Darkwind: Ancient Enemy 2 (23 page)

The master bedroom was a little messy, the bed unmade, a few clothes draped over a wingback chair near the window, the closet door open. Palmer looked at a few of the photos in frames on the dresser and hanging on the walls. He saw the women from the living room at various ages, along with a young man who must be Travis. And he saw the husband who had died six months ago.

The girl’s bedroom was neat and organized, and Travis’ bedroom was the opposite, messy and cluttered. Sports posters covered the walls in Travis’ room along with a rifle mounted on a wood rack.

Palmer hurried back into the living room. He found the sheriff still standing in the same spot. It looked like he hadn’t moved a muscle.

“It’s all clear back there,” Palmer said. “Travis isn’t in the house.”

The sheriff didn’t respond.

Palmer touched the sheriff’s shoulder gently; he didn’t want to startle him with that gun still in his hand. He spoke with authority, his words sharp and commanding. “Sheriff Hadley, I’d like you to holster your weapon.”

The sheriff finally turned and looked at Palmer, seeming to slowly come back to life. He lifted his weapon up like it weighed a ton and slid it into the holster on his belt.

“The house is clear,” Palmer said again. “Travis Conrad isn’t here.”

“Yeah,” Hadley croaked.

Palmer glanced at the pieces of the women, at their heads sitting on the two chairs. He noticed that their necks were congealed with dried blood and that the cuts were ragged as if their heads had been torn away from their bodies. It was the same thing with the pieces of limbs and torsos. He couldn’t be certain just by looking at the pieces—forensics would have to make that call—but judging by what he’d seen down in New Mexico, these murders looked very similar.

Who could do something like this? Who had that kind of strength? And why tear the women apart and just shoot the man?

Palmer couldn’t let himself get mired down in questions that he couldn’t answer at this time. He needed to compartmentalize his thoughts and focus on the things that he could solve right now.

“Who’s the man on the floor?” Palmer asked Sheriff Hadley.

Hadley looked back at the corpse on the floor like he needed to see it again to believe it. He tried to talk, his mouth moving, but no words were coming out.

“Sheriff?”

“It … it can’t be possible.” The sheriff’s words came out in a hoarse whisper.

“What can’t be possible?” Palmer heard the echoes of the forensics people he’d talked to yesterday and today in the sheriff’s words.

“That man is Nora’s husband.”

That stopped Palmer for a moment. He shook his head slightly like he hadn’t heard Sheriff Hadley correctly. “Wait a minute. I thought you said her husband was—”

“Dead. Yeah, that’s right. He’s dead. Been dead for six months.”

“But then what’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

Palmer was quiet for a moment, staring down at the corpse on the floor, staring at him in a new light now. The black suit, the gray goo coming out of his brain. Why would someone bring a dead man here just to shoot him in the head?

Just then the sheriff’s shoulder mike crackled to life, making him jump a little. He grabbed it and thumbed the button. “Sheriff Hadley here.” His voice sounded much stronger than it had only seconds ago.

“Ronnie called in from Cody’s Pass,” a woman’s voice said from the mike. “There’s something strange going on at the Mountainside Inn. A car crashed into the lobby.”

“We got some more pressing matters here at the moment,” Sheriff Hadley said. “Get Freddie to—”

“There’s a lot of dead people there,” the woman on the mike squawked. “At least three so far. Mutilated. One of them is Travis Conrad, the kid you were looking for.”

Sheriff Hadley and Palmer locked eyes.

“We need to get there,” Palmer told him.

South of Cody’s Pass, Colorado

C
ole pulled the SUV off the road into a wooded area that was hidden from the road. He wanted to keep this vehicle off the road for a little while, and he needed some time to gather his thoughts.

It was dark all around them and he had the lights off. He had all the doors locked. It was getting cold, but not too uncomfortable just yet. He’d told Stella that they needed to wait a few hours before finding another vehicle, wait until it was later. He already had an idea of a place where he would find one.

David was still asleep in the back seat.

It was risky sitting here in the dark near the woods. After what they’d seen tonight, Cole knew that the thing following them, the thing Stella called the Ancient Enemy, could pop up at anytime and anywhere. But if they were spotted by police, chased by them, then it would be over. They wouldn’t be able to get David back down to the Navajo Reservation; they wouldn’t be able to get him to a shaman. Once David was in police custody, he would be a sitting duck for that thing. It would find someone to kill David, it would frighten some person badly enough with what it could do to people, and that person would snap and kill David.

He couldn’t let that happen.

• • •

Stella sat in the passenger seat and stared out the dark windshield. She glanced around at the side windows every few seconds. She couldn’t help being nervous out here, but Cole was right—this was better than being caught by the police. At this point the police might be shooting to kill. The keys were in the ignition, dangling there.

But maybe the vehicle wouldn’t start, she thought. Then she pushed that thought from her mind. She tried not to think about the Ancient Enemy at all. Maybe it could follow their thoughts, maybe even read them. She tried to think of something else.

They were in Bruce’s Chevy Tahoe. Bruce the salesman who had been so friendly to them when they were standing by the vending machines, the man who had seemed so lonely, like he just wanted someone to talk to for a few minutes, the man who was dead now.

Dead because of her.

She wondered if Bruce had a family. Kids of his own. There were a few suits of clothes on hangers in the back seat, a dark blue suit and a black one. They covered one of the back windows. The rear of the SUV was filled with boxes of samples of whatever he was selling.

They were quiet for a moment as they sat there. Cole had his seat leaned back, one foot up on the dash beside the steering wheel, stretching his leg out. He stared out at the darkness beyond the windshield, lost in thought. He had one of his pistols resting in his lap, ready if he needed it.

“What was that back there?” he finally said.

Stella didn’t answer.

“Are there more than one of those things?” he asked, looking at her. He kept his voice low so he wouldn’t wake David up.

“I … I don’t think so,” Stella said. “I think all those things are part of the same … the same organism.”

“What makes you say that?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just seems that way to me.”

“But maybe there are a lot of those things and they’re like …” He seemed to be struggling with the concept for a moment. “Like they’re all connected together through their thoughts.”

“Like some kind of hive mentality?”

“Yeah. Like bees or ants are all separate creatures but they operate with the same goal. But this would be way more—”

“More complicated than ants or bees,” she said, nodding like she understood what he was trying to say. “It’s like the pieces of this thing can split off and do things separately, but then all the pieces can come back together as a whole any time it wants to.”

“You saw those things crawling out of Trevor, Jose, Frank, and the others at the cabin when it was burning, didn’t you?”

Stella nodded.

“They seemed to be changing … like changing their form. They were like giant insects for a minute, then like some kind of thing out of the ocean, then like something I’ve never seen before. And they crawled out of those bodies, and they joined together. And then … then they were gone.”

She nodded. She remembered.

“And today at the hotel, when I shot at them, they just … just disappeared again like they’d done at the cabin.”

“The air seemed to actually warp around them when they disappeared,” she reminded Cole. “Like it had altered the space around it, the very molecules.”

“This is like science fiction shit,” Cole said. “Something you’d see in some kind of horror movie about aliens from another planet.” He thought for a moment. “You said something about aliens before when we were at the cabin. Do you think this thing could be some kind of alien?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. It could be. Who knows? The Navajo, along with many other southwestern Native Americans, have stories of Star People that came down to Earth, supernatural beings. Some of these Star People are actually in their origin stories. And there are many who believe that cultures have been visited by aliens many times in the past.”

Cole shook his head in frustration and looked out the window. “How the hell are we supposed to fight an alien … something from another planet?”

Stella glanced into the back seat and looked at David. He was still curled up on his side and sleeping deeply. She had covered him up with one of the suits that Bruce had hanging up by the back door. She was glad to see David getting some sleep now.

She looked back at Cole who was still staring at her in the darkness. She could see his breaths fogging up in front of him. It was beginning to get pretty cold in here. “I just wanted to say … to say thank you for saving us. You could’ve run if you wanted to back at the motel. You were already in this truck; you could’ve just kept on driving.”

“I told you I wasn’t going to run out on you.”

“Yeah. And I’m sorry we ran out on you.”

He just stared at her.

“I was just scared,” she said.

“I know you find it hard to trust me,” Cole said. “I understand that totally. I’m a criminal. But like I told you back in the cabin, I’ve been trying to change my ways for a while now. The only reason I was at that bank was because of my brother. I wanted to do this one last job so he could pay Frank off.”

She nodded.

“I’ve been trying really hard to change my ways,” he told her. “And I’m
still
trying very hard.”

“I know.”

He smiled and nodded as he started the truck. “Okay. Now let’s go steal another truck.”

Cody’s Pass, Colorado—The Mountainside Inn

E
verything was turning to shit pretty quickly for Special Agent Palmer.

He stood in the lobby of the Mountainside Inn which now had a gaping hole where the lobby doors used to be. Shattered glass and twisted pieces of aluminum framing lay scattered on the lobby floor and outside in the drop-off part of the parking area. And right in the middle of that wreckage lay Travis Conrad’s body, twisted and run over. He had a gun near him, a gun that was registered to his dead father, a gun that had apparently been fired recently. He also had a severed finger in his shirt pocket—a finger that Palmer was willing to bet was a perfect match to the missing finger on his mother’s hand.

There were two other bodies in the lobby—the clerk whose bottom half wasn’t lining up at all with his top half, and the remains of one of the guests, a man named Bruce Goldman. It looked like Bruce had fallen into a meat grinder and then was pulled out before the machine was able to turn him completely into hamburger. Bruce’s vehicle was missing from the parking lot, a 2012 Chevy Tahoe. It was most likely the vehicle that had been used to the smash through the lobby doors and run Travis over.

There were no answers here to these murders, no reason for them, no obvious method of how two of them had been done.

And there were a few other things making all of this much worse for Special Agent Palmer.

Number one: There was a growing group of reporters, journalists, and camera operators gathering outside in the early evening beyond the police tape. Their vans were parked in the parking lot, cameras raised up on poles on top of the roofs, lights set up. Attractive male and female reporters clenched microphones in their hands with their local news station logos on them and they wore practiced grim expressions on their face. Some of the reporters were from the local paper and the nearest TV station, but a few of them had already come down from Denver. And there were probably a lot more of them flying in at this very moment. Palmer wasn’t sure where all of these people were going to stay because the town’s hotel was now a major crime scene.

Someone had already leaked this story to the press. Maybe it was one of the cops at the burnt cabin, or maybe even one of the firefighters, someone willing to take a few hundred dollars in exchange for this swarm of reporters invading their small town.

Number two: Sheriff Hadley was still in shock. He stood in front of Travis Conrad’s body. He wasn’t the only one who was traumatized; all of the local cops on the scene stood around with the wide-eyed look of shock in their eyes, like they were trying to navigate through a world they couldn’t understand anymore, a world they never could’ve imagined.

Three: Palmer had called Alonzo Johnson and Susan Dorsett, the lead forensics technicians down at the New Mexico sites. They had tested for DNA evidence, and they had plenty from the victims, but nothing from a perp. No animal or human DNA whatsoever. No blood or skin samples, no clothing fibers, not a single hair. It was like those people down there had been killed by something invisible … by something that wasn’t
there
.

And here was number four … his ringing cell phone. It didn’t take Cardenelli too long to hear about these murders on the news and/or an internet report. Thank God Cardenelli had only heard about the murders here in Colorado on the news and not the ones in New Mexico yet. Palmer was surprised those details hadn’t been leaked to the press yet, but he thought that maybe the Navajo didn’t want a ton of reporters and cameras trampling across their land so they weren’t willing to sell themselves to reporters so quickly or cheaply.

Agent Palmer answered his phone. It was the third time Cardenelli had called. He had already left two voicemails threatening bodily harm if he didn’t call him back right away … he couldn’t ignore his boss any longer.