Comes The Inquisitor *Series*(AU,TEEN) Complete - 9/23

[Kathy W]

Banner by Misha. Thanks a million, Misha!


TITLE: Comes the Inquisitor, Book 3 in the Shapeshifters series.


SUMMARY: It's 1947, and the four Warders (shapeshifters) have managed to hide both the Granolith and the pods in the pod chamber before two of their number are killed and two captured. Follow the three year captivity of one of the aliens along with the power struggles within the military, see the construction of the White Room, watch a shapeshifter befriend an Indian boy named River Dog and the events described in "The Balance" take place.


AUTHOR: Kathy W


LENGTH: 151 Chapters, divided into 9 parts


RATING: TEEN (For occasional language and medical situations)


GENRE: Prequel/backstory. I consider this a "canon" story because with extremely rare and negligible exceptions, what happened on the show happens here. My intention is to provide backstory and explanations for what we saw onscreen, not to change what we saw onscreen.


COUPLES: No couples. Unless you consider Nasedo and Langley a couple.


PERSPECTIVE: Those responsible for making it happen—the shapeshifters.


SERIES SUMMARY: I’ve always been fascinated with what happened before the pod squad hatched, and I’ve had a million questions. Why don’t the hybrids remember more? Why was the Destiny Book in the library instead of in the pod chamber? Why did the Dupes wind up in a sewer in New York City? Was Nasedo really working for the Skins? Why was Langley so unwilling to help Max? And so on and so forth.

This is the story from the viewpoint of the shapeshifters, my own little fantasy about what happened, why it happened, and what went wrong, comprising six to eight separate stories, each a sequel to the other. They will closely track the show; my intention is not to rewrite Roswell, but to fill in some of the blanks. The story starts on the ship headed to Earth, and will likely end with Max’s encounter with Langley many years in the future.


SEQUEL TO:

And the Stars Fell From the Sky: First book in the series. Chronicles the shapeshifters journey to Earth and the creation of the hybrids. Can be found here: viewtopic.php?t=1302&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=0

Alien Sky: Second book in the series. Covers the aftermath of the crash and the capture of the two surviving shapeshifters. around and through the Roswell episode "Summer of '47". Can be found here: viewtopic.php?t=1302&postdays=0&postorder=asc&&start=0


DISCLAIMER: I own nothing. Nothing anyone wants, anyway. I’m just borrowing these wonderful characters to amuse myself. And hopefully you.

Some of the events in this story are taken from Roswell episodes, and some are taken from eyewitness accounts of the “crash”. In addition to characters from the show, there are a few real people in this story. I know precisely none of these people, and am borrowing them strictly for this little tale.



Pronunciation and Character Guide:

Aliens

Brivari—Zan’s Warder: “var” rhymes with “far”
Jaddo—Rath’s Warder: “a” as in “ah”, soft “J”
Valeris—Ava’s Warder, now dead: “ler” sounds like “lair”
Urza—Vilandra’s Warder, now dead: sounds like it looks
Covari—The name of the shapeshifters’ race: Rhymes with “Brivari”
Riall—Zan’s father: Ree-all
Argilians—The name of Khivar’s race: “g” is soft, like “j”
Malik, Amar—Two of the five shapeshifters who faked their own deaths and remained behind while on a mission to Earth several years ago. They now work for the Argilians (Skins). The other three of the five are now dead. Ma-lick, A-mar (rhymes with “far”)




Humans

Civilians:

Dee Proctor—the 8 year-old girl who first discovered the Antarians’ ship on Pohlman Ranch
David Proctor—Dee’s father
Emily Proctor—Dee’s mother
Mac and Rose Brazel—The Proctor’s next door neighbors. Mac works on Pohlman Ranch. It was Mac who first brought the ship fragments that he and Dee Proctor found to the attention of authorities.
George Wilcox—Chaves County Sheriff (Roswell and the crash site are in Chaves county.)
Charles Hemming—Roswell Sheriff.
James Valenti—Roswell sheriff’s deputy, future father of Sheriff Jim Valenti from the show.


The Army:

Major Sheridan Cavitt—Formerly Captain Cavitt. Co-commander of the operation concerned with experimenting on the aliens. In charge of security and military intelligence.
Major (Dr.) Daniel Pierce—MD/Psychiatrist and co-commander of the operation concerned with experimenting on the aliens; in charge of the medical and psychological aspects. Future father of Special Unit Head Daniel Pierce.
Lieutenant Stephen Spade—Formerly Private Spade. In command of the security detail in the compound.
Lieutenant (Nurse) Yvonne White—Assigned to assist in experimentation on the captive aliens.




The shifters refer to each other by their Antarian names. See if you can figure out which is Langley and which is Nasedo.



Note: This story is divided into parts, which are subdivided into chapters. It begins one day after Alien Sky left off.

[Kathy W]

COMES THE INQUISITOR



PART ONE: ESCAPE



PROLOGUE


July 13, 1947, 2000 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base




Anyone stumbling by chance into the little room in an abandoned section of the Army base would have found those assembled inside to be a motley crew. It was crammed with people of different stripes, all tensed, all holding their collective breaths. Every light blazed, casting a glow so intense it hurt the eyes. The tension, the sense of danger, was palpable.

Ringing the perimeter of the room was a circle of soldiers holding unusual looking rifles, cocked and ready to fire, all aimed at the same target. The next layer consisted of white-coated medical personnel, all peering over the tops of their surgical masks, some straining onto their tiptoes in an effort to see over or past their colleagues. The inner layer was the smallest—and strangest—of all. Two men wearing the insignia of Army Majors crouched over a table, intent, waiting. One wore a standard Army uniform, while the other was clearly wearing a similar uniform under his hospital whites, judging from the oak leaves visible on his collar. Both were staring at the occupant of the table; indeed, every gaze, every weapon, every thought in that room was focused on the strange figure strapped to the table, silent, unmoving.

The figure was short, about half to two thirds of average human height, with leathery skin, hairless and gray. The head was oddly shaped and much too big for the body, as were the eyes, almond-shaped and huge. It had two arms and two legs, two hands and two feet, but the fingers were impossibly long, and the feet strangely shaped. It was unquestionably not human; humanoid, yes, but not human.

The figure lay strapped to the table, eyes closed, appearing unconscious. About a dozen wires were pasted to its head, connected to a machine which had a roll of paper silently whirring through it; a pen scratched wavy lines as the paper rolled past. The eyes of the Major wearing the hospital whites flicked back and forth from the figure to the machine’s readout, while the eyes of the other Major remained focused on the figure itself, wearing a look of utter disgust.

Time passed. People started shifting uneasily. Upstairs, in a windowed observation room, a couple dozen more onlookers leaned forward, their noses only inches from the glass.

Nothing happened.

The uniformed Major cast a sharp look at the hospital gowned Major. “Why isn’t it waking up—Doctor,” he added, with more than a touch of sarcasm in his voice.

“I’m not sure,” the doctor mused, staring at the nearby machine’s readout.

“You should administer another dose at once,” the Major announced.

“I’d rather not do that,” the doctor answered in a worried tone. “I’ve already used more than I’d planned to. According to the EEG, it should be substantially awake already. Given what these things can do, I don’t want to risk reviving it completely, and I doubt you do either.”

“Why not? What about your precious serum, which you swore up and down would allow us to hold it?”

“In order to test the serum, I need to be able to see what effect it has,” the doctor answered, a trace of weariness in his voice as though he’d explained this many times before. “And in order to do that, I need the creature at least partially revived. Which is exactly what I’m trying to do now. One thing at a time.”

The Major sighed dramatically. “Can’t you handle a simple medical procedure like counteracting a sedative?”

“ ‘Simple’ according to whom?” the doctor queried evenly, not rising to the Major’s bait. “Obviously, we’ve never worked with this physiology before. The sedative may take longer to wear off than in humans, just like it took more of it to work in the first place. Or the stimulant may take longer to work. We should give it more time.”

The minutes dragged by, with the doctor waiting calmly, the Major impatiently. The crowd began to mutter.

Finally, after fifteen minutes had passed, the Major said, “Well?”

The doctor looked nonplussed. “I don’t understand it. I would have expected it be awake by now, even given how little we know about it.”

“Administer another dose of the stimulant,” the Major ordered a nearby, white-coated medic. The medic hesitated.

“I said administer another dose!” the Major repeated severely.

“He can’t,” the doctor replied, a faint note of satisfaction in his voice. “You know perfectly well that I am in command of this aspect of the Operation. He will only obey my orders.”

“Yes,” the Major said contemptuously, “and you’ve done such a wonderful job, haven’t you?” He leaned in further across the table. “You told me you could wake it up and hold it. That was the only reason I agreed to this nonsense in the first place!”

“Agreed?” the doctor echoed. “You had orders, Sheridan. You didn’t ‘agree’ to a damned thing. If the fiction that you ‘agreed’ to anything at all makes you feel better, then by all means, amuse yourself.”

“Can you do what you promised, or can’t you?” the Major demanded.

Ignoring the Major’s temper, the doctor turned to the one nurse in the room. “Check for a heart beat,” he ordered.

The nurse reported the heart rate as strong and steady. “Let me study these readings,” the doctor said, as the Major fumed. “They might shed some light on the subject. We have to be careful not to kill it, and given our level of ignorance, we could very easily do that. How do you think General Ramey would react if we killed it? How would you react? You keep telling everyone it’s ‘your prize’; you don’t want it dead, do you?”

More minutes ticked by. The doctor studied the EEG readings as the Major continued to kvetch. The nurse dropped her stethoscope, and bent to retrieve it.

Finally, the Major had had enough. “This is a waste of time!” he said angrily, turning to the assembled crowd. “Dismissed! Until such a time as the doctor has figured out how to ply his trade.”

One by one, the soldiers lowered their odd-looking guns. Everyone started filing out of the room. Some of those watching through the window upstairs began to drift away.

The Major cast a triumphant look at the doctor, who was still gazing thoughtfully at the figure on the table. “Not a very auspicious beginning, was it? I’m sure the General will be so pleased.”

“The General, unlike you, understands that this could take time,” the doctor replied. “You won’t be able to hold this one over my head.”

“We’ll see about that,” the Major said darkly.

The doctor sighed with exasperation. “Honestly, isn’t it time to end this school boy rivalry? One of these days, you’re going to grow up, Sheridan, and I just hope I live long enough to see it.” He frowned at the strips of paper in his hand. “This just doesn’t make any sense. Granted, this thing isn’t human, but still, given the way the sedative worked, I would expect to be able to make some extrapolations…” He broke off suddenly. “Unless….”

“Unless what?” the Major said impatiently.

“Sheridan,” the doctor said slowly. “Bring the soldiers back.”

“What? Why?”

“Bring them back!” the doctor said sharply.

Suddenly the EEG machine started going crazy, the recording needle swerving wildly.

“What is that doing?” the Major asked in alarm, stepping closer. “What does it mean?”

“It means it should be wide awake—and more,” the doctor said wonderingly.

The Major snorted. “So much for modern medicine. It doesn’t even look slightly awake, never mind wide awake.”

“Looks can be deceiving,” the doctor warned. “Now get those soldiers back!”

Too late. The huge eyes flew open, black as midnight, no pupils. In the space of seconds, several things happened at once.

Both the Major and the doctor were flung against the far walls and held there, suspended, pinned by unseen hands. Both tried to speak and failed, the breath knocked out of them. The glass in the window of the upstairs observation room shattered, blowing inward upon the startled occupants and raining down on the few remaining people left in the room below. The wires on the head of the figure popped off as one, and the EEG machine sparked, smoke rising from the back.

The lights flickered and died, throwing the room into inky darkness.







CHAPTER ONE


Earlier that day, July 13, 1947, 0900 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base



Lieutenant Spade strode down the hallway toward Major Cavitt’s office, wondering what the hold up was. General Ramey had reaffirmed Pierce’s status as the one in charge of the medical aspect of this operation in the wee small hours of the morning, and Pierce had duly appeared about 0700 this morning to begin the process of awakening the prisoners. But according to those who had been there at the time, Pierce had been rebuffed by soldiers stationed outside the aliens’ room by Cavitt, whose eagerness to see his prizes awake had apparently been trumped by his need to trump Pierce. Both Pierce and Cavitt had retired to Cavitt’s office to argue the matter further. Two hours later, no one had seen hide nor hair of either of them.

Spade pondered his feelings for the new doctor as he headed for Cavitt’s office. On the one hand, it was very satisfying to watch Pierce needle Cavitt. Cavitt badly needed someone to check his enormous ego and endless ambitions, and Pierce was the perfect person to do that. Not only was there personal water under their bridge, but Pierce was also a Major and co-commander, so neither Pierce nor Cavitt outranked the other. Someone else would always have to step in to referee their disputes, and that unfortunate duty would likely fall to General Ramey, who seemed happy to fulfill that roll—for now. Whether he would remain so was another matter entirely.

On the other hand, Spade had been disturbed by the doctor’s skepticism about the aliens having feelings and emotions similar to humans, despite the fact that they had attacked only when provoked and returned time and again for what had been taken from them, including the remains of their colleagues. He could understand the ordinary, grunt-level soldier having a rough time with this concept, but Pierce was a psychiatrist—he should know better. Spade had gotten the uncomfortable feeling that Pierce considered the aliens his own personal toys, in a different way than Cavitt perhaps, but no less so. They were interesting specimens, objects to be studied, not people in their own right. That was not encouraging.

He was nearing the office, and began walking faster. Rounding the corner of the hallway which led to Cavitt’s office, he ran smack into someone. His eyes widened when he saw who it was.

Yvonne White.

Her eyes had widened too, as she jumped back in surprise. Then her face hardened, her mouth setting in a thin line.

“Excuse me,” she said coldly, stepping around him.

Spade’s throat tightened. “Wait,” he said, catching her arm as she swept past. “Yvonne…..let me explain.”

Yvonne cast a withering look at his hand, which was holding her right arm. “Lieutenant, if you want to keep that hand, you’d best remove it from my arm.”

Spade swallowed and let go. “I’m…..I’m sorry. It’s just…..I know what you’re probably thinking, and there are things you don’t know.”

“Nor do I care to,” Yvonne responded icily. “Good day, Lieutenant.”

Yvonne turned and stalked off back the way she had come, Spade watching her helplessly. Just as she passed Cavitt’s office door, it burst open, disgorging both Cavitt and Pierce in a heated argument. Spade and Yvonne stood on either side of the angry officers, openmouthed, watching.

“The General will not be happy about this, Sheridan,” Pierce said angrily. “Defying his direct orders is not the way to get on his good side.”

“I’m not defying his orders,” Cavitt snapped, face flushing. “There has merely been a slight delay as the staff—my staff, which you so unceremoniously dismissed—completes the work they were doing. And stop referring to me by my first name!”

“My staff can finish anything your staff began, and then some,” Pierce announced flatly. “This is political grandstanding, and you know it. You can’t win—you know that too. You’re just going to drag this out as long as possible for no better reason other than you can. Is that it?”

Cavitt stood mutely, the expression of satisfaction in his eyes unmistakable.

Pierce sighed wearily. “So tell me….how many dozens of favors did you have to call in for this little display of hubris?”

“All of them,” Cavitt said flatly.

Pierce’s eyebrows rose. “Really? All of them? For just a few hours delay? That was an extraordinarily high price to pay for such a small benefit. Either that, or perhaps there weren’t that many favors to call in.”

“Are we finished?” Cavitt snapped. “Because my doctors—real doctors—require my presence as they finish their work.”

“Do they now?” Pierce said dryly. “Amazing. Never thought I’d see the day a ‘great warrior’ like you would lower himself to darken the door of a lab. But all for a good cause, I suppose,” he added, as Cavitt’s eyes flared. “You haven’t won, you know,” Pierce continued, his tone becoming hard. “General Ramey confirmed that I’m still in charge of the medical end of things here, whether you like it or not.”

“Obviously, the General doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground,” Cavitt muttered.

“I’ll pass that along,” Pierce said pleasantly, ignoring the withering look Cavitt shot his way. “Favors notwithstanding, the General made it perfectly clear you were to turn them over to me today.”

Cavitt smiled as though he’d just won an important point. “Exactly. Unless I’m much mistaken, ‘today’ consists of a period of twenty-four hours. We are currently not even halfway through that twenty-four hour period. As long as I release the aliens to you before the end of that period, I am in compliance with the General’s orders.”

Pierce rolled his eyes. “You really think he’s going to buy that, Sheridan?”

“For the last time, stop referring to me by my first name!” Cavitt exploded. “You will address me by my title!”

“Which one?” Pierce asked blandly. “High King of America? Supreme Ruler of the Universe?”

Cavitt opened his mouth to retort, then restrained himself with obvious effort. “Since you need specific direction, you will address me as ‘Major Cavitt’ or ‘Major’ at all times.”

“Ah, yes. The hard fought for moniker of ‘Major’,” Pierce said in a bored tone, as Cavitt turned a vivid shade of scarlet. “I can understand how you’d be all aglow about your new rank, which I earned two years ago, but let me introduce you to the concept of ‘parity’. I’ll use your title if you use mine. Which you haven’t. Ever..”

“You have made it clear that you don’t wish to be addressed as ‘Major’,” Cavitt pointed out.

“Correct; I wish to be addressed by my other title of ‘Doctor’,” Pierce answered pointedly.

Cavitt’s expression became even harder, if that were possible. “Some of us do not have the luxury of two titles to choose from. And not all of us who do deserve them.”

“Be that as it may,” Pierce said, “It’s either ‘Sheridan and Daniel’, or ‘Major and Doctor’. Your choice.”

A tense silence fell over the hallway. Spade watched Cavitt’s jaw working fiercely; he looked like he wanted to pummel Pierce right then and there. Neither Cavitt nor Pierce had taken any notice of him or Yvonne, standing several feet away on the other side of the dueling pair, her eyes wide.

“Very well, then,” Cavitt said, his voice a virtual iceberg. “Sheridan and Daniel it is. I would prefer not to address you at all, but when addressing you becomes unavoidable, I would be more comfortable using your Christian name. At least that’s not a lie.”

For a split second, fire flared in Pierce’s eyes. It died as quickly as it flamed, but Cavitt had managed to hit a hot button. He saw it, and gave a smile of triumph.

“Turn the subjects over to me now, or I’ll have to go back to the General and tell him you’ve been a bad boy,” Pierce said, in a tone of mock dismay.

The triumphant smile dropped from Cavitt’s face, replaced by a scowl. “Run to daddy if it amuses you,” he growled. “This has already been settled. You will have your lab rats before the day is out. Protest if you wish, but even Ramey won’t listen to your whining now.”

“Oh, I shall protest,” Pierce said, “if only to establish what I just know is going to be a pattern. I’d like to give the General fair warning.”

“If you’re not going to awaken them right away, at least let me feed them, sir,” said a female voice.

Both Cavitt and Pierce whirled toward Yvonne. Their expressions made it clear that they had been unaware of their audience, and unhappy to learn of it now. Spade took advantage of the distraction to duck into a nearby doorway. If they were perturbed at one person watching them, they would likely be even more so about two.

“Lieutenant,” Cavitt said tersely, “I didn’t realize you were there. In the future, it would be wise not to eavesdrop on private conversations.”

“It would also be wise to hold private conversations in private,” Yvonne answered. Her voice shook slightly, but her eyes were burning. “Sir,” she added as an afterthought.

Cavitt flushed. Pierce didn’t bother to suppress a smile. Spade, peering cautiously from the doorway, was momentarily taken aback at the challenge in Yvonne’s tone. She had been so mild mannered and serene when he had last see her; now she sounded angry and defiant.

Yvonne ploughed ahead without waiting for a reply. “May I remind the Major that the first subject captured has gone without any kind of nourishment for over forty-eight hours?”

“Good,” Cavitt said shortly. “I don’t want them well fed. I want them weak and at least partially sedated, until we figure out how to control them.”

“But sir,” Yvonne protested, “the humane treatment of prisoners is well outlined in….”

“ ‘Humane’?” Cavitt echoed, a grim smile on his face. “What an interesting choice of words, Lieutenant. There’s just one problem with the concept of ‘humane’ treatment in this case—the prisoners are not human. Which effectively rules out all bleating on the subject of ‘humane treatment’, does it not?”

“ ‘Humane treatment’ refers to both the treatment a prisoner receives, and the behavior of the captor,” Yvonne said firmly. “The prisoners may not be human, but what about you, Major?”

Spade caught his breath. Stop! he begged silently. Yvonne was absolutely right, of course, more right than even she knew. But if Cavitt thought she was sympathetic to the aliens…..

Cavitt had gone scarlet at Yvonne’s implication. He stepped toward her, stopping just inches from her face. Yvonne’s eyes widened in alarm, but she held her ground.

“Did you know, Lieutenant,” Cavitt said softly, “that I initially opposed your involvement in this operation? Women are weak and soft, sympathetic to things that do not deserve sympathy. But my doctors insisted; they argued for a nurse to do their bidding, and when I reflected on how well you handled yourself during the autopsies, I acquiesced and chose you. Perhaps you, who had handled their decidedly non-human entrails, were capable of grasping the gravity of this situation.” He paused. “I hope I wasn’t wrong.”

He swept past her, boots clicking on the tile floor. Undeterred, Yvonne turned back to Pierce, who had been watching this exchange silently with raised eyebrows.

“Doctor?” she appealed. “Can’t you do anything?”

Pierce shook his head sadly. “Much as it pains me to agree with Sheridan, he’s right. Their weakness might be the only thing that saves our hides. I have no intention of letting them starve,” he added, seeing the look on her face. “They are worthless to me if they are injured or dead. But they are also worthless if we fail to retain them, so that must be our first priority.”

“I don’t expect the Major to understand, but you’re a doctor,” Yvonne persisted, as Spade winced. The more she pressed this particular point, the more danger she was in. “You took an oath to ‘first do no harm’, didn’t you?”

Pierce sighed, and as he did so, Spade could see annoyance in his eyes. “Lieutenant, I have spent more time than I care to lately being lectured by Major Cavitt. I don’t need you joining the parade. Nor do I need you to remind me of my oath, my duty, or the fact that the first casualties in this situation were human, not alien. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Pierce turned and walked away as Yvonne took a step forward and opened her mouth, obviously intending to pursue the argument. She never got there. A hand clamped over her mouth, a strong arm flung itself around her, and she was pulled back into the shadows as Doctor Pierce’s footsteps faded away up the corridor.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Kathy W]

Hello to all who are reading!

kittens: Good to see you again. Agent Pierce wasn't specific about when the first alien escaped, so in this little corner of the universe, he escapes fast.






CHAPTER TWO


July 13, 1947, 0930 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base



Yvonne kicked furiously as she felt herself being dragged backward. This was the second time she’d been dragged away with a hand clamped over her mouth, and she lashed out with all the remembered indignation of the first time, plus her fury at this latest assault. She felt her elbow connect with ribs and heard a satisfying “Oof! in her ear. Good. Maybe that would teach someone better manners.

Whoever the culprit was this time apparently didn’t have an accomplice. Yvonne continued to fight, drawing several gasps of pain from her assailant, as she was pulled into a nearby closet. She heard the door being kicked shut, the closet plunged into total darkness, and she panicked. With a mighty heave, she wrenched herself from her captor’s grasp and flung herself forward, connecting painfully with shelves on the other side of the room. She heard a scratching sound, a dim light clicked on, and Yvonne found herself staring into the eyes of Stephen Spade.

The two stared at each other in silence for a moment. Both were disheveled and panting. Yvonne rubbed her arm where Spade’s hand had gripped painfully, and Spade nursed his repeatedly wounded ribs. But he was standing squarely in front of the closet door, and the expression on his face made it clear she wouldn’t get out without a fight. Whatever he was up to, he was determined.

“What in the name of all that’s holy has gotten into you?” Yvonne spat at him. “Wasn’t it enough to capture aliens? I take it you’ve decided to branch out a bit and capture a few women now? I hate to disappoint you, but I don’t think you’re going to get as many points for me as you did for them.”

Her voice was dripping sarcasm, and she was surprised to see that he seemed genuinely bothered by this. He leaned against the door, looking at the floor, and Yvonne risked a step forward. No dice. His head flew up, and his eyes grew hard.

“You are not leaving this room until you’ve heard my side of the story and I’ve told you what you’re up against,” he said firmly. “There are things you don’t know.”

“Surely, you don’t expect me to genuflect with the rest of the base, do you?” Yvonne said angrily. “I’m not the least bit interested in a blow by blow account of how heroic and brilliant you are. If you think….”

“Would you just shut up a minute?", Spade exploded. Yvonne fell silent. Spade leaned toward her, his eyes intense. “Your life is in danger, and never more so than when you express sympathy for the aliens. You can’t afford to keep doing what you just did with Cavitt. No matter how right you are, it’s too dangerous.”

Yvonne stared. He looked genuinely frightened, but what on earth was he talking about? “So what if Cavitt thinks I sympathize? What’s he going to do about it? Reassign me? Don’t I wish. Demote me? Discharge me? At this point, I don’t care. I do not want to be here.”

“Listen to me, Yvonne,” Spade said earnestly. “If Cavitt decides he can’t keep you here, you’re going to wind up with something a lot worse than a dishonorable discharge. You’re going to wind up dead.”



**********************************************************



Proctor residence



Dee Proctor propped the rubbing she’d just made against the lamp on her desk and contemplated it. The faces stood out more sharply in 2D, and she studied them for several minutes, looking back and forth from her rubbing to the metal book which lay open on her desk. No matter which rendering she gazed at, one thing was certain: Both men were handsome and both women were beautiful. Whoever had decided what they would look like obviously had some grasp of human ideals of beauty.

She yawned and stretched in her chair. Warm summer sunshine was streaming in the window. It was already hot and muggy, typical summer weather. Few sounds drifted in through the window, this being a Sunday morning. It had only been a week ago that she had told her father about the aliens, only six days since the Army had found them. Six days, and it felt like six years.

Dee glanced around the room, thinking of the evidence she had of all that had happened in the past week or so: A fragment of the aliens’ ship, safely hidden between her mattress and the box spring. Five amber-colored stones. A metal container with an alien inscription. And the metal book now laying open on her desk. And memories, she thought sadly. Lots of memories, not all of them good. Someday, perhaps, she’d learn to remember the fireworks and the spaceship ahead of the guns. They had helped the aliens hide the sacs containing the recreations of their royalty, and even helped rescue the two sacs the army had taken. But the price had been high: Two of the aliens were dead, and the other two were missing, probably captured or dead. Hopefully the former. Much as she didn’t want them caught, captured was far preferable to dead.

Dee looked back at the book. It’s cover was smooth and blank, although she would have sworn she saw markings on it for just a moment last night. The pages were etched with strange symbols cut deep into the surface of the page. The symbols didn’t look like an alphabet; they reminded her of pictographs or Egyptian hieroglyphs. She had stayed up for hours, painstakingly copying every single symbol.

Her efforts to copy the pictures had been less successful. There were three sets, one of which showed the two women pregnant. A lump formed in her throat as she remembered Valeris’s message to Brivari, memorized in haste while soldiers swarmed around their ship and still locked firmly in her memory. “I have one more name to add to the list of the slain: Antar’s Crown Prince, the heir to Zan’s throne. Ava was pregnant with a son. Her unborn child died with her, and I placed him in his mother’s stasis unit and sent them out together.”

Will she remember?, Dee wondered, running her finger over the etchings of one of the pregnant women. When Valeris’s Queen woke up in a brand new, completely different body, would she remember the baby she had lost? According to Jaddo they were all supposed to be born fully grown, with all the memories of the people they had been. Somehow she could see it being a kindness if this particular memory was left behind.

It was the remaining drawings that had intrigued Dee the most. There were two more sets, each consisting of four human faces, two male, two female. One set depicted children, the other set those same children as adults. She’d tried to copy these freehand, but couldn’t do the faces justice. She’d tried placing a sheet of paper over the page and tracing, but her pencil poked through, just as it had when she’d tried the same method to copy the symbols.

Finally she’d tried rubbing, with spectacular results. The four faces sprang to startling life, gazing back at her with solemn expressions. Brivari’s King, she thought, looking at the lead male. She had no idea what color his hair or eyes would be, but she was willing to bet he’d be a dark, brooding type. Jaddo’s General was handsome and dangerous looking, while Valeris’s Queen seemed fragile and beautiful. And the last one….

Dee looked sadly at the fourth rubbing, the future face of Urza’s princess. The one who had supposedly started the war by falling in love with the enemy and trying to run away with him. She knew these people had looked nothing like this when they had lived before, but seeing them like this wearing faces like her own made them seem more real.

A sound drifted through her open window, made her turn. She knew that sound—that was the crunch of gravel as a car pulled into the Brazel’s driveway. Something she hadn’t heard for a whole week, ever since the Army had taken Mac into custody.

Racing to the window, Dee clambered onto the window bench and looked down. The Brazel’s car was in their driveway, and as she watched, delighted, both Mac and his wife Rose climbed out.

“They’re back!” she shouted joyfully to no one in particular, running for the stairs.




*********************************************************



Eagle Rock Military Base




“Dead?” Yvonne repeated. “What do you mean I’ll wind up dead?”

Spade nursed his swollen ribs. Man, that woman had mean elbows. “I mean if Cavitt thinks he can’t trust you anymore, he will kill you himself, or have you killed—probably the latter.”

Yvonne’s eyes narrowed. “Major Cavitt is a bully and a control freak, but he’s no murderer. You, on the other hand, are well known for turning on a dime, helping someone one minute, and hunting them down the next. At least Cavitt is consistent. Why should I believe you?”

“If I tell you…will you let me finish before you decide to beat me up again?”

The ghost of a smile played across Yvonne’s face. “You had that coming, Lieutenant. You were the one who gagged me and dragged me in here, remember?”

“You were about to say something else to Dr. Pierce,” Spade reminded her. “You’re already in trouble with Cavitt, and I had to shut you up. You don’t realize what the consequences could be.”

Yvonne eyed him for a moment before settling herself on top of a nearby box. “All right. I’m listening.”

Spade got right to the point. “On Thursday morning, Cavitt called me into his office and told me that two soldiers I knew, Private West and Private Belmont, had been killed in their beds by aliens in the middle of the night. He let me view the bodies from a distance. Both had silver handprints on their chests.”

Yvonne’s eyes widened. “I never heard this. Who were these people?”

Spade slid down to the floor, his back against the door, relieved she was listening. “Private Belmont was one of the four of us who first discovered the ship. Two were killed that morning, and now Belmont’s dead; I’m the only surviving member of that group. Private West was the one who killed the alien who surrendered, the one who never woke up.”

“So….the aliens killed them in retaliation?”

Spade shook his head. “The aliens didn’t kill them. Oh, I believed Cavitt. I was furious, which is why I agreed to help him try to catch them. Which was exactly what he wanted, as it turned out,” he added angrily. “The night we caught the first alien, I found him before anyone else did. I asked him why he had murdered them in their sleep, and he denied it; he said I’d been lied to. So I went to the morgue to find out who was telling the truth.”

He paused. Yvonne waited a moment before saying, “And?”

Spade looked her in the eye. “The silver handprint was paint, Yvonne. Aliens didn’t kill them. I don’t know what did—poison, maybe, because I couldn’t find any obvious wounds. But the handprint was fake, and Cavitt must have known. The doctors who were there must have known too, but the aliens killed them the night the first alien was captured.”

The implications of this last statement were washing over Yvonne’s face. “You think….Cavitt killed them?”

“Either he killed them, or he had them killed,” Spade answered, “probably the latter. I doubt he’d want to get his own hands dirty. It was win-win for him; in one fell swoop, he brought me into his camp and got rid of two more eyewitnesses.”

Yvonne sat rigid on her box, her hands working in her lap. “Do you know how I came to be here?”

“I assume you were reassigned,” Spade said, wondering what she was getting at. “You were originally going to London, right?”

Yvonne gave a bitter laugh. “No, that was just a sham. I was about to get on the bus when someone clapped their hand over my mouth and dragged me off. I fought them, and they conked me over the head. I woke up with a concussion locked in a room on the base, and then Cavitt showed up and announced I’d been ‘chosen’ for an important assignment. He also tried to blackmail me by threatening to have me court-martialed because I talked to that reporter.”

Spade’s eyes widened. “You talked to a reporter?”

“I had to talk to someone,” Yvonne said defensively. “I didn’t know where you were, and Betty was willing to listen. I didn’t tell her much. Just enough to keep her interested. I was hoping something would get published, that the world’s attention would be focused here, and would make people think twice about what they were doing.” She paused, thinking. “But that was Tuesday, before those two men were killed, and before any of the aliens were captured. What would Cavitt have done with me if you hadn’t been converted, or he hadn’t captured them?”

“He might have killed you,” Spade said quietly. “He might have killed me too if he’d thought he hadn’t managed to ‘convert’ me, as you put it.”

“Well, he did ‘convert’ you, didn’t he?” Yvonne asked, her eyes boring into his. “In spite of what you just told me, you still helped capture the second alien.”

“That was an accident,” Spade insisted. “I haven’t let on to Cavitt that I’m onto him because I know I’m dead if I do. I decided to stay and work against him. I was trying to prevent the other alien being captured, but I hadn’t counted on yet another obstacle—another alien. At least one, maybe more. They were fighting, and that muddied everything up.”

“But they said there were only the four of them!”

“They also said they were hiding from their enemies,” Spade pointed out. “The new one I saw was definitely an enemy.”

Yvonne was quiet for a minute. At length, she shook her head. “This is a pretty wild story, Lieutenant. One of our CO’s a murderer, more aliens out there—how do I know you’re telling the truth?”

Spade pushed himself to his feet. “You don’t,” he said simply. “Just please, don’t piss off Cavitt. And be careful with Dr. Pierce. I’m not sure he’s much of an improvement.”

“He must be—he’s a doctor. You heard him say he doesn’t intend to mistreat them. It’ll be a cold day somewhere before we hear Cavitt say anything like that.”

“Pay attention to why he said they won’t be mistreated,” Spade cautioned. “Not because they’re people in their own right. Not because it’s wrong. Because they’re of no use to him if they’re hurt or dead. He sees them as things, as test subjects—not people.”

“So you think he will mistreat them?”

“No,” Spade said soberly. “I think he won’t. For all the wrong reasons. And someone who thinks like that is every bit as dangerous as someone like Cavitt. Maybe more so.”

Yvonne stared at him silently, clearly unconvinced.

“Look,” Spade sighed, “just be careful, okay? Watch what you say. If they see you as an obstacle, you won’t just be reassigned or kicked out—you might be dead. We’ve got enough bodies stacked up on both sides of the line. Don’t give Cavitt or whoever it was a reason to add to the pile.”

Yvonne didn’t respond. Spade waited a moment, then opened the door to the hallway, checking carefully in case anyone was nearby. He turned back to Yvonne.

“I’m sorry I grabbed you,” he mumbled, slipping out the door.

“Stephen….wait!” Yvonne called. Spade paused, taking it as a good sign that she was willing to use his name again..

“What’s going to happen when this is all over?” Yvonne asked, her eyes round with alarm. “There are at least a hundred people here now, and almost all of them are eyewitnesses to something or other. What will happen to us then?”

Spade shook his head. “I don’t know. And I don’t even want to think about it.”

He turned and walked out of the closet, leaving Yvonne shivering inside.




***********************************************************




Proctor residence





“Daddy, Mama, Mac is back!” Dee called excitedly as she raced down the stairs, practically tripping herself in the process. Her father was standing at the window, coffee cup in hand, gazing toward the Brazel’s house with a grim expression on his face.

Dee stopped at the bottom of the stairs, puzzled. “Mac is back,” she repeated, walking slowly to stand behind her father. “Don’t you want to go over and say hello?”

“Did you see who came with him?” her father asked, not taking his eyes off the window.

“Mrs. Brazel is with him,” Dee answered, with a growing sense of dread. What had she missed with her quick glance out the window upstairs?

“Come here,” David said, motioning toward her. Dee came abreast of the window, leaning her hands on the windowsill. “Look in the back seat of their car—no, wait. You won’t have to. They’re getting out.”

Dee’s throat tightened as she watched two armed soldiers climb out of the back seat of the Brazel’s car. They took up positions on either side of the Brazel’s front door and proceeded to ignore both Brazel’s, who were lugging suitcases into the house.

“What are they doing here?” Dee whispered.

“I would imagine they’re here to dissuade anyone who might get the bright idea of running over and talking to Mac,” David said. His voice was level, but Dee could hear the undercurrent of anger. “And looking at the neighborhood, I’d say they’re succeeding.”

Dee swept her gaze over the rest of the houses on her block that she could see. People were staring at the Brazel’s house, watching out their windows, standing in their doorways or on their front porches. The expressions on their faces were curious…and fearful. No one made a move toward the Brazels. Normally half the neighborhood would be over there by now, spaceship or no spaceship.

Dee tightened her grip on the windowsill. “They can’t stay there forever,” she said fiercely, more to herself than her father. “Can they even be there at all? Is Mac under arrest, or something? And if he is, why did they let him come home?”

Dee twisted around to look at her father, who had a curious expression on his face. He looked down at her abruptly. “Good question,” he said. “I’ll go find out. And you,” he added, as she started to follow him, “are staying here. At least for now,” he amended, upon seeing her crestfallen expression.

“Wrong. Both of you are staying here,” said a voice behind them.

Both Dee and her father turned to see Dee’s mother, Emily Proctor, standing with her arms crossed and wearing her familiar, don’t-even-think-about-it expression.

“Don’t you dare go stirring things up by marching over there just minutes after they’ve arrived home,” Emily said firmly. “The last thing we need is for the Army to be reminded that Mac originally claimed he had a child with him when he found those ship fragments. They seem to have forgotten that, and I’d like to leave it that way.”

“I’m just a next door neighbor checking up on some friends,” David said, trying, and failing, to sound innocent.

“Forget it, dear,” Emily said blandly. “I’m not buying it, and they won’t either.”

“So you think we should just roll over and put up with this?” David demanded.

“I’m not certain there’s a ‘this’ to put up with,” Emily pointed out. “They only just got back; the soldiers may leave soon. Let’s see how this plays out before you go storming over there awash in self-righteous indignation.”

“Emily…..” David began.

“David—no! We have been through too much lately, and if you ask me, you’re getting far too comfortable with the concept of playing Superman.”

David’s face colored. “I’m not trying to play Superman. This is about right and wrong. They’re trying to prevent people from talking to each other, to intimidate them into silence, and that’s exactly how Europe started going downhill. Hell, it’s probably not even legal to have soldiers stationed at a civilian’s house like that.”

“Fine,” Emily sighed. “If you think it’s illegal, call the Sheriff. But please don’t put all of us through any more than we’ve already been through on the basis of five minutes of observation.”

Dee returned to the window as her parents continued to argue. The Brazels had just finished bringing the last of their luggage into the house, and Mrs. Brazel appeared at the front door, no doubt heading out to check her beloved flower beds. But the soldiers stopped her, pointing back inside, and she disappeared into the house with a frightened look on her face.

Bullies! Dee thought angrily. She had been calmer lately after helping to rescue the last two of the alien sacs and Urza’s makeshift funeral, but now she felt the old anger and resentment flaring again. Her mother had a point, but so did her father.

No one else appeared at the door of the Brazel’s house. Her parents continued their passionate discussion. Dee resolved to wait and see what happened. It was still morning; maybe the soldiers would go away after awhile. Besides, she knew there were ways into the Brazel’s house that had nothing to do with the front door.




********************************************************




1600 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base




The secretary waved her on, and Yvonne White paused outside Major Cavitt’s office door, at war with herself about whether or not she really wanted to do this. Was it wise to whack this particular bee’s nest? Was this one of those times when ignorance was bliss? It would be so easy to walk away, to dismiss Stephen’s wild claims as the workings of a guilt wracked mind. To forget all about his allegations, and what they could mean for her. For everyone.

No. Even if she could forget Stephen’s claims, the one thing she would not be able to forget was the look on his face when he told her. Yvonne was very good at reading faces, non-verbal communication being common in her line of work. Stephen had really believed what he had told her about Cavitt, had been frightened for both of them. He’d probably have a heart attack if he knew what she was up to now.

Yvonne had given a good deal of thought to Stephen’s assertions, but it bothered her that he had no proof of such a serious charge. Much as she hated Cavitt for the way he had treated both her and the aliens, she had not thought him capable of cold-blooded murder. Now she had her doubts. She’d taken the liberty of doing some checking, as much as could be done by telephone given that she still wasn’t allowed to leave the compound, and what she’d discovered was not encouraging. And along with those discoveries had come another: She needed to know. And if knowing wasn’t possible, she needed to hedge her bets against the chance that Stephen might be right, even if she couldn’t prove it. Which is how she came to find herself kibitzing outside Cavitt’s office door, wondering if she really had the acting skills to pull this off.

Guess we’ll find out soon enough. She raised her hand and knocked.

“Enter,” came a sharp, slightly irritated voice.

Damn! She’d been half hoping he wouldn’t be here. More than half hoping, if she were honest with herself. But there was no going back now, which was probably a good thing; no doubt she’d talk herself out of it given the chance. She carefully smoothed her uniform and walked into the office.

Major Cavitt was sitting at his desk sorting through a large stack of papers. He looked up briefly when she entered, then looked back at his papers just as quickly.

“What is it, Lieutenant?”

“I wanted to speak with you, sir,” Yvonne said, “concerning our earlier.....discussion.”

“What do our prisoners deserve now?” Cavitt said, annoyed, still sifting through his papers. “Manicures? Facials? Lord knows they could use them.”

Yvonne let the sarcasm wash over her, ignoring it. She had expected this, and had prepared a response which she hoped would appeal to Cavitt’s vanity and competitiveness. “You misinterpret my intentions, Major.”

Now he did look up briefly. “Do I? Enlighten me.”

“The Army is about rules, Major,” Yvonne said steadily, keeping her face blank. “It’s important that we follow the rules, including the rules pertaining to prisoners of war. Without rules, we would fall into chaos. It is our adherence to the rules that has made the American military the mightiest force on Earth.”

Cavitt stopped shuffling and sat back in his chair, regarding her seriously. “I’m glad to hear you say that. But I’m at a bit of a loss as to why you think the rules regarding prisoners of war should apply to extraterrestrials.”

“Major,” Yvonne said, stepping closer and doing her level best to look earnest, as opposed to repulsed, “it’s very important that we do this right. This operation is top secret now, as well it should be, but eventually the world will hear of it. And when it does, it will judge us on our conduct here. That conduct must be impeccable. That conduct must be beyond reproach. History will remember not only what you did, but how you did it. How do you wish to be remembered, sir?”

Yvonne waited while Cavitt pondered this speech in silence. She knew he dearly wanted to go down in history as the man who had discovered extraterrestrial life. Her best weapon at this point was the suggestion that he might be vilified by future generations for his behavior.

“As you are well aware, sir,” Yvonne continued, “there are always pacifists in any generation. Those who claimed it was heartless to drop the bombs on Japan, for example. Or those who contend we should attempt to work with the Communists.” Cavitt snorted softly, and Yvonne knew she now had his full attention.

“Someday, there will be those who will study this operation and pass judgment if they feel the subjects were mistreated. We must make certain we leave them no ammunition, nothing to point to that will sully the memory of the brave men who are making history here and now.”

Good Lord. She was nearly making herself sick with her own overwrought argument. But if she was successful, Cavitt would have a reason he could accept for her defense of the aliens, a reason which would hopefully stop him from suspecting her real motives. A reason which might even serve to mitigate his own behavior. She waited, holding her breath. Would he buy it?

After several long moments, he did. “You make a valid point,” Cavitt said thoughtfully. “I should be more careful, if only to ward off future misrepresentations of our work here. History will indeed judge us, and as Commanding Officer, it is my responsibility to make certain we are judged rightly.”

Yvonne had to deliberately refrain from rolling her eyes, and from pointing out that he wasn’t the only “commanding officer”. His tone was so sanctimonious and his face so sober that it was almost comic. She knew damned well that Cavitt wasn’t the least bit concerned about history’s judgment regarding anyone but his own sweet self.

“Was there anything else, Lieutenant?”

Down to business. “Yes, sir. I wasn’t certain who I should approach with this, but I decided the primary issue here is security, so I’m bringing it to you. I can always take it to Dr. Pierce if you prefer.”

“No, that’s all right,” Cavitt assured her. “Dr. Pierce and I are in constant communication, so there is really little distinction between us. What’s this about?”

“The bodies of all personnel killed by the aliens have been transferred here for study, but it has come to my attention that two are missing,” Yvonne said, privately doubting that Pierce would agree there was “little distinction” between him and Cavitt. “A Private Belmont and a Private West, to be exact.”

Yvonne watched Cavitt’s face carefully. His expression was bland—a bit too bland, perhaps.

“Those two will not be transferred here,” Cavitt said casually. “Tests will be conducted off site.”

“But they’re still here, sir,” Yvonne noted, with an earnest, efficient expression. “I checked. I can have them sent up from the morgue; all I need is your authorization.” She withdrew the requisite form from her pocket and placed it smartly in front of him on his desk.

Cavitt’s eyes flicked down toward the form, then back up to her. “That will not be necessary. Dismissed.”

“But what if they’re found?” Yvonne asked with genuine alarm, albeit from a source Cavitt did not suspect. “Isn’t their presence in the morgue a security risk?”

Cavitt watched her carefully for a moment as Yvonne kept the concerned, earnest expression plastered firmly on her face. “You’re right,” he finally said. “I will have the bodies transferred to a more secure location immediately.”

“But….don’t you want them here, sir?” she asked innocently. “We already have the bodies of all the others. The more specimens we have, the more we will learn.”

“We have plenty of specimens here,” Cavitt said . “They’ve certainly killed enough people.”

“Yes, sir,” Yvonne responded promptly. “I’ll handle the transfer myself.”

“No,” Cavitt said quickly. “I’ll take care of it.”

“Yes sir. Then I’ll make certain that copies of the work already done on the bodies are sent here before they leave.”

“No! Cavitt snapped. Yvonne jumped.

“I appreciate you bringing this to my attention, Lieutenant,” Cavitt said, regaining his composure, “but I will see to this matter myself. You are not to pursue it in any way. Is that understood?”

“Of course, sir,” Yvonne replied.

“Good. Dismissed.”

Yvonne left the office, closing the door quietly behind her and leaning against it, closing her eyes as she felt herself beginning to shake. The only way she’d managed to get through that was to not think about the implications of what Cavitt had been saying, but now that it was over....

“Lieutenant?”

Startled, Yvonne jerked her eyes open. Cavitt’s secretary, Harriet, was staring at her over her typewriter, a look of mingled sympathy and concern on her face.

“Are you all right, Lieutenant?”

“Of course,” Yvonne answered. “I’m fine, thank you. Just a little......” She paused, struggling to find something diplomatic to say.

“No need to explain,” Harriet said wryly. “I’ve worked for him for the past six years. I know what he’s like.”

I doubt it. “I’m fine,” Yvonne repeated, trying to sound causal. “Just tired, that’s all. It’s all been quite a whirlwind.”

“For me too,” Harriet agreed, “what with the Major being promoted, and everything else that’s going on......” As she spoke, she swept her hand across her teeming desk, knocking a pile of papers onto the floor in the process. “Oh, good grief!” she grumbled, bending over to retrieve everything. Yvonne joined her, grateful for something mindless to do, reaching under the desk for some papers that had slid underneath, her eyes coming to rest on the wastebasket as she did so. What she saw there made her breath catch in her throat.

It was a newspaper, the Roswell Daily Record. She hadn’t seen a newspaper in days, hadn’t even seen the sun until early this morning, the first time she’d been allowed upstairs since being brought here. It was one of the headlines on the front page that caught her eye and the photograph below it, at once both familiar and chilling.

“Did you get them all?” Harriet was asking.

Swiftly, Yvonne plucked the paper out of the wastebasket and tucked it behind her. “Yes, I did,” she said to Harriet, standing up and handing her the pile of papers with one hand while holding the newspaper behind her back with the other, praying that Cavitt wouldn’t choose this incredibly inconvenient moment to pop out of his office. “I should be going now. Lots to do.”

“Thanks for the help,” Harriet said, so busy rearranging everything that it was no problem at all to slip out the door with the newspaper. Once outside, Yvonne tucked it into her uniform as best she could and headed for the basement, barely holding herself together as she passed the checkpoint and flew to her quarters. Closing the door firmly behind her, she pulled her desk chair in front of it and flopped on the bed, pulling the paper out. It was dated July 11th. That would be Friday, and this was Sunday—two days ago. Betty’s face, looking just as she had last Tuesday morning over the breakfast table at the restaurant in Roswell, stared back at her with accusing eyes.





YOUNG REPORTER DIES IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT


Miss Elizabeth Ann Osorio, 28, reporter for the Fort Worth Star Telegram, died in an automobile accident in the early hours of Thursday morning on rural road #68 just north of Roswell. Miss Osorio was found slumped over the steering wheel of her car on July 10th at approximately 2:30 a.m. The sheriff’s deputy who found the car said Miss Osorio had apparently run off the road, and could find no discernable cause for the accident. No witnesses have come forward. Foul play has been ruled out.

Miss Osorio’s body has been returned to her family in Texas. Internment will be on Sunday, July 13, in Holy Cross Cemetery, Fort Worth, Texas.

The people of Roswell extend their sincerest condolences to Miss Osorio’s family, colleagues, and friends for the tragic loss of this young woman’s life.






Hands shaking, Yvonne set the paper down on the bed and pulled her knees up to her chest, looping her arms around them and rocking back and forth, shaking. Betty’s dead she said to herself over and over, as though repeating it would make her believe it. The bright, vivacious, kind woman who had lent her an ear was dead, buried this very day. Yvonne didn’t believe for one minute that her death was an accident. And she was willing to bet very good money on who was responsible.

A full twenty minutes later, Yvonne pulled herself unsteadily to her feet and walked into the bathroom. Her make-up was a mess, mascara smears making her look like a raccoon. She leaned over the sink, splashing water on her face, scrubbing away the dirt and tears. When she was finished, she dried her face with a towel, looking at her puffy eyes in the mirror.

“Be careful what you wish for,” Grandma White had been fond of saying. “You might get it.” “You got what you wanted,” Yvonne whispered to her own reflection. By most measures, her little visit to Cavitt’s office had been a rousing success. With any luck Cavitt would think twice before doing anything too awful to the prisoners. Hopefully her own sympathy toward them would be interpreted in a different light. And she’d gotten the proof she'd wanted about Stephen’s accusations.

He was right. They were working for a murderer.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Kathy W]

Hello and thank you to everyone reading!





CHAPTER THREE


July 13, 1947, 5 p.m.

Proctor residence




Dee Proctor walked into the kitchen, the door banging behind her. “Sorry!” she called automatically. Door banging was not appreciated in the Proctor household. But when she found her mother, she seemed not to have heard. Emily Proctor was holding a cup of coffee and gazing out the window toward the Brazel’s house.

“What’s going on?” Dee asked. “Did something happen?”

“No,” Emily sighed, “and that’s the problem. Mac and Rose aren’t answering their phone. The soldiers are still there, still preventing them from coming out or the few brave souls who have tried from going in. And your father’s about to pop.”

“He’s not the only one,” Dee noted. She had spent the afternoon at various neighborhood houses and had heard a great deal of discussion on the subject of the Brazel’s current predicament. “Everybody’s steamed. Mr. Rothman says he’s going to go over there and see if the Army wants to tangle with an eighty-one year old man who walks with a cane.” Emily closed her eyes and shook her head, as though trying to clear her mind of the image of Mr. Rothman beating the soldiers with his cane. “Why are they doing this anyway?” Dee continued, plopping on a nearby kitchen chair. “Sorry,” she repeated, as her mother shot her a disapproving look. Becoming airborne before connecting with a piece of furniture was also not appreciated in the Proctor household. “They already had Mac locked up; if they wanted to keep him that way, why did they let him come home?”

“Probably because Sheriff Wilcox has been leaning on them,” Emily said. “And the Daily Record has been asking a lot of questions. So has Mr. Joyce down at the radio station. It’s becoming a PR problem.”

“What’s a PR problem?”

Emily smiled. “ ‘Public relations’. How people perceive the Army, whether they like them or not, whether they think they’re doing a good job.”

Dee scowled. She didn’t need to tell her mother what she thought of the Army just now. “Well, I think Daddy’s right. I think we should go over there and raise hell. I mean ‘heck’,” she added hastily, as her mother’s eyebrows rose. “Hell” certainly wasn’t the worst cuss word out there, but it was still frowned upon. “I’m sure he said ‘go over there and raise heck’.”

“I’m sure,” Emily said dryly, obviously not buying it. She sighed, leaning against the window, her coffee cup forgotten. “Your father’s right—this is foul, and something needs to be done. I just don’t want this family to be at the head of the line. The Army seems to have forgotten about us, and I’d just as soon leave it that way.”

“Why do we have to be at the head of the line?” Dee asked.

Her mother didn’t answer for a moment. She just kept staring out the window, a blank expression on her face, until suddenly she turned to look at Dee, beaming.

“You’re absolutely right. And you’ve just given me a wonderful idea. Several wonderful ideas, actually.” She handed her coffee cup to Dee. “Take care of this, will you? I have a few dozen phone calls to make.”

Dee watched her mother bustle off, mystified. What was she up to? Her mother was no less apt than her father to attack a problem; she just tended to come at things sideways, as opposed to her father’s more direct approach. That’s why it had been so surprising to see her mother spit it all out to that soldier in the culvert when they were rescuing the sacs, while her father verbally tap danced. Direct confrontation was more her father’s style.

Shrugging, Dee carried the cup to the sink and looked out the kitchen window toward the Brazel’s. You do what you need to do, Mama, she thought serenely, and I’ll do what I need to do.


********************************************************



Brazel residence




Stepping carefully so as not to make noise, Dee climbed the Brazel’s basement steps. She must have grown; it had been harder to slip through the chained doors of their walk-out basement than it had been the last time she’d tried it. The lock had broken on those doors last year, and Mac had chained them loosely shut. Enough to bar admittance to an adult, but not enough to keep out a determined, relatively small kid.

She paused at the top of the steps. How best to proceed? If she just burst out, she’d probably scare both Brazels half to death. Better to knock. Granted, it would be weird for them to hear someone knocking on the other side of their basement door, but that couldn’t be helped. She raised her fist and knocked.

Nothing happened. She knocked again, louder this time. It would probably take them awhile to figure out what was going on and find her. Assuming they were even downstairs, that is.

After three full minutes of intermittent knocking, Dee decided they were probably upstairs and reached for the door handle. But it turned before she could grab it, and the door swung open to reveal an astonished face.

“Dee?” Mac whispered, as though he didn’t believe it.

Dee grinned at him. “Hi, Mac!”

“Dee!” Mac shouted, scooping her up in his arms and twirling her around the Brazel’s kitchen. “You’re all right! Thank God!”

“Pipe down!” Mrs. Brazel whispered, her expression fearful. “What if they hear you?”

“Ah, nertz to them,” Mac said sourly. “It’s my house, last I checked. Oh, it’s so good to see you again!” he continued, twirling Dee again. “I’ve missed everyone so much!”

As Dee watched the world swirl in front of her eyes, she saw Mrs. Brazel, mouth hanging open, glancing down the basement stairs as if expecting soldiers to appear at any moment. “How did you get in here?” Mrs. Brazel asked. “Did anyone see you?”

Mac set Dee down with a sigh. “Can we drop the third degree, Rose? She squeezed through the gap in the basement doors. They don’t lock tight. I’m surprised you still fit,” he added to Dee in a teasing tone. “You’re bigger this year.”

“So are you,” Dee deadpanned, poking Mac in the waist and making him roar with laughter. Mrs. Brazel jumped.

Mac sighed again. “You’ll have to forgive Rose. It’s been a bit tense. And she’s not quite the rebel I am—we are,” he amended with a wink.

Dee looked over at Mrs. Brazel, who seemed to be struggling to decide whether she should welcome Dee or panic. “Are you okay?” Dee asked gently.

Mrs. Brazel abruptly reached a decision as tears filled her eyes and she swept Dee into an enormous hug. “I’m sorry, dear,” Mrs. Brazel said. “It’s not that I’m not delighted to see you—I am. This past week has just been so frightening! I wasn’t certain they’d ever let Mac go, and now I’m not certain they’ll ever let us out of our own house.” She abruptly released Dee and started bustling around the kitchen. “Would you like something to drink? We don’t have much in the house yet, but I could offer you some milk, and I know I have some chocolate.”

Dee was about to say, “No, thanks,” when she saw Mac nod his head very deliberately. “Yes, thank you, Mrs. Brazel. I’d love some.” Mrs. Brazel actually smiled and scurried around, pouring and stirring.

“I’ve been dying to know what’s going on out here,” Mac said, steering Dee to a kitchen chair. “I think that was the worst part of the whole thing: No newspapers, no radio, no nothing. What’s been happening?”

Dee hesitated for a moment. When one has had a week full of aliens hiding in your home, healing aliens, rescuing alien sacs, and fighting hostile aliens, how did one start? When one has learned that your two favorite aliens are dead, and buried one of them, where did one begin?

“A lot,” she answered quietly. “An awful lot happened.” Mac looked at her sympathetically, and Mrs. Brazel paused in her stirring. “But we’re okay. They didn’t find out about us. What about you? What did they do to you? Did they hurt you?”

“Nah,” Mac scoffed. “Just locked me up and sat on the key. Wouldn’t let me out till I agreed to go back on the radio and take everything back. But I got’em back,” he said with satisfaction. “Anyone listening closely would’ve caught it.”

“The part about them not being green?”

Mac smiled. “You heard it?”

“Nope. Anthony did.”

“Anthony?”

“Anthony Evans. He’s the new kid down the street. He heard what you said, and he also thought they wouldn’t let you go until you gave another interview.”

“Smart kid,” Mac said, impressed. “I’ll have to meet him sometime.”

Mrs. Brazel set the chocolate milk in front of Dee and sat down at the kitchen table. “Do your parents know you’re over here?”

“Well…no,” Dee admitted, “but Mama’s working on some kind of plan to bust you out of here, so I don’t think she’ll mind.” Not true of course...her mother would mind in spades. She’d worry about that later.

“Emily?” Mrs. Brazel looked surprised. “That sounds more like David than Emily. I hope she doesn’t do anything reckless.”

You have no idea what she’s had to do in the past week, Dee thought to herself. “Daddy wanted to have it out with the soldiers this morning, but Mama made him wait. I think she’s afraid someone’s going to remember that my name came up in all of this.”

“You don’t want them to remember that,” Mac agreed soberly. “They’re happy now that they’ve got two aliens to play with, so just let’em play, and don’t remind them that you ever had anything to do with any of this.”

“ ‘Two aliens to play with’?” Dee echoed. She leaned forward eagerly in her chair. “How do you know that? Did you hear something?”

Mac and his wife exchanged glances. “You’d better tell her,” Mrs. Brazel said quietly.

Dee looked questioningly at Mac, who stared at the floor as he spoke. “The soldiers who guarded the room where they were keeping me had very lose lips,” he said with a slight smile. “Cavitt’d probably have a fit if he heard what they said. Anyway….according to the guards, they captured two aliens, the first one last Thursday night, and the second one the next night. I’m sorry,” he added, stealing a peek at her as though he were afraid she might explode.

“You mean….they’re alive?”

“Oh yeah, they’re alive,” Mac said grimly. “You should’ve heard them crowing about it. Or maybe it’s just as well you didn’t,” he added as an afterthought.

“Yipee!” Dee yelled, jostling her glass of chocolate milk and causing Mac and his wife to jump in alarm. “That’s great news!”

Both Brazels were astonished. “It is?” Mac asked, flabbergasted.

“Yes!” Dee exclaimed. “It means they’re alive! I was afraid they were dead like the other two they caught.”

These words had a curious effect on Mac. He rose from the table and went to the side window, staring silently. Mrs. Brazel shot him a sympathetic look, but said nothing.

“I’m really sorry about all this, Dee,” Mac said gruffly, without looking at her. “This is all my fault.”

Now it was Dee’s turn to be flabbergasted. “Your fault?”

Mac nodded. “If I hadn’t gone to the Sheriff, none of this would’ve happened.”

“But…if I hadn’t made you go out to that part of the ranch in the first place, you wouldn’t have found anything to take to the Sheriff,” Dee objected. “So it’s really my fault.”

“Nonsense,” Mac said firmly. “You weren’t trying to turn anyone in. You thought it was just a falling star.”

“And you thought it was a Russian plane,” Dee pointed out. “And everyone says Russia is the enemy.”

“But…” Mac began.

He got no further. “Stop it, both of you!” Rose Brazel exclaimed in exasperation. “You might just as well blame me for doing the laundry early and finding those metal pieces before Mac went back to the ranch after lunch. Or blame the woman at the base who took George’s phone call—if she hadn’t been at her desk, maybe George wouldn’t have gotten through so fast. Or blame George for placing the call in the first place. This could go round in circles forever. What happened, happened,” she said, eyeing both people in front of her severely. “No one wanted it to happen. No one was trying to hurt anyone. Everyone acted in good faith. No one is to blame. Or if you must blame someone, we’re all to blame. Personally, I like the former.”

“ ‘Sometimes even when we do everything right, things don’t work out right anyway’,” Dee murmured, remembering what the soldier had told her the night they rescued the sacs from the culvert.

“True,” Mac allowed, “but I would hardly call what the Army is doing ‘acting in good faith’.”

“Perhaps they’ll come ‘round,” Mrs. Brazel said. Her face wore the expression of one who is trying valiantly to be charitable, with little success. “One can only hope cooler heads will prevail.”

“Assuming they have any cooler heads,” Mac muttered.

A noise outside caught Dee’s ear. “What was that?”

“Probably just Mutt and Jeff banging around on the porch,” Mac said irritably.

But Dee didn’t think so. All the soldiers she’d seen had moved stealthily, not banged around. She walked to the bay window in the living room and broke into a wide grin.

“I don’t think it matters what the Army thinks anymore,” she said to Mac and Rose. “I think the whole thing’s been decided for them.”




********************************************************



5:45 p.m.

Sheriff’s station, Roswell




Deputy Valenti banged his locker door shut and bent down to tie his shoe. He was on duty in fifteen minutes, and he was running late. Another locker opened beside him, and Valenti looked up to see Jake Cook.

“Jim,” Jake said, nodding in Valenti’s direction as he began to strip off his uniform.

“Evening, Jake,” Valenti answered.

“So,” Jake said, his tone sly. “Seen any more aliens lately?”

Valenti shot Jake a dirty look. “No. Have you?”

“I never saw any to begin with,” Jake said, smiling, as he pulled a pair of work boots out of his locker. “Just wanted to make sure I’m ready in case an invasion’s coming.”

Valenti had a powerful urge to wipe the smirk off Jake’s face, but starting a brawl in the locker room wasn’t exactly the way to stay off Hemming’s shit list. “When I find out the exact date and time, I’ll let you know,” he said sarcastically.

“You do that,” Jake said seriously. “I’d hate to be caught unprepared.”

Valenti fumed as he banged his locker door shut, wishing mightily that he could bang it straight into the chuckling Jake’s face. Rounding a corner at mach ten, he collided head on with John Donniger, the deputy who had found him passed out in his car. Just my luck, Valenti thought sourly. Both at once. Taunting was always worse in stereo.

“Jim! Whoa, I didn’t see you there!” Donniger said. “Sorry. Say,” he continued, seeing the scowl on Valenti’s face, “are you all right?”

“Aren’t you going to ask me if I’ve seen any aliens?” Valenti barked. “I’ve only been here twenty minutes, and I’ve already been asked that three times. I thought Hemming said the whole thing was going to be kept quiet?”

Donniger shifted his gaze uneasily left and right as though looking for eavesdroppers. “He did tell me to keep quiet about it,” he said, “and I did. But….well Jim, you just can’t keep things like that quiet. Not in a station this small, and not even in a larger one, I suspect.”

“Wonderful,” Valenti snapped. “So now they all think I’m crazy?”

“No. They think you were drunk,” Donniger admitted. “The jury’s still out on whether or not it was wise to try the alien defense to weasel out of it.”

“I’m not..” Valenti began shouting, then lowered his voice as someone walked by, throwing them a curious stare. “I’m not trying to ‘weasel out’ of anything!” Valenti hissed. “I wasn’t drunk, and I did see an alien! Honestly, why would I say something like that if it weren’t true? Why would I risk being thought a nutcase unless I was absolutely sure of what I saw?”

Donniger sighed. “Look Jim, I like you. You’re a good deputy, you’re a great guy, and I’ve never known you to be the type to go on a bender and cook up a tale. But I know what I saw—I found you passed out in a car with eight empty bottles of beer. I didn’t find any signs of tampering, either human or….alien. There’s just no proof of what you’re claiming.”

“That doesn’t mean I’m wrong!”

“It also doesn’t mean you’re right,” Donniger pointed out, “and with a story that weird, you need proof.” He paused. “Look, I need to get going. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah. Fine,” Valenti said shortly.

“Well…g’night, then,” Donniger said, and beat a hasty exit.

Valenti leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. He’d almost had proof. Twice now he’d almost had proof, and both times he’d been foiled, once by an alien and once by that damned kid with the firecrackers. That whole episode with the kid had almost gone south on him when the kid had accused him of being a peeping tom and the mother had started to buy it. Fortunately, Valenti hadn’t identified himself. Even if she had believed her son, it would have taken some work to track him down.

Still, Valenti had stiffened every time the phone rang over the weekend, wondering if the mother had found him and filed a complaint. Given the way his colleagues were acting toward him now, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch for them to believe the worst of him. An incident like that could get him yanked from the force.

Footsteps sounded in the hallway nearby. Valenti abruptly pushed off the wall as another deputy, Ian Hunt, rounded the corner.

“Jim,” Hunt called. “I’ve been looking for you. Hemming wants to see you.”

“Why?” Valenti asked, in a tone that said a little too obviously, what now?

Hunt must have heard it, because his face broke into a wide smile. “Not sure. Said something about a phone call.”

Shit. He’d spoken too soon; the kid’s mother had called anyway. Valenti took off up the hallway, muttering under his breath, only to stop when Hunt called, “Hey, Jim!”

Valenti turned around. “What?”

“I just wanted to tell you that I thought the whole alien angle was brilliant. Too bad it didn’t work.”

Valenti didn’t answer. He spun around and continued up the hallway, mentally cursing the entire human race.



********************************************************



Brazel residence





Mac and Mrs. Brazel hurried to the window. Now three faces, two astonished and one delighted, looked out on the scene outside.

What appeared to be the entire population of Baldwin street was heading for the Brazel’s front yard. A knot of about thirty people were already arranged at the edge of the front porch, and many more streamed into the yard from every direction. Many carried a dish of some food or other as though this were some sort of bizarre housewarming, and all wore determined expressions. Dee saw Anthony and both of his folks near the back; she caught a glimpse of her parents and ducked further behind the curtain.

“Sweet Jesus,” Mrs. Brazel breathed. “There must be sixty or seventy people out there!”

“More than that,” Dee said cheerfully. “More like a hundred, after you count all the kids.” It was true; whole families were grouped outside, mothers holding babies, fathers holding the hands of toddlers. It looked like another block party.

At the head of the pack was a wizened old man leaning on a cane who beamed at the assembled residents like a proud father. “Just a minute here, and we’ll get started!” he bellowed back toward the crowd. “We’re just waiting for a few more ‘guests’!” Everyone smiled when he said the word “guests”. Dee twisted around so she could see the faces of the two soldiers guarding the Brazel’s front door. They were shifting uneasily from one foot to another with nervous expressions on their young faces.

“Good ol’ Rothman,” Mac said admiringly. “Eighty-one years old and not afraid of anything.”

“Do you think this will work?” Mrs. Brazel asked worriedly.

Mac was grinning broadly. “I do now!”

Dee looked away from the soldiers to where Mac was staring. Two cars had pulled into the Brazel’s driveway; the crowd obligingly parted to make way for them. The first car disgorged a man who was obviously a reporter, as well as a second man holding a large camera. The second car was driven by none other than Frank Joyce of KFGL radio station, the man who had interviewed Mac both times about the aliens.

“Ah, there you are!” shouted Mr. Rothman amiably. Step right up, step right up….let’em through!” he squawked at some Baldwin street residents who weren’t moving fast enough to suit him. “Let’em by!”

The crowd parted further, and soon one reporter, one camera man, and one radio announcer were standing feet away from the now thoroughly flustered soldiers, various recording implements in hand and eager expressions on their faces.

“Now then, young man,” Mr. Rothman hollered to the nearest of the two hapless soldiers, “we’re here to see the Brazels. Stand aside!”

Dee smiled as Mr. Rothman’s decibel level practically flattened hairs on the soldier’s head. Mr. Rothman was quite deaf, and shouted even at those only inches away. Normally that was annoying, but now it was downright useful.

The soldier that Mr. Rothman had addressed drew himself up. “No one is to enter the Brazel’s house by order of Major Sheridan Cavitt, United States Army,” he announced in a noticeably uncertain voice.

Mr. Rothman’s face broke into an ear-splitting grin. “I don’t give a rat’s ass who ordered it, sonny!” he bawled at the top of his lungs. “This isn’t the Army base, it’s small town America! You can’t hold people hostage like this—it’s against the Constitution! It’s un-American! It’s against everything we fought for in the war!”

Applause erupted from the crowd as heads large and small bobbed in agreement. Dee knew there was likely not a soul in that crowd except for the very youngest who hadn’t done something to aid the war effort, whether it was collecting scrap for the munitions factories like she and her friends, keeping Victory Gardens like the mothers, or actually serving like the fathers and brothers and uncles. Some families had paid the ultimate price, and Dee noticed as she scanned the crowd that these had removed the gold stars that marked the loss of a family member in the war from their windows and pinned them to their shirts. The stars glinted in the late afternoon sun, silent protests to what was happening right in front of them.

“We’re not going to stand for this!” Rothman screeched, clearly enjoying himself enormously. “There are a lot more of us than there are of you! Now stand aside, I say, before we trample you!” This last was delivered in a hopeful tone, as though Mr. Rothman, at least, would dearly love to do just that.

A flashbulb popped. The reporter and the radio announcer scribbled. The two soldiers guarding the front door were looking decidedly nonplussed. “All of you, go home!” one of them barked, with a notable lack of conviction. “You’ll be in real trouble if you attempt to enter this house!” His hand moved to the hilt of his gun as if to emphasize his point.

Big mistake, Dee thought. The faces in the crowd turned angry, and their muttering grew louder.

“Real trouble, you say?” boomed Mr. Rothman. “What’dya gonna do, sonny—shoot me? Get a picture of this!” he shouted excitedly at the photographer standing six inches away from him. “Get a picture of them threatening to shoot me!”

A flashbulb popped again. The soldier cast an uneasy glance at the large crowd of potential witnesses before them and looked Mr. Rothman up and down, taking in his bent frame, wooden cane, and practically useless hearing aid. His hand fell from his gun.

“I’m Frank Tepper, from the Daily Record,” announced the reporter from his perch on the bottom step of the porch. “Is Mr. Brazel under arrest?”

“Well....no…” one of the soldiers said uncertainly.

“Then why are you here?” Mr. Joyce demanded. “The Army isn’t local law enforcement. What right do you have to hold a citizen under house arrest?”

“I….well….” the soldier stammered. He looked at the other guard, who gave a tiny shrug.

“Look, you’ll have to take this up with Major Cavitt,” the shrugging soldier said. “We’re just following orders.”

“Orders?! shrieked Mr. Rothman, waving his cane threateningly at the soldier, who backed away in alarm. “Orders to lock a man and his missus in their own home? I’d like to see the dimwit who gave those orders! I’d give him a piece of my mind he wouldn’t soon forget!”

Mr. Rothman was now beet red in the face. The rest of the crowd didn’t look much calmer. The soldiers were rattled, but stood their ground. The wind was blowing in another direction; both reporter and radio announcer leaned forward eagerly, sniffing the air like hunters stalking their prey.

Mac let the curtain drop. “Enough,” he said firmly. “Someone’s going to get hurt.”

“What are you going to do?” Mrs. Brazel asked in alarm.

“Calm down, Rose,” Mac said. “I’m just going to open the front door—my front door,” he added pointedly. “I have a right to open my front door, don’t I?”

Mrs. Brazel never got a chance to answer. Mac flung the door open wide and beamed at the crowd in his yard, which instantly broke into a cheer and surged forward.

The denizens of Baldwin Street piled into the Brazel’s house, pushing aside the frustrated guards. The soldiers made helpless and exasperated gestures to one another over the heads of the milling crowd, but they were clearly outnumbered and they knew it. After five minutes of fruitless attempts to stem the flow, they gave up and left.

Dee curled up in the bay window seat and watched them leave. They might be back, of course, but for now, the power of public opinion—or perhaps the fear of it—had trumped the Army. In the kitchen, both Mr. Joyce and Mr. Tepper were busy talking to Mac, while anyone within earshot listened intently. The house was almost full, more people were streaming in, and there were still more out in the yard then there were inside.

Tucked inside her special spot away from the crowd, Dee closed her eyes and savored the happy hum of the crowd. She wanted to make this moment last as long as possible. This was the first time in what seemed like a long time that she felt proud to belong to the human race.




********************************************************



1800 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base




Dr. Pierce entered the room where aliens were being held and checked his watch, frowning. A technician handed him a clipboard full of data, which he examined for a full five minutes before tossing it onto a nearby table with an air of defeat.

“No change?” he asked one of the technicians.

“None,” the technician confirmed. Both men stared at the short, gray figure strapped to the table. Electrodes covered its bald head and its chest, stretching to machines off to the side. “We withheld the last two doses of sedative; we’re coming up on the next dose in an hour or so.”

“And you haven’t observed any change? Yes, yes, I know the data didn’t show anything,” Pierce said impatiently, as the technician gestured toward the discarded clipboard, “but we don’t really know what we’re looking at, do we? We can measure its heart rate and respiration, but we don’t know what the normal values are, so those measurements aren’t very useful at the moment. What about your eyes, Corporal? You do still know how to use them, don’t you?”

“The subject has not displayed any signs of regaining consciousness, Doctor,” the tech replied, ignoring Pierce’s sarcasm.

Pierce sat down on the end of the stretcher and gazed worriedly at the “subject”. “What’s wrong?” he asked, talking more to himself than the tech. “I would have expected the drug to at least begin wearing off by now, in a human patient at least. I hope we didn’t put it into a coma by keeping it continuously sedated,” he added, with a worried glance at the second, human-appearing alien, unconscious on a nearby stretcher.

“We don’t understand this creature’s metabolism,” the tech pointed out. “Perhaps it just takes longer to wear off. Or perhaps it will require a stimulant to help the process along.”

“Perhaps,” Pierce murmured. “The danger there is waking it too much. I don’t want it conscious, just slightly so. Just enough to glean an idea of how it produces the energy it's capable of wielding. If it’s fully conscious, we’ll never be able to hold it.”

Pierce mused for a moment, arms folded, fingers tapping on his elbows. “We’ll wait one more hour,” he said finally, “and then we’ll intervene.”

“Yes, doctor,” the assistant replied. “Shall I notify Major Cavitt, or won’t he be attending?”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll be there with bells on, if only to chronicle all my alleged ‘mistakes’,” Pierce said dryly. “Do you know it took me three phone calls to General Ramey just to make him turn the subjects over to me? But I only have a limited time in which to wake them and demonstrate control over them; otherwise, Ramey wants them kept sedated. I have to get this right fast.”

Pierce slid off the end of the table and headed for the door. “I’ll be back at 1900 hours. Call me if anything changes.”

“Yes, Doctor,” the technician replied.

Neither were looking at the gray figure as they parted, so both missed the flickering of the huge gray eyelids and the twitching of the long-fingered hands.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Kathy W]

Hello to everyone reading! *wave*





CHAPTER FOUR


July 13, 1947, 6 p.m.

Roswell Sheriff’s Station




Deputy Valenti knocked on Sheriff Hemming’s office door with a feeling of foreboding. The Sheriff wanted to talk to him about a phone call? That couldn’t be good. He could think of at least three different people who wouldn’t have good things to say about him now.

“Come in!” Hemming’s voice called. Bracing himself, Valenti entered the office.

“Ah, hello Jim,” Hemming said, looking up from his desk. “Close the door and have a seat.”

Valenti studied Hemming’s face as he obeyed. He didn’t look angry, or worried—just serious. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as he thought.

“I received a call from the County Sheriff, George Wilcox. You know him?”

Valenti’s heart sank. So Wilcox had finally blown him in for confronting him last week in his office. Or maybe the Proctors, or that kid’s mother had complained. “Yes, sir,” Valenti said, trying to keep his voice even, his head swirling with ways to get out of this one.

“I guess a few of his guys aren’t doing so well, what with the all the hoopla lately. Two of them just up and quit, and George wants to give a few more some time off, just to get away from it for a bit. He’s asked me if I can spare some men temporarily. I’m sending you over to him.”

It took a moment for this announcement to sink in. “Over to….you mean I’ll be working for Chaves County instead of Roswell?” Valenti asked.

Hemming nodded. “Yep. I can sympathize with George,” he added, with a beady look at Valenti. “I think some of my people could stand to get away from it too.”

“I see,” Valenti said, smarting. “And you think that you’re going to ‘get me away from this’ by reassigning me to the precinct where others are dropping like flies?”

Hemming leaned back in his chair and gave his deputy a level stare. “No,” he answered. “The only way to get away from this nuttiness is to leave the damned state. But it will get you away from this department for awhile, and I think that would be a good thing. I destroyed the report on your adventures the other night, but you must have noticed that word’s gotten out. Everyone’s wondering if you were joshing or serious.”

Valenti kept his face blank and said nothing.

“So I think it would be a good idea for you to disappear for a little while until the chattering dies down,” Hemming continued. “I also think it would be good for you to have a larger area to work with, some of which has nothing to do with flying saucers. It’ll keep you busy. Hopefully busy enough that you’ll stay away from the beer.”

Five minutes ago, a comment like that would have brought an angry outburst, but Valenti didn’t reply. Something had just occurred to him, something that would have been immediately obvious if he hadn't been so busy taking umbrage at Hemming’s attitude.

Corona was in Chaves County.

Corona being as small as it was, its residents used the Chaves County Sheriff’s department as their police department.

The Proctors lived in Corona.

Working for Chaves County meant that he had authority in Corona.

Valenti’s pulse quickened. This could be just the break he needed. He’d have to get Wilcox to accept him, of course, and that could be tricky, given their last altercation. But his fellow deputies’ reactions to him lately had given him an idea of how to tackle that problem.

“You will be staying away from the beer, right Jim?” Hemming was saying.

Valenti tightened his grip on the arms of the chair. This wasn’t going to be pleasant, but he didn’t see any other way out of it. He was going to have to eat some crow, even if meant lying through his teeth. Besides, no one believed him anyway.

“I’m grateful for this opportunity, sir,” Valenti said, hoping he sounded humble. “I…I’ve been meaning to tell you that….that you were right about the other night. I really thought I’d make it home in spite of how much I’d had to drink, so I made up….well, I don’t know what came over me. I guess I just panicked.”

Hemming’s expression softened. “That’s all right, Jim. No harm done. As I said, you weren’t doing anything illegal. We’ve all gone on a bender now and then, eh?”

Valenti managed a wan smile. “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” He stood up. “When do I report to Sheriff Wilcox?”

“Immediately,” Hemming answered. “George isn’t on duty tonight, but the deputies there will show you the ropes. And Jim,” he added, as Valenti turned to leave. “I’m glad you came clean about what happened. Although I must admit, you were so sure of yourself……you really had me going there for a while.”

Hemming smiled, and Valenti worked hard at looking chagrined. The two men shook hands, and Valenti exited the office, only to bump into two more deputies.

“Well, if it isn’t the alien party boy!” one of them said, clapping Valenti on the back and grinning. “Say, do you think maybe the aliens drank some of that beer?”

Swallowing the retort rising like bile in his throat, Valenti tried to look sheepish. “It was worth a try, wasn’t it? With everything that’s been going on, it might’ve worked.”

The two deputies smiled and laughed. “It might’ve at that,” one of them agreed. “Nice try, Valenti. Too bad no one bought it.”

The two walked off laughing, and Valenti closed his eyes a moment to steady himself. God, this was going to be hard. But better everyone think him a one time drunk with a tall tale than a crazy man. That left him free to do whatever he had to do to find out what the hell was going on around here.




*************************************************************




7 p.m.

Proctor residence




The doorbell rang, and Emily Proctor opened it to find Sheriff Wilcox on her front porch. “George! This is a surprise.”

“I’ve just come from visiting Mac and Rose,” George said, removing his hat. “I heard you stared a rumble today.”

“Who? Me?” Emily asked innocently. “Why, Sheriff, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Are you here to arrest me?”

George shook his head, smiling. “Nope. Not enough evidence. May I come in?”

“Are you sure you want to be seen entering the house of an alleged subversive?” Emily asked dryly as she stepped back and held the door for him.

“I’ll take my chances,” George said, following her into the kitchen.

“Coffee?”

“Please. Can’t get enough of the stuff today.”

“Today’s Sunday, George,” Emily said, fishing in the cupboard for a cup. “It’s a day of rest, remember? Cream?”

“Black, thank you. And ‘day of rest’, my ass.” George looked around suddenly. “Where’s Dee?”

“At a friend’s house,” Emily answered calmly. “Don’t worry—she’s not here to hear you swearing like a sailor.”

“Good,” George said, sitting down at the kitchen table and accepting the cup Emily placed in front of him. “That means she won’t be able to hear the rest of it too.” He sipped his coffee. “Want to know how I spent my ‘day of rest’?”

“Seeing as you already know about mine, I suppose it’s only good manners to listen to yours,” Emily said.

“I spent my morning with the phone ringing off the hook with people furious about the guards placed outside the Brazel’s house,” Mac said. “My afternoon was spent at the base, trying to get them to call off their dogs. I kicked up enough of a fuss that Major Cavitt himself decided to deal with me personally, and….”

“ ‘Major’ Cavitt?” Emily said in disbelief. “I thought he was a Captain!”

“He was. He got promoted.”

“They made that jackass a Major?” Emily exclaimed, flabbergasted.

George smiled. “Now who’s swearing like a sailor? Yes, they made him a Major. Isn’t it nice to know that our armed forces reward such brilliant individuals? Anyway,” he continued, “I was getting nowhere until word arrived that the residents of Baldwin Street had risen up in revolt. And that certain representatives of the media were in attendance recording every word. That changed their tune quite a bit. The last thing they want right now is publicity.”

“And what makes you think I had anything to do with this?” Emily asked.

George shrugged. “I figured it out. You did a good job; you covered your tracks well. Fortunately I had to do an awful lot of digging to find out where it started.”

Now it was Emily’s turn to shrug. “I made a few phones calls, and asked everyone else to call two other people, who asked those people to call two other people. Everyone heard from someone different, so we would be hard to track.” She paused. “What do you mean, ‘fortunately’?”

George fiddled with his coffee cup. “I have news, Emily. None of it good, I’m afraid.” He hesitated a moment, then glanced up at Emily, who was staring at him soberly, waiting for it. “When I was at the base, Cavitt quizzed me about the kid who was supposedly with Mac when he first found the debris from the ship. It’s my fault he knew about that at all,” he added uncomfortably, looking away. “I’m the one who mentioned it to him in the first place.”

“Stop it, George,” Emily said gently. “I know you didn’t mean us any harm. You had no idea what was coming—none of us did. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.”

“Damned hindsight,” George muttered. “Anyway, I threw Cavitt off, but I was surprised he’d remembered; no one’s bothered to pursue that angle since that night before they found the ship. All of you still need to keep your heads down. It’s not safe at this point to remind anybody that your name ever came into this in any way, even as a misstatement.”

Emily relaxed a bit. “I figured as much. That’s why I spent my day trying to prevent my husband from storming the Bastille all by himself, and insisted on involving as much of the neighborhood as we could this afternoon. There’s strength—and anonymity—in numbers.”

“And it worked—beautifully,” George said admiringly.

“For the moment,” Emily cautioned. “They could be back.”

George shook his head. “They won’t be back. The newspapers are watching, the radio jocks are watching, hell, everyone’s watching. Or they will be, after all this comes out in the Daily Record tomorrow. They won’t try that again. Something else, maybe, but not that. They want this whole spaceship thing kept totally quiet.”

“I’ll bet they do,” Emily said sourly.

“Which leads me to the second piece of bad news,” George said. “Cavitt may be standing on his head trying to keep this quiet, but his base is buzzing. It wasn’t hard to find some lose lips.” He paused, as if reluctant to continue. “They’ve got your….friends, Emily. Two of them. They’re still alive, and I take it they’re being kept sedated.”

“We know,” Emily said sadly. “Mac heard that too, and he told us this afternoon. Privately,” she added hastily, as George’s face lit up in alarm at the thought of Mac Brazel announcing to a huge crowd that the Army was holding two space aliens.

“I gathered the other two were dead, although I wasn’t able to confirm that,” George said.

“Oh, they’re quite dead,” Emily said soberly. “At least one of them is.”

George frowned. “The Army could be lying about that. How do you know?”

Emily rose and carried her coffee cup to the sink. She stood gazing out the kitchen window for a long moment before answering.

“We buried him—in a manner of speaking.”

“Oh,” George said uncomfortably. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“I never met him,” Emily mused, as though to herself. “I hear he liked people—our people—and that he argued for Dee’s life when she was injured.”

George was silent. Emily looked around abruptly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to go all maudlin on you. It’s just that we haven’t seen you in awhile, and you have no idea what’s been going on around here.”

“Maybe I do,” George said. “I heard other things on the base. Something about one of aliens getting away the night the first was captured. It took something with him, something the Army badly wants back. They combed the area for hours, and never found whatever it was.” He gave Emily a pointed look. “You lot wouldn’t have anything to do with that, would you?”

“Sometimes I wish we hadn’t,” Emily said truthfully. “Other times, I’m proud we did.”

“I see,” George said, eyes wide. “And is this….something….going to turn up in my county somewhere?”

“No,” Emily answered. “It’s hidden. It’s safe.”

“Good,” George said. He sighed, stood up from the table, and headed for the front door, Emily trailing after him. “If it makes you feel any better, my life’s been hell recently too. The whole county is in an uproar, with alien sightings everywhere and people in a panic. Some of my deputies couldn’t take it. I had to call down to Roswell for some temps while some of my guys took a break, so don’t be surprised if you see some new faces around here soon.”

Emily opened the door, and shouts rang out from across the street. Dee and some other children were running around, pelting each other with water balloons.

“She looks normal,” George said, smiling. “How’s she doing?”

Emily’s face bore a wistful expression. “ ‘Normal’ is rather a dirty word around here at the moment. Nothing will ever be ‘normal’ again. We’re going to have to come up with a new definition.”

When George looked at her quizzically, she continued, “Can you guess what Dee said when she found out the two had been captured?”

“I’d imagine she was very upset.”

Emily shook her head. “Nope. She was thrilled. Thrilled they were still alive. You know the world has gone dark when a little girl thinks being captured is cause for celebration because she knows from personal experience that the alternative is worse.”

George leaned against the door jamb and sighed. “We didn’t acquit ourselves very well, did we? Our first contact with people from another world, and we acted like animals.”

“Worse,” Emily said darkly. “Animals would have treated them better.”

“True,” George said heavily. “One more thing before I go….I heard they’re going to try and wake up those two they have. What’s going to happen when they do? I’ve heard they can do some pretty amazing things. Can they hold them?”

“Not from what I’ve seen.”

“I see,” George said slowly. “So that means when they break out….”

“…they’ll be loose in your county,” Emily finished for him, nodding. She studied the look on George’s face for a moment before continuing. “You know, George, if you don’t want to get mixed up in all this, we’ll understand.”

George plopped his hat on his head. “Nonsense,” he said firmly. “I’m the law here, and I’m sworn to protect the people. I’ve decided that means all the people, even those who don’t look like us. I can’t make sense of my oath any other way.”

Emily gave him a warm smile. “Call us anytime, day or night. We’ll get the phone.”

“I’ll do that,” George said, heading down the porch steps. He turned when he reached the bottom.

“You really think they can’t hold them?”

Emily shook her head. “No way.”




*************************************************************




1900 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base



Dr. Pierce entered the room where the aliens were being held to find it packed. Soldiers with tranquilizer rifles ringed the room, and more soldiers with real guns ringed the second, human-looking alien who was still heavily sedated. Major Cavitt was pacing; he looked up and scowled as Pierce approached.

“Subtle. Very subtle,” Pierce said sardonically, nodding toward the soldiers with guns trained on the second alien. “But then, subtlety was always your best trait, wasn’t it?”

“You haven’t seen what these things can do,” Cavitt retorted. “If you manage to wake it, threatening its friend might be the only leverage we have.”

“How do you know they’re friends?” Pierce asked cheerfully. “They could be mortal enemies, or co-workers, or lovers, or just bosom buddies like you and me.”

“Do you mind?” Cavitt groused, frowning, as the assembled soldiers stifled smiles.

“I was merely pointing out that we know nothing about the social order of these creatures,” Pierce said calmly. “You may not have the leverage you think you have.”

“Nevertheless, they stay,” Cavitt said firmly. “I have to be prepared in case you fail.”

“Your confidence is touching,” Pierce deadpanned.

“I knew you wouldn’t take this seriously,” Cavitt said furiously. “You never took anything seriously.”

“And you take everything too seriously,” Pierce commented. “Now…shall we get started, or is there some religious rite you’d like to perform first? With you as the deity, of course.”

More stifled smiles. Cavitt’s face was an interesting shade of purple. Pierce leaned in and whispered softly so that only Cavitt could hear. “You know, baiting you was always one of my favorite pastimes.”

Leaning back, Pierce turned to the nearest technician as Cavitt’s face darkened further. “Still no change?”

“No, doctor,” the tech answered. “None at all.”

Pierce nodded. “Then let’s begin.”





*************************************************************





Copper Summit, Arizona




Malik tensed as he heard the airlock begin to hiss. He already knew the likely outcome of Amar’s confrontation with The Leader, and he was not looking forward to its aftermath. He waited in tense silence for the outer airlock door to hiss open and disgorge a likely furious Amar.

It had taken Amar well over twenty-four hours to clear the human tranquilizer from his system. He had stayed in the abandoned farm house the entire time while Malik roamed about, obtaining food and water and keeping an eye out for humans. Malik had also tried to keep an eye on Brivari and Jaddo, to no avail; gaining entrance to the human military compound was now more difficult than ever. He had tried once more, right after his visit to the pod chamber, with no success. The compound was buttoned up tight, and the risk of discovery should he have taken the form of one of those authorized to enter it was too great.

They had waited until this afternoon to return to Copper Summit. Amar had wanted to be absolutely certain he was completely recovered before the trial they dreaded—that of standing before The Leader and admitting they had lost both Royal Covari to the humans. Failing to capture them was bad enough, but to have the humans capture them instead was downright embarrassing. Privately, Malik was impressed the humans had found a way to deal with people so much more powerful than they were. Their success was further proof that humans were not as stupid as Amar thought.

The second airlock door hissed open. Malik sighed; his grace period was up. He had spent two hours inside the atmospheric chamber himself, giving his account of what happened right after Amar had finished his. The Leader had then spent a good hour conferring with those on Antar, after which Amar had been called back. No doubt The Leader would want to speak to Malik again now that he had finished with Amar; that was the way it usually worked. Covari were questioned separately as a means of finding inconsistencies in their stories, then questioned and re-questioned to nitpick the details. It was an unfortunate consequence of finding oneself a member of a race that was universally distrusted.

Amar stomped out and began pulling boxes off shelves, rifling through storage cabinets, and generally making a mess. Malik, who had risen in anticipation of being ordered back inside the chamber, paused uncertainly.

“Doesn’t he want to see me again?”

“No,” Amar said flatly.

“No?” Malik repeated, bewildered. “Why not? Not that I crave his company, but…”

“We are to drop the matter of the Royals for now,” Amar said shortly. “We are to work on perfecting the seal instead.”

Malik blinked. It worked? He had tried very hard to induce The Leader to drop the matter of the Royals, at least for the moment. Technically he was preaching to the choir; he knew The Leader would dearly love to rid himself of this troublesome distraction, especially now, when he was so close to achieving what he’d come here for. That decision would actually be made by those in power on Antar, and Malik had been careful to feed The Leader several well-grounded arguments for strategic waiting, hoping he would pass them along to the powers that be.

“ ‘Drop the matter’,” he echoed, as though this were a new concept. “You mean we are to just…..leave them there?”

“Shit!” Amar slammed a pile of research papers on the table, and Malik jumped. “I do not believe this!” he thundered. “We have them, Malik! We know right where they are! They are helpless, friendless, defenseless….and we’re just going to walk away? Is he crazy?”

“Well…we don’t ‘have’ them,” Malik pointed out, refraining from noting that, for one who supposedly disdained human expressions, Amar seemed to use quite a lot of them. Particularly those of the profane variety. “Actually, it’s the humans who ‘have’ them.”

“Semantics!” Amar said crossly. “Someone has them. We don’t have to hunt them down. But as soon as the humans let them wake up, you know perfectly well they won’t be able to hold them. They’ll vanish into thin air, and we could spend years looking for them after that.”

“We both heard the humans say that they don’t plan to awaken them,” Malik said. “They know they can’t hold them. And we wouldn’t be able to hold them either.”

“Of course we would! We have the generator!” Amar said, indicating the ruined, five-sided device that had blocked Jaddo’s abilities, lying in a heap on a nearby workbench. “What?” he demanded when he saw the look on Malik’s face. “It worked! It needs a little tweaking, but it worked.”

“Amar,” Malik said, choosing his works with care, “if we tried to use that to control the Warders, we would wind up knocking out power over a huge area. If we leave it on, we risk exposing ourselves; if we turn it off, we risk their abilities. The generator isn’t usable right now. Even if we can remove them from the human compound, we need a better way to hold them before we even attempt to pull them out of there.”

“Pull them out of where?” Amar asked irritably. “Weren’t you listening? Weren’t you watching? The humans won’t be able to resist waking them forever, and when they do, it won't be long before Brivari and Jaddo won’t be ‘there’. We need to move now, while they are still sedated.”

“And what does The Leader say?”

Amar plopped into a chair wearing a thoroughly disgusted expression. “He says the same thing you just did—we could not hold them with the current technology. No one back home is in a hurry; apparently, it will take a couple of decades for the hybrids to mature, so we have plenty of time. They’re planning on sending reinforcements at some point in the future, so he’s unwilling to risk us right now. He feels the humans will not take the risk of trying to awaken them any time soon. But I’m willing to bet they’ll try to wake them sooner rather than later, at which point the Warders will escape and go to ground. And we’ll be left combing this goddamned planet for them for the rest of our miserable lives,” he concluded, with his usual optimism.

“We’ll have help,” Malik pointed out.

“Not soon enough,” Amar countered. “They’ll still have plenty of time to run. He’s crazy, I tell you! We were so close, so close…”

Malik was silent for a moment, watching Amar chew on his frustration. Malik would be perfectly happy to have the Warders escape, of course. They would need to be free agents at the bargaining table that might very well exist in the not too distant future. Their contact on Antar always led them to believe that things were going well back home. But The Leader was careless with the details about what was really going on, and it didn’t take much of an imagination to fill in the blanks.

Filling in those blanks produced a story far darker than the one being fed them through official channels: The populace was in an uproar over the coup, and Khivar was not doing well. He had taken the throne in what had been the standard fashion on Antar for centuries—armed conquest. But Riall had changed everyone’s expectations by choosing peaceful conquest, and Zan’s ascension had given Antar something it had never had in living memory: A peaceful succession. For the first time, the transfer of power had been cause for national unity and celebration instead of fear and strife. So now, as Khivar expected to be accepted by the people after having played the game by the rules, he found the rules changed, the old ways no longer welcome. Zan’s allies were defiant; even his detractors, sensing the public mood, refused to ally themselves with the new regime.

Public unhappiness with his tactics wasn’t Khivar’s only problem. Without the body of the King he had conquered, he was technically unable to claim the crown. And it got worse—unable to produce the body of a single member of the royal family, Khivar found the public unwilling to believe they were dead. Rumors had spread that they were being held prisoner by Khivar, or that they had been spirited away to a secret location from which they would eventually emerge and reclaim the throne. This ‘secret location’ was widely believed to be one of the neighboring planets, and the unrest at home was spreading to their sister worlds as fingers were pointed and accusations made that various places were providing sanctuary.

Even Khivar had become suspicious. His generals had assured them the Royals were dead, but only one had actually seen one of the bodies: Athenor, Khivar’s second in command, claimed he had killed Rath himself. He could not vouch for the other royals, however, and as time went by and the bodies were not found, everyone’s imaginations began working overtime. Trust Brivari to pull that off, Malik thought admiringly. It must have been quite a feat, killing anyone who had seen the Royals dead, removing the bodies without anyone seeing them, disposing of them so no one could ever find them. You could pull that off with one body, perhaps, but four? That was nothing short of incredible.

So Khivar sat alone atop a still warm throne, caught in a web of his own making. He had killed Zan, but he could not prove it, could not claim Zan’s crown, could not stop the people from turning Zan into a legend and clamoring for his return. Khivar ruled, but he had seriously misjudged the reaction to his bid for power; the people had had just enough of a taste of peace to realize what had been taken from them, and he was viewed not as a conqueror, but as a usurper. He had succeeded in theory, but failed in practice, a perfect example of someone who had won the battle but lost the war.

“Stupid seal,” Amar groused, poking at the latest model lying on the workbench. “I don’t understand why they can’t do all this back home. They have better materials, better equipment. We have to scrounge for parts whenever a revision is needed….”

“They do do most of it at home,” Malik interrupted. “We just test it.”

“They can test it at home,” Amar said peevishly, determined to be miserable.

“They can’t duplicate the Earth’s atmosphere that precisely,” Malik pointed out. “They can come close, but field testing is better. Look,” he said as Amar began to vent again, “we’re almost done. The skins are almost fully mature. All they need is a reliable way to seal them. As soon as they have that, they can send a team of their own out here to work on the rest, and we will have fulfilled our part of the deal. Then it’s their turn to fulfill theirs.”

“The Leader should at least let us go back to Roswell to check on what’s going on. They’re going to escape, I just know it!”

“We are the only two left—without us, he is helpless,” Malik pointed out, nodding toward the airlock. “He’s afraid we’ll be caught just as the Warders were.” He frowned. “Wouldn’t you be worried about that too, Amar? The human base is a difficult place to infiltrate. You might be captured yourself. I would think you wouldn’t find it worth the risk.”

Amar was silent, glowering at the tools scattered on the workbench.

“But it is worth the risk for you, isn’t it,” Malik said, eyeing him closely, “if it means you get to watch Brivari suffer, get to gloat over him as he lies helpless. That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”

Amar scowled at him. “Is that so much to ask? I have that coming.”

Malik sighed. “Torturing Brivari won’t change the past.

“No,” Amar answered bitterly. “But it’s a start.”





*************************************************************






2000 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base




“Why isn’t it waking up, 'Doctor'?” Major Cavitt said sarcastically.

“I’m not sure,” Dr. Pierce answered, sounding faintly bewildered.

Yvonne White looked down at the motionless gray figure on the table in front of her, sharing the doctor’s puzzlement. The alien had now missed three doses of the sedative; some was undoubtedly still in its system, but enough should have worn off to permit it to regain consciousness. On top of that, it had been given a stimulant at twice the usual dosage for its weight. In human terms, it should not only be awake, but wide awake.

Perhaps it’s better this way, Yvonne thought sadly, as Cavitt and Pierce proceeded to trade barbs. She had argued for its revival, but in retrospect, that might not have been such a wonderful idea given what awaited once it regained consciousness. Assuming they could hold it, of course, and she was sincerely hoping they couldn’t. Especially now that she knew her commanding officer was nothing less than a cold-blooded murderer.

The EEG machine continued to scratch out lines that looked as though the creature were conscious, even though it continued to appear just the opposite. Major Cavitt was demanding it be given another dose of stimulant. Yvonne started at the narrow strip of paper sliding out of the EEG machine, reflecting on just how little they knew. They were interpreting everything—the EEG, drug dosages, expected reactions, everything—in human terms, the only terms with which they were familiar. But human terms may mean nothing in this situation, and might even be harmful.

Several more minutes went by. “Check for a heartbeat,” Dr. Pierce ordered her, while Major Cavitt was drawing a breath to begin a fresh round of carping. Yvonne placed her stethoscope on the leathery gray chest directly over the organ which passed as the creature’s heart and heard a strong, fast, steady thump.

“Heart rate steady and strong at...” Yvonne consulted her watch… “123 beats per minute,” she said. Pierce nodded, apparently satisfied that they had not yet done anything dire, and went back to arguing with Cavitt.

Yvonne removed the stethoscope from around her neck. Out of habit, her hand slid under the sheet and moved automatically to the creature’s wrist, checking for a pulse, before she remembered that this was an alien, not a human patient. Before she could pull away, the long gray fingers closed purposefully over her hand.

Yvonne was so startled that she dropped the stethoscope. It clattered to the floor, sounding like a machine gun in the tense atmosphere of the room, silent but for the Majors’ bickering. The gray fingers were still closed around her hand, under the sheet where no one else could see. She squeezed the hand once, and it promptly squeezed back

Yvonne suddenly found her own heart beating at least as fast as the creature’s. That was no mere muscle twitch, or the feeble movement of someone heavily sedated. The alien was awake, very likely wide awake, despite all appearances to the contrary.

Cavitt had turned and frowned at the sound of the dropping stethoscope; Pierce spared a glance, then went back to studying the EEG printouts. She pulled her hand away from the creature; it did not resist. Bending down to pick up the stethoscope, her mind raced, putting together all the pieces from earlier in the day and just now.

Dr. Pierce had been puzzling over the creature’s EEG readouts for the past several hours. They had shown a very slow, but steady rise in brain activity which should have been mirrored by an increase in consciousness. But the creature had shown no sign of waking, and finally Pierce had decided to administer a stimulant to speed the process along.

It’s awake, Yvonne thought wildly. It’s probably been awake for hours. But it would have been groggy at first, most likely unable to escape. It had hidden its increasing consciousness, no doubt banking on their own unfamiliarity with the data they were trying to interpret. And it had worked—perfectly. The creature was now fully or very near fully conscious, and no one but she was the wiser.

Major Cavitt abruptly ordered the soldiers out of the room. They filed out, and Yvonne watched them leave with relief. If the creature was on the verge of attempting escape, the fewer people in the room, the better.

The last of the soldiers disappeared through the doorway, taking up positions outside the room. Now there was just Major Cavitt, Dr. Pierce, herself, and a couple of medical technicians left. One of them replaced the curtain around the human-appearing alien while the other milled around, fidgeting.

“This just doesn’t make any sense,” Pierce said. “Granted, this thing isn’t human, but still, given the way the sedative worked, I would expect to be able to make some extrapolations…” He broke off suddenly. “Unless….”

“Unless what?” Cavitt said impatiently.

“Sheridan,” Pierce said slowly. “Bring the soldiers back.”

Yvonne froze. Pierce wasn’t looking at the creature, he was studying the EEG printouts. Had he reached the same conclusion she had?

“What? Why?”

“Bring them back!” Pierce said sharply.

Suddenly, the EEG machine went crazy. For a moment, every eye in the room was on the machine as the recording arm skittered wildly back and forth, making pronounced scratching noises that grew louder by the second. Yvonne felt a faint crackling in the air, almost like static electricity. Then she heard a voice, a voice that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once.

<Step back!>

Confused, Yvonne looked around. She couldn’t figure out who had just spoken. Everyone was staring silently at the EEG machine, frozen in place as though someone had deliberately halted time at this very moment.

<Step back!> the voice repeated. Instinctively, Yvonne obeyed, moving back as far as she could until her back was against the wall.

The creature’s eyes flew open.

And then all hell broke loose.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

[Kathy W]

Hello and thank you to all who are reading!






CHAPTER FIVE


July 13, 1947, 2020 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base





Her back against the wall, Yvonne instinctively threw her arms over her head and slid to the floor as the glass from the observation room window upstairs shattered, raining upon the occupants of both rooms. Shards tinkled on the floor around her, pieces pelted her arms and head, stinging as they broke the skin. Risking a peek from her hunched position on the floor, she saw the technicians cowering just as she was, their heads still buried in their arms, unable to see what she saw. And what she saw was no less than completely astonishing.

Major Cavitt and Dr. Pierce were literally pinned to opposite walls, held by an invisible force. Both tried to speak and failed; they appeared to have had the breath knocked out of them. The EEG machine began to smoke, the leads attached to the skull of the creature suddenly popped off as one, and the gray figure everyone had assumed was sedated sat up. Black eyes raked the room, taking in the commotion in the ruined observation room, the captive officers, the cowering techs, and finally, Yvonne, who stared at those bottomless black eyes as though held in some sort of spell.

There was an electrical crackling sound as the lights flickered; seconds later a voice shouted, “Hold your fire!”. Suddenly the lights died, plunging the room into blackness as chaos erupted in the hallway: Shouting, running feet, the clatter of weapons, people stumbling in the almost total darkness. “Hold your fire!” the voice shouted again only seconds before an explosion shook the room, causing more debris to rain down on Yvonne and everyone else. And then….

….silence. Time seemed suspended for a moment as everyone held their breaths.

Emergency generators kicked on, bathing the room in a soft glow just as Cavitt and Pierce slid abruptly to the floor, landing hard on their respective tailbones. The dim light broke the spell of silence; tense, urgent voices filled the observation room upstairs and the hallway outside, punctuated by the occasional profanity as people struggled to navigate the gloom. Yvonne watched Cavitt clamber to his feet, wincing. Soldiers burst through the door, alert, rifles at the ready. But they had nothing to aim for, as it was immediately apparent that the prisoner was missing.

“Are you all right, sirs?” a soldier asked, glancing from Cavitt to Pierce.

“Never mind us, find it!" roared Cavitt, rubbing his sore backside. “I want that thing back!”

The soldiers hustled out, followed by the technicians, their feet crunching on the shards of glass coating the floor, the instruments—everything. Yvonne stood up slowly, carefully brushing glass from her hair and uniform. She glanced over at the human-appearing alien; the curtain surrounding his stretcher seemed to have deflected the brunt of the exploding glass. Or had the escaping alien protected its friend? She couldn’t say.

Cavitt rounded on Pierce, brushing glass off his own uniform, eyes blazing. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

Pierce was still sitting on the floor, an expression of amazement on his face. He looked at Cavitt as though noticing him for the first time.

“Well?" Cavitt demanded again.

“Amazing,” Pierce whispered.

“Do you mean to tell me,” Cavitt hissed, “that you just lost one of the most important prisoners we will ever have, and all you have to say for it is ‘amazing’?”

Pierce was silent for a moment. Then he looked up at Cavitt and abruptly began to laugh.

Both Yvonne and Cavitt stared as Pierce’s laugh grew from a chuckle to a knee-slapping belly laugh. The sight of him sitting on the floor, covered in glass from the shattered window and laughing uncontrollably was supremely disconcerting. Cavitt’s expression shifted to include disbelief along with the rage. Yvonne began to wonder if Pierce had cracked.

“Why are you laughing?” Cavitt whispered fiercely. Pierce laughed harder. “Why are you laughing?" Cavitt repeated, absolutely beside himself.

A moment later Pierce’s laughter began to abate. Cavitt peered at him closely, worried now. “Daniel?” he said tentatively.

Yvonne watched silently, afraid to move, afraid to alert them of her presence when they seemed to have forgotten her. The look on Cavitt’s face was surprising. It had not taken long for word of his enmity toward Dr. Pierce to travel the compound, and just about everyone had now heard the tales of how Cavitt and Pierce had trained together and now hated each other. Just about everyone had also seen evidence of the latter with their own two eyes. But for a fleeting moment Yvonne glimpsed a different Cavitt, and realized with a start that Pierce and Cavitt had not merely been acquaintances—they had been friends.

Pierce had finally stopped laughing, but he looked up at Cavitt with amusement in his eyes. “We’ve been had, Sheridan. Royally had.”

Anger flowed back into Cavitt’s expression. “What do you mean?” he demanded. “ ‘Had’ by whom? That thing? You said it was asleep! You said it wasn’t waking up!”

“I think it’s safe to say I was wrong, don’t you?”

“You….what….how….” Cavitt stopped, so furious he was speechless.

Pierce pushed himself to his feet and dusted the glass shards from his white coat. Reaching for the stack of EEG printouts, he arranged them on the now empty table, end to end in a straight line.

“Look at these,” Pierce said to Cavitt. “Those readings were taken earlier today,” he said, indicating the left most edge of the line, “and the rest were taken at successive intervals throughout the late afternoon and evening. I’ve laid them out in chronological order.”

Cavitt stared, first at Pierce, then at the papers on the table. “I’m not a doctor. What am I looking at?”

“As you can see, the readings slowly—very slowly—climbed over a period of about three hours, then leveled off,” Pierce said, pointing to a reading midway through the pack. “This would seem to indicate that….”

“Never mind the medical mumbo jumbo!” Cavitt said with exasperation. “What does it mean?”

“That’s exactly my point,” Pierce said. “I thought it meant one thing, when it really meant another. I misinterpreted the data.”

“And?” Cavitt said impatiently.

Pierce sighed, sinking down on a nearby stool after first brushing glass off it. “It appears that the creature has been at least partially awake for quite some time now. My administering the stimulant no doubt furthered that process.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Cavitt said slowly, “that that—that thing has been awake for hours?”

Pierce nodded. “If I’m interpreting the data correctly this time—and there is no guarantee that I am—I believe so, yes.”

“And you couldn’t figure this out?” Cavitt asked incredulously. “You, with those medical degrees you keep shoving in my face, couldn’t determine whether it was asleep or awake?”

“My medical degree is for human physiology,” Pierce replied evenly. “Need I remind you that these creatures are not human?”

Cavitt opened his mouth to retort but was interrupted by the arrival of a soldier, who glanced nervously around the room at the wreckage. “Report!” Cavitt ordered.

“There were no casualties, sir,” the soldier replied. “Only minor cuts and scrapes, things like….”

“I don’t care about casualties, Private!” Cavitt exploded, causing both Yvonne and the soldier to jump. “Where is the prisoner?”

The soldier’s jaw dropped. Everyone knew Cavitt was aggressive and driven, but this blatant lack of regard for the safety of his own men was apparently a surprise. As late as this morning it would have been a surprise to Yvonne too. Now she knew better.

“I’m relieved no one was injured,” Cavitt said hastily, backpedaling as he realized he’d made a strategic error. “Of course I am,” he added, as though trying to make himself believe it. “Now—do you have the prisoner?”

The soldier hesitated, swinging a terrified glance back and forth from Cavitt to Pierce. “It’s—it’s gone, sir. It blew a hole straight through the doors. It escaped.”

“And you let it?” Cavitt spat in disbelief. “Why didn’t someone shoot it, Private? Why did I spend all that money outfitting everyone with tranquilizer rifles?”

“We were ordered to hold our fire, sir,” the soldier replied in a shaky voice.

Cavitt’s face darkened. “By whom?”

“Lieutenant Spade, sir.”

Yvonne closed her eyes. Stephen. He had said he intended to work against Cavitt, and she’d been fretting all day over whether or not to believe him. Here was the proof, and he would no doubt catch hell for it.

Cavitt’s skin tone became mottled; he looked like someone was strangling him. “Find it,” he whispered. “I don’t care what it takes. I don’t care what you have to do or who you have to mow down to do it, but get that thing back here!

“Yes, sir!” sputtered the terrified soldier, who fled the room before Cavitt turned to Pierce, who had watched the scene in silence, his eyebrows hovering somewhere around ceiling level.

“I hope you’re proud of yourself! Do you realize what you’ve done? We just lost the….”

“Sheridan,” Pierce interrupted, “before you get a good head of steam going, just calm down. We know these things have digestive tracts of some sort or other, and we know it hasn’t had any nourishment for at least three days. It’ll also be dealing with all the drugs we’ve given it. It’s weak; it won’t get far. We’ll find it.”

“Is that supposed to be reassuring? Look at this!” Cavitt fumed, gesturing to the wrecked room. “Now you’re not reading a report, Daniel. Now you have first hand evidence of how dangerous these things are! Can you just imagine what it will do it gets out into the community?”

“Dangerous, yes,” Pierce agreed, staring at the EEG data, “but only to those who oppose them. It didn’t kill anyone. Not even you and me.”

“It probably wasn’t strong enough to kill us and escape,” Cavitt argued. “Under different circumstances, we would be dead.”

“Perhaps,” Pierce said. “But I see no pattern of wanton cruelty. I’ve found no evidence that they kill for sport. I doubt it will harm anyone. More likely it will just hide.”

“You’re sure of this? As sure as you were that it was still unconscious?”

“Much more so, actually,” Pierce replied calmly. “It’s intelligent and cunning. It profited from our ignorance of its physiology and used that ignorance against us. It’s too smart to waste its strength and risk discovery by going on a killing spree.”

“You sound as though you admire it,” Cavitt said peevishly.

“I do,” Pierce admitted. “I always bow to a superior move by an opponent.”

“Well, I don’t!” Cavitt snapped. “I bow to no opponent, superior or otherwise.”

Pierce sighed. “Yes, I know. It’s one of your more enduring character flaws.”

Cavitt nostrils flared; he took a step toward Pierce, and for a moment, Yvonne was convinced he was going to strike the doctor. Pierce remained where he was, looking Cavitt directly in the eye, challenging him to cross the line.

At length, Cavitt appeared to get control of himself. “If you will need me, I will be in my office speaking with General Ramey about this…incident.”

“I’m sure you will,” Pierce said seriously. “Don’t forget to include the bit about you not caring about casualties. I know I won’t.”

Cavitt opened his mouth as if to reply, and then apparently thought better of it, stalking out of the room, barging past knots of soldiers who scrambled to get out of his way. Yvonne waited a few more moments, hoping Dr. Pierce would leave. When he made no move to go, she decided she could no longer stay here when her help might be needed outside to tend to those who were injured. She took a step toward the door, causing several pieces of glass to tinkle onto the floor.

Pierce looked up in surprise. “Lieutenant! I had no idea you were there. Are you injured?”

“Just a few minor cuts. Nothing serious.”

Pierce raised his eyebrows. “Have you been here all along?”

“Y-yes, sir,” Yvonne said reluctantly. “I was a bit dazed, and…and…I didn’t want to interrupt.”

Pierce smiled. “You mean you didn’t want to waltz into the middle of a war zone? Smart thinking, Lieutenant, smart thinking.” He sighed and glanced down at the EEG printouts splayed across the table. “I guess I can’t blame Sheridan for feeling the way he does. I’m not happy about this myself, although I’m more chagrined then angry. It was obviously listening to every word we said; when I insisted the soldiers be called back, it apparently decided it couldn’t wait any longer.”

Yvonne said nothing. That was exactly what had happened, of course, but it would be a cold day somewhere before she admitted she knew that.

“Still,” Pierce continued, “our little gray friend left us some extremely useful information, although inadvertently, I’m sure.”

Yvonne’s throat tightened. “What’s that, doctor?”

Pierce waved a hand over the EEG printouts. “It was still hooked up to the EEG when it began its little light show. I now have evidence of what’s going on in its brain when it does whatever it does to produce the energy fields it utilizes.” He picked up a printout and stared at it. “I suspected as much, but I wasn’t certain,” he murmured. “I need to have a fellow neurologist take a look at this, but if I’m right…”—Pierce paused and looked up at Yvonne—“…if I’m right, then in the act of escaping, our alien guest has handed us the means to keep the other. Indefinitely.”






*************************************************************






9:00 p.m.

Chaves County Sheriff’s Station




Chaves County Sheriff’s Deputy Sean Donovan let the door of the station slam shut behind him, not bothering to close it quietly. He tossed his hat and his flashlight on a desk and headed straight for the coffee pot, pouring himself a large mug of black coffee before joining the other deputies seated around another desk in the front office.

“So—where was the alien this time?” Tom Woods asked, as Donovan sank gratefully into a chair.

“Under Mrs. Amos’s shed,” Donovan replied, rolling his eyes. “Or so she says.”

“What makes her think an alien was under there?” queried Alan McMahon, who reached for another doughnut after handing one to the deputy seated next to him, someone Donovan did not recognize.

“Her dog was digging at something under the shed,” Donovan explained wearily, “and when she went out to look, she swears she saw an alien.”

“What exactly did she see?” asked the strange deputy.

“Sean, Jim Valenti from Roswell, the first member of the relief squad to arrive,” Woods said, indicating the new deputy. “Jim, this is Sean Donovan. He drew the short straw for checking out the latest alien sighting.” McMahon snickered as he chewed his doughnut.

Donovan held out his hand. “Good to meet you… ‘Valenti’, is it?”

“Call me ‘Jim’,” Valenti replied, shaking Donovan’s hand. “So what did this woman see?”

“The same thing everyone sees, most likely,” Woods replied, as Donovan nodded grumpily and lost himself in his coffee cup. “Short, big head, black eyes. Just like the sketch that got out when this broke.” The phone rang, and he picked it up.

“I’d sure like to know where that sketch came from,” McMahon said absently.

But Valenti was looking at Donovan. “Did you see anything?”

“Not a bloomin’ thing,” Donovan grumbled. “Can’t see much under there anyway because the space is so small. Didn’t help that my flashlight died.”

Valenti sat forward in his chair. “Your flashlight died? Why?”

“How should I know?” Donovan said impatiently. “I put brand new batteries in it just last week. Anyway, there was definitely something under there because the dog was going crazy, but I couldn’t see or hear anything. Probably a ’coon or something. Hell if I know.”

“Is your flashlight working now?” Valenti asked.

Donovan reached over, picked up his flashlight, and turned it on. “I’ll be damned,” he said wonderingly, as the bulb glowed brilliantly. “Looks fine now.”

“You have to turn it ‘on’, you know,” McMahon said, with a huge grin on his face. “That’s what that switch on the side is for.” He ducked as Donovan aimed a punch at his arm and missed. “Maybe the aliens turned it off,” McMahon went on, still grinning in spite of the warning glare Donovan was sending his way. “Oooooh, I’m skeered!”

“Oh, shut up,” Donovan said conversationally. “You’ll have to forgive my colleague,” he added to Valenti. “We’re all fed up with the constant ‘alien sightings’ that aren’t alien sightings, and we’re getting a bit punchy. Not that he was any better to begin with,” he added, ducking a return punch from McMahon.

“Maybe Mrs. Amos wasn’t so crazy after all,” Woods interrupted, setting down the phone. “That was the Army base. They want us to be on the lookout for an escaped prisoner.”

The mood in the station suddenly changed, with everyone sobering immediately.

“Prisoner?” Donovan repeated. “What kind of prisoner?”

Woods shook his head. “Didn’t say. Just that they wanted us to keep an eye out for anything acting suspicious, but to be careful not to alarm the public—as if we could alarm the public more than the Army already has,” he added darkly. “We’re just supposed to call them.”

“ ‘Anything’?” Valenti said curiously. “They said ‘anything’ instead of ‘anyone’?”

“Yeah,” Woods mused. “Yeah, they did. Weird.”

“No, it ain’t,” McMahon said, reaching for another doughnut. He lowered his voice. “I’m telling you, they got Commies up there. Commies deserve to be called ‘things’.” He cast a wily glance in Donovan’s direction. “Maybe that’s what was under Mrs. Amos’s shed, Donovan. It was a Russian, and you missed it!” McMahon and Woods started chuckling.

Donovan scowled. “There wasn’t any Russian under there,” he said crossly. “Ain’t enough space under there for the damned dog, let alone a Russian.”

“How would you know? Ever seen one?” McMahon challenged.

“No, I ain’t ever ‘seen one’, lamebrain,” Donovan answered in a singsong voice. “I don’t have to. Russians are the same size as us, and even a small person wouldn’t fit under that shed.”

“Maybe it was a really small Russian,” McMahon said, warming to his theory. “They don’t need to be big, y’know, ’cos their brains are so small.”

“I’ve seen the Amos’s shed,” Woods said, as McMahon dissolved into laughter at his own joke. “You couldn’t fit even a small Russian under there.”

“I know they got Russians up there,” McMahon said, nodding eagerly. “That’s where this whole ‘spaceship’ crap came from. They don’t want anyone to know, so they made up that cock-n-bull story about aliens to cover it up.”

“Then why do you suppose they retracted it?” Valenti asked.

“Cuz it backfired,” Donovan replied, leaning back in his chair with his eyes closed. “Everybody took’em seriously and panicked. So they took it back and came up with the equally cock-n-bull weather balloon story.”

“Too bad they didn’t start with that one,” Woods said ruefully. “Would’ve made our lives a whole lot easier.”

The phone rang again. Woods sighed, and picked it up. After a brief conversation, he hung up and shot a sympathetic look at Donovan.

“That was Mrs. Amos again,” he said. “She says there’s still something under her shed, and she swears it has a big head and black eyes.”

“Original,” McMahon deadpanned, his mouth full of doughnut.

“We’d better check it out,” Woods said resignedly, “now that we know something’s out there that shouldn’t be.”

“Well, it won’t be me this time,” Donovan said, sitting up in his chair and glaring at all of them. “I am not going back out there and crawling around on my belly in the mud with that damned mutt sniffing my crotch! Ain’t gonna happen! One of you can have the pleasure this time!”

Woods opened a desk drawer. “I’ll get the straws.”

“I’ll go,” Valenti said.

Three surprised faces turned toward him. “Where is the place?” Valenti asked, rising from his chair.

“Just north of Warner’s creek,” Woods answered, “off the Ridge Road. You know where that is?”

Valenti nodded. “I spent the afternoon memorizing maps of the county.”

“Bootlicker,” McMahon said under his breath. Valenti gave him a hard stare, which McMahon returned for only a moment before looking away.

“Are you sure you want to volunteer?” Woods continued, ignoring McMahon. “You lot must have been getting your fair share of this down in Roswell. Aren’t you sick of it?”

“We’ve only had Roswell to worry about,” Valenti replied, “while all of you have had to listen to the entire county. Let me go, give you guys a rest. It’s what I’m here for.”

“Fine by me,” Donovan said, settling back into his chair. “You want to be a glutton for punishment, be my guest. Oh, and mind that dog,” he added darkly. “That one seems to like ball sandwiches.”

Woods and McMahon laughed. “How much you wanna bet Valenti here finds your tiny Russian, Donovan?” McMahon teased. “You were probably too busy worrying about your balls.”





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~





More laughter erupted as Valenti wrote down the address on a slip of paper. He smiled at the guffawing McMahon, the grinning Woods, and the scowling Donovan as he picked up his hat, grabbed a set of keys, and headed for the door.

So—the Army lost one of them, Valenti thought with satisfaction. He was willing to bet the rent that what the Army had wasn’t even remotely Russian. He also had reason to believe that aliens could affect mechanical devices like his car, and perhaps could make themselves look like different things. Like maybe something small enough to fit under that shed.

Striding down the hallway toward the outside door, he passed Sheriff Wilcox’s office on the way out. He was grateful that Wilcox wasn’t there tonight; their last meeting had not been friendly, and he was going to have to do some major sucking up tomorrow. Hopefully Wilcox needed help badly enough that he’d be willing to accept what would sound like a heartfelt apology.

Valenti climbed into the front seat of a Chaves County patrol car and set the slip of paper on the dash. He’d never dreamed he would be so lucky.

He’d only been here a couple of hours, and already he’d hit paydirt.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


I'll post Chapter 6 next Sunday.

[Kathy W]

Hello to everyone reading!





CHAPTER SIX


July 13, 1947, 9:35 p.m.

Amos Residence, Chaves County, New Mexico



His knees digging into the soft dirt beside the Amos’s shed, Deputy Valenti rocked back on his heels and switched his flashlight off. It was almost completely dark out, which had the helpful effect of making his flashlight seem brighter in the space underneath the shed, measuring no more than ten inches high. Valenti had looked from all four sides and all four corners before reaching a conclusion: There wasn’t a damned thing under this shed.

Sighing, Valenti tucked his flashlight into his back pocket. He shouldn’t really be surprised. Careful questioning of Mrs. Amos, something Deputy Donovan had apparently failed to do, revealed that she hadn’t actually seen a thing except the dog scrabbling at the edges of the shed. The fact that there were dozens of varmints that could fit under the shed failed to sway her, as did Valenti’s incredulous stare when he learned that the description of the alien had come from none other than Mrs. Amos’s four year-old son, Toby, who stood about 3 ½ feet high, thumb in mouth, something that probably used to be a blanket in hand, and could hardly be considered a credible witness.

Nevertheless, just in case, Valenti had agreed to check under the shed, not the least bit surprised when he found absolutely nothing. Now that he had fulfilled his duty as a public servant, it was time to cross this one off his list and chalk it up to public hysteria. No wonder Donovan was so peeved.

“He’s gone.”

Valenti whirled around, startled. Four year-old Toby was standing behind him, thumb cocked to one side, blanket dragging in the dirt.

“Who’s gone?”

“The little man.”

Valenti smiled indulgently. “Your name’s Toby, right?” The little boy nodded solemnly. “Your mama told me you saw something out here. So where is he?”

“Gone,” Toby repeated.

“Gone? He just up and walked away?”

Toby shook his head vigorously. “Ran away. Rufus chased him off.”

Ah, yes, Valenti thought. Rufus, the ball-eating dog. Donovan had certainly been right about that, and Valenti had insisted Mrs. Amos keep Rufus safely indoors. He didn’t relish the idea of leaning over, butt to the wind, with Rufus anywhere within a hundred yard radius.

“I see,” Valenti said. “And what did this ‘little man’ look like?”

“He had big black eyes,” Toby said, “and a big head.”

Standard newspaper description, Valenti thought. “Uh huh. Anything else?”

Toby nodded. “He had really long fingers. About…” he measured with his hands… “about this long.”

Valenti’s ears pricked. Long fingers? That was a new one.

“How tall was this man? As tall as you? As tall as me?”

“Dunno,” Toby answered. “He was all curled up in a ball. He looked sick. I let him borrow my blanket,” he added, with a wistful look at the scrap of cloth in his hand that had once resembled a blanket.

“Really?” An escaped prisoner might look sick. And the long fingers bit was a new detail.

“You don’t believe me, do you?” Toby said reproachfully.

“Well, Toby, it’s like this,” Valenti said, settling himself on the ground. “Nobody else saw what you saw. And there’s nothing under this shed now. I looked very thoroughly.”

“He’s gone now,” Toby insisted. “Rufus chased him off.”

“You said that,” Valenti acknowledged, “but Rufus could have chased off anything. I can’t find anything that makes me think a ‘little man’ was here. So there’s no way to know for sure if you’re telling the truth or not.”

“Is too,” Toby insisted.

Valenti studied the child for a moment, then decided to take the bait. “Show me.”

Toby promptly turned and headed for the door of the shed, blanket dragging on the ground. Then he opened the shed door and stepped back.

Slowly, Valenti stood up and walked to the door of the shed. It was pitch black inside, and he moved his flashlight across the interior, flitting past a wheelbarrow, a lawn mower, and various gardening tools. Nothing unusual here.

“What am I supposed to see, Toby? This is a just a shed, full of all the things that sheds are usually full of.”

Toby pushed past Valenti to the center of the shed. Dropping his blanket on the dusty floor, he reached down and pulled up a loose floor board. He looked down into the space underneath, then gestured for Valenti to do the same.

Valenti stepped slowly into the shed and walked to the hole in the floor. Training his flashlight on the opening, he peered inside.

Below the loose board was an oval hollowed in the dirt beneath the shed. It looked unremarkable; any number of animals could have curled up there, and undoubtedly would have, the spot being exactly in the middle, furthest from all the edges. But as Valenti looked more closely, he saw something that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up and his heart begin to pound. He got down on his hands and knees and peered into the hole, his face inches away from the surrounding boards.

There, on the bottom of the depression in the earth, was the imprint of a long-fingered hand.

Valenti reached into the depression and held his own, shaking hand up to the imprint. The palm of the imprint was larger, the four fingers half again as long. There appeared to be no thumb; was it possible these creatures had never developed opposable thumbs? Waving his flashlight from side to side, Valenti saw other imprints, most of them partial and faint, but unmistakable now that he knew what to look for.

“Told’ya,” Toby said in a satisfied voice.

Valenti sat up, breathing heavily. After everything he’d seen—spaceships, children jumping out of spaceships, glowing things in the back of a truck, windows that magically fixed themselves, shoes that suddenly changed color—this was the first clear evidence that something living had survived the crash of that ship, the first clear evidence that someone besides himself could see. “Did you show this to anyone else?” he demanded. Toby shook his head.

“Not even the other deputy that was out here?” Another head shake.

“Why not?”

“He didn’t ask,” Toby said simply, as though that were obvious.

“You said the dog chased it off,” Valenti said, urgently. Could it still be close? “How long ago? Where did it go?”

Valenti swung his flashlight around the shed as he spoke, looking for any sign of where the creature may have gone. Toby said nothing. After a moment Valenti trained his flashlight on the child’s face.

“When did Rufus chase it away? Which way did it go?”

Toby remained silent, watching him solemnly. “Which way?” Valenti barked, making the child flinch.

Too late, Valenti realized his mistake. The look on Toby’s face had shifted from vindication to suspicion.

“What are you gonna do to him?” Toby asked warily.

Controlling himself with an effort, Valenti attempted to adopt a more even tone. “I just want to find it.…him.”

“Why?”

“I need to find him.”

“Why?”

“So we can talk to him.”

“Why?”

“We need to find out why he’s here.”

“Why?”

Chafing with exasperation, Valenti stood up. Terrific. His first real evidence of aliens, and it had to come bundled with a circular discussion with a four year-old. “Look, Toby, you said the little man looked sick, right?” Toby nodded slowly. “Well, I want to help him. It’s not good for him to be running around sick, right? We should find him and make him better, right?”

Toby’s eyes narrowed as he considered this argument. Seeing that he had his attention, Valenti pressed on.

“I’m going to go back to the house and call some more policemen,” Valenti said. “They’ll come out here, and I’ll show them what I found….”

“…what I found,” Toby interjected stubbornly.

“….what you found,” Valenti corrected himself, “and we’ll take pictures so other people who aren’t here can look at it too, and then we’ll go looking for the little man. So we can help him,” he added hastily, as the pint-sized eyes began to narrow again. “But we can’t help him unless you tell us where he went.”

Toby continued to regard him in silence. A few seconds later, he rendered his verdict.

“Liar,” he announced firmly. “You want to hurt the little man!” And before Valenti could stop him, Toby lunged into the hole and rubbed the alien imprint out of the soft dirt with his own chubby paw.

“NO! Valenti shouted, pulling the kid back by the scruff of the neck. But he was too late. The damage had been done, the evidence obliterated. “Damn it!” Valenti growled, glaring at the boy.

Toby, for his part, appeared uncowed and extremely pleased with himself. “I’m not tellin’ you nuthin’,” he said defiantly, and he grabbed his blanket and fled.

Swearing inwardly, Valenti pocketed his flashlight and stomped back to the house. A frazzled Mrs. Amos met him at the door.

“Did you find it?” she asked in an agitated voice. “Did you get rid of it?”

“Whatever it was is gone now, ma’am,” Valenti said, struggling to keep the anger and impatience out of his voice, “but I need to use your phone.”

“Of course,” Mrs. Amos said, ushering him to the telephone and hovering nervously nearby.

Still fuming, Valenti dialed the sheriff’s station. “Deputy McMahon,” a thick voice answered between chewing noises. McMahon must still be feeding.

“It’s Valenti,” Valenti said shortly. “Look, have you gotten any other calls about anything like here at the Amos’s?”

“Funny you should mention that,” McMahon said, apparently between mouthfuls. “Seems you stirred up somethin’ out there. Two calls came in, about twenty minutes apart. People claim they saw a weird animal, or a deformed child, somethin’ like that.”

“Where?” Valenti demanded. “Where did they see this?”

“Just a minute, I’ll find it. Don’t get your panties in a twist.” There was a pause while rummaging sounds could be heard. “Okay,” McMahon said at length, “the first one was just south of Warner’s creek on Stone Road, and the second was about two miles further down, on Long Pond Road.”

“Thanks. I’ll check back in later,” Valenti said shortly.

“Go get’im, alien hunter,” McMahon guffawed.

Valenti slammed the phone down, cursing. He couldn’t believe it; he’d only been on this job a few hours, and already he’d earned that moniker.

“Is everything all right?” Mrs. Amos asked hesitantly, staring at her phone.

“Fine,” Valenti said curtly. “Whatever was under your shed is long gone. You’re safe.”

He banged out the front door, Mrs. Amos at his heels, walking fast. McMahon had just confirmed what he’d suspected: The creature was heading south. Toward Corona.

Toward the Proctors.





*************************************************************






2230 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base.




Lieutenant Spade stood at attention before Major Cavitt’s desk. The Major’s hands were clasped tightly in front of him, so tightly one might get the impression he was afraid of what he might do with said hands should they be loosed. His expression was a study in fury.

“Report,” Cavitt ordered, his voice like ice.

“We have been unable to locate the prisoner, either in the compound or on the base,” Spade replied. “We are continuing to search the base; permission to organize an off-site search, sir?”

Cavitt sat back stiffly in his chair, bringing his tightly clasped hands with him. “You gave an order during the escape, Lieutenant. An order I want explained.”

“What order was that, sir?”

“You ordered your men to hold their fire.”

Spade fixed his eyes on a point directly above Cavitt’s head. “Yes, sir. I did, sir.”

“Why?” Cavitt whispered, as though he could no longer trust his voice as well as his hands.

“I was concerned for the safety of my men, sir.”

“You were concerned for the safety of your men,” Cavitt echoed. “How so? Did the creature attack?”

“No, sir. It headed directly for the door. At least I think it did. The lights were out, and the emergency power hadn’t come on yet.”

Cavitt shifted in his chair. “Explain to me, Lieutenant, how the safety of your men was in jeopardy.”

“You increased the dosage of the tranquilizer in each dart,” Spade replied. “It might be enough to kill a grown man. If we had attempted to shoot the prisoner in the dark, a number of those darts would likely have hit our own men.”

“I see,” Cavitt replied softly, “I see. What I do not see, Lieutenant, is why you ordered the men to hold their fire before the lights went out, when there was presumably plenty of light by which to apprehend the prisoner without imperiling our own people.”

“The lights were flickering, sir. They were going to go out any second.”

“You knew this for certain?”

“I’ve seen this phenomenon before,” Spade replied pointedly. “The power failed exactly the same way it did when we captured the second alien.”

“I see,” Cavitt repeated. “And a tranquilizer dart aimed at the prisoner while the lights were flickering and the shooter could still see would not find its mark if the lights went out while the dart was still en route?”

Spade paused. “As I said, sir, I was unwilling to risk the lives of the men….”

“YOU were unwilling!” Cavitt exploded, vaulting from his chair, eyes blazing. “I don’t give a God damn whether you were 'willing' or not! It is not your place to decide whether you are ‘willing’ or ‘unwilling’ to risk either your life or the lives of others! You will risk life when I tell you, as often as I tell you! Is that clear?”

Spade remained rooted to the spot, neither flinching nor betraying the slightest surprise at the violence of Cavitt’s outburst. He’d expected this a good deal sooner.

“I said, is that clear?” Cavitt repeated.

“Clear, sir,” Spade said stonily. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

“DENIED!” Cavitt roared, “along with permission to do anything freely! I don’t want you thinking freely, acting freely, hell, I don’t even want you breathing freely! You will do what I tell you, when I tell you, or I will kill you myself! Is that clear?”

I know you will, Spade thought, his jaw twitching as he nodded, visions of fake silver handprints whirling through his mind.

“I can’t hear you!” Cavitt barked.

“Clear, sir!” Spade ground out between clenched teeth.

“Now—refresh my memory,” Cavitt said, sinking back down into his chair, his face shifting from mottled purple to red. “What exactly were your orders when I stationed you outside the treatment room?”

“To apprehend the prisoner should it escape,” Spade replied flatly.

“And did you carry out those orders?”

“We tried, sir.”

“Oh you did, did you?” Cavitt said scornfully. “And what do we have to show for your efforts? One less prisoner!”

Spade fixed Cavitt with a level stare. “My ‘efforts’ are the only reason you had a prisoner to lose in the first place, if I may say so, sir.”

“You may not,” Cavitt snapped. “I’m afraid your previous efforts won’t exonerate you now. It does no good to assist in capture if you then turn around and aid escape with your incompetence.”

Spade felt the color rising to his face , but he said nothing. Cavitt wasn’t the only one on the verge of losing his temper.

“Just in case you need a reminder, Lieutenant, you are a soldier in the United States Army,” Cavitt said contemptuously. “As such, you are called upon to protect and defend this country, and while you do, your life is forfeit. The safety of the men under your command does not take precedence over your mission, whatever that mission may be. Need I point out to you how important these prisoners are? Need I remind you what will happen if the public learns of their existence? Even the President has been kept in the dark! Not to mention what will happen if the Russians should find them.”

“What do the Russians have to do with this, sir?”

Cavitt gave him a pitying glance. “These creatures are obviously technologically advanced. What will happen if the Russians get their hands on this technology? Or, worse yet, if they convince these…things to ally with them? Do you realize how many lives are at stake here? Against the havoc these things could wreak, the lives of a few soldiers are paltry indeed.

“So we’re expendable, sir?”

“Of course you’re expendable, you idiot! We’re at war, Lieutenant. Soldiers are always expendable in war.”

“We are not at war, sir,” Spade said firmly. “The aliens have not attacked us. Besides, only Congress can declare war, and…..”

“Do not presume to lecture me about the laws of this nation!” Cavitt erupted, his face purpling again.

Spade fell silent, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Cavitt’s chest was heaving, his breathing harsh and loud in the suffocating office.

“Now,” Cavitt continued, making a Herculean effort to calm himself, “in future, I don’t want to hear any more cries of ‘Hold your fire!’. If Dr. Pierce should display his typical lack of skill with the second prisoner and the same result should ensue, you will fire at that thing no matter what; I don’t care if the lights go out in the whole damned state! Is that clear?”

“What if you happen to be in the line of fire, sir?”

Cavitt stopped short. “What?”

“If this happens again, and my men fire indiscriminately, we may very well hit you,” Spade said, working hard to keep the note of satisfaction out of his voice. “Are you expendable?”

Cavitt stared at Spade, speechless. Spade waited silently, his eyes still fixed on a point about a foot above Cavitt’s head. A phone rang. A moment later, there was a knock on the door, and Cavitt’s secretary poked her head in. “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” she said, “but General Ramey’s on the line.”

“Thank you, Harriet,” Cavitt answered, released from his stunned silence. He waited until she’d left before speaking to Spade.

“Dismissed.”

Spade saluted smartly, turned on his heel, and left the office.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~




Having walked until he was at least three corridors away from Major Cavitt’s office, Lieutenant Spade leaned against the wall in a deserted section of hallway and closed his eyes, sweating. God, that had been close.

If either of the aliens had ever escaped, he had been planning all along to give the order to hold fire based on the dosage of medication in the darts. He had overheard one of the doctors saying that there was enough in there to stop a horse, so it stood to reason there was enough to kill a grown man, or close to it. It was an excuse he knew would enrage Cavitt, an excuse he could only use once. The fact that the power had failed was a bonus that provided further reason to give the order in the first place.

But he had spoken a bit too soon. Spade vividly recalled seeing the short, gray figure appear in the doorway, the huge bald head balanced impossibly on the tiny neck. It had been staggering, but its appearance had startled his men, who had stood down after Cavitt gave the order to withdraw. They had scrambled for their weapons just as the lights began to flicker, and Spade had been hopeful that the darkness he was certain would follow would give him cover later when Cavitt called him on the carpet, as he inevitably would. But the lights had continued to flicker, the soldiers had aimed their weapons, and Spade had realized the alien wasn’t going to make it……..

So he had given the order to hold fire, and the alien had turned and looked at him, the expression in its black eyes unreadable. Then the lights had finally failed, an explosion followed, which Spade now knew was one of the doors to the first floor flying straight off its hinges....and it was gone. Those stationed on the first floor had heard the commotion, but hadn’t seen a thing.

The cold of the wall tile was unexpectedly soothing. After a few moments, Spade pushed himself off the wall and continued down the hallway. He had known Cavitt would be livid, of course, but that was a small price to pay to earn some redemption for what he had done. Were it not for him, no one would even be here.

I’ve done all I can, Mr. Alien, he thought as he headed back downstairs. Now you’re on your own.





*************************************************************





10:45 p.m.

St. Bridgit’s Church, Corona, New Mexico




Father O’Neill had just made the sign of the cross and begun rising from his genuflection before the altar when he heard a commotion outside.

Curious, he began making his way down the main aisle of the sanctuary. About halfway to the front doors of the church he heard shouting, pounding footsteps, and the rattling of windowpanes in the vestibule. Running the rest of the way down the aisle, he arrived at the huge, double doors breathless and panting. When was the last time he had actually run? He couldn’t remember.

He paused before the massive oak doors. All was silent outside; had he imagined the sounds he had heard?

Grasping the large, iron door handles, O’Neill cautiously pulled the doors open. Directly outside stood a man wearing a sheriff’s deputy’s uniform who was also breathless and panting.

And he had a gun pointed directly at Father O’Neill’s face.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



I'll post Chapter 7 next Sunday.

[Kathy W]

Thank you to everyone reading, and Happy Thanksgiving!






CHAPTER SEVEN


July 13, 1947, 11:05 p.m.

St. Bridgit’s Church, Corona, New Mexico




Father O’Neill gaped at the deputy standing before him. The unfamiliar man had a wild look in his eyes, his breath was coming in gasps as though he’d just been running, and the hands that held the gun leveled at the priest’s nose were none too steady.

“What is the meaning of this?” O’Neill sputtered.

“Who are you?” the deputy demanded, his voice ragged.

“Who…What? What are you talking about?”

“Who are you?” the deputy repeated savagely. “Identify yourself!”

Given that the deputy appeared rather unhinged, O’Neill decided to comply. “I am the Reverend Robert O’Neill, pastor of St. Bridgit’s Church. Who are you? And why are you pointing a weapon at me?”

The deputy studied him closely for a moment, eyes narrowed as if deciding whether or not to believe him. “It could have known that,” he muttered under his breath.

“Who could have known what?” O’Neill asked, more confused than ever.

The deputy took a firmer grip on his gun. “Who started the Protestant Reformation?”

“What in God’s name are you talking about?” O’Neill said, astonished.

“I can’t be certain you are who you say you are!” the deputy barked. “Now who started the Protestant Reformation?”

O’Neill’s eyes blazed as his astonishment gave way to anger. “I have been pastor here for twenty years, young man!” he said tartly. “Ask anyone in Corona. And I do not see how failing to give you the name of Martin Luther would prove otherwise!”

The deputy hesitated; the gun he gripped so tightly in both hands lowered a couple of inches.

O’Neill had had enough. “Put that thing down!” he ordered in his best Sunday morning homily, fire and brimstone voice.

Slowly, the deputy lowered the gun, and some of the fanatical light left his eyes. “I’m sorry, Father,” he said, after a long moment spent staring at the priest. “I’ve been chasing an escaped prisoner, and I think he went into the church.”

“Oh, I see,” O’Neill said sarcastically. “So of course you decided to aim a weapon at my head and quiz me about church history.”

The deputy swallowed. “This prisoner I’m chasing can….disguise himself in many ways. I thought perhaps you were…..” His voice trailed off.

O’Neill’s eyebrows rose so high they could have tickled a seraphim’s toes. “You thought perhaps I was an escaped prisoner? Pray tell how could an escaped prisoner have had the time to disguise himself as a middle-aged priest in mere seconds, Deputy….Valenti?” O’Neill finished, peering at the deputy’s name tag.

“Right,” Valenti mumbled. He holstered his weapon. “Sorry. But I’m sure he was heading for this church,” he added, in a more confident voice. “I’ll need to have a look inside.” He took a step forward.

But O’Neill blocked his path. “You will do no such thing!”

Valenti pulled up short. “Why not?”

“In the first place, I will allow no weapons in this house, the Lord,” O’Neill said firmly. “In the second place, this escaped prisoner may be seeking sanctuary, which I am duty-bound to give.”

“Sanctuary?” Valenti repeated incredulously.

“Yes, young man, sanctuary,” the priest repeated slowly, as though speaking to someone quite slow. “Holy Mother Church’s rendition of asylum, a ….”

“I know what sanctuary is, Father,” Valenti said impatiently. “It’s a medieval notion that has no place in 1947.”

“Nevertheless, the church still recognizes it,” O’Neill answered.

“Well, the State of New Mexico doesn’t,” Valenti retorted.

“Then I’m very much afraid the State of New Mexico will lose this particular argument,” O’Neill said stoutly. “I answer to a higher authority. And so do you,” he added pointedly.

“Father, I…”

“I will search for this escaped prisoner of yours,” O’Neill interrupted. “What you will do, young man, is wait right here for me to return. You will not enter this building without my consent. You will not brandish your weapon, or threaten me or anyone else who may be in this house of God in any way. Have I made myself clear?”

“And if you find anyone in there?”

“Then I will inform you of that, and we will discuss the matter. Quietly. Calmly. And in a civilized manner,” O’Neill said sternly.

“How will I know if you’re telling the truth?” Valenti asked suspiciously.

“Are you suggesting I’m a liar?” O’Neill flared, causing the deputy to take a step backwards. “I am an ordained priest, an intermediary between God and man! How dare you suggest such a thing!”

Valenti apparently decided not to push his luck. He sighed, and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ll wait here,” he said sullenly, “but don’t take too long.”

“I won’t,” O’Neill answered shortly, closing the door to the church with a bang that made the deputy jump.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~





The priest was gone a long time.

Valenti paced impatiently back and forth outside the massive double doors, the single dim light overhead throwing shadows everywhere as the minutes ticked by. He was so close, so close…. To be stopped at this juncture by a pudgy priest was infuriating.

He had tracked the creature for the past hour, stopping at households who had called to report what most called a prowler, using their phones to check in with the station and get the next location. It was heading south as he had suspected, and it was growing careless. A number of people had seen it, although between the distance and the darkness, no one else had labeled it an alien. It had scuttled under porches, knocked over garbage cans, and scared various pets, always managing to be gone by the time Valenti arrived.

But the last few houses Valenti had visited had been so close together, he hadn’t even needed to call the station. There had been noises, the sounds of something fleeing heedlessly, mingled with the occasional shout or cry of surprise. He’d followed the ruckus all the way down this street, never catching a glimpse of what he was chasing until just moments ago, when he had seen a shape the size of a child heading straight for this church.

Valenti swore under his breath. He knew it was here somewhere. He could sense its exhaustion, feel its desperation as it threw stealth to the winds and ran for its life. Now was the best time to catch it, when it was weak, and desperate, and….

The door to the church opened, and the priest’s round face appeared.

“There is no one in this church but me,” he announced.

Valenti gave an impatient snort. “With all due respect, Father, you may have missed something. This…person can hide in ways you can’t imagine.”

“And I know this church better than you can imagine,” the priest answered sharply. “I’m telling you, there is no other person present in this building. If, as you say, your prisoner headed in this direction, he must have veered away. Perhaps he was expecting the church to be empty, and was frightened off by my presence. Regardless, there is no one here. Continue your search elsewhere.”

He began to close the door. Valenti jammed his shoulder into the door, holding it open.

“Now, see here, Father,” he said indignantly. “I’m the law! I have the right to search any building, including this church, and you have no business stopping me.”

The priest had his considerable bulk jammed against the door, which didn’t budge. “Do you have a warrant?” he demanded.

“This is public property, Father. I don’t need a warrant!”

“Public property? Oh, really?” the priest said archly. “Won’t that come as a surprise to the Diocese? I hate to burst your bubble, Deputy, but this property belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, not the town of Corona or the State of New Mexico. Produce a warrant, and I will, of course, obey the law. Barring a warrant, you have given me no reason to do you any favors. You have behaved rather rudely, and, if I do say so myself, irrationally. If you continue to harass me further, I shall take up the matter at once with Sheriff Wilcox.”

Valenti paled at the mention of Wilcox. The last thing he needed right now was to have Wilcox mad at him. Infuriating as this situation was, if he could just hang around long enough, he was sure to catch it. It couldn’t hide forever.

“I’m sorry, Father,” Valenti said, hoping he sounded contrite as he eased up on the door. “I was just trying to do my job. A number of people have reported a prowler tonight, and I thought the person I saw heading for your church might be our man. I’m on loan from Roswell, trying to spell your guys who need a break, and I didn’t want this one to get away on my watch.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t completely explain your behavior tonight,” the priest replied frostily, “but I wish you luck in your search. Oh, and Deputy?”

Valenti looked at him questioningly.

“Do try not to shoot any innocent people like you almost shot me. Recapturing this prisoner is not worth the life of an innocent man, and it would behoove you to remember that even the prisoner is a child of God.”

Valenti swallowed hard. “Yes, Father. I’ll be more careful.”

“I certainly hope so,” the priest replied darkly, shutting the door in Valenti’s face.

Valenti stood on the front steps of the church for a long minute before making a circuit of the building, checking carefully behind bushes, looking everywhere. Finding nothing, he headed back to the station to see if a prowler had been reported anywhere else.

He seriously doubted that was the case.




~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Father O’Neill leaned against the closed door and closed his eyes. The sheer stubbornness and iron will of the Irish had held him together—barely. Now he began to tremble, and within seconds, he was shaking uncontrollably.

What am I going to do? he wondered frantically. He had no idea of where to start or how to proceed. He was ashamed to admit that, for a moment there, he had seriously considered telling the deputy the truth.

The truth. O’Neill winced. He had castigated the deputy for implying he might lie, and then he had gone and done just exactly that. Well, perhaps not in the strictest sense of the word. He had said, “There is no other person present in this building,” and perhaps he had been right. What he had found hardly fit either the popular or classical definition of a “person”.

Semantics, O’Neill thought despairingly. Semantics would not save him. He had lied, in spirit if not in fact. Forgive me, Father, he prayed silently, but at the time, it seemed Your will.

O’Neill pushed himself off the door and headed unsteadily up the main aisle toward the altar. When he reached it, he paused, as if preparing himself for what lay ahead. Finally he ascended the steps and pulled back the drapery which obscured the area beneath the altar, wincing anew at what he saw there.

“I want to know if God is the God of everyone,” young Deanna Proctor had asked him only yesterday. “Of course,” O’Neill had answered confidently.

The resolve with which he had answered that question was about to be tested.





*************************************************************






23:30 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base




Lieutenant Spade entered his quarters, Cavitt’s shouting about the order to hold fire still ringing in his ears. He’d been sweating like a pig during that confrontation, and he needed a new shirt. Actually he needed a shower, but that would have to wait until he’d had some sleep. He let the door close behind him without bothering to turn on the light and headed for his locker.

“If it makes you feel any better, my encounter with the Major did not go much better.”

Spade jumped a foot and lurched back toward the door, reaching for the light switch. He flipped it on and whirled around.

Dr. Pierce was sitting in the room’s one chair, yawning and stretching as though he’d been asleep. He looked like hell; his eyes were bloodshot and his face haggard as he shifted stiffly in the straight backed wooden chair.

“What the hell are you doing in my quarters?” Spade demanded in astonishment. “Sir,” he added quickly. He was overjoyed that the one alien had managed to escape, and that he had aided that escape. But he’d already pissed off one commanding officer, and as much as he enjoyed pissing off Cavitt, doing so was exhausting. No sense pissing off a second CO this soon.

Pierce smiled faintly. “Please. Call me ‘doctor’. And unlike Major Cavitt, you may always assume you have my permission to speak freely unless otherwise informed.”

Spade eyed him narrowly. “You didn’t answer my question, doctor. And I had no idea you made a habit of eavesdropping.”

“A ‘habit’? Goodness, no. Only when I feel it would be to my advantage.”

“You still haven’t answered my question,” Spade pointed out, trying to decide which to pay more attention to—the doctor’s disarming honesty, or the fact that he had deliberately snooped on a private conversation.

Pierce shrugged. “I needed some place private to speak with you, and this seemed the best place.”

“Why do you need to speak with me privately?”

“I think it better that no one else hear this particular exchange.”

Spade was silent, waiting. Now what? More questions about why he had ordered his men to hold their fire? But that was Cavitt’s bailiwick, not Pierce’s. He shouldn’t have to catch it from both of them.

“I had some time earlier today,” Pierce continued in a conversational tone, “time in between snits with Major Cavitt, you understand. So I decided to avail myself of the opportunity to study the bodies of those the aliens had killed. And while I was in the morgue, I made an interesting discovery.”

He found them, Spade thought, his pulse quickening. He found the fake handprints.

“What interesting discovery?”

“I discovered that two of the soldiers, a Private West and a Private Belmont, had false silver handprints on their chests, apparently made with paint. The handprints have faded on all the other bodies where that method of execution was used, so the fact that these two prints were still visible was immediately noticeable. It appears those two may not have been killed by aliens, but someone obviously went to some trouble to make it appear as though they had been.”

“If that’s true, then why are you here?” Spade challenged. “You should be reporting this to the General, not hiding in my quarters in the dark.”

“I wasn’t ‘hiding’,” Pierce replied patiently. “You didn’t find me under the bed or lurking in your locker, did you? Besides, I was rather enjoying the dark. It’s been a trying day. For both of us, I imagine.”

“Does it always take two or three repetitions before you answer a question?” Spade asked shortly.

The faint smile returned to Pierce’s face. “Are you trying to make me regret that carte blanche regarding permission to speak freely, Lieutenant?”

“No. I’m trying to find out what you want. And I’m not having much luck.”

Spade and Pierce stared at each other a moment in silence while Spade waited for the axe to fall. No doubt he’d stepped over even Dr. Pierce’s distant line of insubordination, but he was too tired and fed up with this whole mess to care. And Pierce had given him permission to speak freely. Might as well use it.

To Spade’s surprise, Pierce let it drop. “I learned something else interesting, even more interesting then fake silver handprints,” he said, ignoring Spade’s temper.

“Oh?”

“I learned from the very helpful and very admiring guard that you had visited that very morgue on the night the first creature was captured and cajoled him into granting you admittance. By my estimation, you visited mere minutes after its capture.”

Damned guard. Pierce was watching him closely; Spade kept his face impassive. He wasn’t certain what was going on here. Was Pierce looking for another witness so he could bring Cavitt down? That was an intriguing possibility because Pierce was a doctor. He could determine what had killed West and Belmont. Unless, of course, he was here to silence him forever, which was a distinct possibility.

“So—you know about this,” Pierce said. It was not a question. “Who did you tell?”

Spade paused a good long while before making a decision. “No one.”

“No one?” Pierce said in surprise. “You discovered that two of your fellow soldiers died by suspicious means, and you told no one?”

“Who was there to tell?” Spade said bitterly. He grabbed a shirt from inside his locker and started pulling off his old one. If he had just signed his death warrant by admitting he was the only one who knew, he may as well die wearing a clean shirt. “No one would have believed me. If I’d attempted to reach anyone outside the base with a claim like that, you can bet the bodies would have been gone by the time anyone got there, and my goose would have been cooked.”

“Smart thinking,” Pierce mused. “They’re gone now.”

Spade stopped buttoning his new shirt. “What? I thought you said they were there earlier?”

“They were. I returned later this afternoon for further study, and they were gone. No one knew where. No one knew why. No surprise,” he added.

Spade sat down heavily on his bed. “Did you find out what killed them?” he asked quietly.

“Nothing obvious, I can tell you that much,” Pierce said. “Neither died by either of the two known methods of execution used by the aliens. There were no marks, no wounds, nothing to indicate trauma of any kind. The answers to what killed them lie inside; I would need tissue samples, blood samples, preferably a full autopsy, which is, of course, out of the question now.”

“So what now?”

Pierce paused a moment. “Now, Lieutenant, I’m afraid there is nothing else to be done.”

Spade looked at him in astonishment. “What do you mean there’s nothing else to be done? You’re a doctor and and an officer; they’ll listen to you the way they never would have listened to me! You just confirmed the handprints were fake and that they died by foul play!”

“No, I confirmed that aliens did not kill them, at least not by any method they’ve used thus far,” Pierce corrected. “There is obviously subterfuge at work here because someone planted those fake handprints. But the fact that the handprints are fake does not automatically prove murder, nor does it even prove that aliens didn’t kill them. They may have other ways of killing, ways we haven’t seen yet.”

Spade was fuming. “Now that you know about this, you have to make some effort to find out who’s responsible!”

“I’m afraid it’s nigh impossible to find whoever’s responsible,” Pierce said soberly. “Even if I could prove a human-induced cause of death, there is still the difficulty of linking that to a specific individual or individuals. The doctors whose signatures are on the death certificates are dead, killed by the aliens the night the first was captured, so I’m afraid they are unable to assist us. And, of course, there is the problem that no one further up the chain of command would give a rat’s ass about any of this.”

“Meaning?” Spade asked irritably, although he thought he probably already knew the answer.

Pierce sighed. “As you’ve already discovered, Lieutenant, the soldiers assigned to this operation are considered expendable. Precious few upstairs would care if those two died by shady means, as long as they got what they wanted—alien prisoners. Even if we had incontrovertible proof—hell, even if we had a confession from someone—I’m certain too many of the powers that be would turn a deaf ear to the whole thing. They want their aliens, and they don’t care who they have to walk over to get them.”

“I can’t believe this!” Spade muttered, rising and slamming his locker door so hard the entire locker shook. “I know Cavitt did this! I know he did! And you know it too!”

“I know nothing of the sort,” Pierce said reasonably. “I have no evidence he was involved in it. I admit that’s a distinct possibility, but absent proof, it’s a moot point. Even if Sheridan is involved, it would be very difficult to pin it on him even under the best of circumstances. He wouldn’t have done it himself; he’s too smart for that. He would have contracted that out, put several layers between himself and the dirty deed. He would be very hard to reach.”

“So we do nothing, is that it? You’ve just told me that two of my buddies were murdered—probably murdered,” Spade amended, as Pierce began to object, “and there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it?”

“Looks like.” Pierce leaned forward in his chair. “A word of advice, Lieutenant?” he said softly. “Major Cavitt is riding high at the moment. The top brass are very pleased with him for obvious reasons; it’s a bad time to oppose him, even if you had Jesus Christ sitting in your witness box. Even I have to tread carefully. Accusing him of something this dire without proof is suicide.”

“You mean he’d kill me,” Spade said flatly.

“I mean that someone—we don’t know who—might have been willing to kill for this mission, and it stands to reason they’d be willing to kill again,” Pierce said pointedly. “Dead men tell no tales. Make certain few know you have a tale to tell.”

Spade stared at the doctor uncomprehendingly. “Why are you telling me this?” he demanded fiercely. “You know I knew about it. You claim nothing can be done about it. So why are you here? Did you come to finish off the last witness to what happened? To make certain I don’t have a ‘tale to tell’?”

Pierce shook his head sadly. “Lieutenant, Lieutenant, Lieutenant,” he said wearily. “Such paranoia. Then again, you do work for Sheridan. That might explain it.”

Spade took a step closer to Pierce, who was still lounging in the chair, as much as one could lounge in such an unforgiving seat. “You didn’t answer my question. How many times do I have to ask this time? Four? Five?”

Pierce stood up, which placed him only inches from Spade’s nose. Spade didn’t back up.

“Once will suffice,” Pierce said levelly. “I am here, Lieutenant, because I want to know what made you leave the most triumphant moment of your career to date and head for that morgue. I want to know how you knew to look there. You’re not the only one who knows. Someone told you, so there’s someone else who knows. I want to know who that someone is.”

“The answer might surprise you,” Spade whispered.

“Try me,” Pierce said firmly.

A full minute passed while officer and soldier stared each other down. Neither moved.

“The alien told me,” Spade said finally.

Pierce’s eyes widened in surprise. “The alien told you?” he repeated. “The alien you had just captured?” Spade nodded. “That would be the one in alien form, correct?” Spade nodded again.

Pierce moved away, standing with his back to Spade. “They can speak in that form?” he continued, still sounding shocked. “They don’t appear to have the facial muscles necessary for speech! It spoke English?”

“Yes.”

“And what did it say?”

“I asked it why it had killed my friends in their sleep, and it denied it,” Spade said, closing his eyes against the memory. “It said I had been lied to.”

“And you believed it?”

“I wasn’t sure what to believe,” Spade said. “I needed to know for sure.” He paused. “And it didn’t kill them. It was right.”

“So it was,” Pierce murmured, “so it was. Well. That’s interesting. I had no idea they could speak our language in that form. Most interesting, indeed.”

“Will that be all, Doctor?” Spade asked, anxious to steer the conversation away from dangerous waters.

“What? Oh, yes, Lieutenant. I appreciate the information. And I am sorry I can’t be of more help in tracking down exactly what happened.”

Maybe. Maybe not, Spade thought, as he stretched out on his bed, knowing full well he wouldn’t be able to sleep tonight.

“Good night, Doctor.”

“Good night, Lieutenant,” Pierce answered heading for the door. He flicked off the light switch and paused in the doorway. “One more thing,” he said slowly. “Exactly why did you order your men to hold their fire tonight?”

Spade was grateful for the darkness between him and Dr. Pierce. Grateful that he didn’t have to worry about the expression on his own face, grateful that he didn’t have to look at Pierce’s. He only had to worry about his voice. That had to be steady.

“I already explained that to Major Cavitt. And since you’ve admitted you were eavesdropping, you heard my answer. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s been a trying day. For both of us, I imagine.”

“Of course. Good night, Lieutenant,” Pierce said softly, closing the door behind him as he left, leaving Spade frustrated, sweating, and in need of yet another new shirt.





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July 14, 1947, 12:10 a.m.

St. Bridgit’s Church, Corona, New Mexico




A soft double knock sounded on the church front doors. Father O’Neill scurried down the main aisle to answer it, asking himself for the hundredth time in the last hour whether or not he was doing the right thing. Having just rebuffed one officer of the law, was it really wise to be voluntarily consulting with another?

But O’Neill placed great stock in that still, small voice inside that the world liked to refer to as “intuition”, and which he called “God”. It was that voice which had warned him against cooperating with the deputy who had been here earlier, and the same voice now told him to trust the man now standing just outside. By the time O’Neill reached the doors, he was able to open them without hesitation. Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox stood there, wide awake and in uniform, giving no indication he’d just been pulled from his bed at an ungodly hour.

“Thank you so much for coming, Sheriff,” O’Neill whispered, opening the door wider so the sheriff could step inside. “I am so sorry to wake you at such a late hour, but I….I….well frankly, Sheriff, I just don’t know what to do,” he finished, flustered.

“That’s quite all right,” the Sheriff told him. “Always glad to be of service. Although I’m still not clear as to why my deputies couldn’t handle whatever’s bothering you. You were mighty vague on the phone.”

“That will become clear in just a moment,” O’Neill assured him, still whispering as he closed the door firmly behind the Sheriff. “Follow me.”

“Father?” the Sheriff whispered as O’Neill headed toward the sanctuary.

“Yes?” O’Neill said, turning around.

“Why are we whispering? There’s no one else here.”

“That’s what you think,” O’Neill said gravely, and he turned and marched up the aisle of the deserted sanctuary, the Sheriff trailing with a puzzled expression on his face.

When O’Neill reached the main altar, he climbed the steps confidently, the Sheriff lingering behind at the bottom, unwilling to follow. “You will need to join me up here,” O’Neill said firmly. “Believe me, the Lord won’t mind,” he added, when the Sheriff continued to hesitate. “We have much bigger problems here than who is walking on altars.”

Reluctantly, the Sheriff climbed the steps and joined the priest in front of the altar table. Without comment, O’Neill reached down and pulled aside the linen which hid the area underneath the table.

O’Neill watched Wilcox’s face carefully. Had he done the right thing by calling him here? For a moment, he thought perhaps not; the expression on Wilcox’s face was not one he was expecting. It took O’Neill a moment of careful thought before he recognized it; not revulsion, or horror, or even surprise, but....recognition.

“You’ve seen this before, haven’t you?” O’Neill asked.

“Once. From a distance,” the Sheriff allowed, not taking his eyes off the gray creature curled beneath the altar table for even a moment. “Is it alive?”

“It hasn’t moved since I found it here,” O’Neill answered. “I’m afraid I’m not sure.”

As if on cue, the creature’s eyes flew open, revealing black, pupil-less depths. The long fingers curled and uncurled, and it shifted in its hiding place as though it were in pain.

“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” O’Neill breathed.

Wilcox shook his head gravely. “With all due respect, Father, I’m afraid you’re talking to the wrong people.” He retreated down the altar steps, calling behind him, “I’ll need to use your phone.”





*************************************************************





12:20 p.m.


Proctor residence



The jangling phone on the table in the hallway reverberated through the Proctor household like a siren, startling all of them awake. It was Emily who managed to make her way downstairs first, one hand on the wall to steady herself. She’d gotten up much too fast.

“ ‘lo?” she said thickly, still half asleep.

“Emily, it’s George,” came a worried voice on the other end of the line. “I’m terribly sorry to wake you so late, but I need your help.”

“Our help?” Emily repeated. “George it’s....”—she consulted the grandfather clock by the front door— “....it’s past midnight.”

“I know that,” George replied impatiently, “but you’re the only people who can do this job.”

“Job? What job?”

“Remember our conversation earlier?” George asked. “You said I could call anytime, day or night.”

Understanding flooded over Emily. She was instantly wide awake.

“Let me guess,” she said, leaning wearily against the wall. “I’m about to regret having said that.”


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


I'll post Chapter 8 next Sunday.

[Kathy W]

Hello everyone!

Misha: Hi there! <wave> You are so right that Brivari would have been the better prisoner--Jaddo is going to exasperate humans and Brivari alike. And Anthony's coming back in Part 2 (Chapter 8 is the end of Part 1). Right again about the alien living in Dee's house--eventually Anthony's going to figure it out, despite his and Dee's current "don't ask, don't tell" policy. But I think that's a good thing; Dee needs a co-conspirator her own size.


Note: It has been brought to my attention that the double lines of stars separating sections are causing people to scroll left and right to read the story. I am so sorry about this. I thought it was a bolluxed setting in my browser. I've corrected the Book 3 threads, but it will take me awhile longer to correct the Work by Author threads.








CHAPTER EIGHT


July 14, 1947, 1:05 a.m.

Corona, New Mexico





The streets of Corona were silent and deserted as David Proctor drove through the main part of town. Up ahead St. Bridgit’s Church loomed, its bulk a silhouette against the night sky. Alien emergencies always seemed to happen in the wee small, and as David neared the church, he reflected on the fact that in the past week, he’d seen more of Corona at night than he had in his entire life, despite the fact that he’d been born and raised here.

David pulled into the church’s parking lot, looking for George Wilcox’s car. It was hard to see; the only light was a single, dim lamp over the double front doors of the church, and that did nothing to help the parking lot. George’s car was at the far end of the lot, enveloped in gloom and virtually invisible from the road. Not a bad idea, David thought, parking his own car next to George’s. It would be just his luck to wind up with witnesses, however unlikely that may be. Or perhaps it was the aliens who had all the bad luck. His own luck, come to think of it, had held up pretty well; it was the aliens who had not been so fortunate.

Closing the car door as quietly as he could, David headed for the church’s side door, the one near the sacristy. George had been cryptic on the phone just in case anyone was listening—damned party lines—so David wasn’t exactly sure what he was walking into. A live body? A dead body? At home, both his wife and his daughter were anxiously awaiting news. Best to get on with it. He raised his hand to the door and knocked twice, as instructed.

A few seconds later footsteps echoed inside, and the massive door creaked as it opened a few inches. Father O’Neill’s anxious face appeared in the resulting crack, his features practically melting with relief when he spied David.

“Oh, thank goodness!” the priest said, opening the door wider and almost pulling David inside. “I apologize for the lateness of the hour, Mr. Proctor, but Sheriff Wilcox says you are the resident expert on….er….well…..”

“Aliens?” David finished helpfully.

“Er….yes. I suppose,” the priest answered uncertainly. He made a flustered gesture toward the sanctuary. “This way.”

David followed through the little hallway that housed the sacristy, across the front of the altar, and up the altar steps, where George Wilcox was standing with a worried expression on his face.

“Dave,” George said with a nod, “thanks for coming. This one’s out of my league.”

“And mine,” Father O’Neill chimed in. “I’m afraid it’s not in very good shape, and I haven’t the faintest idea what to do for it.” He reached down and lifted the linen drape that hid the area underneath the altar table.

David sank slowly into a squatting position to get a better look at the huddled figure on the floor underneath the altar. He had seen Brivari injured while in this form, but this looked much worse. The gray skin was shriveled as though the skeleton underneath—assuming they even had a skeleton—had shrunk. It was curled in a fetal position, eyes closed, small mouth open, long fingers slack. It looked dead.

“Jesus,” David whispered.

“Don’t blame Him,” Father O’Neill said soberly. “I can assure you, He had nothing to do with this. This is man’s work.”

“Has he moved at all?” David asked.

“A little, several minutes ago, before we called you,” Father O’Neill answered. “So this is a ….. ‘him’?”

Deciding that now was not the time to attempt an explanation of the aliens’ gender bending abilities, David replied, “For all practical purposes, he’s a ‘he’.” The priest’s eyes grew round.

“And you know this one?” George queried.

David hesitated. This was probably Brivari or Jaddo, although he had no way of identifying them in this form, and no way of being certain this wasn’t one of the hostile aliens. “I think so,” he allowed, ignoring the look of concern on George’s face. “I’ll take him back to the house. I need some blankets from my car. I’ll be right back.”

“I have some,” Father O’Neill said, rising from his crouched position. “I was going to put something over it—him—anyway because it—he—looks so cold,” the priest continued, stumbling over his pronouns. “And then you knocked, and I was afraid you were that awful deputy again.”

“What awful deputy?” George demanded.

“The one who was chasing this….being. At least I think he was. He said he was chasing a prowler, but I rather doubt that now. He was awfully worked up, that one. It took a few minutes to get him to stop pointing his gun at me.”

“One of my deputies pointed a gun at you?” George asked, astonished.

“He wasn’t one of yours, at least not anyone I know,” O’Neill responded. “He wore a different uniform, and he said he was on loan from Roswell.”

“I did ask Sheriff Hemming down in Roswell if he could spare a couple of people,” George confirmed. “Some of mine are really unraveling, what with everything that’s been going on.” He stopped and looked down at the gray figure, stark evidence of what had been “going on”. “Guess he sent someone over tonight. I’m awfully sorry about this, Father. Did you get his name?”

“Yes. It was ‘Valenti’.”

“Valenti?!” both George and David exclaimed simultaneously. Each looked at the other, surprised.

“You know him?” David asked.

“You know him?” George said. “How?”

“Later,” David said firmly. “If Valenti’s hanging around, it’s more important than ever that I get him out of here,” he said, looking at the curled figure under the altar table.

George looked at him a long minute. “All right,” he said finally. “But I want to hear all of it, chapter and verse, just as soon as this is settled. Same goes for you, Father,” he said, turning to the bewildered priest. “I want to know everything Valenti said and did while he was here.”

“Of course, Sheriff, of course,” O’Neill answered, bustling off to the sacristy and returning a few moments later with a large blanket.

Kneeling down, David helped the priest spread the blanket on the altar floor beside the alien. He was only a bit larger than his daughter, so the blanket would be able to cover him completely. The hairless skin was dry, leathery, and cold to the touch as, grimacing, David slid his hands underneath the body, preparing to help lift him onto the blanket. He was unprepared for what happened next.

A dead King lying in state….

…a young King, newly crowned, with beautiful women on either side of him…..

...a young boy, eyes flying open, screaming in panic, his features oddly familiar....

…a pitched battle watched from a window high in a building….

…a girl lying on the floor of a wooded area, her arm bent at an impossible angle, blood running down her face….

…bright lights…a white ceiling…faces looming overhead…one face in particular….an explosion….

…being chased….pursued…..hunted. Panicking…..his pursuer was getting closer, and he was getting weaker………

The images stopped, and the church swam back into view. David was still kneeling beside the alien, but he had let go, and he was shaking, sweating profusely. Both George and Father O’Neill were bending over, staring at him worriedly.

“Dave?” George said tentatively.

David looked back and forth from one to the other, momentarily at a loss for words. He had forgotten all about what had happened the last time he had touched Jaddo, the rush of images and the feelings they had provoked. It had been overpowering then, and this time was no different.

But why was this happening? Jaddo had deliberately formed what he had called a “telepathic connection”; this alien didn’t appear conscious enough to perform such a feat. And Jaddo had made it clear that David could not form such a connection himself; he needed to touch someone who could, which he had apparently just done.

“Are you all right, Mr. Proctor?” came O’Neill’s anxious voice.

“Fine. Fine,” David replied, waving them away. “Just a little woozy, that’s all. I did get up rather fast, and it is the middle of the night.”

George looked unconvinced. “Are you sure you want to do this? Because I’ll understand perfectly if you don’t.”

“I do,” David said firmly, meaning it. He reached out and gingerly slid his hands underneath the upper half of the gray body, bracing himself against what he might see. But no images came this time, and with the priest’s help, they transferred the alien to the blanket and wrapped it snugly.

“You should put it—him—in the trunk,” George said as they headed out of the church. “I know it sounds awful, but you can’t take the risk of anyone finding that in your back seat.”

“Agreed,” David said, the bundled alien in his arms so lightweight it was frightening. Whoever would guess a being this small and fragile-looking could be so powerful? “He’s unconscious anyway; he won’t mind. Father, could you fish my car keys out of my pocket and open my trunk?”

The priest hurried to comply, and the threesome made their way into the parking lot where their burden was safely hidden away in David’s trunk.

“Thank you, Father,” David said, “for everything. Not everyone would have been so understanding.”

“Your daughter asked me only yesterday if God was the God of everyone,” O’Neill replied thoughtfully. “I answered ‘yes’ without hesitation. That was no idle answer.”

David nodded, and turned to the Sheriff. “Thanks, George. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to know you’re on our side.”

“Anytime, Dave, anytime,” George said. “Are you going to make it home okay, or should I follow you?”

“I’ll be fine,” David answered, climbing into the front seat.

“I’ll follow you for a bit anyway, just in case,” George said.

David started the car and headed out of the parking lot, the Sheriff trailing, Father O’Neill heading back into the church. He pulled out onto the road, unable to keep the images he had seen out of his mind. Many he didn’t recognize, but a few made sense. The two kings, one dead, one alive, made it clear who that was in his trunk; it was Brivari who had guarded a king. He had been captured three days ago. This was what they’d managed to do to him in only three days.

Two other images he had recognized immediately. One was the face of the man hovering in the brightly lit room, a face he had seen before on his own front porch as they had led Mac away that fateful night before the ship was discovered. Cavitt got what he wanted, David thought grimly, just the memory of that face filling him with fury.

Still, he found that fury preferable to the memory of the second recognizable image, an image so terrifying that even now, it filled him with a cold dread that was practically paralyzing. The young girl lying on the ground, her face covered in blood, her arm clearly broken, alone in the woods even though her own parents were only a short ways away, oblivious to what was happening.

His own daughter.






******************************************************




2:20 a.m.

Proctor residence





Emily Proctor closed her eyes and leaned back wearily in the rocking chair, letting the amber colored rock drop from her cupped hands into her lap. A few feet away, the gray figure curled on the guest room bed moved slightly, then was still.

“Is he going to be okay?” Dee asked worriedly. She was sitting cross-legged at the very end of the bed, watching Brivari with rapt attention.

“I hope so,” David answered. “He looks better already, but he’s still got a ways to go.”

“What did they do to him?” Dee whispered.

David shook his head sadly. “I don’t know.”

“I don’t get the impression they did anything too awful,” Emily said, opening her eyes. “He’s not injured, not in the conventional sense. He’s mainly just exhausted, and really, really weak.”

“They probably drugged him to keep him asleep just like they did with Jaddo,” David commented.

“That was three days ago,” Emily said. “If he’s been asleep from then till now, that means he hasn’t had anything to eat or drink in three days. No wonder he’s so weak.”

“Isn’t there anything else we can do?” Dee pleaded to her mother.

“I don’t think so, honey. He’s pulled a lot of our energy through these rocks, but we don’t have anything more to give at the moment, and I’m not sure he’s up to using any more. We’ll have to wait till morning.”

Dee’s face turned sullen. “I hate the people who did this,” she said angrily. “I hate them!”

“Don’t,” Emily said firmly.

Dee stared at her mother in astonishment. “You think what they did to him is okay?”

“Of course not,” Emily answered with a touch of exasperation. “It’s just that hate is a wasted emotion. It consumes the hater and fixes nothing. Spend your time and energy helping him get better, or helping to hide him. That will work against the people who did this far more than you just sitting there hating. The people who did this don’t care if you hate them or not.”

“Off to bed with you,” David said, as Dee appeared ready to argue the point. “We’ve done all we can for now. He needs to rest. Do you need me to go with you?” he added, when Dee swayed a little as she climbed off the bed.

“No,” Dee said stubbornly. “I’m okay.”

David and Emily exchanged glances as they watched their daughter pad back to her own room. Both Emily and Dee had used the healing rocks on Brivari when David had first brought him in, but David had made Dee stop when she began to feel faint and her lips had turned gray. Brivari was sucking the energy out of both of them, using the rocks as a kind of straw. Emily had the sense to hold back, to take breaks, but Dee just threw herself into it heart and soul, not knowing when to quit.

“I shouldn’t have let her do this,” David sighed.

“You couldn’t have stopped her if you’d wanted to,” Emily replied. “Besides, she needed to do this. She needed to feel useful, to feel like she somehow made this better. We pulled her out in time.”

“And what about you?”

Emily gave him a tired smile. “I’ll be all right. I’m a hell of a lot better off than he is,” she added, gazing at the huddled figure on the bed. She paused. “You’re sure it’s Brivari?” David nodded.

“How do you know?”

“I….I saw things again,” David admitted, “like I did with Jaddo.”

Emily’s eyes widened. “What things?”

“Kings. One older and dead, one younger and alive. I think the younger one is the one who just died in their war.”

“Brivari is the one who guarded a king,” Emily murmured.

“I saw something else,” David continued. He had been mulling over whether to tell her this, but he found the image so disturbing that he found himself selfishly wanting to share it, as if sharing it would somehow lessen its horror. “I saw Dee lying on the ground in the woods behind the school after Denny Miltnor attacked her. Her arm was all twisted, and there was blood running down her face…” David’s voice cracked. “She looked awful, Em. She looked.....dead.”

Emily’s face had gone white as a sheet. “Why did you see that?” she whispered.

“It’s what he saw the night they healed her,” David explained. “I see things the way they saw them, and I feel what they were feeling at the time.”

“And what was he feeling as he looked down at our dying daughter?” Emily asked in a tentative voice, as if afraid of the answer.

“Fear,” David answered simply. “Fear that she would expose them. Not deliberately, but carelessly, because she was a child. But there was something else mixed in…a sense of duty, of responsibility, of owing her. He told me that the night I helped them move, when I asked him why they had saved her. He said they owed her protection because she had risked her life in the King’s service. He didn’t lie to me. He really did feel that way. And it’s a good thing, too. Can you just imagine where we’d be now if.......” He stopped, unwilling to finish the sentence.

Emily was silent for a long, long time, her face still white, her fingers twitching in her lap. At length, David rose and headed for the door.

“Coming to bed?”

“In a minute.” She picked up the amber colored rock again. “Let me try one more time.”





******************************************************




July 14, 1947, 8 a.m.

Proctor residence




Emily Proctor quietly entered the guestroom holding a plate of toast in one hand and a glass of milk in another. Brivari lay curled on the bed in what looked like the same position as last night. He did not appear to have moved.

And he may never move, Emily thought sadly. They had given him what energy they had to spare, but it might not be enough. Emily wasn’t exactly certain how she gleaned the information she did from those glowing rocks—perhaps they facilitated some kind of “connection” similar to the one David had experienced, though mercifully free of home movies—but she did get a sense of how the injured person was feeling when she used them. And the most overwhelming sensation she’d received from Brivari was one of exhaustion, an exhaustion so profound it frightened her. The next most prominent sensation had been one of hunger, hence the milk and toast. He didn’t strike her as capable of consuming them, but should she be wrong about that, at least something would be there for him.

Emily set the plate and glass on the bedside table next to the bed and turned to the window. Hesitating at first, she drew back the curtains, letting the summer morning sunshine stream into the room. If I were going to die, she thought, I’d rather die in the sunshine than in the dark. She turned around.

His eyes were open.

Emily stared for a moment at the huge, almond-shaped black eyes with no pupils, then broke into a smile.

“Good morning,” she said softly. “Welcome back.”





******************************************************





0830 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base





The first thing he heard was sound. Beeping noises, feet shuffling, even the sound of breaths being held. Gradually the sounds grew louder, and he moved his head from side to side to hear them better. And that was when he realized how very, very weak he was. Even moving his head took effort.

Jaddo opened his eyes. Several seconds passed before he was able to discern shapes against the background of bright, white light surrounding him.

Humans.

“Doctor!” a fearful voice exclaimed. “I think its waking up!”

Faces came into focus, faces full of mingled curiosity and fear. One human stepped forward; dark hair, a white coat, some kind of rank insignia near the neck. “You are awake,” the dark-haired human said with interest. “And no light show this time. Can you hear me?”

Jaddo didn’t answer. He doubted he had the strength to tackle physical speech even if he’d wanted to....and he didn’t want to. He had obviously been captured—the less said, the better.

“I’m going to assume you can,” the human continued. “I am Dr. Pierce,” he said, gesturing to himself, “and you are a….” here the human paused as if searching for the right word “…..a guest of the United States Government.”

He smiled a completely unconvincing smile. “Welcome to Earth.”




End of Part 1
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Next week: Part 2--Awakening

I'll post Chapter 9 next Sunday.

[Kathy W]

Hello to everyone reading!







PART TWO—AWAKENING



CHAPTER NINE


Four days later

July 18, 1947, 1000 hours

Eagle Rock Military Base





Doctor Pierce jumped as Major Cavitt careened into his office, slamming the door back against the wall in the process. “Why didn’t you tell me it was awake?” Cavitt demanded angrily.

Pierce rocked back in his desk chair and smiled. “Good morning, Sheridan. I’m fine, thank you. Nice of you to ask. And you?”

“Don’t play games with me, Daniel,” Cavitt retorted. “You said you would notify me immediately once the prisoner was fully conscious!”

“Correction: I said I would notify you immediately when I found the prisoner safe to approach and sufficiently recovered to withstand interrogation,” Pierce said calmly. “There’s a difference.”

“So is it safe to approach?”

“I believe so,” Pierce replied. “I watched it try to free itself from the restraints, and fail. It hasn’t changed its shape either. Perhaps it’s too weak, or perhaps the serum suppresses that too. A pity, though that would certainly make our job easier.”

“How long has it been awake?”

Pierce sighed. “The sedative wore off completely yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday morning? And why, may I ask, did you not see fit to disclose this information to me?”

“Because I was afraid you would barge in there and pop your cork—like you’re doing now,” Pierce said, as Cavitt’s face reddened. “You’re forgetting the ‘sufficiently recovered’ part, and no, I don’t think it is sufficiently recovered. I have no idea how our medications affected its physiology. The last thing we need is to give it the alien equivalent of a heart attack.”

Cavitt gave a snort of exasperation. “Will you at least do me the courtesy of telling me what it’s said?”

“Of course. Nothing.”

“Nothing?” Cavitt repeated incredulously. “Nothing at all?”

“Not a word.”

“But they speak!” Cavitt protested. “Lieutenant Spade said they speak English.”

Pierce shrugged. “Perhaps this one doesn’t. Or perhaps it doesn’t want to.”

“I’m afraid it doesn’t have a choice in the matter,” Cavitt replied darkly. “When can I have it?”

“Not yet.”

“Just exactly how long do you think you can get away with this? You’ve been stringing me along for four days now, pretending it wasn’t awake yet, and now….”

“I wasn’t pretending,” Pierce interrupted sharply. “I deliberately kept it partially sedated while we tested the serum. I didn’t want a repeat of what happened with its shipmate.”

“Which was your fault,” Cavitt said pointedly.

“Which was no one’s fault,” Pierce replied firmly. “In case you haven’t noticed, this is a completely different species. How was I supposed to know what their vital signs were or anything else about them, for that matter? If it makes you feel any better, the information we gleaned from the other one’s escape is precisely what allowed us to hold this one.”

“Oh, I see,” Cavitt said sarcastically. “Losing one of the most important prisoners this country has ever held on my watch is supposed to make me feel better?”

“Have you found it yet?”

Cavitt looked away. “No.”

“Well, that would be your fault,” Pierce said placidly. “You’re the soldier, or so you keep reminding me at every available opportunity.”

“If you hadn’t screwed up, I wouldn’t need to be looking for it in the first place!”

“Blaming others for your own shortcomings. Not exactly a career path, Sheridan.” Pierce shook his head in mock sadness as Cavitt flushed again. “Honestly, you are so easy to rile. You fall for it every time, do you realize that?”

“And you enjoy taunting me,” Cavitt retorted. “Do you realize that?”

“Of course,” Pierce replied casually. “But that doesn’t mean you have to make it so easy for me.” He reached for his coffee cup and headed for the coffee pot behind his desk. “Have some?” he asked, gesturing to the pot. “But then I suppose you don’t need any more caffeine, do you?”

“When can I begin the interrogation?” Cavitt demanded, not taking the bait this time.

“I’m not sure,” Pierce replied, setting the pot back down.

“And why not?”

Pierce sat down heavily in his chair. “We’ve been over this already,” he said in a tone one would use with an underperforming student. “But since you don’t seem to have understood it the first several times, why don’t you have a seat and I’ll have a go at explaining it again.”

Pierce waited. Cavitt remained standing in front of the desk, ignoring the chair in front of it only inches away from him.

“Very well then,” Pierce said, sipping his coffee. “Same song, umpteenth verse. This is a species we’ve never encountered before. I have no idea how the drugs we used will affect it. We’re still tweaking the dosage of serum; that suppresses brain activity, specifically the portions of the brain the first one used when it escaped. We’re still not clear on how these drugs work even in humans, so it took some time to suppress the correct areas of the brain and to discover the correct dosage. Too little and we could lose this one; too much, and it won’t be worth interrogating. That wouldn’t be much fun for you, now would it?”

“This is all fascinating,” Cavitt said acidly, “but you still haven’t answered my question. When can I have it?”

“When I am certain it’s stable. It’s still quite weak from all it’s been through, not to mention exhausted.”

“And since when do we have to wait for our prisoners to be well rested before interrogating them?”

Pierce set down his coffee cup. “You know, I think that’s the problem here. You see the alien as a prisoner; I see it as a test subject.”

“You mean a lab rat,” Cavitt said derisively.

“Semantics,” Pierce said dismissively. “Call it what you will, but my point is that test subjects, or ‘lab rats’ if you prefer, are always well treated. One does not glean useful or consistent information from sick, weak subjects. Scientists know this. But then, you’re not a scientist, are you?”

Cavitt leaned forward, his hands on the desk, looking Pierce directly in the eye. “If you think for one minute that you stand on somehow higher moral ground because you are a ‘scientist’ with a ‘test subject’, then you’re an even bigger fool that I thought. I know you—you will use that thing in there to find out what you want to know, just like I will. You will hurt it, threaten it, manipulate it, do anything to it you must to make it divulge its secrets, just like I will. The difference is that I don’t cloak my actions in pretty words. I don’t need to. Have you given any thought to why you need to?”

Pierce stared silently at Cavitt, his expression inscrutable. After a moment, Cavitt stood up.

“You fancy yourself better than me, Daniel. And you’re not. Except perhaps in the one way you wouldn’t want to be: You’re a better liar.”

As Cavitt turned and stalked out the door, Pierce leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He was exhausted; the last four days of constant work and little sleep had taken their toll. He hadn’t bothered to tell Cavitt about the near misses: The overdose of serum that had almost put the alien into a coma. The under dose that had allowed it to marshal some small amount of whatever energy it used, rattling the equipment around them, causing the lights to blink, breaking the straps that bound it, and sending them scrambling to administer another dose. Now he thought he had it right, but it was a delicate balance. A balance that could change at any moment, because this was uncharted territory.

Pierce stood up and reached for his lab coat. He had other problems besides serum dosage. Speaking wasn’t the only thing the alien wasn’t doing. It was already very weak, and the longer this continued, the weaker—and less useful—it would become.

Just what I need right now, Pierce thought wearily as he headed out the door of his office. An alien hunger strike.



******************************************************



Yvonne White carefully balanced the tray of food as she walked down the hallway toward the room where the alien was being held. He had been allowed to fully awaken yesterday, although so far he had moved little, still hadn’t spoken, and, most distressingly, refused to eat. This last was a huge concern for Dr. Pierce, who continued to fret over the creature’s health and how they might be harming him without meaning to. Yvonne strongly suspected Pierce was far more worried about the personal consequences of losing yet another hugely important prisoner than he was about the alien’s health, but it was still refreshing to see someone actually trying not to hurt him.

Whatever his reasons, Yvonne had to give Pierce credit for effort. She had prevailed upon him to begin intravenous feeding just as soon as it had become clear that the serum he'd developed to suppress the alien’s powers was working. But he had continued to weaken, and Pierce had suspended the feedings amid concerns that the intravenous solution formulated to meet the most basic nutritional needs of humans was doing more harm than good. All attempts to induce the alien to consume something, anything, had so far been unsuccessful. The debate had already started as to how this would be addressed. Having had the unhappy duty of participating in forced feedings, she was determined to prevent that from happening. These people, whoever they were, had been through enough already.

Now that the alien was awake, the mood in the compound had changed considerably, the tension heightened. More guards were on duty, all equipped with tranquilizer rifles. Yvonne could feel their eyes on her as she headed for the door to the prisoner’s room where four more soldiers were stationed, two on each side of the door. She addressed one of the guards on the right whose expression appeared a bit more friendly. “Private Thompson,” she said, reading his name tag. “I’m here to check on the patient.”

“ ‘Patient’?” muttered one of the guards to the left. He glanced down at her tray, loaded with a variety of foodstuffs because they weren’t certain what aliens ate. “So you’re gonna try and get it to eat too? You’re the latest in a long parade. Dr. Pierce was just in there, and he got nowhere.”

“I know,” Yvonne replied. “Dr. Pierce asked me to try because I have experience with this problem. I might be able to convince him to eat.”

“That ain’t no ‘he’,” the soldier said, glancing toward the window in the door. “It may look like a ‘he’ on the outside, but I hear it sure don’t look like one on the inside.”

“It just seems rude to refer to a living being as ‘it’,” Yvonne remarked.

The soldier looked astonished. “Rude? Why? It ain’t human.”

“Does that matter?”

“Hell, sure it matters,” the soldier replied, in a tone which suggested that was a stupid question.

Yvonne decided to skip the moral debate with this one. “Would you let me in, please?”

““Don’t know why everyone’s so damned concerned about it and all,” the guard said, scowling. “It’s a monster. Who cares if it wants to starve itself?”

Yvonne bit back a sharp reply. Unfortunately this was the prevailing attitude in the compound toward the alien, and it had only gotten worse of late. Cavitt had been livid when the first had been lost, and the troops, still smarting from the tongue lashing they’d received, seemed to be taking it out on the second alien.

“I need to go in,” Yvonne said, addressing Thompson, who had remained silent. “Would you please unlock the door for me?”

“Of course, Lieutenant,” Thompson replied courteously. He shot a disapproving look at his fellow soldier, who glared back. “Maybe what it needs is a woman’s touch.” He gestured to the two other guards. “LaBella, Walker, accompany the Lieutenant inside. For your protection, ma’am,” he added to Yvonne. “Doc thinks he’s got that thing muzzled, but you never know.”

The door swung open and, closely followed by the two guards, Yvonne stepped inside.




******************************************************




12:00 p.m.

Proctor residence




Several miles away, another woman with a similar tray full of food entered another room which held yet another alien.

Emily Proctor emptied the contents of the tray onto the bedside table in the guest room. Brivari lay curled on the bed in a fetal position, asleep. He hadn’t spoken a word since he’d been here. She had occasionally seen his eyes open like she had earlier in the week, but his gaze was unfocused, and he didn’t seem to be aware of her presence. To the casual observer, he appeared to be in some kind of weird, waking coma.

But Emily knew better. All the food she had been leaving had been disappearing, and yesterday morning she had arrived with breakfast to find Brivari in human form once again. It was a different form than he had previously used, and that had momentarily rattled her. But she had nevertheless breathed a sigh of relief; the only bathroom in the house was upstairs, and whenever any of Dee’s friends had used it, Emily had held her breath. They kept the door to the guest room closed, and he certainly wasn’t making any noise, but still….the thought of someone stumbling into the guest room and seeing….what they would see…..was unsettling, to say the least.

He had eaten nothing for several hours after that; the act of changing shape had apparently worn him out all over again. But then food began disappearing again, and she had noticed that he was usually in a different position when she looked in on him which meant he was moving more often. These were good signs, and the whole family continued to hope he would recover, especially Dee. She hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and Emily had begun to worry afresh about how all this was affecting her daughter.

Emily finished emptying the tray and turned to the window. The afternoon sun was uncomfortably bright; probably time to close the curtains a bit. She took one step away from the bed......and flinched as a hand closed around her wrist.





******************************************************




Eagle Rock Military Base





The tray of food in her hands, Yvonne stepped over the threshold, the two soldiers on her heels. The door swung shut behind them, and she could hear the sound of a key turning in the lock.

“We’ll wait back here, where we can get a clear shot at it,” one of the soldiers whispered to her. She turned to look at them, saw the fear in their faces. The eyes of one were round, his hands gripping the barrel of his gun very hard. The other’s eyes were hard; he looked like he wanted a reason to shoot. Hopefully he’d leave disappointed.

Yvonne turned back toward the motionless figure lying several feet ahead. She had been in here many times since this nightmare began, always bearing a cocktail of emotions: Pity, anger, regret, shame. Now she could add awkwardness to the list. Now he was awake, and she was going to attempt actual conversation. Conversation meant that eventually she would have to answer for the behavior of her own people. She wasn’t looking forward to that.

Yvonne walked forward, gripping the tray as hard as the soldiers were gripping their guns. The alien lay on a hospital bed which had replaced the metal operating table on which he had previously lain. She had lobbied for that bed, along with the hospital gown he now wore, and despite some grumbling, had managed to arouse enough uneasiness in those who made such decisions that she had won both battles. Apparently the fact that the alien looked human had trumped the fact that he wasn’t.

Reaching the edge of the bed, Yvonne stopped, hovering nervously. The alien was motionless, his head turned toward the opposite wall, eyes open. He was restrained in several places with wide, leather straps that buckled like belts: Wrists, ankles, chest, waist. If she cranked the bed into a sitting position and moved his rolling bed table as close as possible, there would be just enough play in the straps that held his arms for him to reach the tray of food. Barely.

Assuming she could convince him to eat, that is. This was not a new dilemma; it was common for soldiers to refuse food, especially after awakening to find lost limbs, dead friends, or themselves in captivity. She’d faced this problem dozens of times—why was this time so hard?

Yvonne turned around and looked at the two soldiers, still hovering by the door, waiting for her to make a move. She glanced at the window of the observation room, which she knew held at least one guard. There were no microphones in the observation room, but the soldiers behind her could overhear. Whatever she did, whatever she said, it would be quite public. Being in this room was like being in a zoo.

“Hello,” she ventured, deciding that the best start was a simple one.

No response.

“I’ve brought you some food,” Yvonne continued, undaunted. Nurses were used to one way conversations. “You haven’t had anything to eat in several days. You really should eat something.”

Still no response. Yvonne set the tray down on the bed table and was instantly sorry she’d done that. Now she had nothing to do with her hands.

“Listen, I know you’re not thrilled about this,” she said. “Neither am I. But it’s in your best interests to eat. If you don’t, we’ll have to force you to eat, and that won’t be any fun for anyone, myself included. So do yourself a favor, and avoid that.”

Waiting, Yvonne watched the alien’s face closely for any sign that he had heard. He didn’t so much as twitch; his eyes remained open, staring straight ahead, his expression fixed. She remembered this one—this was the testier one of the two who had come to rescue their captured companions. While he certainly hadn’t been polite to her, or anyone else for that matter, it was still difficult to see him this way, trussed up like an animal. Even in this predicament he gave the impression of a caged lion, just waiting for his chance to strike. To restrain a creature this powerful and dangerous struck her as foolish, to say the least.

Yvonne moved to the foot of the bed to get a better look at him. Soldiers in this condition usually exhibited hopelessness; countering that hopelessness meant finding something that gave them a reason to live. “Think of your loved ones,” she would say, “and how upset they would be to hear you’re in this condition.” Sometimes merely threatening to inform a soldier’s family of their refusal to eat was enough to turn the tide.

Enemy soldiers required a different tack. Since they were frequently convinced they’d never see their loved ones again, that argument didn’t work. “The war may end soon,” she’d say, “or even if it doesn’t, there are always prisoner exchanges. If you’re not healthy, your government won’t consider you for an exchange. Don’t miss that chance.”

But neither of those approaches would work here. The alien had no family to live for, unless one counted its escaped companion, assuming that one was even still alive. He had no government to negotiate for his release, no war that might end sooner than expected. What did this one have to live for?

It was the expression on his face that gave Yvonne her answer. Now that she wasn’t looking at him sideways, she could see that what she had taken for a blank expression was really tinged with something else—defiance. His not eating wasn’t a sign of illness, or depression, or even exhaustion: He wasn’t eating because they wanted him to. It was the one thing he still had control over in this uncontrollable situation. But in the end he was only hurting himself, and it was her job as his nurse to make him see that.

Yvonne mentally ticked over everything she knew, everything she remembered about this particular alien before deciding how to proceed. She moved to the other side of the bed and crouched down by his head. Now he would either have to look in her general direction or turn away.

“Look,” she said firmly in a low voice, too low for the soldiers at the door to hear. “I’m going to give it to you straight. Because we’ve met before, and from what I remember, you’re the type who appreciates hearing it straight. Am I right?”

The alien still wasn’t looking at her; his eyes were fixed on a point over her left shoulder. But she thought she saw those eyes twitch just a bit, just enough to let her know he’d heard.

“The fact is,” Yvonne continued, “you’re a prisoner here, and there’s not much you can do about that right now. The doctors found a way to block the part of your brain that lets you do the things you do, so you won’t be able to blast yourself out of here. You’re stuck—and so am I. I’m a prisoner here every bit as much as you are. If I tried to leave, they’d probably kill me.”

This time she was positive she saw the eyes flicker. He still wasn’t looking at her, but she knew he was listening.

“The best you can do right now is get your strength back. Because you and I both know you’re not going to be here forever. Sooner or later you’ll find a way out, and when you do, you’ll need all the endurance you can muster. You’ll never make it if you’re weak. So don’t be weak. Eat, and make certain you’re ready when the opportunity comes. You may not get another chance.”

Now the eyes did flicker toward her, coming to rest directly on her face with a glare that could have bored holes in iron. Yvonne braced herself against the side of the bed and forced herself to look directly into that awful gaze without shrinking. She could feel the rage rolling off him in waves; she let it wash over her, reminding herself that she wasn’t responsible for his predicament and that she was angry too, for very similar reasons.

“I know you’re angry,” she said, “and I don’t blame you. I’m angry too. I never wanted this to happen. I was powerless to stop it, but I’m not powerless to affect it. And neither are you. I know you’re strong enough to feed yourself. If you don’t eat voluntarily, do you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to force a tube down your throat and feed you that way. And I’ll have to help. I don’t want to do that, but I won’t have a choice.”

His eyes continued to bore into her as she came to her point.

“Do you have any idea how many people here would love to do that to you? To watch you suffer? Don’t give them that satisfaction. Deny them that privilege. Don’t give them a reason to hurt you further. You’ve been through enough. Eat the food, and leave them disappointed that they won’t get to force the issue.”

Yvonne paused; surely that would get through to someone with a personality like this. But the eyes drifted away, and she couldn’t tell if he was considering what she had said or rejecting it. He may need some time to think about it. Hopefully he wouldn’t take too much time. She straightened up, cranked the bed into a semi-sitting position, and adjusted the bed table so it would be within range of the straps that held his arms.

“Think about it,” she said, noticing the two soldiers’ ears prick up now that they could hear her. “But don’t take too long. They won’t wait much longer.”

The alien remained motionless, his head turned away, staring at the wall. Yvonne was about to leave when she remembered she had one more card to play, one more piece of information that might be a powerful motivator.

“Your friend escaped.”

Yvonne jumped as the head whipped around and those words, those words with no sound that she’d heard when the other alien escaped pounded inside her head. The words she’d assumed she’d imagined in the heat of the moment, and now realized she hadn’t.

<He’s gone?>

Behind her, the soldiers were scrambling. “It moved!” one of them shouted.

“What….who?” Yvonne said, confused. What was that? Was that how they talked? They had somehow communicated without words the first night she had seen them; was that what it sounded like? Why could she hear it now, but not then?”

<When?> Yvonne heard the word clearly, but not with her ears. Only seconds prior to that, she couldn’t have imagined “hearing” anything without using her ears. The alien’s eyes were still fixed on her, his gaze so intense she could imagine it producing heat.

“Four days ago,” she whispered. “They never found him.”

The door behind her burst open and more soldiers spilled into the room. One of them pulled her backwards while the rest ringed the bed, guns raised.




******************************************************



Proctor residence




Emily looked down, startled, to find Brivari with his eyes wide open, gripping her wrist. Instinctively she tried to pull away, but his grasp was surprisingly strong for one who had appeared unconscious only moments ago.

“God, you scared me!” Emily exclaimed, her heart beating a tattoo inside her chest. “I’m awfully glad to see you awake, but I’m not going anywhere, so you can let me go."

But the hand gripped harder, and her eyes widened in alarm. “Hybrids,” Brivari whispered in a raspy voice. “What happened?”


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


I'll post Chapter 10 next Sunday.