UFO:
FOSSIL CREEK, ARIZONA, 0430
Under a brilliant Milky Way, the figures are puny. Bent double, they might be crabs scuttling over rocks, and the whump-whump filling the air around them the wing beats of some giant mythical bird. But as the big Chinook soars up and away, its navigation lights off, the creek returns to a silence broken only by the gurgling river.
Dressed like astronauts, they work swiftly, using subdued flashlights to set up trestle tables, microscopes, and flasks. The heavy gloves turn this into a clumsy operation. Only then do they begin to explore the creek, and it is fifteen minutes before they find Joe Wupatki at the edge of the river. His cell phone is clutched tightly in his hand. His face is black and blistered, his eyes are staring, and his facial muscles are still contorted by his last efforts to breathe.
It was never established just what Joe Wupatki was doing in Fossil Creek at two o'clock in the morning, and it had been hard to take his flying saucer call seriously. Nevertheless he was a respected elder of the Tonto Apache reservation, and if Old Joe said he'd seen a UFO crashing in the creek, then so be it. This was the logic that sent the first patrol car out from Payson.
Within half an hour the solitary patrolman reported that he had reached Strawberry and was about to turn west, onto the unsafe, unpaved road that plunges steeply down the Mogollon Rim to Fossil Creek. This was his last message. When he failed to respond to calls, a second patrolman was sent out. When he, too, fell silent, three more cars were dispatched from Flagstaff, a good hour to the north. These were high-clearance, four-wheel-drive vehicles—the report had come from remote, rugged hill country—and the officers, by now sensing trouble, took rifles.
Arriving at the Strawberry turnoff, one of these officers managed to croak a few garbled, choking words, but the telephonist could make no sense of them, and from then on the vehicle's radio sent only the occasional indistinct noise, like tapping or bumping, and what might have been groaning. These sounds, too, eventually stopped.
As the mysterious silence continued the dispatcher, by now on her own in the little police station, became increasingly agitated. Her nerve finally gave out and just after four o'clock she roused her boss, who called Phoenix Air Support, who sent out a Eurocopter. It drifted up and down the Mogollon Rim road, saw nothing until, up the Rim, it scanned a little parking lot next to an all-night diner just outside Strawberry. The Night Sun illuminated a dozen corpses scattered over the tarmac, some in police uniform. At least they were presumed to be corpses since they weren't moving and were lying in various unnatural positions. The police vehicles, three of them, still had headlights on. One had smashed into the side of the diner.
A chain of dead-of-night phone calls followed, and as the bowl of night faded from black to dark blue to deep scarlet, the sun rose to reveal men and women, protective suits now pink in the Arizona dawn, swarming over the base of the pine-covered canyon. Their findings triggered a series of events that would, inside a week, lead to the brink of war.
Excerpted from The Furies by Bill Napier.
Copyright 2009 by Bill Napier.
Published in October 2009 by St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.
