The Nevada Triangle

A desert whopper.

The Nevada Triangle

“All passengers prepare for emergency landing!”

Every nerve in Mason’s body was a live wire. There wasn’t a damned thing left to try, but he couldn’t let go. Even though he knew the jetliner was out of control, even though the ground was rushing at him with all the visual impact of a tsunami, even though he knew he was about to die a death beyond imagination.

All protocol was out the window.

“Everybody out of the aisles! Seat belts fastened! Heads down between your knees!” He switched off the intercom and reached for the mic.

“God in Heaven!” his copilot wailed. “Oh God! Oh Jesus! Oh God oh God oh--”

“Ground, this is CAL-7. We are going down. We are going down. Beth I love you, I love you. Kids, I love you I love you I lo--” Mason’s throat seized. Blood filled his eyes, his entire frame locked up. To port and to starboard, black smoke billowed and wheeled, racing its orphan wisps in dark tendrils that swept the glass like loose wipers. Now the smoke passed as though cleared by a gigantic lung, and the visual window blew out to a reeling panorama of fuzzy landscape and crystal clear details--ancient cacti, gutted cars, weeds and rocks so sharp they might have been etched into canvas--as his head jerked back, as his mouth broke wide for one endlessly plummeting, mind-blowing scream.

* * *

The smoke and dust were terrific, all but obscuring the crash site. Flames shot through the plane’s corpse, danced and raged overhead, lit the windows and passed. The smell of jet fuel was everywhere. A trough the length of three football fields had been ripped out of the land, ninety feet wide at its broadest. Nose, fuselage, and tail were in three distinct sections, buried, rather than scattered, due to the dramatic incline of descent. The right wing had detached completely, the left was a black crumpled ruin. And the real-time concussions, the aftershock of impact, still sang in the earth, still sent small stones tumbling.

And a number of flat stones began to tremble on the desert floor. One by one the stones were shifted aside, and one by one the hot dusty creatures burst aboveground to maniacally charge the wreckage. Their pecking order was evident; the fastest and toughest were the first inside--the first-pickers of cufflinks and fountain pens, of ribbons and bows. Two creatures fought over a crushed passenger, triggering a sudden frantic pile-on of hairy bodies. In a minute the victor came up holding a cheap patent leather billfold. This little monster used his teeth to tear out a photograph of a sweetly smiling family. He snatched it with his paw, pressed the treasure to his chest, and threw the billfold, with its cash and credit cards and traveler’s checks, to the losers.

* * *

Crash investigators have one of the toughest jobs on the planet. You never really adjust to it--ever--though it’s imperative to develop a steely exterior, and to always treat it as just a job.

Crash investigators for major airlines have upped that career ante considerably. Analytical and technical aspects aside, it’s not just a matter of noting and recording the dead--angles, impetus, collateral consequences--it’s a matter of cataloging torsos, mutilated faces, and miscellaneous body parts, many burned beyond recognition.

A museum display in Hell: the plane’s great black ruptured body, split open like a ripe pomegranate, the horror of charred corpses duly strapped in for the unbelievable, some cut right in half by those very seat belts.

The nauseating stench, the hundreds of wild fixed expressions that not even death, not even flames, not even formaldehyde can repair.

This job description, and the once-sanguine men and women who complement it, provides for a sober on-site experience. Those who try to survive by alleviation--through camaraderie and inappropriate or disrespectful behavior--don’t last. They’re not tolerated by the professionals who’ve built up the fortitude to take nightmares in stride, to break down only in the womb of family, and to regularly come to work with a set of gonads that would humble a daredevil.

Deale got through it with an air of iron efficiency.

An amazing man, able to consider the trajectory of a mutilated child with the emotional detachment of a chemist at his microscope--even if that innocent cadaver happened to be a dead ringer for his own beloved blonde daughter. His men were fellow travelers, treated with complete seriousness, no matter how deep or trivial their issues. Deale could get along with almost anybody, in a business sense, so long as that anybody behaved with mutual respect.

One person he couldn’t get along with was the by-the-book, automaton type; the type that used rank and connections to override authority. So when the tall ponytailed brunet in worker’s protective goggles, black form-fitting jumpsuit, and narrow steel-toed boots flashed her ID, Deale automatically became a different creature, the skewed-view kind of man his crew secretly admired. He glanced at her credentials with an air of surly indifference. Marilyn Sharpe. Yeah, pretty sharp all right, and way too good-looking to be taken seriously. Colder than dry ice. Eyes deep and cool, mouth soft and wide. But that voice would wilt a satyr:

“You’re Deale? I’ve been assigned to manage this site; those bodies are not to be moved by anyone, not without my okay.”

Deale looked away. “We’re pristine here, Sharpe.” He hiked up a leg on a bumper for his watching men’s sake, adding with thinly veiled condescension, “Is there anything we can help you with, agent?”

“I want absolutely nothing removed from these victims. Every ounce of personal belongings is to be scrupulously accounted for.”

Deale stomped over and got right in her face. “Agent Sharpe. If you’re implying…if you’re hinting for a nanosecond that one of my men is some sicko stealing off the dead then you’re gonna find yourself with real problems here. Meaning, with me.”

She met him chin-to-chin. “Inspector Deale. My department isn’t accusing anybody of robbing the dead of cash and valuables. What’s pertinent, and this obviously has nothing to do with you or your men, is property of sentimental value. Relatives of victims of three of Southern Nevada’s last major disasters, air and ground, have reported articles missing--articles of great personal, rather than monetary, dearness; objects naturally overlooked by investigators, but worth gold to the next of kin.”

Deale smirked and backed off. “So old Dickey Riley still gets around, huh?”

“Riley?”

Deale blew her off. “The Columbia pilot. Don’t play innocent.”

“Not familiar.”

Deale considered her askance. “Richard Riley was pilot of the 747 that took down three hundred and forty-eight fares and a crew of eleven just shy of Vegas way back in October. He’s the only survivor, if you can call him that. When they put him back together he started raving about ghouls in the desert, stealing spiritual items off the dead.”

“Transients? Campers?”

Deale smiled wryly. “No, Agent Sharpe. Real ghouls. Things that go bump in the night. None of this is classified; it’s just the stuff that trickles down the airmen’s grapevine.” He bowed for effect. “Maybe I could set you two up.”

She pulled on her mask and surgical gloves and made for the plane. “First things first.”

* * *

Sharpe wasn’t sure what to expect, though she’d been briefed on issues of Riley’s temperament, the urgency of personal sterility, and bedside protocol. She knew Riley had broken nearly every bone, lost copious quantities of vital fluids, been burned over seventy percent of his body, and been pronounced dead at least three times, twice at the scene of the accident. She knew he could communicate only through an artificial voice box, could eat and eliminate only via tubes and traps, and then only with assistance, could not go outside his protective room, could not tolerate visitors without those visitors first being painstakingly scrubbed and inspected. Columbia Airways, bound both by contract and public relations, made sure he was well cared for.

Richard Riley greeted her in his customized sitting gurney, both arms and four of his seven remaining digits supported by cable casts, the steel half of his skull painted flesh with a waxy veneer. This waxy impression was evinced, too, in the yards of grafted skin covering the man from forehead to ankles. Facial reconstruction: seventy-three total hours of experimental surgery, eleven unbelievably agonizing flirtations with insanity. At this time Riley was suing for no further treatments. It wasn’t a cosmetic matter anyway. The ex-pilot’s countenance was a red and gray patchwork of butt and back grafts, strung together with wire, staples, and tender loving care. Pig hide eye flaps had to be extended for sleep, and the removable false lower jaw, clamped in place to encourage basic skull conformity, needed hourly shifting to prevent the tongue’s sliding back into the gullet. He was wrapped in a pair of light sheets for Sharpe’s sake; ordinarily the constantly calving skin grafts, if not permitted to breathe, would drive him to itching madness. The shades were always down in Riley’s room; the least kiss of sunlight was screaming hell--even the fluorescents had to be tempered with special film. Only a pair of small emerald-green reading lights made objects visible, though their surreal cast predictably intensified the viewer’s initial sense of horror and alienation.

“I, Mr. Riley,” Sharpe began, “am here solely for information. Please. I promise to be brief.” She adjusted her mask before consulting a laminated pad pinched in her sterile gloves. “In October of last year, the liner you were piloting for Columbia went down in the Nevada desert. You were coherent in the ambulance, and intermittently between surgeries. Corroborated reports have you swearing your downed jet was assaulted by creatures that raided the dead for personal items. Since that accident there has been an epidemic of similar tragedies producing losses of otherwise worthless items that are still unaccounted for, most recently CAL-7’s disaster southwest of Henderson. Our computer models demonstrate that these accidents have peculiarities consistent with your crash. The incidents--though not all were aviation-related--took place in a specific desert region of Nevada, miles removed from civic bustle and commerce. All these incidents involved a human toll exceeding fifty persons--they were genuine disasters. Except for your particular case, there are no eyewitnesses from any scene.

“Our agency, Mr. Riley, is interested in satisfactorily addressing the grievances of those relatives who are on record as stating their loved ones have been relieved of objects of depth. We have to be. These are very serious charges, and the bereaved have garnered very serious legal representation. The FAA is being deemed liable. My agency has partitioned large funds for the purposes of putting this matter to rest. To this end I have been assigned to take whatever steps are necessary. A visit to CAL-7’s crash site brought up your name and story. I’m not here to be judgmental; I have to follow whatever leads are made available.”

The man in the gurney let his head rock back to view his guest directly. This slight adjustment of angle and additional wedge of green gave Sharpe a clearer look at something she hadn’t bargained for: only half of Riley’s uppers were dentures; the other side, now grotesquely illuminated, were his own salvaged and replanted teeth, projecting through a partial cheek and serviced by a sanitary white dribble cot. It would have been possible, had she the stomach or inclination, to look straight down his throat at the vibrating mechanism now assaulting her:

“I stand by my statement. I was conscious and cogent. I know what I saw. You can take that back to your agency.” The effort cost him. Riley sucked laboriously at the cot. Sharpe could see the gurney’s onboard computer calibrating and resolving.

“Let me repeat, Mr. Riley, that I am in no way judging your actions or descriptions. You were there, not me. I’ll take whatever you say at face value, but I can’t read your mind.”

“Fair enough.” The head fell back on its sponge pillow. “I remember every second up to the crash. I could never forget. My next impression was of being dead, but of still living. It is an odd thing, ma’am, but in catastrophic shock the body does not feel pain--at least not the same animal that has wracked me since--and the mind is clearer than at any other time. I did not hallucinate, nor did I make a deal with my demons. I saw this thing, this hairy little hissing creature, work its way into the cabin and look around. It evidently thought me dead--what other conclusion could there be.

“It went through my copilot’s uniform and wallet; it took his crucifix and a family picture. Through the door I saw several more, accosting the dead with equal urgency. When this little monster came to me it stopped abruptly, bent over my face and placed its paw upon my mouth. It must have felt a trace of breath, for it gave a small squeal and scurried back out.

“Ma’am, as I say I was in deep shock. My brain and body were reeling; I swear I died a moment later. But I came to outside the plane on a makeshift stretcher--a pair of horrified rock climbers had pulled me out. One had encountered a faint pulse. I must have told the ambulance attendants, brave men who somehow beat the helicopters across the desert, the same story I am telling you now. Since then I have remained a prisoner, here, alone except for my nurses and the occasional Columbia representative.”

“You claim they were after personal articles. Were any removed from your person?”

“None.”

“They feared retaliation, then?”

“Ma’am, I was unable to lift a finger or bat a lash. There were at least a dozen within my view. I was no threat. It was not my strength they feared, it was my innermost being.”

“I don’t follow.”

Riley half-lifted himself, his eyes burning green. “Young lady, there are things we are not intended to follow.” His head collapsed back on the pillow. “Not while breath yet fills our bodies.” He stared at the ceiling. “Leave me now. Cling to this precious existence with every fiber of your being.”

Sharpe nodded. “Thank you for your time and patience, sir. I’ll make sure my agency and Colombia are made fully aware of your assistance and hospitality.”

“Go!”

* * *

“So is it gonna be like ‘sir’, or is it gonna be like ‘ma’am’?”

She gave the little photographer a dour look, one of many to come. He was shifting back and forth like he had to take a leak, and bad, like he’d been holding it forever.

“It’s gonna be like ‘Agent Sharpe’, okay? And, if that’s way too formal, just ‘Sharpe’ will do fine.”

All that mussed brown hair, those huge round black-rimmed spectacles, the scrawny frame under thrift store combat fatigues--agents are never assigned assistants they’d choose, not in the field. Sharpe hadn’t requested a photographer, but didn’t dare object; the fact that her impossible idea was given a tentative thumbs-up was enough to keep her going.

They were sharing the shade of a canvas awning, eleven miles southwest of Boulder City on a desert flat that, except for the blazing sun’s lesser proximity, might have been on Mercury. A staff limo--read: converted school bus--baked twelve feet away, emptied of all forty-nine crew. The photographer was interning; they told her he’d be green.

“How old are you, kid?”

He bristled. “Please don’t call me ‘kid’. My real name’s Gilbert, but my official name’s StingMaster.”

“How old are you, Gilbert?”

He looked away. “Thirty-six. But like I said, it’s StingMaster.”

“Cool. So let me run the skinny by you. Stop me if I don’t make sense.”

“Okay, stop.”

“Real mature. Now shut up and listen. Accounting has agreed to a staged accident out here, and you are along to record it. That’s all that’s required of you. Some delirious airline pilot named Riley witnessed what he called a lot of little creatures stealing personal items off the dead at a crash site. I didn’t word it quite like that or we wouldn’t be here. The Agency probably thinks there are sequestered Manson Family-like tribes doing hit-and-run acts in the desert. The fact that trinkets are taken instead of cash supports the idea of drugged-out airheads. They can’t really believe that, but they have to go with something, so if you can come up with even one verifiable snap of such a lowlife, it’ll be introduced as evidence against all these claims of a shadowy crash investigator looting corpses on-site.”

“Man! Little creatures! You mean like elves, or maybe more like midget Wookies?”

Sharpe considered him sourly. “I won’t dignify that with…look, Gilbert, what he said was ‘ghouls’, all right? ‘Things that go bump in the night’.”

“Ghouls in the desert. Possible. I mean, like totally radical, but not impossible.”

“Then you’ve heard of them?”

“Ghouls, sir or ma’am, live underground, the same as trolls. But they need stuff--stuff from real people--in order to survive spiritually. Artifacts, y’know? Mementos. So they lift junk off the dead and feed off the sentimental vibes stored in that stuff. Those vibes become their souls, you dig?”

“I guess Riley must’ve read the same comic book. Is there any way to stop them? I mean like kryptonite or anything?”

“Dude…” Gilbert let his head fall. “This ain’t no storyboard universe, okay? This is as real as whatever they taught you in spy school or wherever. The only way to kill a ghoul is by taking his picture. That takes his soul.”

“Good thing I was assigned a cameraman after all. So these ghouls of yours wait underground for corpses to loot, thereby ensuring their immortality. Why pick this spot? What’s so special about the desert?”

“You’ve heard of the Bermuda Triangle?”

“Of course.”

“So what’s so special about it?”

“Oh, Jesus. Flying saucers on sojourn?”

“Maybe…” Gilbert raised an eyebrow. “The ancients knew things. They spoke about a happening just like this; an underground world where hairy little dudes lurked, copping personal items off the dead for spiritual purposes. They called it Etherea, the city in the sand. I mean that’s just like a rough translation, obviously. It was divined by the Three Mystics when they gazed into the Crystal Portal. Don’t give me that look, okay? The ancients were like way-hip to the whole trip because they were able to speak with angels and demons. And they had visitors, from other worlds and other dimensions. But they died out, and with them went the secrets of the universe. So who knows what ghouls are really up to? With the ancients gone, maybe nobody’ll ever know for sure. Maybe they’re just tripping here, minding their own business until some nearby accident happens that they can, like, exploit, y’know? Or maybe they simply teleport planes to cause crashes and get what they need, like a totally radical force of guerrilla Gollums.”

“What’s a Gollums?”

Gilbert’s jaw dropped. “Dude!” He gloomily wagged his head. “Gollum’s like this psycho fisherman who lives in a cave. Bilbo stole his One Ring but he almost got it back from Frodo at the Crack of Doom.”

“D***o…?”

The photographer’s face twisted all around “Awww…don’t you people keep up? Bilbo left the shire on his eleventy-first birthday, I mean like way after the whole Smaug thing. Now hang onto your flashlight, Agent Sharpe. This is so heavy I don’t know if I can do it justice. Y’see, the Dark Lord forged the ring in Mordor, and--”

“And,” Sharpe broke in, “the Air Force has agreed to airlift a gutted World War Two bomber stocked with gas and a small detonator. They’re going to release it strategically so that it crashes in a cleared area close enough to observe. The bomber’s really a mess; it’s costing more for the lift and drop than for the plane, but the Air Force is willing to halve the bill by making this all part of an official exercise, complete with video from the air. You, as our ground cameraman, are going to get in as many shots of that crash and burn as you can, then we’re going to get dirty. We’re not trusting long-range lenses in all this rising heat. As soon as it’s safe to approach, you and I’ll mosey on over for your close-ups.”

“And how long’ll that be, man?”

“Like forever, man. There’re no hidden tribes of crazed hippies, Stinkblaster, and no noble armies of swashbuckling fairy princesses. But there has to be something that makes logical sense, and we’re either going to find it or head home empty-handed. How many megabytes will your equipment handle?”

Gilbert sneered in private offense. “Dude.” After a few seconds he held up an old khaki camera case covered with campy Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter stickers. “Like, Hwang-Yu Special Edition, UL. Bangs straight 30mm and digital. Hair-trigger autofocus, in whiteline and infrared. Independent shutter and Dynalens. Magnesium instaflash for the life of the battery.” He blew a kiss at the sun. “Solar-chargeable nickel-cadmium.”

Sharpe nodded appreciatively. “Old school.”

“So if it turns out your pilot dude was right, and I end up being like your mentor on the subject, you’ll step down from the whole bitchy Elvira thing and admit I’m The StingMaster?”

“Fair enough.”

Now an air horn, the kind used at sporting events, barked once behind a little imported trailer. “That’s it,” she said, and swung up her binoculars. Gilbert began tweaking his camera’s lens.

Four cable-suspending Chinooks appeared over a low range, each copter supporting a section of bomber at nose, tail, and wings.

At a precise point the cables were released simultaneously, and the derelict, with the payload in its nose, dipped dramatically before gracefully planing two hundred feet into a spectacular explosion and mini-fireball. The fuel burned itself out rapidly. Bearing nothing inside to support a blaze, the hull was a black and blue carcass within minutes.

The agent and photographer moved boulder to boulder. The rest of the company waited back.

“Now what?” Gilbert wondered, stepping around the fuselage, still ticking hot in the sun. “I sure don’t see any of your crazy hippie dudes.”

Sharpe joined him under a twisted wing, out of sight of the makeshift command post. “None of your like totally bitchen fairy dudes, either.” She grabbed his shoulder and shook. “Look! Look!”

A hairy little creature popped out of the ground, then another and another. They stared in all directions before beginning an all-out dash for the plane. Sharpe pounded the frozen photographer on the back. “Shoot, shoot! Get it! Shoot!” Gilbert was so nervous he jerked up the camera. Sun glinting off the lens startled the creatures. They hesitated as one, looked all around and scattered. She grabbed his arm and dragged him out into the light, even as several vanished before their eyes. The agent and photographer ran in a crouched pursuit of the slowest. It turned and hissed as they were closing in. A second later it had disappeared.

“He went under here!” Sharpe said excitedly, dropping to her knees.

Gilbert joined her on the other side of a flat stone. He tapped on it and bent an ear. “Like a manhole cover,” he breathed. “Look; it’s been worked into shape, maybe by chipping away with sharp rocks.”

They pushed the surprisingly light stone aside and peered down a hazy well, now swimming with dust and swirling motes.

Sharpe went down first, finding footing a yard below the rim. Once the photographer was in they shoved the stone back into place, leaving a crescent of daylight.

They were hunched on a little ledge that was dissolving even as they fought for purchase, their wide eyes adjusting to a strange half-light filtering throughout a labyrinth of crumbly tunnels. A sudden burst of daylight to their left announced the rapid plunge of another of those creatures.

“God,” Sharpe whispered, “it’s real.”

Gilbert grabbed her arm with passion. “Middle-earth!”

“No, Gollums, no! Listen, man: these aren’t hobbit holes.”

“You listen yourself! The proof’s right in your face, and all you can do is act like it’s an illusion. What more do you need?”

Sharpe nodded. “You’re right. Let’s get moving before they slip away.”

“Are you nuts?”

“Look, Gilbert--” she grabbed his hand “--we’ve come this far, and we’re not leaving without some pictures. You’re absolutely right-on: we’ve latched onto something amazing. So let’s go exploit the opportunity.”

Their fast-eroding shelf abruptly broke up, forcing them to creep down a foot at a time. Soon they were standing alone on a fairly flat floor, maybe thirty feet below the surface, contemplating a number of slender passages into the unknown.

“Gone!” Gilbert whispered.

Sharpe looked up and around. “The desert floor’s porous up there; light filters down in bits and pieces, so to speak. There’s air, enough to breathe anyway.” She squinted into a narrow tunnel. “Not so much light beyond this hole we’re occupying, apparently, but there’ll always be some at our backs.”

“You’re going…in?”

“We are going…in. Eeny, meeny, miny, moe. Let’s go. Make sure your magicflash is ready on that multigizmo.”

The dimness increased step by step. In a few minutes they grew aware of a similar light source at the chosen tunnel’s far end; evidently another surface-lit pit.

“The desert’s honeycombed,” Sharpe whispered. “All these interconnecting tunnels could go on for miles.”

They came to a slender right-hand opening. It was black within; Sharpe flicked on her flashlight’s red emergency bulb and they slipped inside.

They were at the entrance to a dome-shaped warren, spacious as a small cathedral. Sharpe’s beam, trained on the floor, at first picked out only a massive, wall to wall heap of personal items: hats, gloves, ribbons and bows, lighters, pens, purses and shoes. There were scattered piles of scarves and stockings, along with a flyer’s cap, two wigs and a set of false teeth. All were mashed and charred by physical disaster; most were streaked and spattered with old dried blood. A nauseating smell hung in the air and clung to the walls; an old, grieving smell of caked sweat and stale perfume. Only as she swung the beam did they become aware of the dozens of hairy creatures hanging by their feet from the walls and ceiling. A lax mucilaginous web was slung creature to creature.

They were hideous things to view up close, but their absolute stillness made them seem harmless, like stuffed animals in a trophy room. So deep was their coma that Sharpe was able to shine her blood-red beam directly in their faces. Their fangs protruded over the lips, and their eyes, open even during unconsciousness, were huge yellow orbs without any reflective capacity. The nails on their paws, fore and rear, tapered into long scythe-shaped affairs.

“Sleeping?” Gilbert whispered, his fat round Harry Potters gleaming in the camera’s green corona.

“Hibernating,” Sharpe whispered back, though the creatures appeared absolutely deaf in their dormant state. “These guys have been in here a while. They’re not the ones we were following.”

“So now what do you believe? Are you still gonna swallow whatever the man tells you?”

“I’m not blind, Gilbert. It’s some kind of undiscovered species. It’s…I just don’t know. It’s for the specialists to figure out; it’s only our job to report what we’ve learned.”

“And to save it for posterity.” He stepped backward stooping, simultaneously pulling his camera’s viewfinder to eye-level. “And I believe the word you were looking for, Agent Sharpe, is rediscovered.” He winked. “All a matter of angles. Somewhere in here’s the perfect vantage for catching not only these nodding Orc dudes but at least the top third of this junk pile. And you can take that back to your Joe Science.”

“Aren’t you,” she hissed, “the one who described them as camera-shy? Don’t flash them, Gilbert! What are you, man, a flipping idiot or something?”

The StingMaster’s eyes burned in the dark. “You…what do you know? For God’s sake, lady, your job doesn’t make you smarter than me. It just makes you more programmed than me. I mean, they can cover up an alien crash for half a century. They can rig an election, massacre students, and fake a moon landing--and these are the very people you’re working for! So don’t call me an idiot.”

“You’ve made your point: the whole free world’s a conspiracy designed to hide the fact that we’re all characters in some kid’s video game. Your culture rocks, Buzz Lightyear. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

Gilbert glared. He froze in an awkward stoop, whispered, “But, sleeping or grooving, you guys are coming with me,” and took a snap. The flash momentarily blinded them both.

Immediately the creatures began falling like stones. Some screamed and hit the floor hissing, while those plummeting from just above got caught in hair and clothes and went ballistic with their nails. The trespassers were buried alive in a hissing, heaving scrabble.

The vileness of that fur and scratchy skin, the clawing and nipping, that unbelievable stench--Sharpe and Gilbert blew out of the heap in a full-blown panic. They lunged through the aperture and ran back down the tunnel shrieking. They were mobbed, covered, freed, mobbed again. At last they burst out into the original well. The little creatures followed them up full-tilt, scrambling and hissing like cats.

Gilbert and Sharpe kicked and flailed as they climbed, backs to the crumbling earth, and when Sharpe reached the covering stone she was hysterical enough to slide it aside in one move. Gilbert paused for half a minute, snapping away with his camera. The little creatures dropped in their twos and threes; the remainder stayed on the well’s floor, blinking and hissing.

Sharpe half-hauled the photographer out. They quickly kicked the stone back into place.

“Man!” Gilbert heaved. “Was that ever hairy!” They leaned on each other in the frying sun, looking around at a yawning reality. The pair staggered back to the base on eggshells, expecting stones to slide at every step. The bus was waiting in the heat; the crew on board, the gear packed.

“Hold it!” Gilbert whispered. He shielded the camera under his shirt and a minute later brought out a black plastic film canister on a leather thong. “Now our secret’s safe in here,” he said, draping the canister around his neck as a pendant.

“What secret?”

He squeezed her shoulders in his arm. “Just for now. Trust me, dude.”

She wormed out immediately, and with attitude. “Don’t you shush me! And for that matter, go get yourself a room.”

But Gilbert came right back, passionately clutching her hands. “We’ve got the proof, man! We’ve got what people have been waiting for…for like forever. We’re gonna be rich, we’re gonna be famous. We’re gonna be like rich and famous.”

“This is bigger than us, son. We’re gonna be silenced and put out to pasture somewhere. You think the powers that be are just gonna throw this place wide open to the general public? To hordes of starry-eyed pinballers and Comic-Con groupies? To dorm devils and conspiracy theorists? You’re the one who alluded to Roswell! Well, this whole desert’s going to be quarantined under the biggest cover-up of the millennium. No one’ll ever hear from us again. So let’s just go get our rabies shots and call it a day.”

“Trust me.”

The driver, all sagging belly and flushed flesh, leaned against the right front fender with a forearm resting on the windshield’s hot frame, his free hand languidly waving them in. He clung to the handrail for perhaps two minutes after they’d found a seat; his head down, one foot on the first step and the other in the dirt. He climbed in like an invalid, sweat rolling down his back and chest.

Gilbert, unable to sit still, brought his voice down low and leaned in. “Ummm. Listen, sir or ma’am…I been thinking about your objection, and I get the feeling we should like make us a pact.”

“A pact?”

“Yeah, a pact. You know, like a private agreement, dude-to-dude.”

“I’m listening.”

He nudged her gently, simultaneously rattling the film canister.

“In here’s pure gold. These pictures aren’t just worth a fortune, man, they’re priceless. We can name our sum to any TV station in the world.”

“Those photographs are the property of the Agency.”

“Oh-h-h…I dunno ’bout that. I’m an intern; I’m not on anybody’s payroll. This camera’s my property, and so’s the film. Until I’ve received a check from ’em, they got no say whatsoever. And with the dough we make off our first interview you could retire and buy your own agency. We’re in this whole deal together, see? You got the credibility and I got the goods. By that math, Agent Sharpe, these pictures of the creepy little sand dudes are both our property.”

She leaned in tight. “It’s like ‘Marilyn’.”

Gilbert’s whole face lit up. He stuck out his hand. “A pact it is then!”

“A pact it is.” She shook hands. “And dude…dude? I just want you to know that you are The StingMaster.” They sat as schoolchildren, hands folded on laps. Little by little Gilbert’s left hand crawled across his thigh. Their pinkies locked.

“Okay, folks,” the driver wheezed. “Let’s roll on out of here and snag us a couple of cold ones.” The passengers all cheered. He wiped his forehead, grimacing. “Everybody make sure your seat belts are fastened.” Once he was certain they’d complied he gasped and turned himself in his seat in the manner of a man boarding a wheelchair. The engine kicked over. “Ah, Christ,” he muttered, and put the bus in gear. As they bumped along he gradually leaned against his window. His face was very red. He sagged and sagged, bit by bit. Suddenly he sat bolt-upright.

And the bus banged out of control, accelerating in a serpentine path off the dirt road to the lip of a rocky gorge, where it did a swan dive onto an outcropping, flipped twice in the air, and crashed on its side in a storm of diesel smoke and thrashing flames.

And the ground erupted in a flurry of sliding stones as the hairy little figures raced out, clawing one on top of the other for first dibs. One of the scrappier fought corpse to corpse, snatching medals and keys, ear rings and key chains, finally lurching onto a scorched man and woman locked in a horrified embrace. He tore off the woman’s ID badge, rooted through her boots and pockets, then ripped open the man’s fatigues and scratched around until he came up with a little black film canister. It was an absolute prize: quirky and lightweight, with a stretchable leather thong that gave it a nice personal touch. He rattled it against his ear, tested the cylinder’s side for smoothness. Another paw made a swipe, but he bit and slashed, jealously clutched the canister to his chest, and dashed out of the bus.