Star Crossed

Chapter 2-1

Chapter Two

Because I wasn’t sure of exactly what I was doing or where I was going, I pushed the button to disengage the auto-drive, then tried not to roll my eyes as the little tube deployed from the dash.

“Blow here,” the car’s mechanical voice said.

Blow yourself, I thought, but complied. The only way to drive a car unaided was to prove to it that you weren’t impaired by alcohol or other some other illicit substance. It was kind of annoying, but it worked. Deaths in alcohol- and drug-related car accidents had dropped to almost nothing once the “sniffers” had been installed in the vast majority of vehicles on the road.

As I backed out of the driveway, I headed toward the main road, Route 89A. No big shock there, since it was pretty much the only way to get from here to there in Sedona. What did surprise me, though, was that I turned left, heading away from the heart of town. Almost without thinking, when I got to Dry Creek Road, I turned right, winding my way through residential areas, and then moving out to the more open land past them. There wasn’t much out here, except the Enchantment Resort.

So, what? I asked myself. Is this all a sudden yearning to hang out in the resort’s bar and try to pick up rich retirees or something?

But that wasn’t the way I turned when I came to the fork in the road. No, I headed the opposite direction, and my heart sped up a little as I realized where I was going.

Secret Canyon.

The spot where the aliens had hidden their base, all those years ago. The place where my father had once been…well, grown or hatched or decanted or whatever it was the aliens did to bring their armies of clones into the world.

It wasn’t something I’d known at first, of course. That’s kind of a lot to lay on a kid, and I had to give my mother credit for handling it better than most people probably would have. She waited until I was old enough to understand, but not so old that I would blame her for hiding something so important from me for a good chunk of my life. I was eleven when she’d sat down with me and said she needed to tell me some things about my past, about my father. By then, I’d guessed that I wasn’t adopted — or rather, I knew I was her child, if not Lance’s. My mother and I might not have had the same coloring, but there were certain things about my appearance that did echo her features, such as the shape of my mouth and chin, if you knew enough to look.

So, I’d already been wondering for a while as to who my father really was, and what had happened to him. On that day, she’d had Lance take Kevin and Kelsey and Melissa off to the movies so she and I would have the house to ourselves. And she’d taken a picture from inside an envelope and laid it down on the dining room table.

“This is your father,” she’d said simply, and I’d lifted it up and stared down at it, gazing at the image of the man it contained, trying to see something of myself in him.

The dark hair, yes, and a little of the high, wide cheekbones, too. The photo was obviously something she’d taken with her phone and then had transferred to photographic paper later on; it was a little out of focus, but I could see them clearly well enough, see her happy smile and the smile he wore as well, which had an element of wonder in it, as if he was staring at things he’d never seen before.

Which made sense, considering that he’d spent what little there was of his life before that cooped up in a base somewhere in the mountains I was now approaching. He hadn’t known anything of human life, even though he looked like a normal man. Well, an unbelievably good-looking man, that is. Even as a young girl, I’d recognized that he must have been very handsome. I suppose that begs the question as to why aliens who were creating hybrid soldiers would care enough about human aesthetics to choose genetic material from good-looking people to work with, but their motives were inscrutable most of the time. Besides the whole world domination thing, that is.

Then my mother gave me a carefully edited version of how she’d met him, how she’d taken him into her home. It wasn’t quite the “well, when a human/alien hybrid super-soldier and a woman love each other very much” speech, but it was something along those lines. The upshot seemed to be that she’d pretty much given up on Lance, who at the time was doing everything he could to keep my mother at arm’s length, and so she’d hooked up with the gorgeous stranger, and the end result was me.

My father had sacrificed himself to destroy the alien base, or at least put it out of commission long enough to give the people who were fighting the aliens — my parents and my Aunt Kirsten and Uncle Martin and Paul and Persephone Oliver — a chance for some breathing space, time to regroup. That might not sound like a particularly impressive collection of people to pit against a bunch of hostile reptilian aliens intent on taking Earth and its resources for their own, but Aunt Kirsten was sort of their secret weapon, since it turned out she was half-alien as well, and Uncle Martin not of this earth at all. Of course, they were of the “good” kind of aliens, the ones the UFO community generally referred to as Nords or Nordics. Still, it had been a shock for my Aunt Kirsten to learn she wasn’t exactly as girl-next-door as she’d once thought. And it was probably even more of a shock for the Reptilians, since it sounded as if they really weren’t prepared to face someone with her kind of powers.

At any rate, things in Sedona had been completely quiet since then. So why I was driving out here now, with the sky lowering and my car bumping along a road that had suddenly turned to gravel, I really couldn’t say. The smart thing would’ve been to turn around, go home, and open the neglected bottle of pinot noir that was currently sitting on the kitchen counter.

But I didn’t do that. Instead, I inched along until even the gravel road ended. A weathered sign indicated this was the Secret Canyon trailhead, although I didn’t see any hikers out here today. The weather had most likely scared them off, which I thought was probably just as well.

I turned off the car and got out, then tightened the scarf around my throat. Since I’d been tromping around Mars Hill, checking weather stations, before I left Flagstaff, I was wearing jeans and sturdy all-terrain boots. As long as I didn’t do any serious rock climbing, I should be okay with pretty much anything I encountered out here.

Well, almost anything….

Shaking my head at myself, I headed uphill, moving to the north and east, toward the box canyon where the “back door” Persephone and Lance and Michael Lightfoot had found so many years ago was supposed to be located. There was another way in, farther north, through a narrow defile that extended to the actual rear entrance of the base, but I’d been told it was all caved in, due to the explosives my father had set off in his failed attempt to destroy the whole operation. I say “failed” because, although he did a lot of damage, he didn’t get rid of the aliens utterly.

No, it had taken my Aunt Kirsten to manage that.

The cold, dry air seemed to catch at my throat, and I wished I’d thought to bring some bottled water along with me. Then again, when I left the house, I’d had no idea as to where precisely I was headed. Certainly not on a wild-goose chase like this.

A chill wind soughed through pine and juniper, and I could practically feel the light failing as the sun slipped farther west and the clouds moved in. I pulled my phone out of my pocket to check the hour, then slid it back in. Five-fifteen. I didn’t have much time.

Time for what, I wasn’t precisely certain.

I climbed upward, scrabbling over ruts left by torrential monsoon rains, avoiding abandoned branches and patches of cactus. The whole time, I kept thinking I really must have lost it, because only a crazy person would have come out here at this time of day in the first place, even leaving aside the dubious nature of my intended destination. At the same time, I was thankful for all the hikes my family had taken as I was growing up. I was used to this sort of terrain, and since I’d also done a good bit of hiking around Flagstaff after I moved there, I hadn’t allowed myself to get soft.

But then I saw it — a metal door set into the hillside, so obscured by overgrown manzanita bushes that if I hadn’t known it was supposed to be here, I probably would have passed right by it. I had a feeling that the protective camouflage was what had kept it from being discovered prior to this…or maybe it was simply that people avoided this obscure little corner of the canyon. The aliens were long gone, and yet I still felt something here, something cold, menacing. It was not a spot to linger in.

Given all that, logic suggested that the best thing to do was to get the hell out of there. Since logic had absolutely nothing to do with why I’d come here in the first place, I ignored those prickles of cold trickling down my neck and instead reached out to touch the wheel-like latch in the center of the door, to wrap my gloved fingers around it and attempt to turn it to the right.

I’d halfway expected that it would be rusted shut, or that it wouldn’t budge at all. Instead, it turned easily enough, opening on a dark tunnel which led into the hillside. The air that emerged was far colder than the brisk wind currently blowing at my loose hair, and I shivered. Along with the cold came an acrid, bitter odor. Not decay, which was something I’d halfway expected, since a bunch of aliens and hybrid soldiers supposedly had died in there before I was born, but it was still unpleasant.

All the more reason that you should hike back down this hill and let well enough alone, I told myself. For some reason, though, my feet remained resolutely planted where they were. Worse, they began to move into the darkness, which was blacker than anything I’d ever seen before. Even on moonless nights in this part of the world, the stars were so bright that you could use them to navigate if necessary.

There weren’t any stars down in that scary black hole, however. I dug my phone out of my pocket once again and switched on the flashlight app. The beam wasn’t very wide, but it was bright enough to show me my footing, which was all I really needed. And at least the phone was fully charged, so I wouldn’t have to worry about the light dying on me and stranding me somewhere in the bowels of the base.

I moved forward, feeling my boots touch smooth rock. With my free hand, I reached out to feel the wall, which was rock as well. The corridor sloped downward, and I recalled Persephone saying at some dinner or another years ago…when the adults were talking in hushed whispers and hadn’t realized that I was sitting on the stairs and eavesdropping…that there had been both elevators and a stairway. I sort of doubted the elevators would be working after all these years, so I had to hope the stairs were still clear.

They turned out to be, the metal free of rust despite the quarter-century that had passed since anyone had set foot in the place. I paused on the landing for a few seconds, and then that strange pull or compulsion or whatever it was seemed to tell me to go down.

So that’s what I did.

The clang of my footsteps against the diamond-plate metal of the stairs seemed to echo in my ears, and I couldn’t help wincing. Maybe that was a foolish reaction, since there was no one around to hear me, but still it felt as if I’d awakened something here, something that had slept for far too long.

I went down one flight of steps, stopped at the next landing.

No.

The word sounded so clearly in my head, it almost felt as if someone had spoken it aloud. In fact, I was startled enough that I turned around, flashing the beam from my camera in all directions, making sure I was still alone. But of course, I was. I saw nothing, not even cobwebs in the corners, not even beetles scuttling away from the intrusive illumination of my camera’s flashlight.