SKY WOMAN OF GROOM LAKE

by Charlie Peart

  Nick had never touched Amie before, except initially to say hello. He had been told once, in a briefing regarding the biologic make-up of the aliens, that they were warm-blooded creatures, with a slightly elevated temperature level from humankind. But Amie’s hands had been hot! And the sensation they had caused had burned into him, but in the most pleasurable possible way. He was astounded and, minutes later, terribly embarrassed.

  Nick stuffed his photos in his large jumpsuit pocket, muttered verbally to Amie, “Got to get to work. Talk to you later.” Then Nick hastened away, scurrying off to the other side of the hangar floor, where he busied himself and did not communicate with his alien colleague for the rest of the day.

  As Amie watched Nick leave, she wondered how soon it would be before he would receive, in his consciousness, the important message she had implanted. When she had clasped his hands she had directed a strong subliminal message into his thought pattern, yet it was cleverly hidden within the “orgasmic feeling” she knew Nick obviously received.

  Amie felt a little sad for Nick. “He is a good man” she thought, “but his kindness makes him my best hope. Nick is the only one that can help me get out of here.” Amie was well aware of the possible consequences for Nick if he succeeded in helping her, or even if he didn’t succeed.

  Chapter 8

  Nick took Janet Airlines flight 667 back to Las Vegas and a shuttle taxi to the MGM Grand. This was Nick’s hotel of choice, where he stayed during the weeks he worked on the project.

  Nick wasn’t a gambler and rarely spent time in the casinos, but he enjoyed the buzz of Vegas and tried to enjoy the most recent shows while he was there. Last night he had taken in the Cirque du Soleil production “Ka” for the second time. As before, he felt totally mesmerized by the experience.

  Tonight, however, Nick was tired. He went for a brief swim in the hotel’s outdoor pool, drip-drying for a while at a small table in the tropical setting while sipping slowly on a beer. His mind and body felt oddly drained. This evening he decided he would take it easy and just stay in his room, while ordering room service.

  Nick went to bed early, around 10pm, and fell quickly asleep, but later woke with a start around 2am. His body was dripping with sweat. It was not from the lack of air-conditioning, because the room was set for 67 degrees, but as the result of a nightmare. In the darkness, he laid his head back down on his pillow and tried to recall the dream.

  Unlike many of his dreams, this was one he could clearly recall once he awoke. It seemed to involve him and Amie. She was standing in front of him, trying to tell him something important. Her hands reached out and she touched him, as she had the day before. Once again, he felt that crazy sexual thrill. Yet now there was something else. Amie was standing in front of him, a smile on that little, lipsticked mouth and she seemed to be trying to convey something to him. She was not wearing her sunglasses and there was intensity in her large, dark eyes, as they seemed to be illuminating and glowing. She continued to stare at him. He didn’t know what she wanted. It was frustrating.

  And then, immediately, he got it. “Help me, Nick.” Now he was beginning to read in his mind what she was trying to tell him. “I need your help, Nick. I can’t do this by myself.”

  Nick remembered taking Amie by the hand, and her hand was hot, burning his, as they ran from the hangar. They ran out through the heavy metal door. In the dream, Nick was amazed they had opened it and slipped out so easily. As he looked back at the slowly closing door, his boss was standing there with arms folded and shaking his head. “No, Nick,” he thought he could hear his boss saying, but it was hard to hear the voice, because it was drowned out by beautiful, almost intoxicating music. He and Amie kept walking, and then they quickened their pace and were running. Her little feet scampered nimbly across the ground, almost as if she were flying. But suddenly there seemed to be barriers. Fences had to be hurdled, clinging, scratching bushes and thorny vines had to be pushed aside. Nick recalled hearing himself yelling, “No!” But the music playing in his head was so sweet that he kept going anyway. Underlying all of this was the sense that he shouldn’t be doing what he was doing. Where they were heading was dangerous. And that particular sense was apparently very strong. It was enough to have woken Nick up in an anxious sweat.

  These were the details that replayed in Nick’s anxious mind as he lay, almost panting, in the dark. He suddenly felt an intense need to turn a light on for reassurance. The normal appearance of the room then began to slowly calm him.

  However, Nick was too agitated to return to sleep. He got up, went to the bathroom, and then sat down on the bed, propping up some pillows and switching on the hotel TV. Then, within ten minutes he turned the set off, because he was having a hard time concentrating on much of anything except that odd dream.

  Nick kept ruminating on the nightmare’s meaning, mulling the myriad details over and over in his mind. He couldn’t evade the inevitable conclusion that, in the dream, he was trying to help Amie escape Area 51. “An extra-terrestrial being wants my help to escape,” he deduced. “But how am I going to be able to do that? Amie has been housed for years in a totally secure facility. So how can I be of any help to her? I can’t. And why would I want to? It’s all totally crazy. That dream I had was nuts.”

  With that uncomfortable conclusion, Nick returned to sleep, only to be confronted by another troubling dream. In this dream, Nick was on the long flight back to Baltimore-Washington International, thinking about Amie and deciding that she had just cause to feel a need to be free. Instantly the plane began to rapidly descend. The other passengers became agitated and were holding tightly onto their seat arm rests, whimpering and crying, as they realized something was amiss with their flight. In the next scene, Nick found himself on the ground, standing beside a smoking, damaged plane and then being herded, with others, onto a spacecraft. Nick and his fellow passengers were being rather roughly treated, as a determined guard with enormous, cold, blank eyes, prodded them with a weapon to hurry them along. As the vivid dream progressed, Nick realized he was being taken away on the strange craft, to be held prisoner on another planet, and perhaps might never be allowed to return to his home. This idea filled him with panic. The dream continued in a surrealistic way, with his dream character being forced to do whatever his alien masters demanded. He began to long for escape. But how?

  Nick awoke, this time thrashing around on his bed, sweat covering his body once more. It was now 5am. He lay in bed, again reviewing his dream.

  Nick now seemed to be thinking about Amie in an entirely different way; her need to escape seemed entirely reasonable. If he substituted Amie for himself, in his recently experienced dream, the logic of her request for help seemed very rational.

  Yet, if he tried to help her, it would be the end of his career, his pension, and maybe even his life. For many years, and at the cost of millions of tax dollars, the government had gone to great lengths to prevent the public from learning about the existence of alien visitors from outer space. Anyone stupid enough to try and aid an alien in some cockamamie escape plan would be most likely caught and possibly eliminated.

  However, the dreams helped Nick realize that he felt great concern for Amie. Over the past several years they had developed a real bond. It actually made him sad to think that, once he finished this project and retired, he would never see her again. He would receive his exit briefing and be warned to scrub her existence from his memory. Amie would remain behind, to one day die and become a curious specimen in a top-secret laboratory. Probably there would be no one left to mourn her passing, as the other two would be gone as well. This somber thought actually brought tears to Nick’s eyes, and suddenly he found himself remembering the burial of his wife.

  When that sad emotion passed, Nick began to feel confused about becoming so attached to Amie. He no longer seemed to view her as an alien. She was someone he was beginning to care about, almost as much as he cared for anyone close to him in his own family.

  He glanced
at the clock; it was 6am. Nick took a small bottle of wine out of the mini-bar and poured himself a glass. He needed to calm down and pull his thoughts together.

  If he did try to help Amie, he needed some leverage against the government when they came after him. He had no particular plan in mind. Yet he knew that, sooner or later, they would identify him as the prime suspect in her escape. How could he protect himself?

  The protection of threatened media exposure might be one way, Nick thought. The project documentation was restricted to Area 51, and he could not take any papers with him on leaving nor was he allowed to bring in a laptop or even a cell phone from the outside world. But if Amie did escape with his help, he could take pictures of an obviously alien-looking Amie, without her wig and makeup, and he could record enough information on his own that it would be credible to a journalist. The documentation would have to hidden somewhere, of course, and only threatened to be used if the government pursued him.

  Nick felt embarrassed, an hour later, that while he was doing normal things like showering, shaving, and getting himself ready for another work day, he had actually been seriously thinking of how to help Amie escape from Area 51. What a hero he had been in his thoughts! He was like some science fiction character right out of the movies, cavalierly risking his career.

  Sober thoughts were now prevailing, and Nick wondered why he had spent the last hour kicking all of this around. He questioned whether his impending retirement was the real source of his confused thoughts. After all, he reasoned, it was an upcoming enormous life change. Maybe he needed a therapist or a checkup, or maybe both? It just wasn’t like him to get so agitated by a few dreams and so off track that he was drinking wine at 6 o’clock in the morning. With that last thought, he headed off to breakfast and the beginning of his routine workday.

  That morning, on the Janet flight into Area 51, last night’s dreamscape had almost faded from his memory, and he concentrated on the next few days ahead. The project was far from completion and the pressure was on to conduct more test flights. When he arrived at the hanger, he was all business, touching base with the various engineers involved and taking calls from his Pentagon management over a secure line.

  Amie approached Nick around lunchtime and asked if they could get together for something to eat. He had purposely avoided her all morning and felt a little nervous talking to her now, although he tried not to show it. But that was probably useless he realized. She would sense it anyway. From his recent past experiences with her, he knew it was almost impossible to disguise his thoughts.

  Nick reluctantly agreed, however, he decided to ask one of their other work colleagues to join them. His chosen colleague was hardly receptive. “I don’t know why you want to eat with that alien, Nick. Hell, she gives me the creeps. All of them do.”

  Nick reminded his colleague that he wasn’t being particularly kind, and that the aliens were “voluntary partners” with them in their team project. To which the man, realizing that Nick had input regarding his work performance evaluation, acquiesced to the luncheon invitation.

  However, Nick was disturbed by what his colleague had revealed. Others were probably noticing that he had a rapport with Amie, and wondering why. When Nick went to the lavatory to wash up for lunch, he vowed to reduce the number of times he would take lunch with her to once a week.

  Amie was not allowed to utilize the main cafeteria. She was rather fond of green salads, as well as watermelon, apples, and peaches, but she did not like meat or animal products. She could make a lunch selection and a security assistant brought it to her from the cafeteria. She could then eat her food in the small break room area off of their hangar or back at her pod. Amie often chose to eat in the break room, which she usually did alone, or while sitting at a table with her two alien comrades. Nick always felt a twinge of sadness for them, as the alien beings sat isolated and alone at their table.

  Amie sat by herself now, waiting for Nick to join her. Her alien crewmembers sat at another table on the opposite side of the room. Nick and his workmate had opted for burgers, which they had already purchased in the cafeteria and brought back to the break room, in order to join Amie there. They walked up to her table, the smell of their burgers filling the air as they were set down on the table in front of her. Nick could see that the smell of the sizzling meat was causing Amie some unease. A great fan of lunchtime burgers, he was surprised that he had never noticed her disdainful reaction in times before, when he had invited himself to join her.

  The three of them sat together at the table, talking verbally at first, and then launching into some thought-speak. But the third luncheon companion, whom Nick had purposefully brought along as a sort of “chaperone” for his meeting with Amie, appeared very uncomfortable. He ate rapidly and suddenly jumped up and left them, under the guise of wanting to talk to one of their other colleagues, sitting at a nearby table. “It’s a work related issue,” he offered as his excuse, while he hastily packed up the remains of his burger and hurried away to the other table.

  At this point, Amie and Nick sat alone together at the table and there was an uncomfortably long thought-silence between them.

  Amie spoke first. “Something seems to be troubling you, Nick. Would you mind telling me what it is?”

  Nick smirked at her, because he knew it was ludicrous to pretend she probably didn’t already know what was on his mind. He decided to play it straight. “I had some weird dreams last night. Maybe you could tell me what they mean, Amie.”

  “I sense you are feeling uncomfortable with me. That is what I am reading from you now. You are upset that your colleague left us. He was terribly ill at ease sitting here. That is all I know from you. As for your dreams, you will need to tell me more about them.”

  “In one of the dreams you and I went through a door. I think the door represented a pathway to take you from here to somewhere else, to help you escape.”

  “And you found that disturbing?”

  “Yes, I certainly did. If I were to help you escape, it would mean the end of my career, possibly my very life.”

  I’m sorry if thoughts of me trouble you, Nick.” Amie reached out her hand and touched his, very briefly. That little touch sent another one of those “orgasmic” signals to his brain, and this one was even stronger than before. Nick instantly reacted, actually moaning with pleasure, and jumping slightly, nearly knocking over his drink.

  There were only a few diners left in the break room at this point, but those few all looked over at Nick, wondering if he was in pain. He recovered himself and managed to force a smile assuring his workmates that he was fine. Amie hastened to steady his wobbling drink.

  After a few minutes, Nick recovered his composure and managed to convey his thoughts to her in a cogent manner. “I want to help you, Amie, I really do. It’s just that...”

  He didn’t get to finish his thought, as she overrode his with her own. “You’re afraid they will punish you if they find out, correct?”

  “Yes, I guess so. I don’t know exactly, to be honest. I don’t know what I think right now. Give me a minute. God, what did you just do to me?”

  “Did you enjoy it?” A small smile formed on her lips.

  Nick ignored her reaction. “Listen, Amie, they will find out. Even if I am able to get you somewhere far from here.”

  “If you get me out, Nick, and I am able to contact the Seeker, you could come back with me. I promise you, they will never find you.”

  Nick reflected on her words for a few seconds. “I actually did think about that, Amie. But I don’t want to leave my world, my family, my plans for a happy retirement. I don’t think I am that adventurous, at my age. I couldn’t do it.”

  “I understand, Nick, I really do.”

  “Amie, I’ve trusted you enough to tell you my innermost thoughts. You do understand don’t you? These are things I could get thrown in jail for, if anyone else heard them. I think I have earned your trust, don’t you?”

  “Yes, you have. Nick
, you are my only human friend. My true friend here in this prison.” She hesitated a moment and then continued. “ Do you remember that I told you that I had a secret?”

  “Yes, I remember. Something no one else knows, you said.”

  “I am sensing you want to know my secret, correct?”

  “Well, yes, of course I would.”

  Amie hesitated for a moment, then removed her sunglasses and stared into Nick’s eyes.

  “Tell me. What is it?” he urged her.

  “I can leave this planet, I can get away. But I will need to go to one of the ‘spiritual’ places on your planet. I do not think I can contact my people from anywhere but these special spiritual centers. The Seekers will look for me there, it is the place where I can send them a signal.”

  Nick felt confused. What was she trying to tell him? Was that the secret? “What do you mean by ‘spiritual’? Where exactly would that be?”

  “There are many such places on your planet, Nick, but perhaps you are not aware of them. There is Machu Pichu, and the pyramids on the Giza plateau, Stonehenge, even Sedona in Arizona. These are all places of harmony. They are places of enhanced vibrations. The energy in these spots flows to such an extent that my rescuers could sense my energy from far away. One of the best places is actually near your retirement home in Florida. It is what you call the Bermuda Triangle. Here the energy vortex is one of the strongest. If you research it I think you will find that many people have seen what you call UFOs there. It is a strong spiritual center.”