Desert Hearts

Chapter 1-2

“It’s beautiful,” Paul said.

“You must have read about it.”

“Yes…but reading’s not quite the same as seeing it with your own eyes.”

“True.”

Michael had been watching silently, his face tilted upward to watch the sparkles until the last of them died away. “There’s one,” he said quietly.

It drifted in out of the darkness, a sphere a little larger than a baseball, glowing in shades of pale gold. If you looked closely, you could see variations in the colors, shadings that some people claimed looked like faces. Lance had never noticed anything like that, but then again, he’d never been one to anthropomorphize. Wasn’t the presence of the orbs enough without having to give them human features?

Paul raised his camera. Lance heard a click, but there was no flash. He guessed that was on purpose; the ufologist knew his way around a camera pretty well. Must have adjusted the shutter speed for the darkness, knowing that the glare of the flash would fade the glow of the orb to almost nothing.

“It knows we’re here,” Michael said quietly.

Lance could sense it, too, a feeling of being watched. Nothing inimical, not like the cold malice that had radiated from the base in Secret Canyon, but even after all these years, he found the sensation a little unnerving.

Whether or not Paul felt the same way, Lance couldn’t say. The man was a scientist, someone more centered on the left side of his brain. And although he had to be experiencing some level of awe, that didn’t stop him from snapping away methodically with the camera, or pausing to pull a small notepad out of his shirt pocket so he could scribble down some notes.

The orb drifted to the top of an especially tall juniper and seemed to linger there for a moment, as if surveying them one last time. Then it blinked out of existence — no gentle fading away, no flash. It was just there one second and gone the next.

“Amazing,” Paul said.

Lance shrugged. “Just wait until you see the Day of the Dead festival at Tlaquepaque.”

“Orbs are old hat to you, huh?”

“Maybe.” He turned away and gazed out through the darkness, but the only light in evidence was the glow from the town itself, a few miles away from where they stood. “It’s exciting the first couple of times, maybe, but they don’t actually do anything. No one’s really made any contact with them. We’re not even sure if they’re intelligences or not, or maybe some sort of advanced observation device. But at least they give Kara and Kiki something to show off to people besides UFOs.”

Paul nodded. “Reminds me of the dolphins.”

Lance raised an eyebrow, and even Michael’s normally placid features took on a confused cast.

“When I was a kid, my parents took me to Southern California one summer.” Paul set the SLR inside its camera bag but didn’t zip it closed — in case any more orbs showed up, Lance decided. “We went on a whale-watching trip, but we didn’t see any whales. The tour operators made a big deal of pointing out the dolphins, though…sort of a consolation prize, I suppose. I was just saying the orbs are Kara’s backup in case the UFOs are a no-show.”

“Which means she’s been doing a lot of orb tours lately, I guess.” Lance knew there was nothing to see, but somehow he couldn’t prevent himself from glancing up into the black sky, instinctively checking to see if any of those pinpoints of light had decided to move in a way contrary to the laws of physics.

A low chuckle. “It hasn’t been a good summer for UFO tours, that’s for sure. Persephone’s gotten an earful.”

“Kara wants to blame the whole thing on Persephone,” Michael added.

A little unfair, maybe, but not exactly untrue, either. After all, if it weren’t for Persephone O’Brien…sorry, Persephone Oliver, the base up at Secret Canyon would still be humming along just fine. But with its corps of hybrid soldiers decimated and the alien-possessed humans who had been running the show deader than high-country grass, the base had gone completely quiet. None of the UFO hunters had dared to go back into Secret Canyon to see what, if anything, was happening there, but the conspicuous lack of UFO activity over the past few months seemed to indicate the aliens had taken a powder for the time being.

But because the topic of Kara Swenson was a sketchy one, for a variety of reasons, Lance settled for making a noncommittal noise. It certainly didn’t help having the Olivers around as the perfect portrait of newly married bliss. Sure, give them a few more months, and they’d most likely degenerate into the petty sniping and bickering most couples of his acquaintance indulged in. In the meantime, though, the situation had only heightened the tension between him and Kara.

Most of the time, he did a pretty good job of not thinking about Kara’s expectations. Over the past few years, they’d settled into a more or less friendly détente. He would allow himself to admit that he liked her and enjoyed her company, and no more. Of course, he knew he was fooling himself, and lately he’d been having traitorous thoughts about saying the hell with it and confessing that his indifference had only been an act…but he wasn’t quite there.

Yet.

His tone was a little harsher than he’d intended as he said, “Kara needs to understand that there are greater things at stake here than her bank account.”

Michael raised an eyebrow, and Paul suddenly found something fascinating in the sky to the northeast. At first, Lance thought he was just intentionally avoiding having to make a comment, but as Paul continued to stare upward, Lance tilted his head as well to see what had drawn his attention.

It hovered in the night sky, a flat-black triangle that blotted out the stars. Lights shimmered along one edge, then the other. With a rumble Lance felt in his bones rather than heard, it moved slowly on its axis so it faced due north, then shot upward at an angle that should have been impossible.

For a long moment, none of them said anything. Finally, Paul remarked, “Looks like they’re back.”

Kara

One agonizing sip at a time. That was all the water I could manage to get into the stranger. Each time he swallowed, he coughed, and I had to wait for the spasm to pass before I could tip the paper cup — I’d decided not to risk one of my glasses for this procedure — against his cracked lips and dribble a little more of the precious fluid into his mouth.

Somehow, I’d managed to push him up against the couch so he was basically upright. Although I knew that logically I should have picked up the phone and called 911 so an ambulance could take him to the hospital, something seemed to prevent me from doing so, had made me walk right past the cell phone on the dining room table and instead go to the kitchen to pour some bottled water into a Dixie cup.

Now I knelt next to the stranger and continued to coax the water down his throat, knowing he needed it more than anything, but also knowing that too much would only make him sick.

He shut his eyes, lashes incongruously dark and thick against the sunburned, flaking skin on his cheeks. I’d need to hit him with about a gallon of moisturizer after I was done hydrating him.

This was crazy. I’d never had any fantasies of playing Florence Nightingale or Clara Barton, so why the hell was I sitting here, patiently giving him water in dribs and drabs, when he’d broken into my home?

All right, so maybe he hadn’t done much actual “breaking,” since I’d left the front door unlocked, but he’d definitely entered my home without my permission. In a way, it made sense — mine was the house at the end of the cul-de-sac, and if he’d wandered in off the desert, naturally he would have gone to the building closest to open land. Still….

“What’s your name?” I asked softly.

He shook his head. Whether that meant he still couldn’t speak or simply didn’t want to tell me, I couldn’t say for sure. Resigned, I tipped a bit more water down his throat. At least this time he didn’t cough. That was a good sign. I lifted the cup to his lips again and let him drink the last of the water in the cup.

“How’s your stomach?” I asked, hoping maybe he’d speak if I wasn’t asking anything about his name or where he’d come from. “Do you feel nauseated?”

Another shake of the head.

The man was obviously tougher than he looked. I wondered just how long he’d been wandering around out there in the heat and the sun. Temperatures had been hovering just below the century mark for the past few days.

“Let’s try some Gatorade,” I said then, holding back a sigh. “Gotta replace those electrolytes.”

I pushed myself up to a standing position and went to the kitchen. Although generally I thought it was pretty nasty, the sports drink did come in handy for the times I overdid it in the heat, and so I always kept some around.

After pulling another paper cup out of the dispenser and filling it halfway with Gatorade, I returned to the living room. The stranger didn’t seem to have moved, although I noticed Gort had lain down next to him, as if to keep watch while I was in the kitchen. The dog whined a little as I approached, then c****d his head.

“Your guess is as good as mine, Gort,” I said, and knelt down next to the man and directed my next words at him. “I hope you like raspberry.”

He didn’t move, so I decided to take that as a “yes.” Once again, I lifted the cup to his mouth, but he surprised me by reaching up with one hand and wrapping his fingers around the fragile little Dixie cup.

“Got it,” he told me. His voice was barely more than a raspy whisper, but at least he’d said something. That was a start.

“No problem,” I replied, watching as he greedily drank down the Gatorade. “More?”

He nodded. “Please.”

I gave him what I hoped was an encouraging smile and went back to the kitchen once again. This time, I got out a plastic cup left over from one of the MUFON meetings I’d held at the house, and filled it with the Gatorade. After that, he’d probably want something more substantial. Maybe some soup? I had a few cartons of some interesting organic stuff from my last pilgrimage to the Trader Joe’s in Prescott. Sedona was wonderful, but it could be somewhat lacking in the shopping department, and I made a habit of going over to Prescott at least once a month to stock up on the things I couldn’t get in town.

When I returned to the living room, I noticed at once that the stranger had pulled himself more upright so he wasn’t quite as slumped against the front of the couch. Luckily, it was leather; if he left any grime on it, I should be able to wipe it off more or less easily…I hoped.

“Here you go.”

He took the cup from me and drank down the Gatorade — not greedily, but in even, measured swallows, as if gauging exactly how much he needed to take in at a time for the greatest benefit. Once he was done, he handed the cup back to me. “Thank you.”

Although he looked like about a hundred miles of back road — and smelled even worse — there was something about him that seemed calm and efficient, two words I generally wouldn’t use to describe the desert rats one saw around town. He didn’t seem to fit the type. It was more like he’d suffered some accident, some catastrophe that had left him stranded in some of the most inhospitable country in the world.