Xenoman

24 Church of Lew

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"There it is." Xeno said, as Andrea drove the station wagon past the motorist greeting sign, heading down Old Main Street, into the barrio side of Darkphalt:

WELCOME TO DARKPHALT

AS BORING AS IT LOOKS

"Yes, just as it appeared outside the psychic border of the Polaroid," Garry said from the dashboard telepane.

"Are we going to inspect the flying saucer? The one that crashed outside of town?"

"Xeno, we're in the middle of a tail job. We can swing back in the morning." On the dashboard telepane, three video game icons appeared, moving across a luminous grid. The green icon in front represented Lew's vehicle, the pink icon in the middle represented Estro's vehicle, and the blue icon trailing behind represented Xeno's vehicle. "I've locked on to the Lamborghini and the Gremlin with the spycam. Andrea will do all the driving. All you have to do is sit back and enjoy the depressing scenery."

The decrepit storefronts rambled by like a continuum of anti-theft security grills, beneath pale copper street light, with mannequins, appliances, sporting goods, pawn shop items, getting lost in patches of cryptic darkness. They passed a powered down movie theater, the snack bar lying in gloom beyond the lobby doors, the transparent ticket booth and the marquis, drowned in ashen shadow. Farther down, a cramped studio-size massage parlor with absolutely no detail about rates, services, or operating hours, just the neon MASSAGE sign radiating in the dead of night, the entire front door and shop window cheaply curtained from corner to corner.

"Hey, that looks like—" Xeno spotted the oncoming Klownburger through the windshield. He held out the Polaroid of Trianne, matching up the storefront ahead with the one in the photo. All the windows were boarded up, the fiberglass signage cracked from the elements, the ceramic Klownsy head no longer spinning above the parking lot, the wild speed-freak smile frozen in shadow. The place had been condemned for months. A cloud of dust blew through the open windows, turbulence smacking gravel on the windshield, distant howls of wind picking up down the road.

"Yes, that's the Klownburger where the Polaroid of Trianne was taken," Garry continued. "A real riff raff magnet, so they shut it down. Focus on the little car thingies on the dashboard telepane."

"All right. Focusing on the little car thingies." Xeno rolled up the windows to keep the dust out. "So, we've got the Lamborghini following the Gremlin from a safe distance, and we're following the Lamborghini." He looked through the windshield to see where they were going. "Looks like we're running out of shops . . . Looks like we're running out of main street." The storefronts dropped off to nothing, as the station wagon came to the end of Old Main Street, turning to shrubby open desert, bumpy terrain, the trail snaking through dark clusters of warped cacti, becoming obscured by thickening dust in the high beams. "Looks like a sand storm."

"Not to worry. Andrea will navigate via thermal grill sensors." The headlights on the station wagon went dead, leaving Xeno's face in the faint icy light of the dashboard telepane.

"Wow, I'm beginning to like this ugly station wagon more and more." Xeno continued watching the colored car icons on the dashboard telepane. The green car icon, representing the AMC Gremlin, came to a slow halt in front of a building icon on the grid, paused, inched forward, as if passing through a gate, then stopped. The pink car icon, representing the Lamborghini, inched closer to the building icon, paused, circled around to the back, then stopped. "Looks like they both parked up ahead, but not together."

Andrea parked the station wagon behind a dark thicket of high saguaros, several yards away from a mission style restaurant, awash in adult video flood lighting, the structure easily identifiable by a three bell campanario retro-fitted with three synthetic alien heads. The sealed entrance gate and the high adobe walls concealed the courtyard within.