Navigating Vasquez: A band on the Rocks

By DENNIS ANDERSON
Valley Press Editor

What went before:

Melba Trousdale lost her boyfriend during an engagement picnic at Vasquez Rocks. He was snatched by a giant tentacle near the set of one of the science fiction action flicks filmed at the rocks. The tentacle snapped her boyfriend, Aaron Slingfact, into a pool of greenish-blue light.

Seeking help from her ex-brother-in-law, bounty hunter Gort Beerata, Melba rode into the Big Rock Inn. At the venerable hostelry, Melba and Gort encountered Don Diego Rivera O'Riley, a reputed ufologist and sometime shaman.

Just when the trio was ready to develop a theory on the missing boyfriend, the Antelope Valley's most feared outlaw motorcycle club - the Vegans - showed up. The meatless bikers pursued Melba's friends from Elizabeth Lakes to Littlerock, leaving a trail of laser blasts and flame.

A Valley Press reporter, the missing man's cousin, joined the band on the quest. Reporters have questions, and Jack Slingfact was forming them all the way to Vasquez Rocks, where he spotted a one-armed man fleeing from a tunnel under the Antelope Valley Freeway. Jack pursued the one-armed man, and free-fell into the latest chapter.

Chapter 10: The Thing in the Pit

Jack fell into the black hole that bottomed from the tunnel beneath the Antelope Valley Freeway that led to Vasquez Rocks. It reminded him of a similar fall when an Army "black hat" jumpmaster unceremoniously gave his butt the tiniest shove with a size 12E Corcoran jump boot. He hadn't told the others about the embed thing, because their war stories were so much hairier than his own.

But the little shove from the 34-foot tower at Fort Benning had the advantage of a harness attached to a guide wire on a pulley that would conduct him conveniently down to the sawdust to pound his face like a big granular powder puff if he didn't manage the PLF just right. No guided parachute landing fall here, no harness to snap him like a marionette. Just falling in the dark, grabbing air, kicking legs, utterly unprepared for what would doubtless be that sudden stop accompanied by broken legs, and internal bleeding, if he was lucky.

Up in the Rocks, Melba Trousdale adjusted the binoculars loaned to her by Don Diego Rivera O'Riley.

"Jack should have been here by now," Melba said.

After two days on the run from vengeful Vegan carrot juice- and bourbon-swilling motorcycle outlaws, after dodging laser blasts and witnessing the otherworldly abduction of her almost-fiancé Aaron, after sleeping on a too-familiar Army cot in Don Diego Rivera O'Riley's fortress of solitude, Melba was beginning to sound a little forlorn.

"Have faith in Jack," O'Riley, the big medicine man said. "He made it back from Iraq. He can get down the freeway to a county park."

"Jack was in Iraq?"

"He was one of those embedded guys."

"I didn't give him enough credit," Melba said.

"Jack would share his last pack of butts with you, and he don't even smoke," the medicine man said.

Gort, the 6-foot-6, 258-pound bail recovery agent, low-crawled the last 20 feet or so up the escarpment where Melba and O'Riley concealed themselves. Gort was a hulking Viking, a walking armaments system built to rival a "Transformer" sequel or the governor of California. But he was pale beneath his scrubby beard, and his sweat was 9 mm.

"Melba," Gort said. "Didn't Lila tell ya about my thing with heights?" Lila was Melba's sister, and Gort's ex.

"Lila and I haven't talked since you went off your meds and she went to Albania."

"Albania?"

"Peace Corps volunteer," Melba said. "After you blew up the house with an incendiary grenade she wanted a change of pace. She figured the Peace Corps was a little more peaceful."

"Albania?"

"They ate a lot of beets."

Gort was often pale, but rarely sweaty. Bounty hunters need their cool. "So, she didn't mention I'm acrobat-phobic?"

"You mean acrophobic?" O'Riley the medicine man said.

"No, acrobat-phobic," Gort said. "I had to skip trace a trapeze artist on a bench warrant. Only way to follow him was to grab the next trapeze."

"Lila never mentioned it," Melba said.

"No net," Gort said, looking down the seven-story height of the escarpment. "I was out of traction in about a month."

They were hunched inside an envelope of prehistoric extrusive rock, a giant taco shell formation with a good observation field on the rest of the county park that was home to picknickers, tourists, rock climbers and countless movie and TV shoots since before "The Ten Commandments" and Republic's "Captain Marvel."

Because it was a weekday, and there was no filming, the place was an empty beach in the desert foothills, populated only by sagebrush, and the jutting escarpments that made the locale as appealing as Stonehenge or Easter Island for movie crews. Only Stonehenge and Easter Island were not in the "30-mile zone" from the film factories in Burbank. And that is how the rocks, through the magic of "Star Trek" and "The Flintstones" had become as oddly monumental as the giant heads of Easter Island or the druidic stones of Stonehenge.

The visitors also spotted no traces of recent filming. No telltale tire tracks, no litter from the ubiquitous RV trailers that housed the talent. The park should have been trashier since the budget cuts that bankrupted California.

"It's clean," the medicine man said. "Too clean."

"It's like they left, and didn't want anybody to think anybody had been here," Gort said.

"Meaning what?" Melba asked.

"If I break into a house - not that I would do such thing," Gort said, "but if I break into a house, and I want to make sure it's the right house, I look for a utility bill to make sure I'm tracing the right bail skipper, capeesh?"

"Uh huh," Melba said.

"But I know that they know that somebody is going to have been there, right? So, I mess the joint up, and maybe swipe a boom box."

"So it looks like a crime scene," O'Riley said. "But it's a staged crime scene."

"Right, and when the dude gets home and he don't call the cops, I know I've got my boy."

"So," Melba said, "what's that got to do with no film set here at the rocks?"

"They left in a hurry," Gort said. "But not so much of a hurry that the place didn't get swept clean."

"To make it look like they were never here," O'Riley said.

"And that's a clue," Gort said. "That's what torqued me about Lila. She was taller than me, and prettier than me, but worst, she never gave me credit for doing the deducting thing. Like I was just some big galoot."

"Lila really loved you, Gort," Melba said. "I think it was the blowing up the house thing."

"Picky."

"What do we do now?" she asked.

"We wait," O'Riley the medicine man said.

"For what, a search warrant?" Gort asked. "Or for me to get over my acrobat-phobia?"

"For dusk," Diego said. "Park closes at dusk, and we can go down and make a close check on the ground."

\uE06F

A warm blast of air hit Jack in the face, lifting him up like a giant hand. That felt like the pocket of air that picks up a skydiver at 130 mph terminal velocity, or a wind tunnel. The air was lowering him gradually, until he landed on his backside. He picked himself up and dusted himself off.

Except there was no dust in the total blackness of the hole he fell in. He did a cursory check for fractures and adjusted his eyes. That was easy because it was a deep black, the kind that make you see little squirly dust bunnies in front of your eyes.

He took a few steps, and decided he was not in a mine shaft, or a cave. He was walking on a smooth surface. He stuck his arm out to full length and touched a wall, but its surface was rough.

He took a few steps, hand tracing the rocky surface. He heard enough dark quiet that he felt his heart pump at right parachute door drumbeat.

He could feel his hand tracing a curve, and as he rounded the curve, he could see a greenish light in the distance. It pulsed, and when it pulsed it shifted hue to a bluish glow.

He took the little flashlight from his bomber jacket and thumbed the "on" for a faint glow. "Damn drugstore batteries," Jack muttered. He dropped the flashlight in his pocket and replaced it with the lockblade knife retrieved from his goody bag at the Business Outlook conference.

He heard something moving in the darkness. It had mass, because its sound signature, even amplified in the passageway, had the tonal quality of an enormous zipper. Whatever it was, it was moving his direction.

His feet did what feet do when they hear primal zipping. They picked up pace. Jack began running headlong toward the bluish green glow. The zipping noise followed, gaining on the smacking staccato of his desert boots hitting hard surface.

The hair on the nape of our neck, the old primitive fight or flight, tells us when something is close. He felt the closing distance of the zipping noise, and it was something tubular, the size of a giant anaconda, moving along the tunnel wall like a giant slinky.

Jack, jackrabbit running in the dark, felt something tap the back of his lower his leg in the dark, then coil around his leg. The serpentine thing that coiled his ankle had a glowing tip, like a blood red eye.

"Tentacle," Jack said. And he tried to twist away, but the thing had him, pulling him away into the dark, away from the bluish green glow.

To be continued next Sunday.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Previous chapters of Vasquez Rocks can be read at avpress.com behind the extraterrestrial icon.