The 37th Parallel, page 1
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To Asher and Arya, who are young enough to believe in little green men.
And to Tonya—after reading this you’ll see that they aren’t that little, and are probably gray.
A generation from now, people will look back at us the same way we look back at those who believed the Earth was flat; the evidence that we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials is so overwhelming, it’s actually a leap of faith to believe anything else.
—Anonymous aerospace executive
There’s more physical evidence that UFOs exist than there’s physical evidence that Jesus Christ existed.
—Chuck Zukowski, to the Denver Post, July 22, 2007
CHAPTER 1
* * *
37.2841° N, 108.7787° W
September 12, 2000. A stretch of interstate highway winding along the base of the Ute Mountain Range near the Colorado–New Mexico border, a little after 4:00 p.m.
In a panoramic splash of pine trees and puffs of falling snow, flashes of brilliant sunlight reflected off the cap of Ute Peak, the Sleeping Mountain, high above. And then a beat-up RV lumbered into view. Over the rumble of the camper’s engines rose the off-key tenor of an all-American family sing-along.
Chuck Zukowski was at the wheel of the twenty-four-foot Winnebago Warrior Class A, both hands tapping out the rhythm of “Sweet Home Alabama” on the thick vinyl of the steering wheel cover. Early forties, sandy-haired, fit, Chuck was smiling as he navigated the camper down the serpentine asphalt. His three kids were in the back, one girl and two boys, and his wife, Tammy, a pretty brunette, was up front, joining Chuck in keeping the beat with her fingers against the dash. From the lines beneath Chuck’s blue eyes, it was obvious that they’d been driving for quite some time, but there was enough vivid scenery flashing by outside to keep even the youngest kid from getting bored. This sort of road trip was something the Zukowski clan enjoyed. In fact, when Chuck finally spotted the small ranch-style motel along the highway, coinciding with the notice from the dulcet tone of the RV’s audio GPS, he was almost reluctant to pull in for the night.
After parking the RV in the empty motel lot, Chuck grabbed a pair of room keys from the lobby manager, and the Zukowski family settled into two adjoining rooms overlooking a tarp-covered pool. The kids went straight for the TV in their room, after a quick dinner, microwaved to perfection in the RV, but next door, Tammy headed for the bed and sank into it with a tattered paperback, exhausted from the long day in the camper.
A few hours later, the kids finally let the TV get some rest, and Chuck closed the door between the two rooms. The sun was long gone outside, the view of the shuttered pool replaced by an inky blackness, broken only by the occasional flare of neon from the vacancy sign hanging above the motel lobby. Tammy was still digging into the paperback, but Chuck could tell she was down for the night. He ran his fingers through her hair and then told her he was going out for a short walk. Barely looking up from the book, she asked him to get some ice from the machine on his way back.
He took the ice bucket from the mantel by the door and headed out to the parking lot. Opening the back of the RV, he leaned into a four-by-four storage compartment and reached toward a locked strongbox affixed to one wall. With a jangle of keys, he pried open the box and exchanged the ice bucket—which he would fill when he returned to the Winnebago—for his equipment: a three-pound police flashlight, a video recorder, an EMF counter, and three rectangular batteries. Then he reached for the leather holster hanging from a hook at the back of the box and removed his .40 caliber Glock from it before checking the cartridges and strapping it to his waist.
By the time he exited the RV, snow had started to fall again, but even so he could see the headlights snaking toward him down the desolate highway.
• • •
Two hours later Chuck was breathing hard as he burst through the last line of thick pines into a clearing following his two companions—an athletic man, midthirties, sporting a pony tail and dressed in a thick hunting jacket with a machete slung over one shoulder, and a thin, slightly older woman struggling along in a bulky snowsuit and too many scarves. Tufts of low grass covered in snow punctuated the field of icy gravel. The three of them were now at least eight thousand feet up, high enough to feel the altitude; the other man, Joe Fex, part Native American, a rugged outdoorsman reared on the ranches that pockmarked this corner of the country, was barely sweating as he began setting up their makeshift campsite, raising a canvas tent to protect their equipment. But the woman was trembling from exhaustion and certainly fear. Chuck had no worries about Fex; the big man was an old friend and had accompanied Chuck on many similar excursions over the years. But the woman was a wild card; Chuck had met her over the Internet not two weeks earlier, and the drive over to the base of this hike was the longest time Chuck had spent with her in person. Chuck would have been much happier if they could have left her behind—but it was her information that had brought them to this spot.
According to her website, she was supposed to be some sort of psychic. Chuck wasn’t the type to judge anyone—for all he knew she had a cemetery full of dead people on speed dial. More likely, she was batshit crazy, but it didn’t really matter. As usual, Chuck had done his research. The psychic might have been the first to turn him on to this particular location, but now he had a case file an inch thick on this place.
Case file or no, the next two hours licked past in near silence, the three of them getting colder as the wind picked up, rustling through the nearby pines and sending ice chips and gravel skittering across the ground. Chuck wondered if they should cut out and chalk it up as another in a long list of wild-goose chases. In a few more hours, the kids would be waking up, and Tammy would want to get back on the road and find someplace for a good, cheap breakfast. Maybe there was a Denny’s somewhere up the interstate.
Chuck froze midthought, as he noticed something strange. The wind seemed to have stopped—not gradually, but suddenly—and the air went silent. He opened his mouth to say something to Joe, but before he could get the words out, there was a sudden flash of light in the pitch-black sky above. Incredibly bright, at least three hundred feet up—and it stayed lit. Before Chuck could shout for Joe to grab the camera from the tent, a second light joined the first, and the two flashes sprinted through the air in a wide arc. Then, it seemed as if the entire sky had opened up, lights exploding everywhere, brighter than the Fourth of July.
“Holy shit!” Chuck screamed. “Joe . . .”
Joe was already dashing at full speed around the psychic—who had curled into a ball on the ground, her face a mask of pure terror—and into the tent. He quickly returned with the camera and all three batteries. Chuck grabbed the camera from Joe’s shaking hands, turned it toward the sky, hit the button—and . . . nothing.
The camera was dead.
Chuck cursed, yanking the battery out of the device, jamming the second fresh battery into the base. He hit the button again. And again, nothing. He tried the third battery, but it was obvious all three batteries were now, inexplicably, completely drained. Chuck felt his pulse rocketing in his veins. To have one backup battery go out would have been unusual—but all three?
“What the hell are they?” Joe shouted, as the two men stared at the lights arcing back and forth through the sky above them. “Helicopters?”
Chuck shook his head. His mouth was dry, his chest constricted with fear. He’d never seen anything like this before.
“No way. Helicopters can’t move like that. Or fly that close together.”
“A meteor shower? Some sort of discharge? Or . . .”
And just as suddenly as they had started, the lights vanished. Completely. The sky went back to black. A strange, intense silence spread across the clearing, severe as a leather belt snapping tight. Not a single tree branch twitched.
And then a high-pitched scream pierced the air, from somewhere below the tree line, maybe two hundred feet down the mountain.
Christ. Chuck looked at Joe as the screaming grew louder. There was a crashing of tree branches: Whatever was making that noise was coming toward them. Some sort of animal, maybe an elk or a moose, running at full speed, screaming that unnerving, terrified scream. Bearing down on them, louder and louder, diving headlong through the pines toward the clearing . . .
And then just as suddenly as it had started, the noise cut off dead, midscream. The animal, whatever it was, had been running from something. Something that had taken it down in a single stroke.
The breeze picked back up, and the night switched back to normal, as if none of what Chuck and his companions had just experienced had ever happened.
Chuck stared at Joe, at the way the big man was shivering beneath his hunting jacket, and then at the psychic, who was sobbing on the ground. Then he looked down at his own trembling hands, one of which was resting on the hilt of his .40, still in its holster.
He shook his head, completely unnerved.
“Whatever ran that animal down—this Glock isn’t near big enough, is it?”
At that, even in his terrified state, he almost cracked a smile.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
RUSH, COLORADO,
38.845858° N, 104.092197° W
Even after twenty years, the feeling of excitement still took Chuck by surprise, the intense burst of adrenaline that seemed to hijack his entire system the moment before he arrived at an incident site, the sense of anticipation that built in his chest, shortening his breath. Today, the long drive over from his home in Colorado Springs hadn’t helped. Two hours was a lot of time to be alone with one’s thoughts going through nothing but high, barren desert, broken by sporadic areas of low brush, dried-up streambeds, and the occasional barn.
When he finally reached the dirt turnoff to the fifty-acre cattle-and-horse ranch, whose owner, Glenda, had called him, he drove up and parked his pickup truck next to the house. He caught a glimpse of the rancher’s face as she crossed the short distance from the edge of the grazing area where she’d been waiting for him. From both personal experience and his years on the force, he knew what fear looked like. Chuck had always been good at reading people—even before his training at the police academy in Colorado Springs, and the eight years since that he’d spent as a reserve sheriff’s deputy in El Paso County. Anyone who’d been involved in law enforcement as long as he had had seen more than his fair share of terrified people. He’d been a first responder at scenes of domestic abuse, pulled people from burning cars and buildings, even helped cordon off shocked witnesses at the scorched debris field of a small plane crash. But the look on the rancher’s face was something else, a shade of fear that Chuck was uniquely qualified to recognize, because he was one of a handful of people, in law enforcement and other fields, who’d seen it before.
“Morning,” Glenda managed to say as she reached Chuck’s truck. He had the door open, but was still sitting and gathering his equipment from the front passenger seat. Rubber gloves, plastic bags for samples, two cameras, his handheld electromagnetic field reader, and his gun. He was pretty certain the gun was unnecessary. If history was any predictor, whatever had hit this ranch several days earlier had come in fast and had finished just as suddenly.
“Made it as quickly as I could, ma’am,” Chuck said as he got out and strapped the equipment to the special vest he wore. He’d designed it over the years, after responding to so many of these calls and learning what he would need for most of them. He placed the plastic bags and gloves into Velcro pouches along his ribs and the EMF reader and gun into holsters on either side. “I only wish I could have gotten here closer to when it happened.”
Half a week since the incident—a truly frustrating lapse of time, but it couldn’t be helped.
“I’m just glad you’re here. The officers who came by the morning it went down were—well, less than useful.”
Chuck could hear the distaste in her voice, and he completely understood. He’d already read the police report made by the two investigating officers who had stopped by the ranch after Glenda had first called 911. It was obvious the two cops had been far out of their comfort zone—Chuck couldn’t really blame them for that. It was equally obvious that the officers hadn’t been able to give the woman any comfort. It took a lot to traumatize a third-generation rancher, but a pair of cops from the El Paso County sheriff’s department weren’t going to be able to make much sense out of something like this.
Unlike the police officers, Chuck wasn’t there in an official capacity. Although he had holstered his service revolver to his vest, and his badge was in the glove compartment of the truck, he wasn’t wearing his uniform, and he wouldn’t be filing any paperwork in Colorado Springs. In fact, he hadn’t been alerted to the incident by anyone involved with the department, but by a television reporter whom he had worked with before, an on-air producer named Andy Koen who had put him in touch with Glenda. The fact that she’d even taken his call, and had immediately asked him to come down to her ranch, was a testament to how terrified she truly was. Ranchers weren’t exactly known for welcoming outsiders; Chuck only hoped he could provide a little more explanation, if not consolation, than the investigating officers had.
They started away from the truck and into the ranch proper, Glenda moving determinedly past a low fence that marked the edge of the cows’ free grazing area, Chuck a few feet behind. Immediately, Chuck could tell that something was off. He’d been on plenty of ranches over the years, and on the surface, Glenda’s compound wasn’t unusual. Eighty or so acres, twenty-five head of cattle, with a low house beyond the grazing area and a medium-sized barn attached to the horse corral directly ahead. But the farther they got from the road, the harder Chuck’s heart started to beat. The low grass they were now moving through seemed untouched—ungrazed—and it was instantly obvious why that was. The handful of cows Chuck could see were clustered together in a small section of their feed area, as close to the barn as they could go. Beyond them, within the horse corral, the horses were behaving similarly—crowded together near the back fence. In the distance, he could hear a dog making noise from somewhere inside the house—a high-pitched sound, more wail than bark.
“They’ve been like that since it happened,” Glenda said. “Huddled over there, by the barn.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “They won’t go near the bodies.”
“On the phone, you said that at least one of the horses was nearby when it happened?”
Glenda nodded. “A survivor. A witness. Whatever you want to call him.”
This was part of the reason for Chuck’s elevated adrenaline level, beyond being at the site of the incident itself. It was extremely unusual for there to be any “survivors.” Usually, there were only bodies.
“Over here.”
Glenda led him the last few yards to the edge of the corral, where she unlatched a wooden gate and headed for the horses grouped together by the back. It took almost ten minutes for her to coax the animal away from the group; another ten for Chuck to get the poor thing comfortable enough with him so that he could approach.
It was a young male, a little over two years old, and to describe the animal as agitated would be a laughable understatement. He pawed at the ground, eyes rapidly shifting, spittle pooling at the edges of his mouth. Moving closer, Chuck immediately saw a reddish mark on the horse’s upper nose—what looked to be some sort of cut, scrape, or even burn—about the size of a quarter. Following Glenda’s lead, he bent low and saw similar marks on the inside of the animal’s legs.
“And his behavior—the way he’s acting—this is unusual for him?”
“Unusual? He’s one of my husband’s favorites. Like a pet. Him, Princess, and Buck, the three of them were inseparable.”
Chuck nodded. Horses are different from other animals on a ranch—they’re high maintenance, but more than that, they are often part of the family. Glenda and her husband—who, over the past few months, had grown too ill to tend to the ranch, leaving it under her watch—had raised these animals from foals. Beyond the emotional value, horses were expensive. Ranchers like Glenda ran their businesses at very tight margins. The unexpected loss of even a single animal hurt—losing multiple animals could mean the difference between a good season and a bad one.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. And the dog—she’s even worse. Same sort of marks on her. Shaking, drooling, whining. She won’t even come out of the house anymore.”
From the corral, Chuck could still hear the dog’s high-pitched wail. Nearly a week had gone by and the animal was still obviously traumatized. Chuck would want to take a closer look at the poor thing and run some tests on the agitated horse. But first, it was time to see the bodies. Without another word, Glenda led him toward the pasture where the incident had taken place.
Even from a distance, Chuck could tell that the two fully mature horses—Princess and Buck—lying prone in the grass had died unnaturally. The carcasses were flat against the ground on their sides, splayed out in exactly the same position. As Chuck drew closer, he could see no signs of predators or of any sort of defensive resistance—no deep hoofprints or raised furrows. They had obviously died suddenly. According to Glenda, they had been young, healthy animals, worth around a thousand dollars each.
