The Druid Gene (4 page)

S
omething woke
Darcy from a deep sleep.

She’d been dreaming about something that seemed important, but she couldn’t remember what that was. Possibly it was something frightening after the stress of the day before. Surely that was why her heart was pounding and why she felt frozen, afraid to move or breathe.

She waited, listening. A cool breeze ruffled her hair, bringing with it the fleeting sound of crunching steps over the stone near the top of the gorge, as well as hissing and something rhythmically clacking together. She didn’t know what it was and that bothered her. Something told her that the sounds were some kind of large animal vocalizations, but she couldn’t put her finger on what kind of animals they might be.

The sounds came and went with the caprice of the wind. They played tricks on her mind. She could almost believe the animals were speaking two different languages to each other, one comprised of low-pitched hissing tones, the other of clicks and clacks.

It was surreal. She felt suddenly cold and more than a little frightened. She shrank down and prayed she was dreaming, though it seemed far too real to be a dream.

Adam had said there was no evidence of any animals in the area and she had trusted that he knew what he was talking about. She was aware that there were plenty of snakes, birds, lizards, and scorpions in the Sonoran Desert, but she sensed that these things that she was listening to, whatever they were, were much larger than that.

They were coming closer. It almost seemed like they were arguing. She would hear the low hiss, it would rise in volume—its tone becoming more belligerent—and then it would be cut off by the staccato clacking. Perhaps the two animals were having some kind of territorial dispute.

She went through a mental checklist of all the kinds of desert wildlife she knew of, trying to pinpoint what it might be. She needed to figure out if it was a threat or if it could be ignored.

It wasn’t a bobcat or a coyote. They wouldn’t make those kinds of sounds. Predators would be nearly silent and solitary. They certainly wouldn’t have a prolonged interaction with another animal. It could be a mule deer or a javelina, just stumbling around up there, looking for food in the scrub, maybe. But somehow that didn’t seem plausible either.

She moved slowly, deliberately, until her lips were touching Adam’s ear and her hand was on his chest. She jostled him and whispered, “Adam!”

He shifted and turned his head, one eye peering at her. His lips smacked together like there was a bad taste in his mouth. “What?” he asked, full baritone.

She shushed him harshly and then strained to listen for any sign that he’d been heard.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, a little more quietly.

“There’s something up there. Something big. Listen.”

He grunted and rolled onto his back. “I don’t hear anything.”

She didn’t either. Had they gone away or were they listening now, too?

After a few minutes, he sighed and went for the zipper.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m awake. I’m going to pee. Is that okay?”

She felt silly all of a sudden. She was acting like a hysterical person. She didn’t need him to protect her. It was probably part wild animals, part distortion of sound on the wind, part dark-night childish fears with a hefty dose of imagination fueling the paranoia she was feeling.

Adam didn’t wait for an answer. He peeled back the zipper and crawled out. A rush of cold air snuck into the bag as he staggered away with a flashlight. She patted the bag down around her and huddled on her side with the bag pulled up to her nose.

Then she saw the dark outline of something large skimming the rim of the gorge with its nose pointed toward the center, blotting out the stars. Nearly silent, it seemed bigger than a helicopter, but triangular in shape. She couldn’t see a lot of detail in the faint light of just a partial moon, but it didn’t look like any kind of vehicle she’d ever seen before.

The nose of the ship swung around and pointed at her. It hesitated for a moment and didn’t continue its arc around the top of the canyon. It zipped to a new location, moving like a hummingbird, until it was very close, hovering ten feet above the floor of the gorge near the waterfall’s pool, the nose of the ship still pointed in her direction. Then it slowly lowered and touched the stone with only a whisper of sound.

She hadn’t made any conscious decision, hadn’t even felt herself move, but she had scrambled out of the sleeping bag and found herself standing with her back to the cliff face.

They were trapped. The ship had just landed between them and the ladder that, as far as she knew, was the only way out of the gorge.

She couldn’t take her eyes from it. She backed up slowly, her hand gliding over the rough, gritty wall. She realized she was mumbling Adam’s name over and over again like a terrorized child and stopped. She turned her head for a second to call for him a little louder.

The light from a flashlight blinded her and she panicked as it was almost certainly revealing their location to whatever was inside that ship. “Turn that off!” she demanded.

Adam emerged from the scrub nearby and sidled up to her. “Oh, sorry. What’s up, babe? Did you lose your flashlight?”

“No, we’ve got a problem. Look.” She pointed at the ship and he saw it for the first time.

“Holy shit,” he whispered. “What do you think that is? Some kind of secret government airplane?”

“I don’t think so. I think it knows we’re here. We need to hide or find another way out. Now.”

“What? They’re probably just doing some kind of military exercise. Maybe they’ve got a malfunction or something. They might need some help. They probably can’t get cell signal out here either.”

“No, Adam, no. It was looking for us.”

“Darcy, we have permission to be here. This is reservation land. They’re the ones that are going to get in trouble.”

A section of the ship came away with a white puff of powder that drifted in the moonlight. The section slowly lowered to the stone. It was a ramp. Two figures appeared. In the dim light, it was hard to make out more than silhouettes. One was tall and slim with arms that were disproportionately long and thin. The other was very short, clearly not human. It was some kind of animal.

She felt horror growing inside her, rooting her with disbelief to the spot where she stood, as she fought to understand what she was seeing and hearing. The low hissing tones and the clacks had come from that pair. That was loud and clear now.

The second creature began to descend the ramp, revealing that it was every bit as big as the first, that it just moved low to the ground…on multiple legs. From that distance in the dim light, she couldn’t tell how many. It seemed like six or maybe eight.

Adam grabbed her arm and pulled her into the scrub. They ran, fueled by blind terror. Pungent limbs tore at her clothing and hair as she followed Adam around the perimeter of the gorge. He stopped periodically to scan the cliff face for another possible exit route carved into the stone. But there wasn’t one. Without rock-climbing equipment, she didn’t see any possible way out except for the ladder.

The hisses and clacks grew louder, reverberating off the rock with ominous overtones. Sometimes the strange utterances morphed into angry shouts that sounded bizarrely like Italian, Portuguese, or some other romance language.

Darcy looked to Adam. He spoke Spanish, but he showed no sign of recognizing anything they were saying. They darted through open spaces toward the cover of the scrub until they reached the pool. The dull roar of the waterfall muted most of the sounds that the visitors were making.

Adam sent her a questioning look. She nodded. The waterfall would hide them and muffle any sounds they might make. It was also the last hiding place between them, the ship, and the ladder.

They ducked under the cold sluice, drenched instantly. There was a small hollow behind the falls, but the depression wasn’t deep enough to protect them from the constant, chilling spray. Water dripped from her hair and ran down her nose, stealing all her warmth. She was covered in gooseflesh and shivering. Adam wrapped his arms around her and put his chin on top of her head.

He put his mouth to her ear. “Let’s wait just another couple of minutes, then make a dash for the ladder. Hopefully they’ll be on the other side of the canyon by then and won’t even see us.”

She met his eyes and nodded once. He held her gaze, a disquieted, perplexed look on his face. She knew what he was thinking. She was thinking the same thing. The world had changed overnight. Reality was far different from what they’d thought. One hike in the desert had just changed their lives forever.

She wondered if the two events were related. Had the blue light under her skin summoned these strangers here? Was this somehow her fault? If she hadn’t touched the stack of stones, would they be sleeping peacefully now under the stars? Or was the world just a crazy, surreal place? Once you stepped away from the safety in numbers that civilization provided, were you exposed and vulnerable to any number of insane possibilities?

Or was she just unlucky? Had all her mother’s silly new-age stuff marked her as a target? Had a childhood surrounded by too many crystals channeled some kind of negative voodoo energy?

Adam moved, interrupting her increasingly paranoid thoughts. He gripped her, shoving her back in the niche, and edged slowly to the other side of the falls. She could barely see him. Without his warmth, she began to shudder violently. Her fingers and toes were numb and thick like blocks of wood.

He stood in the water. She didn’t know how he could see anything, but he must have. He came back for her and they dashed through the falls together, heading for the cover of a desert ironwood tree with saguaro cactus growing up through its limbs. She recoiled as the cactus pricked her shoulder through her sopping-wet clothes. They huddled there for a minute, listening. She couldn’t hear anything but the waterfall.

They locked eyes and came to a silent agreement. He jerked his head, indicating she should go first. She took off at a dead sprint, intending to skirt the black, hulking ship and head straight for the ladder and escape.

She pulled up short, almost immediately. Adam barreled into her from behind, knocking her to her knees. She scrambled to her feet, backing into him.

Directly in front of her, moonlight glinted off the carapace of a segmented body. It was reared up on hinged, sticklike hind legs, bristling with hairs. Its forelegs terminated in pincers which held a long, metallic stick, fluidly following Darcy’s every movement. It made a chittering, clacking sound. Its eyes were dark, glittering, multifaceted protuberances, completely inhuman in every respect.

She turned, her heart pounding in her throat. The enormous insect’s companion had come through the falls behind them and held a similar instrument under its arm. It wasn’t human either. It was hard to make out, but it moved unnaturally—its limbs flowed as though it didn’t have joints and there was something on its head that looked almost leafy. It was the one making the disturbing low susurrations.

With one alien to each side and the wall of the canyon behind them, there was nowhere to go except into the pool. She turned to grab Adam, but she was too late. The stick the tall alien held made contact with Adam’s side. A blinding ray of white light emanated from the device, enveloping him. His eyes rolled back as he crumpled to the ground.

She screamed his name and reached for him to break his fall. Her fingers were glowing.

Something touched her back. All her muscles seized up painfully, and she realized she was engulfed in a similar beam of light from behind.

She was falling, too.

D
arcy woke
, bathed in a warm, blinding light. She was too disoriented to discern whether it was the same light that had knocked her out or something new. She had no sense of time passing—a second might have gone by since she fell unconscious in the gorge or it might have been days or weeks.

She blinked and squinted to clear her blurry vision, but that didn’t work. There was something thick and waxy coating her eyes, and they weren’t doing what she wanted them to. She tried to bring her hands to her face to wipe it away, but couldn’t.

A cold wave of panic washed over her. Her body was immobilized and felt numb. A scream rose in her throat, aching to be released, but it was held there—the muscles refused to budge. There was something lodged there. It was impossible to swallow. She wanted to cough, but couldn’t. She felt grateful that she could breathe at all.

She was pretty sure she’d been chemically sedated, but that it was wearing off. She was experiencing anesthetic awareness. She wasn’t supposed to be awake. Someone was doing something to her, surgically, without her consent.

What was happening to her?

Gradually the panic subsided and she was able to perceive more input from her body. There was a sharp, heavy pressure building in her forehead. Periodically she felt hot little scrambling jolts shooting through her cranium, short-circuiting her thoughts. Each incipient shock created a disquieting sense of deja vu as she re-experienced the trauma of regaining consciousness again and again.

Oh, God, what could they be doing inside her head?

Something smooth and cool lay over her cheeks and the air smelled stale and medicinal. Intermittently she’d catch a whiff of something damp and rich, like compost tinged with cinnamon. It was foreign, strange. She didn’t like it.

There was also a soft shushing sound. It was more than that, actually. It was a constant, whisper-soft breath, tickling the curled tendrils of hair around her ear. She focused on that. It was the most calming thing she could perceive. She pretended it was her mother’s soothing hush when she was small and hurt or fearful.

In the background, there was something clacking in a mesmerizing way. She had the odd sensation that a translation of the clacking was just there, on the tip of her brain. She could
almost
understand its message. It made her uneasy for some reason, but she couldn’t determine why, so she tried to ignore it, tried to stay calm, tried to hold on to sanity.

“Click-click-clack…regaining consciousness, mistress…clackity-click-clack-click.”

“Shush-hush-hish-hisssssssssss…delicate…shish…here…ssssss…more precisely, this time…hishshshshsh…didn’t kill this one…praise the Cunabula.”

Darcy drifted away and began to dream of giant bugs flamenco dancing in a grove of frolicking trees, sending her secret messages in Morse code with castanets.

* * *

D
arcy opened
her eyes to a dim room. She felt heavy and weak. Her head ached ferociously.

Something shiny and green was waving around in front of her face. It felt like an invasion. She raised a limp hand to bat it away.

There was a chittering sound. It sounded like an indignant warning. It also sounded like…speech.

She blinked. Her eyes could barely open and were pointing in two different directions. With effort, she focused them.

Looming in her field of vision was an inexpressive insect face, its double-jointed antennae hovering over her, twitching.

She screamed uncontrollably, coming up off the platform she lay on despite bone-deep fatigue.

It slipped down and backed away from her on four hind legs, gleaming emerald thorax and head still upright. Its forelegs folded in a pose that looked astonishingly like human disapproval.

She was so shocked, she went silent.

The insect emitted more clacking sounds. As they registered, some aspect of her brain began to tumble them around, replaying them over and over again like echoes. Words formed out of the disordered noise: “Too loud. Foolish, half-witted anthropoid.”

She gasped. Her eyes bulged. “You just…spoke…” But she stopped herself, because that wasn’t what she’d actually said. She’d said, “Vuas itust…loquestas…”

Everything was spinning, rotating wildly around this insect that had her full attention. She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

Its head inclined in something like acknowledgement. More clacking followed.

She watched, fascinated. Her eye was drawn to small sections of its shell just above the joints of its forelimbs—it was doing something akin to shrugging to make the sounds—and those sounds were consonants somehow.

She reeled, sure she must be dreaming.

Consonants. But there were vowels too, very subtle, between the clacks. She narrowed her eyes, trying to see how it was producing those softer sounds. The mandible, a sort of sideways beak, remained stationary. It did not appear to be producing any sound from its mouth whatsoever. The vowel sounds came from elsewhere.

“The implant is functioning well,” it said.

“Didn’t anyone ever teach you that it’s impolite to stare?” a breathy voice said from the other side of Darcy’s bed.

Darcy jumped and whipped around. Then she groaned and clutched her head. Her vision went black for a second. The sudden movement made her brain throb. She didn’t have a choice. She had to lie back down.

“Caution. I wouldn’t do that if I were you. We probably should have kept you tied down.” The owner of this newest voice came into her field of view.

“Oh…” That was all Darcy could say. A person unlike any other she’d ever witnessed stood before her. She instantly made a connection with a small sculpture of a face shrouded in leaves that had hung in her childhood home: the Green Man. It was a symbol of rebirth and renewal that her mother loved.

“Lights.”

The lights came up, harsh and bright, making Darcy squint painfully.

The intense white light revealed a willowy, feminine form standing at Darcy’s feet. This person swayed slightly and turned her face up to the lights in the ceiling. Her voice came out a breathy monotone, but vibrated somehow with pleasure when she said, “That’s better. I am called Hain.”

Very little of Hain’s skin showed, and what did was a muted yellow-chartreuse. She wasn’t wearing clothing. Rather, her trunk was encrusted with coral-colored, striated medallions of varying size that seemed to grow into each other, in an almost crystalline way, over her skin. Her arms and legs were covered with something organic that looked like aged, golden-yellow paint that had developed a network of fine cracks, like crazing. Even her fingers and toes were covered, those digits being long and fragile looking.

Around her neck sprouted a lush wreath of undulating leafy growth in various shades of waxy greens, some scalloped, others fernlike. Loops of fuzzy, mossy filaments draped over her shoulders and around her hips, flowing with her movements. Atop her head was an airy crown of soft, green branching strands, burgeoning in all directions. Even her face and neck were covered with frilly clusters of green plaques, like lichen, creeping over her features. Her deep, sea-green eyes were incredibly large, expressive, and knowing, but she had the barest suggestion of a nose and just a slit for a mouth. She was otherworldly.

Hain turned to the insect. “They all have so much to say when they speak their insular gibberish, but put a civilized tongue in their mouth and they are reduced to mutes.”

The insect chattered a bit. Something told Darcy that sound was laughter. She didn’t like it. She didn’t like anything that was happening here.

She looked down and was shocked to discover that she was naked, covered only by a gossamer-thin sheet. She scrambled to grab the transparent covering, pulling it up to pool over her more private areas.

With growing horror she realized that all of her skin was reddish and ashy. It felt hot to the touch, stripped of all moisture, painful, as though she’d been burned. What were they doing? Experimenting on her?

In addition, there were thin tubes attached to her body. She groped with clumsy, fumbling fingers along them and found they were inserted directly into her left carotid artery.

Hain had gotten close, was peering at her with intense curiosity. Her monotone voice came out slow and deliberate, like she was speaking to someone with diminished mental faculties. “Do you have a name?”

Darcy ground her teeth before answering. Somewhere between her brain and her tongue, the signals she sent were transformed from English into this other language. She was hearing it for the first time from her own lips, but still understood it. “What have you done to me? Why did you take us? Where am I? Where’s Adam?”

Hain’s voice continued with little change in pitch or intonation. “Aha! Did you hear this, Chitin47? I had begun to think the Lovek’s legends were some kind of ancient galactic joke, mayhap as old as the Cunabula themselves. These anthropoids have been all but reticent until now, but this one has expressed understanding of its past, its current situation, and that of its companion. And umbrage too, a complex emotion. Oh, well done!”

Darcy felt the urge to tug out the tubes and try to fight them somehow. But that would be suicide. If she pulled something that big out of her carotid, she would bleed out in minutes, not to mention that she felt weak as a kitten. “What do you want?”

“I have already requested your name.”

Darcy stayed silent.

“You have much to learn about the universe, my provincial little friend. But no matter. You’ve demonstrated that the device implanted in your brain is functioning properly. That, for now, is all that’s needed.” Hain turned toward the insect and intoned, “My research shows the closest anatomic analog to be nieblic. Use those protocols for sedation and immune-system stimulation henceforth. Let’s get this one healed up and in with the general population. She’ll get her answers there. We needn’t waste valuable time on explication now.”

The insect inclined its head and turned to a console where it began to press buttons and use a touchscreen computer. Hain swept out of the room.

“Wait!” Darcy called weakly, but her eyes were already closing.