by Chris Lowry
“How long was I out?
“Just a few minutes.”
“What did I miss?”
Rob pointed to the large pile of flaming debris.
“That was our ride.”
“Another helicopter? I only saw two.”
“UFO.”
She studied him for a moment and touched the tender gash on her forehead.
“Maybe I'm not the only one who took a mild concussion,” she said.
“Come on,” she climbed up and offered him a hand. “I guess we're walking.”
Jodi and Rob kicked up tiny twirls of dust that drifted off with the smoke as they began walking down the dirt road.
They walked for an hour, then two, turning onto a main road.
The only way they could tell the difference was this road had two lanes instead of one.
It also had recent tire tracks in the hard dirt, made visible in the faint starlight as a different color on the ground.
Jodi trudged in front of Rob until a growing see of headlights brightened behind them.
She pulled him off to the side of the road and put a hand on her pistol. She wasn’t sure if it was friendlies, or someone else sent to kill them.
The headlights were blinding as it picked them out of the darkness.
No shots rang out, so she assumed that was a good start.
A mud covered pickup truck pulled over onto the shoulder and an old man reached over to crank down the passenger window.
“Need a ride? Hop in back.”
No questions. Just a friendly offer. They hopped in back.
8
Jodi and Rob sat on the curb outside of a dusty phone booth.
Jodi pulled a locket from under her shirt, wiped dirt off of the edges and opened it up, looking at the smiling black and white photo of a man inside.
He's ruggedly handsome with tired eyes, and that chin thrust so common in G-men.
“Who’s the suit?” Rob asked.
“Dad.”
“Where is he?”
She didn't answer him.
“Oh-” he said.
“He was with the government too.”
“He looks it. No offense.”
“He never followed orders,” she told him.
“Subsequently, he was killed in the line of duty.”
“That explains it.”
She hid the locket under her shirt.
“You may think so, but it’s more than that,” she said.
“There’s a pattern in everything, if you look hard enough to find it. Orders simplify the pattern.”
“I think it’s the chaos theory. Everything that can go wrong, will.”
“That's not chaos theory, that's Murphy’s law.”
“That too,” he said.
A taxi cab pulled up. The driver glanced over at them, then laid into his horn.
Jodi slipped the hem of her coat aside as she stood and revealed her holster to him.
The cabbie stared at her with wide eyes.
She reached over and moved the other side of her coat to show him the silver badge clipped to her belt.
He nodded.
She hauled Rob up and shoved him into the back of the cab. She did a good job at ignoring his protests.
9
Rob spent the next few minutes staring out the window and watched the dusty countryside whiz by.
“What next?”
“My orders are-” Jodi started.
“Your orders are going to get me killed. Just tell me where I’m supposed to be. I’ll meet you there.”
“You don’t leave my sight.”
“Come on, you can trust me.”
“Like you trust me?” she said.
“You haven’t been shot at yet.”
“They’re not shooting at me.”
He started at her while that sank in.
No one had taken a shot at her except when she put herself between him and the guns aimed his way.
He wondered why anyone would shoot him. Sure, he could be a bit belligerent, especially in traffic which was one of the reasons he cycled to work.
That and the suspended license for one little incident of road rage.
Still being an asshole in traffic wasn't a reason to kill anyone.
He went back to the landscape outside of the window as his mind raced.
10
The cab pulled up to the edge of a private airstrip hunkered down at the end of a private road.
“Here,” Jodi ordered him to stop.
She paid the cabby with neatly folded bills and climbed out of the cab with Rob.
She led him to a hanger over to one side.
The door was open and a small Gulfstream Jet was parked half out of the hanger, the stairs folded down.
“I don’t like this,” he said.
“So you said. But my orders are-”
“Screw your orders.”
Rob marched away from the empty hanger.
He searched the empty runway, the deserted tarmac.
Jodi moved past him toward the plane.
She studied the cockpit window for a moment, then whipped around to Rob.
“Don't say it,” he sighed as he saw her eyes.
“Run!” she screamed.
She sprinted toward him and grabbed his arm.
They tripped over each other as he tried to turn around and match her momentum, and she struggled to drag him up to speed with her.
Behind them, black clad commandos spilled out of the body of the plane.
They tramped down the steps and raced after Rob and Jodi.
She spun Rob toward the gate at the long private road.
Two black vans squealed to a stop and formed a V shape that blocked the gate and road.
Jodi hauled Rob toward the field.
Commando's popped up from hidden foxholes and started herding them.
“Hanger!” screamed Rob and pointed to another hanger across the way.
Jodi pulled her gun to cover him.
“Go!” she shouted.
She chased after Rob for a moment and noted the Commando's weren't shooting, they were keeping a path to the hanger open.
“It’s a trap!” she yelled at his retreating back.
The Hanger doors rolled back. A line of eight Commandos stood there, guns up and pointed at Rob. He stumbled to a halt.
“It’s a trap,” he said in a dramatic whisper to Jodi as she stepped up next to him.
“Genius.”
They stared as a man stepped from behind the wall of guns facing them.
He was tall, bald and scarred. Lines crisscrossed his head and face like a net of knives had landed on him.
They were thin, narrow and uneven.
He smirked at the duo and waved them through the door.
“I'm glad you could make it,” he said in a gravelly voice that made Rob want to clear his throat.
“Come on in.”
Rob and Jodi raised their hands up over their heads and walked into the dark hanger.
11
The hanger was a large cavernous space at least a football field wide and two football fields deep.
Plastic panels in the roof were spaced every ten feet so to take advantage of the sun and natural light, supplemented by Xenon work lights strung up between the skylights.
Rob stopped halfway through the door.
A large alien spaceship hovered in the middle of the hanger, surrounded by four black F14's.
Two Troop Transports, four government issue sedan's and two Black Suburban’s are dwarfed underneath the flying saucer.
“Shit,” he said.
“Is that?”
“Impressed,” said the scarred man.
A name patch on his black commando gear read RIGGS, though that wasn't his real name.
It was good enough for this assignment.
“It's not ours...yet,” he continued.
“It's real?” Jodi asked Rob.
“Told you.”
/> He blanched and moved to cower behind
her.
“Are you hit?”
Rob nods toward the underbelly of the ship and tries to cower lower.
“Nordes,” he said.
Jodi turned back to the ship as a thin opening spread on the hull.
Five tall thin blond humanoids dressed in dull black jumpsuits march in lockstep out the saucer.
Each of them was armed with wicked looking oversized blaster rifles.
They could have been clones since they all looked exactly alike.
Not quite Viking or Norse, though she could see why he called them that.
There was a Scandinavian leaning to the way they looked.
“What's a Norde?” she asked.
Riggs grabbed Rob by the collar and jerked him from behind Jodi.
“A Norde is our friend.”
He dragged Rob toward the alien war party.
“And they want to talk to you.”
Jodi reached for Rob, but a Commando grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back.
“Don't move,” he said.
Riggs led Rob out to the middle of the hanger and abandoned him on the concrete floor.
The Commandos backed away to line the wall in a single file.
“Crow!” Jodi screamed.
The Nordes floated toward Rob and surrounded him.
The leader raised his blaster rifle and aimed it at Rob's head.
Rob leaped at him and jerked the rifle from his hands.
The laser made a fizzing sound as red bolts shot around the circle.
Rob shot two Nordes and leaped over the leader.
He landed and blasted a third alien.
Jodi grabbed the Commando holding her arm and flipped him across her back.
She jammed a knee into his throat and took his weapon.
Riggs shouted and aimed his rifle at her.
Rob turned the blast rifle onto the Commando's.
He sliced through the men lined up against the wall before they can shoot back.
Riggs ran for the open doorway firing over his shoulder as his boots slammed on the pavement.
The Norde leader retreated to the hovering saucer.
A Norde popped up and fired at Rob.
He sidestepped the blast bolt and shot back, pegged the alien in the chest.
The hanger was silent. There was no one left to shoot, but Jodi scooped up a couple of magazines from the Commando's slumped against the wall.
Rob grabbed her hand and dragged her up.
“Come on,” he growled. His voice was different, lower.
They ran for one of the Suburban’s and he shoved her behind the wheel.
“Drive.”
Rob climbed in the back seat and lowered the passenger side window.
“Where did you?!”
“Go! Go!” he screamed.
The bottom of the saucer split in half and Nordes spilled out like angry hornets.
Rob leaned out of the window and opened fire with the blaster rifle. Each shot fizzed through the air and nailed the target.
Jodi gunned the Suburban and raced through the open hangar doors.
They bounced up the dirt road toward the gate.
“Gate!” she screamed.
Rob dropped the rifle and ducked inside of the truck.
The Suburban crashed through the gate and sent metal flying.
Rob climbed over the front seat.
“We may need that rifle,” said Jodi.
An explosion rocked the truck.
Jodi gripped the wheel and fought to maintain control.
“Kill switch,” he said.
She nodded and concentrated on the road.
12
They hit the Interstate exit and Jodi swung the truck to the East.
“Think we were followed?” she asked.
“They know where we're going.”
“This might have tracker or kill switch in it,” she said.
He shook his head.
“They would have used it already.”
“What's going on? How did you do that?”
“Do what?”
“The Rambo Terminator action at the airport.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You- killing aliens like some gymnastic ninja alien hunter?”
“Gymnastic Ninja Alien Hunters? I think that was a Z movie on Scify one year.”
She studied him a minute.
He wasn't kidding. Or maybe he was kidding about the movie, but there was something different in the way he held himself. He looked almost deflated.
“What do you remember?
“We were at the airport, the men in black showed up, and-
He stopped talking and stared at her with wide eyes.
“Nordes? Who are they?”
Rob rubbed his face and leaned back into the seat.
“Bad guys. Of galactic proportions. The Bad Guys.”
She waited for him to elaborate but he didn't.
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“It’s happening.”
“What’s happening?
He glanced at her, then looked back at the highway as it stretched behind them.
“I told you I was abducted, a lot. I got picked up by the Grays. That was their ship in the desert. They’ve been visiting since 1947.”
“Roswell?”
He nodded.
“We need to get out of this truck. We attract too much attention.”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“Get off this Interstate. We're too easy to find. That's our priority.”
“And then?”
13
Hitchhiking is a lost art form.
When cars hit their golden age and highways criss-crossed the land, a daring young soul could stick out their thumb and catch a lift almost anywhere.
Then Freeways were built, and cars got faster to keep up with the wide-open road.
Faster cars meant less opportunity for hitching, and toss in a couple of dyed in the wool serial killers, or at least urban legends about unwary travelers either catching said ride or picking up the killer and the result is a fast-moving population who will barely drift away from the shoulder to create enough room to pass, let alone pull to the side to let someone in.
Hitching in the desert was worse.
Open highway stretched for miles as Jodi and Rob marched along the dusty shoulder.
The advantage of the emptiness was they could see anyone coming for miles.
It also meant they could see for miles that no one was coming.
“The Gray’s sent an ambassador to make first contact,” said Rob. “We shot down the ship, tortured the survivors.”
“Great first impression, “ Jodi grunted.
“Foam dummies my ass.”
“The media always gets it wrong. In 1976, an invasion force was headed our way. We were toast. But they got in a fight with the Nordes instead. It saved us.”
“Who are the Gray’s?
“They send scout ships here all the time. Recon us. They picked me up once, we started talking and they told me all of it.
She glanced at him. He doesn’t look like much of anything.
“Why you?”
“Usually you hear about bizarre experiments-”
“Sex with them. Anal probes.”
“Right. Well, I never had it. I mean, never with them,” Rob sputtered.