Bone chase, p.7
Bone Chase, page 7
A lot of supposition here. Not sure this is accurate —Matt
Wow! Just Wow! —Steve
Ethan sat back, realizing he’d been holding his breath. He let it out in a long, slow release.
These words that had been gathered, these thoughts on the screen, were enough to shatter the very idea of God. It was no wonder the Six-Fingered Man wanted them dead. It was no wonder there’d been so much secrecy surrounding it. That all the information had been hiding in plain sight all this time was stunning. It was as if the entire world wanted to believe in God and his host of angels despite the continued references to a race of giants.
First the term angel, then the sons of god, and now the term Nephilim. They didn’t mean what everyone thought they meant. For a brief moment Ethan shook his head and disbelieved what was on the pages before him. Maybe it was all wrong. Maybe Jonas of this document had taken too many liberties with facts and come to the wrong conclusion. It happened in math all the time when multiple operations were in the same equation, such as multiplication, addition, and subtraction. If the equation was solved in the order that the factors appeared, then the answer would be wrong. There was an established order of operations, which he taught as PEMDAS—parentheticals, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, and subtraction. The only way to solve for X accurately was to solve using the PEMDAS order. What if there was a critical element in the text that had been missed and which caused all of it to be wrong?
Shannon moaned in her sleep. She cried out softly. “No. No, stop.”
Ethan hurried across the room and sat on the bed beside her. He gripped her shoulder with one hand and stroked her still-damp hair with his other.
After a few moments, she stopped moaning. Then she opened her eyes. She stared at him, imploring, hungry.
He took her into his arms and kissed her like he’d never kissed another woman before. He felt desperate yet satisfied that this was where he should be. She was staring into his eyes. He wanted desperately to make love to her but worried that it might change things between them. So he kept his clothes on, kissing her, holding her.
“Don’t you want me?” she whispered finally.
“More than before.”
“I still love you, too, Ethan. I thought I wouldn’t. I was afraid to call, but your dad…”
“I’m glad you did call,” he said. “I thought I’d lost you forever.”
“I thought I’d lost you, too.”
He held her for a long time until she found sleep.
FACT: An 1870 edition of the Wisconsin Decatur Republican indicates that members of the Smithsonian were excavating from a giant mound when they unearthed battlements and fortifications. Among the many artifacts were the bones of eighteen large males in heights ranging from twelve to seventeen feet tall. They named this Fort Aztlan. Although the original article is still available, in the Smithsonian records there is no mention of any giants. Instead, the mound has been linked to an early American Indian culture who abandoned the mound in 1200 CE.
Smithsonian does it every time —Matt
ELEVEN
Nine the next morning saw them sitting in the parked Dodge across the street from the Way of Life Church—a single-story, L-shaped, gray stucco building with a large white cross above the door. The church and its empty, vast parking lot stood just east of the mobile-home park, separated by a six-foot block wall.
“See anyone watching?” Ethan asked. “I’m asking because I can’t tell. What are we supposed to look for if we don’t see any cameras or active surveillance?”
Shanny pointed at the traffic light. “There’s a license plate reader there, but no active surveillance. Looking at the state of the trailer park, I doubt there’s any sort of security.”
“I’m nervous,” Ethan said, sweating even though the Magnum was air-conditioned.
“I told you that I’d do this, Ethan. I don’t need you being all macho on me and trying to be the man. I’m perfectly capable.”
He glanced quickly at her, remembering how efficiently she’d taken down the old man in the rest-stop bathroom. “I know you are, Shanny. I just—I just need to be more involved. I put you in this position, so I need to participate.”
He could see her nodding and staring at him. “It’s okay to be scared, Ethan. I was always scared when I went outside the gates of our forward operating base.”
He realized he’d never asked her what had happened. “You said that you were medically discharged. What—I mean—I shouldn’t even be asking.” He shook his head in frustration. “Forget I ever asked.”
She regarded him. “No. It’s okay to ask. I’ve been waiting for it, actually.” She sighed. “I’d like to say I was shot by a terrorist or Iraqi freedom fighter. I’d like to say that I got blown up by an IED. But it was far less dramatic than that. I was shot by an accidental discharge.”
“An accidental— What’s that?” he asked.
“It’s when some piece-of-shit reserve army major has a round in the chamber of a rifle that is not on safe and he drops it. The round went through two walls and into my stomach. I woke up in Landstuhl, Germany, minus a spleen and three feet of small intestine.”
“Jesus. You mean you were shot by accident?”
“I was shot by incompetence.” She pursed her lips. “And now I can’t go back to any war zone.”
His eyes widened. “Wait. You’d want to go back?”
She sighed. “As crazy as it sounds, there’s a friendship one makes in a war zone unlike any others. There’s a feeling. You’re always on. You’re always ready to react. Everything is propelled by carefully controlled excitement. It’s nothing like the relative safety of America.”
“I don’t think I could do that,” Ethan said.
“Don’t sell yourself short. You don’t know what you can do until you’ve been put in that position.” She nodded to the trailer park. “Are we ready to go?”
He swallowed and nodded.
They were parked in a cul-de-sac in a housing division with a clear view of the mobile-home park and the church. They couldn’t see everything inside the mobile-home park, though, and were hesitant to enter without at least trying to detect surveillance.
There was movement at a window in one of the houses in the cul-de-sac—a woman’s head with her ear pressed against the phone she was talking into.
“We’re attracting attention,” Shanny said.
Ethan sighed. “Okay. Okay. I’m moving.”
Ethan put the Magnum in gear and drove out of the cul-de-sac, turned the corner, then pulled up to West Southerland Avenue. Across the street was the entrance to the mobile-home park. His plan was to drive through it to Sunland Avenue and take a right. They wouldn’t stop, but they’d go slow and see what there was to see.
Once there was a break in traffic, he crossed the road. A sign warned drivers that the speed limit was five miles an hour, and then they were in. The descriptive word that came to mind was dilapidated. Everything was faded by the scorching desert sun. Siding was peeled back or missing on several trailers. The small yards had toys and lawn chairs and the rusting hulks of old cars shoved into them. Not a single blade of grass or flower lived anywhere. The only color that broke the monotonous gray dirt was the trash that was spread all over the place.
An old woman sat on a porch, smoking a cigarette despite the oxygen tubes attached to her nose. She wore broad sunglasses like those given by the doctor after a dilation test. Her gray hair shot out in all directions.
Across the street from her, a young boy swung a plastic bat repeatedly at an immense purple ape that hung by a rope from a leafless tree, its neck noosed, its stuffing coming loose.
Shannon made a face. “Oh, hell. And Matt lived here?”
“Matthew Fryer. And yes, unit twenty-four.”
Ethan swung left, following the road.
A teenager had his head under the hood of a Toyota Camry. He glanced at them as they passed by, then flipped his middle finger.
Shannon waved back and grinned tightly. “The welcome wagon.”
“Doesn’t feel so welcome.”
A dog tore after a cat around the end of one of the trailers, the feline staying just out of reach. They both disappeared in a cloud of dust as they skidded around the backside of another trailer.
Ethan began counting down. Even-numbered addresses were on the right side. Twenty-eight. Twenty-six. Twenty-four.
And there it was. An abandoned blue-and-white single-wide. The door stood open. As they passed, they saw movement inside. Was it a new resident? Thieves perhaps? Or could it be the Six-Fingered Man? He could have someone watching the outside. Perhaps the teenager. Perhaps the old woman.
Stickers stood out on the fly-spewn end window. One was for AARP. The other was from the Way of Life Church.
Then they were past it. They didn’t stop, neither did they speed up.
“Did you see who was inside?” he asked.
“No. Just movement.”
He watched the rearview mirror to see if anyone would exit. He did this for several seconds before Shannon screamed.
“Stop! Stop the car!”
He slammed on the brakes just in time to not hit a kid on a Big Wheel who’d decided to cross the road at that moment. The kid stared at them with immense eyes. His shock-white blond bangs covered his forehead.
A door slammed, and a woman ran down the wooden steps of her trailer and into the street. She was blond like the kid and had the same large eyes, except both of hers had bruising around them.
“Watch where you’re fucking going, why don’t you?” she screamed, jerking the kid from the Big Wheel, then grabbing the toy with her other hand. She lugged both of them to the side of the road, her face furious. The child seemed more terrified of her than he was of being run over.
Ethan let out a whoosh of air. “Christ on a crutch.” He’d come so close to running over that kid. All he’d been doing was looking in the rearview mirror—and he looked again. This time a man stood in the street. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt. Ethan looked to his hands. One was in his pocket. The other—the other was holding a gun, pointed at the ground.
“Oh shit.” He floored the Magnum.
The man brought his gun up to fire.
Ethan jerked the wheel to the left, turning down a short side street. He thought about taking another left, but then he saw the man running through a yard to intercept them. Instead of continuing, Ethan slammed the Magnum to a stop, rammed the station wagon in reverse, then spun the wheel until he was back on the original street. Within seconds he was roaring back the way they’d come. By the time the man figured out what they were doing and doubled back, they were at the entrance. Ethan passed the woman on the porch, then turned left onto West Southerland Avenue. They sped past a high school, a Walgreens, then a Circle K convenience store. He turned into a housing division on Hidalgo Street, took several random turns, then pulled to the curb.
He was breathing heavily. Despite the cold of the air conditioner he was soaked in sweat.
Shannon sat wide-eyed in her seat. “I thought he was going to shoot us.”
“He almost did. How’d he know it was us?”
“I think they were waiting for something that didn’t fit. Look at us. In a shiny red Dodge Magnum. Do you think he got this plate number?”
“We can’t take the chance,” he said.
“But that’s only if a cop sees us and stops us, right?”
He shook his head. “Police cars and traffic cameras have plate-recognition readers that are on all the time and work by scanning every car in their view. Driving around with a known plate would get us caught sooner than later.”
“Who do you think it was?”
“It wasn’t the Six-Fingered Man. Could have been one of his minions.”
They sat there for a few more minutes.
“What next?” he asked.
“We go back,” she said.
He turned to her. “Seriously?”
“Dead serious. It’s the last place they’d expect us.”
He shook his head slowly. “I’m not so sure it’s a good idea.”
“I am. Trust me on this.”
He smiled nervously. “I’d love to trust you, it’s just… well, okay.”
She looked at him with a combination of fear and wonder.
“When are we going back?” he asked.
“Let’s give it an hour, then head over. This time I’ll drive. We’ll use the nifty walkie-talkies we bought.”
FACT: In 1932, government trapper Ellis Wright discovered human tracks molded into gypsum in the alkali flats of what would come to be White Sands Missile Range. Each footprint was twenty-two inches long and from eight to ten inches wide. The tracks were so complete even the instep could be discerned.
TWELVE
An hour later Ethan found himself overdressed, superheated, and standing out like a sore thumb as he strolled down West Southerland Avenue wearing a hoodie, jeans, and sunglasses. He should have had shorts and a T-shirt like everyone else in this circle of hell they called Phoenix, but even then he’d feel the weight of the heat. He breathed shallowly, trying to put his misery behind him.
They’d spent the better part of the hour arguing. She wanted to go, but he didn’t want her to. Part of it was out of sheer obstinacy. He totally recognized that. He didn’t want her to get hurt. Another part was that he’d felt some of the excitement she talked about when they’d driven through earlier. Getting chased had been totally terrifying, but afterward he couldn’t help but laugh. Part of him wanted to feel that again even in the face of possible danger.
Shannon waited in the comfortable confines of the air-conditioned Magnum, which was parked in the church parking lot, blocked from street view by a long green-and-white bus that read Iglesia Camino de Viga along with the church cross.
Their plan was for Ethan to walk through the neighborhood on foot. If he got into trouble, he’d climb the wall and meet her in the parking lot for a quick getaway.
The plan was foolproof.
Who was he kidding?
Ethan shoved his hands in his pockets, rounded his shoulders, and lowered his head. He channeled each of the students he’d had who’d hated being in math class, attempting to project the same juvenile disdain and arrogance. He shortened his steps and walked sloppily, letting his feet shuffle inelegantly beneath him. He acquired the teenager sag, letting his back become the eternal question mark for Why the hell should I care?
He turned into the trailer park, taking the same route he’d taken earlier in the Magnum. Now, walking through, it felt different. Seeing it through the windshield had been bad enough, but now he realized how being in the vehicle filtered the pure desperation of the place. Walking along the cracked asphalt, seeing the edges littered with cigarette butts and a thousand pieces of confetti-size garbage and with the hot smell of decay pungent to the nose, it took on a whole new reality.
Ethan passed the old woman on the porch. She sat in the same position as before, sucking on both oxygen and a cigarette. If she’d gone inside, he couldn’t tell. Now closer, he noticed how wrinkled and parchment-like her skin was. Her head didn’t move as he passed, which made him wonder if she might possibly be blind behind those dark sunglasses she wore.
The kid with the baseball bat wasn’t there, but Ethan did see the teenager. He’d stopped working on his car and sat in the shade of a shed, smoking a cigarette and listening to something on an MP3 player.
Ethan shot the kid a nervous look, then continued down the street. He could see the blue-and-white single-wide that was unit 24. Butterflies mummerated in his stomach. The distance to the trailer was a rheostat of fear, turning higher and higher the closer he got. His hands were shaking in his pockets when he was two trailers away. He felt his legs stiffen as they threatened to lock.
He halted in front of the trailer. Teeth chattering, butterflies now pounding against his insides with glass-coated fists, he wondered what the hell he was even doing there. He was a math teacher, not a fighter. What was he going to do? Sneak into the trailer and suddenly find the proof he was looking for?
The voice made him jump.
“You were here before.”
Ethan jerked around. The teenager. Ethan didn’t know what to say.
Tall and lean as a metal pole, the kid wore baggy camouflage shorts and a muscle shirt from a Papa Roach concert. Acne pocked his round face at regular intervals. It looked as if he might have been trying to grow a mustache. His head was covered with a shock of black unruly hair that seemed dyed. He took a long pull on his cigarette as he looked Ethan up and down. “That’s a crap disguise if that’s what it’s supposed to be.”
“It’s not a disguise,” Ethan mumbled.
“Dude, you’re like sweating terribly.”
Ethan wanted nothing more than to be somewhere else. But he had to do something. “Do you know the man who lived here?”
“You mean Matt?” The kid laughed, finished his cigarette and stomped it out, then laughed again.
“What’s so funny?”
“No one knew shit about him when he was alive. Now that he’s dead everyone wants to see him.”
“How’d he die?” Ethan asked.
“Hit by a car.” The kid paused, then said, “Dumb-ass way to die.”
Ethan nodded. His fear was leaving him in millimeter increments. This kid was just like any of the others in his class. Just a kid. Ethan cleared his voice. “Other people looking for him?”
