Authors: David DeBatto
At the edge of the fire, a young woman named Rainbow stood with her back to the light, gazing up at the stars, visible to
the east, the moon overhead gone now behind a bank of clouds. She’d never felt this good, ever, never known just how one-with-the-universe
it was possible to become—it was everything she’d read about in her studies of Eastern mysticism and Zen philosophy, but it
was better, because this, this night, this ceremony, this special group of people, had somehow managed to tie it all together,
the ancient and authentic past (as represented by the Native Americans) and the realizable future, as represented by the crew
from the
Enterprise.
They were at the cosmic tipping point between universal epochs, the leader said, and she knew it was true. She loved how
for the first time in her life, she felt like she could be whoever she wanted to be. She wasn’t sure what that was, exactly,
but it didn’t matter—it was the freedom itself that she felt, more than how that freedom manifested itself. So what if the
Hopi warrior was really a Jewish librarian from Denver, and the Navaho medicine man owned a science-fiction bookstore in Flagstaff,
and the Mescalero shaman was currently living off Social Security in Bisbee—tonight, anything was possible.
“I love you,” she said to the sky, watching for movement. The ship was coming. Brother Antonionus had promised it would come.
The idea made her so happy. Perhaps it would beam them up and take them with them, or perhaps it would simply study them tonight,
in order to better prepare for the final ascension. It was an auspicious night. “I love you so much. I’m so grateful. I really
am. I love you so much,” she told the universe, letting the tears come. It was the way she’d been meant to feel. It was everything
she’d lacked in Seattle, working in a cubicle for a running shoe company, dehumanized and joyless, in a town where the permanently
overcast sky hung like a fat gray mattress about a hundred feet above the ground—that’s what it felt like.
That was wrong. This was right.
She wondered, vaguely, what had happened to her daughter Ruby, but knew she had to be around somewhere. The universe was too
benevolent to let anything happen to Ruby—Rainbow couldn’t afford to worry about it. The earth would take care of Ruby. Rainbow
tried to remember the lesson: Stress created negative vibrations, and negative vibrations interrupted the frequency upon which
the universe resonated, whereas positive vibrations harmonized with it. That’s what Brother Antonionus told them, and he’d
gotten that straight from the Rigelians themselves.
“Brothers and sisters,” the man in the white robes with the beatific smile on his face said, his blue eyes glazed and sparkling
with an inner radiance, “People of the Light—move to the rhythm of the universe and feel the pulse of the planets. They are
watching you, my brethren. They see what you do and they feel what you feel. They are waiting for their children to come home.
They are coming to take us home, once we show them we are ready…”
Ruby was bored. She’d spent the day helping the grown-ups make a gigantic mandala in the sand that was supposed to serve as
a landing pad, but she was frankly (and secretly) hoping that the UFOs didn’t come tonight, even though she knew her mother
would be disappointed. Ruby didn’t care—her friends were having a slumber party next weekend, and she wanted to go. All in
all, she was pretty excited about the possibility of traveling to another planet and hanging out with super-intelligent aliens,
or at least she was at first, but the more she thought about it, the more she felt like maybe she needed to spend a little
more time on this planet, and besides, when she hung out with the super-intelligent kids at school, she didn’t have any fun
at all.
She’d taken a flashlight and wandered off to look for javelinas, the wild pigs that sometimes followed each other around with
their noses in each other’s butts because they were so nearsighted they couldn’t see ten feet in front of themselves. She
checked over her shoulder occasionally to keep the watch fire in view, but she wasn’t worried about getting lost.
She was surprised when she felt something hard rap against the top of her skull, as if a squirrel had thrown an acorn from
a tree, and then another, and a third, until she realized they were raindrops, not acorns. Storms could blow up fast in the
desert, she knew. She knew also that it could be dangerous to be caught in a wash, where flash floods could sweep you away
in an instant.
She turned and headed back to the fire, but then she heard something and stopped.
Something in the desert.
Crying out.
She turned her flashlight toward the sound.
In the distance, she saw something move.
It was a woman, a Native American woman—a real one, not one of the fakes who liked to dance around watch fires and take their
tops off.
The woman stopped when she saw Ruby’s flashlight. Ruby was about to call out to her, and say something like, “Over here—come
this way—you can wait with us until the storm passes,” but then something happened.
She wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but it was like a flash of light, without the light. Like somebody was taking her picture
with a flashbulb, but she’d blinked at the last minute, except that she hadn’t blinked, and now there was a bright blue streak
on the back of her retina, but she couldn’t say why, except that she was looking at a woman, and then the woman sort of… melted, and now the woman was gone.
Ruby couldn’t breathe.
Ruby couldn’t move.
For a second, she thought she’d dreamed what she’d just experienced. As she collected her wits about her, Ruby then thought
what she’d seen was a woman being struck by some sort of invisible lightning. And lightning brought with it thunder, which,
at so short a distance, should have been deafening—Ruby had heard only a soft crackling, and then a snap.
And then the woman was gone.
Maybe it was a dream, Ruby thought. Or maybe the image had been sent to her by somebody, the way some people saw the image
of the Virgin Mary in the frost on a windowpane—maybe it meant Ruby had been singled out to be a witness to something special,
except that she could still see the look of fear on the woman’s face, and the pain she felt as she burned. Ruby could definitely
smell something had burned, like the time she was trying to fry ants with a magnifying glass with her friend Cody and accidentally
lit her own hair on fire. The picture of the woman melting was not an image Ruby cared to carry with her—it frightened her—but
how was she going to get rid of it? Maybe if someone explained it to her.
Perhaps Brother Antonionus would know. He seemed knowledgeable about such matters.
Far away, in a darkened control room, lit only by the light of a liquid crystal display, a conversation:
“Collateral target acquired.”
“Positive lock?”
“Affirmative.”
“Biometrics?”
“Calibrating. One twenty-nine point five-four centimeters. Twenty-eight point two-six kilograms.”
“Human?”
“Probable orthodontia.”
“A child?”
“Female. Recommendations? Awaiting instructions.”
“Abort.”
Three weeks later, a Mexican girl named Rosario Flores, from the town of Hermosillo, in the state of Sonora, was arrested
in the kitchen of a Mexican restaurant in Tucson by agents from the INS who’d received a tip that the owner employed illegal
immigrants. She’d been taken into custody and searched, whereupon it was discovered that she was wearing a set of dog tags
she said she’d found in the desert, hanging from a branch of a palo verde tree in an arroyo. The dog tags belonged to a woman
named Cheryl Escavedo, a sergeant first class in the Arizona Army National Guard. A call to her unit by INS revealed that
she’d been recently reported missing from her job at an entry-processing center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. INS was asked
to hold Rosario Flores in custody.
Flores was cooperative and told INS that she’d been taken to the border in a windowless step-van, along with twenty-five or
so other people, all willing to pay the coyote three hundred dollars apiece to get them into the United States. They’d been
let out of the van in the dead of night, somewhere in the desert, to relieve themselves, got back in the van and drove north
in the darkness and transferred to a windowless tractor-trailer, to be let out again in a warehouse in Tucson. For all she
knew, she could have crossed the border anywhere from Yuma to El Paso. She was sorry she’d taken the dog tags. She found them
when she was looking for a place to go to the bathroom. She hadn’t known what they were. She didn’t want to go back to Hermosillo.
Couldn’t she please stay?
When Escavedo’s Jeep was found abandoned near Spirit Mountain, on the Tohono O’Odham reservation, at the side of a road called
Camino del Diablo, not far from the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument and the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Testing Range,
the Pentagon was informed. The Jeep appeared to have been hit by lightning, the local authorities said, probably after it
had been abandoned. The tribal police asked the Pentagon what they wanted them to do.
The Pentagon said they’d send somebody out to investigate, and to sit tight until he arrived.
TWENTY YEARS AGO, WHEN COUNTERINTELligence agent David DeLuca was a rookie cop with the Yuma police department, his first
thought, looking into a missing person and an abandoned vehicle on or near the reservation, would have been that the disappearance
was alcohol related. It was simply, unfortunately, a fact of life. The girl he’d been sent to find had lost both parents to
alcohol, had been raised by a grandmother, no longer living, and an uncle—it wasn’t unusual either to see the habits of substance
abuse passed down from one generation to the next. Yet the girl had been a straight-A student at Goldwater High in Somerton,
a lifelong teetotaler who’d worked in a shelter for Cocopah women from homes where alcohol abuse had led to other forms of
abuse. Ben Yutahay, the tribal policeman who’d met him to assist in the investigation, ruled out alcohol. His son Marvin had
known Cheryl in high school and said she didn’t drink, even then, when everybody did.
Ben, Marvin, and DeLuca stood in the desert, the light growing in the east and only the last few brightest stars still shining
overhead.
“If that’s lightning,” said Ben Yutahay, squatting in the dust next to the abandoned Jeep, “it’s the funniest lightning strike
I’ve ever seen. Not that it can’t do funny things. I saw a guy once who got his shoes blown off by a direct hit but other
than that, he was fine. But this is strange.”
“How so?” DeLuca said. He’d worked with Yutahay twenty years ago and had considered him a friend, though they’d gone separate
ways and not stayed in touch, DeLuca back east to the Boston P.D., Yutahay transferring over to the tribal authority, where
he headed up a unit of “Shadow Wolves,” so dubbed by the media for the way they could track the immigrant-smuggling “coyotes”
and
narcotraficantes
through the desert, preferring the early morning and twilight hours, when the low sun cast long shadows that made the tracks
stand out against the desert floor. With F-16s from the 56th Fighter Wing in Gila Bend making practice bombing runs in the
Goldwater Proving Grounds and Marines completing their desert training before heading off to the Middle East, it was a particularly
dangerous place to be an illegal immigrant. DeLuca and Yutahay had left the motel at four in the morning. After a late flight
to Phoenix and the puddle-jumper to Yuma, it had been after midnight when DeLuca checked in. He was exhausted, and yet the
desert sunrise somehow revived him.
“Usually when lightning hits a car, it runs down the outer surface to the ground. Sometimes it melts the tires or the windshield
wipers but it leaves what’s inside alone. That’s why people are safer in lightning storms staying in their cars. Sometimes
you get a side flash where the electricity runs along the surface from the car to something more grounded, like a tree or
a saguaro, maybe. These tires are fine and there’s no side flash. All the damage is inside. But like I said, you can’t always
predict what lightning is going to do. If you could, it wouldn’t be lightning.”
His hair was going gray, and he’d put on about forty pounds since DeLuca had last seen him, but other than that he was the
same, with the same dry sense of humor that DeLuca remembered. His son Marvin was a spitting image of his younger self, DeLuca
thought. Marvin had come along because, Ben said, Marvin was finally thinking of learning a trade and making an honest living
in law enforcement, instead of sneaking around digging up rocks to sell at the big gem shows in Los Angeles or Santa Fe. Marvin
was crouched next to his father, who was pointing at something under the car.
“This is her uncle’s car,” Yutahay said over his shoulder. “I wonder how she got it.”
Ben stood and crossed to where DeLuca was scrutinizing the horizon. It was beautiful rough country, and though he was happy
in Massachusetts, sometimes he still missed the desert.
“The car stopped before the rain came, anyway,” Yutahay said. “There aren’t any splatter marks under the car. The electrical
system is a mess. I can’t tell you exactly but from the sloshing, I think she had plenty of gas.”
“Can you tell what time of day? Or night?”
“The weather report said the rain started falling around eleven, so it had to be before that, but probably not much before.
The headlights were left in the on position, but she left these in the car,” he said, handing DeLuca the flashlight and the
NVGs, both Army issue. “Why would she leave these in the car if it was dark out?”
The flashlight still worked. The batteries in the NVGs had drained.
“Full moon?”
Yutahay shook his head.
“Quarter moon,” he said. “Partly overcast that night, too.”
“Maybe she thought she didn’t need them?”