The Third Rescue

by Jay Mackey

One of the blue shirts was clearly the leader, talking to the cops, flashing what CJ assumed was a badge. He seemed to be taking over, and some of the cops weren’t real happy about it.

  After that there was more confusion. The blue shirts ushered CJ, along with his newly discovered parents, his grandparents, Penny and her parents, and Oval, to the parking lot area near the front of the lab. They were told to wait, and not to talk. One blue shirt stood nearby, holding a large gun, and staring at them. At least they took the handcuffs off Noga.

  CJ stood with his mother holding one hand. She was quietly crying. Nini was holding CJ’s mom’s other hand, and she was crying too. Someone found Oval a chair from inside the office so he could sit down. Penny stood with her arms crossed, watching everything carefully.

  The blue shirts seemed to be most interested in Zeus’s lander. They referred to it as a plane. They asked all the cops if they saw the plane. None that CJ could hear said they got a good look at it, although many said they saw it leaving.

  CJ didn’t hear any questions about who shot who, or why they were shooting, or even who anybody was. Also strange—none of CJ’s friends or family were asked anything, at least as long as the cops were still around.

  After what looked like a contentious argument between the head blue shirt and several cops, the police cars all left, leaving only the blue shirts to deal with the carnage.

  And deal with it they did. Throwing the body of Big Man into one of the black SUVs, picking up shell casings from all the gunfire, picking up stray debris and broken glass, they cleaned up.

  Finally, the man who seemed to be the head of the blue shirts came over and said, “We’ll be leaving now. Please follow my men over to our vehicles.”

  CJ knew that something didn’t feel right. It hadn’t for a while, at least since these blue-shirted men showed up and took over from the police, throwing the cops out like they were some children who happened to be in the way. Telling them to keep everything about this whole event quiet, because it wasn’t what it seemed.

  “No way we’re going anywhere with you,” CJ said, stepping in front of his mother, feeling very protective. He wasn’t going to lose her again. Or any of them. This wasn’t safe.

  Blue Shirt looked at him like he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. He frowned, pointed, but seemed speechless.

  “Jack told us about you,” CJ said. “You tried to kidnap us at the coffee shop. Jack said it was because you were protecting secrets, afraid something might happen.” CJ felt the cold steel fear in his stomach ease just a bit. “Well, guess what. Something did happen. Right here.”

  “No, kid,” said Blue Shirt, “you have no idea what you’re talking about.” He was starting to look a little pissed.

  “But I do,” said CJ. Off to his left, Penny’s father looked a little confused. He heard Noga make a grunting noise behind him that he took for a sign of approval.

  “You’re going to do whatever you have to do to keep this quiet,” continued CJ. “Hide it all. Right?”

  Blue Shirt didn’t respond. He turned to one of the other blue shirts and said, “Get these people into the trucks, NOW!”

  A couple of the blue shirts started toward CJ and the rest of the group. Behind him, CJ heard Nini say, “No,” and then Penny’s dad said, “Wait a minute. What’s going on here? Who are all these people, CJ?”

  CJ said, “These men are trying to take us away in those trucks.”

  Things then got a little more confused. The blue shirts pushed and herded everyone toward the trucks. Everyone talked at once.

  Penny’s mother said, “But they’re the government.”

  CJ responded, “That’s the problem. They’re government. They want to keep us quiet.”

  One of the blue shirts pushed Oval a little too hard, knocking him off balance with his crutches, and he fell to the ground, grumbling, “Damn it, I’m not going with you.”

  Then there was a loud screech: Penny, yelling, “STOP,” at the top of her lungs.

  Everyone froze in place and stared as Penny pushed past her parents to come face to face with the head blue shirt, who glared at her.

  “You want to keep this hidden, keep us all quiet, right?” she said to him.

  “This is national security, girlie,” Blue Shirt said, reaching out to grab her arm.

  You could see that Penny didn’t take that well, as her face turned even redder than it had been before. She yanked her arm away.

  “It’s important that no one knows what has happened here, right?” she said. “Or what is happening right now?”

  “Do you know?” Blue Shirt said. “Because most of these people have no idea. And they’d panic if they knew.”

  CJ stepped forward to stand beside Penny. “Most of these people know already. They’re part of it. And the others will know soon. Because I’ll tell them, or my mother will. Or my grandmother.”

  “Wait, you’re the kid Blankenship wanted?” asked Blue Shirt.

  “Yeah, that’s me. So he could experiment on me like he did my grandmother.” CJ stood his ground.

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Blue Shirt. Like he didn’t believe it. Or at least, didn’t want to believe it.

  Penny again. “If you’re trying to keep this secret, it won’t do any good to lock us up.”

  “Why is that?” Blue Shirt said. He caught himself quickly, following with “We’re not locking you up.”

  “Bull,” said CJ. “You locked Jack up. For years.”

  “Goddamn it, kid,” said Blue Shirt, grabbing him. “Get in the damn truck.” Turning to his men, he yelled, “Get them moving!”

  Penny yelled, “IT’S TOO LATE.” She reached into her shirt and pulled out her cell phone. “I’ve had this running since this whole thing started.” Holding the phone in Blue Shirt’s face, she said, “I grabbed my phone from the office where they were left when we came in, and stuck it in my sports bra, with the camera pointed out. I’ve been live streaming everything that’s happened. The gun battle. CJ meeting his parents and great-great-grandfather. The aliens taking off. Cops. Blue shirts. All of it.”

  She turned the phone around and stood next to Blue Shirt, like she was taking a selfie. “Say hello, Mr. Government man. Lots of people are watching you.”

  Blue Shirt didn’t say hello. He angrily grabbed the phone and jabbed at it. Then he handed it to one of the other blue shirts.

  “Turn this off,” he said. “Erase that recording.”

  Penny grinned. “You can’t erase it. It’s been live the whole time. It’s been shared and joined by so many people, you’ll never stop it now.”

  Oval, who was still sitting on the ground, said, “Shit. It’s gone viral.” He had apparently found his phone too. He was fiddling with it and held it up. “Check out #alienslandinginvegas. Whoo! You’re famous, Penny.”

  “And so are you, Mr. Government man,” she said.

  64

  Nevada, April 2018

  There was a lot of standing around after that. Blue Shirt walked away and talked on his phone, waving his hands in the air and at times yelling so loud CJ could hear what he was saying, which was mostly curse words. CJ helped Oval get up off the ground and got him over to the chair again, where he could sit down and get off his crutches. Oval then kept everyone up to date on the latest numbers for Penny’s video.

  “You’re over 5,000 views,” he said. And then just a little later, “Over 10K! Whoo hoo.”

  Penny tried to keep a close eye on Blue Shirt, but was kept close to the others by the other blue shirts, who made sure no one wandered off.

  CJ gave Penny a big hug. He almost kissed her, but pulled back at the last minute. Based on the funny look on her face, Penny knew CJ was going to kiss her and was embarrassed by him. Either that, or disappointed. CJ wasn’t sure—there were so many emotions running right then, his own as well as everyone else’s.

  There was more crying. Lots of crying. Nini and Ann, particularly, couldn’t stop crying and hugging. Gus and CJ�
�s dad were very concerned about what was happening, and peppered CJ with questions. Penny’s parents were still confused, and crowded Penny, asking her who was who, and why the government was the bad guy here.

  After what seemed a very long time, Blue Shirt came toward the group, looking very upset. “Congratulations, folks. You’re in the movie business.”

  He waved to the rest of the blue shirts, yelling, “Let’s go, let’s go.” And in short order, they were gone.

  As the last of the black SUVs pulled away, Oval yelled, “Hey, he was right. They didn’t waste any time. Look.” He held up his phone, as if everyone could see it. Realizing his error, he pulled the phone back and read, “Caught on the set of the new blockbuster, #alienslandinginvegas. There’s a picture from Penny’s video, maybe from the gun battle. It’s a little blurry.”

  He looked up, then back at his phone. “Oh, here’s another post: ‘Actor Web Spaulding with a fan at the secretive movie #alienslandinginvegas, now shooting.’ It shows Penny taking a selfie with our blue-shirted friend.”

  “Web Spaulding?” said Penny. “I’ll bet a million dollars his name isn’t Web Spaulding.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Gus. “Looks like the government is going to discredit your whole video, and anything any of us want to say about what happened by saying it was all a movie shoot. So nobody is going to believe us.”

  CJ asked, “Do we care? As long as they leave us alone?”

  Gus nodded. “That’s all we’ve ever done—kept our heads down and didn’t call attention to ourselves.”

  “I guess,” said CJ. “But what about Jack? Is Blankenship going to be punished for shooting him? And how about the government keeping Jack locked up for years? And me. I shot two men. And Penny shot one. Shouldn’t we have to answer for that, even if it was in self-defense?”

  Nini looked at him and said, “Are you looking for revenge? For justice? I hope not. I hope you can just live your life.”

  CJ was having a hard time with this, but at the same time he felt very lucky to be with family—more family than he ever dreamed of.

  Penny seemed to have hit the wall. Her confident manner disappeared, and she cried openly. “I shot a man,” she said to her mother, who tried to comfort her.

  Penny wanted to ride home with CJ, but there wasn’t room in Jack’s car, so they gave each other long hugs before climbing into separate cars. Oval rode with Penny and her parents and Gus drove Jack’s car with Nini, CJ and his parents.

  As they drove off, CJ, nestled in between his parents in the back seat, turned to his mother, wiped his eyes, and said, “I have so many questions . . .”

  Author’s Note

  Thank you for reading The Third Rescue. I hope you enjoyed it. Please consider leaving a review on Amazon or Goodreads. The review doesn’t need to be long or complicated; just a sentence or two is fine. Reader recommendations are critical for an independent author like me, to help us reach more readers and to keep writing more stories.

  Acknowledgments

  I’d like to thank, first, my wife for putting up with me, sequestered in my office, trying to write something that somebody will want to read. She’s always the first to read my completed manuscripts, and no matter how bad those early drafts are, she never criticizes them.

  My editor, Lynda Dietz, did an amazing job of cleaning up the manuscript, correcting not only my errors, but alerting me to inconsistencies, pointing out my tendency to overuse various words, and, in total, making the book better than it was.

  My cover designer, Elizabeth Turner Stokes, made the book look terrific.

  My beta readers, Marisa Trigger, Mickey Miles, and Rebecca Clark, gave me valuable feedback, and also some much needed words of encouragement.

  And finally I’d like to thank the friends and family who’ve read and commented on the various manuscripts I’ve foisted on them over the years. Some of those early drafts were very rough. I’ve always appreciated the support.

  About the Author

  Jay Mackey grew up in Montana. As you probably know, nearly every child growing up in Montana about that time had his or her own horse. They were useful for things like riding into town, getting to school in the morning, and for tying up outside the local saloon. Unfortunately, Jay didn’t have his own horse. Aside from that one thing, his childhood seemed pretty typical for a city/suburban child, even if the city wasn’t quite as large as some.

  After picking up a couple of degrees, he moved to Cincinnati for work. There he met and married the love of his life, and they’ve been very fortunate to have raised two brilliant children. Jay’s career has been mostly in advertising.

  Currently, he lives in Cincinnati with his wife, where they enjoy a stunning view of the Ohio River.

  Connect with Jay at:

  jaymackey.com—email jay@jaymackey.com

  facebook.com/thewriterjay

  twitter.com/writerjaymackey