Bentley Little - The Summoning

Janine grabbed the other woman by the arm, pulling her through the parking lot. "Come onI" She had already taken out her keys, and when she reached her car she quickly unlocked the driver's door. "Get inI" she said.

Sally Mae looked at her uncomprehendingly.

"Get in the carl" Janine screamed. She shoved the other woman onto the seat, pushed her past the steering wheel to the passenger side, and hopped in herself, slam ming the door and locking it. She started the car, floored the gas pedal, and peeled out, speeding toward the highway. '

"What in cow's ass heaven is that?"

RHal, the friendlier guide, stood and walked over to where his partner stood looking toward the ranch. "What?"

Tracy looked quizzically at her husband over the campfire. Ralph only shrugged.

"Listen. Don't you hear it?"

RHal shook his head. "No..." His eyes idened. "Yes!' "What is it?"

Tracy asked.

Rhal walked over, threw another branch onto the blaze "You two stay here by the campfire. We'll be back in two shakes of a lamb's tail."

Two shakes of a lamb's tail? Did they really talk like that, Tracy wondered, or was this something they just put on for tourists? "Where are you going?" she asked.

"Back to the ranch to see what's happening."

' Ralph stood. "We might as well go, too. It's getting cold out here, and I'm sure we'd be much more comfortable in our rooms than we would out in these sleeping bag"

"We're camping," Tracy said firmly, fixing him with a determined stare.

Ralph sighed, sat down. ""Whatever you say."

"What's the point of going to a dude ranch if you're just going to treat it like a hotel? Why did we come all the way out here if we weren't going to take advantage of it?"

"I said okay."

"We'll be back," Hal said, nodding at them. The other guide had already mounted, his horse, and Hal followed, slipping his foot easily into the stirrup and swinging his leg over the saddle. With a "Hey[" and a couple of clicks, the two cowboys were off, riding into the desert night.

Tracy leaned back on her sleeping bag, staring up at the stars. It was cold out here, but it was invigorating, and she felt' Trace

She turned her head toward Ralph. "Yeah?"

"Lookl"

She sat up, followed his pointing finger.

A bird was hovering in the air above the desert at approximately the spot where the ranch was located.

"It's a phoenix," Ralph said, his voice quiet and filled with awe.

It was.

Tracy stared at the bird. It was huge, the size of a small plane, and totally unlike anything she had ever seen. It seemed to glow from within, radiating a diffused white light that brought into extraordinarily vivid clarity every feather, every talon, every detail of the creature's majestic body. The bird looked more real than real, a three-dimensional being in a two-dimensional world. There were colors in its plum age that she had never seen before, that were not variations on black or white or blue or yellow or red, colors that wet not part of the known spectrum. : ..: /

"Are they having some kind of laser show?" Ralp asked. "Is that what this is? I don't remember readin anything about it in the list of events."

She ignored him. It wasn't a laser show. It was a bird, A real bird.

An honest-to-God phoenix. She re ache across her sleeping bag and grabbed the strap of her can corder case. She unzipped the vinyl bag and took out that camera. She wasn't sure there was enough light for her to shoot, and she knew instinctively that there was no way this magnificence could ever translate to videotape, but she had to try.

She aimed the camcorder at the bird, pressed down o the "Record" button, and began to speak for the beneit of the mulddi,r--ecdonal microphone. "It is about nine thirty, and we are in the desert outside the Rocking Ranch in Rio Verde .."

Jamped do the narrow dirt road that led to highway, refusing to look in the rearview mirror, concentrating solely on the portion of the road before them that: was illuminated by the headlights. Sally Mae lay huddle against the passenger door not moving, not speaking, n even whimpering.

They had passed no other vehicles, had seen nota lights or headlights, andJanine wondered if they were the only ones to have escaped. How many people were at the ranch right now? Fifteen employees, maybe.

About twenty five guests. , I Could the vampires have killed forty people?

She pressed down harder on the gas pedal, but the car was just heading into a turn and the vehicle fishtail wildly in the dirt as the road curved. Janine held hard to the wheel, struggling to maintain control, straightening out only after almost swerving into the adjoining ditch.

Ahead, her high beams reflected off the bullet-riddled face of the stop sign that stood at the edge of the highway. They'd made it!

She slowed down, the car bumping over the serrated steel of the cattle guard that separated the dirt from the asphalt.

And the car stalled.

Died.

No! Janine pumped the gas pedal, trying to will the car back to life, but there was no response, and the vehicle rolled back a few feet on the slight incline.

"Start, you piece of shift" Janine was screaming at the car and crying at the same time, tears blurring her vision as she turned the key in the ignition and heard only a series of impotent clicks. Sally Mae, still huddled in the corner, made a low, incoherent sound of abject terror. "Shut up!" Janine yelled at her. She turned, slapped the woman hard across the face.

And saw movement through the passenger window. "Help!" The windows were closed, there were no lights on the empty highway, no ears, no trucks, but she screamed anyway, a raw panicked shriek that threatened to permanently damage her vocal cords. "Help!" She pumped desperately on the gas, turned the key.

The monster was coming.

He lurched toward them out of the darkness, an over tall man in a frayed out-of-date suit, face rotting from the inside out, decay pushing through the thin layer of skin on the forehead, cheeks, and chin. He staggered around the front of the car, through the twin beams of the head lights, and around to the driver's side asJanine continued to frantically turn the ignition key. He grinned, revealing dirty bloody teeth. His bulging eyes looked downward from her face to her abdomen.

He knew she was pregnant. He could sense it. BiHe would eat the fetus,

"Don't morel" Janine screamed, though Sally Mae had not moved at all.

"Stay in here! The door's locked[ He can't get in"

A fist punched through the window, shattering the glass!

She did not even have time to cry out as strong fingers closed around her neck and yanked her outside, through the broken window, into the cold air of the night.

The hotel room was shitty. It was supposedly the best that the town had to offer, but despite the bland pleasant clean lines of the accommodations and the reassuring presence HBO and CNN on the television, there was something set ond-rate about the room, as though it was straddling that line between adequate and shabby and was leaning clearly toward the latter,

But Rossiter didn't care. He felt good, charged, mot alive than at any time since he'd left the Academy an happier than he'd been since he'd come to this hellisl state.

This was big.

He'd known it in the back of his mind when he'd co related the figures on the computer, but it had been cox firmed when he'd met the Oriental girl and he grandmother, This was big, not in a pulp-novel Melvi Purvis G-man way, but in a manner that was far more profound.

He was not just catching criminals.

He was fighting the forces of evil.

He had not talked with Engles when he'd told Robert he would--he'd spent that time severing des with the stale police and kicking those dipshit lazy-assed bastards off that case--but he had called his supervisor and left a bri message on his answering machine, providing just enough description to keep him out of trouble with protocol. He' then immediately called Washington and, after some necessary phone bullying that led him quickly up the chain of command, had made a full report to James F. Watley, head of the Bureau's Western Division. It was foolhardy, perhaps--he knew how crazy all this sounded. But he'd written his speech out beforehand, and he was an old hand at making the implausible plausible, and he believed he had successfully demystified the more fantastic aspects of this situation until it fit foursquare into the Bureau mold.