by Lesley Davis
“I’m looking for the gift wrap aisle. I want to stick a bow on this for you so that the next time you want to crack some skulls you’ll use this and not the butt of a valuable gun.” She smirked at Emory as she sauntered off, obviously pleased with herself.
“Well, aren’t you just hysterical,” Emory muttered, watching her leave the store. “You can get your own damn ice cream.”
Chapter Nineteen
Back on the road, barely five minutes after leaving the store, Sofia was surreptitiously watching Emory drive. She had never seen her look so antsy. Finally, she had to call her on it.
“Okay, you’re twitchier than a kid who’s been let loose with Red Bull. What’s wrong?”
“I can’t raise Dink on the phone.”
Emory looked almost…terrified. Sofia stared at the phone that lay on the center console between them. She acknowledged it had been quite a while since she’d heard his voice. Emory hadn’t been talking to herself either so he’d obviously been silent in her ear.
“Maybe he’s asleep,” Sofia said.
Emory made a face, and Sofia could tell she didn’t think that was the cause.
“It’s just so…quiet,” Emory said.
“What? Without the voices in your head telling you to do stuff?” Sofia couldn’t help but tease her a little to try to get a rise out of her. The fear in her eyes made Sofia feel uneasy.
“With all that’s happening, I have no idea if the saucers have been where he is and wiped him out too. He’s my best friend, and I’m worried about him. In fact, I think it would be safe to say he’s my only friend.”
“You don’t strike me as the antisocial type.”
“I’m not, but it’s difficult to keep friends once they realize you believe the government is Big Brothering you and has hidden agendas going on. It starts out as great after-dinner conversation, but soon friends start rolling their eyes and changing the subject if you say anything. It’s hard to be among people who don’t see the world the same way as I do. They’d rather stay oblivious. It’s easier for them to just go with the flow.” Emory shrugged. “I had one woman tell me she believed what I was saying but didn’t want to think about it because it made her depressed. She said she’d rather ignore what she could see because she didn’t want to bring her children up into that kind of world. What kind of parent sees what the world is doing and doesn’t even warn her kids about it?”
Sofia didn’t know how to answer that. She was guilty of the exact same thing but in reverse. She hid the truth. She lied to keep it from being exposed. She helped perpetuate a view of the world the government wanted to be seen. A smokescreen to hide what really lay behind. For Sofia, that was the existence of manmade alien saucers. She couldn’t help but wonder what other lies were also being kept from her. With every layer of command, there were secrets untold.
She checked her watch. They were roughly two hours away from the base. The roads they’d been on had traffic, but the other vehicles had been few and far between. Sofia found that curious. A convoy of large trucks passed them a while ago. They appeared to be military…but not the usual vehicles. There was no insignia to give any clue as to their affiliation. Sofia wondered just who exactly had been drafted to gather the population. So far, Emory hadn’t commented on them, though they could just be seen in the distance. She was too busy checking her phone for a signal and looking to the sky. Sofia chewed at her lip as she wondered just who really was rounding up civilians to take them who knows where. She glanced at a silent Emory. I’ve been in her company too long. She’s got me seeing conspiracies in everything too. She wished she could talk to her superior officer, but she hadn’t had the chance to call in and he hadn’t made contact with her.
She’d see him soon enough.
Emory was still fussing with her phone. “The signal’s gone. We’re cut off from him.” She shot Sofia a nervous look. “That’s not a good thing.”
“You don’t have him in your ear all the time, do you?”
“No, of course not. But at this moment? We need him there. He’s got a much wider view on the world, Sofia. I need him watching over us, telling us what’s going on.”
Sofia was surprised to realize how upset Emory was getting. “Hey, look. We’re heading to a high security air force base. You’ll be safe there. Wherever it is Dink hides out, let’s face it, he’s not here with you. He can’t fight by your side like I can.”
“I know that, but your base isn’t safe, Sofia, no matter how many guards it has on its doors. Without Dink we have no early warning system if there are saucers in our area. You got your orders from somewhere, but you haven’t been in contact with them since. I’m with you constantly, Sofia. You’re more isolated than I am. What’s to say we’re not driving toward a base that has suffered the same fate as Area 51? Then what? How safe are we then, both of us cut off from our intelligence?” Emory picked up the phone again. “Goddammit, Dink, now is not the time to go radio silence on me.” She lifted her eyes to look up at the sky.
“Oh fuck! Saucer, twelve o’clock.”
Sofia could see the bottom of the saucer descending from the clouds. It looked huge in the sky even though it was miles away. She grabbed hold of her seat as Emory quickly swung the van off the road and raced across fields that led to a homestead spread out in the distance. Sofia looked back and could see the familiar white beam being emitted from the saucer. It was directly over the convoy that had been stopped dead in its tracks.
“We need to hide fast,” Sofia said, not wanting to see more people abducted when there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“Working on it, Major.” Emory swung the wheel harshly. They skidded out of the field and onto a dirt road that lead up to the house that was surrounded by apple trees. “They’ve got to have a storm shelter, right? Or at least a cellar, somewhere to stick all those apples?” Emory gunned the van up the driveway. “When we get out, grab the guns. I swear, if I get beamed up I’m going with grenades in my pocket and I’m blowing those bastards sky high.”
“I should never have let you near the armory.” Sofia grimaced as they hit a deep rut in the ground. The van slammed into it and bounced them back out. Sofia’s hand flew up to brace herself against the roof to stop her head from banging off it. “We also need to get you some counseling for the crazy kamikaze thoughts inhabiting that brain of yours.” Sofia barely hesitated before asking, “Will there be enough grenades for both of us?”
Emory flashed her a big grin and nodded. She directed them into a barn that had been left with its doors wide open. “Somebody sure left in a hurry,” she said as she drove in. She turned the engine off and rushed to grab anything she could use to try to hide the large VW Bus from sight.
Sofia grabbed all she could from the back of the van and then helped Emory close the barn doors. They ran around to the back of the house, and Sofia was never more thankful to spot a storm shelter. She had to shoot the lock off the doors to gain them entrance. She led the way down the steps inside. Sofia felt her way down along the wall until she found a space where she set up a base to put the camping lantern on. She lit it and only then did Emory close the hatch above them. The lantern gave off a bright glow and revealed the inside of the shelter to them. Various old bicycles were lined up against the back wall and tubs of apples were stored in hay. A light fixture hung from the ceiling, minus its bulb.
Emory came down the steps and got a gun out of the bag. She sat on one of the old padded seats in the shelter. She didn’t take her eyes off the hatch door as if expecting it to come flying open.
Sofia picked her own weapon and took the seat next to Emory. “I thought the saucers had moved overseas,” she said, careful not to raise her voice above a whisper.
“Looks like they’re back. Maybe the climate wasn’t to their liking.” Emory rolled back the sleeve of her fatigues. Even in the light thrown by the lantern, Sofia could clearly see Emory’s arm hair was raised.
“What is that?” she asked.
<
br /> Emory rubbed at her arm. “That’s my early warning signal. The saucers and big ships must have some kind of static thing going on because this happens to me every time they’re close.”
They sat in silence, eyes trained on the outer doors. Sofia strained to hear anything from the outside. She kept her breathing quiet and her eyes focused on the shelter doors. Sofia waited, her gun aimed and her finger on the trigger.
After a long while, Sofia heard something, a faint rustling noise. There’d better not be rats down here. She looked around nervously. The noise was a little louder, and she realized it was Emory messing with a bag at her feet. Emory took out her tub of ice cream and then pulled a spoon from one of her pockets. Sofia stared at her as Emory popped the lid off, licked all the ice cream off it, and began digging in. She couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “Really? You’re eating that now?”
“It’s melting. It would be a shame to waste it while it’s still semi-frozen.” She held out a loaded spoon to Sofia. “Want a bite?”
Sofia shook her head. She was amazed by how Emory’s mind worked at the most stressful of times.
“I eat when I’m nervous,” Emory explained around a mouthful of Caramel Chew Chew. “And look at it this way. If I get beamed up right now maybe I can take an alien’s eye out with this.” She licked her spoon clean and brandished it.
Sofia leaned against Emory. She was understandably frightened and too tired to care anymore. “Don’t ever change, Emory Hawkes. Batshit crazy suits you all too well.” She returned the goofy smile Emory gave her and accepted a spoonful of ice cream while they waited to see if the saucer was going to find them and whisk them away.
*
Emory didn’t know which was worse, being outside and watching the saucers do their worst, or hiding and waiting for them to come find them. She checked her watch again for the umpteenth time.
“Do you think they’ve flown to new pastures?” she asked.
“It’s been an hour and we haven’t had a visitation so I’d say so. How’s your early warning system?”
Emory checked her arms. “The hairs aren’t standing up. I think they’re long gone. We dodged a bullet there, Captain. Pity those trucks in front of us weren’t as fortunate. I have a horrible feeling they flew right into the saucer’s path.” Emory shook her head at the thought. The trucks hadn’t stood a chance. The saucer had literally dropped from the sky above their heads. “Do you think they were military?” Sofia’s silence made Emory turn to look directly at her. “They weren’t military?”
“They were probably an evacuation convoy. I recognized the trucks from Hurricane Katrina.”
“FEMA? So the saucer abducted evacuees?” Emory screwed her eyes shut and willed herself not to lose her temper. The trucks were supposedly carrying people to safety and instead had driven them into the path of their abductors.
“It was an unfortunate incident. If we hadn’t stopped at that store or you hadn’t deliberated for a while over which ice cream to choose, we might have been farther down the road. The saucer could have taken us just as easily.”
Emory felt her blood run cold at that sobering thought. She glanced around their shelter. “This place looks like it was left in a hurry. The folks who own this place could have been in one of those trucks if they’d asked to be taken to safety.”
Sofia nodded. “They could. For now we need to concentrate on the fact we’re not. We have a job to do to try to get all those people back.” She stood up, laid down her gun, and stretched languorously.
Emory watched her, admiring her beauty once more. She was striking, in a tiny spitfire kind of way. It made Emory want to rile her up to watch her explode. Because when her eyes flashed their fire, Emory was more than ready to burn. “I bet you knock people out when you’re dressed in something other than your fatigues. Which is saying something because you totally rock the camo look.”
Sofia eyed her. “Are you flirting with me?” She lowered her arms from where they’d been over her head, stretching out the kinks in her shoulders. She brought them to rest on her hips. It was a defiant stance.
It made Emory smile all the more.
“You bet I am. You’re gorgeous. I realize in the real world, B.A., Before Aliens, you wouldn’t have given me a second glance.” Emory shrugged. “It’s not like we would even have met in the first place.”
“Seeing as I’m career military and you’re nowhere near the CIA agent you purport to be.”
“There is that.” Emory moved closer. “But here we are, fighting side by side. Taking on the invaders together, despite our differences. How cool is that?”
“You’re still just one more screw-up away from being thrown in the brig.”
“Be honest. You’d miss me if you had to lock me up.” Emory moved closer still and reached out to snag a piece of Sofia’s hair between her fingers. It felt silky smooth to her touch.
Sofia stared at her. “I probably would, but I’d stand less chance of being court-martialed for being guilty of colluding with a scandal-stirring journalist who is out to expose military secrets.”
Emory didn’t take offense at Sofia’s words. She could see the faintest glimmer of humor in her eye. “Ignoring all that though, here it’s just you and me.” She gestured around the small room. “A secluded hideaway,” she pointed to the lantern, “romantic lighting. I’d be crazy not to admit I’d really like to kiss you again without the fear of either one of us dying in the next second to instigate it.”
She looked at Sofia’s lips and watched as her tongue came out to nervously moisten them. “I’ll back off if you want me to. I understand the policy of ‘don’t ask don’t tell,’ and I might be assuming where I shouldn’t be, but if you’re straight, for God’s sake let me down quickly and painlessly.”
“Your gaydar works better than whatever it is you use to detect danger,” Sofia said wryly.
Emory muttered a “Thank God” under her breath. “If you’re feeling this”—she waved her hand between them—“thing between us, then I’m sure you’ll agree time is too precious to waste. What with all that’s happening outside in the crazy place the world has become.” She purposely let her hand fall from where she’d been running Sofia’s hair through her fingers. She saw it as a good sign when Sofia grabbed for it and held on.
“You drive me to madness. You know that, right?” Sofia squeezed Emory’s hand.
“I can’t honestly see that changing, to be honest.” Emory tugged Sofia closer.
“And your breath smells of ice cream.”
“So does yours. You did share my spoon once you realized I wasn’t going to stop making orgasmic noises until you sampled some of its creamy goodness too.” She slipped her hands around Sofia’s waist and pulled her closer still. “Watching your tongue lick the spoon clean tested my sanity.”
“Oh, you can’t blame me for that. You’re already certifiable.” Sofia’s smile was a tad cruel. Emory wanted to kiss it off her face.
“You’re very mean to me,” Emory pouted at her playfully. She did so love a woman with spirit. And Sofia was proving to be the feistiest she had ever met.
“And you talk too much.” Sofia grasped Emory’s collar and pulled her down to kiss her into silence.
Lost in the feeling of Sofia’s soft lips against her own, Emory closed her eyes and reveled in the sensation. Sofia felt so good in her arms. Sofia’s hands cupped Emory’s cheeks as she deepened their kiss. Their touch kept Emory exactly where Sofia wanted her as she overwhelmed Emory’s senses. Emory groaned as Sofia took teasing nips at her lips, tugging at her lower lip just enough to make Emory chuckle at the show of dominance before she was kissed senseless again.
Emory ran her hands over Sofia’s back, but the heavy fabric of her jacket hindered her from feeling more. Emory tugged at it, wanting desperately to explore Sofia’s shape.
Sofia was the first to pull back, her eyes burning with arousal. She panted softly as she fought to catch her breath. “We should go.�
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Emory whined pathetically. “Fuck saving the world for a moment! I just want you kissing me some more.”
“At ease, soldier.” Sofia pulled out of Emory’s arms. She kept her head down as she fussed to straighten her clothing.
Emory purposely stepped back into Sofia’s personal space. “Oh, I’m no soldier, but I’d gladly serve under you, Captain.” She leaned in closer to whisper in Sofia’s ear, “And I’m very good at taking orders…especially in bed.”
Sofia moaned. It was a sin-laden, breathy sound. She tugged Emory to her and kissed her forcefully once more before roughly pushing her away again. “God, you’re more addictive than the damned ice cream.” She ran her fingertips over her bruised lips.
Emory was surprised to note that Sofia’s hands were visibly trembling. Though it killed her to do so, Emory took a step back to give Sofia some space.
“I guess the outside world is waiting for us to rejoin it so it can start spinning again. Kissing you made everything grind to a halt for one purely magical moment.” She smiled at Sofia’s shy smile. “Come on, Major Turn-on, let’s get back on the road before either of us changes our minds.”
Chapter Twenty
Emory gladly let Sofia take point and lead the way back up the steps. She watched Sofia slowly ease open the doors, her gun drawn ready for whatever lay out there.
“All clear.”
Emory clambered out after Sofia and was glad to breathe fresh air again. She closed the doors behind them and wedged a piece of broken bark under the handles to fashion a poor man’s lock. Then she followed Sofia back to the barn to retrieve the van.
Emory took the time to top up the gas with one of the canisters from the previous base. She was so glad to get back in the driver’s seat of her vehicle. She waited for Sofia to fasten herself in before starting the engine.