Desert Assassin (3 page)

Twelve minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot of Killer Two’s Diner for the first time. It was two in the afternoon. The diner was empty. He walked in and proceeded to slowly check out all the memorabilia. After sitting down at the counter, he called out, “Where’s Killer Two?”

The big man stepped out of the kitchen, walked up to the counter and asked in return, “Who wants to know?”

Williams stood up, extended his right hand and said, “You ever hear about Kowalski’s trip to Japan with Haystacks Calhoun?”

Killer Two all but screamed, “You know about the mailbag?”

Williams nodded.

The two men proceeded to recount what they had heard about the infamous mailbag episode. While the details were somewhat different, the endings of both versions were the same.

According to legend, Kowalski and Calhoun had traveled with nine other wrestlers by plane to Japan in the early 1960s. The plane flew from Los Angeles to Hawaii and then from Hawaii to Japan where the wrestlers were scheduled to put on a number of exhibitions.

Calhoun, at a reputed 601 pounds, was a prodigious eater and supposedly had bowel movements which were few and far between. However, when he did go, he made up for lost time. During the second leg, he needed to take care of business. Unfortunately, he couldn’t fit in the lone lavatory at the rear of the plane.

The need became an emergency. One of the wrestlers dumped the contents out of a mailbag which was located in the galley. The galley was in the center of the passenger section with openings on both sides. Calhoun went into the galley to use the mailbag, while two wrestlers held up blankets covering the openings as best they could.

Minutes passed and then a series of loud noises, almost explosions, could be heard emanating from the galley. The two guardians tried to hold their positions, but gave up after a valiant effort. Dropping the blankets, they raced to the back of the plane.

True, half-true or false, it didn’t matter. Williams and Killer Two laughed to tears after comparing versions of the legendary flight. Finally composing himself, Killer Two said, “Whatever you want, it’s on the house.”

Not wanting to take advantage of his new found friend, Williams settled for a hamburger and black coffee. While he was eating, Killer Two sauntered over to the counter. “You know how Calhoun once beat Killer by cheating?”

“No,” said Williams as he prepared himself for more entertainment.

“Killer used to drive between most matches and always had a tennis ball with him. He’d steer the car with one hand and squeeze the ball with the other one. He would switch hands back and forth. After doing this for a few months, he developed a super strong grip. This is how he invented the claw hold. Mainly he’d jam his thumb in to the stomach of his opponent causing big time pain. “Once he became famous for using the claw hold, he began to be asked if it would work on Haystacks given the amount of fat protecting his stomach. When the two were matched up, Killer got Haystacks on his back in the center of the ring. Getting on his knees, he dug his thumb into the blubber so hard that he started to scream.”

“Who, Calhoun?”

“No, no, Killer. Finally, he pressed so hard that Haystacks passed gas. The smell was so bad that Killer almost passed out. Haystacks rolled over and pinned him.”

When Williams stopped laughing, Killer Two said, “How about some pie for desert?”

Williams thought about it and replied, “I think I’ll pass on it.”

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

H
AVING RETURNED HOME FROM HIS TRIP
to buy the Geiger counter, Williams turned his attention to the photos. He uploaded them to his laptop and began viewing the meteorite. If nothing else, the close to spherical shape made it a most unusual find. There were no meteorites in the photos he had looked at online that were close to being round. All were irregular in shape.

There was more. Several of the zoom shots showed what appeared to be a thin, vertical five to six-inch crack. There was a small spot at the bottom of the crack which didn’t appear to be part of the meteorite.

It had been a long day. After completing the examination of the photos, he went to bed earlier than usual and without the customary Merlot/doo-wop enhanced stay on the porch.

He woke up early the next morning. Following a shower and breakfast, Williams added a wooden box to the contents of the jeep. If the Geiger counter showed the meteorite not to be radioactive, Williams planned to bring it back to his garage.

Although he was trained to keep his emotions in check at all times, he could not help but feel a rush of excitement as he drove back to the meteorite. Having read that only one meteorite, found in Japan, was known to have any measurable radioactivity, he knew the chances of this one being dangerously radioactive were almost nil. Nevertheless, his years in the military demanded he take no chances when dealing with something out of his sphere of expertise. He walked slowly from the jeep with Geiger counter in hand to the meteorite. Nothing. “Good,” thought Williams.

Turning his attention to the spot, he was uncharacteristically startled. It was still quite small, but was visibly larger than what the photos showed it to be a day earlier. Beyond that, it appeared to be a very thick, dark red liquid which was imperceptibly leaking from the base of the crack.

He sat in the sand no more than two feet from the meteorite and stared. As the coming days would confirm, he fortunately resisted the temptation to touch the spot. Bringing the meteorite back to the garage was no longer a consideration. Williams continued to focus on the spot for nearly two hours, primarily to see if he could detect any expansion or movement. He didn’t. However, several times he had an eerie feeling that the spot was aware of his presence.

Four days passed with Williams making early morning, noon and late afternoon visits to the meteorite. The spot continued to expand at an agonizingly slow pace. Most intriguing was that rather than dropping directly down into the surrounding sand which was three inches below the bottom of the crack, the spot retained a near perfect coin shape, seemingly clinging to the meteorite. When it finally reached the sand, it kept the circular shape as it began to spread on the surface.

On the morning after the sixth day following the discovery of the meteorite, the spot was approximately seven inches in diameter, no more than a quarter inch thick and the top of it had pulled away from the bottom of the crack. No more of the liquid – if that was what it was – could be seen oozing. No longer a spot, two days later what was best described as being a disk was situated entirely on the sand surrounding the meteorite and was an inch removed from it. Williams was now convinced he was dealing with a life form.

Once the disk began moving on the sand, Williams increasingly began to wonder whether he should attempt to destroy it. To do so, however, would be to destroy what might be one of the greatest discoveries of all time. It was at this time that he also began to think about contacting his former girlfriend, Alice Fay Henderson, and the General.

Two more days passed. The disk was several feet removed from the meteorite and headed directly toward the nearest vegetation, a clump of desert grass no more than two feet away.

When he returned to the house that morning, Williams found on the front steps what he had been waiting to be delivered, a package containing a camcorder with an advertised battery life of twelve hours. He raced back to the disk, set the camcorder four feet from it and hit the record button.

Instead of afternoon repair work, he opted to put himself through a longer than usual two hour workout. Following the workout, he showered and then searched the internet to read as much as he could about exobiology. That occupied him until late afternoon when he retrieved the camcorder. The disk had closed the gap by an additional six inches and appeared poised to reach the grass the next day.

The evening was spent watching the video taken by the camcorder and trying the figure out how the disk, or “Thing” as he began to think of it, managed to move. He conjured up the name remembering having once watched on a late-night television show the 1951 science fiction film,
The Thing from Another World,
which came to be known simply as
The Thing.

It was back to the meteorite and Thing shortly after dawn. He wasn’t surprised to see it had picked up speed during the night and was only four inches away from the clump of grass. The grass occupied about a four square foot area. He set up the camcorder and waited. Thing reached the grass two hours later.

Williams, who prided himself on being ready for any eventuality in any situation, was totally unprepared for happened next. Initially, Thing slowly rolled over a few blades of grass, flattening them in the process. It stopped. The small section of grass disappeared. Thing seemed to swell slightly. Then it suddenly picked up speed, as if energized by the grass. Within ten minutes, all the grass had been flattened and had vanished in the process, seemingly ingested by Thing which swelled to the shape of a dome close to five inches in height. It stopped with nothing appearing to happen for the next hour.

Thing continued to remain motionless. Williams left the camcorder running and went back to the house. He returned twice, and both times found that Thing hadn’t moved. With the sun about to set behind the distant mountains, he gathered up the camcorder and returned home for the night.

Needing to decompress after what he had witnessed during the day, Williams spent close to three hours slowly sipping Merlot and listening to doo-wop. Trying to analyze what was happening and to figure out a course of action, he speculated as to what might happen if Thing encountered a small animal, an insect or a large arachnid such as a tarantula or an emperor scorpion similar to one he had tangled with in Africa. Instinctively, he knew what the result would be.

Questions by the dozens flashed into his consciousness. What the hell was it? Where did it come from? How did it survive what must have been thousands, millions or even billions of years trapped in what was then a meteoroid? Did it possess intelligence? Of what was it composed? Left unchecked, how big could it get? On and on came the questions. With them came no answers.

Williams didn’t know whether he was relieved or disappointed the next morning when he found that Thing hadn’t moved during the night. He set up the camcorder, watched for a few minutes and then left as it remained stationary. Three trips later, including one at dusk, nothing had changed.

“Perhaps,” he briefly thought, “the grass somehow poisoned Thing.” He quickly dismissed the thought. He wondered what would happen if he poked Thing with a stick, but decided that was not a good idea.

Back at the house, Williams put together a tuna salad for dinner and then spent his porch time once again trying to make sense of what was happening.

Thing began to flatten slowly three days later. When it had finished, it was over nine inches in diameter with only a slight increase in thickness. Looking at the transformation, Williams pondered whether Thing’s flattened shape was its natural one or whether it was caused by Earth’s gravity. It certainly did not seem to be an efficient one with respect to travel. If its species, if indeed there was one, existed on another planet, chances were that the planet’s gravity was much less than that of Earth. But, then again, if it had hundreds of tiny legs, perhaps the shape was well suited to its survival there – and possibly on Earth. Also, what was transpiring within it while in the dome shape? Obviously, it used the grass to increase its size, but what else?

Nearly forty minutes after it had fully re-flattened, it began moving in the direction of another clump of grass about four feet away. It was also the nearest vegetation. Williams decided it was time to act. He drove back to the house and returned with a four-foot long two-by-four and placed it directly in Thing’s path two feet from the grass. As soon as he did so, Thing stopped. Ten minutes later, it started up again, but at an angle which would allow it to go around the right side of the barricade. Williams was impressed not only by the change in direction, but the increase in Thing’s speed. No longer imperceptible, it was moving along as would the slowest of snails.

“The damn thing seems to be able to think,” Williams said quietly. He then speculated as to whether Thing was aware of his presence.

Williams remained confident that he could control, at least for the moment, what he knew to be an alien. As a result, he once again dismissed any thought of destroying it as he watched it approach the second clump of desert grass. Every last blade of grass was gone before fifteen minutes had elapsed. Thing was back in the shape of a dome.

Three days passed with no movement. Early into day four, Thing reverted to its flattened shape, but now it was just over a foot in diameter. Shortly thereafter, it began moving toward a three foot high shrub. Looking at the size and thickness of the shrub, Williams couldn’t imagine how Thing would tackle something that was about three feet in height and just as wide at its greatest diameter. It was moving faster than it ever had and Williams estimated it would arrive at the shrub by mid-morning the following day.

Thing was a little more than two feet away from the shrub at 6:00AM the following day and there, in its path about a foot in front of Thing, was an assassin bug poised and ready. A little over an inch in length, it was dwarfed by Thing. However, it held its position as its slow-moving adversary approached. As was to be expected, Williams was mesmerized.

During his first year in the desert region, in addition to the repair work, Williams exercised no less than an hour daily and read as much as he could about animal and plant life in the desert. He was familiar with the traits of the assassin bug. It was not afraid to engage a larger opponent and had as its main weapon the ability to deliver a sometimes lethal dose of a toxin. Assassin bugs survived by siphoning off blood from their victims, usually other insects. However, some species of assassin bugs, such as cone-nosed bugs and kissing bugs, extracted blood from mammals rather than insects. Williams wasn’t certain, but he suspected he was looking at a cone-nosed bug.

Thing finally made it to within a quarter inch of the assassin bug. The bug struck, undoubtedly attempting to inject its toxin. In what had to be no more than two seconds, Thing rolled into a three-inch ball engulfing its over matched victim. Ten minutes later, Thing rolled under the shrub and stopped. It did not move for four days.

During the entire time of the confrontation, Williams uttered a single word, “Damn.”

He spent a significant amount of time monitoring Thing during those four days. Late into the fourth day, Thing began to vibrate and continued to do so for eighteen minutes. As the vibrating stopped, it began to flatten. When the transformation was completed, it appeared to be about the same thickness as it was before the encounter with the assassin bug and no bigger in diameter. However, it had a slightly oval shape with what appeared to be two small antennae at the end of one of the elongations. Thing then turned so that the antennae pointed toward Williams.

Williams watched for an hour as Thing remained stationary. “What do I do now?” he asked himself.