Bad Vibrations: Book 1 of the Sedona Files (13 page)

“Which was?” Kiki asked from the front seat. Her eyes were shining as she looked back over her shoulder at Lance.

“Eyes ahead,” he admonished. “If I’m going to die today, I don’t want it to be because you ran this crate off the road.”

“Fine.” But although her tone was sulky, she did as he directed and pointed her gaze forward, over the increasingly treacherous dirt-paved lane, which was barely large enough for one vehicle at that point. God help us if some hikers were coming down Dry Creek in the opposite direction.

“Anyway,” Lance continued, “I kept seeing some sort of facility, apparently underground. Scientific base, I thought—there were a lot of white lab coats. Didn’t think much of it at first…until I got a better look at the men who were guarding the base.” He paused, eyes narrowing as if at some unpleasant memory. “They all had the same face.”

He couldn’t have meant.... Twisting in my seat so I could look at him more or less directly, I said, “You don’t honestly expect me to believe— ”

“Yeah, I do. Clones. They could have been the same man sent through a photocopier or something. At first I just thought I wasn’t seeing correctly—remote viewing’s not really like watching a movie projected in your head, you know—and I thought I was giving them all the same face because I wasn’t getting enough detail. But it kept happening over and over, and I started seeing more, and I began to understand what was going on. They weren’t men. They were hybrids.”

“Human-alien hybrids?” Kiki demanded, and bounced up in her seat like some middle-school girl who’d just been told the latest teen heartthrob was coming to visit her homeroom class. “For real?”

“Both hands on the wheel.”

“They are!”

For some reason I had the urge to burst out laughing, the juxtaposition between her girlish excitement and Lance’s dour revelations was so extreme, but I managed to hold it in. I doubted Lance would be encouraged to continue if I began giggling uncontrollably.

Still, I couldn’t really believe what he had just said. Sure, I knew aliens existed, and were plotting against us, but there were lines where the borders of complete insanity were crossed, and as far as I was concerned, we had just driven over one of them. “Really? This isn’t
The X-Files
.”

“I’m well aware of that.” He sent me another one of those sideways irritated stares. “I’m telling you what I saw. And what I saw wasn’t human. The hybrids were just part of it.”

“You saw…
them
?” Adam asked. Unlike his girlfriend, he had no need to watch the road, so he had turned around in his seat so he could more or less see the rest of us directly.

“Sometimes. But even those glimpses were enough to tell me they were involved, and heavily. Took me awhile to figure out where all this could possibly be going down, and once I’d gotten what I thought was the truth, I knew I had to leave the program. Couldn’t risk my supervisors learning what I’d seen. I had to let them think I’d just burned out.” Another one of those shrugs, somehow eloquent in its resigned simplicity. “So I took off, but I kept researching what I could. And it became clear pretty fast that the times I’d seen aliens at the base were the times that correlated with high levels of UFO activity in the region. They can cover their tracks a lot of the time, but there are just too many eyes looking at the sky in this part of the world.”

“Wow,” Kiki breathed, even though she’d apparently learned enough not to glance back. “So they’re holding Paul Oliver in a base full of aliens and hybrid clones?”

“Probably.”

“That is so cool.”

I wished I shared her appraisal of the situation. About all I could hope for was that this happened to be one of the times when our little gray friends weren’t hanging around. Hordes of blank-faced clones were bad enough without tossing a bunch of aliens with unknown powers and abilities into the equation.

“And we’re all just going to go barreling in there in our Scooby van and save the day?” I asked.

For a minute, Lance didn’t say anything, but only stared past me, his gaze turned curiously inward. Then he smiled again, but this time the expression didn’t reach his eyes. “No. It’ll be just the three of us when the time comes—Michael, and me…and you.”

My stomach dropped to somewhere in the vicinity of my feet—which were still covered in my Kohl’s flats and not hiking boots, unfortunately. But I made myself think of Paul, alone in that cell, with that inky bruise distorting his eye, and the livid traces of another contusion painting his jaw, and I knew I didn’t have any choice.

For Paul, I was willing to risk everything.

The road ran out a few minutes later, and Kiki limped the van over to a hiding place behind a clump of scrubby juniper trees. I shoved my purse under my seat and hoped I’d be in a position to retrieve it when all this was over.

Everyone climbed out of the van, and I could tell by Kiki’s furrowed brow that she was less than thrilled about being left behind.

“Adam and I can help, you know. I’ve hiked these hills—I know what I’m doing!”

“This isn’t just a hike, Kiki,” Lance said. For some reason, his tone sounded almost gentle. “Besides, what would I say to Kara if something happened to you?”

“And what am I supposed to tell Kara if something happens to you?” she shot back.

I never thought I’d see Lance looking embarrassed, but he did appear distinctly uncomfortable. “Hopefully, you won’t have tell her anything.”

“Hmpf.”

It could have been my imagination, but I thought Adam, who hovered a few inches behind Kiki’s left shoulder, seemed almost relieved about being left behind. I guessed his enthusiasm for chasing UFOs didn’t extend to infiltrating underground bases staffed by human-alien hybrid soldiers.

I couldn’t really blame him.

Michael had been silent for some time. Now he stood a few paces away from the rest of us, watching the looming red rock cliffs with intent dark eyes, as if he saw something hidden there that the rest of us had overlooked. “I know the way.”

“I figured you would,” Lance said.

The older man didn’t smile, but only nodded. “Forty years of climbing these hills helps.”

Of course I didn’t have that sort of background. I didn’t think the few times I’d gone hiking in the Hollywood Hills with one of my exes counted as experience with this sort of expedition. I tried not to look down at my completely inadequate footwear, instead brought up the mental image of Paul in that cramped little cell.

“Lead on, then,” I said, a little more heartily than I’d intended. I guessed I wasn’t fooling anyone.

“You’re brave. That’s good.” And Michael turned and began moving.

Brave? That was a laugh.

Lance looked almost as if he were about to comment, but instead just shook his head and followed in Michael’s footsteps. I noticed how both men seemed to find a way to jog from scrub brush to scrub brush, effectively hiding their movements. I certainly wasn’t trained in the field, but at least they were giving me a good example to follow. I moved after them, then paused for a second to turn back toward Kiki and Adam.

“Keep the motor running,” I said, and Kiki, who’d been looking rather sulky, flashed me a grin.

“Aye-aye, captain.”

The ground sloped upward at a somewhat alarming angle. I’d known we’d have some rough terrain to climb, but I hadn’t realized how quickly it would grow treacherous, how soon the relatively flat land where the road had ended would transform itself into rough slopes cut into gullies by years of rain and weather, how the rocks would give way under my feet, leaving me scrabbling toward the next semi-level spot before I lost my balance completely.

True, I was making the climb in more or less practical flats and not a pair of Louboutin platform pumps, but it was all a matter of degree. Once or twice Lance’s hand shot backward at the last moment before I slipped completely and went ass over teakettle; I couldn’t help noticing that both he and Michael wore heavy-treaded hiking boots, the sort of things my friends and I had derisively referred to as “waffle-stompers” back in our middle-school days. Still, I could see they were a necessity here, allowing the two men to find purchase in the scree, and I was definitely thankful for Lance’s helping hand.

And all along that sensation of cold seemed to work its way up my spine, a perception of some wrongness that plucked at the very molecules in the air. For all his insouciance, I could tell Lance felt it, too. His brow furrowed more than ever, and droplets of sweat that had nothing to do with the chilly day glistened across his brow. And Michael, who climbed as quietly and methodically as a machine, also appeared to be sensing it as well, because once or twice he stopped and thrust his chin upward, as if scenting the air, and then shook, for all the world like my shepherd-mix Elsie used to do back when I was a kid and she crossed a smell she didn’t like on her evening walk.

For myself, I’d like to say I was concentrating so hard on not falling off the side of the mountain that I didn’t have time to sense any bad vibrations or evil vapors or whatever you wanted to call them, but that was far from the truth. The day was cool, but not cold, and I should have worked up a sweat with the way I was exerting myself. Instead, my hands trembled from a chill I couldn’t shake, and the back of my neck was a prickled mass of gooseflesh. The chill I’d sensed emanating from the hybrids back in Raymond’s lab seemed to be intensified tenfold now that I was in the heart of their territory. Whatever we were climbing toward, it was something that every sense in my body—including my sixth one—told me I should be trying to avoid at all costs.

But the heart never listens to common sense, so I pressed on, ignoring the waves of cold flowing over me, the sensation that seemed to build as if an actual physical force pushed back against my every step.

Michael paused and looked back at Lance and me. “You feel it?”

Wordlessly, we both nodded.

“They’re powerful.” Again his chin went up, his profile craggy as the red rocks against the mottled spring sky. Incongruously, he grinned. “But so are we. This way.”

He led us down a narrow little ravine dotted with wind-ravaged juniper, manzanita, and small pincushion cacti. It narrowed as we approached, and then the sky was blotted out as gnarled evergreens met overhead, effectively enclosing us in a living cave.

“Hope you know where you’re going,” Lance commented, his breath sounding a little ragged. I didn’t know whether it was from exertion or from the oppressive atmosphere around us. Maybe both.

“You can’t assault the front gates with only three soldiers,” Michael said. “And so—the back door.”

And that’s just what it was—a metal door set into the hillside, halfway obscured by a particularly tenacious manzanita specimen that had taken up residence directly above its lintel.

“And I suppose they’ve just left it unlocked,” Lance said, with a curl of the lip.

“No need,” Michael replied, and looked over at me.

“What?”

“You must open it, Persephone.”

I fought back the urge to laugh. “Um, Michael, I hate to break it to you, but I’m a psychic, not a Jedi Knight.”

“I know that,” he said imperturbably. “And it doesn’t matter, as long as you believe in your need to free this man.”

When he put it that way…

I approached the door and stared at it for a long moment. It looked like something left over from a Cold War–era fallout shelter, with one of those metal wheels in the center that you’re supposed to turn to get the door to open. Only I knew it had to be locked from the inside. Who builds a top-secret base and leaves the back door open?

Might as well humor Michael…not that I had any alternatives to present, besides going around to the front entrance—wherever that was—and inquiring whether they were done with Paul Oliver and if I could have him back, please?

On that note…

I reached out and grasped the wheel firmly at the nine and three o’clock positions, and tried to turn it. Predictably, nothing happened.

It would have been better if Lance had laughed at me. As it was, I had to force myself to ignore his eyes boring into the back of my neck, as if willing me to fail.

All right, fine. I tightened my fingers on the wheel again and tugged. Still nothing.

Focus. I needed to focus. For a few seconds I shut my eyes, bringing to my mind once again that vision of Paul in his cell, waiting with a sort of hopeless patience. And I thought of how much I wanted to hear his voice again, to feel his arms around me and the touch of his mouth against mine. How I was damned if I was going to let some stupid piece of metal stand between me and the man I loved.

Loved. I really was in big trouble.

Metal gave way with a horrifying screech, and the wheel began to turn. Startled, I lifted my hands, and Michael called out,

“Don’t stop!”

I clamped my fingers around the cold, rusted metal and turned. The ground beneath my feet seemed to shake, and the door slowly swung open—not by much, but enough to let the three of us squeeze past.

“Well done.”

I turned to look back at Michael. “How—what—”

“You don’t need to question. I knew you could do it. Come— Paul is waiting for us.”

He pushed past me and into the opening, followed by Lance, who smiled slightly and said, “Come on, Alice. Time to go down the rabbit hole,” before he disappeared into the side of the mountain as well.

For just a second I hesitated. If anything, the flow of cold and ill will seemed to have increased once the door was open. But I’d just shown myself that I had gifts I didn’t even know I possessed. I’d have to pray they would come to my aid once again.

I took a breath, and followed the two men into the darkness.

A
t first I
couldn’t see anything. I blinked, eyes straining against the black around me. Then I tried to tell myself that the cool, silent darkness should be reassuring. After all, it would’ve been a lot worse if we’d stumbled into a main hallway populated by blank-faced hybrid guards.

I bumped into something hard and lumpy and smelling vaguely of sweat. Lance’s voice snapped at me, “Watch it!”

“Sorry,” I mumbled.

Michael sounded infinitely more at ease. “Lance, we need you now. You saw this place. You know more of it than either Persephone or I.”

I heard Lance expel a breath, followed by a faint scratching noise, as if he had eased his way along the wall a little ways and the zipper of his jacket had caught on the rock wall. “Give me a minute.”

“Of course.”

I wished I had some of Michael’s tranquility, or failing that, even slightly less jumpy nerves. The dark and the oppressive air around us probably had something to do with it, although it seemed that—for the moment—no one had detected our presence inside the base.

The silence was almost absolute. If there was any activity at the facility, human or otherwise, it had to be a long way from where we were. Although that notion should have reassured me, instead it just reminded me that we’d only taken the first step, that we were still a long way from finding Paul or getting him out of here.

Then I heard Lance say, in a low monotone unlike his usual speaking voice, “Ten levels. Five entrances—six, if you count this one, but no one uses it.” A long pause. “Detention areas are on the eighth level. There’s a bank of elevators north of here…two hundred yards.”

“Elevators?” I demanded. He couldn’t be thinking of us just marching into an elevator and sailing down to the eighth level. Just because there weren’t any guards in evidence up in this forgotten corner didn’t mean the elevators wouldn’t be crawling with guards.

“Shh,” said Michael.

Lance took in a breath. “Stairs…fifty yards from here. Not used much.”

“Now, that’s more like it,” I muttered. Maybe we could get in and out without anyone noticing us. Right. I was willing to believe there could be forgotten stairways tucked into unused corners of the base, but I sort of doubted the detention level would be unmanned. No, there were probably guards and security cameras and laser alarms and God knows what else.

And that was only if we actually made it all the way down there without someone—or something—discovering us.

“Show us,” Michael said, and I heard rather than saw Lance slip past the older man, going farther into the tunnel. “You next,” Michael added. “I’ll bring up the rear.”

Fine by me. I wasn’t afraid to admit to a bit of cowardice. Besides if some alien-human hybrid got the jump on us from behind, Michael Lightfoot was far better suited to fighting him off than I would be. The man might have twenty years on me, but he looked tough and solidly built, whereas I had never even mustered the energy to take the self-defense classes Ginger had advised I take—“a girl can never be too careful,” she’d told me, and I had to admit she was probably right. Then again, I sort of doubted she had envisioned the sort of mess I currently found myself in. More likely, she’d been thinking of fighting off purse snatchers in the parking garage at the Beverly Center.

The tunnel or hallway or whatever it was sloped downward somewhat, but other than that I had absolutely no idea which way we were going. Apparently my bump of direction didn’t work so well underground.

Luckily, I wasn’t the one in the lead, and Lance did seem to have some idea of where to go. After a few minutes he stopped. “Here.” And I heard the creak of a door opening, followed by a flood of light.

All right, it was actually more of a trickle. But after the complete black through which we’d just been traveling, even the wan fluorescent lights in the stairwell seemed blinding. I blinked, and followed Lance down the stairs, with Michael’s footfalls behind me impossibly soft, even though he wore heavy hiking boots and the steps were made of diamond-patterned steel, the sort of thing you saw sometimes on heavy-duty truck bumpers.

I kept count as we descended, and so I knew when we hit the eighth level. The steps continued on below us; of course, since Lance had said there were ten levels to the facility. And that was frightening in its own way, that something as big and as complex as this base had apparently been built right under the noses of the local population, with no one but the most extreme of the alien theorists and UFO chasers even guessing at its existence. How many layers were there of this conspiracy? How in the hell had I ever thought I could do something to stop it?

As far as I knew, I didn’t say anything, but Michael laid a quick, reassuring hand on my wrist. “We only need to focus on the task at hand. The bigger picture can wait.”

Great, I’m just surrounded by psychics
. I managed a wan smile, though. Maybe that’s what it required—a group of three, each with his or her own skill set. I knew I couldn’t have gotten this far without Lance and Michael, and conversely, they wouldn’t be here without my help. After all, I was the one who had somehow managed to get us past the heavy door at the end of the canyon.

“So what now?” I asked. “Because I’m pretty sure we can’t just open that door—” and I jerked a thumb toward a gray-painted structure that looked as if it might have worked at Fort Knox in a past life— “and go sailing in there.”

“Lance?”

He’d been standing near the doorway, head tilted to one side, eyes half-closed. “I’m not getting much. There’s someone—or something—out there, but I can’t get a grasp on it. I don’t think I ever saw this level, but only the upper ones where they do the research.”

“All right.” Michael turned toward me. “You try.”

“Me?” I shook my head. “Look, I’ve already said I’m no clairvoyant—”

“And yet you saw Paul, were taken away so strongly that you lost almost fifteen minutes in the vision. You can do this.”

It must be nice to have such an unshakable faith. But he was right—I had done something similar, and less than an hour earlier. Maybe my proximity to Paul would help, would strengthen my inner eye and allow me to see even the things with which I didn’t have a direct connection.

Drawn by some instinct, I moved closer to the door but didn’t touch it. Instead, I stood there, only a few inches away from its metal surface, and thought of Paul, who was now so very close. I closed my eyes, and saw.

His cell was on this floor, at the far end of the level from the stairwell where we were currently hidden. I could feel his energy, sense it pulsing outward, so very different from the other men who populated the floor.

Men. That was using the term loosely, because although they looked human enough, it was their vibrations that seemed to be the source of the wrongness, as if the very air was offended by their existence. Whoever the original “donor” had been, he was good-looking enough…and yet seeing those regular features duplicated over and over seemed to distort them, twist them away from their original symmetry. And even in a high-security facility such as this, you’d think that men stationed on guard duty together would have some contact with one another, some sort of conversation. Not these; they were silent as if carved from stone, and yet I could feel their energy pulsing beneath the surface, darkly, vibrantly alive. I knew then that they were communicating, just not verbally. And if one of them knew something, then all of them would.

I swallowed. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“He’s there,” I told my two companions. “Other end of the floor…of course. There are ten of those hybrid guards on this level, and more on the floors directly above and below. I’m not sure how many. I suppose it doesn’t matter all that much, since ten are too many for us to deal with anyway. And if even one of them raises the alarm, then we’re done.”

“Any ideas?” Lance asked, and for once he didn’t sound mocking. Just worried.

Well, he must be worried if he was asking for tactical advice from me. Obviously a full frontal assault wasn’t going to work, since we weren’t armed, and even if we were, it wouldn’t have mattered much, since it was ten against three and I didn’t even know how to shoot a gun, let alone take out a bunch of trained soldiers enhanced with alien DNA.

What we did have, though, were three people with some highly unusual talents, talents that we could possibly put to use in this situation. Although I had sensed intelligence in the hybrids, I hadn’t sensed much in the way of individuation. Ants and bees weren’t known for having distinct personalities, and I thought that possibly the same sort of dynamic was at work here. If we could fool one of them, maybe we could fool them all.

I’d heard of psychics who were able to use the sheer power of their mind to fool others or coerce them into doing things they would never have contemplated if they’d been in full possession of their faculties. That was a very gray area in the paranormal world, and of course one I’d never done much in the way of investigating. My talents really didn’t lie in that direction, even if I’d had the inclination to abuse them in such a fashion. However, I didn’t have much compunction about using them on the hybrids. I wasn’t sure you could even count them as true people. Besides, I wasn’t going to try to make them jump off the building, or light themselves on fire, or even squawk like a chicken. No, I just wanted them all to be otherwise occupied for the next few minutes so they wouldn’t notice a prisoner being sneaked out right under their identical noses.

“I have no idea if this is going to work,” I said. “But I’m going to try to distract them. Just be ready.”

“Ready for what?” Lance asked. For once I didn’t see anything in his face except worry. He was probably thinking I’d bitten off more than I could chew.

Well, I was feeling approximately the same way, but I knew I didn’t have much of a choice, since we hadn’t armed ourselves with knockout gas or Uzis.

It probably would have been better if I could have stayed behind and worked from the stairwell; it was always easier to concentrate if I were alone. However, since Paul probably didn’t know Michael and Lance from Adam—and because I knew I didn’t want to have to wait a second longer than necessary to see him again—I inched out in front of the two men and paused for a second, focusing on the discordant sensations from the hybrids who waited only a few yards away from us.

As I’d sensed earlier, there were ten of them. Two stood directly in front of the door to Paul’s cell. Three more were clustered in the center of the detention level, where I thought the elevators were located. A single guard waited at the far end of that floor—near a service elevator, from what I could tell. The other four were ranged up and down the corridor, one of them so close I probably could have hit him with a well-placed softball throw.

But I wasn’t armed with a softball. All I had was my mind and my will and my need to have Paul returned to me.

I took a breath, then another. Just a distraction, something to pull them away long enough that we could get to Paul’s cell. I had a flash then of the cell door, of the key card–operated lock next to it. Wonderful. All right, a distraction that would also make at least one of them drop his key card.

Thought is energy. Brain waves can be measured. Simple electrical pulses. The trick was making those pulses have an effect in the physical world.

As one, the hybrids’ walkie-talkies began squawking. “Code red! Code red! All units investigate possible intruder on Level 7!”

Both Lance and Michael stared at me.

“What are you looking at?” I snapped. “This is only going to work until they figure out there’s nothing going on up on Level 7.”

And in my mind’s eye I saw them converging on the elevator.

Key card
, I thought, and that same inner eye showed me one of the guards stumbling, a piece of plastic falling from what should have a secure pocket of his jumpsuit. Perfect.

“Let’s go!”

I didn’t wait to see if the two men were following me. Time was wasting, and the elevator doors had just closed on the ten hybrids. The window had already begun to shut.

Breaking into a run, I headed down the corridor to the spot where I knew Paul’s cell was located. A brief pause to bend down and pick up the dropped key card, and then it was on to the end of the hall, to the blank steel door with the card reader glowing red next to it.

One swipe, and the door opened. Of course it would. At that point, no one knew anything was wrong.

I burst in, closely followed by Lance and Michael, and saw Paul standing in front of his cot. The look of wariness on his face melted away into utter shock.

“Persephone? How—” He looked past me to my two companions. “Who—”

“We don’t have time for that,” I broke in. “These are friends.”

“Hi, I’m Luke Skywalker—I’m here to rescue you,” Lance said, with an evil grin.

“And we really don’t have time for that, either,” I snapped. And as much as I wanted to run to Paul and wrap my arms around him, I knew that would take up far too many precious seconds.

In fact, we were already running out of time. The low-level dissonance of the hybrids in the back of my mind altered to sharp spikes of frustration and anger.

“They know they were sent on a wild-goose chase. We’ve got to go now!”

“Back to the stairs,” Michael said.

We all headed for the door and turned to go back in the direction we’d come. A wave of cold hit me, and I said, “No—they’re already coming back down the elevator. We’ll never get past in time.”

To my astonishment, Paul remarked, deadpan, “When you came in here, didn’t you have a plan for getting out?”

“Call me the brains, and I’ll kick your ass,” I told Lance, whose gray eyes had taken on a glint I’d already begun to recognize. “To the service elevator.” And I pointed back along the corridor, past Paul’s now-empty cell.

“Do you know where it comes out?”

“No,” I admitted. “But it’s better than just standing here, right?”

“True.” He moved closer, took my hand in his. Just the feel of his fingers around mine was enough to reassure me that somehow we’d be able to get out of this mess. “Let’s go.”