Easter eggs on the run.

 Easter eggs on the run.

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Pedro didn’t stop. He couldn’t. Lupita’s scream echoed behind him, searing his chest worse than the desert air that burned his lungs. He glanced back once more, and for a moment he swore her body twisted unnaturally, like the beam didn’t just drop her but pulled something out of her. The helicopters’ spotlights swept across the scrubland, searching for his silhouette, and the night exploded with the hum of drones circling lower, their red eyes blinking like predators.

He stumbled into a dry ravine, ducking beneath a canopy of mesquite. His hands shook. He wanted to turn back, to drag Lupita’s body with him, but his gut whispered something darker: she isn’t just gone… they’ve taken her. As if to confirm the thought, he heard the thump of rotor blades and the metallic screech of cables sliding. Dark figures rappelled down from the helicopters, faceless men in black gear who moved without hesitation. Pedro watched in horror as they hooked straps beneath Lupita’s limp form, hauling her upward into the chopper’s belly like prized cargo. The sight churned his stomach. He had heard whispers of this before—the “night harvest,” migrants taken not to detention centers, but to places no one returned from.

He pressed himself into the dirt, heart hammering, as one of the drones dipped so close he could hear the mechanical whine of its rotors. He bit down on his knuckle to keep from screaming. A memory crawled into his mind, the rumors he’d overheard back at the border camps: people carried off in the sky, their voices sometimes echoing through the desert days later, hollow and broken, calling out for loved ones. He had dismissed it as campfire fear, stories told to frighten new crossers. But now he saw the truth. The rumors were warnings. And he was too late.

Beneath his shirt, a sharp edge pressed against his ribs. Instinctively, Pedro clutched at the concealed belt wrapped around his waist. Inside it, sealed and sweat-stained, were their medical files—X-rays, lab results, and documents pressed into his hands by a trembling doctor in Tijuana. Forty-eight hours, the man had said, gripping both him and Lupita by the shoulders, eyes wide with something beyond fear. You must reach the clinic across the border in less than two days. If you don’t… they will find you first. Pedro hadn’t asked why. He hadn’t dared. But now, with Lupita torn from his side and the hunters swarming the night sky, he understood one thing with perfect clarity: whatever was in those files was the real reason they had been marked.

Inside the choppers were no soldiers in the ordinary sense. They were a medical division hidden under acronyms and shadow budgets: DHS merged with NASA’s deep research wings, a genetics corps that had never been admitted to Congress, never spoken above basement levels of power. Their task was simple and monstrous: locate anomalies in human DNA, extract carriers, and erase the witnesses. And tonight, somewhere in the lines of those medical files pressed against Pedro’s chest, they had found something they wanted back.

“to be continued” Easter eggs on the run (2024) — By Jason Gunthers