The downpour continued to pummel vehicles, structures, and the surrounding terrain. Only the Cadillac seemed immune, an island of serenity in a deluge of destruction. Stories fell in front of it, behind, and all around, but not on. Baffled, Ross Ed turned to his only companion.

“What is it this time?” Jed the dead did not reply.

The three captains were running for cover, any cover, trying to protect their heads with their hands. Two of them stumbled toward the rest rooms while the one who’d been talking to Ross Ed threw himself into a parked car. He was forced to abandon it when a stone the size of a cantaloupe crashed through the windshield. Trailing glass shards, he joined a cluster of soldiers who were making a dash for the bathrooms.

Seeing as how his car was undamaged and unattended, Ross Ed turned the key in the ignition and put it in drive. Nobody emerged from under cover to challenge him. Easing off on the brake, he headed out of the parking lot. Stones began to strike the spot where he’d been parked, but the Caddy received not so much as a scratch. It was as if a giant umbrella had been opened over the car, shielding it from the downpour.

The heavily armed rangers and military police who moments earlier had been manning barricades had fled in search of safety. Nudging the wooden barriers aside, Ross eased the Fleetwood through and accelerated down the on-ramp. Most highly localized of storms, the tempest raged behind him but did not follow.

The night was clear and cloudless as he reentered I-10 and pushed the Caddy up to seventy-five. There was no longer any point in driving slow to avoid attention. They knew what he looked like, and what his car looked like.

He debated how soon to abandon the interstate. If he could just make Tucson, he might have a chance to lose himself in the maze of city streets. The more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed that they’d give him that chance. A high-speed car chase through a major urban center would be a poor way of maintaining secrecy, which they had obviously gone to some length to preserve. He was sure they’d do anything to prevent him from reaching the city. Therefore he would have to exit as soon as possible and try to lose them in the countryside.

The officer he’d spoken to had been up-front about their intent. Certainly that had been equally clear to Jed. There was no question in Ross Ed’s mind that the alien (or at least the built-in defensive mechanisms in the alien suit) was responsible for the delivering deluge.

“Thanks,” he told the corpse. “Come too far to start back-tracking. Need more time to decide what to do.” Jed chose not to argue the point.

When the appalling downpour finally ceased, the military contingent trapped in the rest stop cautiously emerged from shelter to inspect their surroundings and regroup. Robinett was the first to notice that the Cadillac was gone. Somehow Suttles wasn’t surprised.

Not a desert plant had been left standing. Every vehicle, including the trucks, had been badly damaged. Certainly none were in drivable condition, much less capable of pursuit. Trashed along with windshields, engines, tires, and instrument panels was a lot of very expensive electronic surveillance and communications gear. The van in particular looked like it had taken direct hits from a couple of rocket-propelled grenades. It and the two cars were so full of holes they appeared to have been used for target practice.

Which they had been, Suttles reflected. By the heavens.

Reaching up, he felt a trickle of blood running down his right temple. No one had escaped the battering. Exposed skin had been bruised, clothing shredded. It could have been worse, he reflected. They had suffered a thousand minor injuries and not a single major one. Intent, coincidence, or luck?

“What the hell happened?” Robinett was cradling a badly banged-up left arm.

“It wasn’t hail.” Suttles decided that in spite of her bruises and scratches Captain Kerry was more alluring in tattered attire than tailored. Wrapping a length of torn cloth around her fingers, she reached into one of the million holes that now pockmarked the rest stop and picked up a tiny chunk of gray material.

“It’s still hot.” She showed it to her companions, rolling it between her fingertips so it wouldn’t burn through the material. “Heavy, too, for its size.”

“What is it?” Suttles squinted at the nondescript granule.

“Isn’t it obvious? It’s a meteorite. Smaller than some of those that hit, larger than a lot of others.” Flicking it aside, she indicated his ripped shirt. “Some primitive societies will launder with pumice, but this is ridiculous.”

“That’s crazy,” he retorted. “No way. How come we’re only scratched and cut, while the vehicles have been totaled?”

A bemused Robinett was kneeling to examine some of the debris. “I guess as meteor storms go this one was highly selective. Most of the big stuff didn’t fall until we were under cover. It didn’t want to kill us, just put us out of commission.” He turned slightly to eye Kerry. “Want to bet that the first person to take a hike over the hill finds nothing but used helicopter pans scattered across the desert?”

There was no need to take the bet, as a couple of the rangers had already left to check on the chopper’s status. Taking a seat on a decorative boulder noticeably scarred by the storm, Suttles glanced down as the remaining bits of his cellular phone trickled away into the dirt, leaving only a slab of plastic and a few dangling capacitors clipped to his belt. Not surprisingly, there wasn’t a single intact piece of communications equipment to be found among the dazed and befuddled company.

“He’s gone.” Robinett nodded toward the far end of the parking area, where the wooden barriers had been pushed aside to allow a large vehicle room enough to pass. “And we’re stuck without any means of calling for help.”

“Let’s get out on the interstate,” Kerry suggested. “We’ll flag down someone with a car phone, or a trucker with a CB.”

Suttles trailed behind his two colleagues. “I’m afraid it won’t be that simple. If I were out driving in the middle of the night, I might stop for someone in a uniform. Even a trucker might not pull over for a bunch of beat-up, gesticulating maniacs dressed in rags. I wouldn’t stop.”

“We’ll find somebody. People are curious.” She glanced down at her muchly revealed self. “If necessary I’ll go stand in the middle of the slow lane. That ought to make a trucker or two blink.”

Don’t overestimate your attractions, Suttles murmured but only to himself.

On one point they agreed: sooner or later someone would pull over to find out what had happened. He peered back over his shoulder, in the direction of distant Tucson. The question was, how long until that happy moment arrived? How far would their long tall Texan have traveled by then? They didn’t even know what direction he might be heading. Unless he was a complete fool he’d get off the interstate fast, whence he could continue in any conceivable direction. He might even now be heading for the international border at high speed. If he made it into Mexico before they could cut him off, they’d have a hell of a time getting him back. Sealing the border must be their first priority. Keep him in the country and they’d run him to ground sooner or later.

Robinett was staring skyward, his voice full of wonder. “How do you order up a meteor storm, keep it confined to an absurdly small area, and moderate the impacts? Thousands, we must have taken thousands of hits. Surely they couldn’t all have been individually guided?”

“The suit.” They both looked back at Suttles. “The alien may be dead, but his suit is still active. It contains mechanisms we don’t understand. A logical function of such a piece of equipment would be to preserve and defend its owner.”

“So you bomb your perceived enemies with micrometeroites.” Kerry snorted in disbelief.

Robinett rubbed his injured arm. “Some of them weren’t so micro. I took a couple of hundred hits myself, yet I’m still walking around.” He nodded off to their right. “Meanwhile the big brothers of the pinheads that were pelting me were punching holes in army trucks. I can’t even conceive of that kind of precision.”

“All the more reason why we have to get ahold of that suit and its commute.” A thoroughly frustrated Kerry kicked an uprooted cactus aside.

“Yes.” Robinett turned thoughtful. “I wonder what other tricks it has in its repertoire? Maybe next time it won’t be so careful.”

“We’ll take precautions.” Skin gleaming through her torn clothing, Kerry topped a low rise and started down toward the interstate.

“Against micro-manipulated meteor storms?” Robinett sounded something less than confident. “We’re going to have a hell of a time bringing this guy in.”

“We’ll get him.” Saud slid beneath her shoes. “If nothing else, he has to sleep sometime.”

“That’s so,” agreed Robinett, “but dead aliens probably don’t.”

“Then you’re convinced that’s what it is?” Suttles asked him.

“I wasn’t before. I am now. Al least, I’m convinced that it’s an alien. I’m not so convinced that it’s dead.”

“I told you; it’s the suit that’s doing everything.”

“You’re sure? You’re absolutely positive it’s dead? I won’t be convinced until the autopsy’s been run.”

Remembering the Texan’s concern for the bodily integrity of his discovery, Suttles feli guilty. “I saw it up close. It’s dead.”

“Right. And form follows function. There’s dead and then there’s dead. Read your Egyptology.”

Behind them officers were beginning to give orders to their demoralized troops. Equipment salvage commenced in the hopes of finding something capable of communicating with headquarters. The effort proved futile.

Almost as futile as the captains’ attempts to flag down passing traffic. Vehicle after vehicle ignored their frantic gesturing. A few slowed slightly but then sped up again, their occupants no doubt discussing and probably having a laugh at the expense of the trio gesticulating by the side of the road. The operator of one eighteen-wheeler slowed long enough to favor Kerry with an appreciative whistle, but didn’t stop.

Recognizing that this might take a while, Suttles found himself a comfortable patch of sand and sat down. Eventually they would be missed and others would come to check on the operator’s status. That could take some time.

With every car that shot indifferently past, with every truck that rattled the road without slowing, their quarry was receding farther and farther into the cool, clear Arizona night.

NINE

On the crumpled map, Tucson loomed tantalizingly near, but the longer he thought about it the less sure Ross Ed was of his ability to avoid the attentions of the military there, much less the local police.

The Fleetwood was the problem. Instead of a generic world car he was cruising the highways and byways of the Southwest in a veritable boat, a land yacht in a sea of canoes. He was too easy to spot.