Runaway Heart (26 page)

     
After a minute the doctor returned with two CDF men wearing
camouflage. "Lie down. Take off your underwear and spread your legs."

     
"Ain't gonna happen," Herman said.

     
"I'll give it to him," the doctor ordered. Immediately
the two CDF commandos jumped Herman and held him while the doctor gave him a
shot. In seconds he was asleep.

     
Herman didn't often dream, or at least he didn't remember much if
he did. But now he dreamed a strange, terrifying tale. The nightmare was
populated with half-reptile, half-human monsters and large bat-like creatures.

     
He also dreamed of Gino Zimbaldi—relived his trip to JPL, talked
with Zimmy about the Ten-Eyck Chimera file, explaining Roland's death and his
desperate need to get the fifty pages decoded. As he was talking to Zimmy the
huge monster bats hovered over him.

     
Herman woke up.

     
He was back inside Barbra's car with a terrible headache.

     
He squinted out the window at the little baseball diamond. The sun
was already up. He looked at his digital
watch. The battery was dead.
Strange,
he thought.
The
watch is only six months old.
His groin was killing him so he unbuttoned
his pants and looked down at his abdomen.

     
He had a bandage there. Herman slowly peeled it off. Underneath
were four sutures closing a tiny incision.

     
They'd done some kind of operation on him!

     
Shaken, he opened the car door and stumbled out, leaning against
the silver Mercedes, fumbling with his pants while he tried to remember what
had happened. The dreamlike nightmare was receding quickly, but he tried hard
to recall it so it would stay in his conscious mind. Everything up to when the
doctor gave him the shot was clear. After that, only the hateful dream. When he
got to the part about Zimmy it seemed less like a dream and more like a memory.

Herman took his pulse.

     
His heart was normal, beating a steady seventy-eight beats per
minute. He'd had the arrhythmia when he went to the base and now it was gone.
From everything he'd learned from his doctors, once an arrhythmia started it
had to be converted in order to reverse the condition. But this one had gone
away on its own. Herm wondered how that could be.

     
He was pretty sure he had been on the fourth level of Dreamland,
somewhere near Nightmare Hall. Gil and Tom had said that the experimentation
unit was on the same level as the medical facility. Of course, he had no
physical evidence, and he couldn't prove any of it. Except for one thing.

     
His sinuses.

     
Whatever was blooming in the central Nevada desert always got him.
Every time he was there his sinuses ended up packed tighter than a Midas
muffler, and right now they were completely plugged.

     
Herman pushed away from the Mercedes and walked across the
baseball diamond looking for Jack Wirta's Fair-lane. He found it parked a short
distance down the dirt road. Wirta was sleeping in the back seat.

     
Herman reached in and shook his shoulder.

     
"Jack . . . hey, Jack. Wake up!"

     
The P.I. opened his eyes and looked up at Herman.
"Shit," he said and sat up. "What happened? Where am I? What
time is it?"

     
"I'm not sure what happened. We're back at that little
baseball diamond in the Malibu Mountains. My watch is fried, so I don't know
what time it is."

     
Jack looked at his watch. "Mine's dead, too." He shook
his head. "One minute I'm pissing in a cup and getting a shot, next thing
I'm back here and I got some fucked-up dreams."

     
"I think I know—at least, I have an idea. But we gotta make
sure Susan's okay first."

     
"Susan?"

     
"If they took us, I'm worried they mighta snatched her,
too."

     
Herman ran back to the Mercedes. It was strange, but he ran as he
hadn't been able to run in years.

     
He climbed in the car, started it, then drove past Jack, who made
a K-turn and followed.

     
Herman sped down the small road heading toward the beach and
Susan, dreading what he might find there.

W
hat they found was Susan sitting in the
guest house with a strained, worried expression. She had been halfheartedly
working on a UCLA application for student aid, and sprang to her feet as they
came through the door.

     
"Thank God you're all right," Herman said.

     
"Where the hell have you two been? I called the cops, but
they said they don't investigate missing persons cases for forty-eight
hours."

     
"Honey, you remember Gil and Tom?"

     
"Of course I remember. How could I forget them?" But she
was furrowing her brow.

     
"Honey, you won't believe it. You won't, but you have
to."

     
"What?" She was getting impatient now.

     
"We . ..
 
Jack and I
were kidnapped by CDF troops. We were taken away in an Aurora Hyper
Whispership—a prototype, I think."

     
"A what?" Jack mumbled. His split lip where Paul hit him
was sore and causing a lisp.

     
"It's a prototype aircraft. An Aurora Whispership."

     
"You sure it wasn't a Klingon Star Fighter?" Jack
blurted.

     
"I heard the pilot calling Dreamland Control. He said, 'We're
entering The Box.' He said, 'this is Psych Twenty-seven.' Tom and Gil told me
that Psych series aircraft were Aurora prototypes being tested at Area
Fifty-one. They said the government was working on noise-cloaking devices for
aircraft called 'Whisperships.' "

     
"Wait. Hold on a minute.
Who
went to Area
Fifty-one?" Jack asked.

     
"We
did."

     
"We did?"

     
"You bet we did. What kinda detective are you? We were out
there inside the secure Dulce Genetics Lab on Level Four." He turned to
Susan. "You remember what's done down there, honey?"

     
"Nightmare Hall," she said. But the way she said it was
disbelieving and incredulous.

     
"It's where the government is doing research on aliens,"
Herm said. "At least, that's what Tom and Gil thought."

     
"Whoa! Hold it! I'm not doing any
X-Files
shit."

     
"Look, Jack, that's where we were."

     
"That's where
you
were. I was at a plain old military
base in the desert with guys wearing standard GI camouflage. There were no Star
Fleet salutes and no aliens. Trust me, I saw everything."

     
"We had on hoods. How could you see it?"

     
"My hood was leaking. They got a moth problem they need to
address."

     
"You're kidding? You saw what was out there?"

     
"Kinda." Now Jack was taking a step backward because
Herman was moving in on him, that intense look back on his raccoon face.

     
"Like what?" Herman challenged. "What did you
see?"

     
"Like what? Like miles of runways. Looked like they went all
the way to the horizon."

     
"The long strip on Papoose Lake! What else?"

     
"I don't know . . . little dirt-covered hangars. Calm down,
will ya?"

     
"The igloos!" Herman shouted and spun triumphantly
toward Susan. "He saw the igloos!"

     
"No igloos. No Alaskans, no polar bears, no ice. Just little
hangars built into mounds of dirt."

     
"They're called igloos. They drag the prototype aircraft off
the runways and hide 'em in there when the Russian satellites go over."
Herman was really getting excited.

     
"This proves what Tom and Gil were saying."

     
"Really?" Susan seemed less sure.

     
"We were
there,
honey. I
know
it! My sinuses. .
. my sinuses were plugged when I got back. You know that's the only place I get
sinus allergies."

     
"You use your sinuses for global positioning?" Jack
sneered.

    
 
"Dad, slow
down a minute."

     
"We were there. Right inside Dreamland, right where Gil said
they were doing tests on the aliens."

     
"Herm, you've gotta stop with this alien stuff," Jack
pleaded. "You sound like some lunatic who just took a ride in a spaceship.
Keep it up and you're gonna start getting your meals delivered under the
door."

     
"Roland was killed by something that went right up the side
of a glass tower, hung there, and pried open a window. A feat requiring
superhuman strength. Then whatever it was ripped Roland apart. Shredded
him."

     
Jack turned to Susan. "Make him stop."

     
"I think a hybrid, a Ten-Eyck chimera did it. Yes—some
half-man, half-space-alien, gene-spliced by using DNA from a dead intergalactic
traveler."

     
"From the planet Ten-Eyck?" Jack said sarcastically.

     
"Maybe. Yeah. . . why not? A hybrid made at Dreamland in
Nightmare Hall."

     
"Excuse me. I gotta go outside and cough up a furball."
Jack turned and walked out of the room onto the porch.

     
He sat in one of the Brown Jordan deck chairs, his ass right
there, pressed against the same white plastic that Barbra Streisand and Jim
Brolin pressed their asses against. Not much of a thought, admittedly, but he
was trying for some earthly reality. He decided that regardless of his
attraction to Susan, he had to dump this gig.

     
His memory of the trip was nothing like Herm's. Okay, the
helicopter
had
been strange. He'd seen something with angled sides and
all kinds of panels hanging off it. And, yes, it
had
been incredibly
quiet, and he'd heard the Dreamland Control radio transmission, same as Herm.
But that was a long way from hybrid aliens.

     
What Jack remembered about their kidnapping was a little out
there, but certainly not from some George Lucas epic. He remembered seeing the
guys in camouflage with little round patches on their pockets. He remembered
being put in a car and driven across the base, seeing the whatevers—the igloos,
and the little one-story building with all the security. He had caught a
glimpse of that door lock, squinting through the pinhole in his hood. There was
a unique procedure for getting into the place: Everybody was dressed the same
and each had an ID card that, he guessed, must have been reissued every
morning, because it confirmed the individual's
exact weight.
The
soldiers stepped on a scale and were weighed along with their weapons, then
they inserted the card into a slot to verify the scale weight. Jack guessed
nobody got to take a piss or sweat on duty. Next there was some kind of eye
scan where a laser went into the left eye and read capillaries or indecent
thoughts— something. After which the door slid open.

     
Jack remembered the ride down in the elevator, going to the little
medical room, and the doctor with the bushy brown hair. Then Jack Wirta,
private eye, was pissing into a cup like an NFL wide receiver.
DNA!

     
Then came the shot and the strange dream. The dream was sort of a
replay of the trip he and Susan took to San Fran. He never remembered having a
dream that seemed like a memory before. He and Susan were back in Alioto's
Restaurant. He'd been telling her what the coroner's report said. . . He'd also
dreamed about several of the conversations he'd had with Herman.

     
He stood up and walked over to the patio wall, propped his foot
up, and wished he hadn't stopped smoking. While he was having these thoughts he
looked down and saw it.

     
The sand was still wet from the rainstorm that had passed through
after making its way south from San Francisco. The midnight downpour had
darkened the sand and hardened it. Just outside the low brick wall there were a
bunch of
footprints. He leaned over and studied them. They all had the same sole
markings, but appeared to be three different sizes. That meant three men.