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The Navajo Nation
Tuba City, Arizona
“I WAS YOUNGER than you the first time I came here,” Nathan said, as they waited at a traffic light. “Your grandparents took me on a trip to the Four Corners. We stopped here in Tuba City for lunch.” The light turned green, and he started to accelerate. “Things have changed so much in some ways but not at all in others.”
“The American Indians have a gene which made many of them naturally resistant to the Sagittarians’ weaponized hemorrhagic fever,” Ben said.
“Is that right? They were lucky, then. Those were some bad years.” Millions of people died as a result of the alien-engineered biological weapon. It was finally stopped when defectors from the United Earth Alliance released information on how to produce a vaccine. “We called it the Red Death.” Nathan was quiet for a few moments. “Honestly, boy, I’m glad you’re too young to remember the war.”
They rode in silence for a while before Ben pointed at the dashboard screen, on which was displayed GPS routing. “We’re almost there. Sunset Motel.”
“So we are,” Nathan said, hitting his turn signal. “You remember who we’re supposed to talk to?” Nathan wanted to see if Ben had retained the information Stella had given them.
“Her name is Mary,” Ben said. “Daughter of the owners. Five foot two, long black hair, twenty-four years old. She works at the front desk.” He held up an envelope full of cash. “We hand this to her, and she tells us which room he’s staying in. Oh! I mean, we show her the money, and give it to her once she gives us the room number. Hey, why don’t we just get a key from her?”
“We can, but if he’s in the room it’ll likely be deadbolted. We’re still going to have to try and get him to open the door. You remember what to do?”
“Yeah!” Ben said, excitedly. He was thrilled to be part of the plan this time, not just waiting in the truck. He was wearing, under his jacket, the body armor vest that Jesse had given him. “Don’t worry, I can handle this.”
Nathan parked his truck on the street near of the Sunset Motel, out of the view of anyone in its rooms. It was one of those places where each room had its own door to the parking lot, and shared a wall with the room on either side of it. “This place has seen better days,” he muttered, as they made their way up the sidewalk. It looked like it had been vintage even before the war. The paint was faded from the sun, and there were only a couple of cars in the lot. The neon sign had a letter burned out, and read SUNSET M TEL. It was the kind of place where you could pay cash and nobody would ask for an ID. “Stay here,” he told Ben. “Get your stuff ready. I’ll get Shadow.”
The office was at one end of the U-shaped structure. Mary, the girl at the desk, went wide-eyed as Nathan walked in with Shadow. He was a big dog and he struck an imposing figure. The transaction went exactly as planned; only a few words were spoken, though Mary did come around the desk to pet Shadow. Erik Landers was in Room 2, at the far end of the building. The nondescript black Town Car parked in front of the room was the vehicle he’d arrived in. She hadn’t seen him leave, but admitted she hadn’t been able to watch the whole time. She also said that other people had come and gone from the room over the past few days, but none of them had checked in at the desk.
That was enough for Nathan. He thanked the woman as he handed her the envelope full of money. He led Shadow out of the office, and signaled Ben on his radio. Nathan and the dog made their way along the front of the building, staying in the shade of the overhang. In the chance their target was watching them out the window, it would look like they were just going to one of the other rooms, and he wouldn’t be able to see them approach after they turned the corner. Each room had a window that faced the parking lot, but coming from the direction they were, they wouldn’t have to walk past the window for Room 2 before they got to the door.
Meanwhile, Ben exited the truck with an empty pizza box in his hands. He was wearing a red ball cap with a slice of pizza embroidered upon it. They had done this routine before, and it surprised Nathan how often it worked. Ben strode straight for the door as Nathan approached from the side.
Ben looked at his uncle. Nathan nodded at the boy. It was go time.
The kid took a deep breath, exhaled, and rapped on the door three times.
A muffled voice came from behind the door. “What is it?”
“Pizza!” Ben declared, raising his voice so he could be heard. “Large pepperoni?”
“I didn’t order a pizza!” the voice said.
Ben kept the bit going. “Yeah, I have the pizza you ordered! Large pepperoni!”
“I didn’t order a pizza!” the man insisted, frustration in his voice.
Nathan nodded at Ben. The boy knocked on the door again. “Look, Mister, I’ve got other deliveries to make. Your pizza is getting cold.”
“Son of a bitch!” the man behind the door snarled, followed by the sound of locks being undone. He pulled the door open quickly and looked down at Ben. It was Erik Landers, and he was in his underwear. “For fucks’ sakes, kid, I said I didn’t order a—”
Landers froze when Nathan stepped into view. The bounty hunter’s bronze badge was hanging around his neck. In one hand, he had his service revolver, a .41 Magnum Ruger Sentinel with a flashlight mounted under the barrel. In the other, he held Shadow’s short lead.
“Federal Recovery Agent!” Nathan announced. “Get your hands where I can see them!”
The bounty could have done things the easy way, but in Nathan’s experience they seldom did. Instead of complying, he tried to slam the door in Nathan’s face. He couldn’t get the door latched, though, and Nathan turned Shadow loose. Landers futilely tried to scramble across the bed as the enhanced working dog shot after him like a fur-covered missile. He screamed as Shadow latched onto his arm and pulled him down.
Before Nathan could stop him, Ben ran in after the dog. Landers was struggling with Shadow, trying to hit him with his free hand in a vain attempt to let go. Ben didn’t hesitate. He produced his can of pepper foam and sprayed Landers right in the eyes with it. The bounty’s screams went high-pitched as he gasped for air.
“Shadow, out!” Nathan ordered. The dog let go of the mark, jumped off the bed, and sat, watching his prey warily. Ben backed up and moved behind his uncle. Erik Landers was curled up into a ball on the bed, blind, burning, and bleeding, struggling to catch his breath. Nathan kept his gun drawn and nodded at Ben, who went and checked the bathroom to make sure no one was hiding there.
“Erik Landers, in compliance with the Extraterrestrial and Collaborator Recovery Act, and by virtue of the authority vested in me as a licensed and bonded Federal Recovery Agent, I am taking you into custody. You have the right to remain silent, and to be given proper and humane care while in my charge. If you attempt to resist or flee, I have the legal authority to use lethal force without further warning. You will be transferred to federal custody for processing and adjudication. Do you understand?”
Landers didn’t answer. He just kept gasping for air and cursing aloud.
“The rest of the room is clear, Uncle Nate!” Ben announced.
“Good job, boy. Go bring the truck around and get the first-aid kit. Keep your eyes open in case this asshole has friends.” Ben did as he was told, leaving Nathan and Shadow alone with the wanted man. “It didn’t have to be like this, man,” Nathan said. The alleged gunrunner looked pitiful, bleeding from his left arm, snot dribbling down his face, his eyes watering, dressed in nothing but a pair of tighty-whities. “I would have let you get dressed, given you a bottle of water, and you’d have had a perfectly nice ride back to the office. Now you’re going to be miserable for the rest of the day.”
“I want a lawyer,” Landers gasped.
“I look like a cop to you? You’ll get a lawyer when Homeland Security comes to pick you up. Until then, I suggest you keep your mouth shut. We’ll get you patched up before we haul you off.”
Nathan was surprised when Ben’s voice sounded over his radio. “Uncle Nate!” he said, excitedly. “Someone’s pulling into the parking lot! They’re coming in hot!”
“Coming in hot?” Nathan repeated. “What the hell does that mean?”
He got his answer seconds later. A white panel van screeched to a stop in front of the motel room. Nathan grabbed Shadow’s collar and pulled the dog into the bathroom. Hugging the dirty tile floor, he gritted his teeth as a gunman opened fire in full auto. Plaster and tile exploded into dust as rifle rounds tore through the wall. The mirror shattered. The lights blew out. Then it was over. There was muffled shouting, but the loudest thing was the ringing in his ears.
You have to move, Nathan told himself, trying to will his body to listen to him. You have to move or you’re going to die. His muscles finally obeyed. He rolled to his side, drew his revolver, and scrambled to the bathroom door.
Nathan caught the gunman mid-reload. A masked man with a short-barreled Zhukov assault rifle was fumbling for a spare magazine, trying to get it out of his jacket pocket. Erik Landers was behind him, clutching his wounded arm. His eyes went wide as Nathan popped out of the bathroom, lying on his side, gun drawn. BOOM! The shooter fell to the floor, and Landers was sprayed with blood and bits of brain matter.
“Freeze!” Nathan shouted. “Don’t you fucking do it!”
Erik Landers hesitated for just a second. Nathan had him in his sights, but the door was so close. Two steps and he’d be out of sight. A few more and he’d be in the van. His muscles tensed, telegraphing his decision.
You dumb bastard, Nathan thought, squeezing his revolver’s trigger again. The gun roared. Landers didn’t make it those two steps; the slug hit him square between the shoulder blades, and he dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.
Tires squealed again as the driver of the white van stomped on the gas. He almost did a donut in the parking lot, he flipped around so fast, and in seconds he was gone. Gun in hand, Nathan checked Erik Landers. He was dead. Sighing, the bounty hunter called Shadow, stepped over the dead men, and went outside.
Ben pulled up in the truck a second later and jumped out so fast he almost forgot to put it in park. “Uncle Nate!” the boy said, eyes wide. “Are you okay? What about Shadow?”
“I’m fine,” Nathan said, pulling two spent cases from his revolver’s cylinder. Shadow trotted out of the motel room and approached Ben, tail wagging. “So’s he. Our bounty’s not.”
“Oh, shit! Is he dead?”
Nathan only nodded as he dropped two fresh cartridges into the revolver’s chambers, then closed the cylinder. “This is gonna be a long day. The police will be here soon. Did you get a look at the van?”
“I just saw a white van,” Ben said. “But I was pulling up in the truck. The dash camera should have recorded everything.”
“Good,” the bounty hunter said, holstering his revolver.
“I’m sorry I didn’t help,” his nephew said, looking suddenly dejected. “You could have died. It just happened so fast. I tried calling you on the radio but you didn’t answer. I should have grabbed the shotgun. I should have—”
Nathan stepped forward and put a hand on his shoulder. The boy was rattled. “Ben, listen to me. You did the right thing. You couldn’t see what was happening from your position. You didn’t know how many shooters there were, or what weapons they had. You lost comms with me because my earbud fell out. For all you knew, I was already dead. Charging in blind would have been a stupid thing to do.”
Ben took a deep breath and wiped his eyes. “I know. I just wanted to help.”
“You do help, boy. You’re my partner. When we get home, I’ll show you how to use that revolver I picked up in Vegas, and I want you to start carrying it when we’re working.”
“Really?” Ben knew the basics of shooting, but he’d never expressed much interest in it before.
“Sure, why not? You’ll be fifteen in a few months. If you’re going to keep doing this, you need to be able to protect yourself.” Nathan paused; sirens wailed in the distance, drawing closer. “Quick, get on the horn with Stella and tell her what happened. Get the video from the dash cam pulled up for the cops. I’m going to check the room and see if there’s any intel we can grab before the cops get here. Get going now.”
Ben did as he was told and got back in the truck. The boy was pretty tech savvy, and normally searching for intel was one of his jobs, but he’d been through enough today without seeing one dead man covered in another dead man’s brains.
Jesus, Nathan thought. Jesse was right: this was no life for a kid.
“DID YOU DRIVE ALL THE WAY UP HERE just to make my life more difficult, Nate?” John Yazzie was a lieutenant in the Navajo Nation Territorial Police. He looked around the grisly scene in the motel room, shaking his head. A pair of his officers was zipping the two dead men up into body bags. “The chief is going to be apoplectic. He didn’t want to let you guys come on the Reservation. I talked him into it. I vouched for you.”
Yazzie had served with Nathan in the war. They’d both been tank commanders in the same battalion, and they’d seen a lot together. “Please tell the chief I’m awful sorry about this,” Nathan said. “No, I mean that. You know how I operate. I always try to de-escalate. This is going to create a lot of headaches for me, too. Unfortunately, he didn’t give me a choice.”
Yazzie kicked a piece of spent 5.45mm brass from the dead gunman’s assault rifle. “No, he didn’t. But what about the other guy, Erik Landers?”
“What about him? I told him not to run.”
Yazzie sighed. “Nate, you shot an unarmed man, in his underwear, in the back. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t particularly give a damn. What these clowns did to you was attempted murder. But the Tribal Council Prosecutor, he’s kind of a stickler for things like this. I know him. He might want to press charges.”
Nathan frowned. He didn’t like quoting the law to people, especially not to an old friend like Yazzie, but there were a lot of misconceptions about Federal Recovery Agents out there, and about the rules they were required to operate under. “I appreciate the warning, but he can’t do that.”
“Trust me, he can. He’s a real hardass. Every time there’s a use-of-force incident in the Department, he’s on us like a mosquito. He—”
“No, I mean he can’t. Legally. This was a Homeland Security tasking. I read him his Thirty-first Amendment rights. I warned him that trying to flee would result in the use of deadly force. He thought he could outrun a bullet, and he was wrong.”
Yazzie raised his eyebrows. “Wait, he’s a collaborator? Stella didn’t say anything about that when she called me. He didn’t have the mark on his arm.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but as a matter of course we don’t divulge the specifics of bounties to cops.”
“What about the tattoo? He didn’t have one.”
“Landers wasn’t a direct collaborator. As far as we know, he was never involved with the UEA or the war. Allegedly he’s been running weapons to pro-alien insurgent groups down in South America. That suspicion was enough to convince a judge to move this case from the DOJ to DHS, I guess.”
“Wow. They can do that? That’s kind of scary.”
Nathan shrugged. “Supposedly there are legal requirements, and it all has to get signed off by a federal judge, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t think the system got abused sometimes. If not for the asshole with the Zhukov I wouldn’t have fired. I didn’t know if the guy in the van had a gun, though.”
Yazzie nodded. “No, I follow you. No big loss, anyway. If you’d shot a Navajo citizen it’d be a different story, but some asshole from back east who’s arming collaborator terrorists? I think the chief will understand. I’ll need you to write up and sign a sworn statement before you go, though.”
“No problem. I told Ben to give the video from my dash camera to your officers outside. He got a pretty good view of the whole thing.”
“We already put out an APB for the van. We’ll notify the police around the Four Corners in case he leaves the Rez.”
“Oh, hey, before they get it loaded up into the meat wagon, I need the body.”
“What?”
“I need Erik Landers’s body. I’m required to turn my bounties over to DHS, dead or alive.”
“Seriously?”
Nathan nodded. “We’ve got a big industrial refrigerator at the office that we use for this. The Feds do autopsies on every one of the DHS cases, looking for alien modifications and implants. I think they test them for diseases, too.”
“Holy hell. Can you send me a copy of the regulations that state that? I didn’t know that, and the chief probably doesn’t, either.”
“Sure. Some of this stuff is pretty obscure. You know, in the years I’ve been doing this, I’ve only ever had to kill a handful of men. It’s my job to bring them back to stand trial, not to be an executioner. I’m going to have to fill out a shitload of paperwork over this.”
Yazzie nodded knowingly. “I know how that is. Come out to my car, will you? You can type the statement into my computer. I’ll print it out and witness you signing it, and then you’re free to go. I’ll call you if anything changes, but the situation being what it is, I’m going to recommend that they just drop the matter.”
“You need one from Ben, too?”
“No,” the police officer said, “he’s a minor, and he wasn’t in the room anyway. The video from your truck should suffice.”
“Thank you, Yazzie.” The two men shook hands. “It was good seeing you again.”
“Next time, come visit without shooting somebody, yeah? We’ll go fishing.”
Nathan loved to fish, but he didn’t get to do it very often. “That sounds like a plan. I’ll bring Ben. It’s about time I taught that boy to fish. He’s more interested in video games and online chat boards.”
“Come on, let’s get that statement signed so you can go. It’s getting dark.”
Thirty minutes later, Nathan returned to his truck, were he found Ben looking at a laptop. A body bag with the corpse of Erik Landers was secured in the bed of the truck. Shadow had sniffed curiously at the dead man but was now curled up on his cushion. He’d been a good boy today, and he was going to get a raw steak when they got home.
Wait a second, Nathan thought. “Ben, that’s not your laptop.”
“It’s the dead guy’s,” Ben said, casually, not taking his eyes off the screen. “He had it unlocked when we showed up. I’ve been looking through it for intel.”
Nathan was so proud of Ben he could bust. He didn’t gush, because that would embarrass the boy, but still. “Outstanding work. Find anything good?”
Ben looked up from the screen. “Not really. There’s a second drive and it’s encrypted. If we can unlock that, we might find something good.”
“Can you, I don’t know, hack into it or something?”
“No, Uncle Nate, I can’t hack into it,” Ben said, doing finger quotations. “Without the encryption key, there’s nothing I can do. Except”—he reached into a bag, and pulled out a small plastic pad with a cord hanging from it—“he had this.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a biometric scanner. I’m willing to bet he used this to access the drive.”
Nathan raised his eyebrows. “Well, there’s only one way to find out. I’m sure he won’t mind. And listen, you did good work today. Things went to shit and you held it together. I’m proud of you.”
Ben’s face flushed a little. “Thanks.”
“Now, let’s get going, hey? I’m hungry. You wanna stop and get some Navajo tacos on the way home?”
“With a dead guy in the back?”
Nathan shrugged. “Like I said, I’m sure he won’t mind.”