“Yes, sir,” Marty said.
“Absolutely, sir,” Howard said.
“All right, here it is,” Owen said. “It was a spy balloon. Super classified. A-l. It hit something and fell back to earth.” He felt a shiver run through his bones at the realization that he may well have found his mission. The question was, what did the balloon hit, and why didn’t this “other craft” crash too?
Chapter Three
Russell Keys tossed the burger and listened to it sizzle on the grill. The day was bright, and very warm. He felt a trickle of sweat run down the side of his face. Across the yard, various friends and neighbors huddled in small groups. Kate stood among them, their son Jesse in the grass at her feet. Everything appeared entirely normal, but nothing felt that way. At least not to him. He didn’t know why. He knew only that all the things that should have brought him joy left him feeling curiously bereft instead, left him moody and withdrawn like a man held by some distant grief, mourning a loss he could not name or find a way to get beyond. Lately he’d turned to alcohol to dull that pain. He knew his drinking had cost him one job, then another, that his life was spiraling downward, as if he were trapped in a crashing plane.
“You’ve got a good-looking boy there,” Bill Walker said as he approached the grill.
“Takes after his mom,” Russell told him. He placed a few buns on the patties. “Kate tells me you’re with the police.”
“Yeah,” Bill answered. “It’s an easy job for the most part. Nothing much to do in a little town like this.”
“You should find a girl, get a family started.”
Bill glanced toward Kate. “You already took the best girl in town.”
Russell’s gaze moved toward the children on the lawn. They were chasing each other and scuffling happily in the grass. So why in the midst of such a scene, did he feel this odd and inexpressible dread, as if he could see their young lives unfold before him, darken in time, and come to their dreary ends?
“And not only the best girl in Bement,” Bill went on. “But a great kid.”
Russell held his gaze on the children. “Yeah, I got it all,” he said softly, though he felt that he had nothing, or that what he had was not really his-it all seemed vague and insubstantial, part of a world he had only one foot in, the rest of him… somewhere else.
“You should be the happiest man in the world,” Bill added.
But he wasn’t, and he knew it. He sensed his unease sinking deeper and deeper as he watched one kid go down, tackled, then tickled good-naturedly by the others as they held him down. He felt the tangle of arms and legs around him, the feeling of being held down against one’s own will. It was all he could do to hold back a scream.
Bill looked at him pointedly. “You okay, Russell?”
“Yeah,” Russell answered quickly, his eyes still on the pile of children.
The kid beneath the others was fighting to free him-self, and Russell felt his dread spike into desperation, as if he were like that kid, strapped down, unable to move, fighting to be free. “Stop it!” he blurted suddenly. “Let him go!” He bolted forward, as if blown by a violent gust of wind, rushed to the pile of children and began pulling them off with such desperate violence that when he’d pulled the last one from the heap, he realized that he’d scared them all, and that their parents were now watching him with troubled faces and cruelly questioning eyes.
Sue was sitting outside Owen’s office, holding the same paper bag she’d tried to show him earlier.
She rose as he came toward her, a strained look in her eyes. Whatever was bothering her, it wasn’t something Owen wanted to hear about, not something he cared about. He was relieved when a large man suddenly blocked his way.
“Are you the people we talk to about flying saucers?” the man asked. “Because me and my boys have some information.”
Information about flying saucers, Owen thought, eager to check out anything now, no matter how crazy it seemed, because it would all have to seem crazy… until it was proven true.
And so, within minutes, he was following Edward Watkins and his sons up a ridge.
At the top of the ridge there was a large gorge lined with pine trees, some of which had been uprooted and now lay on their sides like fallen soldiers. At the center of their fall, Owen made out a huge disc, as large as a B- 29, but without wings, the sides smooth and gray, a craft of some sort, he guessed, but not like any he’d ever seen. It might well be a hoax, he knew, something Watkins and his boys had cooked up to rib the military brass. But what if it weren’t a hoax? What if this disc really were from outer space? That was the way he had to look at such things now, he told himself, not in order to dismiss them, but in order to investigate them fully.
The descent into the gorge was treacherous, but within a few minutes Owen stood beside the disc. Now he could see things from a better perspective. Trees that had looked liked saplings from the rim of the gorge were in fact full-grown pines, scores of them, torn out of the earth and heaved away from the craft. If this were a hoax, he thought, then it was a huge one that had taken days and days of work to pull off.
And it wasn’t just the trees, as Owen saw on closer inspection. The disc too was much larger than he’d guessed, its “nose” embedded deep within the earth while the “tail” rose upward at an angle, like half a drawbridge, casting a deep shadow beneath its upraised bulk.
Cautiously, Owen stepped under the lifted craft and gazed at its undercarriage. As he studied the shiny base of the craft, the air grew oddly cold, and something dense pressed in upon him like thousands of invisible weights. Overhead, the belly of the craft was marked with strange pits and circles, the writings, perhaps, of another world.
For a moment, Owen hesitated, then he lifted his hand and touched the bottom with his outstretched fingers while Watkins and his boys stood and watched in awe.
Something sounded, a rustling, metal scraping metal.
He whirled around and saw a panel open, something coming from it, in the shape of an arm, but not a human arm, thinner and more elongated, with a four-fingered hand, each finger with an extra joint. He glanced at the rancher and his sons, all of them stepping back, mouths agape, eyes staring.
Owen turned back to the dangling arm, then moved around it slowly, methodically, peering through the open door for some glimpse of what lay beyond it, the inner working of the craft. He could see little more than the shadowy darkness, but something in that darkness drew him toward it. He reached up, grabbed for leverage, and hauled himself into the craft, while outside, the rancher and his sons waited for him at a safe distance.
When he reappeared before them a few minutes later, he knew that it was in his eyes, and that they saw it there, glimmering wildly, all the horror and wonder of what he’d seen inside.
Russell looked at the clock on the nightstand. Three forty-two. The windows were open, a soft summer breeze filtering through the curtains, lifting them slowly, as if by invisible strings, then letting them fall again. What could look more normal than the play of wind on fabric, he wondered. And yet the movement looked strange and oddly frightening, like long shrouded arms beckoning to him.
He turned from the window, to where Kate slept beside him, soft and tender. He really was the luckiest man in the world, he thought for a moment. He had a loving wife and a perfect son.
He touched her hair, his gaze very tender, then smiled and turned back toward the window.
And they were there.
Standing beside the bed.
Five German soldiers.
