Manna From Heaven (2 page)

An only modestly successful country and western singer, she had to admit. Otherwise she would never have allowed herself to be cajoled into doing this.

“All you have to do is drive the Jeep about a mile inside the park and let the animals in the back go free. What’s the big deal about that?” That was how the job had been broached to her.

“And for this I get paid two hundred dollars?” Charlie had responded skeptically.

“Yep.”

The persuasion had come from her sister Marisol, who was also her sometime singing partner—when they performed together, they billed themselves as the Sugar Babes—and the new owner, by way of a day job and about ten thousand dollars of carefully saved earnings, of County-wide Critter Ridders. The fledgling business billed itself as being able to rid residences of any and all unwelcome species of wildlife that had for one reason or another decided that sharing a home with humans was not half bad. Usually the humans disagreed, which was
where Critter Ridders came in. For the right price, they (at the moment,
they
consisted of Marisol, her boyfriend Mark Greenberg, and Howie Stubbs, the previous owner, who was training them) would remove and relocate anything. Not kill, but move to a new home in a sylvan setting where creatures of the wild
should
live. The usually well-to-do homeowners who availed themselves of Critter Ridders’ services liked the idea of that. They didn’t want to kill Bambi. They just didn’t want him living in their garage.

“So what’s the catch? We’re not talking bears or anything, are we?” Charlie had known her sister long enough to be cautious. Marisol had a talent for trouble—or, more properly, for getting Charlie into trouble—that she had been honing since they were toddlers.

“Squirrels, chipmunks, maybe a bird or a raccoon—no man-eaters, I promise,” Marisol had said airily. Then, with a wheedling smile at her sister, she’d added, “Come
on,
Charlie. Mark and I just want the one night off to celebrate his birthday. Howie’s going to pick up the animals and load them for us. All I need you to do is drive. It’s not like you have anything better to do. You and Rick go out for Sunday brunch, and then on Wednesday and Friday nights, world without end. This is Thursday. So please?”

Put that way, Charlie’s love life sounded positively dull, which she supposed it was. Rick Rozen was a big blond who coached football at St. Xavier High. Their dating schedule had long since settled into a comfortable groove dictated by Rick’s need to have everything in life be on a schedule. Charlie was starting to find Rick and his schedule a little boring—all right, a whole lot
boring—but he was good-looking and had a good job and, as Marisol pointed out, wouldn’t be lacking for offers if Charlie cut him loose. Charlie hadn’t even realized that she was thinking about cutting him loose until Marisol said that, but Marisol had, because she knew her little sister pretty darn well, as she frequently pointed out. Charlie’s elder by two years, Marisol was, at twenty-nine, a tall, voluptuous, redheaded beauty with the personality of an army general and the determination of a bulldozer. As far as facial features went—oval-shaped, high-cheekboned faces, big blue eyes, delicate noses, wide, full-lipped mouths—Charlie and Marisol looked enough alike to be twins. But Charlie’s build was far more slender than her sister’s, even taking into account the D-cup implants that Marisol unashamedly admitted to, and Charlie’s thick mane of shoulder-length hair was a quieter honey blond. And her personality was nowhere near as forceful as her sister’s. Charlie could generally be counted on to go along to get along, a trait which (unless it was benefiting someone else at her expense) Marisol thoroughly approved of.

Only Charlie was getting tired of it. She had always been the good girl in the family to Marisol’s bad one, and now everyone expected her to behave that way, and the
role was getting old. A touch of excitement in her
life would be a good thing. An exciting
man
in her life would be a good thing. Put it this way: If one suddenly dropped into her lap, she wouldn’t turn him down.

Or would she? The truth was, she probably would. If a truly exciting man came into her life he would probably strike her as being too much of a risk. Her choices tended to be safe ones, and exciting was something that
happened to someone else, not Charlotte Elizabeth Bates.

Tonight was a case in point. Hanging onto the steering wheel with both hands and leaning slightly forward as she strained to see through the darkness, Charlie cursed her own people-pleaser nature. Even if she ended up getting her throat ripped out by a wrathful raccoon, as at the moment seemed entirely possible, she had no room to complain, she scolded herself. She deserved exactly what she got.

After vowing not to, she’d given into Marisol’s entreaties
again.

The raccoon snarled and rattled the bars of its cage as forcefully as a convict demanding release.
Maybe a raccoon,
Marisol had said, oh, so casually. Well, this thing was as big as a bear cub and as mean as a badger. Charlie couldn’t help it: Shivering, she glanced in the rearview mirror, which, as the raccoon’s cage was wedged in with the others in the cargo area behind the backseat, allowed her to see precisely nothing.

The creature could be loose, and she wouldn’t know about it until it leaped on her.

Sadie moaned. Charlie knew just how she felt.

“Just a little bit farther.” Charlie realized as she said it that she was trying to comfort herself as much as Sadie. Not that the idea of reaching her destination was precisely comforting. Once there, she had to don the special gloves and mask and overalls that Marisol had provided, lift the cages from the rear cargo compartment of the Jeep, set them on the ground and open the doors.

And then leap back inside the Jeep until the animals chose to vacate the premises, at which point she was
supposed to load the empty cages up again and return to home base.

What
had she been thinking? Marisol’s offer of two hundred dollars for a simple drive into the countryside was beginning to make sense. It was really more in the nature of combat pay.

There were other animals in the back besides the raccoon. A skunk, for one. A ticked-off skunk beat a ticked-off raccoon for sheer unadulterated unpleasantness any time, as Howie had told Charlie with a cackle when she had accepted the keys to the loaded Jeep from him. But this one was tranquilized—Howie informed her proudly that he’d hidden the dose in a section of apple—and peacefully asleep.

So what was she supposed to do when it came time to set it free, Charlie wondered for the first time with a touch of hysteria: Upend the cage and tip the poor drugged creature out beside the road?

She would, she decided, cross that bridge when she came to it.

The rest of her cargo—a possum and its kits, a barn owl, and an eight-foot long black king snake that made her shudder every time she thought about it—were awake, but more or less behaving themselves. Only the raccoon was throwing a hissy fit.

It was just after midnight. The song on the radio crackled, then sputtered away into static. After fiddling with the dial for a moment without success, Charlie turned the radio off. From past visits to the area, she knew that the surrounding mountains blocked all transmissions from here on out, including those of cell phones. Hers, in her purse on the floorboard beneath
Sadie, was now useless, which was, she reflected, something she was better off not dwelling on. A small green rectangular sign flashed by:
CHEATHAM WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT AREA
, ten miles. Thank God, she was almost there.

The two-lane highway was deserted. Although the mountains rose up to scrape the sky to the north and east, this particular stretch of road was relatively flat. Grassy fields interrupted only by the occasional stand of trees stretched endlessly all around. The fast-flowing Cumberland River ran parallel to the road perhaps a half mile away, visible occasionally when a bend in its course brought it closer. The last sign of civilization had been a self-service gas station some fifteen minutes back. Which meant, essentially, that she and Sadie and the zoo in the rear were alone in the wilderness.

Except for the light in the southern sky, that is. Charlie had first noticed it when the Jeep had topped that last rise. At the time, it had been distant, noticable only because the October night was so very dark, threatening rain, with clouds obscuring any hint of a moon or stars and fog creeping in from the river to cover the low places in the road. The light was beneath the clouds, way low for an airplane if that’s what it was, and way bright.

Too bright? she wondered, watching as it drew nearer. And didn’t airplane lights shine straight ahead? It almost seemed as if this light was directed at the ground, like a spotlight or a searchlight or something.

The rattling of the raccoon’s cage reminded her that she had more immediate problems than a too low, too bright light.

Sadie whined. A glance showed Charlie that the six
pound dog was sitting up now and looking anxiously at her.

“I know. I should keep my eyes on the road.”

But with the best will in the world to do so, Charlie could not ignore the light. She barely had to lift her eyes from the gleaming surface of the asphalt to see it now. It was closer, brighter, and seemed to be coming straight toward the Jeep.

Could it be a UFO?

The thought popped into her mind from the part of her brain that enjoyed
X-Files
and Stephen King novels, only to be immediately dismissed. She did
not
believe in UFOs. At least, not when it was daylight and she was within shouting distance of another human being. Tonight, on this deserted stretch of foggy highway with only her tiny dog and a bevy of disgruntled forest friends for company, the existence of UFOs suddenly did not seem quite so farfetched.

It occurred to her that the shining twin beams of her headlights made her about as visible to the craft in the sky as its light made it to her.

Charlie was possessed of a sudden, almost irresistible impulse to douse her lights. Don’t be an idiot, she scolded herself. She was not going to spook herself into a crash.

But no matter how hard she tried to focus on the highway to the exclusion of all else, the light was now impossible to ignore. Whatever the flying object was—an airplane or a helicopter were the only possibilities, of course—it was heading straight toward her. In just a few minutes the Jeep would be illuminated by the beam.

Alien abduction were the two words that popped into her head.

Which was ridiculous. She knew it. Casting a nervous glance at her instrument panel to make sure none of the dials were gyrating wildly—she would have had a heart attack there and then if they were—she stepped on the gas. From experience she knew that a thick stand of trees lay not more than two miles ahead.

If she could just scoot beneath the trees before the light reached her, she would be safe—wouldn’t she?

She wasn’t going to make it. Her speedometer read sixty, seventy—an insane speed for this stretch of road—and yet the Jeep suddenly seemed to be moving in slow motion. The light was close now, just a couple of hundred feet away and closing fast, its blinding beam illuminating the tall grass in the fields beneath it. The light was beside the Jeep,
on
the Jeep, its brightness lighting up the inside of the vehicle as
if it
were the middle of the day.

Ridiculous or not, all she could think was: tractor beam. Designed to pull her and her vehicle up inside the craft. Any minute now, she would be paralyzed, and the Jeep’s wheels would leave the road.

Sadie whimpered in sympathy.

Charlie’s heart pounded. Her mouth went dry. She stomped the gas, pressing the pedal to the metal with a vengeance. The Jeep’s rear wheels squealed as she peeled away from the light.

Something crashed into the roof of the Jeep with the force of a falling boulder. There was a sudden loud thud just above her head. Charlie cried out, ducked and instinctively hit the brake. The tires shrieked. Though she fought to keep it on the road, the Jeep went out of control. It shot over the gravel shoulder and into the
adjacent field, jerking and bouncing and sliding sideways as it went. For one blank, horrible moment as she wrestled the steering wheel, all Charlie could think of was that she could no longer see where she was going. Then she realized that the reason she couldn’t see was because a black-clad body—a human body—was plastered across her windshield. A pale face rested almost directly in front of hers. Blood poured from its mouth. Its wide open eyes stared at her through the glass.

Charlie screamed. The Jeep crashed with an ear-shattering bang, and she was thrown forward as it came to an instant, jarring halt. The body flew off the hood, vanishing into the tall sea of grass beyond the vehicle.

For a moment after the Jeep stopped moving, she simply sat where she was, stunned. Her face rested in a smothering pillow; the world had turned white. It took just seconds for her to realize that the air bag had inflated. Then it deflated, leaving her leaning limply against her seat belt and staring out through the windshield into a field of tall golden grass that was partially illuminated by the one working headlight. The other, like the entire right front of the Jeep, had plowed into a tree.

A pitiful-sounding whine drew her gaze sideways. The blue cushion was no longer on the seat beside her. Neither was her dog.

“Sadie!” Charlie called in an unsteady voice. The passenger compartment seemed to be intact, although the impact had severely damaged the Jeep’s exterior. Sadie had been flung forward with no seat belt or air bag to cushion her flight; please God she wasn’t hurt. Charlie called her again.

Looking as shaken as Charlie felt, Sadie clambered out of the passenger side footwell into her arms. Charlie did a quick check. The dog was trembling, but seemed unharmed.

Oh my God, Charlie thought, gathering Sadie close and burying her face in the dog’s satiny coat as she remembered the body on the windshield. I’ve run over someone!