Startoucher

by C. J. Odle

  “Pretty good,” Jake said between mouthfuls. “Chef-Artiste Pierre Laffite has some serious competition.”

  As they slowly ate their pancakes topped with pieces of strawberry and banana, Jake wondered if it would really be their last meal on Earth. No Michelin three-starred restaurant, just a humble pancake at a roadside diner.

  A trickle of pickup trucks began to pull up to the diner, and over the next half an hour, the seats at the counter filled up. The atmosphere became lively with the chatter of the early-breakfast crowd, and Jake and Sarah nursed their second cups of coffee, enjoying the normalness around them.

  The sky outside lightened, and when the big clock above the counter showed six thirty, Jake got up silently. Sarah drained the last of her coffee. It was finally time to leave.

  Jake made his way onto the I-40 and then drove north up Kelbaker Road. At ten to eight, he turned left onto Kelso Dunes Road and continued west until just past the main dune parking area. He adjusted the Porsche’s gearing and clearance before crossing the short patch of sand and low brush to join the smaller dirt road. His GPS had shown that the dirt road ran parallel to Kelso Dunes Road but penetrated much farther west into the Mojave.

  Sarah rubbed her eyes and gazed across the desert.

  “We’re here.”

  “Almost,” Jake replied, touching her face.

  To his left were a series of granite hills, and over Sarah’s shoulder on the right were the majestic dunes, pristine against the azure sky. He slowed down as they reached the approximate point where he’d joined the dirt road after leaving the alien vehicle and driving past Gemini and Marina.

  Jake stopped the car and got out to scan the desert. His previous tire tracks had been erased by the overnight winds, but up ahead to the right, he recognized the graceful peaks of the two dunes. Climbing back into the driver’s seat and starting to drive, he turned slowly off the dirt road and felt the bumps of the desert under his wheels. The early-morning air carried a sweet moisture and the faint scent of the desert plants. Jake drove farther out, threading his way along the left-hand edge of the dunes.

  “It feels weird to be driving so near the dunes like this,” Sarah said. “It’s just not something you do, you know?”

  Jake understood. These were spaces that few people visited. The dunes were as different from downtown LA as it was possible to get. Driving here felt like an intrusion into a sacred landscape, a place with no need or use for humans.

  “It shouldn’t be far now,” Jake said. He could feel the sense of the right direction pulsing in his body, pulling him forward to an open, firmer patch ahead.

  “There’s nothing here,” Sarah said. “Are you sure this is the right spot?”

  Jake just smiled. “Watch.”

  The alien ship shimmered into existence, as though a mirage suddenly becoming real. The toroidal disc was suspended above the desert floor and glowed faintly in the morning sun, brighter than it could have been through simple reflection. The column of light rose from the ground and passed through the middle of the spacecraft before vanishing high above.

  “It… it’s…” For several seconds, Sarah could manage no other words as she stared at the ship.

  “It just appeared,” she finally said.

  “Actually,” Jake explained, “Sirius or Vega must have lowered all the shields, including the camouflage screening, so we could see where to drive.”

  “It’s incredible.”

  Jake nodded as he continued toward the craft. “I think there’s a lot of power in there,” he said. “Imagine the amount of energy it must take to cross the galaxy.”

  Although, now that he thought about it, something else impressed him more. Power and more power, sheer technological achievement, was a very human way of looking at it. The truly awe-inspiring part concerned the required shift in cognizing the universe to build all this.

  How would it feel to be Vega or Sirius? Jake had experienced a brief flash of the universal consciousness, but what must it have been like to be connected to it so strongly for two hundred and fifty thousand years? Their technology was just one facet of this connection, the other facets unfathomable to the human mind.

  He brought the car to a halt on the sand before the alien ship. They sat for a moment, facing the silence and purity of the desert. Then Jake got out and walked around to open Sarah’s door.

  Jake turned toward the dirt road and glimpsed the shields around the ship shimmer into existence once again, just the faintest refraction in the air appearing where they sprang up.

  Jake and Sarah stepped toward the ship, and a beam of light engulfed them.

  Marina followed Billy’s directions, and after driving north up Kelbaker Road, she nursed the Beast left onto the dirt-track road. It was 8:10 a.m. A discussion took place amongst the cars in front about whether driving on such a small desert road was permitted, but Billy explained that if they continued north to take Kelso Dunes Road instead, most vehicles would not be able to cross the scrubby sand later on. This small road would lead them directly to the access point to walk to where Jake’s car had appeared from yesterday.

  As the convoy rumbled on, Adam and Billy scanned the desert. After three miles, they could see the main dune trailhead half a mile to their right, and then, a mile or so later, the end of Kelso Dunes Road. Marina drove west between the granite hills and sloping dunes for six miles more.

  “Stop!” Billy said, pointing. “The GPS indicates it’s over there.”

  Marina pulled over, and the convoy of 120 vehicles slowly ground to a halt. SUVs, pickup trucks, sedans, motorbikes, jeeps, RVs, and vans began to discharge slightly bewildered-looking passengers.

  Gemini put on their shades and baseball caps before walking toward the coordinates, while Marina grabbed her daypack and stepped along the side of the road, peering at the desert from underneath her wide-brimmed hat.

  “Guys!” Marina shouted. “Look!”

  Billy and Adam walked over and gazed at the fresh tire tracks. The three of them started to follow the clear marks, and those watching began ambling onto the sand, some with proper clothing and water for the desert, most without. The convoy transformed into a procession, with nearly three hundred people trailing Gemini and Marina as they edged along the dunes.

  The sun began to heat up as the procession trudged across the desert for over twenty-five minutes. A couple of news presenters tried to conduct interviews or pieces to camera while walking, occasionally stumbling and then having to start again.

  Marina and Gemini stopped when the tracks abruptly vanished. People at the head of the procession bunched together and then spread out to get a better view and to allow those behind to move closer.

  Marina waited for them to work out the rest of it. To realize there were tracks coming into the desert but none going out, and certainly no sign of a car. People stared at the spot where the tracks terminated as it slowly sunk in. A couple of bikers took selfies with their phones, and more and more people pressed forward to see what the fuss was about.

  “Maybe someone lifted the car up with a helicopter?” a newswoman suggested.

  “No chance,” replied a biker, gesturing at the sand. “We’d see the backwash of the rotor blades.”

  “Maybe they just drove backward in their own tire tracks?” offered an earnest young man with at least five piercings in each ear.

  “How could you reverse and match all those twists and skids in the sand?” the biker replied.

  “What’s this got to do with the president?”

  Marina let it run, not really listening to it. She was more interested in the way the air shimmered faintly just by the end of the tire tracks. She stepped closer.

  “Can you feel it?” she asked Adam and Billy. “Like electricity in the air just here? Like there’s going to be a storm?”

  Adam frowned but then nodded after a moment. Billy held out a hand… and ripples seemed to flow out across the air, spreading as though he’d touched the surface of a pool
of water.

  “Be careful,” Marina said.

  Billy prodded the hidden surface with his index finger. “I’m fine. There’s something here, though. Come on, try it.”

  Reluctantly, Marina reached out, and it was like pushing against a wall. Ripples spread as she touched it, and however hard she pressed, it was impossible to penetrate further. She leaned her weight against it then, only to look back and find about a hundred cameras taking pictures of her as she did so.

  “Come on,” she said. “Try it yourselves.”

  They did. Some of them were rather hesitant at first, but then, excited and amazed. More and more explored the edges of the invisible wall, and the circumference of a large circle began to be traced, people fanning out until nearly all three hundred were positioned a few feet apart. One person raised both arms horizontally to the side, stretching their hands toward each neighbor, then another, and another, until the whole circumference became ringed with people holding hands.

  The two news crews stepped around the circle, filming and thrusting microphones to snatch excited quotes.

  Hands broke contact, and countless selfies and group shots were taken of bodies leaning into the shields, sending ripples of energy cracking through the air. The two news crews hiked back to their vehicles to upload their footage via satellite, while other people walked along the sand until they found some hint of a signal. Gemini used the satellite and phone connections of their RV. Everyone, from the hardened alien hunters to the merely curious, did their best to tell the world about what they were seeing. Hundreds of separate images of the invisible wall hit the internet…

  And immediately went viral, cascading across the world like a virtual tsunami.

  In a nondescript office tucked away on the third floor of the Pentagon, Major Carlos Johnson sipped his morning coffee from a Styrofoam cup and surveyed his windowless room. His rank and security clearance entitled him to a larger office with a view, but he found it easier to concentrate here. His desk had a stack of handwritten notebooks placed neatly to the left of two computer monitors, and there was nothing else on it save a metronome on the right. The major was meticulous in everything he did and a legend in the Pentagon. Nicknamed the Bloodhound, he excelled at sniffing out items of seemingly unconnected intel and then piecing them together into a cohesive whole.

  The major leaned forward in his chair and reached for the metronome to set a slow, steady beat. Some liked to work to Mozart, others to hard rock, but the Bloodhound found that the ticktock of the metronome evoked in his mind Sherlock Holmes contemplating a case in his high-backed armchair and smoking a pipe in front of the blazing coals, the grandfather clock in the corner. Tick… tock.

  He ignored the images on the monitors and opened the top notebook to study his recent entries. The POTUS had been missing since twelve thirty p.m. EST yesterday, shortly followed by the lead scientist at CERN, the pope, and the president of China. The US government had hastily fabricated a story about the POTUS suddenly falling sick with a virulent fever.

  No one had moved to a war footing yet. If it had just been one president who’d gone missing, it could have been more serious. The Americans might have blamed the Chinese, the Chinese the Indians. Warheads pointed, armies assembled. No one, however, could think of any country stupid enough to attack America, China, and the entire Catholic faith. Everyone worked hard to suppress the news, but stories were leaking out.

  He peered at an underlined word next to the entry on the pope. Alieni.

  Gently stopping the metronome, he turned up the volume on one monitor to watch the feed from KNBC news.

  “We now have on the line James Shilton, professor of digital technology at the University of California in Berkeley. Good morning Professor, thanks for talking to us on such short notice.”

  “Morning, Cheryl, always a pleasure. Quite a story we have brewing up in the desert.”

  “What’s your expert opinion? Are these images real, or just high-quality fake?”

  “I’m in the lab now, having just run the images through some pretty clever software, and I have to say, after initially being skeptical, I’m now leaning toward believing something really is going on in the Kelso Dunes. Nothing connected with aliens, of course, but it’s still rather puzzling.”

  The Bloodhound had seen enough. He picked up the phone and punched the extension for General O’Shea.

  More people trickled into the desert in ones or twos, looking for a chance to take their own pictures with the invisible wall and the surrounding pandemonium. Those in the original convoy with jeeps, pickups, or decent SUVs returned to their vehicles and drove across the desert to the wall. A couple of guys in jeeps ferried people and supplies back and forth from the dirt road to the newly emerging camp. Tents were erected and a few generators set up. Another news crew appeared. Most of those ill prepared for the heat drove off, planning to return later when better equipped.

  Two policemen arrived sweaty and out of breath, having abandoned their squad car after discovering it was unable to tackle the sand. A park ranger fared better, sirens flashing as he bumped over the rough ground in his truck, gaping in amazement at the excited crowd. Backups were quickly called for.

  Then the spaceship shimmered into view, and the world really went mad.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jake held Sarah’s hand as she gazed up in amazement at the crystals extruding from the ceiling of the transportation chamber. The door glided open, and Jake led her into the tubed corridor. Where were Sirius and Vega? He remembered the way back to the control room, and so he turned left and began to walk along the corridor. Beneath the crystalline surface of the walls, the small neurons fired and fizzed faintly as they passed.

  Sarah looked beautiful in her jade-green dress, her eyes like Alice in Wonderland.

  “I—I don’t know what to say,” she said, fiddling with her hair.

  “You don’t have to say anything. We’ll just take this one step at a time.”

  They arrived at the control room, but when Jake pulsed open the door, no one was inside, so they continued down the curved corridor for a couple of minutes until they reached the room where he’d slept.

  “Here’s my bedroom.”

  The door opened silently, and as they entered, a double bed flowed into position from the shimmering wall. Sarah’s mouth dropped, and Jake smiled.

  “Amazing, isn’t it? Feel the texture—it looks hard, but is really quite comfortable.”

  Sarah tentatively sat down on the bed and placed her palms flat against the surface of the lustrous material.

  “It’s like… almost like silk.”

  Jake sat down next to her, overcome with exhaustion.

  “You look absolutely shattered,” Sarah said with concern. “Why don’t you sleep for a while? You said the trial doesn’t start until noon.”

  “I don’t know if we should.”

  “If we’re needed that urgently, surely they’ll come and get us?”

  Jake glanced at his watch—eight thirty a.m. He felt wired and tense, the lack of sleep and coffee straining his nerves. Sarah was probably right: if the aliens wanted to find them, they would.

  She stroked his arm. “Who knows how long the trial will last; this could be our last chance to rest before”—her voice was sad—“before everything changes.”

  Jake looked at her. She seemed to be in no hurry to leave the room, and besides, he had promised to take this one step at a time.

  “OK, just for a couple of hours.” He set his phone’s alarm and kissed her before lying down, Sarah curling up beside him as he closed his eyes.

  Gradually Jake started to unwind, and the flashes of road and desert slowed down and stopped. Sleep descended and he finally drifted off.

  “Jake, it’s ten thirty!” Sarah shook him awake, his phone beeping loudly. He blinked in confusion before recognizing her face and quickly cutting the alarm.

  “I must have been out like a light,” Jake said groggily. “Let’s
go.” He pushed himself off the bed and rubbed the sleep from his face. Sarah got up to join him, and the bed flowed silently back into the wall.

  Jake walked into the corridor and paused, shutting his eyes and trying to sense the location of the aliens. He could feel the subtle pulsing of the cosmic plasma as the connection to the universal consciousness began to open up.

  “Look, something’s happening to the walls…”

  He opened his eyes to see a line of neurons firing down the right side of the corridor and knew it must indicate the route. They found the two aliens in an oval room dominated by vertical cylindrical tanks of faintly glowing gel. Within the clear, jellylike substance of each tank, a fully clothed human could be seen, eyes shut in sleep and blissfully unware of the events about to come. Jake looked at Sarah. She shook her head in disbelief and clutched her pendant.

  “Are you OK?” Jake asked as he put his arm around her.

  “No. There are jellified people in cylinders.”

  “Those are the witnesses; they’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll be OK,” Sarah said with a weak smile. “Just let me freak out for a while.”

  Jake smiled. “Take as long as you want.”

  Vega and Sirius stepped in front of them, their thoughts pulsing loud and clear in Jake’s head. From Sarah’s gasp of surprise, he could tell she received them too.

  “Welcome, both of you,” Vega sent. “Sarah, I am Vega, and this is Sirius.”

  The alien pointed with its three-fingered hand as it made the introductions.

  Sarah froze, and for nearly twenty seconds, she stared at their translucent white bodies, oversized heads, and large jet-black eyes. As she finally regained her composure, the aliens waited patiently for her to speak.

  “Jake told me about you, the aliens who are running the experiment,” Sarah finally said aloud, and glanced over their heads. “Hang on… is that the president?”

  “You are correct,” Sirius pulsed, its forehead frowning. “We were just about to reactivate the witnesses when you arrived outside the ship. Shortly afterward, more of your kind followed.”