Chapter 1

I don’t know when you’ll be able to read these memoirs, whoever you are. By the time you read them, I could even be dead. That’s one of the reasons I’m writing them, because someone has to know these things. A second reason is that Samuel Moore needs to know what kind of man his father was and the real reason he won’t be seeing his father anymore. A third reason is that writing it will keep me from going crazy while I recover here in this facility, whatever it is and wherever it is. My mind desperately needs something to do while my body heals, which the doctors here tell me will take time, a lot of time.

Fortunately, Rachelle taught me how to encrypt files on my laptop so that they look innocuous if Control sees them and how to foil keystroke recorders. Rachelle is a computer genius. I’d call her a savant. She’ll come into the story soon enough. Do I think Control could be spying on my computer activity here, in a hospital bed, on my own laptop? I know they are. However, when Control looks at my computer logs, they’ll see a history made up by one of Rachelle’s pet AIs that includes a lot of solitaire, social media convos, and movie watching. Hopefully, I learned enough from Rachelle to pull this off and write these memoirs under Control’s nose. I’m willing to risk it. Like I said, my mind desperately needs something to do while my body heals or I’ll go nuts.

It all started when a strange man, who would later introduce himself as Mr. X, came by my office after a lecture. I was a college professor back then. It wasn’t unusual for visitors to sit in for a lecture. Some people are old school and come up to me before the lecture starts and ask permission to sit in, but many times, they don’t even introduce themselves or speak to me afterwards. That’s totally fine. I always hope those people got something good that day that helped them in some way.

I remember when the strange man arrived that afternoon about five minutes after the lecture had started. Most folks arriving late, even regular students who are enrolled in the class, seat themselves in the back or near the back, even if that’s not where they usually sit day to day. Mr. X walked down the steps of the auditorium to an empty seat in the very front of the room, interrupting the class with the sound of his hard, very formal dress shoes resounding on each and every step. As all eyes turned to him, the whole class became so completely silent that there wasn’t even the sound of a page of notes turning or of a pencil scratching new notes. It was like no one was even breathing. The man who would later introduce himself as Mr. X was unforgettably unique.

He was dressed as if he had stepped out of the 1800s, with a vest, bow tie, pocket watch, coat with tails, and top hat. He carried a hardback, portfolio style notebook. As he sat down, he opened the notebook, placing it on the desk-like folding armrest of his auditorium seat. Next, he produced an elegant-looking pen from inside his coat pockets. He placed the pen to the paper and leaned forward expectantly, as if planning to record every word I said, looking right up at me, making eye contact.

It wasn’t his clothes that most captivated the gaze of all of us in the room, however, it was his bodily appearance. His skin was albino white. He was bald to the extent of not having any eyebrows. I thought at first, while he was over in the seats, that perhaps his eyebrows were white and simply not noticeable from that distance, However, later, when he was in my office, I confirmed he didn’t actually have any. He reminded me very much of conspiracy theory videos about Men in Black, except that those characters were portrayed as wearing modern suits, not Victorian ones.

When Mr. X made eye contact with me, I became self-conscious enough to realize I had completely stopped my lecture and that the class had come to a halt. This snapped me out of the state of semi-hypnosis the room seemed to be in, and since I was the teacher after all, I recovered and pressed on with the rest of the class period, which went remarkably well and without further distraction by the day’s visitor.

A nice thing about the schedule I had back then was that my office hours were immediately after that class, which was good since that was the class that I was teaching at the time that seemed to generate the most students who wanted to use my office hours. I could handle questions while topics were still fresh in both my and my students’ minds. Only one person came to office hours that day, Mr. X.

My door was open. I was seated at my desk, which was placed on one of the side walls so that I could see both the door to my right and the magnificent wall of windows to my left. Mr. X stepped into the doorway, clutching his notebook and nodding his head in greeting.

“Dr. Leighton, your lecture today was most stimulating.”

“Thank you. I always enjoy it when people drop by to visit the class. To what do I owe the pleasure of your visit today, sir?”

“I represent an organization that would appreciate a man of your diverse talents and experiences. We are hoping that you might consider doing some consulting work for us.”

This was definitely not going to be the conversation I had expected. Then I realized that coming from this guy, I didn’t know what I could have expected anyway. Who was he?

The man I would come to know as Mr. X sat down in the chair across the desk from me. He smiled cordially and seemed friendly. He certainly didn’t fit the Men in Black stereotype of being emotionless and socially awkward.

I was very intrigued by this guy, so I wanted to know everything I could about him and his organization. I didn’t really need the money. I was comfortable financially. But, with money, more is always better, so that could be a bonus, maybe a big bonus depending on what this opportunity really was.

“What sort of consultation are you looking for?”

“We’re looking for more of the same type of work you’ve already done for us, though you may not have known it at the time.”

I waited for a moment for him to continue, which he obliged to do.

“Last year, when you were consulted regarding the differences between different Native American tribal traditions regarding skinwalkers, your insight resulted in the capture of one and the saving of many lives of those who would have been its victims.”

“The capture of a skinwalker?” I was so incredulous that I caught myself being open-mouthed and shut it, quickly composing myself. This guy seemed serious, completely sincere and straight in his delivery.

“Yes, one that has become very infamous to our organization. It has been responsible for at least twenty-one deaths that we know of, probably more.”

“You’re serious.”

“The deaths of twenty-one people are very serious.”

I leaned forward, matching his posture.

“What type of consultation would you like me to work on for you now?”

Mr. X smiled so excitedly that his eyes twinkled, as if I were a celebrity rockstar and he was about to ask for my autograph.

“We’d like you to come and work for us, full time.”

“Full time?”

“Full time.”

“I don’t even know what your organization does.”

“You know we hunt skinwalkers.”

“That can’t be a full-time endeavor,” I said, humoring him. “There can’t be that many skinwalkers in existence.”

“You’re right there aren’t,” he admitted, “But we work cases that are just as fascinating, too. We believe you would be a tremendous asset.”

“As a researcher?”

“No, Dr. Leighton, as a field agent.”

My face must have betrayed my skepticism and disbelief at that point. Mr. X suddenly sat back in the chair and changed to a more serious approach. He didn’t become adversarial or mean, but he had more of the “tough love” demeanor of a strict parent or a coach rather than a buddy or friend.

“Dr. Leighton, you have tried all your life to make the choices that would make your limited lifespan in this world count for as much as possible. You started out in science, with a love of chemistry and biology, until you realized that pursuing that would leave you stuck in a lab somewhere staring at a wall while you juggled test tubes all day, away from people.

“You switched to anthropology for the human connection, and for the possibilities of addressing issues at a societal level since chemistry didn’t seem promising for you to address them at a molecular level. You also considered psychology but you didn’t want to help just one person at a time.You, all your life, have had a broader vision, one that encompasses the world.”

Here, Mr. X gestured for dramatic effect at the large map of the world behind him, which hung there before my eyes in my office constantly. He knew me. It was life he’d been following me around all his life. He continued.

“You are now almost 50 years old and feel stuck here, too. You are at a very important crossroads, Dr. Leighton. You can accept this place you are now in life as you approach mid-life, or you can seize the opportunity I am offering you to finally find a place where your vision for what your potential is, where you can make a difference for the world with your life.”

He stopped and looked at me expectantly, standing up from his chair and handing me a business card all in one fluid motion.

I took the card. It read:

Mr. X

Agent of Control

(800) 555-2141

“The choice is yours, Dr. Leighton.”

I found myself also standing up and taking the card from him.

“Good day, Dr. Leighton,” Mr. X bid me, tipping his hat to me and leaving as quickly and he’d come.

What had just happened? Was this a prank? 

I would soon find out it wasn’t.

Chapter 2

Physical therapy sucks! It hurts. I’m back in bed now, with my spasms under control enough to keep writing to you, dear reader. One day soon, I’ll probably give you the details of my injuries, but I really don’t want to think about them right now any more than I have to. Writing to you will help keep my mind off the pain. Yes, they give me painkillers in this place, but they don’t block all of it. I’m also writing this time to keep myself awake until dinner gets here. I don’t want to miss dinner because I passed out from pain and exhaustion. Been there, done that. At least the food is good in this place, something to look forward to.

Last time, I told you about my encounter with Mr. X that fateful day and the card he left with me. It wasn’t long, maybe a couple of days later, during the weekend, when I called the number. I wanted to ask more questions.

To my surprise, Mr. X answered himself immediately after the first ring. I had expected to get some voicemail or an operator, but no, I got the man himself.

“Good day, Dr. Leighton!” I could hear that wonderful smile of his in his voice. If he wasn’t so creepy, he could do toothpaste commercials. He paused waiting for me to speak.

“I have a few questions about our conversation in my office this past week.”

“Excellent! I have the perfect way to answer all your questions. I believe you have vacation time for the next two weeks and won’t need to go into work. You had accumulated so much that according to your contract it was a use-it-or-lose-it situation?”

“Yes, but how did you know about…”

He cut me off. “I did say I have a way to answer all of your questions, including that one. We are prepared to offer you a one-time job for these next two weeks, a job that will pay you $50,000, with no further commitments after the two weeks. If working for us really isn’t something you want to do after finding out what it’s really like, you’ll be able to slide right back into the life you have now, and $50,000 richer. What do you say?”

“I’d say yes. If I don’t accept this now, I’ll wonder for the rest of my life what this was.”

“Of course you would. You’re that type of person.” Mr. X sounded pleased and impressed.

The rest of the weekend flew by. I caught up on some grades and generally got my affairs in order so that no job-work from the college would follow me into the two weeks vacation. I had originally planned for it to be a “staycation” and to do the workload at a more relaxed pace with smooth jazz on in the background and a glass of wine at my side on the desk, a bit at a time over several days, but instead I plugged away with hard rock synthwave and caffeine pushing me through it all in one day. I double checked my Rover.com arrangements for someone to check on Lucy, my cat, while I was away. All seemed ready for me to go.

Monday morning came. I took the St. Louis Metrolink downtown early. I walked to the corner of North Taylor Avenue and Pershing Avenue in the Central West End. The coffee shop there was rebranding…again. They had finished remodeling from their previous incarnation and were once again open. I grabbed a chai latte and sipped there on the corner while I looked out for my ride. Though there’s a bus stop at that corner, that’s not what I was there for. I was waiting for a dark tan Ford Expedition to come by with one of my fellow “agents of Control” (whatever that meant). I would be picked up and we’d trek across Missouri to Kansas City to pick up more of the team.

The drink had just had a chance to finally drink without it burning my tongue when the Expedition showed up, driven by a short, cute blonde twenty-something with wavy hair a little past her shoulders and wire frame glasses with perfectly round lenses. There was enough of a pause in the traffic for her to stop for me without getting honked at by impatient people. The passenger window came down and she greeted me.

“Throw your stuff in the back and let’s go.”

The back hatch of the vehicle slowly started to rise. I placed my stuff in the back. It didn’t look too crowded back there. I knew we’d be picking up a total of four more people along the way to our destination, which was somewhere out in Arizona. I was the first person picked up after the driver started the journey, so it was just my stuff and her stuff until Kansas City.

With my stuff situated in the back, I came around front to let myself in the front next to the driver.

“Hi, I’m Rachelle,” she said as she pulled away from the curb and headed for the Interstate.

“I’m Carl. Nice to meet you. How long have you been working with Control?”

“Four years. I was recruited when I was twenty.”

“Right out of college?’ I asked.

“During college actually. Once I learned what they do, I never looked back. The degree didn’t mean that much to me anymore after that.”

“It’s that exciting, huh?”

“Well….” Rachelle paused for a moment as if thinking of her answer.

Finally, she continued. “Why don’t you watch the mission briefing video and then you tell me. It’s on my laptop. You should be able to reach it there on the seat behind you.”

I looked back there. Sure enough, there was a laptop case.

I obliged. Once I had Rachelle’s laptop in front of me and it was booting up, she said, “Use the headset. I’ve already seen the briefing several times.”

I pulled the headset out of the case and plugged it into the machine. The computer had finished booting to a standard Windows login screen. Rachelle told me to login as Guest, which I did. Next there was a desktop screen with a video icon right in the middle labeled “Dust Bowl Arizona”. The laptop was a nice touch screen one. There was no stupid fingerpad. I hate those. I tapped the “Dust Bowl Arizona” icon and thought that I was ready for anything. Maybe I was. Maybe I wasn’t. I was determined to find out.

Chapter 3

I knew it would happen eventually. Today, the main doctor who sees me informed me that I am deemed well enough to be debriefed about what happened in Dust Bowl. I have an appointment tomorrow morning after breakfast to talk about my experiences there. I won’t be walking to the appointment myself, of course. I’ll be wheelchaired in.

I’m actually surprised this hasn’t happened a lot sooner. I’ve been conscious and well enough to answer questions for weeks. I mentioned that to the doctor when he was here in the room. He said that they also wanted me to be in a good state of mental and emotional recovery, too, for the debriefing. I can appreciate that.

In the meantime, I’ll be debriefing you some more dear reader, before I slip off to sleep tonight. Last time, I was in the Ford Expedition with Rachelle and was just opening the Dust Bowl, Arizona mission briefing video.

The video started with a map of Arizona zooming in on a region northwest of Phoenix, and well off any interstate or highway, in other words, barren desert. In that region was a small town, Dust Bowl. A woman’s voice started in Rachelle’s headset.

“Dust Bowl, Arizona was founded in 1912 as a mining camp. Although efforts to have a successful mine there proved in vain, the town hung on. Today it has a population of about 2000 residents. The town supports itself primarily with tourism, including a Native American History and Culture Center, a memorial to native son and decorated World War II hero Lt. Leonard Sees-Like-A-Hawk, a transgalactic alien welcome center (due to a long history of having a high incidence of UFO or UAP sightings in the area), and the Dust Bowl Cactus Forest and Wildlife Refuge.”

The video changed scenes to show shots of each of the mentioned tourist attractions while the narrator’s voice continued.

“Despite tourism being the make-it-or-break-it sector of Dust Bowl’s economy, during the week of Memorial Day each year, the entire municipality shuts down. All stores, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses close. This has been going on annually since at least the 1950’s and perhaps further back than that. Normally, Memorial Day week should be an important week to such a town, the opening of the summer tourist season and a time of year in Arizona when temperatures are still somewhat comfortable before the blazing heat of July and August arrives.”

The video changed scenes to show shots of store fronts, hotel signs, and restaurant logos. Then, it changed to vacant stretches of desert highway.

“It has been noted that Dust Bowl has no corporate franchises. None of the restaurants, hotels, or stores has to explain to any out-of-town higher corporate management why they choose to close down this week every year. Dust Bowl residents go to great lengths to prevent outsiders from being inside the city limits during this week, even going so far as to place “Road Closed” signs on the road going through town at distances of five, ten, fifteen, and twenty miles in both directions from town. No actual road maintenance work has ever been observed during this time. Checks with the State of Arizona have confirmed that no state scheduled or authorized road construction was ever scheduled for these times as far back as records exist.”

The video scene changed what looked like a cross between a Google Earth image and a weather map. It was clearly the same area as the video’s first map display, with major interstates and highways labeled, as well as Dust Bowl and other settlements, including Alamo Lake. There was a swirling brown cloud over Dust Bowl.

“Each year, an atmospheric phenomenon, twelve to fifteen miles in diameter, forms after midnight Sunday night, in the wee hours of Memorial Day Monday morning. The phenomenon dissipates in exactly one week, before midnight the following Sunday night. These images and similar ones have been captured each year since the technology to produce them has been available. The phenomenon is similar to the Great Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, although the 1930’s Great Dust Bowl effects were much larger in scale and generally affected areas further east than western Arizona where the town of Dust Bowl is today, primarily Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico.”

The video began showing photographs from the Great Dust Bowl 1930’s event. Then, it showed the narrator, standing in front of a map similar to one used for the weather segment of a news program. She had shoulder length curly black hair and wore what looked like a paramilitary uniform. The uniform had insignia but I didn’t recognize it.

“This annual phenomenon at Dust Bowl was discovered when a field team was assigned there in 2022 to determine whether Dust Bowl regularly experienced actual UFO/UAP activity or whether Dust Bowl simply built such a reputation for tourism purposes. It is believed that though the satellite images go back many decades, the phenomenon was simply overlooked, not noticed due to both its relatively small, localized size and to Dust Bowl’s remoteness. It has been noted that the residents of Dust Bowl have twice, once in 1993 and once in 2010, voted to turn down an offer from the State of Arizona to connect their town to either Highway 72 or Highway 95 with a proposed upgraded four-lane road that would be more straight that the meandering two-lane road that presently exists. It would seem that the residents of Dust Bowl do want visitors, their tourism industry depends upon it, but not too many visitors.

“It is your assignment, as a member of Field Team 42, to visit Dust Bowl during Memorial Day week this year, study the phenomenon, and provide Control with an official Assessment Report.”

As the video finished, I removed Rachelle’s headphones and closed her laptop, staring out the windshield for a moment.

“I noticed the video didn’t say what happened to the field team that was there before to study UFOs.”

Rachelle agreed with a smile, “No, they didn’t.”

“They also didn’t say whether the UFO activity was determined to be real or not.”

“No, they didn’t.” She laughed. “Welcome to Control, Field Agent Leighton. I’ve been driving since Chicago and I need a break. How about we stop for something to eat and after the break you drive?”

“OK.”

Rachelle seemed to accept all this weirdness with a cheerful fatalism. Her smile made her good mood contagious. As we scanned for road signs advertising a good place to eat, I playfully asked, smiling also, “You weren’t recruited by a guy named Mr. X, were you?’

“Mr. Y, actually. There’s more than one of them.”

“Them?”

“Welcome to Control, Field Agent Leighton.”

Chapter 4

I have a confession to make. I skipped making an entry here yesterday. You’re probably reading this in its completed form, so you’d never know I skipped a day, but I’m telling you because I want you, whoever you are, to know how much I appreciate you reading this. Writing this record is really helping me process what’s happened to my life since I became an Agent of Control (if I even still have that status. It’s not exactly clear at this point what’s to become of me once I’m all healed up as much as I’m going to get healed up, especially after yesterday.)

I have faith that Rachelle’s pet AI will get this file in front of a lot of eyeballs, but I have no idea whether you’re taking me seriously or just thinking that you’re reading a piece of fiction. Either way, it helps me a lot to know that you’re reading this. It’s a much nicer way to work things out than what happened yesterday after breakfast.

My first debriefing session since I came to be here at the facility was intense. Although everyone else in this facility has consistently been friendly, kind, cheerful, and supportive, my interviewer for the debriefing is a Grade A asshole. The session was three antagonistic and adversarial hours that at times involved some yelling from both sides of the interview.

I was so out of sorts afterwards that’s why I didn’t get anything written to you yesterday. I have another debriefing session with that same person scheduled for tomorrow. Oh, joy!

It’s a lot nicer to share these things here with you at my own pace, starting from the beginning, and taking things day by day as they happened. My interviewer jumped right into the worst parts, the death, the shock…I guess you could use the word “trauma”.

Anyway, I’ve rambled enough. You and I, dear reader, left off last time just as Rachelle and I were trekking down Interstate 70 in a Ford Expedition looking for grub and a place to switch drivers.

We soon found a Denny’s. That was good enough. As we pulled in and parked, Rachelle said that since she was short enough and the Ford Expedition was large enough, she planned to sleep in the back after our break while I drove to Kansas City’s Union Station to pick up the next two members of our team. I thought at the time that she was rather trusting of a strange man she had just met, co-worker for a secret organization or not. I would later learn that Rachelle is never unguarded while she sleeps.

Once we were inside, seated at a booth, and waiting for our food to come, Rachelle asked me why I accepted Mr. X’s offer and joined Control. I didn’t tell her the part about me joining on a trial basis. That felt like sharing individual salary information at a corporation that could cause jealousy. What if not everyone got such offers as mine? I shared everything else, though.

“I’ve never really fit in anywhere. I think I know why. I’m haunted by something an old college roommate of mine said once, about 25 years ago”

“What’s that?” Rachelle evinced a real curiosity.

“We had both just graduated with our Bachelor’s degrees, mine in biochemistry with a minor in Spanish and his in philosophy with a minor in finance. He was working at a bank. I was working in a lab. One day, he came home in a really grumpy mood. He’d been having problems with jerks at work in management. He was fuming about people ‘stuck in their left brains’, people too rigid in their logic patterns and thinking of answers only in terms of math to see the big picture of things.

“I was in my twenties and hadn’t developed the people skills and cue reading abilities that I like to think I have today. These days, I would have left him alone to calm down and wind down on his own. But, back in my twenties, I thought my college buddy just needed some humor and fun and cheerfulness, and I thought I’d be the one to supply it.”

“Uh oh.” Rachelle winced in sympathy for the predictable outcome.

“Yeah. When we’re young, we’re often pretty dumb. I sarcastically joked that dissing math/logic people might not be cool since his roommate that he was venting to had just graduated the previous week with a degree in biochemistry. He had been setting up some music on his stereo and suddenly whipped around, turning on me. He used the harshest tone I’ve ever heard him use. He said, ‘Carl, you’re not a scientist’ with real venom.

“I think he saw the hurt on my face which snapped him back to himself and he explained what he meant, which was still harsh, but it made sense. He said that I spoke three languages, that I played a musical instrument, that I could sing well enough to win awards, that I could quickly become brilliant in anything that interested me. He said that I was a Renaissance Man and that unfortunately for me, the Renaissance is long over. Our modern society puts labels on everyone’s foreheads and sticks them in boxes and then labels the boxes. He said that I resist labeling and that I don’t fit in one of society’s boxes. He said that life would be very hard for me since I would never truly fit in anywhere, that I was a Renaissance Man out of my time. It was a dark prophecy, a pronouncement of doom that has come true.”

Rachelle tried to counter my negativity. “You’ve got a good career going as an anthropology professor.”

“I’m an eccentric who found a niche in which to blend in with other eccentrics in a college anthropology department. And I found it too late. I don’t have enough years in to have any savings, nothing built up, no investments. Too many years were just bouncing from one thing that didn’t work out to the next thing that didn’t work out to the next thing that didn’t work out.”

“But when you met Mr. X, you thought you might just have found a place for a Renaissance Man?”

“Yes,” I acknowledged as our waitress arrived with our food.

“Before we eat, I’m going to freshen up,” Rachelle said. “Feel free to start without me. You gotta get your strength up. You’re driving next.”

“Alright,” I said, a little disappointed that since she was going to nap when we got back to the vehicle, that me learning about what got her to join Control would have to wait.

I was unwrapping my silverware from my napkin when I noticed that a cord was trailing out of one of the pockets of Rachelle’s cargo pants, a very thick cord, not a little cord as would charge up a portable electronic device, but a thick household appliance cord. It was white in color, leaving a trail on the ground as Rachelle headed for the restrooms. She seemed oblivious to it, as if it exerted no pressure or sensation that she could feel. I leaned down and looked under the table to see that our table was a “lucky” table that had an electrical outlet on the wall underneath, probably for the staff to plug in a vacuum cleaner at closing time. The mysterious white cord was plugged into this outlet.

This reminded me of a magic trick in which a magician pulls an endless supply of colored scarves from his hand, all tied into a multicolored rope that just keeps going and going. The cargo pants pocket, from which the cord continued to emerge in ever increasing length, looked like a normal pocket, yet twenty feet of cord had already emerged between the pocket and the wall socket under our table. How was this possible?

There didn’t turn out to be any time to wonder about it, since a waiter about ten or twelve feet away with a tray of at least four plates full of food on it, tripped over the white cord with a crash. Matters were made worse when he fell right into a table of other guests who were trying to enjoy their food. The cord became very taught when the waiter tripped and even slipped out of the wall socket under our table. I saw the cord suddenly retract, all twenty-something feet of it, into Rachelle’s cargo pants as quickly as if the heavy cord were thin, light tape measure. There was instantly no evidence that the cord had ever been there. I think I was the only one who had seen it. Rachelle knew about it, though. Her eyes met mine and her face displayed a terrified expression.

No one else seemed to know about the cord that had been there but suddenly wasn’t anymore. The waiter even said, “I don’t know what I could have tripped on.”

Rachelle changed her plan. Instead of going to the restroom, she found a restaurant worker who wasn’t part of cleaning up the mess. I could faintly hear her apologize for the inconvenience since our food had just arrived for in-house dining and she asked if we could change that and get the food to go instead. She whipped out a card to pay for our meals and then finally went to the restroom. I sat there in the booth while a worker came and boxed up our meals to-go, wondering what had just happened.

Chapter 5

Today, I had a different debriefing interviewer, a much more normal seeming person. Although he wasn’t a Mr. Rodgers level of friendliness, he was calm, professional, and not rude, a huge improvement over yesterday’s guy. But, I’m sure you’re more interested in reading about the road trip to Arizona than about me right now as a guy recovering in a hospital room, so here goes.

When Rachelle returned from the restroom, she acted like nothing weird had happened, as if a physics-defyingly long electrical cord had not emerged from and then disappeared back into her cargo pants, as if we had always planned to get our meals to go. She smiled a lot, cracked jokes, and seemed in good humor like before, but didn’t offer any kind of explanation for the odd occurrence or even acknowledge it.

I took my cue from her and conversed back with her normally. Once at the vehicle, I got into the driver’s seat and she got in the back for her nap as she had planned. I set my food container on the front passenger side floor so that it wouldn’t spill. I was hungry and the smells of the food made me feel even hungrier.

As I pulled back out onto I-70, I heard Rachelle’s food container pop open and the tantalizing aroma of her entre drifted up toward me from the back. I tried to ignore it. She ate in silence in the dark. When she was done, she settled in for the nap that she had been needing for a while at that point. I gathered from her sighs as she got comfortable before dozing off that she was a little stressed out. She’d had a long drive, some strange incident at Denny’s, and God knew what else was going on in her life.

I had been looking forward to hearing some of her life story as I had told her some of mine, but that would apparently wait. In the meantime, there were two more folks to pick up in Kansas City. I wondered what they would be like.

Rachelle had driven through the night from Chicago to pick me up in the morning in St. Louis. Now, I was driving us into Kansas City which is only about four hours from St. Louis on the Interstate. By the time we would stop and go to bed that night in a hotel, we’d be in Hays, Kansas. You might notice that we weren’t traveling to Dust Bowl, Arizona by the most direct route. That was because we were picking up the team along the way and one team member was in Denver.

So, you might ask why we weren’t flying. The reason, as it was explained to me, was that Control didn’t consider the events in Dust Bowl, Arizona to be world threatening or a cause of potential mass destruction. There were far more experienced (and heavily armed) teams for that sort of thing. This was even considered a training mission for me, the only newbie. Everyone else had been with Control for at least three years minimum. Liz, the team leader, had ten years experience.

The mission in Dust Bowl was based around a certain time frame, the seven days of the Dust Bowl “event”. We had plenty of time to get there. I think Control intended for some team bonding to happen over the course of our road trip.

We picked up Elizabeth Granger, aka Liz, and Montgomery Moore, aka Mont, in the parking lot of Kansas City’s Union Station. Rachelle didn’t even wake up. After placing his and LIz’s stuff in the back through the hatch, Mont greeted me with a soft, yet friendly “Hello” before gingerly moving to the vehicle’s middle row seats, not waking Rachelle in the back row. Liz sat next to me up front. She had a very managerial vibe coming from her. I felt without any doubt that I was in the presence of “the boss”. I’m sure she sat up there because she wanted to get her own impression of me, whatever any files on me that she had read might say.

Mont was slightly over six feet tall and athletically muscular, though not bodybuilder muscular. He had dark hair cut short, just a little bit past military short. Liz had platinum blonde hair, looked in her early forties, and had a strong, yet feminine jawline. She was a classical type of beauty like you would see in old-timey pictures in an art museum, not necessarily like a woman you would see on a magazine cover today or like a woman you’d see running around in a bikini on an old rerun of Baywatch. Her voice was a rich alto that would have been very sultry if she weren’t such an intimidating boss figure.

We stopped for fuel, drinks, and snacks before we left the Kansas City area. Rachelle still didn’t wake up. Mont and Liz had been on missions with her before and knew what she liked so we bought that. After finishing a small bag of beef jerky, Mont drifted to sleep behind me. He was too big to lie down as Rachelle had, but he was more adapted to sleeping sitting upright. Liz mentioned that before joining Control, Mont had been a police officer.

Liz and I talked quietly in the front. I repeated my story about myself that I had told Rachelle back in the MIssouri Denny’s. I had the feeling that nothing I told her she didn’t already know about me from reading files. Or had my first day with Control just made me paranoid? I did manage to learn that Liz was married and had two kids, a boy and a girl, nearly adults. She lived in Minneapolis and had flown into Kansas City to be picked up. She kept things light and superficial about herself.

A few hours later, when we reached Hays, we found all the hotels full. Both Rachelle and Mont woke up as we drove past NO VACANCY sign after NO VACANCY sign. It turned out Hays was hosting the Kansas Corn Growers Association “Cornvention”.

Rachelle’s voice came from the back. “I’m no farmer, but isn’t this a time of the season that farmers should be busy in their fields?”

Mont chuckled. “Even farmers gotta party sometime.”

After repeated frustrations trying to find a place to stop for the night, we went on down I-70 and stopped at the first hotel that was situated at the south side of an exit. There was no town there, just an exit, although the north side of the exit had a McDonald’s that looked promising for breakfast in the morning. Little hotels like that always make me think of the Bates Motel from Psycho. Now, having been through what I’ve been through as a member of Field Team 42 with Control, the things I’ve seen for real make the Psycho movies pale in comparison.

Relieved to see a neon VACANCY sign lit at the place, we pulled in. Liz went inside to check us in while we waited in the car. Rachelle and Mont had fallen asleep again as we had cruised out of Hays. Everything was very quiet. I hadn’t managed to park in a way so as to be able to see into the lobby and watch Liz and the desk staff in there, so I pulled out my phone and got absorbed in it.

Thus it was very startling to hear a knocking on my window right next to my head. I looked up, set my phone on the seat next to me, and saw a boy there, about 13 years of age. He was wearing a formal white shirt and a long tie that made him look like a Jehovah’s Witness kid come to my door at home, except no Jehovah’s Witness I had ever seen had such long hair. He had long bangs in front, a real salad bowl haircut. He faced downward, like a kid in trouble in a school principal’s office. I couldn’t see his eyes through his bangs. I looked at the clock set in the Ford’s dash. It was after midnight. What was a kid doing by himself out there? Was he in some kind of trouble? I didn’t think he was there to hand me a free copy of The Watchtower.

I rolled my window down just a couple of inches to make talking easier. The kid just stood there, not moving, not saying anything.

“Can I help you?” I asked.

“Please, sir, can I get a ride home?”

Without waiting for my response, the kid stepped to the side and tried the handle to the door behind me. Fortunately, it was locked. The kid only tried the door once, then calmly, without taking his hand off the handle, said, “Please let me in.”

Suddenly, from the other side of the vehicle to my right, Liz screamed “Get us out of here! Floor it!”

Liz had come out of the hotel at just that moment. The look on her face was the serious look of a commanding leader giving orders in a life-or-death emergency. From what I learned later, she might have been. She never took her eyes off the strange boy as she gestured toward her door, indicating for me to let her in.

I started the car, unlocked only Liz’s door, put the vehicle into reverse gear, and pulled away as soon as Liz’s butt hit the seat. Fortunately, in doing so, she didn’t bust my phone I had set there. Also fortunately, the kid didn’t do anything reckless like try to jump onto the car or position himself in front of it. I didn’t want to run over a kid.

As I pulled away, the kid’s hair whipped back and I saw his eyes. They were totally black, no irises or sclera, all pupils, one hundred percent black. My stomach felt like it was shrinking up inside at the sight of it.

“What was that? What just happened?” I asked as I got us back onto the Interstate.

“Yeah. What’s going on?” came Rachelle’s voice. She and Mont had been jarred awake by the Expedition’s sudden evasive maneuvers.

Liz seemed more composed and relaxed again as she answered. “You just met your first paranormal entity, Dr. Leighton. Pull us over at the next exit whether it has any businesses or not. As per protocol after an encounter with Black-Eyed Kids, or BEKs, I’ll have to check us all with a Geiger counter. I have one in my things in the back.”

Geiger counter? Black-eyed Kids are real? How many more times would my mind be blown before we even got to Arizona?

Chapter 6

I was very surprised today to be visited by Mr. X. This isn’t the sort of hospital where one gets visitors. I’m sure the general public doesn’t even know this place exists. I’ve even wondered, out of paranoia, if the outside world out there even knows I’m alive.

Mr. X came by beaming his characteristic unusual-looking smile. I found myself so happy for his company that it didn’t even creep me out like it did before. He was bubbly and effusive. He opened my curtains in the room for the first time in my memory to get sunlight for the small, tastefully-sized vase of flowers he brought me to cheer up my room. There was a small parking lot outside with ordinary-looking cars, as if this was a small hospital or nursing home anywhere in America. So, I was above ground. I made a mental note to get closer to the window as soon as I could to see what state the license plates of those cars were from.

Mr. X offered enough information, worked and woven into the one-sided conversation that he had with me that I didn’t push for more answers.

“I’m so delighted that they tell me you are recovering so well and so quickly considering all you’ve been through. Your parents are fine. I took the liberty of telling them that you are alive and well and that I represent a company for which you accepted some field work out of the country, in a place without regular communications. I also took the liberty of making arrangements with your university to preserve your position there should you wish to return to it. I did promise you that when the Dust Bowl assignment was over, that you could return to your previous life if you wanted. I keep my promises, Dr. Leighton. I have made it possible for you to do that if you wish to upon the completion of your recovery.”

“Thank you very much,” was all I managed to say.

“Don’t think of it, Dr. Leighton. Let it not be said that Mr. X doesn’t keep his promises. Never let that be said.” He dropped his smile and his voice grew serious for that last bit, about keeping promises. But then, the bubbly Mr. X was back.

The strange man made about five minutes of chit chat small talk after that and left me feeling a lot better. After the things I saw on the road to Dust Bowl and on the road trip there, and after the roughness of my first debriefing session, I had wondered about my status and about my freedom after recovery. I had decided days ago that they probably weren’t going to kill me and disappear me…probably…because they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of fixing me up and boarding me all this time if it were more expedient to let me die out there in the desert.

Speaking of the desert, let’s get you what you’re reading this for, more of the story of what got me here.

We soon stopped at an interstate rest area. Liz had indeed brought a Geiger counter along. We each stepped out of the vehicle. There, in the middle of the night, parked away from a camper and some semis with snoozing truck drivers, we were checked for radiation exposure from the Black-Eyed Kid. Liz said we were fine. It was decided to just drive all the way through in shifts to Denver. The hotel stop for sleep was to be skipped.

I was exhausted and it was my turn to sleep in the back. Liz drove. Rachelle was awake. I dozed off listening to Mont telling Rachelle the story of how he’d come to believe there was more to our world than the simple and ordinary. Apparently, according to LIz, as part of team building, we were allowed to discuss missions we’d been on before for Control, as long as we didn’t mention anything that was above field agent clearance. We all had field agent clearance except for LIz, who was above.

Mont had had a military background before becoming a cop. As I listened there in the back of the Expedition, drifting off to sleep, I found out about another legend that, like the Black-Eyed Kids, turned out to be true.

“This isn’t your typical war story,” he began. “It’s something else entirely. I’m about to tell you about the day my skepticism died and my belief in the supernatural was born. 

It was 2008, and I was 24, a young lieutenant fresh out of West Point, full of confidence and skepticism. I didn’t believe in ghosts, UFOs, or any of those campfire tales. My world was solid, defined by the hard facts of military life. We were stationed in a remote part of Kandahar, Afghanistan, tasked with searching for a missing patrol. The area was notorious for its rugged terrain and hidden dangers, but nothing could have prepared us for what we encountered.

We’d been out there for hours, and the sun was starting to set behind the mountains. The air was thick with dust and tension. We found the remnants of a missing patrol’s gear scattered around the entrance of a cave. There were no bodies, no blood—just an eerie silence that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Our squad leader, Sergeant Collins, signaled for us to move in. As we entered the cave, the darkness swallowed us whole. Our flashlights barely pierced the blackness, revealing ancient carvings on the walls that looked out of place, almost like they belonged to a different time. My heart was pounding, but I kept telling myself it was just another mission.

Then, we heard it—a deep, guttural growl that echoed through the cavern. We froze. The sound wasn’t human, nor was it any animal I’d ever encountered. Before we could react, a massive figure emerged from the shadows. It stood at least 12 feet tall, with fiery red hair and six fingers on each hand. Its eyes glowed, yes literally glowed, with a malevolent intelligence.

Panic set in. We opened fire, but our bullets seemed to do little more than irritate the beast. It moved with terrifying speed, grabbing one of my men and snapping his spine like a twig. The cave became a slaughterhouse. One by one, my squad was torn apart, and there was nothing I could do. I watched as my brothers-in-arms were reduced to lifeless heaps on the cold, rocky ground.

Somehow, amidst the chaos, I managed to throw a grenade. The explosion stunned the giant, giving me a fleeting moment to act. I grabbed a fallen soldier’s rocket launcher and fired. The missile struck the giant in the chest, sending it crashing to the ground. It let out a final, earth-shaking roar before it lay still.

I was the only one left standing. My body was covered in cuts and bruises, but the physical pain was nothing compared to the psychological torment. I stumbled out of the cave, gasping for air, my mind reeling from what I had just witnessed.

The aftermath was a blur. A recovery team arrived, and the giant’s corpse was quickly secured and flown out for study. We were sworn to secrecy, threatened with dire consequences if we ever spoke of what happened. The official report blamed our squad’s deaths on a Taliban ambush, but I knew the truth. I had seen the impossible, and it shattered my understanding of reality.

For years, I tried to bury the memory, but it haunted me. Nightmares plagued my sleep, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was so much more to this world than I had ever imagined. I began to read about folklore and legends, trying to make sense of what I had encountered. The skeptic in me had died in that cave, replaced by a man who knew that there were things beyond our comprehension lurking in the shadows.

The world is a strange, mysterious place, and sometimes the line between myth and reality isn’t as clear as we’d like to think. That’s how I became open to an offer like working for Control.”

With some of my last conscious thoughts that night, I realized that giants in Kandahar were real too. Figured. I wondered what legends would turn out to not be real as I learned more and more working for Control. Was it all real?

There were only two more folks to pick up before reaching Dust Bowl, one in Denver and one in Flagstaff, from Flagstaff, we’d leave Interstates and main roads and head out into the desert.

Before completely slipping away to sleep, I thought I heard Liz explaining that Jonie, whom we would meet in Denver, was a mage. A mage?

I had strange dreams as the Expedition rolled down the Interstate miles. I dreamed of a magician performing card tricks for an audience while wearing cargo pants that looked like Rachelle’s. There was a giant in the audience.

Chapter 7

I received a package today from Mr. X. Inside was a phone, a nice one. Attached to the phone was a Post-It Note that read “Use Me. Text HELLO to 555-4545. I did, of course. There’s been no response yet. It’s been about twenty minutes. I’m going to start my writing to you for today and I’ll keep an eye on this phone.

It was about five hours from Hays, Kansas to Denver. It would be about eleven hours from Denver to Flagstaff. I awoke from my slumber after sunrise with the vehicle filled with daylight to the sound of my colleagues discussing various eateries we were passing to select one to stop at for breakfast. I felt somewhat refreshed. At some point as the miles had passed in the darkness, my mind had calmed down enough to have actually restfully deep sleep mentally, although physically I was stiff and sore from the seat of a Ford Expedition not being a proper bed.

The food question was settled by the sighting of a billboard advertisement for Waffle House. This lifted everyone’s spirits. According to the sign, breakfast was twenty miles away. Liz decided that twenty miles was enough distance that there would be time to share something important with us. It wasn’t something about her, of course. On our journey to Dust Bowl. Arizona Liz was the one of our field team who did not share any stories of her past or anything significant about her background, which we accepted as her having an aloof management style as our boss. We would find out her dark secret after arriving in Dust Bowl, but to tell that now would be skipping ahead. No, it wasn’t something about herself. Liz thought it would be a good idea at the point to prepare us for picking up Jonie in Denver.

“There are some things that we should know about Jonie as her team members before we start traveling with her. She’s been through a rough patch in her life and this will be her first field assignment since someone very important to her died. Jonie is a mage, a magi, a magic-user, a magician, one with the Spark, whichever word or phrase you like to use for it. The person in her life who died recently was her apprentice.”

Liz paused for this to sink in. I decided that I didn’t care if I looked a little ignorant. I had to speak up.

“You mean she can cast spells or has magic powers?”

“Exactly,” Liz responded in a way that didn’t make me feel awkward for asking. “Jonie and her apprentice Ashley were brought in to help investigate a field site up in far northern Canada from which a local cult had been summoning things that were then loosed to hunt the local populace. The population density up there is so thin and the hunting range of the entities so wide that the missing persons reports had been piling up for awhile before Control was aware that the pattern of missing persons was indicative of more than just the normal harshness of the wilderness up there or even the work of a mundane, completely human serial killer.

“Ashley wound up being seduced and ultimately controlled by the main controlling entity that the cultists were worshiping. Jonie had to kill Ashley herself to stop the main entity from breaching mystical barriers and entering our world completely in its whole, physical form.”

“That sounds like more than just a rough patch, Liz,” opined Mont. “How long ago was this? Are you sure she’s ready to be on a field assignment again?”

“Control thinks so. There is a little more to tell, though. Ashley was Jonie’s ex-husband’s biological daughter. When Ashley realized she was a mage and needed a teacher, Jonie, who had been her step-mother, was the only mage Ashley knew and trusted to guide her through the process of learning to manage her own inner Spark. The two were very close. Even though she was divorced from Ashley’s father, Jonie has no biological children, can’t have any in the future, and thought of Ashley as her own daughter.”

“How did her dad take it when her heard that Ashley died, and how?” asked Rachelle.

“Ashley’s father had already passed two years before from cancer.”

“How old was Ashley?” I asked.

“Fourteen. I am careful to divulge the information of others and only do so for good reasons. I think it will help our team if you all know ahead of time that Jonie will need some space and may seem distant or like something is bothering her. She will still be an important part of this team. If what is happening in Dust Bowl turns out to be supernatural rather than a time-space anomaly, having a mage on the team could be critical.”

“Mages are aloof and distant,” said Mont.

“Not all of them,” retorted Rachelle. “Remember Paco?”

“Oh, no! Let’s hope we never meet a mage like Paco again.”

Rachelle smiled at me since I was the odd man out on this inside information.

“Mont and I were on a team together that traveled to some Aztec ruins a few years ago. Paco was that team’s mage. Paco was a real party animal. Remember when he animated that piñata? He drank Mont under the table. Mont hasn’t drunk any tequila since then.”

“And I won’t ever again either, but can we change the subject?” asked Mont.

“Here’s Waffle House,” said Liz. “That’s a brighter subject.”

It was a brighter subject. I relished the thought of a roadside Waffle House, a little piece of normalcy in the weirdness that my life had suddenly become.

Chapter 8

Last night, while I was sleeping, the phone from Mr. X beeped softly. I had it under my pillow so as it beeped, it gently pulled me out of a dream. The paranoia that I have learned as an Agent of Control prompted my choice of keeping it under my pillow. I didn’t want the phone to disappear while I was sleeping and then have to put up with the nice, polite hospital staff around here lying through their teeth at me saying sweetly things like “I’m so sorry your phone was misplaced, Dr. Leighton. Everyone will keep an eye out for it.” I would have to smile and pretend to be polite back and thank them for looking, all the while thinking to myself misplaced, my ass. Is such paranoia justified when one works for Control? Sometimes. In this case, the answer turned out to be yes.

My room’s door was closed. As I’ve mentioned before, this isn’t a regular, public hospital with many floors and lots of activity. Even with my door open, there aren’t any noises drifting in from the hallway. At night, the place gets eerily quiet. There in the dark, quiet hospital, I slid the phone out from under my pillow and saw that I had received a text message. The text message had come from Spitfire.

You’re probably wanting to know who Spitfire is. Spitfire will come into the story I’m writing to you soon, dear reader. I’ll continue that story a bit here in this writing session. I don’t know how much more I”ll be able to write to you, since I may be leaving this facility prematurely. It seems. By way of explaining that for now, I’ll share the text message thread with Spitfire. You might ask, if I’m so paranoid, how do I know that the texts are really from Spitfire? Once Spitfire enters the story, you’ll know, as I do, that there’s VERY little chance it could be someone else.

SPITFIRE: Hey, Dr. L! Are you there?

ME: Yeah. If you’re sending me this, that means Rachelle survived? They don’t really tell me anything here. They claim the explosion site is still being investigated, that people are missing, and that bodies are still being found.

SPITFIRE: That’s true. Chelle and I are good though. So is everyone except Mont. 🙁.

ME: He died a hero. 

SPITFIRE: Yes, he did.

ME: It’s great to hear from you.

SPITFIRE: You, too, but you didn’t get this phone for social purposes. 

ME: Oh?

SPITFIRE: You’re in danger.

ME: Crap.

SPITFIRE: Yeah.

ME: What’s going on?

SPITFIRE: The facility that you’re in is compromised and we have to extract you. We think we’ll do it in about a week. You should be recovered enough and we have a plan.

ME: How do you know I’m me texting you back?

SPITFIRE: The phone is loaded with biometric sensor stuff. If anyone but you tries to use it, it will act like a normal phone. Also, communications from me will self-delete at the end of each conversation. Also. while communicating with me, I hack the phone’s camera and visually confirm you’re you.

ME: You’ve thought of everything.

SPITFIRE: I try. Mr. X is the one who thought of the plan to get you out, though.

ME: If you say I’m in danger, that this site is compromised, but you’re leaving me here for another week, then the danger is not immediate?

SPITFIRE: No. It’s not immediate. It’s just not a good idea that you stay there long term. We need time to get everything in place for your extraction, and the more you’re recovered by then, the better anyway.

ME: Should I be worried about the food or the drugs they’re giving me?

SPITFIRE: No. There’s no reason for them to kill you right now and they will want to have you around to question as a witness to what happened in Dust Bowl.

ME: They’re already doing that.

SPITFIRE: How’s that going?

ME: One of the debriefers was a real jerk to me, but I haven’t seen that one since the first session. They’ve all been nicer since then.

SPITFIRE: Good. I’m glad things aren’t sucking too much for you there. Your first debriefer must have been one of Control’s agents who is a little too tightly wound-up, a little too gung ho, like Liz was.

ME: Which Liz?

SPITFIRE: Both of them.

ME: How’s Chelle?

…

Spitfire and I continued to chat for a bit about how the rest of Field Team 42 is doing, but that first bit of our chat that I’ve shared with you is the important part. Apparently, I’ve got to get out of here. According to Spitfire, Control is about to have some kind of organizational civil war or coup and my team wants to get me out of here so I don’t get caught up in it.

What will happen then? I don’t know. If Control has a civil war of a coup, and changes into a completely different organization with different priorities, goals, and values, would something like Mr. X’s promise that I will be able to return to my “normal life” if I choose to once I’m recovered, be possible anymore? Is that the kind of promise that an all-new, all-different Control would honor?

It’s all too much to think about right now, so I’m going to settle in and just write the next part of the story that I was going to write to you anyway, dear reader.

Sure enough, checking the phone again shows that my conversation with Spitfire self-deleted like it never happened, so I’m going to put it out of my mind for now, and concentrate on getting you caught up, dear reader.

Chapter 9

I’m writing entries more frequently now because I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen with my extraction, when and how it’s going to go down, or if I’ll be able to continue these entries to you afterwards. My commitment to getting the word out there as to what’s going on with Control still stands, and if you’ve stayed with me this far, then I feel like you deserve me to either complete this or get as close as I can. So I promise not to slack from here on out, dear reader.

I wasn’t sure what I had expected upon meeting a real mage for the first time as we picked up Jonie in Denver. What I came to quickly realize was that we all have probably met mages in our lives and not known it. They look just like anybody else.

As we drove into Denver, we turned off the Interstate into the Capitol Hill area. Capitol Hill is known for its eclectic and artistic vibe. It’s a historic neighborhood with a mix of Victorian homes, bohemian shops, and diverse residents. The area’s alternative culture and acceptance of unconventional lifestyles make it a natural fit for a community interested in magic and the supernatural. Liz was driving with the rest of us in the back, saving the front passenger seat for Jonie, whom we were to pick up in front of the Molly Brown House Museum, the former home of the “Unsinkable” Molly Brown, a Titanic survivor and socialite, now a museum dedicated to her life and the history of Denver.

Liz had contacted Jonie to let her know about our revised travel schedule since we had driven in shifts through the night rather than stopping for any sleep in Hays, Kansas as originally scheduled because of the encounter with the Black-Eyed Kid. In the early morning, hours before the museum would have opened for the day, Jonie was waiting by the street for us while a couple of homeless slept nearby. Jonie was tall with long brown hair that wasn’t curly enough to be wavy but not straight enough to fall flat either. As she climbed into the vehicle and greeted us, she smiled but her smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. She seemed friendly but not warm, as if she were doing her best to soldier on through deep depression and determined to go through the motions of interacting normally with other human beings whether she wanted to or not. Considering the story Liz had told us of what she’d been through lately, things that I knew I couldn’t even imagine, I thought she must be very brave and strong.

Liz had her sit in the front seat and watch the mission briefing video on the situation in Dust Bowl, just as Rachelle had had me do while she drove when I had first climbed into the vehicle. Mont apparently already knew about Dust Bowl and hadn’t needed to see the video.

“What do you think?” Liz asked when Jonie was done.

“If it’s magic, and it’s affecting such a huge area, it’s got to be extremely powerful. How certain are we that it’s a magical phenomenon?”

“We aren’t. But in your opinion, it could be magical?”

“Yes, but if it is magic, and not some time-space warp the quantum physics nerds would jump up and down about, it’s big, very big. It would be as big as the magic zone around the Superstition Mountains on the other side of Phoenix from there. Maybe even as big as the Skinwalker Ranch magic zone. Big enough that I think there should be more magi along than just me.” Jonie’s last two words just me almost cracked her voice. She was probably glad they were at the end of a sentence.

Liz didn’t give Jonie any motherly nurturing, or any encouraging coach pep talk such as “You’ll be fine”. Instead, our mission boss just flatly acknowledged, “I understand”, then added, “I know he’s not a true mage, but we’re picking up Windsinger in Flagstaff.

“MItch?” Jonie seemed pleased at this. She obviously knew Mitch (aka Windsinger?) and thought highly of him. “That’s good.”

We continued into the longest leg of the journey, eleven hours from Denver to Flagstaff, with pit stops as necessary and a longer break in Albuquerque. There were hours spent in silence while folks read books or napped or engaged in personal electronic devices. There were also conversations (some of them started by Liz for what I suspected was supposed to be team building). Rachelle was the funny, goofy one. She was the youngest, most optimistic and highest spirited of us. Liz was ever the aloof boss, competent, capable, in charge, and never letting her guard down to be human. Mont would always start a conversation reserved, trying to just be an observer, but when he was directly asked a question, he often answered in stories. He was quite the storyteller and often had us laughing at some of the quirky anecdotes of military life, dealing with things on the streets as a cop, or growing up in Chicago. Inside, he was a poet as well as a warrior. Jonie, of course, was the truly reserved one, and no one pushed her. I tried my best to keep up with these amazingly interesting people. 

The one incident during those eleven hours that really stood out had to do with Rachelle’s amazing cargo pants. I don’t think they were the same pair as the pair that had sprouted an impossible extension cord in a Dennys in Missouri. They were a different color, but the same style pants.

Rachelle was in the very back. Liz was driving. Jonie was in the front. Mont and I were in the middle. Mont, who had seen both deserts, was describing the difference between Afghanistan and what we would see in Arizona. Suddenly, there was a strong, artificial floral aroma filling the vehicle.

“Why do I smell Tropical Flowers detergent?” asked Mont.

There were some squishy noises coming from behind us. As Mont and I looked back, there was Rachelle, wearing her ear buds and holding up a wet phone looking at it to judge whether it had gotten soaked and would be ruined or whether it could just be dried off quickly. She grabbed a small towel that she had hung in the window to block the Sun and started trying to save her phone. The smell of Tropical Flowers laundry detergent intensified. I could see bubbles, impossible amounts of bubbles, like from a bubble bath commercial which always shows more bubbles than the actual advertised product creates, oozing from every pocket of Rachelle’s cargo pants.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Rachelle squirmed in her seat, bubbles starting to overflow the seat and cover the floor near her feet. “Liz, can we pull over? I need to change pants.”

I could see Liz’s eyes make contact in the rear view mirror with Rachelle’s. Without missing a beat, as if Liz knew exactly what was happening, Liz just glanced at the traffic behind us and said, “Sure” before pulling off onto the Interstate shoulder.

It was then that I heard a sneeze, a feminine voiced sneeze, a clear “Achoo!” although no one I could see had sneezed, not Rachelle, not Liz, not Jonie, not even Mont.

Who had just sneezed?

Chapter 10

With Rachelle in the back of the Expedition not having her own exit door, one of us men in the middle would have to move to let her out. I was on the side away from the Interstate traffic, so I got out and tilted my seat forward so our dripping wet companion could maneuver herself out of the vehicle. I could see voluminous amounts of suds and foam were still emerging from her pants as she climbed out. She left a trail as she dashed to the back of the vehicle to open the hatch door back there and get a pair of dry pants out of her luggage.

I called out to her once a passing semi-truck whizzed past so that I thought she could hear me again, “I’ll get back in and Mont and I won’t look while you change.”

“Thanks,” I heard her call back as she pulled out new pants.

Shielding herself from the view of Interstate travelers as best she could, using a Ford Expedition for cover, our computer IT specialist changed into a dry version of the same clothes she’d had on before. Muffled through the windows, I heard what I assumed was the same small, feminine voice that had sneezed saying, “Sorry, Boss” quickly answered by Rachelle’s voice sharply hissing “Not now. Later.” in response. Then I heard a knocking on my window behind my head letting me know to turn around and let Rachelle back in.

Everyone seemed to take this all in stride, so I took my cue to not make a big deal out of it and to not ask any questions, but to just be cool with it as they were. Once Liz had an opening to leave the shoulder and get us back rolling along the Interstate, she asked, “How is Spitfire these days?”

“Oh, she’s doing ok. Apparently she’s doing laundry today,” answered Rachelle nervously.

“I see.” Liz made brief eye contact with me in her rearview mirror. “Carl, you’re the only one who doesn’t know, so this is as good a time as any to mention it. Rachelle has a symbiotic organism bonded to her. She lives in an extradimensional space accessed by Rachelle’s clothing pockets. That’s why Rachelle’s wardrobe is very pocket-themed. Spitfire is Rachelle’s personal assistant, but I imagine she’s cleaning up a mess right now, so we’ll introduce you to her later..”

“Great,” I replied, thinking once again how this experience had been going on far too long to be a dream. I had memories of days and nights and days of this road trip, so if this was a dream, I had to be in a coma.

When we got to Flagstaff and met the last member of Field Team 42, Mitchell Windsinger, I learned that Mitchell could see and I learned what that meant. Mitch had inherited sight from his Native American grandfather. He wasn’t a mage, like Jonie. He couldn’t channel magic around him. Instead he could perceive it in ways that most other people could not. In addition to his work with Control, he helped people for free as a public service who were having problems with spirits. He regaled us with the story of his latest case.

“I helped a young woman who needed to move to the East Coast to take advantage of an incredible job offer that was the perfect move to catapult her career. Her problem was that she couldn’t sell her house in Flagstaff. Every time that she would try to show the house to interested buyers, the master bedroom closet door would open and slam on its own and the closet light would go crazy turning on and off and on and off. As you can imagine, this killed any interest the would-be buyers had and they all withdrew their offers. The closet was doing that all the time, not just in front of respective buyers. Sometimes, it would go on all night. The woman had to sleep in another room because the banging was so loud.

“When she brought me in, I could see her dad there next to the closet. I felt like he was her dad, anyway, so I confirmed it by asking whether he was still alive, and no he wasn’t. I asked what he had looked like, and she showed me pictures on her phone and it was him.”

Mitch paused for effect and I could tell he enjoyed how silent and rapt we all were  for a moment before he continued.

“Her dad didn’t say anything. Spirits usually don’t in my experience, but he kept pointing at the closet floor, pleadingly, insistently, urgently. The woman had the floorboards pulled out of the closet and we found tons of cash, stock and bond certificates, and other family treasures and heirlooms. Apparently, her dad didn’t want her selling the family home and leaving all that behind, buried underground on property sold to someone else, with no one even knowing it was there.”

I said, “That’s got to be very gratifying to be able to help people like that.”

Mitch smiled, “Sometimes, with those kinds of cases, it is. Sometimes, my gift sucks. I’ll tell you some of my grandfather’s stories sometime.”

With the addition of Mitch to our team, we were a complete unit: a shaman with sight (Mitch), a mage (Jonie), a computer nerd with a strange extradimensional assistant (Rachelle), a warrior with a military and police background (Mont), a representative of management (Liz), and me. Once again, I was doomed to be the Renaissance Man, capable of many things, but not really knowing how I fit in or what my place really was.

I felt good about these people, though. I looked forward with excitement to be on a mission together with them, to face whatever challenges we would find in Dust Bowl, Arizona, which was now our next stop.

Chapter 11

By Wednesday, May 22nd, we had left Flagstaff and were rolling across Arizona toward Dust Bowl. We had, due in so small part to the fact that we had not stopped to sleep in Hays, Kansas the night that we had met the Black-Eyed Kid, made excellent time in our journey. The original road trip itinerary planned for us by Control had included “fudge factor” time that we had not needed, so that we might reach Dust Bowl and begin our investigation in advance of the Memorial Day week phenomenon there.

Along the way, Liz had shared some of the information, what little there was, about the 2022 Control team that had gone there. It turns out they had lost contact with Control and disappeared. I could sense the palpable unease that divulging created within our vehicle as it toodled its way down desert highways. I thought about all the subjects that had come up over the course of our group’s time together that my companions had just taken in stride as normal (at least their world’s version of normal): mages, shamans with Sight, Black-Eyed Kids, giants in Kandahar, pocket-sized dragons living in people’s pants, the existence of cults in the Canadian wilderness that sounded like they were from a Lovecraft story, etc. They had casually mentioned Skinwalker Ranch and the Superstition Mountains as being actually supernatural places. Everyone seemed a little set on edge knowing that we were going into something in which a previous team had completely disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again.

“According to the communications that Control received before losing contact with the UFO/UAP investigation team, the locals refer to the phenomenon as the Dirt. They describe its arrival each year as ‘when the Dirt blows in’. We’re about to get to work, people. We’ll stop on the outskirts of Phoenix for food and rest, but the next stop after that will be Dust Bowl. Rachelle, I think it’s time Carl and Spitfire made acquaintances with each other since Carl is a part of this team now. Each working member of this team needs to have a working relationship with each other. Let’s do that when we stop in Phoenix.”

“Sounds good,” Rachelle replied before dropping her voice as if she were speaking to someone else, someone right next to her, as if a child or a pet were in her lap. “Yes, I heard what Liz said. Yes, I realize that implies she considers you a member of this team.”

Rachelle’s voice resumed its normal volume for talking with the whole group. “Thanks a lot, Liz. As if her ego wasn’t bad enough already.”

Liz smiled. “You’re welcome.”

*******

LIz had said that we were just stopping in the outskirts of Phoenix. We veered off Interstate 17 at New River, headed for Highways 74 and 60. We found a Subway restaurant and got grub for everyone, including an extra sandwich that I was told was for Spitfire. We saved the subs until we located a roadside picnic area that didn’t have anyone around. By that time, it was Mitch’s turn to drive. He parked the Expedition and we went to a covered picnic table as far from the road and parking area as possible, with as little viewing opportunity for anyone to see us up close as possible.

Liz and Mont passed out the subs and laid out the extra one for Spitfire. It reminded me of kids playing with imaginary friends except that I knew Spitfire wasn’t imaginary and I’d be seeing her shortly. Rachelle sat down next to Spitfire’s sub and her own sandwich, across from me.

“Oooooooooh, that smells so good!” came a small, girly voice from Rachelle’s direction opposite me but Rachelle hadn’t spoken. I blinked and my eyes focused on one of her shirt pockets where a tiny orange creature’s head, neck, shoulders, and forearms emerged. The creature did indeed look like a tiny dragon. The particular orange color that she was was just a couple of shades darker than an orange crayon, pretty orange but not a bright or loud orange. Her ears were pointy. Between her ears there was a red crest that gave the impression of a hairdo.

What was it like looking at Spitfire for the first time? It wasn’t like watching a CGI character in a movie. She had real 3D depth to my eyes. She cast a shadow on the table. It also wasn’t like watching a Claymation figure move. Spitfire looked from a distance like she had smooth skin, but if she were to come close enough for one to touch her, one could see that what had seemed to be skin was, seen up close, actually super fine scales, so fine you might measure them in millimeters.

According to Liz, I had seen my first supernatural entity when we had encountered the Black-Eyed Kid in Kansas, but I wasn’t sure that I shouldn’t count Mr. X as a supernatural entity and I had seen him before that. But Black-Eyed Kids and Men in Black were humanoids. Spitfire, a p’ckit dragon, wasn’t even trying to look human. I had thought that the first truly nonhuman creature I would probably see as an Agent of Control would be something like a sasquatch or a Gray alien. I hadn’t expected this little dragon that looked like a character from a children’s book or a cartoon.

“Hello,” I said.

Spitfire jumped out of Rachelle’s pocket, spread her cute tiny little wings, and lighty landed on the picnic table next to her designated sandwich. She inhaled deeply, savoring the aroma of the sandwich.

“Hey, Carl,” she said without even looking up at me.

“It’s very nice to meet you,” I said.

“Yeah, you seem pretty cool. I’ve been watching you for a few days. You’ve lasted this long. I think you’re gonna make it.”

“Make it?”

“Oh, yeah! A lot of people bail on Control before things even get this weird to them. That BEK would have made a lot of normies crap their pants. Remember the last time we were breaking in normie and she had a panic attack, guys?”

“Yes, they remember,” said Rachelle. “I don’t think Carl is going to have any panic attacks.”

“I don nieder”. Spitfire was trying to speak now around a mouthful of her sandwich. I think she meant to say “I don’t either.”

“Is she really gonna eat the whole thing?” I wondered out loud.

Spitfire answered for herself between bites. “I could, but I’m gonna take some of this in my house and save it for later.”

“Your house is inside Rachelle’s pants?”

“Inside her pockets actually. It’s what the science nerds call an extradimensional space.”

“But you could eat the whole thing?”

“Eathily.” Spitfire was trying to eat and talk at the same time again. “You sood see my Cousin Smerd eat thumtime.”

Chapter 12

It was my turn to drive as Field Team 42’s Ford Expedition rolled into Dust Bowl, Arizona. According to the dashboard readout, it was 101° outside. I was thankful to be born into a time period with air conditioning technology. It was about an hour before sunset on Wednesday night. The Dirt was due to blow in at midnight on Sunday night. There were no ROAD CLOSED signs out yet. The hotels we passed all had VACANCY signs. Apparently, it was a few days before the town would begin turning away strangers. Things were still normal, whatever normal was in this place for fifty-one weeks a year without the Dirt blowing in. We were greeted at the city limits by a huge billboard capitalizing on the town’s UFO reputation featuring a scene in which a Gray alien with an exaggeratedly large head smiled down at a huge plate of pancakes, urging us to eat at a local establishment.

Liz instructed me to drive all around the town once so we could scope out the place. She said that doing that once wouldn’t look out of place for tourists. As a town of 2000 regular residents, it didn’t take long to take in the town. In the middle of town was the Native American History and Culture Center, and nearby was the memorial statue of Lt. Leonard Sees-Like-A-Hawk. As soon as we started passing by the statue, Mitch asked, “Can we stop?” He was fixated on the statue.

Liz immediately approved this. “Absolutely.” She gave me the nod to pull over. “What do you see?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. I’ve never seen anything like it before. I wish my grandfather was here to ask.”

“Well, he’s not, so I’m asking you.” Liz wasn’t snappish at him. She just sounded like she was trying to ground him realism. His grandfather, his mentor in this whole having the Sight thing, was gone.

We stopped and all got out. “We’re going to look at the statue for a bit and take selfies with it like we’re tourists,” said Liz. “This will give Mitchell time to assess what he’s seeing.”

We did as instructed. We acted like tourists as far as anyone observing us would see. No one was nearby to hear us, so Liz continued asking Mitch what he was learning about the statue with his Sight.

“When I look at that statue, I see the aura of a living person. It’s clearly a statue and not a person, but it has the aura of a living person like you or me or any of us. I’ve never heard of anything like this.”

Liz whipped out her phone and made sure she had pictures of the statue from all sides as well as the historical marker plaques that went with it. Then said, “Well it looks like we found something already. What’s your assessment, Jonie?”

After participating in our acting like tourists for a bit, Jonie had closed her eyes and begun mouthing words as if praying. I realized that I was watching an actual mage cast an actual spell right in front of me.

“It’s curse magic,” she said, “but that’s all I can read on it. It’s related to some kind of curse.”

“Let’s finish checking out the town, and then stop in one of the local restaurants for something to eat,” said Liz. “Let’s hope that all the clues to this place’s mysteries are so easy to find.”

The only other place in town that seemed unusual in any way was the town’s church. Or what had been the town’s church. It was a burned up, hollowed out shell, but clearly the shell of a church. A faded and charred sign still stood on its lawn reading “Dust Bowl Nondenominational Assembly”. Mitch looked at it wistfully as we drove past it.

“Something bad happened there, but it was a long time ago. Something sad.”

“Excellent work, team,” Liz seemed pleased. “Let’s get something to eat and a place to stay for the night. We’ve made a very good start here, I think.”

Chapter 13

We ate at a local establishment with an all-you-can-eat salad bar. Since I knew about Rachelle and we were out of sight of the restaurant’s front room, Rachelle didn’t have to be so sneaky about stuffing food into one of her pockets for Spitfire. I watched an entire banana disappear into a pocket for which the banana was too tall, leaving the pocket flat afterwards. It was like watching Mary Poppins unpack her bag or Santa Claus empty his sack. The normal physics of volume were entirely absent. Extradimensional space, I thought.

While we were there, I tried to book hotel rooms for us with my phone over the internet. However, as the briefing for the mission had told us, none of the businesses in Dust Bowl were associated with corporate franchises, they were all mom-and-pop local operations. Thus, online services such as Expedia, Kayak, Priceline, or Hotels.com were useless. No hotels in Dust Bowl even showed up on those websites. We’d have to actually check in at the desk in person the old-school way, which was fine, but it was one more reminder that Dust Bowl had things going on under its superficial presentation as a desert tourist town. We expected that as Memorial Day weekend got closer, we would probably be pressured to move on and get ourselves out of Dust Bowl, but we did not have any idea so far what form that pressure might take.

We were seated at a large, circular corner booth in the restaurant’s back room because that was the only place ready to go that would seat six comfortably. There were other customers in the front area who could not see us in the back room. We were pretty much done eating and no one had gone back to the salad bar for some time, so I think that after a while, we might have been forgotten. We could overhear some of the front room customers, townsfolk apparently. Some of them with voices that were either low and deep or high-pitched enough to carry well were saying some interesting things. We all hushed and listened.

“Bob Beauford is boarding up his house again this year. I saw him starting today.” This was a deep, baritone voice.

“How many years has he been doing that?” This was a higher pitched voice.

“Ever since his wife died in 2019. He says no one is getting inside his house again during the Dirt storm,” answered the first voice.

“The way I heard it, it didn’t get into his house. It taunted his wife into coming outside and it killed her on their lawn,” the second voice responded.

Next, a voice that didn’t carry so clearly could be heard speaking in an admonishing tone.

“Well, why didn’t you say there were out-of-town folk in the back?” The first voice sounded a little annoyed.

After that the voices in the front were kept too low for us to hear more.

*******

After dinner when we were checking into our hotel, the clerk asked us how long we planned to stay. Liz answered that we planned to stay through the Memorial Day weekend and leave Tuesday after Memorial Day. The clerk informed us that would be impossible, that we’d have to check out no later than Saturday. The hotel would be closed starting on Sunday for an entire week.

“But that should be enough time to see our little town. There’s not much here,” said the clerk as she handed out our keycards, one set to our group’s men and one to our group’s ladies.

Jonie, who had been super-introverted and quiet on our road trip, chimed in. “I think your town out here in the desert is adorable.” I thought that not that Jonie was working a case, that she was throwing herself into the work and was becoming more focused and functional. I could relate to that. I may not have had to kill my own mage apprentice, but I knew grief and how finding work to do helped.

“Thank you. Please enjoy your stay, but remember when Saturday comes, you need to be gone.”

As we walked down the hallway toward our rooms, Liz asked. “Did anyone notice a strangeness to the customer service we just experienced?”

“It’s a little odd for someone working in hospitality in a town that’s built on tourism to say that there’s not much to see in their town,” noted Rachelle.

“And what’s with this ‘you need to be gone’ stuff?” asked Mont. “That sounded like a threat.”

“It did. Didn’t it?” Liz agreed.

Our rooms seemed normal. The cable TV channels were all normal and showed that the rest of the world was as normal as it ever was. Our rooms could have been anywhere, in any small town in America, not necessarily the one into which the Dirt was about to blow in.

*******

The next morning, Thursday morning before the Dirt was to arrive Sunday night at midnight, we returned to the same restaurant in which we’d overheard the discussion about the Dirt the night before. The smell of bacon and eggs washed over us as we entered. The kitchen sounded lively, but the patrons seemed melancholy, resigned, as if they knew what was about to happen to their town, and why wouldn’t they? They lived with whatever happened here year after year. None of them seemed talkative even amongst themselves with those at their own tables. The kitchen sounded lively though, as workers filled orders and shoved food through the serving window at the waitresses.

The only person in the place who seemed to be in a good mood was a man sitting by himself enjoying eggs, sausage, and coffee. He tried chatting up the waitress that was serving him, and she returned his small talk with some of her own, but it was easy to tell her heart wasn’t in her work or serving customers that day.

As we sat down, Mont stretched and remarked, “I couldn’t sleep a wink last night. This town must have quite the night life. I could see police lights through our curtains of people getting pulled over all night at odd hours. It kept me up.”

I hadn’t noticed. I had slept well. But, I did notice one problem with what Mont said. “Our room’s window doesn’t face a street, the highway, or a parking lot,” I said. “There’s nothing back there.”

“Then what were the lights?” Mont seemed confused.

“Perhaps something we should discuss in private later.” Liz suggested. “Let’s change the topic.”

Liz was right, It did feel like everyone in the place, though they weren’t staring, was paying a little too much attention to us, listening.

Chapter 14

Liz directed a comment to the man who was trying to be chatty. “Pardon me, sir, but you don’t seem local. Are you a tourist like us?”

He smiled at her. “Well, I’m not local yet but I’m working on it. I’m a pastor who’s come to see about reviving the old church in this town.”

You could have heard a pin drop when he said that. There wasn’t even the sound of someone’s silverware scraping a plate or scooping up a bit of omelet.

“My friends and I noticed the burned one when we got to town, but we didn’t see any others.”

“There aren’t any, but God called me here to change that.”

The waitress came by to refill the pastor’s coffee. She added her two cents to the conversation. “It’s not that there aren’t any Christians around here, Pastor, but no one’s had the heart to have an organized church since the old one burned down. Most of us just follow Jesus in our own way without a church. Maybe your ministry is needed in another town.”

“I’ve been praying a lot about it,” he replied “I’ll keep seeking God’s will.”

“You do that, Pastor.” The waitress left the pastor’s table, taking her coffee pot to refill the cups of other patrons.

Suddenly the sound of smashing glass came from outside. Heads turned to look out the window. The pastor suddenly shouted, “My car!” and ran for the door. A figure in a hoodie was fleeing the scene of a car, presumably the pastor’s, a nice black Camaro.

Mont’s cop instincts must have kicked in. He got up from our table and followed the pastor out the door, taking off after the hooded figure. Everyone could see that the driver’s side window of the pastor’s Camaro was broken inward. There was glass all over the dash. The rest of us and some of the townsfolk who wanted a better look went outside after the pastor as well, some of the townsfolk leaving enough cash on the table to cover themselves so they wouldn’t have to come back in to pay.

We could see police lights down the street. It looked like a La Paz County sheriff’s car. A deputy was arresting the man in the hoodie while talking to Mont. Their exchange was brief because a moment later, Mont was walking back to us, a dissatisfied and frustrated look on his face. The pastor had opened his car door and retrieved something from the driver’s seat. It was a brick on which was taped a note that read: PREACHER GO HOME.

*******

Later, back in one of our two hotel rooms, we held a discussion about our investigation so far. “Do you think the attack on the pastor’s car was racistly motivated?” asked Jonie. The pastor was black and Dust Bowl was a predominately white town, Native American Cultural Center notwithstanding.

“I don’t think so,” said Liz. “Whatever happened with the town church had the effect of the townsfolk never wanting a church here again, not matter who its pastor would be.”

She looked at Mont. “What’s your impression of the La Paz County sheriff’s department?”

Mont sighed. “I think the deputy knew the perpetrator. He seemed anxious to make sure I had no interaction with the guy. He asked me where I was staying. When I told him, he said that the place is closed down this weekend, which he could have said no matter where we’re staying because every place in town closes this weekend and he probably knows it. He went out of his way to mention that if I don’t have a place to stay this weekend, that he’d be forced to arrest me under anti-vagrancy laws. He told me he doesn’t appreciate vigilantes whether they are retired police or not. I had the distinct impression that he was helping the brick-thrower get away from me.”

“Nice fellow,” I said.

“They really don’t want strangers around when the Dirt blows in,” said Mitchell.

“I suppose Control wouldn’t want us to get arrested,” Rachelle opined.

“No, they would not,” LIz admitted, “but if we really can’t stay in town when the Dirt blows in, there are options that Control has considered for us.”

“Such as?” asked Mitchell.

“We’ll face that when it comes to it,” our fearless leader assured him. “For now, Thursday evening is coming and the Dirt doesn’t blow in until midnight Sunday night. I want to know more about the church fire and more about Lt. Sees-Like-A-Hawk, the man whose statue Mitchell says has the aura of a living person. The Laz Paz County sheriff’s department won’t have an anti-vagrancy reason to arrest us until Saturday night. Let’s make the most of that time.”

Chapter 15

Around noon that Thursday, before the Dirt rolled in, I found myself headed to Parker, the county seat of La Paz county, in the Ford Expedition with Mont, Rachelle, and Spitfire. Our mission was to visit library archives of newspapers and other sources of records for La Paz county. Until the 1970s, Dust Bowl had had its own newspaper. As a precaution, we weren’t all leaving Dust Bowl in case it might become more difficult to return for some reason, such as if the roads back into Dust Bowl became closed, for example. Liz had wanted Jonie and Mitch to stay there since their particular talents made them more useful onsite there in Dust Bowl, such as when Mitch had seen the peculiar aura emanating from the statue of Lt. Sees-Like-A-Hawk. So, it was left to us “muggles” as Rachelle described us, who weren’t mages and who didn’t have the Sight, to slog through old records.

Once we got into Parker, we grabbed some burritos from a Taco Bell drive-thru and headed for the county library. We finished our food in the Ford before heading inside the library, anticipating a no-food policy in there. It was a library after all. Several yummy Taco Bell food items disappeared into Rachelle’s pockets. A few minutes later, one of her pockets fluttered open and an impossibly loud burp emerged. Rachelle laughed. “I think someone’s satisfied. Let’s go inside.”

Rachelle is a computer technology savant, but that wasn’t needed to do simple library research. The three of us humans (not Spitfire, of course) each took a different computer. Rachelle (who was the fastest at this sort of thing) was to look at the UFO.UAP history of the area. That was a broad search over decades. Mont and I were a little more focused on specific dates and events. Mont would look for info on the fire that destroyed the church in Dust Bowl. I would check for anything on the life of Lt. Sees-Like-A-Hawk.

As we entered the computer room, we were surprised to see the pastor from the cafe in Dust Bowl, who had had the brick tossed through is car window, seated at one of the computers, already researching the church fire that had claimed Dust Bowl Nondenominational Assembly.

“Hello, again,” he said, flashing his bright, friendly smile.

“Hi, there, pastor,” I replied, wondering what sort of explanation I could or should give about why we were here. Doing this level of research obviously wasn’t something that a group of normal tourists did. I decided to not offer any explanation unless it just became awkward to not have one. I’d focus on him.

“Researching the church fire, I see.”

“Yes. I just realized we didn’t get a chance for proper introductions at the cafe since things happened to fast. I’m Tom, Tom Brosnan. Some people are old-school and call me Pastor all the time, but I’m fine with Tom.”

“Nice to see you again, Pastor Tom. I’m Carl. My friends are Montgomery and Rachelle.” Then, wanting to skip over mentioning what brought us to the library, I continued asking Tom about his business there. “Those pictures on your screen look pretty old. When did the fire happen?”

“1992,” he replied. “It was a little suspicious at the time because the authorities were quick to declare the cause to be faulty electrical wiring. However, one fire investigator at the time dissented, claiming that the point of origin of the fire was along a wall that had no electrical wiring.

“This guy was the pastor at the time.” Tom scrolled down to bring a photo of a brown-haired, caterpillar mustached man into view. “Pastor Mike Mervin. It says here the church had been there since the 1930’s, almost sixty years by the time it burned down in 1992. It had a congregation of 1100. That’s over half of Dust Bowl’s modern day population. So, it was an active enough church to be there for sixty years and have over half the town attending, yet they never rebuilt and there’s never been another church in Dust Bowl since. I don’t get it.”

“I hope you find the answers you’re looking for, Pastor. I’ll pray for you and this situation.”

“Thanks. That means a lot. Let me know if I can ever help you with anything.”

We each sat at a computer ourselves and got to work. With Pastor Tom there, we couldn’t discuss our findings out loud with each other, so that discussion waited until we were on our way back to Dust Bowl from Parker. It was Thursday evening by that point, apparently a little too early for the road closings to start since the Dirt wouldn’t blow in until Sunday night midnight. We got back to the hotel with out three other team members unimpeded.

There had been conflicting reports on the fate of Lt. Sees-Like-A-Hawk at the end of World War II. According to some information, he had survived the war and returned to Dust Bowl. This information included his military record which Rachelle got for me by calling in some favors with folks she knew at Control. However, according to other information, he had died in Europe and didn’t make it back to the US. The reports of his death overseas came from the local newspapers of the time. How was it that the military said he came home from the war, but the local news sources said he didn’t? That was sketchy as hell.

Rachelle’s own research into the UFO/UAP history of the area was a long list of decades of sightings and alleged encounters. Our plan for the evening was to observe the field behind our hotel where Mont had seen the strange lights and see if we might not have an encounter of our own.

Chapter 16

Behind our hotel was a tall wooden fence, about ten feet high. This would have kept folks from casually strolling into the field back there. Upon investigation, we discovered a few loose wooden planks in the fence that were not actually nailed in place. They were propped in place to look from a distance like they were attached normally, but they were not. Someone had obviously moved them on occasion to access the field behind the hotel.

Wearing our hiking boots so that our feet would not encounter anything sharp on the field after dark, we entered the field ourselves and began looking for a good spot to observe a potential UFO light show. When I call the area a field, we have to remember that we’re talking about the Arizona desert. A field here isn’t like some farmer’s field in Iowa. It was an open field, sure, but no farmer would have wanted to plant crops there. It had definite boundaries like a field, though. Behind us was the hotel. To our left, quite a ways off, was a road. Ahead of us, at least a mile were hills. To our right, at least a mile off also, was the main neighborhood of Dust Bowl with its houses and streetlights. Before the Sun went down, I could see that the Dust Bowl houses also had a wooden fence like the hotel’s fence separating them from the field also.

We found an arrangement of small boulders, possibly piled there when someone had wanted to clear the area to be smoother for some forgotten use: ranch animals, an athletic field or golf course, a construction project later canceled, whatever. We used these boulders as furniture and settled in after Mont, with his desert survival experience, decided to check them for snakes. He said that under and between the rocks would be a perfect place for the reptiles to stay cool during the day.

“Yeah, that’s something my grandfather would have done,” Mitch said wistfully.

“What do you think your grandfather would make of what’s happening in Dust Bowl?” asked Liz as we settled in, sipped water from our canteens, and waited for sundown.

“I think he would suspect that Lt. Sees-Like-A-Hawk was murdered after he got home and it was covered up as him just not making it back from the war. That would explain why his military record shows that he came home alive and the local newspapers of the time claimed he did not. That would jibe with the curse magic that Jonie detected. He, or someone else, could have called up an avenging curse on this place.”

Jonie agreed. “That would be a very good explanation for why there’s a living aura around the statue of the lieutenant, and why it reads as curse magic.”

“I wonder how our friends fit into this,” Liz said.

“What friends?” I asked.

“Those friends.” Liz pointed to the sky over the hills marking the southern border of the field. The Sun had fully set not long ago while we had been talking. Now, three glowing orbs far too distant to tell their true size flashed a complicated pattern of rainbow colors at each other, or perhaps at something or someone on the ground somewhere in Dust Bowl or its environs.

Over the next two hours, we watched the orbs dance in the air over the hills. Rachelle produced a very advanced-looking camera from Spitfire’s pocket dimension, pulling it from a pocket on her clothes much too small to contain it otherwise. Rachelle recorded the orbs’ aerial show.

They grew and shrank. They changed colors. Amazingly, they separated into more orbs and then merged back together. There were never less than three orbs total, and, at times, as many as twelve. I wondered if that was a fixed ratio, if it meant that each of the original three was capable of splitting into as many as four.

Twice, one of the orbs left the area of the hills and came over the field where we were. The second time this happened, I began to panic when one hovered right over us. My heart stopped beating for a moment as I was sure we were about to be levitated into it against our wills and be abducted. I thought I’d never be seen again and I’d just be another disappeared vacation tourist. My students would get a substitute teacher for the rest of the year. My downstairs neighbor would probably adopt my cat Lucy. Why had LIz brought us out here, so exposed and vulnerable like this? The previous Control field team that had come here to investigate UFOs had vanished, hadn’t they? I mean, Control was so cautious about using Geiger counters after exposure to Black-Eyed Kids, and yet they just have people stroll out looking to get abducted by aliens in strange fields? If I lived through this, I would make it a point to bring it up with LIz later.

The craft, if it craft it was, wasn’t discernible as anything but an orb even up close like this. There was no shape of a spaceship made of metal or anything else that my eyes could see, just the blinding brightness of the orb. It shone a spotlight on us for perhaps thirty  or forty seconds, which felt like forever, and then it moved on, leaving us alone.

We sat in silence for a while after that, the only sounds coming from Rachelle’s camera. Then I heard Spitfire’s voice clearly, as one would if she stuck her head out of one of Rachelle’s pockets. “Is everything all right out here?”

“We’re being checked out by some visitors from out of town,” Mont replied.

“Why do you ask?” Rachelle wanted to know.

“Some of the physics in my pocket dimension just went a little wonky for a moment.”

“Probably due to our proximity to the alien phenomenon,” Liz remarked.

“Oh. Well when you find out where they’re from, let me know,” the tiny dragon sounded off. “I need to know where to send them a cleaning bill.”

We chuckled at that break in the tension.

Then, just as we had begun to relax, a woman’s voice came from right behind us.

“You’re from Control aren’t you?” I recognized the voice of Alice the hotel night clerk. “A group of your people came into town two years ago. They said they could stop what happens in Dust Bowl this time every year. Is that what you’re here to do?”

Our attention had been so engrossed in our close encounter that we hadn’t noticed the approach of this woman. I thought she must have been very brave to have approached us while we were under the direct examination of one of the orbs.

Liz either recovered very quickly and smoothly to the woman’s appearance or she hadn’t been as totally distracted by the UFO and knew we were being approached. “We don’t actually know what happened to the group in 2022. They never came back and lost contact.” Apparently, Liz thought honesty was the best policy here.

“They’re dead,” said the hotel clerk. “And one of them may not be dead, but he’s not coming back.” She looked at the orbs dancing in the sky over the hills and sighed as she said that last part. Then she continued. “I came to tell you that the townsfolk also think you’re from Control and that the sheriff is planning to arrest you and take you to the county lock-up in Parker to keep you away from Dust Bowl during the week while the Dirt’s here.”

“Arrest us why?” asked Rachelle.

“He’ll just make up a reason and then let you go in a week, after it’s over. I want to offer to hide you at my house because I believe you can stop this. I believe you can make Dust Bowl normal again.”

“What do you mean by normal?” asked Liz.

“Like it was before the lieutenant came back from the war. That was when the Dirt started. Nobody’s alive anymore who remembers it, but that’s what we’re all told, all of us who live here. Please, don’t go back to the hotel. Come to my place. It’s across the field in town over there.”

“Let’s go,” said Liz. “I’m not going to let some backwater county sheriff block us from carrying out this mission just to hide these town secrets.”

Leaving our things behind in the hotel, and our Ford Expedition in the parking lot of the hotel, we took off across the field following Alice. I wondered if we were following this Alice down a rabbit hole into a wonderland.

Chapter 17

     “What do–”, Liz began but Alice cut her off.

     “Please,” the Dust Bowl native said, “not here. We’ll be safer at my place. Voices carry.”

     So, we walked in silence across the field where something otherworldly had hovered over us before we met this mysterious Alice lady. Mont brought up the rear. I could tell from the way he walked that his hand was ready to pull his gun from its hidden holster if that turned out to be something necessary. Mitch and Jonie walked in front of Mont. Mitch’s eyes were wide open scanning both the sky and the horizon, no doubt looking to see if his Sight showed him something. In contrast, as I saw her face in the moonlight, Jonie’s eyes were nearly closed as she walked. A true mage, she was reaching out with other arcane senses than Mitch possessed. 

Liz and Rachelle walked behind Alice, Rachelle looking down at her feet, probably concerned, as I was, about stepping into an ankle-twisting hole in the dark. Liz’s face looked as if she were working to keep a lid on her questions. Alice had said it would be better to talk at her place, so Liz was waiting, but obviously not patiently. I walked a little off to the side of the group, studying this mysterious Alice woman.

Alice looked to be of mixed Native American and Caucasian heritage. She had a tattoo of some kind on the left side of her face, but in the moonlight it was impossible to tell what it represented. She seemed to believe that as representatives of Control, we were here to “fix” Dust Bowl, to make it “normal again”. Those were high expectations. We weren’t even sure yet what was going on, let alone whether or not it was “fixable”. I hoped we weren’t going to have to disillusion this woman, who presented herself as an ally to us in a town in which the authorities themselves were against us. A chill night time desert breeze picked up from somewhere, so I zipped up my jacket, put my hands in my pockets and continued on toward the residential neighborhood in the distance.

We reached the street at the edge of the field and came under the glow of the street lights there. There were no cars on the street. There were no pedestrians about, no one going for a jog or a power walk, no one walking their dog. The only signs of life were lights in the windows of houses and the sounds of television sets coming from open windows. People were there, they just weren’t outside.

We made our way down the street one block and then turned away from the open field to our left and into the neighborhood to our right for two more blocks. Alice’s house was a modest one-story ranch style house with a one-car garage. She led us right in through the front door without first unlocking it. Her place had a deep carpet that looked like it came from another decade, but the furniture looked modern. She led us past the living room without a word and opened a door between the living room and the kitchen. Beyond the door, stairs to the basement loomed. Alice leaned over and reached forward into the darkness. I could hear what sounded like the pulling of a stringed lightswitch, then her face was a little more illuminated. I could now see that the tattoo on her face was a Rosicrucian cross.

The members of my team started glancing at each other.

“This isn’t a trap,” Alice promised. “It’s just safer down here.”

“Safer from what?” Liz asked.

“Safer from being overheard. Many of the neighbors don’t believe that nonresidents should be here when the Dirt blows in either. They’d help the sheriff find you.”

Liz nodded. “All right. Lead the way.”

Alice’s basement was finished, with its own carpeting that looked better than the carpet upstairs, a couch that looked better than the couch upstairs, other furniture, a pool table, a refrigerator, and a desk with an older, but still serviceable-looking computer. I noticed that the small windows at the top of the foundation’s wall were all blacked out and had wads of rags and old towels stuffed around the edges. I remembered what Alice had implied about neighbors listening. The cloth stuffing was probably an attempt at noise cancellation.

Alice was visibly relieved that we’d made it all the way to the basement. She went to the fridge, opened it, and grabbed a beer bottle from the liberal contents there. “Can I offer you something?” Her relief was evident in her voice.

“Maybe in a bit,” Liz took the liberty of answering for all of us as she sat herself in the nicest looking chair in the basement. She crossed her legs and sat forward with the easy air of managerial command with which she approached nearly every conversation. “First, as I said, we lost contact with the team in 2022. Could you tell us what happened to them?”

The rest of us took her lead and seated ourselves around the basement, Jonie and Mitch together on the couch with the rest of us finding chairs.

“I’m not exactly sure. Whatever it was had to do with their personal dirt.”

“Personal dirt?”

“When the Dirt blows in, it brings with it everybody’s personal dirt.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those things in our lives that we’d like to stay buried, forgotten, in other words, our personal dirt. Here’s mine.” She went over to the computer and jiggled the mouse, dismissing the screensaver. Underneath the screensaver was the Facebook page of a man in his late forties.

“This is my former brother-in-law Richard. The reason he divorced my sister was that he and I were having an affair.”

Alice minimized the Facebook page and opened a different picture of the same man, a picture of him much younger, at least ten years younger. Alice continued, “The Facebook picture you just saw was current, and it’s what RIchard looks like in New Jersey where he lives today. This picture,” she indicated the younger one, “is what will come here when the Dirt blows in. He looks just like he did when I was having an affair with him all those years ago. He’s even wearing that stupid Kansas City Chiefs jersey he used to wear. But he’s not the real Richard. We could call the real Richard in New Jersey right now if we wanted. Whoever or whatever will come when the Dirt blows in can’t be the real Richard.”

Liz looked concerned. “Does this younger Dirt-created RIchard try to get into your house?”

“Yes. And I’m afraid of what would ever happen if he got me. Your Control team in 2022 was gotten by whatever their personal dirt was.”

Liz turned pale. I could tell even in the dim basement lighting. “This is bad. As Agents of Control, we don’t have normal ‘personal dirt’ as you put it. Sure, we’re human just like anybody else and have affairs and other things we regret, mistakes and such, but our personal dirt, because of the lives we live, would include monsters.”

Chapter 18

I saw there, on the faces of my field team members, one by one, a revelation of what Liz had meant that their particular “personal dirts” would include monsters. Mont, Mitch, and Rachelle each looked somber, but Jonie looked as if she was about to lose her cool.

“This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me.” She sounded as if she were a child, scared of the dark, trying to calm herself by simply affirming over and over “I’m not afraid of the dark. I’m not afraid of the dark.”

And, like such a child, she repeated the affirmation a few times until Rachelle came over to the couch, knelt down in front of her, and took her hand comfortingly. “This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me. This Dirt curse can’t possibly bring back Ashley to haunt me.”

“I don’t know,” Rachelle cooed soothingly, “but whatever happens, we’ll face it together. I promise.”

Before Jonie could respond, there was a booming knock on the upstairs front door, so resounding that we could almost feel it through the walls even down in the basement.

“Alice! Come on out, Alice! We need to talk!”

“It’s the sheriff!” Alice’s eyes darted to the refrigerator. She went over to it and started pulling it away from the wall. Mont and Mitch, who I guessed as field team veterans were more used to responding quickly in emergencies than I was, instantly moved over to assist our frightened host. Behind the fridge was a small opening in the foundation that led to a small area, not big enough to be a cave, too big to be a crawl space. It was rough, not finished or a regular part of the house. It was about the size of a large walk-in closet. There was no light bulb on a string to light it up.

“Don’t let them find you,” Alice pleaded.

“Let’s go,” Liz pointed at the small opening with her head and eyes by nodding toward it. And so we squeezed ourselves into the underground space adjacent to Alice’s house’s foundation that was accessible by a hole in the wall behind her basement refrigerator. We barely fit, but at least, after we had entered through the small hole, it was tall enough inside that we could all stand up straight with no stooping. I was thankful for that. I don’t know how long I could have stooped without my back killing me. Also, another small blessing was that the air wasn’t dank or moldy smelling. Sure, it wasn’t the freshest of outdoor breezes, but it was ok.

As Mont helped from our side of the fridge, Alice adjusted the fridge’s front to look like it hadn’t been disturbed. The fridge covered the small entrance hole well enough that no light seeped in around the edges of the fridge, leaving us in total darkness. Alice’s voice on the other side was even muffled.

“I don’t think they’ll come in the house, but this is just in case. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

With the refrigerator muffling the sounds from the other side, we heard Alice’s steps shuffling quickly up the stairs. We heard the basement stairs door open and shut. Apparently, the basement stairs door blocked enough sound that between that and the refrigerator, we heard no more for a long while.

*********

At least it seemed like a long while. When I couldn’t stand it anymore, just standing there in the total pitch darkness with my teammates, I thought a cell phone screen might be too bright, even with the fridge blocking light, so I lit up my watch’s tiny screen instead. It had only been about five minutes. It had seemed like an eternity.

Suddenly, we heard the basement stairs door open again, but the steps coming down the stairs didn’t sound like they would be Alice’s. They were heavy and booted. Then, came the voices, deep and male.

Liz whispered frantically, “Cell phones off. No ringing.”

For a couple of moments, as we heard the heavy steps coming down the stairs, our tiny hiding place was lit by our cell phones as we turned them all off.

The voices were deep and penetrating enough that we could make out what they were saying.

“Alice is such a bitch. I can’t believe you asked her out once.”

“She is a bitch,” a second voice agreed. “She turned me down, too. Me! I’m somebody in this town.” This second voice scoffed incredulously.

We heard footsteps sounding like the two men did a quick once around the room. Then the first voice resumed. “There’s nobody down here. Let’s go back upstairs.”

“Hey,” the second voice called for attention softly. It had lost all its chauvinistic bravado suddenly. “Are you ready for your dirt this year?”

“Yeah. I’m good. I keep a gun in every room of my house and a couple of years ago, I started having the city turn off the water to my house before the Dirt blows in.”

“That’s a good idea. I wish I smart like you. I don’t know what to do about mine.”

The first voice sounded like it had compassion for the owner of the second voice. I realized that these two men who might be part of a corrupt establishment, were actually good friends. “Why don’t you come over to my house tonight. It’s only Friday tomorrow. You can tell me what your personal dirt is like and I’ll help you come up with ideas of what to do, ok?”

“Ok.” The second voice sounded better, somewhat reassured.

We listened to their big boots, probably sheriff’s deputy boots, climb that stairs. We heard the first voice call out, “There’s no one down there, Sheriff,” before once again the basement stairs door shut leaving us alone again.

Chapter 19

Alice didn’t return, at all. Eventually, after thirty very tense minutes according to my watch, Liz’s voice in the dark said, “They must have arrested her. Let’s get out of here. Mont, push the fridge out.”

Cautiously, we emerged from our hiding place. The basement light bulbs, dangling from the ceiling, had been left on. The basement looked as we had left it.

“I’ll scout upstairs,” Mont said. He pulled his gun.

“We’re dealing with a duly authorized sheriff’s office,” Liz reminded him. “Put that away. Don’t go waving a gun around law enforcement if you don’t want to get shot.”

Mont nodded with a slightly sheepish expression as he put his firearm back in its holster and covered it up. Liz was right. Whatever they were involved in, they were the sheriff’s office, a normal part of law enforcement and society. We were Control. And what was Control? Was it a secret part of the government? Was it a private entity? Was it even American? Was it international in scope? I wondered why I’d never cared to ask these questions before. It seemed a little dumb of me in hindsight at that moment. Whatever Control was, it was a big secret, not something that would have any sway with local cops. Trying to describe yourself as an Agent of Control, an organization that tracked such paranormal things as Black-Eyed Kids and skinwalkers, to a police officer would probably land you in the looney bin.

Soon, Mont returned. “It looks like they took her. No signs of struggle or resistance. She probably went willingly. There are sheriff’s cars all around the block though and men walking around. There are a few canines, too.”

“They wouldn’t have anything with our scents to give the dogs, would they?” asked Rachelle.

“If the hotel cooperated with them, they could have given them bed sheets or pillow cases,” Mont said.

“Let’s hope room service had already come by our room and that laundry was already done,” Mitch said.

“And let’s hope they consider the house already searched and don’t bring the dogs in here,” added Liz.

     I realized that I had a thought to contribute for once. Maybe I was starting to think like a Control field agent. “If they broke into our vehicle, they could give the dogs our scents that way.”

     Everyone looked at me. I don’t think they were used to the new guy having ideas yet.

     “It’s what I would do,” I hastily added.

     Mont looked at me approvingly. “He’s right.”

     I suddenly felt as though I’d passed some kind of initiation test. I smiled. My teammates all smiled back. For a moment, the seriousness of the moment was gone, replaced with levity and camaraderie. “Welcome aboard, Professor,” Mont said with a chuckle.

“Is that my team nickname now?”

“Yep.”

“Why don’t you guys each have one?”

“Oh, we do,” Rachelle said, “from when we were newbies. Mine was Screens because I’m always looking at them.”

“Screens?” I laughed.

“It’s very modern, very 21st Century” Rachelle said with mock defensiveness. “In the olden days, nerdy girls like me wore glasses and were called Four Eyes.”

“We’ll stay here tonight,” Liz said. “We’ll need someone up at all times to keep watch, but I think it’s very likely the sheriff’s department considers the house already searched and we’ll be ok in here. Tomorrow will be Friday, with the Dirt due to blow in Sunday night at midnight. Once it’s daylight outside, hopefully the police will be gone and we’ll be able to get out of here.

“And go where and do what?” Jonie asked tremulously. “We can’t be here Sunday night. I can’t be here Sunday night. Not if the curse can bring back regrets and mistakes.”

“I understand,” Liz said in a gentler voice than she usually used. “Please don’t worry. I’m going to request that Control extract us.”

“Extract us?” Mont seemed incredulous, and everyone else had surprised looks on their faces, too. “We’ve been in tighter spots than this and never needed extraction before.”

“Nevertheless, we’re getting extracted from this tight spot, Montgomery,” Liz answered solidly, using Mont’s full first name.

Newbie or not, I could read my teammates well enough by this point in our association to be able to tell that extraction didn’t quite sit right with them, except for Jonie, who seemed relieved, but that was understandable.

“Our equipment for contacting Control is in the vehicle,” Rachelle said.

“Which they’ve got to have confiscated by now,” Mitch added.

Liz smiled knowingly. “I think Spitfire has something that will help.”

A cute, tiny little voice emerged from one of Rachelle’s pockets. Spitfire scampered out and sat on Rachelle’s right shoulder, looking at Liz.

“Can you set us up something on the pool table that will get us through to Control, Spitfire?”

“You betcha!”

For the rest of the night, we slept in shifts. There was no bathroom in the basement area, but there was one not far from the top of the stairs, so there was some middle of the night dashing, done hunched over so as not to be seen through any of the windows upstairs. Spitfire pulled a strange arrangement of electrical equipment from her pocket dimension inside Rachelle’s clothing pockets. There were wires, dials (one of the dials I could have sworn was an egg timer), and three different cell phones that looked heavily modified with non-factory standard add-ons, running strange apps that made no sense to me.

Plugged into the ad hoc contraption was a set of headphones and a microphone (both human-sized, so that Spitfire had to stand on her rear tiptoes and use her tail for balance to reach the microphone once she set it in its mounting).

Once the communications apparatus was complete, Spitfire fluttered over to Liz so that she could speak quietly to her. Liz alone among us had not taken one of the sleeping shifts, but had been up all that night so far. Liz had been reading files in Alice’s computer for hours, with a look of worried intensity on her face.

The little orange dragon interrupted her reading. “It’s ready Liz, ma’am.”

“Wonderful. Thank you, Spitfire.”

Liz dragged her chair closer to the pool table, put on the headset, and cradled the microphone on her lap leaning over it. Spitfire flew over to the three cell phones and started tapping on the screens, working the apps.

My turn to be awake had just ended, and I was adjusting myself in a chair that had clearly been comfier in its younger days, to try to sleep. I was too invested to hear Liz’s conversation with Control to sleep immediately, though.

Liz: “Control, this is Field Team 42. We are requesting extraction.”

Pause for the other side.

Liz: “Our situation is that Dust Bowl is being annually affected by an incredibly strong instance of curse magic, strong enough to be Class A reality warping. The curse is fully psychocreative, bringing into existence the regrets, mistakes, sins, and failures of the local populace, and also any visitors in town during the week of the year that the curse is active.”

Pause for the other side.

Liz: “We are concerned that since Agents of Control have had life experiences involving the paranormal, anomalous, and supernatural, that the curse’s psychocreative effects might bring into existence things from our past that would complicate things to a whole new level.”

Pause for the other side.

Liz: “I see.”

Pause for the other side.

Liz: “I see.”

Pause for the other side.

Liz: “Control, I really think—-”

Liz apparently gets interrupted at this point. She has a very frustrated, almost angry look on her face.

 When Liz gets to speak again: “I understand. Thank you, Control.”

With the call seemingly over, Liz looked over at me getting ready to sleep and at Mitch who was stretching since I had just woken him up to take my place as the designated person awake.

“Well,” said Liz, “the good news is that Control is sending backup, quickly, no week long, team building road trips for the backup team.”

“And the bad news?” asked Mitch.

She sighed frustratedly. “Our extraction request is denied.”

Chapter 20

Well, dear reader, it’s been awhile since I added to these files, but something came up that interrupted the flow of this writing, my extraction from the hospital. I’m writing to you now from a different location which I shall not divulge. However, I’m keeping my commitment to you to complete the story of what happened in Dust Bowl as long as I’m around to keep writing it for you. I left off my last entry with our team in Alice’s basement. Alice had been taken by the La Paz County Sheriff’s Office. We were spending the night in her basement with the house surrounded by law enforcement with canines. Liz had used tech equipment from Spitfire’s pocket dimension to contact Control and request extraction. The extraction was denied. I’ll get back to that, picking up from there, soon. First, however, I’d like to explain why I’ve taken so long to write again and what happened with my extraction from the hospital.

Not too many days after Spitfire had warned me on the phone given to me by Mr. X that some kind of escalating power struggle necessitated my extraction from the hospital, a couple of orderlies dressed for surgery in full gowns, caps, and masks came into my room with a gurney. Even if Spitfire had not warned me that some kind of funny business was afoot, that would have seemed weird. I was almost healed. I knew it. I could feel it.

Against doctor’s orders (and I didn’t care whether my room had hidden cameras or not), at night, I would get out of bed and practice walking around the room. I didn’t have a lot of endurance yet, but I was getting there. I got over to the window and satisfied my curiosity about the license plates of cars in the parking lot. I had expected that they would all be one majority state and then I would at least know what part of the country I was in.

I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy. All of the cars would have been faculty and staff, of course, since visitors didn’t come to anonymous, secret private hospitals unless they were part of the anonymous, government secrets like Mr. X was when he had come to visit me. So, with no visitors’ civilian plates out there, all the faculty and staff plates were some kind of dark gold government agency plate. One car was parked close enough to my window and had a parking lot street light close enough that I could read it. I searched for the name of the agency on the plate on the internet, and of course, no dice.

So, when the two orderlies came in with a gurney, all prepped for surgery, I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I was in no shape to fight them. The one at the head of the gurney who slid in right next to my bed was built like a real bruiser. He barely fit in his clothes. I could see inches of skin between his smock and pants when his gown drifted open. A very tall, lanky one stood at the foot of my bed. The little bit of his face that showed above his mask and below his cap was very white like he really needed to get off the night shift and get some sun.

“What’s up, guys?”

The thicker man next to me responded. I knew that in all my time here at this hospital these two were new. I didn’t recognize this guy’s voice.

“Oh, the docs want to check out some things with you,” Bruiser said in what sounded like a forced attempt at bedside manner cheerfulness. He produced a syringe and started prepping it to inject me with something. He reached for my arm to stick me.

“Do I really need to be unconscious for this?” I almost stammered my speech, being more than a little freaked out.

“Yes.”

The thick orderly reached for my arm again. I reflexively pulled my arm away, causing the orderly to gruffly “hmmmmmmm” behind his mask.

Just as things were about to escalate, the lanky orderly at the foot of my bed came around next to his larger colleague. “I’ll take care of this,” he said in a voice that was familiar but for a moment I couldn’t quite place it.

Just as my mind recognized the voice coming from behind the lanky orderly’s mask, he grabbed the thicker orderly, placing him in an armbar joint lock. He forced the large man down onto my bed, pinning him against my stomach and groin area. Then, quick as a cobra, he snatched up the syringe from the large man’s grasp and injected him with the very thing that would have been injected into me. The drug took effect nearly instantly. I could feel the moment against my body that my would-have-been attacker went unconscious and became dead weight. The lanky orderly let him slide off me and my bed, landing on the floor between my bed and the gurney with a thump. Then, my rescuer pulled down his mask revealing the one-of-a-kind smile of Mr. X beneath.

“I believe it’s time for us to take our leave of this establishment, Dr. Leighton.”

I could feel myself smiling back at him like a kid at Christmas, just smiling, and smiling, and smiling. “I couldn’t agree more.”

Chapter 21

Mr. X was pleasantly surprised that I was so healed up and mobile. I got myself onto the gurney without assistance.

“Wonderful, Dr. Leighton! I had no idea you were so well-along on your recovery. That will help us immensely as we escape.”

Mr. X held up one of the gurney’s patient immobilization straps thoughtfully, then looked at me. “I completely understand your reluctance to use these, even for appearances sake. I am inclined to agree. Should we need to move quickly, abandoning our ruse that I am taking you somewhere as a patient, there won’t be time to unstrap you. I have another idea to make our appearance in the hallway look suitably deceptive.”

Instead of strapping me to the gurney, Mr. X, whom I had always thought of as a Man in Black, though in his hospital orderly disguise he certainly wasn’t wearing black, draped a sheet over me, head to toe. “Now, Dr. Leighton, you will appear dead. Dead bodies on gurneys are covered in sheets like this and there’s no need to strap in the dead, is there? Please don’t breathe deeply enough to make your chest or stomach rise, as that would ruin our deception. I’m going to peak into the hallway now to make sure this is an opportune time to leave the room. Remember, Dr. Leighton, shallow breaths.”

I had a niggling little thought that I had to mention to relieve my own nervousness. “Won’t we be seen on camera?”

“Due to Spitfire’s efforts, the security systems here, including the cameras, are not at their peak of reliability right now. Also, the guards who would normally be watching the screens carefully are occupied with a diversion. By the time anyone has the time to check the camera files, we’ll either have succeeded and be gone, or have failed and be captured.”

That was Mr. X, pragmatic as always.

Soon, we were cruising down the hallway. I was under the sheet Mr. X had covered me with, trying not to breathe deeply enough to be noticed by anyone looking at me. The sheet was thin enough that I could see a lot through it, so I closed my eyes, in case anyone on the other side could see through it, too. I could hear Mr. X passing people in the hallway. There was the sound of footsteps, talking, and wheels like those of other gurneys like mine.

I caught a snatch of conversation between two hospital workers, both male and young sounding.

“What are you doing here? Why haven’t you clocked out? You look beat. You need to go home and rest.”

“We can’t leave. We’ve just been put on lockdown. Haven’t you heard?”

“Lockdown?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know why?”

“Not a clue.”

The voices faded as we went past. I felt bad for the people to whom this place was just a job location, people who weren’t into conspiracies or government secrets. There were people who probably had normal lives outside of this place. I marveled at how much more I knew of the world past its societal facade of normalcy since I’d agreed to work for Mr. X, a strange Man in Black who I wasn’t even sure was human, who was now pushing me disguised as a corpse through the halls of a secret government hospital for extraction. Where would this end? Where was my life going? Would anything ever be normal for me again? I suspected not.

I pulled myself out of my reverie and focused on the moment. I was, of course, in danger. There would hopefully be time for reflection and emotional processing later. We were, at the moment, waiting on an elevator. One had already come, but it hadn’t been empty. “I’ll wait for the next one,” I heard Mr. X say. His voice sounded a little muffled. He must have put on his mask back on, to hide his slightly non-human appearance. As a Man in Black, looking slightly non-human could be an advantage, putting people on edge. It wouldn’t do at all for a disguise.

On a normal day at the hospital, it wouldn’t have been abnormal for him to say that he wanted to wait for another elevator. Perhaps the elevator was full enough that the gurney wouldn’t have fit. Perhaps it would have just been courtesy to not force other people to ride in the same elevator with a dead body. Regardless, soon another elevator arrived and we entered. Mr. X pushed a button and we were on our way.

During the elevator ride, Mr. X pulled down his mask again and said, “Please get up, Dr. Leighton. We’re headed for the underground parking garage. No one would believe that a gurney being pushed by an orderly belongs down there, and we may need to move fast.”

I eagerly complied, wanting to feel a little more in control. At least on my feet, if I had to run or dodge, I could do it for myself.

Mr. X stripped off his surgical cap, revealing his crayola white bald pate. He removed his robe, leaving himself in a smock, hospital pants, and tennis shoes, black tennis shoes. At least something he was wearing was his signature color.

The elevator doors opened. As Mr. X had said, an underground parking garage awaited us. All the vehicles, cars, vans, and even a few motorcycles, were all black. The cars and vans had tinted windows.

“Quickly, Dr. Leighton.”

I followed my rescuer out of the elevator. His quick, slipped strides, his frequent looking up and around to make sure we didn’t have company, and the frustrated frown on his face all indicated impatience with finding a particular car.

Suddenly, a voice came from across the garage, echoing slightly on the high ceiling.

“Mr. X, that man belongs in custody. I’m going to have to ask you to return him.”

“Hello, Mr. Y,” responded Mr. X, turning toward the voice.

Chapter 22

Mr. Y looked a lot more like the stereotype of a Man in Black than Mr. X ever had because he dressed more the part. He wore the suit and hat of a 1950’s G-man, as opposed to Mr. X, who, when he wasn’t disguised as a hospital orderly, had always worn Victorian era clothing. Mr. Y was even wearing dark sunglasses in the underground parking garage where they clearly weren’t needed. His skin was the same crayola white as Mr. X’s. He never smiled, though, not at all, whereas Mr. X smiled at every possible conversational opportunity. The two of them seemed very, very opposite from one another.

Mr. Y was accompanied by five men in some kind of military uniform, though not from any of the armed services that the general public knew about. They all had large automatic rifles aimed at Mr. X and me. Little, scary red dots veritably crawled over us, more of them on Mr. X than on me, but there were definitely some on me. I realized that meant that, whatever side Mr. Y was on, they didn’t really care if they took me alive. Great. If I hadn’t already trusted Mr. X that would have sealed the deal right there.

“X,” Mr. Y began in a lecturing tone of voice, “ you’ve always been a bleeding heart. But, really? Taking their side? You know this can only end one way, and it’s not with them on top.”

“Oh, I think you’ll find they’re full of surprises, Mr. Y.”

Before Mr. Y could continue the back and forth banter with his (former?) colleague, the lights suddenly went out, making everything pitch black. Many things happened at once. There were rifle flashes from the area where Mr. Y’s men were as they shot at us. Mr. X grabbed me with a reflexive speed I couldn’t even begin to imagine was anything human and dragged me down to the ground. Miraculously, no bullets hit me, though, not as many rifles had been pointed at me. Then, I could suddenly see Mr. X’s face lit up next to mine in the dark, lit up by colorful lights all over a large handgun he suddenly held. The weapon looked like something out of a science fiction movie, an old, cheesy science fiction movie. It was covered in lights of various colors, some of them blinking, some of them solidly lit. Mr. X pointed it in the direction Mr. Y and his soldiers had been standing in and pulled the trigger. The gun made a whooshing sound. Then, the whole parking garage was rocked by an explosion over where the gun had been aimed. I could hear the shattering of vehicle windows and I had to imagine that those black ops government vehicles probably had much tougher than normal glass. I could hear cracking sounds from above and heard what sounded like hail hitting around me and on the roofs of vehicles, but of course there was no sky above us so it couldn’t be hail. Then I realized Mr. X’s weapon was actually capable of degrading the underground chamber’s structural integrity.

Mr. X raised his voice and called out. “Let us go or I’ll cave in this whole place and bury us all!”

“You know I can’t do that, X,” came Mr. Y’s voice, although there was a satisfying cough afterwards. I imagined him choking on rock dust from the ceiling.

Mr. X turned toward me, his face still lit up by the lights on his weapon. We were on our bellies between two of the black ops cars. “Dr. Leighton, I have found our escape vehicle. It is the next car over on your right. On the count of three, I want you to get over there and use this to open the door.” He handed me a car door lock fob. All right?”

“Sure thing.”

“Good. One…two…three.”

I dashed off into the darkness, determined to find the next car over by feel. Mr. X stood up and fired his strange weapon over the roof of the car that had been on my left, twice. Two more explosions later, and I was letting myself into the car that Mr. X had designated our escape vehicle. The inside of the car lit up with controls that looked like a hybrid of the 80s TV show Knight Rider and the bridge of the Enterprise on Star Trek: The Next Generation.

The passenger door opened and Mr. X sat beside me. It was the first time I had ever seen him look alarmed, about anything. “You’re not supposed to be driving, Dr. Leighton. I believe it’s my fault for not being clear about which door you should have entered.”

Intimidated by the controls, I readily agreed that I should not be the driver.

“Let’s switch.”

“There’s no time for that, Dr. Leighton,” Mr. X said as he reached over and pushed a button on the dash in front of me. Instantly the car engine roared to life. “Get us out of here.”

The car had normal controls for normal things. I’ll never know what the other ones did, but I found the gear shift, the gas pedal, brake pedal, and everything I needed to start getting us out of the parking garage.

“Which way?” I asked.

“That way,” Mr. X pointed. I noticed that there was an EXIT sign that disagreed with Mr. X, but I had decided to trust him, and I didn’t think there was time for an argument. I drove where I was directed.

Another car from the garage started up and started chasing us. The government car handled beautifully around several tight corners. I noticed our path was sloping downward. If I’d followed the EXIT sign, we would have been going upward. This made me nervous.

Finally, we were being pursued straight into a wall. Instinctively, I started to slow down. The sound of gunfire came from the pursuing vehicle behind me, normal gunfire from normal guns, but lethal nonetheless.

“Don’t slow down!” Mr. X seemed as close to panicked as I could ever imagine him getting.

“But the wall….”

“Bother the wall! Keep going or we’re dead!”

I gunned it, pedal to the metal, even though every survival instinct in me screamed for me to hit the brakes, I shoved those instincts down through sheer force of will. Some part of me that had done okay at math knew that even if I slammed the brakes now, we still wouldn’t have enough stopping distance anyway.

Just as I mentally accepted the idea that Mr. X’s extraction of was a suicide mission and that I was going to get killed to keep me from falling into “their” hands, whoever “they” were, right before we hit the wall, Mr. X reached over with both hands. One hand pushed one of the mystery buttons on the dash. The other hand wrested control of the wheel from me and swung us ninety degrees to the right. We were going to smash into a different wall? What difference would that make?

Then, the world seemed fuzzy to my eyes. Mr. X seemed fuzzy. The other cars in the parking garage seemed fuzzy. My own hands in front of me seemed fuzzy. We hit the new wall Mr. X’s re-steering of the car had pointed us toward, but we didn’t crash. Somehow, we went through the wall.

Chapter 23

I couldn’t see anything for what seemed like several long seconds. I’m not sure I was breathing, but I didn’t feel uncomfortable like I couldn’t breathe or like I was holding my breath either. I couldn’t hear anything. I had just started to wonder whether I was dead when we, Mr. X and I, complete with the car, whole, intact, not smashed or crashed, emerged from the other side of the wall.

We had come out in what looked like an underground tunnel for car and truck traffic. A normal-looking road ran through the tunnel, complete with a dashed yellow painted line down the center and white solid painted lines on the edges of either side. The tunnel was lit with lights along the walls and hanging from the ceiling above, interspersed at about the intervals that street lights would have been on the surface.

There was just one problem. We had not emerged aligned with the tunnel. We emerged from a side wall of the tunnel at the same speed we were going when we were in the parking garage. We were going to hit the opposite wall. I wondered if we were going to “phase” through that one, too. We must have emerged a few feet up in the air relative to the road because I felt the car land roughly and begin to skid toward the opposite wall as my foot hit the brake pedal in a futile attempt to stop.

Mr. X, whose hand was still on the wheel from when he had wrested steering control from me, placed his second hand on the wheel also and turned with all his might. The car started to turn even as momentum carried it into what would be the second wall it had hit that day. Super secret, James Bond government spy car or not, the car simply could not turn on a dime. Mr. X got it facing the right way but its momentum still carried it into the wall in a side collision, the driver’s side, my side. We didn’t “phase” through this second wall collision. We hit the natural way, according to normal physics, hard. And it hurt. My body, which had begun to feel like I would eventually heal and get back to normal, was suddenly jarred into spasms of agony. I think I screamed.

After the car crashed there was silence, almost. There was a slight hum indicating that the car was still running.

“It’s still running,” I said dumbly.

“Yes. These things really can take a beating, can’t they, Dr. Leighton?” His voice sounded strained, but I could tell he was making an effort to maintain his normal effusive, smiley demeanor. “We have to get moving if we can, Dr. Leighton. What is your physical status? Have you been reinjured?”

“I think I can move ok,” I hoped out loud rather than stated as a sure fact, “but I’d rather you drive. I don’t know anything about this car.”

“Neither of us will be driving, Dr. Leighton. I see your door will not open.” He nodded with his head at the window past me where the glass had caved in, fortunately none of it had cut me, at least not that I could tell. Inches from my face was the stone wall of the tunnel. Mr. X was right. Even if the car was capable of pulling away from that spot, that door would certainly not be opening again.

“I’ll get out first. Follow me if you can, Dr. Leighton.”

As Mr. X was climbing out of the car, I said, “You can call me Carl. You saved my life. You can call me Carl.”

Mr. X paused for a moment, looking me right in the eyes with a curious expression. “All right…Carl.”

As I was gingerly extricating myself from the wreck, Mr. X moved to the front of the car. He managed to get the hood open, although the edge of the hood that was smashed and smooshed against the tunnel wall made an awful scraping sound. I wondered if raising the hood against the friction of the wall was another of Mr. X’s amazing physical feats. He seemed to be both stronger and faster than one would expect a normal human to be.

I came around and looked under the hood with him. I’m not a mechanic, but I can change my own oil and spark plugs, routine stuff. I know what a car is supposed to look like under the hood. What I saw under the hood of that car was in no way normal. Mr. X was working on it, though. He had removed his hospital smock and was using it to protect one of his hands from touching hot things apparently.

Probably sensing my curiosity, Mr. X began describing what I was seeing. “This is a liquid fluoride thorium reactor, Dr….Carl. It goes for years without refueling. I would love to show you more, but there just isn’t time.”

The albino G-man closed the hood as well as he could with one side of it scraping against the tunnel wall. He went back to the front passenger door and leaned across the seat so he could reach the driver’s side of the dash. He pushed a series of buttons and tapped a screen a few times. Then, he looked through the windshield at me, motioning for me to step over to the side, away from the front of the car, which I did.

The car began to move, making an awful sound for the first several feet as it was still scraping the tunnel wall. Once it was free of the wall, it began driving down the tunnel, headlights on, past us.

“Those looking for us will be tracking the car. That will lead them away from us. We’re walking this way.” He pointed the opposite direction.

“Walking? We won’t get very far very fast.”

“Hopefully we won’t have to…Carl. Ooh, I see you’re not walking too well. Lean on me.”

Mr. X assisted me as we began hiking down the tunnel, opposite the way the car had gone, a secret government thorium car.

“If I had known you needed assistance, there were some items in the car that I could have used to fashion you a cane, Carl.”

“Sorry to slow us down.”

“Don’t be sorry…Carl.” He still seemed uncomfortable using my first name.

“You’re a good friend, X. Can I call you “X”?”

Mr. X looked dumbfounded, as if I had shocked him to his core. Then, that crazy, slightly creepy (though I myself was used to it by now) smile, bright and white enough for toothpaste commercials, came to his face.

“Yes, I suppose I am a good friend. Thank you, Carl. That’s the nicest compliment I have ever received. Of course you may call me X.” Then his face showed that a sudden thought had struck him. “Let’s make sure that we complete our escape successfully. Then we can continue being friends.”

“All right, X. Sounds like a plan.”

Chapter 24

After what I thought might have been about thirty minutes, a door appeared in the tunnel to our right, metal, obviously reinforced, with a small, lit up keypad right next to it. X steered us to it. He propped me up against the wall for support while he handled the keypad. By that time, I had become so weak that right before we saw the door, I had been about to say that I didn’t know how much further I could go. I noticed that my breath was coming in slight gasps as I leaned on the wall, watching X punch code after code into the keypad.

Finally, something worked and the door opened with a loud mechanical hiss. I realized it had been hydraulically sealed. A gush of pressurized air came from the other side. X gently collected me and we walked through.

On the other side was a train station. We were obviously still underground, but this station looked far larger, grander, and more fancy than any city’s subway station in the mundane world. Stairways went everywhere, both up and down. Dozens of passages ran in every direction. Echoing up some of the passages and stairways, I could hear distant trains arriving and leaving somewhere off in the distance. At the opening to each passage were signs that used strange colored symbols I didn’t recognize, as if the people who were actually authorized to be here would be able to find their way around, but no one else would. X and I were alone. Our footsteps echoed slightly.

“Luck is on our side, Carl. There’s a train already here.”

As the door behind us automatically resealed itself noisily, I focused on the red train in front of us. It looked like a high speed magnetic train one might find in Japan or Europe, not some American Amtrak passenger train. There were six train cars. The first five looked unoccupied. The sixth car looked very full.

“Don’t stare at the occupants of the rear car, Carl. Try to walk as normally as you can and pretend you’re not injured. It is important that you and I look as nonchalant as possible.”

“In hospital clothes?”

“Yes, Carl. In hospital clothes. Believe me, it wouldn’t be the strangest thing that’s ever been seen riding these trains.”

As we approached the train, X stayed close enough to me that he could continue to support me if necessary, if I just wasn’t strong enough to make it without help. I was all right, though, or I was strong enough to fake being all right.It looked as though he were trying to get us seated in a car further toward the front of the train, away from the rear car, but as we got up to the train, LED panels next to the doors on each car started a ten second countdown, presumably a warning the train was about to leave the station, so we entered the train immediately. We wound up on the fifth car right in front of the sixth car at which X had told me not to stare.

I did get a side glance though. I thought my experiences as an Agent of Control had prepared me for anything, but I was wrong. I saw that many of the passengers in the sixth car looked like variations of Roswell style aliens. They were wearing orange prison suits and were handcuffed to their seats. The other passengers in the car were human men, armed and wearing nondescript security uniforms.

“Don’t stare, Carl,” X reminded me again.

“Right,” I said and quickly looked away, but not before one of the aliens had made eye contact with me, making me feel, just until the eye contact was broken, like bugs were crawling around inside my skull.

As we seated ourselves in the fifth car, X put his finger over his lips and glanced pointedly with his eyes at a security camera mounted in a corner of the traincar. Then, he moved over to a small snack bar and microwave mounted into the train car wall. He heated a ham and cheese sandwich for me and passed it to me before preparing something for himself.

I helped myself to the snack bar and grabbed a water bottle and a Snickers bar. I thought about how thrillingly normal it seemed to be savoring a ham and cheese sandwich and a Snickers bar, normal, normal, normal. Never mind that there were Roswell-type aliens just one train car behind me or that the train itself wasn’t supposed to exist. I closed my eyes and pretended I was eating at home. Just for a moment I wanted to feel normal, even though most of my body was in pain.

We rode the train for several hours, but we rode in comfort. There was plenty of food and water. The microwave was there to make the food hot. Even the train car’s restroom was nice. Lavender scented. My body felt a lot worse though as time went on.

As the hours went by, the train stopped at several more train stations. A few people entered and left cars one through four ahead of ours. No one came onto our car. Most of the people who entered the train wore business suits, both men and women, but a few wore military uniforms. Most rode alone, but there were a few groups of two or three each. Each time we came to a new station, X shook his head indicating it wasn’t our stop, until one time it was.

I tried to get up when it was time for us to leave. I just couldn’t. My body was paralyzed. I weakly started to mouth “I’m sorry,” to X before I passed out.

Chapter 25

“Carl, do you know where you are?”

X greeted me from the foot of a hospital bed. I blinked my eyes in a panic, wanting them to focus faster, to bring an end to the blurriness of my surroundings. I wanted to rub my eyes, but I realized that my arms, though not strapped down to the hospital bed, were attached to IVs. My right arm had two of them. My left arm had just one. I kept blinking my eyes hard, focusing them without assistance from my hands. As X and his surroundings came into view, I was relieved to see that I was not in the same hospital room as before.

It’s not that I couldn’t still be in the same hospital because my extraction experience had been a dream, or returned to the same hospital after recapture, merely moved to a different room, but I could tell the room was very different from before. This room was clearly a single bed room. My other room had been a two-person room in which they just never gave me a roommate. The curtains weren’t plain white. They had a nice design of a starry sky on them. There were other differences, too. I noticed that the ambient sounds in the hallway sounded different.

A nurse in a different style of nurse uniform came in, nodded to X, then looked at me. “It looks like sleepyhead is awake. Good. What do you remember, Dr. Leighton?”

“X was just asking me that. I just woke up,” I said weakly. “He was asking if I knew where I was.”

The nurse looked back at X with shock on her face. “You call him ‘X’ without the ‘Mr.’? I don’t know anyone else who does that.”

X spoke up. “Carl and I are friends.”

The nurse looked even more shocked. “Extraordinary!”

“Well then,” the nurse continued, “how about Mr. X fill you in on where you are and what’s happened while I check out your condition, ok?”

“Ok,” I said weakly, trying to smile.

While the nurse did various checks on me that included using a blood pressure cuff, looking at how much was left in my IV bags, and even drawing a few vials of blood before she left, X shared with me the following:

“Well, Carl, you gave me quite a scare. As you can imagine, I didn’t want to lose my first official friend so soon after we formalized our friendship. Fortunately, with you in such obvious medical distress, and with both of us in hospital clothes, I was able to bluff our way out of the train station. People there even helped carry you. Very ironic. People whose job it was to capture you were actually assisting in your escape. I appreciate irony very much you see.

“You see, down here, IDs are checked less than they are in the above world, because no one is ever down here unauthorized. People who don’t belong here simply can’t get here. Plus, cameras secure the most sensitive areas. Oh, yes, your ID would be checked if you tried to enter an R&D facility or a critical piece of infrastructure such as a power plant, but simply to walk about residential areas, shopping malls, restaurants, etc., no one asks for your ID around here. As I said, people who don’t belong here, simply can’t get here.”

“Shopping malls?,” I questioned confused. “Restaurants? Are we still underground? Where are we?”

“Oh, yes, Carl. Very good. Yes, we are indeed still underground. You may have heard conspiracy theories about DUMBs, Deep Underground Military Bases. I assure you those conspiracy theories are quite true and that you are in one right now.”

X paused to let me take that in for a moment. Then, he looked up at the ceiling as if he could hear the footsteps of people walking the Earth’s surface above, like upstairs neighbors walking too loudly on their floor which was also your ceiling. “We are underneath Denver Airport,” he said. “There are other bases, too, that you may have heard of if you’ve paid attention to conspiracy theories about the DUMBs. The quasi-humans that I warned you not to stare at on the train were headed for Dulce Base.”

I had heard of Dulce Base in New Mexico. An alleged whistleblower, Phil Schneider, before his “official-suicide-that-couldn’t-have-been-a-real-suicide” event had been on speaking tour for several years spreading the word about the government working with underground aliens there, including an incident in which there was a dispute between the aliens and the government that had become violent before it was resolved. At the time, years ago, when I had watched a video documentary about him and his claims, I had not taken it seriously. Considering my life since, however….

“Quasi-humans?” I asked.

“A fusion of human and ultraterrestrial DNA.”

“Oh, God.”

“No, Carl, we don’t have Him down here. He still eludes the best efforts of the United States government to contain or counteract Him.”

“That’s a lot to digest, X.”

“I suppose it would be indeed, even to an Agent of Control such as yourself.”

“What’s ultraterrestrial?”

“You’re probably familiar with the term ‘extraterrestrial’ which refers to the idea that alien life could hail from other planets. ‘Ultraterrestrial’ life hails from other dimensions or other universes, not just other planets.”

“Wow.”

A new voice came from the hallway, just beyond the door, an exuberant, youthful one, filled with joy. “Father!” A boy, about age 12, ran into the room and threw his arms around X. The boy wore a Spider-man baseball cap, an Incredible Hulk T-shirt, and Hawaiian floral shorts. Remarkably, the boy was the spitting image of the man he called father. Albino, all the way to his pure white eyebrows and completely bald.

“Carl, this is my son J. J, this is my friend Carl.”

The boy looked at into X’s face in surprise.

“You have a friend, Father?”

“I do now.”

J looked at me with awe and respect. He let go of his father’s waist, came over to my bedside and, with a careful eye on my IV tubes,  ever so gently shook my hand. “It’s an honor to meet my father’s first friend, sir.”

I had enough of my wits about me to respond, “It’s an honor to meet his son, J.”

X collected his offspring and pointed to a closed laptop computer that was on the rolling hospital serving table next to my bed. “There’s a computer there if you should wish to continue writing your memoirs, Carl. I’ll be spending some time with my son.”

“Thank you, X, for everything.”

“My pleasure, Carl.”

Once the two albinos had left, I realized that things have come right back where they started, with me writing to you, dear reader, as I recover in a secret government hospital. So, let’s return to what happened in Dust Bowl, Arizona.

Chapter 26

A few hours later, as Friday’s sunrise was approaching, Liz had another, more detailed call with Control. She relayed to us that Control wanted us, if possible, to hunker down there at Alice’s until backup arrived. If circumstances forced us to move from Alice’s, we were to inform Control of our new whereabouts as soon as possible after we relocated.

We risked a few forays upstairs Friday morning for more than just restroom use, but we made our camp in the basement to avoid being seen through upstairs windows. We brought a microwave from the kitchen downstairs along with food from the cabinets and upstairs fridge. Mont and Mitch even found a home game system hooked up to a small TV in a guest bedroom. We guys passed the time Friday gaming and eating. I got to have normal male bonding time with Mitch and Mont as if we were colleagues from a regular, normal, mundane job with normal lives. We laughed and smiled a lot. I realized they were the kind of guys I’d be friends with anyway if we’d met under other circumstances. Mont was something of a philosopher warrior soldier. Mitch felt the tension of having one foot in each of two worlds, the world of his Native American ancestors and the shamanistic role that his Sight compelled him to fulfill versus the modern, secular world.

Jonie and Rachelle played various card games with a deck of cards from a box Mitch had found in the couch cushions. Liz sat at Alice’s basement computer, surfing the internet. Spitfire was nowhere to be seen. She was doing whatever p’ckit dragons do in their pocket dimensions.

Around 5pm, someone entered the house upstairs. Mont instantly paused the video game system so that it was silenced. We weren’t playing it with very much volume anyway, certainly not enough to even be heard through the door at the top of the basement stairs, but it still needed to be silenced as soon as possible. The footsteps sounded like just one person. They were light, unlike the sheriff’s deputies had been the previous night. They came straight from the front door to the basement stairs door. There was a knock on the door, then Alice’s muffled voice came through.

“I’m coming down. It’s me, Alice. I’m alone.”

It was indeed Alice and she was indeed alone.

“I’m so glad you guys are here and that you’re ok,” Alice said once she descended the stairs. “They let me go. There really wasn’t any reason for them to keep me since I convinced them that I didn’t know where you are. They are busy preparing for the Dirt to blow in, and I don’t think they wanted to worry about my personal dirt coming for me since they were all already prepping for their own. So, they let me go.”

“Alice,” Jonie asked, “why don’t the people here just move away?”

“You can’t get away from it that way,” the Dust Bowl resident answered. “Once you experience the Dirt once in your life, it follows you. Apparently, in the history of the town, when the Dirt blowing in once a year was a new thing, some did move away, but it followed them. It’s better to keep the Dirt here, to not spread it.”

“It’s a curse,” Jonie said. “What caused it? How did the town get cursed?”

“No one has a for sure answer, but I’ve been studying it for years and I have some theories that I was sharing with the Control team in 2022. I–”

“Hey, where’s Liz?” Mont sounded suddenly concerned.

“She went upstairs to powder her nose,” answered Rachelle.

“That was a long time ago,” said Jonie.

“I’ll be right back,” said Mont, taking the stairs two at a time.

A few moments later, he brought Liz’s coat, blouse, and pants downstairs for us to see.

“Alice’s bedroom door was open, even though it wasn’t when we set up camp down here. The closet in that bedroom had been rifled through with a lot of Alice’s clothes tossed onto the bed. Alice, can you look in your closet and tell us what’s missing?”

“Sure.”

*********

After a quick search through her clothes, Alice told us that a jogging suit, complete with sweatpants and a hoodie had been taken.

“She’s trying to be nondescript and probably uses the hood to cover her face.” Rachelle’s brow furrowed in thought. “Why? Where is she going? What is she doing?”

“I don’t know but we better contact Control ourselves,” said Mont.