Trespassers: a science-fiction novel

by Todd Wynn

  24

  Juniper Hotel:

  a Bed-and-Breakfast

  A few blocks west of downtown, Stewart was standing in the back office of the Juniper Hotel—a proud, 105-year-old bed-and-breakfast. This two-story brick building would be where Stewart would lay his trap.

  “I want one of you upstairs with me . . . and the other down here,” Stewart said to Grizzly, the six-foot-four, 350-pound bear of a man standing in front of him. Grizzly wore a black bandana and ten years worth of beard growth. Next to Grizzly stood a man named Michael-James. He was six feet tall, extra skinny, and starting to go bald in the front, which he offset with a long, scruffy ponytail. He wore a suit that looked as if it had been handed down from a used-furniture salesman. It hung on him in all the wrong ways, but it made him feel dressed for success, as did his fingerless leather gloves.

  “I’ll go with you,” Grizzly replied, “and Michael-James can stay down here.”

  Grizzly and Michael-James were bounty hunters. In the good old days, the Limestone Group routinely hired bounty hunters to add muscle to field operations. Bounty hunters were a special breed. They were efficient and low maintenance. Most important, they didn’t make a big fuss over encounters with aliens. Even if they did brag over a beer at the local pub about handcuffing an extraterrestrial, no one ever took them seriously. It was all just part of their bounty hunter charm, which made them perfect for the job.

  Loyalty was another admirable trait of the bounty hunter. They were faithful to whoever was paying the bill. And it was hundred-dollar bills they fed on. Stewart was convinced that a bounty hunter would step over a laundry bag full of twenties to get to an envelope of hundreds. Maybe it was something about Benjamin Franklin’s grin. As long as the hundred-dollar bills kept coming, you were the boss. And they were comfortable with the no-questions-asked style.

  Stewart had worked with Grizzly several times over the past five years and was glad to find him available today. When Stewart phoned the man, he got the impression Grizzly had been sleeping, but he was awake now and happy to jump into action when Stewart informed him that he needed four bounty hunters to meet him at the Juniper Hotel. Grizzly said he was available and recommended a fellow bounty hunter named Michael-James as the second. As for the third and fourth, Grizzly suggested that Michael-James could bring along his two nephews, who weren’t actually bounty hunters, but who had helped out on a few hunts in the past. Stewart agreed, sight unseen—he needed somebody fast.

  By the time Grizzly and Michael-James (plus his nephews) arrived—via a beat-around Harley-Davidson Softail and a 1984 primer-gray Camaro, respectively—Stewart’s team had already set up shop in the hotel. Stewart had explained the situation to the hotel owner—at least a sanitized version. Stewart explained that he was with the Limestone Deposit Survey Group, a federal agency. He told the man that some expensive geological equipment had been stolen, and that his team was luring the suspects to this very hotel. Stewart asked to use the facilities with a delicate force: The United States government appreciates your cooperation. And he added a sweetener to the deal: Of course, you will be compensated for the inconvenience. The hotel owner gladly accepted a check for $1,000 and offered to help in any way he could.

  Upstairs, in Room 215, Web sat at a small wooden table, making the final adjustments to the makeshift electronic device that would soon transmit a decoy heart signal. His hands moved with the skill gained from thousands of hours of practice.

  “Make sure the red line is at the top,” he said, to no one there.

  Downstairs, Mindy heard him loud and clear in her earpiece. She was standing atop a wooden chair that she had placed on top of a table against the wall. On her tiptoes she stretched her hand all the way to the ceiling and pushed a tiny black camera into the corner where the ceiling met the wall.

  “Is that good?” she asked.

  “It’ll be perfect,” Web said through the earpiece, “if they’re going to be walking on the ceiling.”

  “So, what are you saying? Lower?”

  “Just point it down,” Web instructed. “Just point the lens down.”

  Normally, placing cameras would be Web’s job. But he was preoccupied with the heart-signal transmitter.

  “How about that?” she asked.

  Web looked from the transmitter over to the iPad on the bed, which still showed a great view of ceiling fans and smoke detectors. “Farther down.”

  Mindy pulled on the little camera, and the image on the iPad tilted into a perfect view of the lobby.

  “That’s good for that one,” Web said. “Now, you can do the bottom corner of the elevator, and then make sure you get the upstairs hallway. And do one outside.” Mindy’s immediate concern, of course, was getting down without twisting an ankle.

  In the back office, New Guy was passing out earpieces. This, too, would have normally been Web’s job.

  “High tech,” Grizzly commented, as he scooped up an earpiece and examined it. “What about the mic?”

  “It’s in there,” Stewart replied.

  “In the earpiece?”

  “Yeah,” Stewart answered, “like you said—high tech.”

  Grizzly grimaced at the tiny device in disbelief.

  “Just talk normally,” Stewart said. “It’ll hear you.”

  The nephews walked across the image on the iPad and entered the back office. They were both wearing white t-shirts and blue jeans. They were coming off a smoke break—since Michael-James didn’t allow smoking in his Camaro.

  “What’d we miss?” one of them said.

  “Put these in your ear,” Michael-James insisted, pointing to New Guy’s hand. His tone seemed to say stop interrupting the adults, and don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.

  Stewart laid out the plan, positioning Michael-James and one nephew downstairs with New Guy. Grizzly and the other nephew would go upstairs with Stewart. He explained that there were four targets and that if two went upstairs and two stayed downstairs, they would be in position to grab all four trespassers at once.

  “But wait for the signal over the radio,” Stewart commanded. “We want to be in sync.”

  He explained that if all four trespassers happened to go upstairs, New Guy, Michael-James, and a nephew were to follow, so that all the trespassers could be captured on the second floor.

  “Do they have anything we should know about?” Michael-James asked. It was his first time with this sort of thing. “Any tentacles or claws or—”

  “They’re human,” Stewart said, “just like you and me . . . except they were born on a different planet; that’s all.”

  The nephews stopped chewing their gum, and the constant dumbfounded looks on their faces suddenly had purpose. Michael-James had failed to tell them about the nature of today’s operation.

  “It’ll be fine,” Stewart advised. “Just treat them like any other bounty.”

  Two-point-three miles away, Bruner was walking the streets of downtown Juniper, looking for anything out of the ordinary. In reality, he was getting some fresh air and giving himself an opportunity to think. But if a clue turned up, he would take it. He saw Nathan's Hardware, but it meant nothing to him. He saw Ruby’s Diner and Larry Greyson Memorial Park. These, too, meant nothing to him. He even saw the large metal statue of the galloping horse. What he saw was a small town going about its day, with no alien activity. He wondered whether people preferred it that way. Would they even want him to find what he was looking for? Bruner had a drive to find the truth, whether people wanted it or not.

  He gazed at the roof tops and felt overwhelmed by the brick and mortar staring down at him. This was what his rut looked like: a canyon with walls too high to conquer. More than aliens, more than proof that his hunches were right, more than anything else, Bruner was searching for two good days in a row . . . then maybe a third. He knew he couldn’t indulge in this type of self-pity for long, but he was enjoying it for the moment.

  On the face of the building in the distance . . . a
broken window. Something seemed very out of place about it. Was it a clue? Maybe. He crossed the road to take a closer look.

  He entered the restaurant and made it past the empty hostess stand—which was guarded only by the magazine this time—and he walked to the back of the restaurant, finding the same door that Jin had discovered yesterday. Bruner climbed the stairs and found the room with the broken window. He surveyed the broken glass on the floor and noticed how the dust had been disturbed. He peered out the hole in the window and into the open sky. Something had landed here, and that something had been carried away. This wasn’t proof of anything, but it made Bruner feel he was very close.

  It had never been proof that drove Bruner. It was something very different. It was a feeling that he somehow knew aliens existed.

  Bruner strolled back downstairs and asked the hostess what she knew about the broken window. She told him she hadn’t seen a thing and she didn’t remember anyone going up there or coming down. Bruner suspected she wasn’t the observant kind.

  “Did you see me go up there and come down?” he asked.

  She didn’t have an answer, and that was exactly Bruner’s point.

  25

  The Search

  for the Heartbeat

  Stewart peered through the drapes, surveying the quiet street below. He was in Room 215. It was decorated with antique furniture and a nineteenth-century motif, complete with a hand-stitched quilt covering the bed, candle lamps, and paintings of Early American farms.

  Grizzly and a nephew stood next to the door. Mindy sat at a table across from Web, who was still working on his device. Mindy monitored the iPad’s display of four cameras: the lobby, the elevator, the hallway, and the street entrance. All were quiet.

  Web leaned back in his chair, folded his arms, and started nodding as he looked over the prototype. Stewart knew him well enough to know exactly what that meant.

  “It’s finished?” Stewart asked.

  Web turned to Stewart, still nodding.

  “So, it’s signalling, now?”

  A smile stretched across Web’s face. Stewart stepped closer and the others followed, all eyes focused on the machine.

  “What is it?” Grizzly asked.

  “It’s a heart-signal generator,” Stewart said. “It’s going to bring them right to us. You see, these trespassers are searching for someone, and they’re using a heart-signal tracker to find him. What this machine does is put out a signal on every frequency, so they’ll pick it up and come right to us.”

  “That’s not how it works,” Web countered. “It actually alternates between the high and low range of the frequency spectrum, confusing the tracking device into thinking it’s receiving a match for the frequency it has been calibrated to detect.”

  “It’s still going to lead them right to us, right?”

  Web nodded.

  “Does it work?” Grizzly asked.

  “Let’s find out,” Web replied, as he reached for the power switch at the base of the machine. The device was circular and had the general appearance of a tiny football stadium. At least, that’s how Stewart saw it. This image didn’t dilute the importance of the moment, as Web gently rocked the lever into position. There was a rattle as the device warmed up, then a steady pulsing as it reached full capacity.

  Stewart and Web smiled. Then Grizzly’s voice broke in with a cold douse of common sense. “Does it work, though?” he repeated.

  The man had a valid point. There was no way to know for sure that it was doing its job. Nonetheless, the little stadium continued to pulse.

  Seven-point-one miles away, Dexim and his team were having doubts about their own tracking device, as they traveled along an old country road in the borrowed Ford Edge.

  “It works,” Tobi said, reading the concern on Lyntic’s face. Lyntic nodded and turned back around to face forward in the front passenger’s seat. She still wasn’t convinced, though.

  The heart-signal tracker was balanced on Jin’s knees in the back seat, and it was his job to let everyone know when the light on the device began to pulse, indicating that the signal had been acquired. Jin watched the little light—dead as a doornail, not even a flicker. What if this thing really doesn’t work, he thought.

  “It works,” Tobi repeated, this time to Jin. He sounded more confident each time he said it.

  In all actuality, the team was not relying on this thing. If they failed to locate her signal, Lyntic had several photographs of their target, which had been converted to two-dimensional images on opaque paper to conform to Earth standards. These could be shown around to the locals to pick up a lead the old-fashioned way. Finding the girl’s heart signal was merely a shortcut that could save days of looking.

  As Dexim held the car within the faded lines of the old asphalt road, he allowed himself a rare luxury: he imagined things going well. He pictured the tracker leading them right to her. He envisioned a quick and painless explanation, followed by a smooth exit from the planet.

  Dexim couldn’t hold this dream for long. Allowing that the tracker would find her, there were still bound to be complications. It was not an easy thing they were going to tell her—that she wasn’t who or what she thought she was. Who knows how she might react? She might not accept it. She might refuse to go with them. Dexim wondered how he would react if he were in her position.

  When the Ford Edge finished its systematic search of the back roads with no luck, it continued onto the interstate to try a larger loop of the area. Traffic was heavy, but flowing. Driving on Earth was not like navigating a spaceship. There was a moment-to-moment decision-making requirement that didn’t exist with space travel, and Dexim was getting a workout, keeping his eyes on the lane, on his mirrors, and on cars buzzing past.

  “Are you sure this is food?” Jin grimaced, as he inspected the gray meat between the two buns he held in his hands, as if it were a science project. Dexim had made a pit stop at a fast-food drive-thru, and the car was filled with the sound of meals being unwrapped.

  “You don’t have to eat it.” Dexim laughed. “I just wanted you to get the full experience—this being your first time on the planet.”

  “I don’t see anything wrong with it,” Tobi said, chewing a mouthful of his own double cheeseburger.

  Lyntic stuck with fries and a milkshake. Jin—not feeling that adventurous after all—folded his burger back into its wrapper and placed it on the floor.

  He heard Dexim turn the blinker on, followed by the pulsing rhythm of the turn signal. Jin watched out the window as the car drifted into the neighboring lane. The skyline of buildings rolled across the horizon, and Jin was struck by the countless windows. They reminded him of the window of his childhood hut, where he had watched so many cars pass by. He realized he was now one of those splendid travelers, dashing off to some great adventure. A satisfied grin should have come across his face. It was absent.

  Jin thought he would escape his sorrows by leaving them behind, crawling out from under them like a snake shedding its old skin. But bouncing against the car door with the slow, steady contours of the road, Jin finally realized that you don’t leave your sorrows behind. You take them with you. It was somehow comforting to know that he would actually have to deal with his sorrows, instead of running from them. After all, they were very familiar, like an old faithful friend.

  The car had finished getting over, but the sound of the blinker kept pulsing. Jin shifted his head to see the dashboard. The flashing green light that accompanied the blinker was nowhere to be seen. Yet, clear as day: blink-blink . . . blink-blink . . . blink-blink.

  Actually, it was more like beep-beep . . . beep-beep . . . beep-beep. And it wasn’t coming from the dashboard. It was coming from Jin’s lap. It was the tracking device.

  “I got it,” Jin called out, still watching the monitor. “I got her!”

  Dexim’s foot was quickly on the brake, not because of the exciting news, but because of the stopped traffic in front of him. The entire car shifted from the
hard braking. Lyntic’s seatbelt caught her, and she instinctively threw her hand over the fast-food packages on the console, trying to keep them from falling. She was mostly successful, except for one fry container tipping over and ralphing its contents all over the passenger’s floor. Tobi was still chewing his burger, as his head rocked forward and tapped the back of the driver’s seat. He didn’t seem to mind. He didn’t even stop chewing.

  Jin held the tracking device in place as his body strained forward. His eyes shifted to the windshield where he saw brake lights and the uncomfortably close trunk of a red Cadillac.

  “Holy shit,” were the words that rolled out of Dexim’s mouth, riding on a wave of adrenaline. His palms held a death grip on the steering wheel and his foot still pinned the brake pedal to the floor. After a few breaths, the words rolled out again. “Holy shit.” This was an expression that he had picked up from his many travels to the States. He had heard it on television and in movies. He had heard it in real life. It had become natural to him. And in times like these, only natural words would come.

  Images quickly appeared in Dexim’s head, images of what would have happened if they had drifted three inches farther before coming to a stop, if they had hit the Cadillac. The police would have been called, and his carload of aliens would have fallen under the suspicious eye of a law-enforcement officer. He certainly dodged a bullet.

  The noisy excitement in the car slowly died down as everyone settled back into their seats. Lyntic let out a sigh of relief. If Dexim had rear-ended that Cadillac, she would have felt just as guilty. That’s the way it works when you’ve been a lifelong team. You don’t suddenly abandon ship and point a finger.

  Everyone’s ears began to work again, and what they heard was a faint beep-beep . . . beep-beep . . . beep-beep.

  “Did everyone hear what I said?” Jin asked, slightly annoyed that his big moment had been overshadowed. Dexim and Lyntic’s heads rolled around the edges of their seats, their eyes fixing squarely on Jin.