The Bone Triangle (28 page)

Still, I waited. I didn’t run out and flag it down. I trusted no one in this place. More importantly, the voice I heard distantly wasn’t that of a woman. It was someone else. Perhaps it was one of the guys from the pillbox, wanting me to come out and make things easy for them.

Eventually, the car returned to the post office lot. I ducked low in the bedraggled, dead trees nearby and watched a man enter the building. He’d left the engine running.

I hesitated only briefly. This could be my shot, and as an impetuous person, I was determined to take it. I ran out of my hiding place—staying invisible—and jumped into the convertible. I put my foot on the accelerator and tore out of the parking lot. The man who’d gone inside, probably to look for me, ran out after me. I saw him clearly for a moment as the headlights splashed over his surprised face.

It was Detective Jay McKesson.

I threw the car into park and stood up on the seat. I aimed both my weapons at him. He raised his hands and walked toward the car. I squinted at him in the light. I wanted to be sure it was the real McKesson. Unlike the thing I’d killed back in the post office, he stood up to close scrutiny. He stood blinking in the glare of my headlights.

“Where’d you go?” he asked, looking around suspiciously.

I realized I was still invisible. I liked the advantage and hopped out of the running car. He walked up to it cautiously, pulling out a new revolver that flashed with a chrome finish in the headlights. He had the pistol ready, but aimed at the sky.

“Draith? Is that you?”

“I’m me,” I said. “I’m sure of that. The question is: are you really McKesson?”

He leaned into the car and twisted the key, killing the engine. That’s when I put my gun up to the back of his head.
I was pretty sure he really was McKesson, but that didn’t mean he was on my side.

“Freeze, Jay,” I said. I stayed invisible, but he could feel the cold muzzle of the gun, invisible or not.

He froze. “You are one sneaky bastard, Draith,” he said. “But it won’t help you out here, and we don’t have much time.”

“We have all the time in the world,” I told him, taking the gun out of his hand and throwing it into the backseat.

“Is that my own gun you have at my ear?”

“Yeah. And yes, I’ll blow you away if I don’t hear what I want to hear right now.”

“Why so hostile?”

“I’ve got plenty of reasons. For instance, I just killed a Jacqueline look-alike. Know anything about that?”

“Did it have fangs?”

“Yeah.”

“Did it like to hang back in the darkness and ask you to come closer?”

“You sent it, didn’t you?”

“No, but I know the type of alien you’re talking about. They haunt this place sometimes. There’s a rip that appears naturally at the center of this town every week or so. Sometimes they slip in.”

“What the hell are they?”

He shrugged. “Doppelgängers. Vampires. Call them what you like. They come from someplace else and prey upon whomever they can catch. They like to appear as someone you know. I’ve been out here before, and I had to kill my own mom once. Unfortunately for the alien I met up with, I knew my mom had been dead and gone for years.”

I thought about that and wondered if the creatures he described could read minds, at least superficially. Just
enough to pick up on the appearance of someone you would trust. I shuddered. These things were worse than the Gray Men.

“Okay,” I said. “I believe you. You’re McKesson and you didn’t send that thing after me. But there’s more I want to know. Start with telling me what you are doing out here.”

“Searching for you, what does it look like?”

I had to admit he had me there. “Okay, how did you know I was out here, and how did you get past the soldiers at Gate 100?”

His teeth were clenched, and I could see he was looking for me out of the corner of his eye. I could tell he couldn’t see me, and that seemed to have him worried. I decided I liked him better when he was worried.

“Jacqueline came to tell me about your little adventure. She asked me to help get you out of here—and by the way, you should never have come up here.”

“It was your idea, man!”

“I know, but I didn’t think you’d walk right into the middle of it. I thought maybe you’d take a tour or something.”

“They don’t give tours anymore. In case you haven’t noticed, this place has been shut down to the public.”

“Yeah, okay, I get that. Hey, how come I can’t see you?”

“I’m asking the questions. Just keep looking at the town. Why did the guards let you in, and why did you come out here, anyway?”

“The answer to both questions is the Community. I used the right names, and I got past the guards. I came because the Community sent me.”

“Why?”

“Because things have gone bad back in town. Things have gotten…out of hand. Last night, a couple of buildings
disappeared. Just housing projects, mind you, but they can’t keep a lid on it anymore. They want it stopped.”

I wasn’t sure what to think. I’d never trusted McKesson completely, but he wasn’t usually a liar. His method was to give you half the truth, then to let you figure out the rest on your own. My job, therefore, was to figure out what he was holding back.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll buy your story. The Beast has gone berserk and the Community wants all hands on deck to stop it. But why don’t they march out the army or something and deal with it directly?”

“Nobody wants that. This isn’t a Godzilla movie. The government has a deal with the powers that rule our hometown. Haven’t you figured it out by now? They get to play god in their little domains with their objects, and in return they maintain order. Mostly, that means they cover up any freakish events that happen in Vegas. I’m the guy who does the dirty work—or no, I’m lower than that. I’m the mop.”

I nodded. I was beginning to get the picture. The government was working behind the scenes, experimenting and the like. But they needed cover. In return for that cover, they allowed the Community to do as they liked. Las Vegas was a playground for the powerful. I suspected the city always had been, one way or another.

“That’s a nice setup,” I said. “But I’m not part of that deal anymore. I’m a rogue, and even for a rogue, I’m a troublemaker.”

I stepped back and let him turn and look around wildly for me.

“You’ll get no arguments from me about that,” he said loudly, as if I might have run off. “But I’m here to offer you a new deal. You can stay on this reservation, rattling around
like old man Trujillo as long as you like. Or as long as you don’t like—it will be a life sentence, I suspect. Either that, or you come with me and help deal with the Beast.”

I put away the bottle and rubbed my face with my free hand. I kept the gun pointed at McKesson’s face while I considered the deal.

I let myself become visible without saying anything. He recoiled at my sudden appearance. He didn’t say anything, however.

“How do we get out past the pillboxes?” I asked him.

“We don’t. Like I said, it’s a one-way trip into this zone, and we’ve already taken it.”

“How then?”

He lifted a hand and wiggled his fingers over his coat pocket. “May I?”

“Do it.”

He reached into his pocket and took out a silver half-dollar, as I’d suspected he would. He placed it on the car’s hood and spun it. Soon a rip formed above the hood. I wondered if it would singe the shiny red paint. I decided it didn’t matter, as the car was going to stay right here.

“We’ve got to go before they figure out what I’m doing.”

I reached into the backseat and grabbed his gun. I figured we might just need an extra weapon. “Let’s do this,” I said, gesturing toward the rip. “After you.”

He climbed up onto the hood, the bumper creaking a little under his feet. Without hesitating he stepped into the rip, and I quickly followed him. My biggest worry was that the rip would vanish somehow, leaving me out here. I wasn’t sure where we were going, or how we would get back to Earth, but I was certain I didn’t want to spend any more time in Mercury, Nevada.

When I stepped out of our world into another, I wasn’t sure where I was going. I did know the coin could take me to only two places, both of which were hot and inhospitable. The rip itself was globe-like, but faded fast as I came through. I knew enough to stand clear, as being in the middle of a rip when it was closing could be fatal. I’d once lost a lot of skin that way, as a tiny hole between two worlds contracted to nothing. It had been like being caught between two passing trucks or in a tiny space between two grinding boulders.

When the rip was gone, I found myself standing on dark ash. The smell of the place, and the look of it, told me immediately where I was. There was no brilliant sky full of bright stars or a single glaring sun. Instead, the atmosphere was gray, smoky, and thick. Everywhere around us were pools of molten rock. They bubbled and released sulfurous vapor.

“Ezzie’s homeworld, I assume,” I said. “Why here?”

McKesson shrugged. He wasn’t looking at me, but was instead scanning all the nearest lava pools closely. I knew what he was looking for. The lava-slugs were swimming out there, and they might have sensed our arrival by now.

“We had only two choices. This one is less dangerous—especially since I think it’s daylight back on the beach world. I’ve already absorbed enough of that star’s radiation for a lifetime.”

“Where do we go from here?”

“It’s going to be a hike. I don’t know this region. But I do know that we should head south. If we do it right, and go about five miles before switching back to Earth, we should be in the foothills on the other side of Indian Springs.”

“What if we screw up?”

He smiled. “Then we come out on the highway, maybe. Or in front of a pillbox. It’s best to go a little too far and not miss.”

We started walking. I was glad I had my backpack with me. I offered McKesson a bottle of water. He sniffed at it suspiciously for a moment, then guzzled it down.

“Thanks. Thirsty work out here.”

“You’ve earned it, I guess. You didn’t have to come back for me. Or did you?”

He shrugged again, and we left it at that. We marched across loose shale and ash. Now and then, McKesson paused to kick at a promising nodule of solidified rock. Sometimes, gems were revealed when the nodule broke. He handed me two large, rough stones followed by what looked like a gold nugget the size of a hen’s egg. I took all these and pocketed them.

“What do you do with all the money you haul out of this place?” I asked. “You don’t seem rich.”

“I stash it,” he said. “In another country. Three other countries, actually. If I ever need to disappear, I plan to be very hard to find.”

I thought about McKesson as I followed him between the lava pools. He didn’t wear flashy clothes or drive flashy cars. I was certain that he wasn’t motivated by wealth. But I didn’t think he was a thrill-seeker like Jacqueline, either.

“Why do you do it, Jay?” I asked him. “Why do you put up with the smug Community and all their bullshit?”

He glanced back at me. “You know the answer to that one, don’t you? We all have our reasons. Why don’t you leave town? Why don’t you go to LA, sit on the beach, and stare at bikinis? Because you’d be bored, right?”

“Not just that. I want to know what’s going on.”

He laughed at me, shaking his head. “Did you find your folks out here?”

“I learned they died in the experiments.”

“Does that make you any happier?”

“The details didn’t bring me joy,” I admitted, “but I had to find the answers. I’m glad to know the truth, even if the answer was tragic. At least I know who I am. A brat from Mercury. A man with an erased past.”

“Well, I’m not in this to learn new secrets. I’m in this to stop the invaders, to keep them out of my town. This alien with the tentacles has gotten too greedy. We’re finally going to take him down.”

“But why did you send me out to Mercury?” I asked him.

He glanced back at me. “You wanted to know who you were, and what the Beast was. I just told you where to get the answers.”

“So you knew I came from the testing sites?”

“Not exactly, but you’ve always shown a powerful resistance to the objects. That happens sometimes with prolonged exposure. In your case, it’s been lifelong. I didn’t know your past, but I suspected it had to involve the test zones.”

Thinking over his answers, I trudged quietly behind him for another hundred yards. We passed a massive lava pool, giving it a wide berth due to the overwhelming heat that emanated from it. When a bubble a foot across popped in the middle of the pool, I ducked reflexively. Gloppy droplets of molten stone flew in every direction, but the disturbance was too far away to reach us.

“There’s a swimmer,” McKesson said. “It’s a big one.”

“What? The bubble?”

“That’s no bubble. Come on.”

He began to jog upslope. I followed, stumbling and glancing back over my shoulder. I saw a ripple out there,
but thought it could be just the stirring of the surface. As it died down, I slowed. McKesson kept moving quickly. I fell behind.

“It’s just some kind of geothermal—never mind.”

Behind us, the edge of the pool splashed. Something was out there all right, something big enough to push a wave of lava and flotsam on the surface ahead of it. I began running again. The loose shale and stones shifted under my feet, clinking and clattering as they slid behind me into the crater.