Chapter:6

Spring, 1999 a.d.
A Change in the Wind

“Daddy! Daddy!” Alicia cried out joyfully, then squealed as she was swept up into the air, swung around and gently deposited back to earth.

Tanya called out from the kitchen, “Supper’s almost ready, wash up, both of you!”

Frank hugged his two-year-old daughter tightly, then looked at her tiny, delicate, but very dirty little hands. “What have you been doing?” he asked, grinning at Alicia and showing her how dirty her hands were.

“I was hunting!” Alicia exclaimed proudly.

“Well, now you’re going to be washing!” Frank laughed, then picked her up and carried her to the bathroom.

It was after dinner and Alicia was finally in bed after telling them all about the shiny, quick little beetles and the worm she’d found under some rocks in the back yard. The ten o’clock news was on, but her parents weren’t watching it – they were just sitting there, together, not doing anything – maybe remembering, but perhaps not.

“How’s the club going?” Tanya asked quietly, her voice tired from the day’s activities of chasing around a two-year-old.

“Fine,” Frank replied. “The new dancer is working out all right, I guess. She isn’t you, so...

“I got an offer to sell the club,” Frank continued. “I told him I’d consider it. It’s not the same without you there. And if you’re not coming back...”

Tanya sighed. They’d been over it before. She didn’t want to strip anymore. She wanted to raise Alicia. But Frank could tell she was restless. There was no real adventure in her life – not like before, when she was an agent in MI ... But tonight, Tanya was feeling especially restless; Frank could tell. Finally, she told him.

“Colonel Brady called today,” Tanya said quietly.

“Really?” Frank asked, wondering where this would go. “What did he want? He’s not still fishing for aliens, is he?”

“Huh?” Tanya asked, surprised by the direction of his question. “Uh, no.”

She sighed. “He wants me to come back – to come out of retirement. They have a job for me that he seems to think I’d be interested in.”

“Yeah? What sort of ‘job’?” Frank asked, sounding a little irritated. He knew that, whatever Tanya wanted to do, playing ‘I Spy’ for Uncle Sam wasn’t anywhere near the top of her list, despite the fact that she was bored out of her mind.

Tanya shrugged. “He didn’t want to talk over the phone. He wants me to come see him.”

“Are you going to?” Frank asked.

“He seemed to think I will,” she replied. “He told me to watch the news tonight.”

“What channel?” Frank wanted to know.

“He didn’t say,” she said.

They watched the news for a few minutes. It was a dull night and the biggest story was the ‘Millennium Bug’ that everyone was terrified was going to crash all the computers. The commercial came on.

“Well, that was fun,” Frank said and started to get up.

“We interrupt this program to take you live to our affiliate station in Palm Springs!”

“Hey, they interrupted a commercial!” Tanya exclaimed, somewhat sarcastically. “Something must have actually happened!”

The TV screen was dark and the picture bounced around wildly, like someone was running and carrying a live feed camera on their shoulder. There was a lot of pandemonium and people talking with extreme emotion – mostly fear, grief and anger.

“Hello, Dave?” the West Coast News Anchorman said anxiously from his desk in Los Angeles. “Can you tell us what’s going on?”

“Dave? Can you hear me?” he inquired again. “We’re going to cut back to our regular newscast until you’re ready. Alright?”

“Hello, Harold?” a new voice asked. “Are we live yet?”

“Yes, Dave, I can hear you,” Harold replied, annoyed at having to give orders over live TV. “Get a camera on you. Tell us what’s happening!”

“Harold? This is just awful!” Dave said, still invisible, but sounding terribly distressed. “I don’t really understand what it is we’ve uncovered here...”

The camera feed, which had been displaying a running gait across sand and shrubs, was approaching a group of people lit up by portable floodlights. Hopefully the invisible newscaster, Dave, would be among them. Tanya’s mind interpreted what she saw as the camera approached: Civilians, milling around, nervous. ‘They act shell-shocked, ‘ she thought, recognizing the behavior of people just after a really bad car crash or when a bomb goes off nearby.

Then the camera was very well focused on the most macabre scene Tanya had ever witnessed on television. It was a man, or once was. His emaciated head was tilted back and there was a long, rounded object sticking out of his mouth and pointing up into the sky. The camera panned down, displaying a naked, mummified corpse. The mummy’s feet were off the ground and a long shaft that disappeared between its legs was supporting the entire body.

Then the camera turned its bright lights across an area where many corpses were staked out in a similar manner – an entire grove of dead, rotting bodies were staked out, reminding Frank of a macabre version of a young tree nursery. Two of the staked-out bodies were still nakedly fresh and bloody.

The scene immediately changed to show Harold sitting at his desk in Los Angeles. His mouth was open in horror. Then he turned quickly to the side and threw up, setting his network career back at least ten years.

Frank and Tanya watched, mesmerized by the ghastly events along with the rest of the world, for the next three hours. All the networks were carrying it. Fox scarfed CBS’s initial images of the staked-out victims and interrupted their live feeds with it repeatedly, stealing millions of gore-hungry viewers from the other, more conservative networks who, after that first horrific burst of images, refused to show them again. It didn’t matter – by morning, the images were all over the internet.

It turned out that every hiker who had disappeared into the Superstition Mountains for the last three years was staked out in that grove. In the days that followed, it was determined that many of those discovered in that grove had died from exposure or other causes, then were evidently found and staked out by whatever monstrous person was committing these Sins Against God and Nature.

The bodies were located on sacred Indian burial grounds, which was why they’d not been discovered before now. The Forestry Service discouraged visitors from desecrating sacred places like this. A schoolteacher who was taking his class out to study ancient Indian cultures discovered the macabre collection quite by accident. There were two rangers with the group, to insure that the ancient site remained undisturbed by the students, not realizing what they would find when they got there.

Tanya called Colonel Brady and turned him down cold. She knew that being a government agent would just muck up the works. MI did everything with a tremendous amount of overkill. Instead, after spending all night talking it over with her husband, she and Frank offered the government the elite services of Tabor Investigations, the newly-formed (one hour old at that time) husband and wife team of Independent Investigators (read, ‘vigilantes’ or ‘bounty hunters’).

The government never got back with them. Frank sold the Club anyway, and they took Alicia to live with her grandmother for the summer. Tanya’s mom was delighted, or so she said. Perhaps when summer was over, she might sing a different tune.

It was two months after the grisly discoveries and there were still hundreds of hikers all over the mountains, along with dozens of agents and officers from every law enforcement group. Tanya and Frank, with their daughter safely ensconced at her grandmother’s and with the bar finally sold, decided to take their long-delayed honeymoon.

Location? The Superstition Mountains, of course.

It was night and they were alone. The homeliest, hook-nosed ranger had showed up around dusk and made sure they were set up properly and their campfire wasn’t going to cause a range fire. The stars were brighter than either of them had seen for years. A coyote and an owl competed with millions of crickets and a pond full of frogs. The wildlife was all invisible, but very audible.

“In the winter,” Frank told her, “the sky is even more magnificent than it is now.”

“That’s pretty hard to imagine,” Tanya whispered, gazing upward as she lay in his arms.

“Yep!” Frank assured her. “You can see the Milky Way stretching across the sky down toward the south, and this Christmas, if you look straight up at midnight, you’ll see Jupiter and Saturn right next to each other. Sirius will be over there,” he pointed to the southeast, “and Orion’s belt will be right there, next to the Milky Way.” He pointed again.

Tanya chuckled, remembering why Jupiter and Saturn would be so close. “Some people think the world is going to end when all the planets line up this year.”

“Do you think the world will end then?” Frank asked.

“Well,” Tanya said, then thought for a moment. “Let’s play it safe and be fucking our brains out at midnight on Christmas – just in case.”

Frank laughed. “Okay, just in case ... But if the world ends then, we might not notice...”

“You’re probably right,” Tanya whispered.

They lay for awhile longer. The coyote and the owl seemed to quiet down, or maybe they went elsewhere. Only the crickets and the distant croakers remained. Tanya jerked awake when a dying ember popped out of the campfire and bounced off her leg. The sudden movement woke Frank, as well.

Tanya sat up. “Whatever happened to ‘fuck my brains out every time you see me’?”

Frank smiled at her. “Do you want to dance for me in front of the firelight? I brought the BB gun.”

“Darling!” Tanya exclaimed sweetly, suddenly very interested.

Despite the cool, night air, Tanya wasted no time getting out of her clothes. Once naked, she took a deep breath and made like she was smelling the moist parts of her body as they finally got some air.

“Ah, yes,” she murmured, inhaling deeply. “The exotic aroma of Deet!”

“Now, sweetheart,” Frank admonished her. “What would the frogs live on if mosquitoes didn’t lay their eggs in the water?”

“I still stink,” Tanya replied, not satisfied with his answer.

“I don’t care,” Frank told her. “You look sexy as hell standing there naked in the middle of the wilderness!”

“Really?” Tanya asked.

Frank didn’t answer. He hit himself in the groin with his fist, instead.

“Oh, my!” Tanya murmured. “Didn’t that hurt?”

“Only my knuckles,” Frank grinned.

“Oh-ho! Well, let’s get your clothes off, then,” she replied and reached for his shirt.

In only a moment, she had Frank naked with his hard-on waving proudly in front of him.

“Now that’s a sight I’ll never tire of,” Tanya said and dropped to her knees in front of him. “Where shall I start on this lovely lollipop...”

She breathed gently, blowing on it and making it twitch. “Ooo! It likes that!”

“It likes being out,” Frank explained. “And it likes finding warm, toothy places to hide in.”

“Oh, well,” Tanya said, then kissed the tip of his cock with her puckered lips formed into an ‘O’.

“Oh, God!” Frank whispered. “It’s been way, way too long since you’ve done that!”

Tanya only chuckled, then sucked the whole thing into her mouth. Frank drew his breath in sharply, then exhaled with a sigh of ecstasy. “Ahhhh, yesss!”