Rescue From Planet Pleasure (6 page)

In Spanish,
fajada
means
banded
, and the eroded columns of stone that made up the face of the butte resembled a tall band or a girdle. A sloped skirt of dirt and rock circled its base. A lop-sided dome with a flat-topped crown topped the summit.

“How tall do you think?”

Jolie raised her sunglasses and squinted. “At least three hundred feet.”

Coyote read his watch and ran faster. Jolie and I sped behind him.

We reached the bottom of the rocky slope and veered to the right around the southern side of the butte. Coyote picked up the pace. Normally his attention drifted like a leaf in the breeze, and it disturbed me to see him so focused. We were obviously on a schedule, but for what?

“Hey Coyote,” Jolie blurted, “what exactly is the hur—”

I elbowed her and shook my head.
Don’t bother.

Coyote bounded over the rough ground and talus with the agility of his namesake. He paused at the bottom of the butte only long enough to again read his watch, then turned his ball cap around and shimmied up a crack between the hundred-foot-tall sandstone columns like a caffeinated lizard.

After the long hike I was ready for a break, but I wasn’t going to let a wizened five-hundred-year-old vampire put me to shame.

Something smacked my head. It was Jolie using me for a springboard to leap high into the gap between another set of columns.

“C’mon, Felix. You’re moving like an old man.”

For humans, a free climb between the eroded sandstone columns would’ve been very dangerous but thanks to vampire levitation, we easily skittered upward.

Once above the columns, we scrambled up the rocky, rounded slope to a tall step of sandstone, climbed that and arrived at the base of the butte’s crown. We were treated to a spectacular high-rise view of the basin—a sprawling blanket of beiges with stripes of olive and viridian—with Chaco Wash unwinding to the northwest and south, and the mesas to the east and north marbled in reds and grays. At the southern end of the wash where it curved around a mesa, the ancient Chaco Ruins looked like tiny, broken rectangles made of dirt.

Coyote didn’t slow for sightseeing. He scampered toward the crown to approach three sandstone slabs set parallel and edgewise against the broad face of the rock wall. He cut another nervous glance to his Rolex.

He ducked into a shaded gap between the slabs and the wall, pointed to me, and beckoned with a quick pump of his arm.

I crouched beside him, Jolie looking over my shoulder.

Two spiral petroglyphs had been carved into the rock wall at waist level. The small one on the left was maybe four or five inches in diameter. The other was larger, at least a foot wide. Both carvings were well eroded and projected a prehistoric eeriness. A vertical blade of sunlight shining between the slabs sliced across the right side of the larger spiral.

Coyote pressed his hand against the center of the larger petroglyph and skipped his fingertips across the spiral grooves as if counting. He spread his hand and held it under the sliver of light, his palm flat against the rock. He looked at his watch and ordered, “Quickly,
vato
. Put your left hand on mine.”

Confused by what he was doing, I hesitated. “What?”

He slapped his hand against the petroglyph. The light crept across the knuckle of his index finger. “Do it now!”

Extending my arm, I leaned over him and placed my hand over his.

He looked at Jolie. “We’ll be right back.”

Back from where?

The sliver of light draped across the back of my hand and warmed my skin. The light grew brighter, brighter still, and I blinked.

Coyote pushed up from under me. Cars honked all around us.

We were at the corner of a busy street and an interstate on-ramp.

***

Chapter Nine

I stood straight, paralyzed in disbelief. One second I was in New Mexico, on top of Fajada Butte. And the next …

I took in the landmarks. An auto body shop straight ahead. A plain, rather ratty, two-story apartment building across the street. Behind me, the signs on the closest lamppost said: Van Nuys Boulevard, and Westbound Ramp for the Golden State Highway.

Pacoima, California.

California was where I had first met Coyote, in a parking garage not far from here. For an instant, it felt like the years between then and now had gone
poof
. An astonished glance at my watch told me that only minutes had passed since I last checked the time.

Coyote dropped his sunglasses into a chest pocket of his denim jacket. His tapetum lucidum glowed a supernatural red. I was about to offer a spare set of contacts to hide his vampire eyes when his irises miraculously dulled to a very human dark brown. His ball cap was still turned backwards and he rotated the cap by the bill to shade his face. “You hungry,
vato
?”

“Did you move us through the psychic plane?”

“Explanations later. Right now, let’s eat.
Vamanos.
” He pimp-strolled up the sidewalk past the jumbled mosaic of commercial signs and storefronts that lined Van Nuys.

I took a hesitant step forward, still not convinced that the world around me was real. A low-rider blasting the percussive beats of
reggaeton
cruised by. The air reeked of car exhaust and warm asphalt. If I was imagining this, it was a pretty damn good dream. I eased into my stride and caught up with Coyote.

We passed a Catholic Church surrounded by an acre of parking lot. Then hoofed past mom-and-pop restaurants, nail salons, cell phone stores, fast food joints—the usual mishmash of American suburban sprawl.

At Laurel Canyon, we hustled across the street toward a
carneceria
-liquor store. A turquoise-colored awning shaded the front door, and an electronic buzzer announced our entrance. The air carried the heavy, humid smell of raw meat. Coyote headed through an aisle with shelves of canned beans and chili on the left and cases of beer on the right. A row of glass cases packed with ice and slabs of beef and pork lined the back wall. I stopped to replace my sunglasses with contacts.

A heavy-set man with a Pancho Villa mustache stood behind a case. He did a double take at our approach and hustled around the case toward us, his thick mitts wiping stains on a butcher’s apron. “
Oye
, Coyote. Long time,
compa.
”

When was Coyote last here?

“Yeah, I’ve been busy,” he said.

The butcher lifted an eyebrow.

“
Tu sabes
,” Coyote explained, “going here, going there. Gathering material for my novel.”

Laughter rumbled in my gut, and I strained so hard to keep from guffawing that my belly hurt.

Coyote shot me an especially dirty stink-eye. He then introduced me to the butcher—Gustavo.

“Here for lunch, Coyote?” he asked.

Coyote smiled. “
Símon.
”

Gustavo backed up a step and plucked a receipt tacked to a corkboard. “First, you gotta settle up your tab. Nineteen fifty.”

Coyote pointed to me. Having resigned myself to the fact that I’d become his personal ATM, I reached for my wallet. He asked, “How about two cups of boar’s blood and six pork tamales?”

“The total then is thirty one
bolas
,” Gustavo replied.

I counted out the bills. Gustavo took the money and disappeared through a swinging door into a back room. He returned with fresh tamales in a Ziploc bag and two Styrofoam cups with plastic lids.

Coyote took the receipt and mumbled something about “for tax purposes.”

Gustavo bid us goodbye and tended to the customers queuing behind us. On the way out I bought a six-pack of ice-cold Carta Blanca.

I found a table around back between the service entrance and the Dumpster. After upending a couple of plastic crates to use as chairs, I brushed cigarette butts off the table. Couldn’t say much about the ambience but we had privacy. Coyote pulled the tamales out of the Ziploc and stacked them on top. I shared the opener on my scout knife so we could crack open our beers.

“Isn’t Gustavo suspicious that you’re a vampire? Who else would order blood?”

“Nah. He just thinks I’m a little weird. Imagine that.” Coyote guzzled a Carta Blanca.

“Start explaining how we got here.” I removed the lid from my Styrofoam cup. Steam curled from the warm blood. I peeled the cornhusk from a tamale and dipped it in the blood. “You could’ve told me we were about to teleport.”

“Don’t tell, show. Right,
ese
?”
A grin wormed onto his face. “That’s something I’ve learned from writing my novel. Besides, if I would’ve told you, you wouldn’t have believed me or understood how going from there to here works.” While Coyote talked, he was chomping on his second tamale and starting another beer.

“I still don’t understand, but I believe.”

Coyote wiped blood from his chin and licked his fingers. His second beer was already a dead soldier. “Then we’re halfway there.”

“So you understand how this teleportation works?”

“
Claro
. Remember when you and Jolie were discussing Phaedra’s drawing?” So Coyote had been eavesdropping.

I replied, “The one of a giant room lined with doors?”

He dunked a third tamale into his cup of blood. “What we just did was go from one door, across the psychic plane, and through another door.”

I shucked my second tamale. “How did you know where we were going?”

He upended beer number three and chugged. He put the bottle down and burped. “I used the Sun Dagger.”

“The petroglyph we put our hands on? That’s its name?”

“Now. It’s been called lots of things by lots of different people.” Coyote returned to chewing, drinking, and swallowing.

“Then that petroglyph was a portal?”

Coyote shoved the last of his third tamale into his mouth. He chewed as he talked. “Portal?” He chuckled and spit bits of bloody tamale. “You’ve been watching too many scientific fiction movies.”

“Then what would you call it?”

Coyote tipped the Carta Blanca to his lips and greedily emptied it. He set the bottle aside and grabbed a fourth and held it in his hands, his eyes focused faraway. He brought his attention to the present and shrugged. “Portal, I guess. It opens into a tunnel,
ese
. A tunnel that’s always shifting through space. One end is on top of Fajada Butte and the other moving around.”

I imagined the tunnels as wormholes, a darling topic of quantum mechanics and science fiction. I recalled that Coyote had kept referring to his watch before using the Sun Dagger. “And depending on the time, the other end opens to a different location?”

“You got it, bro.” Coyote reached for the fifth Carta Blanca.

I snatched the bottle for myself. Since I had paid for lunch, I deserved at least two beers and two tamales to his four of each. “How do you know the schedule?”

“I got it figured out.”

“And you’ll show me?”

“In time.”

“Why didn’t we bring Jolie?”

“You know how it is when you bring a
ruca
along. I wanted this to be just us
vatos.
” Coyote leaned into his chair and unbuckled his belt. He stuck both hands inside his pants and scratched. “You bring a girl and you gotta act Miss Manners and shit.” He fastened his belt and sniffed his fingers. He grasped the last bit of my tamale. “You gonna eat this?”

“Not anymore.”

He dipped the tamale into my cup of blood.

“You can have that too.”

Coyote smiled. “Thanks,
vato
. You’re a decent
camarada.
” He munched the last of the tamale and slurped the remaining blood from both cups.

I cleared the table and pitched our trash into the Dumpster. Coyote started for the sidewalk.

A lot of questions still pinged in my head. “But you don’t need a petroglyph to teleport. Remember the last time we were here? One time, you tumbled out of my car and disappeared. And the other time, when your truck was blown up, you vanished and then returned from wherever you had gone.”

“Doors are everywhere. And I have the magic key right here.” He tapped his temple and his fingertip gave a hollow metallic
thunk, thunk
against his skull.

“Then why did we need the Sun Dagger?”

“I didn’t need the Sun Dagger.
You
needed the Sun Dagger.”

Coyote’s convoluted explanation tied my thoughts into knots. What I needed was another drink. Of something stronger than Mexican beer.

“How do we get back?”

“The same way we got here. Only backwards.”

Did I say a drink? Make that many drinks. From a very large bottle.

Instead of walking south on Van Nuys toward our arrival point, we headed north. Cars and trucks rushed by.

Coyote suddenly pushed me off the sidewalk and into the path of a large delivery truck. A jolt of panic stung my nerves. I was just about to summon vampire speed to bound out of the way when he dove off the curb and slammed into my belly. I dropped backwards and pictured the truck squashing the both of us into the asphalt.

My shoulders hit sand and I sprawled under bright sunlight. Coyote stumbled past me. I lay on my back and stared past the edges of the sandstone slabs on Fajada Butte.

Jolie stepped close and looked down on me. “Where the hell have you guys been?”

I rolled to my feet and brushed dirt from my clothes. I wasn’t as confused as I was angry.

Coyote braced an arm against one of the slabs and beamed a Cheshire Cat grin. “Like I told you. Backwards.”

I looked back Jolie and said, “Pacoima.”

She sniffed. “And you guys had lunch while I sat on this rock?”

I fanned my hands. “Don’t yell at me, I didn’t make the travel arrangements.”

Coyote read his Rolex and said to Jolie, “Your turn.” He ducked under the slab and crouched against the petroglyph.

She chuffed. “We better go someplace awesome.” She saluted
sayonara
and joined Coyote.

I crouched to get a better look at them. “Where are you guys going?”

“Just hold down the fort,
ese.
” Coyote put his hand where the beam of light sliced across the Sun Dagger. “We’ll be back soon.”

Jolie placed her hand over his. They dissolved into the wall, and a blink later, they were gone.

Even though I knew what to expect, I grimaced in amazement.

Holyfreakin’shit.

***