by Dayton Ward
“Look out!”
Wainwright heard Marshall’s warning from inside the Jeep an instant before sharp cracks split the air, the rifle’s reports echoing off the nearby buildings as bullets tore into the side of the cargo truck. Ignoring his flight cap as it fell from his head, Wainwright ducked behind the side of the Jeep, hearing Marshall yell something he did not understand. He ignored her, pulling back on the .45’s slide and chambering the first round from its magazine before rising up from behind the Jeep. Eyes widening in shock, he saw Lieutenant Pearce lying facedown on the gravel lot. Cardillo still was scuffling with one soldier, whereas a second one was no longer in his field of vision. That left the third trooper, the one with the M1, and Wainwright looked up in time to see that soldier leveling the rifle at him. Ducking back down, he heard the snap of the weapon just before a round slammed through the Jeep’s windshield. He saw that a spiderweb had appeared across the glass, radiating outward from the single hole on the driver’s side of the window. He started to rise from his crouch, hoping to locate the remaining soldier.
“I said to stay down, damn it!” Marshall yelled, scrambling from the Jeep and throwing herself down to the ground. Wainwright noted that she had discarded her black service shoes—impractical as the heels might be for a firefight—before the sound of more weapons fire made him flinch.
Peering over the Jeep’s hood, he caught sight of Cardillo’s driver emerging from his vehicle, .45 in hand. He moved to his left, aiming the pistol at the trooper with the rifle. He fired twice and struck the side of the cargo truck near the other soldier, who ducked but did not move for cover. Instead he turned and aimed his rifle at the driver, firing a single shot that struck the soldier in the chest. He pitched forward, falling against the hood of his Jeep and sliding to the ground.
Wainwright ducked again as the trooper swung the rifle in his direction, hearing the sound of another shot. The encroaching darkness was making it more difficult to see their adversaries. Already the shadows were starting to blend together, the weak illumination offered by single bulbs above the doors to the buildings only exacerbating the worsening visibility problem. Leaning around the front of his Jeep, Wainwright fired one frantic shot, hoping to force the other shooter to seek cover. From his vantage point he saw Cardillo delivering a roundhouse punch to the corporal, sending the other man tumbling to the ground. The soldier started pulling himself to his feet but Cardillo had retrieved the other man’s fallen pistol, backpedaling to give himself room and cover as the trooper with the rifle stepped around the truck and gave chase. Wainwright aimed his .45 at the soldier and fired two quick shots. Both rounds found their mark, striking the soldier in the chest and sending him stumbling into the side of the truck. Despite the pair of direct hits, Wainwright was stunned when the man moved, rolling onto his side.
Huh?
Another pistol fired from his left, and Wainwright felt something whip past his cheek. Recoiling away from the near miss, he dropped to one knee as he caught sight of the third soldier. He was near the front of the cargo truck, using it for cover. Cardillo, his attention focused on the trooper with the rifle, did not see the new threat behind him.
“Captain!” Wainwright shouted, rising to his feet and holding his .45 with both hands as he pulled the trigger. The pistol bucked with each of the three shots he fired, two of the rounds catching the other man in the chest and the third striking him in the neck. The soldier staggered, dropping his weapon before sagging to his knees on the gravel. Cardillo, seeing that the man was down, returned his attention to the other two soldiers, but both of them now were scrambling away, running around the back end of the cargo truck. No sooner did Wainwright lunge from behind the Jeep than the soldier with the rifle reappeared, holding the M1 against his right hip and firing multiple shots in rapid succession.
Wainwright threw himself forward, gritting in pain as his elbows, knees, and palms slid across the lot’s unforgiving gravel. Behind him, he heard bullets ripping once more into the Jeep and even the sound of a tire being punctured. The firing continued, with the soldier now turning his weapon on Cardillo’s Jeep. Rolling to one side, Wainwright extended his right arm and fired again, getting off only one shot before the .45’s slide locked to the rear. He had emptied his magazine. Cursing himself for not keeping better track of his ammunition, he fumbled for the pouch on his cartridge belt. Across the lot, Cardillo was on one knee, aiming his pistol at the soldier. The captain fired two shots and the trooper jumped back behind the truck.
Then more gunfire pierced the air and Wainwright turned to see Marshall, propped against the Jeep’s hood and brandishing a .45. The pistol looked enormous in her smallish hands but she handled the weapon with confidence, gripping it with both hands and controlling its recoil as she fired.
“Nice shooting,” he said. Though it was not typical for female Air Force personnel to carry weapons, it was Blue Book policy for field investigators to be armed while on assignment. Wainwright congratulated himself for opting to interpret the regulation to include Marshall, despite her “official” designation as his secretary.
She snapped off another shot. “Thank my father.”
Retrieving a fresh magazine from the pouch on his belt, Wainwright snuck a look over the hood and saw the trooper pulling back, darting out of sight behind the cargo truck.
“They’re making a run for it!” Wainwright shouted as he exchanged his pistol’s empty magazine for a new one. Hearing the sound of a Jeep’s engine, he pushed himself to his feet and ran for the front of the truck. The other Jeep was pulling away, with two figures in the vehicle’s front seats. The soldier in the passenger seat was aiming the rifle behind them, and Wainwright leapt behind the truck as still more bullets tore into its side.
Son of a bitch!
Hearing the Jeep’s tires leave the gravel and spin on the dirt of the service road, Wainwright lunged from behind the truck and fired his pistol. Plumes of dust and dirt filled the air, concealing the fleeing vehicle’s escape as he emptied the .45’s magazine. The Jeep was gone, the sound of its whining engine already fading in the growing darkness.
“Captain Wainwright!”
He jerked his head at the sound of the summons to see Marshall and Cardillo standing over the body of the fallen soldier, with Marshall frantically waving for him to join them. With one last look down the road where the Jeep was now out of sight, he grunted in frustration before jogging across the lot. Cardillo was training his pistol on the unmoving form of the downed soldier.
But, it was not the soldier.
“What in the name of . . . ?” The rest of his sentence trailed away as Wainwright stepped closer, his gaze fixing on the figure lying on the ground. The first words his brain seemed capable of forming in order to describe what he was seeing were “not human.”
“What is it?” Cardillo asked, his expression a mix of shock and disbelief. “One of those Martians you guys are always supposed to be chasing?”
While possessing at least the general shape and form of a human, the thing had no hair, and its skin was of a ruddy red-brown complexion. Its hands were smaller than a typical adult human’s, with three long, thin fingers flanked by what looked to be a pair of thumbs. There were no ears or nose to speak of, and its cheeks and jawline gave the thing an almost childlike appearance belying what Wainwright instinctively regarded as an obvious adult musculature. Gone was the army soldier’s uniform, with the creature instead wearing a black single-piece form-fitting garment. Strapped across its chest was some kind of harness, supporting a device or gadget that Wainwright did not recognize, but it did draw his attention to one other detail.
“A female?” he asked, moving closer for a better look. The thing’s body suit conformed to its wearer’s physique, and beneath the harness were unmistakable female attributes, at least so far as humans were concerned.
“Looks that way,” Marshall said, her voice containing more than a hint of incredulity. Wainwright had to remind himself that this was her
first time seeing an actual extraterrestrial. This creature, which still seemed to possess several humanlike physical characteristics, reminded him of the Ferengi from Roswell, whose bodies also had as many apparent similarities to humans as they did differences.
“It was able to make itself look human somehow,” Marshall said. “How?”
“No idea,” Wainwright replied. His eyes moved from the creature’s face to the liquid, too dark and thick to be human blood, pooling beneath the supine figure from the wound in its neck. “Damn.” His bullet had killed the alien. He shook his head, angry with himself at the wasted opportunity to question the thing despite knowing he had fired in self-defense. Were the other two soldiers aliens like it? What did they know, and how many more of them were out there? “Are there phones in any of those buildings?”
Cardillo nodded. “Yeah. They all have offices with working phones, wired to the garrison switchboard.”
“Good. We need to report this.” Wainwright already could hear what Professor Carlson might say upon learning of their discovery. Then, remembering what had prompted this mess, he looked to Marshall. “Get the Geiger counter.” Inserting his second—and last—spare magazine into his pistol, he said, “We’re going to check the warehouse.”
• • •
Everything about the building’s interior was unremarkable, with the notable exception of the object in the middle of the floor. So far as Wainwright could tell, it was a spaceship.
“Oh, my God,” Marshall said, dividing her attention between the Geiger counter and what sat before them.
“Holy Christ,” Cardillo said, his voice wavering. When Wainwright looked over at him, he saw that the safety officer’s complexion had gone pale, his eyes wide with astonishment. “It’s a flying saucer, isn’t it? A real, honest-to-God flying saucer?”
That was Wainwright’s first thought. Flanked by tables, tools, and work lights that only served to highlight just how out of place the damned thing appeared to be, it was not saucer shaped. Instead, it was triangular in shape, long and thin and to Wainwright resembling a pie wedge or arrowhead. Perhaps twice the length of a station wagon, the thing certainly looked like some form of vehicle or craft. Its hull or outer skin was a dark gray, though he was unable to make out anything resembling rivets or weld lines. The skin was not reflective, almost absorbing the light cast down upon it from the work lamps, and it looked rough in texture, akin to sandpaper or roofing shingles. Scattered on the floor and the tables situated around the craft were pieces of equipment Wainwright could not begin to identify.
“What’s the Geiger counter saying?”
Waving the device in the craft’s direction, Marshall replied, “This is the radiation source, all right, but the meter’s not doing much more than it was outside. We’re not in any danger, so far as I can tell.”
“Radiation?” Cardillo asked, now looking even more nervous.
“We’ll be okay,” Wainwright said, trying to sound reassuring. “That said, I’m not planning on standing too close to it for very long.” Unable to resist the temptation to get a better look, he stepped forward, the muzzle of his pistol centered on the open compartment taking up almost a third of the craft and set back perhaps three feet from the thing’s forward edge. It resembled a cockpit, or the extraterrestrial equivalent, with a canopy raised to expose a single seat encompassed by a horseshoe-shaped control panel or dashboard. The console was festooned with all manner of buttons and indicators, some bearing labels in a script Wainwright did not recognize.
“Does it have power?” The craft’s streamlined, angular shape conveyed speed, and Wainwright had to wonder what might drive such a machine? He heard no discernible sound of an engine, but there was something, a sensation that seemed to play across his exposed skin, telling him that the thing was generating or putting off some kind of energy.
Marshall said, “Only way to know would be to climb in and try firing it up.”
“I think we’ll let the experts do that,” Wainwright said, again imagining Jeffrey Carlson’s reaction once he got his first look at this baby. He hoped he could be present when the professor and his team got their hands on the craft and began taking it apart in a quest to understand whatever secrets it might contain. His eyes lingering on the cockpit, he realized something odd about its interior. “The seat,” he blurted. Looking over his shoulder, he saw Marshall’s and Cardillo’s confused expressions and pointed to the cockpit. “This is from a bomber; a B-29 or something.” The canvas upholstery and lap belt now was recognizable. How had he missed that? Peering closer, he saw that the seat had been fastened to the deck inside the cockpit with conventional bolts. Of note also were additional seams in the deck, indicating where something else had once been attached. He also noted the presence of what looked to be contemporary materials holding something in place beneath the consoles. A maze of wires, hoses, and contraptions he did not recognize filled nearly every inch of available space.
“I think this thing used to have more seats,” he said. Then, casting a glance at the unidentified components and other parts on the floor and tables, he frowned. “No, wait. This other stuff, maybe it was crammed in here.” Studying the lines on the cockpit floor, he nodded at his own statement. “Yeah, that might be it. They may have taken out some of this stuff to make room for the seat.”
Cardillo frowned. “But, why?”
Before Wainwright could answer, Marshall interrupted him. “Sir, you need to see this. You both do.”
Turning to where she was standing near a stack of packing crates, her .45 once more in her hand, Wainwright saw that she was aiming the pistol at something he could not see. He drew his own weapon as he crossed the floor to where she stood, and it was not until he came abreast of her that he saw what she meant.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered, feeling his jaw slacken as he beheld the bodies of six soldiers. All male, the ones lying faceup had their eyes open, wide and fixed. One of those was an officer, his lieutenant’s bars visible on his shirt collar. Wainwright saw no bullet wounds or other visible signs of violence on the bodies, but their ashen color told him what he needed to know. “All dead.”
“Yes, sir,” Marshall said, her voice low. “Looks that way.”
Coming up behind them, Cardillo got his first look at the bodies, and Wainwright heard him gasp. “Jesus.” Without hesitation, he stepped around the two Air Force officers and knelt beside the deceased lieutenant. “I know this man,” he said after a moment, reaching out as if to touch the body before stopping himself. “Lieutenant Matthew Graham. He’s involved with some super-secret testing group here on the base. All hush-hush and whatnot.” Rising to his feet, he turned and gestured past Wainwright and Marshall toward the ship. “Stuff like that, I guess.” His expression changed, becoming harder, and when he spoke again it was with a tinge of anger in his voice. “This is your sort of business, right? Want to explain to me why one group of soldiers would kill another over something like this?”
Wainwright shook his head. “I don’t know, Captain.” He looked back to the mysterious craft. Then, he realized what was bothering him. “Oh, damn.” Before he realized what he was doing, he ran out of the warehouse and back to where the form of the dead alien still lay on the gravel lot. Behind him, he heard Marshall and Cardillo running to catch up.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?” he asked Marshall, who nodded.
“Yes, sir,” she answered. “That ship in there doesn’t belong to this thing, whoever or whatever he—or she—is. At least, it didn’t before.”
“Was the ship in there retrieved from another landing or crash site, or is it something they’ve built based on what we know about alien ships?” It was very possible that some extensive research-and-development effort was taking place, of which he had not been informed. Maybe Professor Carlson knew something.
I’ll just have to ask him, the next time I see him.
Marshall said, “Neither of those answers tells us about the people that thing d
oes belong to.”
Wainwright shook his head, trying once again to process from the beginning everything that had happened over the past several minutes. Two different alien species? From where? Why, and why here and now? What did it all mean, and what was he—and the rest of Earth, for that matter—supposed to do about it?
His eyes locked on the dead alien, Wainwright sighed. “I’m thinking the real next question is: Just how much trouble are we in, anyway?”
EIGHT
Yuma, Arizona
April 23, 1952
Leaving the lights off, Gejalik peered through the curtains at the dusty, mostly empty parking lot. The same three cars that had occupied spaces in front of other rooms remained the only signs of life at the roadside motel. A fourth car, the one she and Adlar had used to make their escape from the army base, was parked outside their own room. Gejalik already had changed the vehicle’s license plates, after first making sure that her actions were not being observed by any of the motel’s staff or other guests. It was perhaps an unnecessary precaution, given that their departure from the base while still driving the Jeep had raised no suspicions. After leaving the installation, they exchanged the military vehicle for the nondescript black sedan. They also had changed their appearances from that of army soldiers to civilians. Only then had they made their way to this motel, which had been their base of operations since arriving in Yuma.
Hearing movement, Gejalik turned to see Adlar emerging from the room’s cramped bathroom. Like her, he had removed his mobile camouflage emitter and resumed his normal appearance. He was unclothed from the waist up, and Gejalik noted the patch of lighter skin on his upper arm from the wound he had just finished treating. “You have addressed your injury?”
His expression fixed, Adlar nodded, glancing at his arm. “Yes. The bullet passed through without causing severe damage, and there was little blood loss. I was able to heal it without complications.”