” I cocked an eye at Nicholas.

He gave a dismissive wave. “Somebody owed me a favor.”

“What about Wilco?” Gabby insisted.

“Gabby, would you stop…” Nicholas moaned. “Poor kid has been through enough. Garth, where'd you get this half-track, anyway?”

I sat up, taking another cheese curd, and checking my surroundings. We were about twenty feet from the half-track. I glanced back.

“That?” I tilted my head in the direction of the vehicle in question. “Found it. So the police caught them? Norman, Brutus, and Timmy?”

Nicholas and Vargas spoke at once: “Yes.”

I turned and looked back up the gully. Nicholas's little compact rental car had been flattened by the giant steel rolling pin on the front of the half-track, the ground littered with the sparkle of safety glass. You could still hear the wreck pop, click, and crack. Just on the other side of the car was a steep slope up to the top of the mound. “
El Viajero.
Their leader, the one with the four vukas in him. The police don't have him, do they?”

Vargas stroked his chin. “The Traveler? Hmm.”

“Who is
El Viajero
?” Nicholas looked at me, then at Gabby.

Gabby seemed to ignore the question. “Angie told us these was a dog with you. Did he come with you here?”

“Wilco was with me until I came down off the ridge. He vanished while I was asleep.”

“Well, a dog may have been with you, but not Wilco.” Nicholas chuckled.

Vargas looked at me askance. “My dog was found by security at the Qwest Arena, and has been with me since. He is back at the motel with Angie and Otto.”

“No, it was Wilco. He had the big dog tag and everything.”

Gabby made a ring with her thumb and forefinger. “About this big, bronze, like the amulet Fowler had around his neck?”

I shivered and looked uncertainly at Vargas.

“Garth, pay no attention to…”

“Nicky!” Gabby glared at Nicholas—he fairly shrank, like a mouse into a teacup. It's astounding how a mother retains the power over her adult children to instantly rein them in with a single word. Humbling indeed for the recipient. But likewise satisfying for the sibling witness. Ah, family life.

My gloat was slight and fleeting. I looked at Gabby. “What are you trying to say?”

The desert wind hissed through the sage and scrub around us. I could feel the dirt drying on my tearstained face, the sweat rolling down my neck and into the small of my back. The ground began to vibrate, to hum, like someone had flicked on a compressor in the ground.

Nicholas jumped to his feet. “What the hell is that?”

“Earthquake?” Vargas slowly rose.

“What the hell is that sound?” Nicholas demanded of Gabby, like she should know.

“El Viajero.”
She smiled knowingly, as a mother does in front of a naive child. “He's here. It is the four vuka, the Tupelca, awakening, looking for the fifth spirit.”

From atop the mound came a howl.

We spun around to see Fowler standing above us on the mound, like some Aztec priest atop Templo Mayor. He was naked, silhouetted against the sun-streaked sky. Dangling from his outstretched hand was the medallion.

“Infexa calupa testa noosi kledpti!”
His shout echoed across the valley.

“Not that kook,” Nicholas moaned.

Gabby shot him a withering glance. “Fine way to talk about your father.”