-1The Invasion of Crackland by Devon Pitlor

PART ONE

I. Kemp Tanner, Nevada cowboy

Kemp Tanner, who usually wrote his first and last names with an inexplicable
hyphen between them as 'Kemp-Tanner,' kicked one pointed, leather boot toe
into the dark sand of the Reese River Valley and discerned a large, winding
movement beneath the surface. It was, he knew, a lethally venomous speckled
rattlesnake estivating from the torrid heat of summer. He kicked at the
writhing form again and a broad, triangular head arose from the sand. With a
quick movement of his pocket knife, Kemp sliced the serpent's head from its
body and kicked the viper's bulging skull, which was larger than a tennis ball,
several yards away into a tuft of mountain brush near by. The snake's head,
unaware that it had been severed from its six foot body, flared its loreal pits
and extended its dripping fangs. Taking no notice, Kemp pulled the bleeding
body of the serpent from the dust and struck off its several rows of rattle
buttons. He then proceeded to skin the creature, holding its still bleeding
stump in his mouth and running his blade down the length of its body until he
could peel away the skin, exposing the pink and hemorrhaging flesh beneath.
When the skin was totally removed, Kemp threw it over a rail sticking up from
the scant soil in his makeshift camp to dry. It might have made a belt or a tie-
cord later. Kemp didn't know. What he wanted was the meat, which he sliced
into half-foot segments and threw into the charred bottom of his dutch oven
over the dressed carcasses of several rock rabbits, or as they were better
known in Nevada, pikas. Into this blend he tossed a few dry sage onions and
some desiccated alfalfa grass. He poured some water from a canteen over the
grub and set it to boil above a mesquite wood fire under the tripod spider from
which his charred pot hung. Satisfied that all was done for his next range
meal, Kemp walked over to the now dead snake head and carefully took it by
its gory, severed head stub. Grasping the broad head with a gnarled hand on
each side, Kemp carefully squeezed a few drops of creamy yellow venom from
the fangs onto the back of his hand. He was careful not to squeeze too much,
then dropped his tongue to lick up the toxin, just enough to give him a numb
but momentarily potent jolt, his desert high for the day.

Since his earliest years, Kemp had drifted up and down between the barren
Shoshone and Toiyabe mountains in the cut of the often dry Reese River which
ran from the Arc Dome in Nye County up through the desolate desert country
past the poisonous Alkali Flats into the arid Smith Creek Valley northward
through empty Lander County to eventually join the Humboldt River at the
county seat of Battle Mountain, which Kemp usually avoided on the grounds
that the tiny town was too crowded. Kemp's life was lived on the throw-down
mostly from camp to camp on the Reese River range, and that was what he had
always considered home. The stony outcrops of limestone and the jaggedly
irregular terrain, punctuated in all seasons by tufts of scattered brush were his
home, as were the feet of the talus slopes which dotted the sides of the foothills
like the creasing folds of dark, stony bridal gowns and contained enough
scattering pikas and chukar partridges to feed him a daily meal. The rock
piles and screes of the valley were like the furniture of a living room to Kemp,
who earned his living variously and had by age thirty-four never paid a cent in
taxes. Toiling sometimes as a wrangler of wild horses, other times in cattle and
goat drives southward, Kemp presented himself as a representative of true
American legend: the authentic cowboy. Although he had left the tiny two-
room schoolhouse in Austin, the only actual hamlet community of Lander
County, at age eleven and had very poor reading and writing skills, his survival
abilities were legion, and he was no stranger to working in the seasonal alfalfa
harvests or even shoveling scoria in the lead or zinc mine tailings. He was, in
effect, a jack of all trades and guarded his independence as his natural Nevada
high country birthright. He had a lame quarter horse which he drafted into
goat or cattle drives during the season, but mostly he navigated either by foot
or with his sometimes functional 1983 Dodge Rampage pickup, which was
scarred and buffeted by the desert sands and dented with the mark of
hundreds of encounters with rocks, stumps and sudden talus slopes.
Kemp around the age of eighteen had once killed a man in a saloon in tiny
Austin. He had drilled him through the middle of the forehead with his old
rusty .22 caliber pocket pistol. By age thirty-four, Kemp could not remember
exactly why, and since no one had asked any questions, he had forgotten the
incident almost as quickly as he had the routine killing of a pit viper like the
speckled rattlesnake. He could become undetectable in the vacant valley of the
Reese River, dissolve into its dry lake beds and sand pits almost like a ghost,
and in Lander County few people bothered with explanations concerning the
free time activities of seasonal vaqueros.

But Kemp was still a very noticeable man. He favored flashy, traditional
western wear whenever he could steal or borrow some. His high-crowned
Stetson hat, torn to shreds around the brim and stained with the sweat of many
broiling summers on the desert range, had been bequeathed from his father, a
man who had died alone somewhere in Nye County beneath the Arc Dome, and
Kemp neither knew how or cared why. He wore the standard spotted
bandanna which had never seen soap but rather had been occasionally rinsed
alongside the muddy alkali banks of the Reese whenever its choking sweat
stench became too powerful. He attached threadbare chaps to his flanks when
using his stock horse on a cattle drive and wore only close-fitting canvas jeans.
His rifle, which he kept in the Rampage, was naturally a ten gauge Remington,
a gun perennially favored by hard-knocks cowpokes. His boots were stuffed
with alfalfa hay in the frigid wintertime, and at all other times he wore them
without socks over feet that had apparently been calloused over since birth.

But then there had been a few other jobs. Kemp had once been hired to front
as a cowboy extra in a feature film shot in the Reese Valley and had once posed
just south of Battle Mountain with a group of young German tourists who
wanted to be in photographs with an "authentic American cowboy." Later
that night, he had taken two of the younger girls to bed, and, in truth, that had
been one of the few sexual episodes he had ever enjoyed outside of the
company of the habitual Lander and Nye County prostitutes which he
frequented at least monthly for his hormonal download. Kemp avoided the
company of steady or even respectable women, claiming that the occasional
valley whore was all that he really needed and coveted no attachment other
than a nominal fee paid to the brothel keeper. He did, however, have a wife.
She was a part-Shoshone, part-Paiute woman named Sunset who lived with his
four children somewhere up beyond the Shoshone Range in the nearly
inaccessible and tailing-strewed Crescent Valley in a corrugated metal shack
with only an outhouse and a rusty pump as plumbing. It was a place that he
rarely ventured. At thirty-four, Kemp was no longer interested in wives or
children.
But that mid-summer day, boiling in the insufferable heat, Kemp felt the usual
stirring for a woman, and after eating a ragout of rattlesnake and pika,
decided to abandon his dry lake camp and wander into Austin to a makeshift
horse barn converted into a local whorehouse run by one Altagracia Rives, a
half-breed Indian who managed a stable of young women, among whom was
Kemp's current favorite, a lissome young thing from Carson City named Stacie
something, who had a bona fide health certificate hanging beside her straw-
stuffed mattress, a certificate which Nevada law required she renew every two
weeks, though she rarely did. Instinct alone found Kemp in his pickup
bouncing over the rock outcroppings on what may have once been a road but
now was only a depression across the sandy loam. The town of Austin, the only
settlement within hundreds of miles, allowed Altagracia to run her enterprise
without a license, and it was just assumed that most of the bruised and stained
cowboys who visited the sheets of her girls were as clean as they were going to
get. Most of them lived on a steady diet of pika, chukar partridge and gila
monster flesh. Altagracia did, however, insist that each visitor from the range
strip naked in front of her before pairing him with any of her girls. Old and
bent through the back, Altagracia scrutinized each customer before he was
allowed bedroom access and confiscated all of his clothing and firearms. Their
clothes she tossed into a vat of water to soak, after which she would hang them
in the blistering sun to dry, and her brothel customers would sit and drink
homemade whiskey from chipped ceramic tumblers until their clothing was
dry enough to wear.

It was name enough to call Altagracia's brothel simply Altagracia's, and the
sparse inhabitants of the basin range called it just that. Unabashedly naked,
they would sit on wooden benches and talk about the corrosive dust of the
valley or about an occasional sighting of tourists or whether another motion
picture company was filming and might need some more "cowboys." This was
Kemp's only social interaction, and, to tell the truth, he did not relish it.
Conversation of any type bored him, and he liked to get his business over quick
and be gone.

On the day of his most recent arrival, however, there was going to be a change
in the customary routine to which Kemp and the others had grown so
mechanically accustomed. It was a change for Kemp anyway. Upon entering
the whorehouse barn, Kemp was greeted by a somber nod from Altagracia.
Behind her stood Stacie, dressed scantily in ripped jeans and a tied black
bandanna covering her over-ample breasts. The drill was always the same.
Give Altagracia the money, twenty dollars cash, and undress. Step in front of
the aging Mestiza and be examined. Other than the usual bruises and
scratches, the customers like Kemp bore no unusual marks. Of course,
Altagracia was precise in looking at their genitals for plantar warts or other
signs of disease. She knew Indian and Mexican medicine, so she said, and
could recognize infection. Kemp having been nowhere except at his dry lake
camp and having done nothing, expected no problems and was anxious to join
Stacie and purge his passion and be on his way.

But on that day, Altagracia's half-breed eyes darkened. There was some kind
of ringworm purulence shaped like a horseshoe near the middle of Kemp's
back in a place where Kemp, who did no own a mirror, would not have seen it.
Altagracia grumbled and stared into his eyes and asked Kemp if he knew
about it. When he said that he did not, she backed him up to a wall-length
mirror and handed him another spyglass to view what had alarmed her, and
sure enough, to Kemp's surprise, there was a hand-sized ring of purple and
reddish dots in a symmetrical crescent peppering the hub of his back just
under his rigid and broad shoulders.

"What the fuck?" was all that Kemp said. Altagracia shook her head at
Stacie, who vanished behind a makeshift curtain without a word. Then the old
Mestiza pointed toward the door. "Get yourself checked," was all she said.
"No doctor. No girl."

Kemp was bewildered. Even after the sort of rough and tumble life he had led
up to his present age, he had never been tainted by any skin disease. It had
been over a month since he had been with a woman, and that woman had been
Stacie, who was reputedly clean. So what was this infection? Kemp knew
better than to argue. Altagracia had loaded pistols and shotguns within easy
reach all over the entry room, and she would not hesitate to use them if any
vaquero failed to obey her wishes. It had long been rumored that she had shot
dead a straggler who had stayed too long in the bedroom of one of her girls.

Kemp felt both a slight panic and a sudden thirst. His life had gone
unbothered for so long that he no longer gave it any thought. He really was
unaware of even his age most of the time, and his pointless drifting was only
toward one temporary job to another as they occurred in the Reese Valley.
Altagracia handed him back his twenty dollars with a kind of pity glowing in
her sunken eyes. "Drinks on me," she said. "Go and join the other boys."

Kemp walked out into the dusty yard and sat fully shirtless on a splintered
wooden bench. Altagracia brought him some boiler whiskey in a brown-
stained coffee cup, and he stared at it before taking a swig.

"Mind if I look?" said Hector Carbajal, who had recently emerged from a
bedroom and was waiting for his jeans to dry on the clothesline. Hector was a
swarthy Mexican Indian who had wafted up long ago into the Nevada high
country like a sort of giant, uninvited tumbleweed. Like Kemp, he did odd
jobs but mostly fancied himself a true vaquero, although his specialty was
tending goats, and it was well-known in the valley that Hector had transacted
more than one venereal ailment from the beasts he minded. "Doesn't look like
syphilis to me," he mumbled with the characteristic accent of a man caught
between languages. "And I've had that too. A dose of penicillin usually clears
it up. You'd better go see Doc Harpling in Battle Mountain as soon as you can.
I've never seen a ring of dots like that. Looks like a bug of some kind."

Kemp made a face as the crude, home-made still-whiskey drained down his
throat. He had not seen Hector for a long time, but they were as close to being
friends as anyone Kemp had ever known. The usual expression of their
friendship was to get drunk together. There was a nameless outpost out on the
flinty sands near Olone in Nye County where they had tied one on less than a
month before. Kemp asked Hector if he remembered that night and if he could
recall exactly what each had done. Hector read through his thoughts and said
that there had been no women. "We got so drunk and so horny that we could
have fucked one another," he laughed. Then his face flattened and he
squinted at Kemp. "There was something funny about you that night," he
added. "Something just a little strange."

II. Hector's story and a trip to Battle Mountain

"We were in that plank-floored place drinking shine with old Pablo Vasquez
that night," began Hector, finishing his first cup of whiskey, "and you were
talking all kinds of crazy shit. I thought you were going to pick a fight and try
to kill someone. You're a vicious son of a bitch when you get drunk, you
know."

Kemp nodded his head. He had the scars to prove his love for both fighting
and violence and didn't need any Mexican to tell him about it. "Get to the
point," he said, buttoning on his faded gingham shirt. "What did I do?"

"Well," began Hector, relishing the fact that he had all the details and was in
the narrative seat, "I never knew that for a white scrub wrangler with a fifth
grade education you could speak such good Spanish."

"Good?" said Kemp, bothered. "I don't speak any Spanish at all."

"You did that night. You were calling me and Vasquez and a bunch of the
other caballeros a bunch of names and insulting our mothers and our whores
and anything else you could think of to insult. We don't put up with that lack
of respect. It's a pride thing." Then Hector smiled. "Don't worry. It's all
over now. No one cares. Blame the cheap whiskey. But...there still was
something..."
"What?"

"Your Spanish. It was not the way we talk. Shit, we are just all old bastard
Chicanos. No one talks Spanish the way you did. You were using words like
'vosotros' and stuff the fucking Gallegos say in Spain. They call that language
Castellano. It sounds like shit. We don't talk that way. Not with that stupid
accent either with all the TH sounds. You called beer cerveTHa for example.
No one says that here. You sounded like a Espanoleto from Madrid or
whatever. Like a fucking edumacated snob. You must have been in school for
a while. If you want to pick a fight with a Mexican, do it in our language like
we speak it. Don't mock us with your Gallego accent and words."

Hector's remarks meant next to nothing to Kemp, who had never crossed the
boundaries of Nevada that he could remember. He dismissed the idea to
drunkenness and concluded with "It don't matter. I didn't mean anything."

"I know," said Hector getting up and retrieving his jeans from the clothesline.
"Nothing at all. Just keep the Spanish lingo to yourself next time."

Two days later Kemp was sitting in the hot dark little reception area of one of
Battle Mountain's only physicians, a Doctor Robert Harpling, who had fled a
civilized practice back east and come to the Nevada high country for reasons
unknown. It had always been rumored that he was an abortion doctor and
was in trouble for that, but fortunately for Kemp, Harpling was also a
specialist in skin diseases, something he did not tell most of his patients.

Kemp Tanner had reached into his meager savings to find the forty dollars that
Dr. Harpling charged most of his impoverished or near-indigent patients.
Harpling, despite his shady past, was a garrulous man who had adopted a
certain feeling for the roughnecks of Northern Nevada. Battle Mountain was
an off-track place where few if any had health insurance, and Harpling,
understanding this, charged very little for his services and at times, under the
right circumstances, often offered them for free. He worked alone in a small
understocked office and saw his patients one by one in the order of how much
he charged them, and for that reason on that somewhat fateful Saturday in
July, the harsh Nevada desert sun was already setting when Kemp was finally
admitted into Harpling's examination room. At the doctor's bidding, Kemp
removed his shirt and Harpling used a rotating magnifier to examine the
strange eruptions on Kemp's back. Like all physicians, Harpling's manner
was to say very little during the initial exam and continuously make a
hmmmmm sound as he stretched and poked at Kemp's taut skin. He froze a
small patch of the rash and sliced off a sample which he slid into a small
container.
"It needs to go to the pathology lab," Harpling said. "You know, this was once
my specialty---dermatology. I can't make a living off that much anymore. So
I'm registered in general practice. But I just want you to know I have seen
some skin in my life." And then, almost as an afterthought he added, "But
none like this before. Hmmmm"

"I've been with a few whores, doc."

"Who hasn't? This is Nevada. We come to expect that. For right now, I can
assure you that this is not an STD, or at least not one that I have ever seen.
The infection forms almost a perfect half-circle and is colored both purple and
red. It doesn't give you any pain. You have no other symptoms. Up close, I
can't see a thing. It look like little crystal scales or something. You can touch
and feel them very well, but each little raised place is kind of stiff and flinty.
Beats me what it is. We'll just have to wait for the lab tests."

With that Harpling straightened up and motioned for Kemp to put his shirt
back on. "I can see where it might scare the gals," he joked. "It looks bad,
real bad. But I don't think it is. Out there on the mesas you may have just run
into something. I know a little about the life you guys lead."

Doctor Harpling led Kemp to the door and exited onto Battle Mountain's
dreary main street alongside of him after locking the door of his office.
"Tourist season," he said. "Probably means a little business for me."

"Me too," said Kemp. "They got me into a movie once."

"Doesn't surprise me. You look like a real cowboy. Square shoulders. Good
build. Tough as wang leather. You're a pretty handsome guy. Maybe you
should try for the movies full time."

"Not my style."

"Well, drop in next Tuesday when the lab report comes and I'll try to have
something for you."

Kemp walked off looking for a tavern that he knew farther down the state
highway which also served as a main street. He noted with some disgust a
group a sightseers getting off a dust-coated tour bus. It also appeared to be
their intention to go to the same tavern. Kemp edged past them without
speaking. He beat them into the door of some place called Jack's Authentic
Saloon and grabbed a seat at the bar. The tourists, mostly late middle aged
and overweight, followed him in. Kemp could see that they were eyeing him,
probably for his "realism," about which he heard more than once before. And
then a portly woman of about forty with rosy cheeks stepped up and asked
him if he would pose with some of the group.

"I don't pose," said Kemp morosely. "Unless I'm paid."

"What a whore," chortled a voice from behind in the small crowd.

"Here," said the woman, handing him a few bills. "Will this be enough?"

Willingly Kemp got onto his feet and stood beside several of the eager tourists
and allowed others to snap his photo. He tried to avoid touching them, but
some of them insisted on leaning an elbow on his shoulder or in some cases
putting an arm around his waist. They were the usual tenderfoots, the type
that always came west to see the snakes and gila monsters, talk to some
cowboys and then vanish forever back into some comfortable and faraway life
elsewhere.

But then the unexpected happened. From a side table, a somber-faced young
man wearing some sort of heat to toe camouflage clothing jumped up and
pointed a digital camera squarely into Kemp's face. He snapped several shots,
turned brusquely, ignoring the tourist gaggle, and paced out of the saloon.
Kemp noted that he was a young white man and far different and far fitter
than the others. Some kind of commando or cop, Kemp thought. Maybe they
are still looking for me for something I did. He would have run outside and
stopped the man but the tourists blocked him by their constant milling around
as they looked at the fake landscape pictures nailed to the tavern walls.

Who in the fuck wanted my mugshot? Kemp thought as he downed several

straight shots of overpriced bourbon. That would be his mystery for today.

III. A stranger appears in the dry river camp

As evening began to fall over the Shoshones and harsh bars of leaden, summer
sun started to narrow through the mountain cuts, most of which only men like
Kemp could actually say they knew, Kemp rammed his dented pickup down
the dry tributary of the Reese toward the last place he had called home, a lean-
to corrugated metal shack next to a wooden box filled with his limited
provisions. In the rising desert vapors, he distinguished a strange form, a
woman, a very young and shapely woman at that. She had a large backpack
by her side and was facing across the mucky stream eastward toward the
darkening Toiyabes. In her hand she held a paint brush and was gazing
intently at a square canvas that she had mounted on a improvised easel.
Another hiker, a tourist, thought Kemp with aversion. And this one far too
close to his camp. But as he neared he noted almost at once that she was not
only well-built but overwhelmingly pretty. She had a straight and narrow
torso, long sculpted legs, square shoulders, and a mane of long, uninterrupted
brown hair that fell almost to the center of her back. Under that, two firm and
rounded buttocks bulged from her tight jeans. By the time Kemp could make
out the features of her face, he realized that she was blatantly striking, far too
pretty to be out on the dry river range by herself painting the stinking hollows
of the empty mountains. As he came closer, the young woman lay down her
brush and stared at his oncoming truck. Kemp ground the Rampage to a
dusty halt just in front of her and slid out. Without fear, she took two steps
toward him, her prominent, uplifted breasts pointing at him through a thin
black tee shirt which made no attempt to cover the flatness of her defined
abdomen or the seductive dimple of her stretched navel.

"Hi," she began without a hint of caution, "I'm Nicole. I take it that is your
squat down there past the sand hill? I hope you don't think I'm intruding. I'm
just hiking though and painting a little as I go."

"I can see that," said Kemp, somewhat at a loss for words. Desire was welling
up in his groin as he spoke. She was alone and helpless, and for a brief
moment his thoughts took the blackest form as he contemplated taking full
advantage of the total isolation of their encounter. But civility regained its hold
over him. This was not a half-breed Indian whore or even a once-domesticated
Austin prostitute. This was an actual bona fide human being and a brave one
at that. Once a person had become humanized, as this girl immediately
became, Kemp, despite the coarseness of his brutal nature, could no longer
simply take advantage of them. And this stunning and plucky girl was every
bit humanized as she stood now in his longing gaze.

Without his saying another word, she continued: "I'm going to roll out the bag
and sleep here tonight, if you don't mind. I know this is probably your
territory, but if you don't mind a neighbor for one night...."

"I don't mind at all," stammered Kemp, still sizing her up. She seemed tough
and nimble, but still, as he told her, there were venomous snakes and equally
toxic gila monsters in the sand. "Scorpions too," he added. "You need to piss
out a circle to sleep in, else they'll come and maybe sting you."

"Piss?" said Nicole. "I'm a girl in case you haven't noticed. I can piss pretty
far out, but the stream is too full for me to make it into a circle. Besides, I have
only so much water in me. Probably not enough to pee out a full circle."

Kemp looked at her crotch, quite visible through her stretched jeans, and
chuckled. "Maybe I should do that for you."
"Piss away. You have the right tool."

"Better still," Kemp rejoined, "I could invite you to bed down in my camp.
I've poured a ring of kerosene all around, and the critters won't invade us."

"I'd love to," said Nicole. "In fact, that is what I was hoping you would say. "

After Kemp had relit his campfire and placed his muddled stewpot over it to
boil, he dredged out a canvas covered canteen full of white spirits. "Indian
medicine," he snorted, handing the vessel to her. "It should warm you up if
nothing else." Nicole willingly took the canteen and drew out a larger than
usual mouthful. She winced her eyes and swallowed. "Rough stuff," she said,
almost choking. "Mind if I have a little water to go with that?" She drank
directly from the tap of Kemp's water reserve barrel and used a couple of
handfuls of the water to wash the dust off her face. Kemp was enchanted. Her
body was as lithe and well-formed as any that he had seen in his life, and she
was so open and bold.

"Where are you from?" he inquired, as if having nothing else to say.

"Back east...just back east. That's where most of your visitors come from, isn't
it?"
A few minutes later they both began eating spoonfuls of the leftover snake and
pika stew that had been reheated in the bottom of the greasy pot. "Not bad,"
said Nicole.

"Must taste like shit to you. Rattlesnake, pika and some gila monster. There
aren't any fish in the river this time of year, and I've been too busy to hunt
down a deer."

"It's food," said Nicole smiling. "I've had worse. Isn't this the time when you
ask me what a girl like me is doing in a place like this."

"I guess that is what a dumb cowboy asks. So, what is a cute dame like you
doing here?"

"Painting. And getting away from it all. I needed to be alone for a while. It
was a plan between me and my boyfriend."

"A plan? If I was your boyfriend..."

"Let me finish that sentence for you," interrupted Nicole. "If you were my
boyfriend, you would never let me out of your sight or something like that."
"Yeah. I guess that is what I was going to say."

The flames of Kemp's campfire were now the only light that punctuated the
dense Nevada desert night which had abruptly fallen. The two of them sat for
a few minutes silently, listening to the immeasurable noises of the Nevada
wasteland darkness which began to enclose them together into a weird firelight
cameo, like a vignette from the end of the world surrounding its only two
remaining survivors. The sticky air became cooler, and Kemp remarked that
even in July it was going go get much colder. Nicole countered with some
comment about her sleeping bag. How it would be warm enough. "But I do
have a plan," she mused almost to herself.

"You and your missing boyfriend," groused Kemp. "Figures. A hot woman
like you always has a boyfriend somewhere. What is this plan?"

Nicole stretched out her long legs and settled back against her backpack and
looked up into the countless stars which dotted the night sky. "Mind if I have
another drink?" she asked. Kemp willingly handed her the canvas canteen.
After her throat recovered from the harshness of the white moonshine, Nicole
stared at Kemp and asked "Wanna hear about me?"
"Yeah. I guess I do. It gets pretty lonely here at night. Fact is, it's lonely all
the time around here. Right now, I don't have any work. Tomorrow I might
find something. So tell me about you. You do know that I could have been a
problem for you if I had been bent in that direction."

"And I could have been a problem for you too," said Nicole with a certain tart
firmness. "But as it comes down, we are not a problem for one another, are
we?"

"Guess not. Tell me about you."

"I do have a boyfriend. He's twenty-three going on twenty-four just like me.
We grew up together from babyhood onwards. He is my best, oldest and
closest friend. Unless you have had a friend like that, you have no idea what I
am talking about. We have been inseparable from one another all of our lives,
and, chances are, we will always be inseparable, but the plan---our plan---was
to part ways for a short time and experience a little of life without breathing
down one another's necks. It's hard to explain. Something about tasting
freedom, I guess. Just like you he, he is handsome and strong. He is also
intelligent and very, very sexy."

"Just like me," laughed Kemp. "So how long are you two going to stay
apart?"

"A few months, most likely. I miss him already, and I know he misses me. But
we made a plan together, and we are determined to stick with it. I chose this
valley because of its emptiness. He went somewhere else. We've been through
a lot together in our lives, things you would not and could not believe."

"I believe a lot of stuff."

"My stuff you wouldn't. Anyway, that is the plan. Get away from one another
for a time and then get back together, unless we both found something better,
and probably just stay as one for the rest of our lives. The plan is supposed to
strengthen us."

"And that is the plan?"

Again the dull roar of a million night critters rose suddenly as a pale, anaemic
moon rose over the Shoshones. Kemp pulled off his shirt, mindless of the
strange eruption on his back, and stirred the flickering embers of the fading
fire. He kicked open his own matted sleeping kit and rolled it out over the
crystalline sand. "Bedtime," he said looking at Nicole in what were now only
guttering shadows. "Bedtime, and it's best to sleep naked in these things. I
hope you don't mind."

"I don't need to look," laughed Nicole. "Naked is pretty sometimes too. We
were all born naked, you know. There is another part to our plan. He is
probably working on that right now."

"What is the other part?"

In the remaining tongues of firelight that licked behind her, Nicole stood up
and pulled off her black teeshirt, revealing a protruding set of well-defined
nipples which she made no attempt to conceal. "I sleep naked too," she said
calmly. "I hope you don't mind."

"Why should I mind? I'm just a stupid cowboy."

"Cowboys are good," continued Nicole, unbuttoning her tight jeans and
pulling them down around her knees. Kemp remarked even in the dimness
that she wore no undergarments. She was totally unabashed by her nudity.

Folding her jeans and shirt and placing them neatly next to her backpack,
Nicole glanced back over her shoulder at Kemp. Her long, dark auburn hair
glistened in the remaining firelight. As she bent over, he breasts dangled
seductively toward the Earth, her buttocks small and firm, were dimpled with
undulating muscles. Paying no attention to the fact that she was being closely
and hungrily scrutinized by Kemp, she reached into a pocket of her backpack
and pulled out a small square package. This she held up in the glow of the
dying campfire and stared at Kemp with wide almond-shaped eyes which
resolved to a pale green in the firelight. "This," she said, "is the other part of
the plan. I presume that even a dumb cowboy knows how to use it."

It was, of course, a condom. She tossed it at Kemp, who wasted no time...

And those details can be surmised.

As their bodies touched and rubbed under the somewhat pungent material of
Kemp's now partially zipped sleeping roll, she thrust herself deeper and deeper
into the cowboy's angular and strapping body. Their lips met almost violently,
as did their other parts. When the throes and thrusting of their boundless
passion were expended and satiated, Nicole rolled over to take in the still-
moaning afterglow of the experience. Kemp lit the heretofore concealed stub
of a twisted joint he had laid nearby. They lay wordless beside each other, still
chafing and kneading their conjoined bodies as the urge struck them.

"By the way," panted Nicole indolently, "my name is Nikki."

IV. Malabo

The following day broke over the lonely Nevada landscape without prologue,
as if the sun had just suddenly been switched on by an unseen hand. Kemp,
feeling slightly timorous now in the company of Nikki, pulled himself out of the
sleeping roll before his gorgeous companion's eyes were fully opened . He
gaped down at her and felt like he needed to pinch himself to make sure had
had not been dreaming. Their lovemaking had been vigorous and sudden, and
Kemp began to wonder why he had spent so many wasted hours of plastic
passion with whores and wandering Mestizas. But then he looked about his
scattered camp and realized with sadness that most of his life had been likewise
squandered. Here he was without a permanent home or even a reliable job in
bed with a young and alluring girl who had come out of nowhere under the
guise of trying to find herself. Instead of finding herself, she had found the
unpromising, worthless and now aging cowboy that he was. What could there
have been in all that for her? Where could it lead? Kemp realized at once that
the answers were nothing and nowhere. Nicole, or Nikki as she now called
herself, was just like the tourists who liked to be in pictures hugging his slim
waist. She was a gawker from somewhere back east with a missing boyfriend
with who she would someday re-unite. As for himself, there would only be the
bleak Reese River Valley and the menial work that he was able to extract from
it.

But Nikki dispelled most of his self-inflicted gloominess when she pulled her
dazzling, sculpted torso out from the bed covers and without so much as a
diffident glance, walked over to his side and massaged his neck and kissed him.
Without a sound, she pulled on her jeans and black tee shirt. He noted that a
pad of dark hair was beginning to grow in her armpits. She was really
roughing it, he knew. No amenities like city women crave. No shaving. No
cosmetics. He wondered how long she would stay or if it were in her plan to
leave right away and was delighted beyond words when she asked him after a
second tin can of grain-rich camp coffee to show her some of the talus slopes
and the cliff faces on the Shoshone foothills. "Let's hike," she said. "Isn't that
what out of work cowboys do?"

By late morning the desert sun was dampening both of them to the degree that
beads of sweat became visible on their foreheads, and Nikki's black tee shirt
became stained with rings of moisture. She sweats, he thought. Everyone does
here. It didn't make her less than perfect. "Let's cool off in the wide part of
the river," he suggested. "It's muddy, but maybe we can throw mud at one
another and wash it off."

"That would be a real treat," laughed Nikki with a tinge of irony. "I don't
mind the sun. I'm getting pretty tan as it is. Say, what kind of hard-ass scar is
that you have on your back? It felt like a bumpy piece of rusted metal."

Kemp remembered his infection, the one that made Altagracia keep him away
from her whores. Of course, Nikki's hand had touched it during their union.
It had no feeling or produced no particular pain, so he had failed to remember
it. In a small panic, he hoped that it was not something contagious.

It later turned out that it was. But that part of the story must perforce come in
due time.

As they walked toward the flank of the first rock fall cliff which signaled the
rising landforms of the Shoshones, Nikki stopped dead in her tracks and
pointed toward the opening to a small cave. "Let's not go in there," said
Kemp. "It is full of bats and other vermin. I tried to sleep in there once and
was almost eaten alive by scorpions and spiders. Besides, there is some funny
injun writing on a block of stone right by the entrance."

"Funny writing? Just the sort of thing I would love to see. I'm not afraid of
these black scorpions either. They are easy to see and step around."

"You're a strange woman."

"Stranger than you would ever believe," laughed Nikki. "Take me to see the
writing."

Kemp obeyed. In fact, Kemp would have obeyed any request Nikki made by
that time. He hated the cave and its spooky writing and knew better than to be
too curious about what "injun" stuff meant.

Suddenly, Nikki, upon viewing an upright slab of stone, shouted "A stele!! It's
a stele. I didn't spend much time in college, but I had a class in archaeology
where we talked about these. They are all over the Earth, left by many
different civilizations. They all contain messages or decrees of some kind.
That's what they think anyway."

"No one thinks anything about this one," grumbled Kemp. "They came again
and again to examine it once. I asked some of them, and nobody knew
anything. One guy said it was from a pre-Colombian civilization. I don't even
know what that means."

"Before the white man," said Nikki solemnly, passing the palm of her hand
over a mystifying set of symbols which appeared to be letters in some unknown
language. "How long ago did you say they came?"
"About six months ago. Before that time, no one, not even me, had seen this
writing."

"That's because it is kind of fresh."

"Fresh?"

"It wasn't written in some prehistoric time. The edges that the letters make
are still sharp. This is a piece of black quartz, and it looks like it doesn't even
belong here."

Kemp begrudgingly moved closer to the upright rock. It had a perfectly

smooth side and was, as he knew, covered with some very simple symbols.
Each symbol was merely a series of either curves or lines attached to make
what looked for all the world to be a letter. "Arabic," he said. "But that's not
it. Some of us used to think it looked like Arabic."

Nikki continued to examine the stele. "I want to take a rubbing of this before I
leave," she said.

Kemp was not happy with the word leave. Somewhere in a buried place in his
mind he was starting to make longer range plans with Nikki. Somewhere a
voice was telling him that it may indeed be time to find a mate, go somewhere
new, get some steady work and settle down.

Nikki interrupted his thoughts by saying "There are spaces between unequal
groups of these symbols. That makes them look like words. Of course, they
could be phonetic or pictographs. Phonetic means that they represent sounds
just like our twenty-six letters do. Pictographs means..."

"Pictures," snapped Kemp. "I've heard all of this before. They explorer guys
said stuff like that when I asked."

"Did they tell you that there appears to be a word here written in our
alphabet?"

"No. Where is it?" Kemp realized that he had always been too spooked by the
stele to examine it very much.

"Right here," said Nikki, tracing her index finger over some letters. "Look."

"Malabo," said Kemp. "What in the hell is Malabo?"

"I have no idea, and I didn't bring a computer out on your desert with me
either. I'll have to google it when I go into town."

"M-A-L-A-B-O" spelled Nikki ponderously once again. "And it is set off a

little from the other squiggly letters like it was something special. I suppose
your visiting researchers knew this, but that could be the key to the
decipherment of the whole stele. It was the way that Champollion decoded the
Rosetta Stone in 1822. He discovered a matching set of ideographic and
phonetic symbols each reinforcing one another."

"I don't understand and I really don't want to talk about it," said Kemp
moving up behind Nikki and placing his hands around her firm breasts.
"I know what I want. Should we?"

"Why not? It was fun last night."

"And a part of your plan."

Nikki smiled and pointed at a sandy patch not far from the cave's entrance. "I
suppose you have enough in you to pee a circle around a place there."
"I do," said Kemp eagerly. "I've been saving some piss. That's a good thing to
do on the desert."

And so the two backed away from the dark, narrow cave entrance and its
upright stone, and appointed themselves in a torrid midday gratification
within sight of the stele and its unreadable message. "Malabo," repeated Nikki
right before the action began. "Malabo."

V. Two trips

After several days of simply spending time with one another, Kemp and Nikki
were obliged to part ways for the most uncomplicated of reasons. Kemp
needed to haul his pickup into Battle Mountain and see Doc Harpling about his
infection, and Nikki, wanted to get somewhere where she could find both an
internet and a phone connection. In truth, she wanted to make a call and check
up on her soulmate and lifelong partner, Trey Agremont, who ostensibly had
been part of the grand plan of temporary severance. Though engrossed
thoroughly with the rough and tumble life of her new cowboy friend, she
missed Trey intensely, this undoubtedly due to the unbreakable bond which
had joined them since earliest childhood. Also, she was still interested in the
strange writing on the stele and wanted to check the meaning of Malabo. Her
plan was, therefore, not to accompany Kemp to Battle Mountain but rather to
hike once again across the stony desert terrain toward the hamlet of Austin,
from which she had first set forth on her journey to the Reese River Valley.
Austin, though tiny, had a large wood-framed hotel, something left over from
the days of the silver barons, where a dusty, rural connector bus pulled in each
week and discharged a mottled group of hikers, explorers, renegades and all-
around wildfolk. It was the only real lodging in town, not counting
Altagracia's brothel, about which Nikki knew nothing. A warm bath and some
link with civilization awaited her at the end of a daylong trek, which was the
sort of solitary adventure that Nikki so much craved in her trial separation
from Trey. Early one morning, she kissed Kemp for what she thought might be
the last time, folded her sleeping bag, packed her backpack and set off across
the pathless and shingly desert.

"Be careful of snakes and gila monsters," was the last thing Kemp had said to
her, although in a regretful way he wanted to say a lot more. For some reason
he was sure that he would see her one day again. There was something about
the unpromising emptiness of the Shoshone Range that got into one's blood, at
least Kemp hoped it had gotten into hers. She'll be back, he thought ruefully,
as he watched her slim frame vanish into the dust devils which swirled against
the eastern horizon. And by that time I will have some cash. Indeed, a major
mustang round up was scheduled for the following day a little north of Battle
Mountain along the Humboldt River high country. Kemp would check his
aging quarter horse out of the rented stall where she was lodged and join the
horse roundup. In truth, he hated mustang rallies for multiple reasons, and his
only thought was of getting a small stake and finding the mysterious and
alluring Nikki again. Despite the vastness of the Nevada wastelands, he felt
confident that he could do that.

Upon arrival in Battle Mountain, Kemp's first stop was at the office of Doctor
Harpling, from whom he gloomily expected bad news. Harpling, as usual,
made him wait in the musty reception room until he had seen and dismissed
numerous other better-paying patients. Then he came out, cigarette dangling
from his lips, and beckoned for Kemp to enter his lone examination room. He
squinted his eyes once again at the crescent-shaped ring of extrusions which
dotted the middle of Kemp's broad and tanned back, making his usual
hmmmmms. Then he turned to Kemp and said that since it didn't give him
any pain, it might as well be left alone. "I could freeze it with liquid nitrogen
or cauterize it or try to cut it out," but my medical instincts tell me to leave it
alone. You'll just have to keep your shirt on when you visit that whorehouse."

"What about the tests?"

"Absolutely nothing. They have no idea what it is. Little pieces of rock hard
scale growing up out of your skin. They grow back too. The place where I
extracted a few of them last week has totally restored itself. No one can
understand the symmetricality of it either. In fact, no one at the lab can make
anything at all out of it."

The doctor puffed on his filterless cigarette and stared at Kemp. Then he
added almost as an afterthought "No, it doesn't seem to be anything you
caught from a whore or an animal, if you've been close to some animals as a lot
of these wranglers have."

"I haven't," snapped Kemp. Never in his thirty-four years on the range had he
practiced bestiality, but he knew of plenty who did.

Kemp rose to his feet, put his shirt back on and paid the doctor another five
dollars. He knew he was getting to the end of his stash. But a certain "high
falutin'" town tavern was calling his name. He had enough crumpled bills in
his pocket to pay for a drink or two and get his stock horse out of hock. He
would spend the night under some dune north of town and join the mustang
round up as scheduled tomorrow. It would probably last four days and pay
him over $500, a small fortune in Kemp's world.

He shook hands with Dr. Harpling and walked off down the main street of
Battle Mountain looking suspiciously from side to side for tourists and trying
to spot an opportunity to get a few more bucks. He knew he was ruggedly
attractive and that the sightseers liked that. Some teenage girls passed in a
convertible and whistled at him. He could even take advantage of that if he
wanted to. But his mind was still clouded with the memory of the ravishing
Nikki and their several days of unlimited pleasure. He wanted to see Nikki
again and wanted the money to do something---anything---right for once.

Unfortunately, it was not a market day, and the town, as well as Jack's
Authentic Saloon, was nearly deserted. A few wranglers passed him by in their
beat up trucks. They were, he knew, heading north for tomorrow's range rally.
He had plenty of time to catch up with that. Once inside of Jack's, he settled
down at the bar and ordered a double shot of bourbon. He stared through the
nearly empty bar to see if there was anyone he could recognize, and, sure
enough, when the glare of the late July sun finally unglazed from his eyes, he
discerned his old range buddy Hector Carbajal in a corner chattering with
some other Mexicans. They were probably heading for the mustang roundup
as well. Kemp motioned to Hector but did not feel like talking. Besides, he did
not know their jagged lingo.

Then an androgynous voice burst out from behind him. "His drinks are on
me," said the voice in what seemed to be the thickest accent that Kemp had
ever heard in these parts. Kemp wheeled around on the barstool and behind
him stood what at first seemed to be a man dressed entirely in coarse camo, but
which eventually resolved into a very fit and masculine-looking woman. She
had, quite against city regulations, a revolver in a black leather holster at her
side and wore another smaller holster from which the carved bone handle of a
huge, and illegal, knife protruded.

At once, Kemp realized that this was the same "man" who had so boldly and
rudely snapped his full facial mugshot the week before. It might as well have
been a man, he thought. Whoever or whatever this woman was, she looked
more adept for rough action than most of the men he saw in the valley. Some
kind of commando, he mused. Very out of place here. Kemp, still wanting to
avoid needless conversation, excused himself, thanked her and headed toward
the toilet at the rear of the barroom. As he passed Hector's table, the latter
grabbed his wrist and looked up. "Be careful, compadre," snarled Hector,
"that is one mean Gallega over there. Watch yourself."

Kemp was annoyed at his sometimes friend. Not only had he clutched him
rather fiercely, but he had put a special emphasis on a presumably Spanish
word that Kemp did not know: Gallega, Gallega.

"You've said that before," muttered Kemp. "What in the fuck are you talking
about?"

"Her," said Hector, swallowing a huge swig of cloudy tequila.

"No, I mean the word. Gallego or however you said it. You accused me of
sounding like one down in Olone when I was drunk."

Hector's Mexican companions broke out in laughter. Obviously it was an

inside joke. Then Hector, smiling at all of them, said "A Gallego is what we call
a fucking Spain-Spanish-Espanoleto-Spaniard around here. She is some kind
of wanna-be soldier and really out of place. The way she talks is not
appreciated by any of us. Sounds like a freaking snob. That is how you
sounded the last time. Like you both learned our language in some posh
school."

Kemp pushed on past Hector and used the bathroom and returned to his seat
where the Gallega was still standing square shouldered and wearing a mean
scowl. Kemp decided to ask her why she had taken his picture, why she had
violated his personal space.

The woman pointed to a corner table and motioned for Kemp to join her. She
brought two more shots with her and sat squat legged backwards on a chair
facing him with her back deliberately turned to the Mexicans. Kemp asked
about the picture but got no immediate response. Then he noted that the
female commando had deep, dark eyes that seemed to penetrate right into his
innermost soul. With different clothes and a more modest style of hair the
woman might have even been pretty, Kemp supposed. Then suddenly her
words came forth, but something was very different. Her lips moved but it
seemed as if no audible sounds issued from them. Instead, her voice, somewhat
occluded but this time accentless, burst into his head making him feel as if it
were coming from another place altogether. Her sentences were like machine
gun fire, staccato and disconnected.

"I've been watching you for a long time. Ever since you saw the slab and the
message. By the cave. I know a lot about you."

Kemp heard himself responding, but it seemed as if he were communicating

through some other channel than vocal sound, something transmitted from his
head.

"Who the fuck are you?"

"My name is Marcelina Ponte. Those borrachos over there are right. I'm from
Spain. They call that Gallega. Fuck them. They don't matter."
"Why did you take my picture last week?"

"I'll show you why in a minute. First, about you and that girl. You like her,
don't you? Well, I'm going to give you a chance to make a lot of money.
Maybe that will win her for you. Maybe it won't. You're going to be a very
special guy, one of a few from around here."

"My picture?" repeated Kemp, irritated by the muffled sounds of their voices
bouncing around in his brain.

Marcelina Ponte pulled out a small brown envelope from her pocket and tossed
it at Kemp, gesturing for him to open it. Inside, Kemp first found three crisp
one hundred dollar bills, but under these was a strange little blue booklet that
he had to turn over in his hand to examine.

"It's a passport," said Marcelina in whatever manner she had of conveying her
words. "It's your passport, picture, number and all. It is a forgery. But no
one will ever be able to tell the difference. Not even with their computer checks
and all. It will take you anywhere. No trouble."

Kemp opened the booklet. There on the first page embossed with a serial
number was his face. Behind his snarling likeness was the only blank wall that
Jack's Saloon had. The leaflet was filled with U.S. government notices and
pages left blank for customs stamps. Kemp had never seen a real passport
before.

"Why do I need this?"

"You'll find out when the time comes. Keep it safe. Go on your little horse
thing. But get ready for some bigger adventure. I know you like adventure. It
will get you out of this dump. You'll be hearing from us soon."

"Us?"

"Yeah. Us. Malabo."

With that, Marcelina Ponte projected herself like a shot out of her seat and,
without a backward glace, strode out the door into the street. Kemp, left in a
kind of fuzzy daze, looked down at his unfinished whiskey. The bartender
walked over to him and examined him with a weary eye. "Didn't know you
spoke Spanish," he muttered, cleaning off the table with a soiled rag.

"I don't," said Kemp, but then it occurred to him suddenly that his whole
conversation with the mysterious Marcelina had been in Spanish, a language
which he didn't think he spoke.

Right then, Hector, followed by his companions, bustled behind him toward the
door. "Gallego" smirked Hector in passing. "A real Gallego talking to a real
Gallega in Nevada. Ain't that some shit?"

Kemp downed the remaining whiskey and felt its warmth clouding his mind
even further. I don't speak Spanish, he thought to himself.

At the time this eerie conversation was taking place in Battle Mountain, about
seventy miles to the south in the dust-coated little crossroads of Austin, in a
three storey wooden rangeman's hotel, in a room decorated with cheap dime
store acrylic prints of cactuses and table rocks, Trey Agremont was pulling on
his jeans and looking down at Nikki Barazan lying on the yellowing and stale
sheets of a bed where they had just made love for the first time in over a
month.

"I couldn't help myself," said Trey. "I wanted to be with you. I knew you had
taken the bus out here to hike in the desert and paint. I couldn't control
myself. We have been together all our lives. There is just no way that...."
"I understand," moaned Nikki, "but we did have a plan. I have done my part
of it."

"You mean by fucking that cowboy you told me about?"

"Yeah, that and some other things. Who have you fucked?"

"Some girls. One followed me around until I decided to come out here looking
for you. Her name was Bambi. Stupid name, but she was pretty cute."

"So was my cowboy. Now I suppose our plan is over. We are back together as
one. Frankly, for me, it hasn't been long enough."

"He had that kind of effect on you?"

"Kind of, but it wasn't just him. I liked the solitude. Sure, I missed you
terribly too. You know, Trey, we are really and truly destined to be with one
another forever. This was going to be our only break. I mean in our lives. I
wanted it to last a little longer. I mean since it will probably be the last time. I
know that I can't live without you. You know that you can't live without me.
But we needed some, some...adventure."
Trey pulled on his tee shirt and looked pensively at Nikki, who was still naked.
A kind of shadow passed over his face. "I think you got yours," he said at
length shaking his head in disdain. "I thought you were more careful."

"What on Earth are you blubbering about? Careful?"

"Yeah," said Trey. "A guy that eats rattlesnake and gets high on its venom. A
guy that skins gila monsters for breakfast...."

"What?" exclaimed Nikki, exasperated.

"A guy like that was bound to carry disease." Without waiting for Nikki's
response, he ran his hand over a patch of raised skin on her back in a place
where it was invisible to Nikki. "Look in the mirror," he said. "Turn your
head all the way around."

Nikki obeyed, and in doing so, saw the same horseshoe shaped crescent of
stony raised dots that she had seen and felt on Kemp's back. A grinding horror
penetrated her chest. "What in the fuck is it?" she screamed.
"No idea," said Trey. "The price of independence, I guess."

A late afternoon sun broke through the filthy gauze curtains which draped
over the unwashed glass pane of their lone window. Sand mixed with particles
of dead desert plants eddied outside along the totally deserted central
thoroughfare of the remote crossroads town. Buzzards twirled in wide circles
in the sky. The proximate desert was little by little overtaking what was the
town of Austin. The two of them were once again together, but never had either
one ever felt so horrible alone.

VI. Enter an entomologist

While Trey Agremont and Nikki Barazan were staring into the blinding haze of
the desert glare from the ramshackle hotel room they had rented in the
dwindling and lost town of Austin, Nevada, over two thousand miles to the
east in a university laboratory, Dr. Eric Palobay and his assistant and ravishing
domestic partner, Brooke Nescott, sat by a marble table top with a single white
examination dish in front of them. With them was Brooke’s son and Eric’s de
facto stepson, Jared, who had stopped by the university on his bicycle. All three
wore puzzled looks on their faces as they stared at the dish and its tiny purple
and red contents. As chairman on the Central State University Department of
Entomology and charter member of the International Crypto-Zoological
Society, Dr. Palobay appeared to have a rather baffling mystery on his hands.
An associate of his in Elko, Nevada---a dermatology lab technician---had taken
a risk and sent him a few seemingly live specimens of some sort of “invasive”
entity that had been extracted the previous week from the back of a range
rider and part time wrangler named Kemp Tanner, a name which, of course,
meant nothing to the group now looking at the specimens. Palobay was not, in
fact, even sure they were alive or even a form of insect life. As far as cryptids
went, Palobay had seen his share of them, but had never examined anything
quite so small. His contact in Nevada had only emailed him that the tiny
protrusions extracted from the man’s back appeared to move occasionally and
have other lifelike qualities but were of a nature that no one had been able to
explain. Eric Palobay had magnified them as much as his equipment allowed
him and found only that the tiny pieces seemed to glow brighter from time to
time and that they also appeared to have the propensity of being able to stir.
There were seven of these things, each about half the size of a tiny grain of rice
and equally hard. In fact, Palobay had attempted to cut them with the
sharpest blade in his laboratory without success. They measured about four
millimeters in length and under two millimeters in width.

Suddenly, Jared yawned. Although the boy had an avid interest in strange and
exotic creatures---cryptids---he was at once bored by the grains of whatever in
the dish before him. Brooke, faithful as ever to her soul mate’s work stood by
to serve in whatever capacity she could as an assistant, but, in truth, she was
becoming uninterested as well. She knew she needed to conclude the day at the
university, get home and fix both Eric and Jared something at least half way fit
to eat.

Eric continued wordlessly, observing the grains from side to side and again
with the powerful magnifiers he had on hand. It was clear that he was at a loss
to explain why such steely little things should have been found growing in a
semi-circle on a man’s back. “Dermatologists,” he muttered, shaking his head
from side to side. “They are always coming up with a new bug. And it never is
good news”

“Except for your vap,” said Jared. “That has extended your life to ninety-six
years old and you look about thirty-five.”

“That, my son, was not discovered by a dermatologist.”

“Oh,” said Jared, suppressing a snicker. Brooke shot him an angry glance
which seemed to say a polite but firm but firm ‘be quiet.’

All at once, Eric rose from his seat and grabbed a yellow legal pad and a
pencil. He glanced at Jared with cunning grin crossing his face. “Who’s good
at math?” he said.

“I am,” replied Jared firmly, not concealing his pride. “I’m the best in the
sixth grade. No apologies.”

“That’s what I thought, and no apologies are ever needed for talent.
Remember that.”

“And I stink,” rejoined Brooke, “but of course you knew that already.”

“I did,” laughed Eric. “I just wanted to hear you say it instead of me. Now
that is exactly why I want to use you instead of Jared for this. Do you mind
doing a little math for me? I won’t laugh at you. In fact, I want you to have a
little trouble.”

Brooke looked quizzically at one of the two men she loved the most on Earth.
In fact, she would have done anything for Eric, and he knew he did not need to
ask. But she wanted to give him a bit of a hard time.

“If you need some math done, why don’t you just use my son?”

“Because Jared would require less brain activity than you will. Do you still
remember how to do long division?”

“Of course,” snapped Brooke legitimately annoyed. “I’m not that stupid. You
remember I was a histotechnologist when you met me. I needed to work with
measurements and numbers sometimes.”

Eric bent across the lab table and kissed Brooke on the lips. “I would never
call you stupid, but you do admit that arithmetic has never come naturally to
you as it has to Jared.”

“True,” said Brooke, kissing him back across the table.

“I’m going to ride home if you two start getting messy,” said Jared with a
feigned grin of disgust.

“No. You might like to watch this,” said Eric with a more serious tone. He
ripped off a sheet of yellow paper and wrote a problem on it. 45599992 divided
by 891059 to the fourth decimal place. He slid the paper and pencil over to
Brooke. “Please get started and take your time,” he said gently. Brooke
blinked at him and set to work. Instead of watching her, Eric stared at the
grainy little buds in his dish. He silently motioned for Jared to come closer and
join him. As Brooke plugged away at the problem, each of the seven sharp
edged grains began to glow brighter. Two of them started to rotate. Finally
they all began spinning slowly while still waxing brighter and brighter in
shades of purple and red. When, at length, Brooke finished the problem,
checked her work, and sat up content that she was correct, the entities resolved
once again to duller, less luminescent shades and finally became motionless.

“What does that tell you, Jared?”

“They respond to brain waves?”

“Our brains emit electronic interferences, waves, at a very low and almost
indistinguishable level,” continued Eric. “But these creatures seem to sense
them and tune in, and they do it faster than our most sophisticated machines.”

Brooke seemed momentarily dazed as she listened to Eric. Her eyes watered
and bulged slightly.

“What is it, honey?” said Eric, concerned.

“Malabo,” whispered Brooke.

Later when questioned, she had no idea of what the word meant. It had just
popped into her head.

VII. Jared’s “babysitter” and a long drive

Brooke Nescott and her domestic partner Eric Palobay had long been
scheduled for some alone time together, and a road trip from Aristock to
Nevada was viewed more as a pleasant release from the tensions of university
life and research than the virtual voyage into nowhere which it turned out to
be. In all of his ninety-six years, Eric had managed to see a fair share of the
world, but he had never seen the American West, and when, after three days of
nearly solid daytime driving, Eric and Brooke finally reached the margin of
the Nevada desert and pointed Eric’s jeep down what has been termed the
“loneliest road in America,” even Eric was jolted by the absolute austerity of
the sullen bare landscape and sparseness of human inhabitation.

“This is the kind of a world where a new cryptid could indeed be discovered,”
he remarked to Brooke as they neared the town of Eureka on their way to
Austin---itself only a mere fork in the stony, dry desert. Eric’s contacts at the
dermatological lab had supplied him with some sketchy details about where
the “wrangler” with the strange affliction "hung out” most of the time. Also,
the same contact had emailed Eric a computer slide show of many of the
strange sites of the dry Reese River Valley. Eric had naturally not been
impressed with the five inch sand beetles or the gila monsters which ate them,
nor did the site of rock pile pikas excite him much, even though he knew that
most likely by the time Jared was an adult there would be no more pikas, so
endangered were they at present. The only picture in the slide show which had
actually grabbed Eric’s attention had been one of dark crevasse-like cave
opening in the upland foothills above the valley. In this opening there was a
slab of black quartz standing upright which had been inscribed with a strange
linear writing that appeared to be a bona fide language. Eric’s informant had
felt that Eric would be especially interested in the mysterious stele and had
taken several very definitive close-ups of it. This stele was in the immediate
vicinity where some cowpoke named Tanner lived, and this was, of course,
confidential information, but Eric knew how to keep quiet and was no stranger
to being privy to details that were ordinarily kept in utter secrecy. Such was
the nature of the world-wide Vap Wearers Organization, the invisibility of
which was by its very nature ubiquitous and absolute. All knowledge of the
beneficial parasite which had kept Eric and so many others hale and hearty
well beyond the usual boundaries of human life-expectancy was protected by
individuals to whom silence was second nature and confidentiality a pre-
requisite for any sort of friendship.

It seemed droll to Brooke that she and Eric were crossing the country on
summer break looking for a lone cowboy who might have contracted the
parasitical invasion of an unidentified cryptid. Looking for one guy had
seemed next to impossible to Brooke until she had witnessed the desolation of
the terrain. “We could probably find anyone out here,” she ventured. “All the
missing people in history. Judge Crater. Jimmy Hoffa.”

Eric smiled and drove on. There was, he knew, both a ramshackle wooden
hotel and some kind of roadside motel in Austin, and that would be their
jumping off point, a place from which they would have to hike the remaining
thirty or so miles into the Shoshone country and mostly dry valley of the Reese
River where their “specimen,” the cowboy, was said to live outdoors.

Meanwhile, back in Aristock, Jared Nescott was not in one slight bit
disappointed to be left behind by his parents. For one, his club had its usual
business to perform, and its leadership was revolving around to his friend
Malachi Ayladore who was planning to recruit many new members. But the
biggest reason why eleven year old Jared, always astute beyond his years, was
content to be left behind was because his “babysitter” would be none other
than his natural father, Dragonsnort, who could for several weeks at a time
emerge from his tree state and assume a human form, as he had over eleven
years previous when wooing and impregnating Jared’s mother, with whom he
still maintained the most intimate of relationships, and this with Eric Palobay's
total and unwavering approval. Theirs was a ménage à trois made in paradise,
and Jared basked in the fatherly love of two outstanding men, who, needless to
say, had long ago proclaimed themselves to be the best of friends….and were.
It was a hot, clammy July, and Jared accompanied by his gang, The Plus Sized
Club, had made a point of visiting the Aristock city Olympic Pool each day.
Club business was no longer carried on in the strange venue of the club’s
namesake, but rather poolside. As lifeguards abounded, there was no reason
for Dragonsnort, whose tattooed and pierced appearance usually raised too
many eyebrows, to escort the boys every day. Jared and the others were
powerful swimmers. On the very day that Jared’s mother and stepfather were
driving across the desert toward Austin, Malachi Ayladore was invested as new
president of the Plus Sized Club as his turn in rotation. The central club
members and founders--Cody, Ian, Tyshawn, Malachi, Subaru and Jared
commandeered one end of the huge pool deck and conducted an official
meeting. Of the many resolutions made by the boys on that day only one is
worthy of mention for this tale. It was roundly agreed upon that one day in the
future, perhaps when the boys were teenagers, they would do two things. One
would be to use Eric Palobay’s contacts in the Vap Society to unearth the
stunning Nautica de Craquelot with whom they had all been smitten before her
protective relocation. The second resolution which received a unanimous vote
was again one that concerned the future. Nautica’s home country was, it was
known, a strange fault under the crust of the Earth near the North Pole, a
place called Crackland---named for its founder---a certain John Crack.
Crackland was, according to Nautica a virtual subterranean dreamland, but it
was ruled by a prep school jackass named Zack, who was its king. King Zack
and all the other harebrained noblemen of his court had mostly distinguished
themselves through their absolute stupidity and unconcern for human lives.
They ruled on whim as total butchers, and it was for that reason that Nautica
had needed to become a refugee. In their own manner of precocious eleven
year old bravery, the boys vowed to restore Nautica to her homeland and rid
the new and hidden country of the despotic and toxic rulers that its ownership
and true governance had installed. Like knights, they put a fist to their hearts
and said “For Nautica and Crackland!!” They said it three times and loud
enough that one of the college-student lifeguards had to come over to the
gathering and ask them to “break it up” and either swim or leave the premises.
And so the Plus Sized Club said it one more time in parting: “For Nautica and
Crackland!!!”

Little did the boys know that others far distant had also set their sites on the
flowering underground land-fault and were at this very moment planning an
invasion of a barely known part of the planet that they rightly felt should be
theirs. But that is one of the elements of this story. One which must be
discovered gradually.

And Dragonsnort: At home alone until Jared and Malachi arrived, he profited
by his escape into human form and was catching up on television news and
sports, drinking beer and eating summer sausage---things he naturally could
not do when existing as a tree.

Before Jared’s arrival, he also chanced to check Brooke’s email, which he had
been asked to do. In it was a message to him that Brooke and Eric had passed
through Utah and were about to cross the boundaries of the Nevada wasteland.
They had enjoyed a very pleasant trip so far, but they both missed Jared and
Dragonsnort, etc., etc. Nothing much of note. Except there was an
attachment. Something Eric had failed to pass to him before leaving. A very
clear set of photographs of an upright rock inscribed with a strange series of
either symbols or letters. Would he please look it over and comment?

Dragonsnort, who knew many things just by virtue of being Dragonsnort,

printed out the pictures and set them on the table. Then he returned to a can
of beer and a baseball game on television.

When Jared finally said goodbye to Malachi, the pictures of the rock and its
writing were the first thing he saw on entering the kitchen.

A few minutes later, he was sitting with his father at the table, as Dragonsnort
willingly consented to examine the pictures with his son, in whom he promoted
all sorts of curiosity about as many things as possible. Dragonsnort, being a
thing of hybrid supernaturalism himself, believed in and promoted the
fantastic, and he was pleased when his handsome son did too.

"More strangeness," said Jared, pouring himself an orange juice.

"Well, you've had a lot of that, haven't you? Me to start with."

"I wouldn't have it any other way. But Mom and Eric do seem to be magnets
for the uncanny. Now they have this tiny cryptid to track down out west. And
suddenly we have a new element, some squiggly writing on a slab of rock."

Dragonsnort pulled up the sleeve of his vest to expose the top of his left arm
and full muscular shoulder. His arm was covered with many designs and some
of them were bold pictures of fantastic hoofed animals and improbable multi-
winged birds. In the past, he had explained the origin of nearly all of his
phantasmagoric tattoos to Jared, who as a younger child was fascinated but
now had come to merely accept that his father, an incarnated tree, was simply
not like the monotonous masses when he joined humanity.

"I told you a long time ago that I had an adolescence just like everyone else,"
Dragonsnort began. "I could remain in human form a lot longer then, and I
wanted to make the most of the time I spent with people---people like your
mother. I thought that I needed to make an immediate impression. I thought
that I needed to get everyone's attention right from the start. So I got the
piercings and the tats. As I grew older, I realized that there were other ways to
make one's mark."

Jared shifted in his seat and traced his finger over the most striking of the rock
face pictures. "So what do you think all this means," he said, a certain
admiration for his father shining in his wide, opaque and intelligent eyes.

"Don't put me on the spot, Jared, and don't hold me in such high esteem.
Despite what your mother has told you, I do not know everything. Now if you
ask me, the writing on this rock could mean nothing at all. The only reason it
was sent to your stepfather is because it is part of the so-called oddness of the
desert pass where the carrier of these new supposed cryptids is meant to hang
out. It could just be someone's way of getting attention like I used to do with
my metal studs and skin scribbles."

Dragonsnort extended his left arm in front of Jared across the table. On its
underside were a strange group of letter-like symbols running in a straight
line. Although the tattoo symbols were about the same apparent size as those
on the stele, they in no way resembled each other. "What's the point?" said
Jared. "I forget what you told me those things mean."
"It's my name," said Dragonsnort.

"Dragonsnort?" said Jared. It was the only name he had ever known his
father as.

"Yep. Dragonsnort. That is the only name I have ever had or wanted. Do you
see a problem?"

Jared furrowed his brow and frowned at the inscription across the bottom of
his father's arm. Then he counted silently on his fingers. "There are twenty-
nine symbols on your arm and Dragonsnort only has eleven letters. So there
must be more than just your name."

"You said twenty-nine. Does that give you some kind of clue?"

Jared started to protest what he felt was becoming a game when he looked into
his natural father's intense black eyes and realized that the hybrid human that
had engendered him was not playing. "Okay. I'll add twenty-nine and the
number of letters in your name: eleven."

"Try subtracting them."

"Twenty-nine minus eleven is eighteen. Where to next?"

"Look carefully at the letters. How many are the same?"

"Looks like three," said Jared suddenly opening his eyes with even more
surprise. Under his breath he spelled the word Dragonsnort once again, still
counting with his fingers. Dragonsnort looked at his son with satisfaction,
realizing that he was about to crack the riddle. Jared continued in a low tone
almost to himself: "Of the twenty-nine symbols on your arm, three are
doubles. Everything else is different in your alphabet."

"That's exactly what it is," said Dragonsnort. "My alphabet. I invented it

when I was about your age. But I wasn't very original. Does that give you
another clue?"

"Your alphabet is just a replacement for our alphabet," ventured Jared

timidly. Then he stroked his chin with some deliberation. " Seeing as how you
were not very original. Am I right?"

"Totally. So solve the mystery of my arm and then we can get to the stone slab
and maybe even email something to Eric."
"Our alphabet has twenty-six letters," said Jared, brightening. Your tattoo has
twenty-nine. That means that you have used every letter in our Roman
alphabet and three of them twice. Those would be the three doubles in your
name. O, N and R."

"Right again," said Dragonsnort with obvious pleasure. So where in these

twenty-nine letters is my name?"

"Right in this longer cluster near the middle. You have to skip a character
each time to reach the letters of your name, but the presence of the repeating
doubles so close gives it away."

"Exactly. I concocted that little lame mystery for a girl I had been courting
before I met your mother. She was attracted to enigmas, so I gave her one. I
needed to add fifteen more unique letters to my name, so I put them before and
between each letter of Dragonsnort. But you can tell where Dragonsnort is
because of the recurring letters being so close together. Before and after each
letter of my name is another symbol representing a letter. To read my name,
you must ignore these."

"Very clever," said Jared. "I need to tell the club about this. We have been
using the FORGISTEN code for so long that others have probably caught onto
it."

"My little trick is well known in cryptology and not very sophisticated," sighed
Dragonsnort. "But it does get attention, and that is what I think this stele is
about. Getting attention. My tat got attention for me. The message on this
rockface is clearly to get attention for the one word they have written with
Roman characters: MALABO. You can see the symbols representing the
letters of this word in each line or sentence of the message. Here it comes at
the beginning of a chain. Here it is in the middle. Here it is at the end. But it's
all about MALABO, and the writer wanted to make that clear. In the same
way
that my tattoo is all about Dragonsnort."

"So what is Malabo and what does it say about Malabo?"

"Let's start with a working premise: The stone's message is in English. Why?
Because it was designed to get someone's attention. Let's go to an online
anagram generator and see if any of the letters of Malabo, which we can now
isolate, sort out to any known words."

After satisfying themselves that the letters only formed meaningless "words,"
Jared and Dragonsnort returned to the photos.
"Your premise is probably invalid," said Jared, once again flexing a
vocabulary far beyond his years.

"Maybe but English is filled with little words like is, to, and, from, on. Every
time Malabo appears in its symbols there is a short word either preceding or
following it. That says either a sentence or a phrase to me. There is probably
another method of deciphering each of the characters, but I read this like "to
Malabo," "from Malabo," "on Malabo" or "Malabo is." So that assumption
tells me that Malabo is not only very important but a noun."

"A person, place or thing?" said Jared. "How can one ever know?"

At this time another charter member of the Plus Sized Club came in through
the back screen door. It was an upright and sound-bodied boy who went by
the name of Subaru and was one of Jared's closest friends. Subaru, being a
founding member of the club, had always displayed insight and aptitude, so
Dragonsnort and Jared took turns explaining their dilemma to him.

Subaru, who was also a cute boy with long, thick light brown hair that often
intentionally covered his hazel eyes, rolled his head and said: "So you tried an
anagram generator online. And then one of you decided that Malabo is a noun
and either preceded or followed by little verbs or prepositions. Nouns are
cool."

"What is that supposed to mean," asked Jared, annoyed by the apparent

flippancy of his friend's remark.

Not answering, Subaru walked over to the computer, nodded for permission to
use it, and typed in the word Malabo into a standard search engine. At least
ten pages of information bounded to the screen within seconds. "Betcha you
two never thought of googling it," he chuckled. "Here ya go."

Looking at each other as if they were dunces revealed, Jared and his father
read about Malabo, a chaotic and churning African capital city on an island off
the coast of a tiny, disjointed country called Equatorial Guinea, which had a
history of dictatorship, despotism, government abuse, nepotism, kleptocracy,
and sudden coups d'états. It had often been the base for private corporate
soldiers to stage mercenary actions against other small West African nations
when it suited the business interests of those paying them. "A real gathering
place for mercs," said Dragonsnort. "They seem to have total freedom there."

Subaru pointed out that there was only one definition for the word Malabo and
this was it. It was not a product, brand name, person, epithet or anything else.
Just the teeming and corrupt capital of a nation that had been frequently
bathed in blood, a negropolis located on an offshore island that also governed a
small enclave of the mainland African coast and a former Spanish colony until
1968.

"A real kleptocracy," said Jared. "I love that word."

Subaru, content that he had found Occam's razor, realized that Jared and his
father were spending what his own father termed as 'quality time' together and
made a motion to leave. Before walking out the same screen door he had come
in through, he wheeled around, stared at Jared, raised his fist to touch Jared's
and shouted the new slogan of the Plus Sized Club.

"For Nautica and Crackland!"

"For Nautica and Crackland!" rejoined Jared.

VIII. Trey and Nikki cross the desert

Some of the first part of their twenty-five mile or so trek toward the Reese
River Valley was in the coolness of a desert morning, and the life-long partners
in love and adventure chose quite naturally to make it hand in hand, a method
of hiking that soon grew impractical as the relentless sun of day began beating
down from the east on their backs. It was late July, and the Toiyabe and
Shoshone ranges were equally parched by the doldrums of a torrid summer.
The route back toward Kemp Tanner's makeshift camp took them through
tracks winding beside the barren flanks of low hills that dotted the depression
between the two ranges and over areas where the gray sand became in places
deep. Slithering under the burning soil, a sidewinder rattler became visible,
and Trey jumped aside pulling Nikki with him. "Fucking snake," he said.
"That is third one we've seen today, and they all have broad heads, which
means they’re full of fang poison."

"If Kemp were here, he'd probably skin and eat it," giggled Nikki. "He does
that kind of thing. He eats everything. I guess they all do out here. He has a
rotten pot that everything goes into and is reheated for every meal."

"Potpourri," smirked Trey. "That's what it really means: rotten pot, from the
days before refrigeration. I assume your new boyfriend has none of that."

"He's not my boyfriend," snapped Nikki, blinking in the arson sun. "He was
part of an adventure that we both planned, in case you have forgotten."

Trey knew better than to be jealous. Since their trial separation, he had
fulfilled his end of the pact as well by sleeping with several girls, who, while not
being Nikki, had satisfied his lust. He realized at length that Nikki had only
purged her own natural itch as well. As the sun grew more wicked, he pointed
to a faint shadow of a mesquite scrub which covered a square yard or two of
rocky soil. "Shall we?" he said, knowing full well that since earliest childhood
Nikki could easily decipher his thoughts if not totally read his mind.

"Sure," said Nikki, instantaneously pulling off her belt. "These too-tight jeans
are starting to drive me crazy." Down came her pants and off came her shirt
before Trey had time to untie his shoes. Once undressed, he looked at the spot
in the modest shade that he had chosen for their lovemaking. In it he
immediately discerned the movements of several prancing black scorpions and
the scatter of large, flat dung beetles that darted in and out of the cover of the
soil. "We gotta clear this vermin out first," he said. Finding a piece of
abandoned plank for a tool he raked out the entire shady patch, flinging the
beetles and arched scorpions as far as his thrust would catapult them. "We'd
better be fast," he said looking at Nikki who stood ravishingly naked in front
of him. "This has got to be their cool spot, and they'll be back."

"Not if you do like Kemp."

"Which is?"
"Use your god-given hose and make a circle. I like to watch you pee anyway.
My perversion."

Trey urinated a small circle around in the semi-shadow. "Neat idea," he

muttered. "Maybe this Kemp isn't so bad."

"My infection?" said Nikki.

"If you have it, I want it too. Do I need to explain why to you?"

"No."

Their joining lasted long enough for the sun to move far enough in the
cloudless sky to once again spotlight the tiny patch of shade with its harsh rays.

It was once again time to move on.

Again regaining the barely defined trail across the dusty fringes of the valley,
Trey asked Nikki to explain to him once again why it was so important that
they find Kemp Tanner. An arduous trek of nearly twenty-eight miles was
required across a terrain that after a time failed to inspire anything but
thoughts of the futility of human life and the stark reality of solitude. Nikki's
reasons were clear. One, she had promised the virile cowboy that she would
return at least once. Two, she wanted to see him again for "existential"
reasons, and she didn't mind telling Trey just that. After all, they were still
putatively in the course of their planned hiatus as a couple, an event that was,
they both knew, calculated more to cement them together for the rest of their
lives than to celebrate or test any kind of independence. But the biggest reason
of all was the painless and nearly numb semi-circle of raised growths that now
decorated Nikki's back. “Kemp has an infection something like this, and I
must have caught it from him. We both need to see a doctor,” she said. Little
did Nikki realize that Kemp had already seen a doctor and had been dismissed
when any sort of medical science failed to identify or quantify his affliction. In
the back of Nikki's mind, however, was the need to castigate Kemp for
infecting her in the first place. She had discovered his ailment only after their
first coupling, and, in truth, she had dived into the sleeping sack with him
several times thereafter on the strength of her newfound passion and the
conviction that the ring of hard flakes on his back was simply a non-
communicable "desert thing." After all, the guy ate serpents, bugs and rock
rats, not to mention the rather tasty chukar partridge with which Kemp would
flavor his perennial rotting pot without, unfortunately, thinking to remove the
birds' innards. Another cowboy thing, thought Nikki.
As the sun passed its zenith and began declining in the west in front of them,
the color of the sand and sagebrush became more strikingly scarlet. Grains of
fool's gold twinkled at their feet with each step they took. The rejoined hands
briefly, but then decided against it. "We're seeing the west," sighed Nikki.
"Some couples wait a lifetime to do this."

As Nikki and Trey continued their weary slog toward the Reese River Valley
and Kemp Tanner's camp, Brooke Nescott and Eric Palobay were checking
into the same ancient wooden hotel in Austin the former couple had abandoned
before dawn that morning. A leathery desk clerk who didn't seem to care
about much of anything explained to them that the central valley of the Reese
River was best accessed either on foot or with a jeep. Eric, of course, had
brought his Jeep Grand Cherokee, but he began wondering whether it
wouldn't be easier on his vehicle if he and Brooke simply hiked over the less
than thirty miles that separated them from the Reese River. But later he
dismissed the idea when someone mentioned scorpions. As an entomologist,
Eric knew that some scorpions, although they were identical to other
scorpions, simply carried more toxin in their stingers and venom glands. The
poison of no two scorpions was ever alike, and whereas one scorpion might
only cause illness and temporary paralysis with his telson, a scorpion of
identical coloring and size might cause instant death. In all, Palobay, realizing
that neither he nor Brooke had thought to wear anything but short leather
walking shoes, decided to "bounce" his Jeep down the rock littered trail
toward the River bank. While in the lobby of the decaying three-storey
wooden frame hotel, Brooke found, as had Nikki Barazan only days before her,
that she could get not only a clear phone connection to the outside world but
could also access the internet. She wanted to know how Jared was doing and
of course wanted to get some word of Dragonsnort, with whom she shared an
equal devotion as that to Eric Palobay. She was, however, surprised to read
Dragonsnort's message. Although everything was well with him and Jared, he
was worried that Brooke and Eric might be stepping into some kind of
preconceived trap. He explained in brief terms that with Jared and Subaru's
invaluable assistance, he had come up with a sketchy meaning for the
inscriptions on the stele and that it had more to do with an unstable and
frankly treacherous African dictatorship than some new species. It was an
announcement, he explained, about either going to or coming from the city of
Malabo in the Bay of Guinea off the western coast of Africa. Malabo was a
hangout for the worst kinds of corporate mercenary goons, a kind of staging
point for assassinations and invasions throughout the African continent.
Beware of these kind of people, he cautioned Brooke. They must have some
kind of operations out there. The rest of his message was filled with pleasant
details about his and Jared's vacation together.
African mercenaries in the middle of Nevada, thought Brooke with some
derision, but she knew not to dismiss anything from Dragonsnort without due
and complete consideration. Eric agreed perfectly with her feelings on the
matter. "Another reason for driving," he chuckled, "other than my old tired
ninety-six year old knees."

"Your knees are younger than any other guy's I know," laughed Brooke.
"Though maybe Drag has you beat in that department. But I really haven't
noticed." At length, the couple decided upon chancing the desert terrain the
next day in the Jeep rather than on foot. They found the town's lone café that
served beer and scarfed down the first real meal they had eaten in three days
of constant driving and occasional snacking.

IX. The news from Crackland

As four people who at least knew about Crackland (of which two who had
actually visited it) were within thirty miles of one another on the Nevada desert
and, as one might guess, very close to meeting one another, the pristine
kingdom itself was undergoing yet another change based on a whim of its
monarch, the former preparatory school prom king Zack Hammer-Twift.
Over three thousand miles from the Reese River Valley in a huge, temperate
and flowering fault under the crust of surface hidden by the glacial ice flows of
Somerset Island within the Arctic Circle in Canada's perennially frozen north,
the happy citizens of the very serene and largely unknown autonomous
territory were going about the business of building and farming in their
routine ways under an as of yet unexplained subterranean sun, which offered
them the benefits of basking in a Mediterranean spring all year around. The
country was still under the iron fist of King Zack, who accompanied by his
charming and overly cute Queen Taryn, often took the electronic trains from
one end of the habitable part of the domain to another just to meet residents,
pardon or condemn criminals, attend executions, be honored at banquets,
observe skateboarding competitions (skateboarding was the only official
royally sanctioned sport in the realm), or just alight suddenly and surprise
their fawning subjects, the grateful settlers from the United States and Canada
who had been privileged to make application for Crackland residency and
generally, due to their northern European ancestry and ability to exercise
useful skills, were accepted into the ranks of the subterranean world's newest
pioneers. These settlers had come to not only adore their quick-acting and
someone dimwitted king but had become fascinated with the intrigues and
assassination attempts that swirled around him and his court as well. Tales
abounded as to how King Zack had deftly escaped death by poisoned food or
toxin-dipped darts, about how a madman, a shamanistic prestidigitator-mystic,
called Jabari the Magician, haunted the nether fringes of the underground
sphere in forbidden and outlawed places where the dome which formed its
splendid sky met the soil of its moist and always fertile earth. King Zack, in
the twelve tumultuous years of his reign, had already been transformed into a
figure of folklore and had, not long before, been deified and made the official
godhead of the entire underground settlement.

Not content perhaps with being only a king and a god, Zack Hammer-Twift of
the House of Wampaugh (named for his former Hudson Valley preparatory
high school) had of late taken up the practice of wearing twin pistols on his
sides, nine millimeter German Lugers as it were, in holsters belted to his waist.
Moreover, he had shed his habitually casual preppy dress of Docker slacks and
Banlon Polo pullover shirts in favor of a tailored gray and red uniform,
complete with double rows of chest buttons and a snappy hard-shouldered,
chevroned tunic. His chest he now garnished with medals and martial
ornaments of all sorts, and he wore knee high leather boots into the tops of
which on both sides he could slide silver-bladed Black Forest throwing knives.
In all, he looked like a hodgepodged, hastily concocted Prussian-Nazi hybrid
and had insisted that his territorial police force, the dreaded Midnight Riders
motorcycle club, abandon their leather vests and horned helmets and attire
themselves as uniformed soldiers in a manner that was nearly, but not quite as
spiffy, as Zack's. The Midnight Riders, whose ranks had grown considerably
since the inception of the monarchy, obeyed not only their king but also one of
the original corporate architects of Crackland, the now Grand Vizier Aaron
Arvicher, who to a large part was responsible for the maintenance of the myth
of royal supremacy as well as for providing the daily drama which showcased
the dull and rather insipid rich boy that he had once foisted upon the new
realm as an absolute sovereign. Aaron Arvicher, now growing quite old, had
always been satisfied with the stability and functionality of the monarchy he
had created out of a spoiled rich boy prom king, and he duly directed his police
force to "evolve" from moto-jocks to storm troopers just as Zack wished.

Much of the music now played in the sprawling royal palace, a huge one level
knotty-pine paneled dwelling, occupying sumptuous palace grounds as large as
a golf course, was now warlike in nature. The vibrant strands of Nazi SS
chorus voices rising to the Horst Wessel Lied often reverberated from
loudspeakers placed throughout the realm in its inhabited places. Likewise,
one was never at a loss to hear Bismarck's Preussens Gloria, Mussolini's
stirring Giovinezza or the favorite of Franco's Falangistas, Cara al Sol. In all,
King Zack had turned his kingdom almost overnight into a Fascist paradise at
least in its trappings, and now a new royal standard, the symbol of a jagged
bolt of lightning breaking down a tree, hung by royal proclamation from every
rooftop in the settled zones, and citizens far too young to remember anything
of surface-world Fascism gaily became little pseudo Nazis and began marching
in torchlight parades, going nowhere in particular, but pleasing their
constantly saluting king immensely. The Midnight Riders begrudgingly began
goose-stepping on demand, a thing which amused Grand Vizier Aaron
Arvicher immensely and about which he would not fail to snicker in the
privacy of his secret palace quarters over tumblers of strong Armenian brandy.

On the very morning that Nikki Barazan and Trey Agremont, their feet
blistered and bleeding, rambled into Kemp Tanner's disarrayed valley camp,
King Zack was wandering in uniform by one of the palace swimming pools
alongside of which Queen Taryn, aged no more than twenty now, lounged with
several girlhood friends in bikinis so skimpy that they virtually covered only a
negligible fraction of the shapely girls' bodies. A lotus-like flower of great size,
plucked no doubt from one of the royal gardens and like all of Crackland's
abundant flora not yet having an official name, floated languidly near the
center of the turquoise tinted pool. Zack stopped momentarily to examine his
queen and her friends, then for no apparent reason clicked his jackbooted
heels together, drew a Luger from his side, took aim and blasted the delicate
flower into a hundred scattered fragments. He snickered and winked at the
girls in their revealing suits and marched away.

Queen Taryn, despite her youth and inexperience, had begun to realize some
months before that her husband the king was starting to go insane. Like
everything else, the thought made her titter even louder. Being queen to a
mad-hatter looney-tune king would be cool, she thought.

X. Trey and Nikki arrive at Kemp's Camp

The blazing Nevada desert sun had not yet fully risen when Trey and Nikki
rambled into Kemp Tanner's rustic "living room" and collapsed on wooden
crates positioned around randomly in the sand to serve as chairs. Kemp was
back from a short-lived mustang roundup but still sleeping under his blanket
roll. He turned over and grunted when the two entered his camp, but then
eyeing them with some annoyance curled sideways and went back into a brief
sleep before he acknowledged their presence. When he did get up, he was
characteristically naked, and Trey attempted to make an assessment of Kemp's
manly assets. Guys do that but few admit it, and Nikki certainly was aware of
exactly what Trey was peering out the sides of his eyes at. When Trey was
satisfied that the much-discussed Kemp was as well but certainly no better
endowed than himself, he shook his head in undisguised contempt at the
bruised and scratched cowboy and the decrepit state of his domestic
surroundings. Nonetheless, he took the lead in introducing himself and
pumped Kemp's calloused hand with a kind of vigor that, in reality, Kemp
disliked from a stranger, and especially one from the East.

"The big boyfriend," he said. "Nikki has told me a lot about you."
"She has a lot to tell. We've been together since we were kids. Babies in fact.
Crawling around on the ground next to one another."

"Well, you can crawl around on the ground anytime you like here. We're more
or less alone. Nikki and I did it enough."

"That was our plan," said Trey dismissively, not falling for the bait Kemp was
obviously laying at his feet.

"Your plan included me. I was an extra. Just like in them movies. Only this
time I wasn't paid."

Nikki stepped in closer, looked Kemp in the eye and cleared her throat as if to
say "beg your pardon."

Wanting to truncate any further exchange, Trey rapidly changed the subject:
"You said more or less alone. I thought you were the only one here."

"I was until yesterday. Now we have a big-ass plane about a quarter mile out
there on the rocks. It's littering up the landscape."
Trey and Nikki both asked Kemp to point the way to the plane. It was
something they wanted to see but didn't know exactly why. Kemp pulled on
his ripped jeans, wedged into some boots and led the way. Around a pointy
rock outcropping crawling with both dung beetles and black scorpions, was a
dusty orange plane standing on wheels mounted on huge plank-like skis. It
took Trey and Nikki no time to exchange a quick look of recognition and gasp
in unison.

"Do you know whose plane it is?" asked Kemp.

"Not exactly. But we know what plane it is. It is a Duckwing 480, one of the
hugest seaplanes in the world. It can fly under normal radar and land on
water, land or ..... ice. It may have come from...."

"California," broke in Trey, interrupting Nikki's words. "Let's not jump to

any conclusions. Besides it has a funny insignia on it. Not the one we've seen
before. That is not the emblem of.....of California."

"No. It's not," said Nikki.

Suddenly, there was a clatter behind the group in the direction of Kemp's
camp. It was another truck, this one belching smoke and full of dirty range
hands, all Mexican. Behind the wheel was none other than Kemp's sometimes
friend Hector Carbajal. Hector was holding a bottle of some white liquor, most
probably tequila in one hand and repeatedly swigging from it. He was visibly
drunk, as were his Mexican Indio companions stuffed in the cabin and riding
on the back of the truck. All the men were shouting some sort of local dialect
Chicano epithets and swinging either rifles or shotguns.

"What's going on?" said Kemp to his sometimes friend.

"We're gonna get us some Gallega pussy then kill us some Gallegas,"
slobbered Hector brandishing his five shot nine millimeter revolver, "They gots
no business in Nevada anyhow."

By the time Trey and Nikki had caught up with Kemp close enough to
understand the conversation, Kemp was shrugging his shoulders and saying
that his visitors were not Gallegas. "What in the fuck does that mean,
anyway?" said Trey under his breath.

"I know," said Nikki with a confused look crossing her face, "but I don't know
why I know."

Their words were interrupted by Hector's shouting. A pair of his partners had
also gotten out of the truck and were looking around Kemp's scattered camp.
Kemp knew they were looking most likely for something to steal and that
Hector had probably already told them that he possessed nothing of value. But
drunk men often just steal for the sake of stealing.

"There are no Gallegas around he repeated."

"Yes, there are. We saw them yesterday when you were still on the trail back
from the roundup. We beat you here. We saw them get in and out of their big
plane."

"They're in the plane?" said Kemp quizzically.

All at once a stirring of rock and dust broke out from behind the serrated rock
outcropping behind the camp and to the far side of narrow slit of the cave
entrance higher up on the talus flank. The entire group turned around to see
an amazing sight. Five bare-chested women, squeezed into bulging camouflage
pants and strapped with small hand-held machine guns were nearing the
camp, gun barrels readied as if to shoot. Each woman was broad-shouldered
and muscular. Each was tanned, and each had long black or brown hair
drawn backwards in to a swinging ponytail. Trey also noted that not only were
the half naked women well-developed, but they had shapely torsos and
abundant breasts and prominent, fruitful nipples as well.

"What is this, the tit patrol?" he muttered to Nikki. Nikki shook her head for
him to remain silent. Something was very wrong. These women, despite their
lack of chest covering, were some sort of soldiers, and it was clear that they
meant business. Also, it did not take Nikki very long to note that the woman in
the lead was eyeing her shamelessly and edging ever closer toward her.

Less than a yard from Nikki, Kemp Tanner, frozen in his tracks, realized that
the lead woman was none other than Marcelina Ponte. The entire group had
got the drop on Hector and his three companions. Marcelina bellowed in
Spanish---Gallega Spanish----for all of them to drop their guns or face the
immediate consequences. Hector made a lewd gesture with his fingers and
muttered something about "fucking a Gallega," but his remark was in
Spanish, and Nikki wondered why she had understood it so readily. She had
never studied Spanish.

Reluctantly, Hector's cohort let fall their firearms onto the dusty desert loam.

Marcelina waved her machine gun at them, pointing toward Kemp's toilet
trench, dug in the soil about ten yards from the camp. "Go take a shit," she
said once again in Spanish. "You all need it."
"And what if we don't want to shit, Gallega?" said one of the swarthy Indios in
the clutch. "What if we want to fuck you instead."

Marcelina glanced at her band. "Calyx," she said, and it was all that she said.
Immediately the only light haired member of the female patrol took five steps
forward and pointed her small machine gun at the man who had spoke. He
managed to get out "Nice tits, Gringa" in English before she pulled the trigger
and perforated him with a row of bullet holes extending from his waist to the
middle of his forehead. The man, quite dead, fell over like a withered tree
before the smoke of Calyx's gun had cleared the air.

"Any more?" shouted Marcelina in both Spanish and English. "Okay then,
compadres. Go over and take a shit. Pull down your pants and hang your
asses over the pit. You know how to do it."

Hector and his remaining two friends complied with stunned obedience.

The glare of the late morning sun as it reflected off the quartz particles in the
dry terrain rose into Nikki's eyes like an opaque glaze through which she
became all too conscious of Marcelina moving toward her, machine gun in
hand. Nikki began to cringe and edge backward, but Marcelina grabbed the
shoulder of her black tee shirt and with one violent yank of a taut, powerful
arm ripped it from her body. Thus, like the other women present, Nikki was
now shirtless.

"We gonna compare tits?" whispered Trey, trying to relieve the tension.
Sizewise, I think they have you beat, Nik."

"Shut up," growled Marcelina in English.

Marcelina spun Nikki around so that her back was facing her ran her hand
over the raised ridges of the arc-shaped series of growths on Nikki's back. A
smile of sly contentment crossed her face. She edged between Trey and Nikki
and walked up to Kemp, motioning for him to remove his shirt. Again, the
Spanish woman passed her hand over the purple and red arc of grainy skin
eruptions. Once more she smiled in unconcealed approval, rolling her eyes at
the others of her bare-breasted contingent, who continued to hold their
strapped on machine guns in a muzzle-ready stance. Trey began to feel a true
panic well up in his chest. The armed women, however, seemed to be totally
ignoring him. He profited from the disregard to glance at some of their
bronzed and robust shoulders and backs. Each of the women had a similar
ring of raised and inflamed, if not glowing rashes, each identical to those of
Kemp and Nikki.
At length, the one called Calyx, who had dispatched the first Mexican slipped
over to Marcelina's side and whispered something in her ear. Trey noted that
Calyx, who did not appear to be either Mediterranean or Spanish but rather of
some white Nordic extraction, was not only well-built but glowingly sensual in
the flatness of her belly and the tightness of her stretched skin. Trey also
remarked that Calyx's eyes were on him as she spoke to Marcelina. Marcelina
nodded with each word she said. Trey had no idea whether Calyx was
speaking Spanish or English. For some reason this did seemed to matter to
him.

Another cloud from a sudden dust devil swirled over the gathering and
covered Kemp's rustic camp with a further layer of rough sand. From the
septic ditch, Chicano voices were heard, and Kemp ventured a glimpse at
Hector and the two other men standing with their pants down and their butts
extended over the pit. This was, of course, how defecation was done in a desert
camp. Hector gave Kemp a look of sober helplessness.

At once, Marcelina stood spread legged in front of her commando party. She
balanced her strapped-on machine gun against the flat muscular definition of
her own seductive and defined abdomen, and with pointed elbows began
barking at Kemp, Trey and Nikki in very clear, albeit accented, English.
"You all have a mission to perform, and you will henceforth do exactly what
we tell you to do. No refusal or insubordination will be tolerated. We are
serious and we intend to put you to the exact use that you have been designated
for. "

For some existential reason, Trey could not help breaking in: "Designated by
whom?" he said with deliberate insolence. Marcelina, dangerously annoyed,
started to point the muzzle of her gun in his direction and glanced at Calyx,
who apparently made her think better of what she was prepared to do.

"Designated by those who are better than you and those who have hired us.
That is all you are going to know for now, so no more questions....or else." She
pointed the toe of her steel-reinforced boot at the corpse of the dead Mexican
Indio. Calyx's confetti maker had done its job.

Then she wheeled around and faced her squad. As Trey looked at the
contingent of women, he could not help but think of the old television series
Baywatch. A bunch of gorgeous and semi-naked females running around
rescuing people and doing the sort of things usually attributed to the strength
and prowess of men....and doing them better. Each of the women must have
not only been chosen for her strength but also for her voluptuosity and
hormonal charisma, just like in the old television series. It was a silly thought
that was soon interrupted by Marcelina, who stared straight into his eyes and
addressed him: "Calyx is going to examine you. Go with her." Nikki glanced
over at her lifelong lover with a resigned expression which said 'We've been
here before.' Trey returned the same 'I can do nothing about it' look to Nikki
and walked off toward the stately long-haired Calyx who wasted no time in
grabbing his belt from behind and directing him to a place near the cave
mouth hidden by the same saw-like rock projections around which the bare-
chested commando women had first appeared. His "examination" was very
short and the sequel to it was, Trey would say later, like "mating with a
tigress." What he would not say later was that sex with Calyx had caused his
fright to explode, dissipate and drain away from his body. At one point in the
frenzied thrusting, performed upon Calyx's camo pants which she had spread
on the sand, she pushed down his shoulders and said "Pay no attention to what
you hear." What Trey heard then, other than the zealous moans of the
animalesque Amazon, was the report of several light-weight machine guns
discharging at once and the sound of heavy weights falling into something soft
and splashy-wet.

It was, of course, Hector Carbajal and his two remaining companions. Nikki
and Kemp had been forced to witness it all. With a offhand flick of her wrist,
Marcelina had directed her squad to walk over to the toilet pit and simply
dispose of the Mexicans who crouched over it. The dead men had thus died
with their pants down and had fallen buttocks-first into a bank of Kemp's
accumulated shit. Marcelina had said something about it being "fitting," and
she had said it in Gallego Spanish, a language which both Nikki and Kemp
now totally understood and for no apparent reason other than they just did.

Later before desert nightfall, the job fell on both Nikki and Kemp to cover up
the pit with dirt, rock and sand. Trey was to remain with Calyx, who insisted
that they both sleep in the very spot they had made love. Calyx also knew the
trick of sleeping in a urine circle, which she sharply commanded Trey to make.

The other women took up positions around Kemp's camp and munched on
pre-packaged food bars and spoke to one another in low-toned
Spanish....Gallego Spanish.

END OF PART ONE

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