David Golemon - Event

For the first time since Niles had been with the Event Group, he saw that Lee was not only deathly ill, but also scared. Jesus Christ, what was on that goddamn saucer that would scare a man who had seen the horrible things he had seen in his life?

Fort Platt was built in 1857 and served as a company-sized staging area for the U.S. Army cavalry patrols aimed at the raiding Apache bands led by Cochise and Geronimo.

The old fort was abandoned after a massacre in 1863 before the end of the Civil War when sixty-seven soldiers lost their lives in one of the Apaches' most daring and audacious strikes. The fort had been reduced to its present degraded state by the never-ending and relentless winds and sudden thunderstorms of the American Southwest. The eroded adobe walls whispered ghostly songs as these winds whipped through the low, broken foundations. The once manicured parade ground was now a dust bowl giving shelter to creatures such as Gila monsters and rattlesnakes.

Now, over a century later, the fort was occupied once again by modern nomads, visitors from Los Angeles.

A beer bottle barely missed Jessie's head. He had ducked at the last possible moment when he saw the gleam of the bottle in the light of the huge bonfire they had built. It hit the old adobe foundation and shattered, spraying beer and glass on the man it had narrowly missed.

"Hey, you son of a bitch!" he cried. "You nearly took my head off with that one."

"What are you doing over there, asshole? You too good to party with us or what?" a bearded giant of a man asked from where he was lying.

The others were around the fire leaning next to their bikes and drinking. The few girls they had on the trip were either on laps or lying beside them. Jessie wondered why he was on this trip in the first place. He didn't really like the guys he rode with on these long weekend trips, but found he just couldn't say no to that little bit of excitement that came into his life once a month. At the moment, what he called the biker wannabes were silhouetted, illuminated in a flickering light cast by the blazing fire.

Jessie walked over to the fire and knelt and held his hands out to the open flame and rubbed them together. "I was just thinking how weird this place is," he said, looking at the old adobe walls. "Man, think of it, the men that used to ride out of here after the Apaches must have been some bad motherfuckers."

The big man looked at Jesse as he twisted the cap off another beer. "Not as bad as this motherfucker right here," he boasted, tapping the fresh beer on his sleeveless Levi's jacket and sloshing beer all over himself and the man lying next to him.

Jesse just shook his head. Out of the fifteen people around the fire, he hated talking to Frank the most. Trying to exchange words with him about the history of anything was like convincing a dog not to be a dog. He felt the IQ points draining from his head every time he tried.

"I think I know what you mean, dude," one of the girls spoke up. She was one of the few chicks they had picked up in Phoenix. "I've lived in Arizona all my life and there's some pretty weird shit out here."

"Yeah, what would you know about weird?" Frank bellowed, kicking the girl's leg.

"I'm here with the likes of you, aren't I?" she said, slapping his large boot away. Then the young girl continued with her story. "I mean weird with the Indians and things like that. People say the desert's haunted. My dad said there were a lot of soldiers and settlers killed right here on this spot, and if you listen at night, when everything is quiet and still, you can hear them screaming." She lowered her voice in a conspiratorial tone. "And there's bodies buried right below us." She patted the ground. "So there!" she said as she turned toward Frank. "Besides, what would a bunch of jerks from L.A. know about it anyway?"

"Why do they say there are ghosts here?" Jessie asked, looking around into the darkness.

The girl was just grateful someone was paying attention to her, so she sat up and joined him in the heat thrown by the fire, squatting beside him. She looked the man over and liked what she saw.

"I mean, like this place we're camped in, the army used to have troops here, and my daddy said at night you can hear their horses cry and the men walking guard. While he was camped nearby one night in the seventies, he and his friends heard several horses with men whooping and hollering as they rode by, only according to my dad, there was no one there."

The man looked around him into the night again. "Really?"

"Uh-huh, that's what my daddy said."

"Did your daddy also tell you you're a fucking idiot?" asked Frank, standing up so quickly he let the girl who had been dozing with her head on his lap slide off and hit the ground.

"Knock it off, Frank, will ya?" whined the girl, rubbing her head.

"You're swallowing this shit, Jessie? Are any of you buyin' this crap?" Frank asked, walking away from the old adobe ruins while undoing his pants.

"I hope a ghost gets that asshole," the girl whispered.

"We couldn't be that lucky," Jessie mumbled, and they both laughed.

As Frank stumbled into the darkness, he looked up at the stars, then at the ground. He was regretting this trip. It wasn't turning out the way it was supposed to. One more day and then it was back to that damn Chevy dealership in Pasadena. Back to oil changes, lube jobs, and blow jobs from that ugly-ass girlfriend of his. Bike runs were supposed to be full of hell-raisin' and chick-banging. Shit, all they had so far on this ride was six dumb whores from a bar in Phoenix, warm beer, and a lot of fucking boredom.

He stopped and finished unbuttoning his pants outside of the firelight. Shit, you can't find anything exciting anymore in this country , he thought. Frank was concentrating on not pissing on his new engineer's boots when in the moonlight he saw the ground thirty feet in front of him erupt into the still night air. The big man was startled, his heart pounded hard in his chest, then the ground settled and became still once again. He squinted into the night, stopped paying attention, and pissed on his new boots anyway.

"You guys quit fucking around," he shouted, "or I'll stomp your asses when you come back in," he called into the darkness.

He quickly pulled himself back into his pants and buttoned up. He started walking backward, first looking toward the camp, then at the area where the ground had just done that funny dance. He had to calm himself down before he returned to the fire so he took a deep breath.

The hard-packed sand and dirt did it again, but now it was about five feet closer. He froze with his eyes wider than a moment before. This time the sand and dirt didn't settle but rushed toward him like a bow wave when a boat slices through water. The dirt being tossed to the side was thrown ten and fifteen feet in the air. He could feel the tearing of the earth through his now entirely wet boots. He screamed, then turned and ran.

The dirt eruption then disappeared as fast as it had exploded.

He had almost made it back to the ring of firelight when the ground fell out from underneath his stomping feet. He frantically grabbed for the edge but missed, tearing most of his fingernails down to the quick. He hit bottom with a bone-crunching thump. He hissed in pain, then took a deep breath and started to shout for one of the others around the fire to help, but was suddenly grasped around the waist as two giant claws cut deep into his midsection, cutting off the scream before it could form. His brain continued to function even as he was squeezed like a tube of toothpaste and his entrails forced out upon the ground amid the sounds of snapping and breaking ribs.