Rocket - Chapter 3
Naida - US/Mexico Border
Three hours after leaving the contractor’s body in the rocks, Naida was starting to understand what “hunted” actually meant.
The first hour had been easy. Almost fun. The scattered search teams were disorganized, their radio chatter full of confusion and fear. She’d listened to them stumble through the desert darkness while she moved north, staying ahead of their clumsy sweep patterns.
The second hour, things changed.
New voices on the radio. Calm. Professional. Coordinates delivered with military precision instead of panicked updates. She’d crouched behind a limestone outcropping and listened to the transition happen in real-time.
“All units, this is Command Actual. New search protocols in effect. Grid pattern Sierra-Seven through Echo-Nine. Thermal sensors deployed. Maintain radio discipline.”
English clipped into military cadence, but the accent underneath it was the same border Spanish she’d heard for weeks in the safe houses. Not soldiers, then. The cartel’s real ones, the ex-military muscle they kept for problems that mattered.
Mierda. They sent the serious ones.
She’d moved faster after that, using her enhanced speed to put distance between herself and the tightening net. But the desert that had felt like an ally during her first night was starting to betray her. Every ridge she climbed revealed more flashlight beams in the distance. Every arroyo she followed eventually forced her back toward areas where radio chatter suggested teams were positioned.
They weren’t chasing her anymore. They were herding her.
The third hour brought a new problem that made the search teams feel almost secondary.
Dawn.
The pressure started as a whisper behind her eyes. Easy to ignore while she focused on evading the grid search closing in from the south. But it built steadily, inexorably, the way the air went hollow and metallic in the hour before a Sonoran summer storm broke open over the city of her childhood, that same wrongness in the bones now, except this storm was the sun itself coming up over the ridge to find her. Her body knew what was coming even if her conscious mind wanted to deny the reality, every cell of dead flesh tuning itself to a clock she hadn’t started and couldn’t stop, the dirt in her grave and the dirt under her boots and the dirt she had not yet learned was hers all whispering the same warning at different frequencies.
She had maybe ninety minutes. Maybe less.
Need to find shelter. Real shelter. Not just shadow.
But there was nothing out here. Open desert in every direction, no cover deep enough to outlast the sunrise, and the grid search pushing her north into increasingly bad terrain. The country up here gave her nothing she could use, a washboard of bajada and creosote running to an eastern horizon that had already begun to bruise from black toward the first sick gray of the thing that would kill her, every wash too shallow to swallow a body and every ridge too bare to put one behind, the kind of ground that had been quietly killing people who tried to cross it for a hundred years and would not care in the slightest whether she was still breathing when the sun finally reached her.
The radio crackled with updates that painted a picture of professional competence she couldn’t match. Six teams, two men each, moving in coordinated patterns. Command element on high ground with overwatch. Motion sensors covering likely escape routes.
They’d learned from the first night’s disaster. Adapted. Escalated.
She was running out of space to run and time to run in.
The arroyo appeared like salvation, deep enough for concealment, winding enough to break line of sight, positioned just outside the search grid’s current focus. She dropped into it with relief that lasted exactly as long as it took for her enhanced hearing to pick up boots crunching across caliche above her.
Multiple teams. They converged.
Jodido. They were waiting for me to do exactly this.
The arroyo cut through the desert like a scar carved by flash floods and forgotten violence, its walls offering shelter from the sweep that had been tightening around her. Naida crouched against the crumbling bank, her slightly-too-large stolen combat boots finding purchase on loose shale that threatened to announce her location with every micro-adjustment of weight. The approaching dawn pressed against her consciousness like a migraine made of light she couldn’t yet see.
“Sector siete despejado. Avanzando al ocho.”
They were working the grid in order, sector by sector, and they were one number from hers.
“Copiado. Los térmicos marcan en los arroyos, pero nada se mueve. Será jabalí.”
The thermal was lighting up on something in the washes, and the man reading it already didn’t buy it. Pigs, he figured. Warm-blooded little javelina rooting through the dark, not her.
She went still.
The sensors hunted warmth, and she didn’t have any. Dead, cold as the caliche under her hands, she threw nothing at all. A blank where a body should be.
“Recibido. Péinenlo a la vista.”
They were giving up on the machines and falling back to their own eyes.
Naida’s enhanced hearing picked up details that should have been impossible: the slight wheeze in one searcher’s breathing that suggested a longtime smoker, the metallic click of safety mechanisms being engaged and disengaged by nervous fingers, the subtle shift in radio frequency that meant they were coordinating with command elements she couldn’t see. Information flooded her senses: precise, unbidden, useful, and she was already running inventory on what she was working with.
Verga. These aren’t random cartel soldiers anymore. Better gear, better tactics. Instead of leaving me alone they upgraded. Not the message I wanted them to get.
The Sinaloa Coyotes were hunting her with the same efficiency they’d used to transport her across this border as cargo. She’d already turned the tables; she just hadn’t told them yet. The sun was the new problem, and that one required a different solution.
Verga verga fuck. The note said stay out of the sun. No caves. No buildings. Nowhere to hide from the sun. I’m going to die. Again. Fuck!
Every sound was too loud. Her heartbeat... no, wait, not hers. Someone else’s heartbeat. Above her.
Shadow wouldn’t be enough. The sun would find her.
Boots crunching loose shale. Someone was about to jump down.
Flashlights in seconds.
Verga. I’m fucked. Completely fucked.
Someone jumped down. Boots hit hard, loose shale skittering.
The Coyote’s flashlight swept right, then left. Settled on her.
“¡La tengo! ¡Sector ocho, la tengo!”
Mierda mierda mierda...
He was already moving, rifle coming up.
Her body answered before she chose it. Her hands caught the hem of her stolen shirt and dragged it up, baring her chest to the flashlight beam. The oldest distraction there was, drilled into her by the coyotes until it ran without her, the one that always worked on men who came expecting cargo. She watched herself do it from somewhere behind her own eyes, clinical, already counting what it bought: the half-beat where his eyes dropped, where the rifle wavered, where some animal reflex older than his training dragged his attention exactly where she needed it gone.
Let las chiches do what they’re good at. Men lose their minds over a nice pair. Buys me the time I need.
Half a second. That was the whole gift.
She was faster.
Vampire speed carried her forward before he resolved the contradiction. She hit him low, claws raking across his tactical vest. The Kevlar held but the impact drove him backward into the arroyo wall hard enough to crack his helmet against limestone.
His radio squawked. “¡Lobo-Tres, reporta!”
She grabbed for his throat. He blocked, training overriding shock. His knee came up, caught her ribs. Pain exploded but didn’t slow her down. Dead bodies didn’t care about broken ribs.
They grappled. His superior weight and training versus her supernatural strength and desperation. He got an arm around her neck, trying for a chokehold. She didn’t need to breathe.
Her teeth found his forearm. Bit down hard enough to feel bone. He screamed and let go.
She threw him. Enhanced strength sent him flying into the opposite wall. He slumped, stunned but alive.
Stunned. Not dead. He’ll live. Neither guilt nor satisfaction. Arithmetic. He fought well. I fought better.
Movement above, his partner at the rim, already sliding down the bank.
Can’t fight them both. Can’t run. Dawn’s coming. Fuck fuck FUCK...
Her hands moved before her brain caught up. Clawing at the dirt beneath her boots. The earth felt different under her fingers: not just dirt, but something that might give way if she pushed hard enough.
Underground. Dig down. Let the earth take you.
“That’s not fucking possible,” she muttered, then froze as her words echoed off the arroyo walls.
Her hands were already clawing at the dirt anyway. The earth felt wrong under her fingers: too soft, almost liquid.
What the fuck. It’s moving. The dirt is actually moving.
Her claws (when had those happened?) sank deeper. The earth parted around her hands like water.
Don’t stop. Deeper.
“Sector ocho, tenemos algo en el arroyo norte. Vamos por confirmación visual.”
Seconds. She had seconds before they reached her. Minutes before dawn killed her.
The ground beneath her hands shifted. Became liquid. The earth opened.
“¿Qué carajo es esto?” But she was already sinking, the dirt flowing around her like water. Thick, heavy water that pulled her down instead of pushing her out. Boots hit the arroyo floor thirty feet away. Flashlight beams swept overhead.
She went deeper, and the earth swallowed her whole.
Absolute dark. Still air. The enormous quiet of solid ground, an immensity she felt the way you felt the depth of an ocean floor under a swimmer’s feet, layers of weight stacked above her in patient masonry that the surface world had never had the patience to learn, and the smell of it filling whatever it was she had instead of lungs now: iron and clay and something older, the dry mineral exhalation of stone that had never seen weather, never been cracked open, never had to explain itself to anything that breathed.
Pressure built in her ears like diving underwater. The world spun; she didn’t know which way was up anymore, couldn’t tell if she was sinking or falling sideways. Her body wanted to panic. Her body always wanted to panic.
Keep going.
She kept going.
Dirt pressed against her face, her chest, her legs. A kind of close pressure, like a held breath that wasn’t hers. The earth adjusting around her. Making room.
Dirt filled her mouth again, tasting like metal and stone, ancient and cold. She didn’t need to spit it out. She didn’t need anything down here that the surface had to offer.
Holy shit. I’m actually underground. I’m inside the fucking ground. I went into the ground. I am in the ground right now.
She could still hear them above: boots scraping, radios crackling, flashlights clicking on. But they were up there and she was down here and there was solid earth between them. The weight of it sat above her the same way you felt a ceiling in a dark room: just present, just there, not threatening.
The dirt made sounds. Tiny sounds. Minerals grinding together where the caliche shifted minutely under its own weight, a thousand small adjustments she would have called silence when she was alive, roots creaking through their slow ancient business of finding the tiny fractures in limestone and prising them apart year by year. And under all of it, the slow percussion of water moving somewhere far below through stone it had been carving for centuries before any pendejo with a flashlight thought he owned this desert. Things she hadn’t heard before because she’d never heard earth from the inside, the way you heard a house from inside its walls instead of from the street, intimate and rude and full of the building’s true business. She hadn’t known it had an inside that sounded like this, and the sound was patient in a way nothing on the surface had ever been patient with her.
Wait. Could she breathe down here?
She tried. Didn’t need to. Of course she didn’t need to. She hadn’t needed to breathe since she’d died. She’d just forgotten, because the surface kept acting like that still mattered.
Okay. That’s... that’s fucked up but useful.
The pressure behind her eyes faded. Dawn was coming but there was dirt between her and the sun now. Lots of dirt.
They can’t find me. The sun can’t reach me. I can hear everything they’re doing. This... this is... this is fuckin’ cool.
Boots moved across the ground above. Flashlights swept back and forth.
For the first time since clawing her way out of her own grave, she was safe. The word sat in her head without a threat attached to it.
She heard everything now. Not just boots and radios, but conversations.
Somewhere off to the east, the net came apart.
Not words at first. Cursing. A man’s voice climbing toward a register men didn’t reach unless something had gone very wrong.
“¡Jabalí! ¡Una manada, hay crías! ¡Quítenmelas, quítenmelas!”
The pigs. The fucking pigs.
“¿Dónde está el teniente?”
“¡En el suelo! ¡Lo agarraron en la pierna, no se puede parar!”
“Le dije que era jabalí.” A pause. Then, lower, half off the net: “Pinche teniente. Nunca escuchan.”
El teniente. Green idiot. Trusted the machine over the man who told him it was pigs, then went to claim the kill himself.
“¡Evac! ¡Saquen al teniente, ya!”
They brought the good gear and a boy to lead it. The desert took the boy first.
The net jumped, and a slower voice rode over the panic, the one that signed the checks.
“¿El teniente?” Pure disbelief, going cold. “¿Me están diciendo que mi teniente está en el suelo por unos pinches jabalíes?”
There he is. The money man just found out his golden boy got gored by pigs. Everybody’s about to have a very bad morning.
“...found Martinez unconscious. Bite wounds on his arm. Jesus Christ, what is she?”
“Command wants her alive if possible,” another voice cut in. “Authorized to use tranqs.”
“Tranqs? She threw him like he weighed nothing. We need bigger guns.”
Static. Then command: “Maintain protocol. We don’t know what we’re dealing with. Sweep the arroyo north to the wash. She has to be somewhere.”
“She went into the ground, sir. There’s no footprints out. No tracks. Nothing.”
Silence on the radio. Longer than procedure called for.
“That’s not possible.”
“I know.”
The slow voice cut back in, and it had stopped being cold. Just angry now, the anger of a man who paid for results and was getting handed ghost stories.
“¿Se metió en la tierra? Nadie se mete en la tierra. ¿Qué se metieron ustedes? ¿Andan drogados en mi operación? Encuéntrenla, o el que me vuelva con cuentos de fantasmas se queda en ese desierto con ella.”
A different voice answered, and it was shaking. “Jefe, estoy tan sobrio como una monja en misa. Sé que no es posible. Pero se lo juro por la Virgen de Guadalupe, es lo que vi con mis propios ojos. La tierra se la tragó.”
Naida could imagine the man crossing himself as he said it.
“Guárdate a la Virgen para el domingo.” The contempt was back, fear riding under it now. “Aquí no manda la Virgencita. Aquí manda la Flaca, y a la Flaca no le rezas, le pagas. Encuéntrenmela, y yo le pago a ella que se la lleve.”
Now they’re arguing over whose saint gets to bury me. The boss wants to pay Holy Death herself to come take me. Cabrón, she already came. She’s the reason I’m down here. They came hunting a scared girl, and they’re starting to understand they found something else.
The earth pressed against her, warm and solid, holding her with the same weight that had crushed her hours ago in a different hole and meant something completely different now: not burial but containment, not silencing but sheltering, the whole mass of the Sonoran upper mantle in her favor for once instead of stacked against her. Like being hugged by the entire desert, except the desert had never hugged anyone. The desert killed people slowly and without comment. And the fact that it was holding her tonight meant something had changed about which side of the contract she was on.
She flexed her fingers experimentally. The dirt responded, flowing aside to give her room, then settling back. She could move down here. Actually move. Swim through solid ground.
Take it. All of it.
This changes everything. They can’t track me. Can’t follow. Can’t even know where I am. I could be under their feet right now and they’d have no idea. I could travel like this. Surface at night. Disappear before sunrise. They built a whole military operation to hunt me in this desert and I just... went under it.
Above, more boots arrived. More voices. Then a longer stretch of radio traffic she couldn’t fully make out, command elements conferring, someone reading coordinates, a voice that sounded like it was working very hard to stay calm. Dawn protocols. They were pulling back before sunrise.
Smart.
She listened to their footsteps recede. Eight men. Maybe ten. All of them walking away from the ground she was inside. Not one of them looking down.
They were leaving. They hadn’t found her.
They couldn’t find her. That was the thing. Actually unfindable, six feet under their boots, and they’d swept right past with their sensors and their grid patterns and their bigger guns.
The dirt around her felt different now. Not crushing anymore. Almost comfortable. Warm, even. The dawn pressure was completely gone.
Safe. She turned the word over and nothing moved behind it.
She’d never been safe. Not from the moment Señor Morales handed her off. Not from before that, if she was honest. There had always been something to outrun. The cousin first, when she was small, and then the long catalog after him, Morales with his promises and his price, the safe houses that stank of diesel and other girls’ fear, the trucks, the coyotes, the shallow grave, every one of them a thing that needed her moving so it could take its piece while she ran, and not one of them had ever let her stop long enough to learn what stillness even felt like.
There was nothing to outrun right now.
Exhaustion came down on her all at once.
Is this normal? Do vampires sleep underground? Mierda, I’m so tired...
Sleep pulled at her. Heavy.
Did whoever made me know this would happen? Did she dump me in the desert because she knew I could... burrow?
Maybe. Maybe not. Didn’t matter right now.
The darkness pressed in. Quiet and still and completely fine. The mineral sounds of the earth doing whatever earth did in the dark, with no one listening.
Except her, six feet down and finally, actually still.
She stopped fighting and let it take her.
The earth held.
© 2025 E L Frederick | Published by Veridian Studios