by David Liss
Activating now, Smelly said.
Jacinto’s eyes went wide. “I’d say that’s working!”
Alice was walking toward me, her hand pushed out, looking like she was trying to find the wall in a pitch-black room. “Let me know if I’m getting warm.”
I moved aside and accidentally knocked into an end table. A framed picture fell forward, smacking against the wood, but Alice seemed completely unaware of it.
Smelly must have seen me notice this. The stealth mode produces a stabilization nimbus, which conceals secondary consequences of your lumbering form. In this mode you could walk on the sands of a beach or through fresh snow and you would still leave no trace of your passing.
“Can they hear me if I speak to them?”
Only if you so request it.
Suddenly, the idea of breaking in Area 51 and stealing a flying saucer didn’t seem quite so daunting. “What about them? Can I conceal them in my nimbus or whatever?”
If they are within two feet, they will also be stealthed, Smelly said.
“Turn the stealth off,” I said.
Yes, master, Smelly answered testily. And not that I don’t like being your cabana boy, but you can activate the suit via your own will. You don’t need to order me around as though you were—and I am laughing as I say this—my superior.
Alice and Jacinto suddenly looked at me in surprise, so I figured I’d popped back into reality for them.
“We’re really going to do this,” Alice whispered.
“You don’t have to,” I told her. “Neither of you does. I mean, even with this suit, the best-case scenario is that I make it to the ship, and it is in working condition, and I fly away from Earth. I’m seriously disliked by one galactic superpower and absolutely hated by the other. Do you guys really want to become fugitives pretty much everywhere in the known universe?”
“I want to see the known universe,” Alice said.
“I understand that, and it’s pretty amazing out there, but it is not so amazing to be hated by billions of sentient beings. It’s not so amazing to have a bigger, meaner, more powerful spaceship try to blow you up. I’ve experienced these things, and I don’t recommend them.”
“But you’re still planning on going,” Jacinto observed.
“I’ve got beings counting on me,” I said. “Someone I care about needs my help, and my father is stuck in an alien prison because of me. I have to go. You don’t. Alice, you’ve been a really great friend, and I don’t like the idea of putting you in danger.”
“I want to help you, Zeke,” she said. “And now that I know what’s out there, I kind of have to see it if I have the chance.”
I understood all those things, and I needed Alice and Jacinto in order to find that ship. If they wanted to go and they understood the risks, I couldn’t refuse their help. I couldn’t even if I hated putting them in danger. I had no idea where I was going or what I needed to do once I got there.
It may interest you to know, Smelly interrupted, that there are five vehicles approaching this location. The address of this domicile is programmed into their handheld computers, and each vehicle contains several armed meat bags.
“How do you know that?” I asked.
My ability to manipulate subatomic particles allows me to tap into your primitive communications systems.
So, Smelly had Wi-Fi. Good to know. “How far away?”
“Less than two of your curiously arbitrary units called miles.”
I felt panic rising up inside me, but I didn’t have time for it. “Jacinto, they’re coming for me.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Government types, I guess, knowingly or unknowingly working for the Phands, maybe. Smelly, do they have helicopters or anything in the air?”
Only automobiles.
“They’re less then two miles out, coming in cars. If we’re going, we need to go now.”
An understanding of the situation seemed to wash over Jacinto’s face, and an expression of determined calm settled in. I saw the look of an experienced soldier, a guy who had faced battle and made it through. I was suddenly glad that this guy was helping me.
I ran into the bedroom and threw my jeans and shirt on over my suit. By the time I came out, maybe thirty seconds later, Jacinto was waving me toward the kitchen.
“Let’s go,” he said. He led us to the garage, where a massive white pickup truck was parked facing out. While Alice got into the front seat and I climbed into the back, Jacinto attached something to the rear of the truck. He then hopped in and hit a button to open the garage door.
“Smelly, can you monitor the approaching cars?
Of course I can. Your inquiry insults me.
“You’re the best, Smelly. Everything about you is super awesome. Which way should we go?”
Instruct the vehicle-operating meat bag to head north from its driveway. And please refrain from offering praise. It is more demeaning than your insults.
“Go north,” I said, “whatever direction that is.”
We pulled out of the driveway, and I heard something rattling behind us. I turned and saw that we were pulling a rusting flat-bed trailer full of lawn-mowing equipment.
“Maybe you should lose all that,” I said. “It’s going to slow us down.”
“It’s for show,” Jacinto explained. “I’ve picked up a bunch of broken equipment over the years, so getting rid of it, when the time is right, is no problem.”
“Then why are you dragging it around?”
Jacinto grinned. “I’m just a guy with a landscaping business. Cops are looking for a kid, right? Maybe a couple of kids? You guys duck down, and all they’ll see is me. I’m just trying to earn a buck, boss.”
The vehicles are diversifying their approach vectors, Smelly told me. There is no way to avoid all of them before slipping their perimeter.
“Which way puts us past the smallest number?” I asked.
Smelly told me a route, and I repeated it to Jacinto. We made it another quarter mile before we saw a dark sedan cruising toward us like a shark.
“Time to disappear,” Jacinto said.
Alice and I ducked while Jacinto slowly passed by the dark sedan. He didn’t look at it or wave or perform innocent bystander. He did his best impersonation of a tired guy on his way from one job to another. After a minute Jacinto said it was all clear, and we sat back up.
“Next stop, Nevada,” he said. “Let’s hope we don’t have any more surprises.”
I looked at the sky for signs of helicopters or flying saucers, but I didn’t see anything. It looked like we were safe. For now.
CHAPTER NINE
* * *
A little more than twenty-four hours later we were in the desert, in a rented van full of camping equipment, ready to break into one of the most secure and secretive military bases in the history of human civilization. To call it a break-in, though, would make it seem much more exciting than what we had in mind. Jacinto’s scheme was for us to get taken into custody.
“If you guys were older,” Jacinto explained as we made the long drive from south Texas to the Nevada desert, “we could have done this the easy way. I’ve got a friend who works with the security subcontractor who handles civilian employees. He could have gotten us on the daily bus out of Las Vegas. But there’s no way they’re not going to notice a couple of thirteen-year-old kids.”
A bus that took us through the front gates would have been a convenient solution. Instead we had to take a more challenging approach. Area 51 was famous throughout the world as the alleged site of alleged research on an alleged UFO that had allegedly crashed outside of Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1940s. We were going disguised as UFO fanatics.
Jacinto was acting like a man who had no plans to return to his old life, which worried me. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him. Even without Smelly monitoring his vital signs for indications of deception or insanity, I could tell that he genuinely wanted to help Alice, but also that he would do anything—e
ven risk spending years in jail—if it meant getting a decent shot at going on an interstellar joy ride in the Area 51 UFO. I trusted that he was on the level, but I also knew I was going to have to disappoint him. Smelly didn’t want Jacinto and Alice coming along because he thought they might slow us down. I had my own reasons: I didn’t want to get them killed. I was heading into a big, dangerous mess, and I didn’t want to drag them along any further than I had to.
Getting out of San Antonio had proved surprisingly easy. Once we were certain we’d lost our pursuers, Jacinto found an empty lot, where he ditched his rusted, useless landscaping equipment. He almost looked on the verge of tears as he unhitched the trailer and abandoned the prop. The stuff was junk, but I understood how he felt. He had been holding on to that equipment for years, waiting for the moment when he would need it, and now that moment was here. There was a kind of sadness in letting something like that go. The trailer full of lawn equipment was like the section of a rocket that is cast off after it has burned its fuel—vital but ultimately disposable.
From there Jacinto drove to the San Antonio airport, where he put the truck in long-term parking, which would help to throw off the pursuers, he said. We took the shuttle to a rental car place, where Jacinto selected a van—probably the last time he would be able to use his credit card—and we were on our way.
“Jacinto,” I told him as we sped west on I-10, “I am incredibly grateful to you for doing this, but you’re spending all this money. Are you going to be okay?”
“We won’t need money where we’re going, right?” he said. “Just credits or whatever.”
“Gold-pressed latinum,” Alice suggested.
I ignored this, not wanting to cover the same old ground again. I’d made my position clear, and Jacinto still wanted to help me. I had to hope they were going to come out of this okay.
Jacinto powered through the long drive, drinking cup after cup of coffee. We stopped only to eat, for frequent coffee-induced bathroom breaks, and once to visit a gigantic sporting goods store to buy camping equipment whose only purpose was to provide a realistic cover story.
I was sprawled out in the back. Alice sat next to Jacinto. Both of us slept a lot. When I wasn’t sleeping, my feelings shifted from fear of getting caught to worrying about my mother to daring to hope that I might actually be able to see Tamret again. Once, Jacinto told us to wake up. He was grinning because the highway turned into a main street that ran through downtown Roswell, New Mexico, where the streetlights were shaped like flying saucers. We drove right past the UFO museum, where Jacinto said he had spent many hours doing research. This whole town thought of the UFOs as something cute, a funny symbol to bring in the tourists. If they’d ever met one of the real monsters who flew around in flying saucers, they might have felt differently.
• • •
After what seemed like an endless amount of driving, we pulled off the desolate Highway 93 onto the even more desolate, and curiously named, Mercury Highway. This was where things started to get a little unsettling. We passed signs letting us know we were getting close to military land. We were warned of missile testing and promised imminent arrest. Jacinto said that there was nothing to worry about and that as long we did not cross onto the base, we would be left alone.
We stopped at a campground called Hawkeye Hill. It was late afternoon by then, and unbelievably hot. As we set up our tents, I downed a couple of bottles of water, which kept me alive, but not particularly quenched. Within five minutes I was sweaty and hot and miserable, and that was with my temperature-controlling high-tech suit under my clothes. For Jacinto and Alice, it was a hundred times worse.
“This place is nothing but ridiculous,” Jacinto said as we worked. “Look how close we are to the base.”
He gestured, and I saw the line of orange signs, spaced maybe fifty yards apart, warning us that we were about to cross into Area 51 and be arrested. They were less than a hundred feet away from the campground, which was absolutely without amenities. The remnants of old cook fires were the only signs that human beings had ever been here before.
“Only the hardest of hard-core Area Fifty-One freaks ever camp here,” Jacinto said. “It’s for the complete wackos, guys who have lost all touch with reality.”
“How did you know about it?” I asked.
He grinned. “Oh, I’ve camped here lots of times. I know the ropes.”
In the distance I could see Humvees crossing back and forth upon the featureless grounds of the base, the sun glinting off their side mirrors. They left trails of dust like comets.
Once the tents were set up, we crawled into the largest one to escape the relentless desert sun. We drank from our canteens and ate sandwiches we’d bought at the last little town we’d gone through. The bread was stale and the cheese hard, but I wasn’t complaining. From that point on it would be nothing but food bars.
“I need some sleep if I’m going to be any use, but I’ll wake up some time after dark. Then we move.”
“You think we’ll actually be able to make it very far?” Alice asked.
“No,” Jacinto told her. “The soldiers haven’t taken their eyes off of us since we stopped. They’ll be watching us with night vision. I’d say we’ll get maybe ten feet onto the base before we’re arrested.” Jacinto smiled at me. “Then it’s time for you to do your thing, or we’re all going to jail.”
“Are we up for this, Smelly?” I asked.
No, it said, I’ve let you bring us out to this desolate wilderness for the pleasure of taking in the scent of your perspiring companions. Of course I’m up for it.
Jacinto slept until about midnight, and we packed up our equipment and were on our way in less than half an hour. The temperature had dropped significantly, and it was now quite cold, though the suit kept me well insulated.
It hardly mattered. We weren’t going to be outside long. The point, Jacinto explained to us, was to convince the soldiers that we were wackos. We had to be believable wackos, which meant we needed to be carrying provisions and maps and other hiking equipment. We had to look like people who believed we could cross the outlying Nevada desert, slip onto a military base, and reach buildings that were miles inside the perimeter.
“Once they stop us,” Jacinto said, “they’ll ask us questions, so just focus on how angry you are that the government’s not telling us what it knows about aliens. Unless they decide we’re actual terrorists, they’ll eventually call the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Department to come take us to jail. That shouldn’t be a problem. Lincoln County is big, but the population is small, and it’s the middle of the night. There aren’t going to be too many officers on duty. It should be at least an hour before anyone arrives, so we’ll have plenty of time.”
I started to take off my outer clothes, but I didn’t get past the top button of my shirt before a disembodied arm appeared out of nowhere and slapped the back of my hand.
Don’t bother, Smelly said, as his floating arm illusion vanished. The suit works fine with your outer clothes on.
“Then why did you let me take them off when—”
Because it was funny, okay? Don’t you primitive ooze-balls understand humor?
I turned to the others. “Apparently, I don’t have to take off the outer clothes,” I told the others.
Jacinto laughed. “Man, your AI is funny.”
We headed out into the night and, as predicted, we had not taken more than a few steps past one of the orange warning posts before we heard the rumble of an engine and headlights blinded us. I tried to blink light and sweat out of my eyes—I felt like I needed to see what was going on in order to not do something to get us shot—but it was all a blur. Soldiers were shouting at us, warning us to drop to our knees and put our hands behind our heads or we would be shot. I squeezed my eyes shut and did exactly what they said to do.
There were two of them, pistols in hand, scowling at us as we kneeled in the blinding brightness of the headlights.
The soldiers cuffed our han
ds behind our backs, and they patted us down, looking for weapons. For the record, handcuffs hurt, even if they’re not ridiculously tight. I can’t endorse a life of crime. We were then placed into the back of the Humvee and driven a short distance through the desert to an isolated guard post, a small building with a few workstations and an interrogation room—one I imagined had been used to question many UFO enthusiasts over the years. On our way in, I glanced around, taking note of everything I saw. There were two other soldiers visible at workstations, one filling out paperwork, one playing a game on his phone. We were going to have to deal with them if we planned to escape.
Once we were in the bare room and sitting on metal chairs, another soldier came in and began to question us. He did his best to act like he took us seriously as a national security threat, but it was written all over his face that he thought Jacinto was just another nut, and an irresponsible one at that, taking two kids onto a secure military base. The soldier barked questions at us, like he didn’t know how to ask anything without shouting. Why were we here, who did we work for, what were our intentions?
“We have a right to know the truth!” Jacinto shouted. “You can’t hide it from us any longer.”
“You can’t keep your secrets forever!” Alice shouted, like she actually believed what she was saying. “Why can’t you tell us the truth?”
“The UFO is part of our national heritage,” I said somewhat lamely. “Like the Liberty Bell.”
The soldier was a professional, and he did not roll his eyes.
After an hour of this, it was pretty clear the soldier had decided we were clueless idiots who had put our freedom in jeopardy for no good reason. He left the room for about fifteen minutes and then came back to tell us that we were to be handed over to the civilian authorities.
“What is going to happen to us then?” Alice asked, sounding completely frightened. She was either really worried or she was a terrific actor.
Your friend is attempting to deceive the authority figures, Smelly informed me, as if he guessed what was on my mind. Its heart rate is steady and it shows no sign of secreting its nasty perspiration. That unevolved being does not waver.