motions of mowing his lawn. He’d not planned to mow that day, but after what had happened the day before, he felt drawn to the familiar, things he could do by rote, the safety of routine.
His nine-year-old son, Charlie, walked along beside him, his bare legs sprayed by tiny green flecks of severed grass.
“Did you know that twelve people have gone to the moon since 1969?” Charlie asked.
Jesse shook his head as he gave the mower a quick shove. “I didn’t realize it was that many.”
“My report is going to be on the first landing,” Charlie said. “It’s going to be a play.”
“I’ll be there,” Jesse said.
Charlie looked delighted. “Even if there’s an accident?”
“I’ll get someone to work my shift,” Jesse assured him.
Charlie gave Jesse a hesitant look. “That accident yesterday, are the people all right?”
“Most of them.”
“Are you all right?”
Jesse stopped moving forward with the mower and looked at his son, wondering what change in his manner had given Charlie the idea that he was… different. “I’m fine,” he said. He saw that his son didn’t believe him, that he suspected something had gone wrong, or been wrong… or was destined to go wrong. He wasn’t sure what his son sensed. He knew only that he wanted to avoid it. He unhooked the lawn mower bag and dumped the grass clippings. “Let’s get this place hosed down before your mom gets home,” he said.
He reached for the hose and turned on the water. The hose moved oddly, like something alive, a serpent wriggling in his hand. A blade of terror cut through him. He dropped the hose, and fixed his gaze on where it lay, half expecting it to rise, coil, strike.
“Jesse.”
Jesse felt his insides leap.
Amelia was standing just behind him.
“Honey, what is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
Jesse stared blankly at Amelia, then at Charlie, unable to speak, his gaze riveted upon the hose as it wriggled wildly, spewing foamy venom across the glistening lawn.
He felt a strange itch in his chest, as if something had bitten him, and headed into the house. From the bathroom, he could see Amelia and Charlie talking worriedly on the front lawn, worried about him, about something… strange.
The itch struck again, sharp and painful, like a bite.
He lifted his shirt and his eyes widened in horror and disbelief, his mind barely able to take in what he saw, not a bite mark, as he’d expected, or a rash, but the boiling mark of a four-fingered hand.
Eric sipped his morning coffee and perused the newspaper. Reagan led. in the polls, and there’d been no resolution of the hostage crisis in Iran.
“This hostage thing just shows you what happens when you let your enemy see your weakness,” he said. “We should have gone in there and gotten our people, no matter what the cost.”
His daughter Mary looked up from her cereal. “My teacher says if we’d done that, they’d have all been killed.”
“Maybe,” Eric told her. “But the Iranians would have been less likely to do it again.”
Julie sat down at the table. “Can we talk about something else?”
Eric returned to the paper. For the last few days he’d been going over reports of “flying saucer” sightings in Maine. With each new sighting, he’d felt the pull of a change, a break from the arid land he had occupied nearly all his life, the desert wastes of Nevada. Except for the Roswell incident, the West had proven of little interest to the visitors. So what was the point of remaining in an area where those he sought rarely appeared, he asked himself. If you wanted to kill a polar bear, you had to go the Arctic, and increasingly in the last few days he’d determined that if he wanted to complete his father’s work, he could not remain where his father had remained. In a sense, he decided, Owen Crawford had lived like a hunter in a duck blind, waiting for his prey to show up, rather than actively pursuing it.
The decision came like a clap of thunder. “I think we should move,” he announced.
Julie turned this idea over, considering. “To somewhere a little farther out of town?”
“No,” Eric replied. “ Maine.”
“Don’t you think this is a bit too sudden?” Julie asked, stunned by what Eric had just said.
Mary gave Eric a knowing look. “Is this ‘cause there’s flying saucers in Maine?” she asked brightly.
Eric looked at Mary, astonished by her cleverness… or was it intuition? “How did you know about that?” he asked.
“Dylan Peters said that he and his family had gone out to some mailbox and taken pictures of flying saucers but the pictures didn’t come out and that you were the flying saucer soldier and you were in charge and all that… like those guys in
“Smart girl,” Eric said proudly. He turned to Julie. “I don’t think it’s too sudden at all.”
Jesse sat alone, reading, but hardly noticing what he read as his mind returned to something that had happened a few days before. It had been a night like this, clear and crisp. A terrible restlessness had seized him, something invisible urging him from his bed. He’d got-ten up, leaving Amelia asleep in their bed, dressed and gone for a drive, down the state highway, where he’d finally ended up near the accident site of a few days before, standing in a wheat field as the wind rippled through the tall green blades. He’d thought himself alone in the field, then a farmer had shown up, shotgun in hand, recognized him as the man who’d pulled his son from a sweep augur the year before, and lowered the gun. The farmer’s question sounded in Jesse’s mind,
Minutes later, Jesse had seen the field for himself, a circle burned out of it, the farmer saying directly what Jesse had thought at the time,
It did, yes, and now, as Jesse glanced up from his book, the night clear and crisp beyond the house, he felt oddly ready for what he saw: a light, bright and searing, reflected in the mirror above the fireplace.
He drew in a deep breath. They were coming for him, and he knew it. They were coming for him again, but this time it was going to be different. He got to his feet. This time he was going to fight them.
He knocked over a table as he rushed out of the house and into the street. The light was huge now, and steadily lowering, its bright glow intensifying as it descended.
“What do you want?” Jesse cried. “Leave me alone!”
“Dad?”
Jesse wheeled around to see his son standing a short distance away, his small hand lifted toward him imploringly. Amelia stood beside Charlie, a bag of groceries in her arms, the headlights of her car illuminating the scene.“Come back into the house, Dad,” Charlie said.
Jesse nodded, his shoulders slumped, as if beneath the accusatory looks he saw in his neighbors’ eyes.
Later that night, as he lay in bed with Amelia, he knew that the time had come, and so he told her everything, how they’d rescued him from the temple in Vietnam, how he’d thought of them as his dark guardian angels, and put himself in danger time and again to see if they would save him, the fact that they always had. But even all this was not enough. Everything had to come out, and so he went on, talking without restraint, the story pouring out of him in a flood of revelation, the way he’d been “taken” from a bomb shelter, the people who were after him, not aliens this time, but military people, how he’d assumed a false name and joined the Army in order to conceal himself. At last, he showed her the red imprint of the hand on his chest, though it was clear she saw only a rash.
“Maybe it’s… all in your mind, Jesse,” Amelia said cautiously.
“You don’t see a hand?” Jesse asked.
She touched him softly. “We’ve been through a lot,” she said. “And we’ll get through this. But, please, see
