“Victoria, get back out here,” Cooper ordered through text. “They’re gathering in the field.”
Cooper’s view showed a group of at least fifty people gathered in a circle at the nearby grassy clearing. People stood upon the charred logs with their hands raised in a ritual and called to the sky in unison. Most of their bodies and arms obscured a large woman at the center dressed in a bear pelt who had the unconscious robbery suspect draped across her arms. She lowered the man onto an altar made from a disc of millennia-old redwood and prayed to the sky.
The woman knelt and the crowd knelt with her, including the young man who had recently left gate duty. She called to the skies in a half-prayer, half-plea and raised a wooden staff above her head. The followers did the same. What were mere sticks turned into a menacing display with so many gathered to scream.
“Dru—” Murphy said over the radio, his words cut off with static.
“Signal…oken…cloud cov—” Emma said, her signal also full of interference.
The bear pelt woman reached into a leather satchel at her hip and revealed a bundle of herbs. She uttered loud prayers in what at first sounded like a foreign language, but sounded nothing like a Germanic or Latin collection of syllables.
Cooper attempted to type a command with eye tracking and found the server slow to uptake his actions. He huffed and turned to Victoria.
“We’re losing the signal, time to pull back,” Cooper said aloud.
The bear pelt woman shouted her prayers both at the unconscious man and at the sky. She rubbed herbs on his face and then shoved a few dried leaves in his mouth.
“Good idea. I do not have enough bullets for them all.” Victoria nodded and backtracked across the dried grass and weeds to the fence along with her superior.
“I said that looks like druid—” Murphy said. “Boss do…rive the ca…up to the gate? Boss? I can—”
The more the bear pelt woman spoke, the more the crowd echoed key phrases, and the more evident it was what they spoke had no similarity to any type of familiar language.
“It would be beneficial to have Emma’s insight right about now,” Victoria said as she ducked behind a trailer and broke line of sight with the crowd.
“That would also mean having Murphy’s opinions about this being an extraterrestrial tongue,” Cooper said.
The two agents hopped the barbed wire fence and re-entered the brush in time to turn around to see what a mass wail was all about.
The unconscious man sat up, nauseous and in pain. He curled into a fetal position and dry heaved. The gathered worshippers shouted their thanks to the sky.
Cooper and Victoria both dialed down the volume of their headsets. Each turned on local memory recording for their cameras and personal audio.
Victoria checked a clearing in the woodland canopy to see an overcast sky, but not something that would completely terminate all communication.
“The nearest dense smog should be from Salinas, Seaside, and Santa Cruz,” Victoria said. “None of them produces enough to spill out at disruption quantities this far away.”
The crowd in the field went silent and everyone bowed to listen to the suspect, who stood upon his redwood altar.
“The police wounded me as I attempted to fulfill my duties.” The man unzipped his dirty yellow jacket and showed off the small streak of blood that trailed down his chest from a tiny cut on his neck. “And as the Enlightened One has gifted me with the nose of a wolf, I tell you, those police are here!”
“Give me the order and I will shut him up.” Victoria spoke aloud and aimed the hunting rifle at the man’s head.
“You’d really draw their ire when you just admitted you can’t shoot them all?” Cooper also spoke as he scooted out of the poison oak and took cover behind a cluster of young pines.
“The plan would be shoot as many as I can, then club the rest,” Victoria said. “This rifle has some nice heft.”
“Go out in a melee brawl? Not my idea of a good plan.” Cooper dialed his sunglasses to zoom in on the ritual and boost audio from the speakers.
“It worked great in Colombia.” Victoria withdrew a hand from her rifle long enough to also set her eyepiece to zoom in and better collect audio from the ritual.
“We’re a long way from the border,” Cooper said with a slight growl. “Collect yourself, Reserve Deputy.”
The woman in the bear pelt surveyed the tree lines around the property.
“Please tell us, Gift Bringer, where are these harmful police?” The woman stepped onto the redwood altar and helped the man stand as slight leg trembles threatened him.
The suspect wobbled in place with the bear pelt woman’s help to stay up. He swept his hands through the air in every direction before he spun himself around to point at the gate.
“They’re coming up the road,” the suspect said. “They’ll be here soon with guns to destroy our sacred way of life. They wish to threaten us and the paradise the Enlightened One has created.”
The crowd stirred to action and roared enough to obscure whatever commands were issued by the bear pelt woman to quiet them back down.
“What’s that?” Victoria pointed toward the barn where a pair of little girls dressed in stitched-together rabbit pelts ran as fast as their little legs could carry them.
Both agents cranked up the audio collection.
“The Enlightened One stirs,” one girl said through a mess of shaggy blonde hair and missing teeth. “The Gift Bringer is being summoned.”
“The Enlightened One will have audience with the Gift Bringer,” the bear pelt woman said. “The rest of us will defend the gate. Gather your weapons!”
The crowd all ran toward their trailers with a fury of screams and curses, including the bear pelt woman. The little girls ran back to the barn at top speed. The suspect, called the Gift Bringer, wobbled as he stood on his own atop the redwood altar.
“So much for having divination powers.” Victoria lowered her weapon.
“Fortunately, they’re unaware of our location,” Cooper said. “It’s up to Murphy to keep himself out of trouble.”
“He has proven his potential,” Victoria said. “But he will need more than potential to make it past a crowd like this.”
Both their attention turned back to the Gift Bringer, who roared. The man clasped his hands against his chest and vanished with a flash of white light. A tiny seedling tumbled from the height of his chest down onto the altar without any trace the man had ever stood in its place.
“We need to find out where he went,” Cooper said. “Let’s circle around to the other side of the fence and inspect the other buildings.”
Both agents crept through the woodland away from their agitated foes and moved toward their new destination.
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