“I’m driving,” said Smithy.
“No argument here.”
Bunny and Breida lay stretched out on the sofas in the back of the Winnebago. Bunny’s side was burning now – he was pretty sure his wound had opened up. He was trying to get his breath back.
He looked across at Breida, who was scanning his surroundings with wide eyes. A curtain hung behind them, dividing the back compartment in two.
The big man licked his lips nervously and leaned forward. “Am I allowed to talk now?” he whispered.
“Yes,” said Bunny. “In fact, look at me, Carlos …” The big man stared at him intently. “Nobody is ever allowed to tell you not to ever again.”
Breida thought about this for a moment and then nodded his head, a smile playing across his lips. “OK,” he whispered.
“And you don’t need to whisper either.”
“OK,” said Breida in a loud voice, before holding his hand over his mouth and giggling.
“Loud and proud,” said Bunny.
“Can I ask questions too?”
“’Tis positively encouraged.”
He pointed at the curtain. “What’s behind there?”
“Hi,” said a nervous voice that Bunny recognised.
“Howerya, Zoya.”
Bunny tapped Breida’s knee. “That, Carlos, is the wizard behind the curtain.”
He looked confused.
“Ye’ve not seen The Wizard of Oz, have you?”
He shook his head.
“Well, we’ll have to fix that. She’s a very smart lady who helped us.”
“Thank you,” said Breida.
“Ehm … you’re welcome,” answered Zoya.
Outside, Bunny could hear the loudspeakers. “Leave the area immediately.”
Bunny nodded. “Great idea.”
The Winnebago jerked as it was thrown into reverse, causing Bunny to wince. He placed a hand on his side and wished he hadn’t.
“Don’t suppose you’ve got a first-aid kit back here, Zoya, do you?”
“Over on the left.”
Bunny saw where she meant and pointed. “Would you grab us that, please, Carlos?”
Breida did so and brought the kit over, steadying himself as the Winnebago jerked again as it got back on concrete and started to accelerate.
Breida stopped, his face suddenly panicked. “Wait! Mr Pie!”
“What?” said Zoya.
“Don’t mind him,” said Bunny. “’Tis his teddy bear. I’m sorry, Carlos. We’ll get you a new one.”
Bunny looked up into the wide face and realised the big man was dangerously close to tears.
“Mr Pie is special.”
“Of course,” said Bunny. “We’ll get him sent on. Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.”
Breida looked down at the floor as if considering this. He nodded slowly, concern still etched across his face. “I haven’t got my toothbrush either.”
Bunny had an unwelcome flashback. “We’ll get you a new one.”
Breida sat down and placed the first-aid kit in front of Bunny, looking only slightly mollified.
Bunny flipped it open and started digging around for what he needed. “It’s a funny name for a bear, though, isn’t it? Mr Pie, I mean.”
“That’s not really his name,” said Carlos. “It’s 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510, but nobody else can remember that.”
Bunny stopped what he was doing and looked at Breida. The big man smiled a guileless grin. “I really like numbers.”
“Right,” said Bunny.
“Ehm,” said Zoya from behind the curtain. “I’d have to check, but that sounded a lot like pi to, like, forty decimal places.”
“Fifty,” said Breida with a giggle. “I can remember to one hundred and eighty-six, but it is too long a name for a teddy bear.”
Bunny gave Breida a long hard look. A tiny part of his brain was tingling, as if it might have finally started to figure something out, but it was nowhere near as loud as the part protesting on behalf of his painful side, or the one for his grumbling belly, or even the one for his desire to sleep for about a week. So, for now, Bunny just nodded. “You’re a surprising man, Carlos.”
“Shit!” said Zoya.
“What?”
“I almost forgot the surprise!”
Chapter Sixty-One
Colonel Travis Fredricks stood behind one of the Humvees as he spoke into the satellite phone. While the crowd of crazies had now been moved back one hundred yards from the site, he didn’t want anyone recording him or reading his lips. Not his first rodeo.
“I understand, sir. Now that the troops have arrived we have managed to move the crowds back and secure the craft … Yes, we tried to secure any recordings, but a lot of the crowd left the area when the choppers arrived. I’m afraid it is getting out there, sir.”
The colonel pulled away the phone to allow his superior to pointlessly vent his spleen. He looked at his aid, Corporal Streeter, who smiled back sympathetically. She’d been his aide for two years now and she was excellent. He’d be sorry to lose her, but a promotion was imminent and she deserved it. They needed more like her. He’d take her over the four-star general at the other end of the call, who was currently talking for the sake of it.
It was a peculiar fact of life that while the US military literally invented the internet, at least as far as they were concerned, their senior command still had no real concept of how it worked. The idea that the footage of the Longhurst UFO could be somehow suppressed was laughable. It had been online about sixty seconds after the first sighting. They’d been tracking it on social media when the call had come through from the prison.
To Fredericks, the whole thing smelled off. UFOs do not travel at a reported sixty miles an hour, they don’t do so conveniently close to roads, and they don’t land beside the only structures in an otherwise vast expanse of desert. They also, don’t appear to a rabid bunch of lunatics in purple robes. This was a new and unsettling development.
Fredricks was aware of the Celestial Church of whatever the hell they called themselves, but only because he had to be. They were cranks. Hippy zealots. Wackadoo screwballs. This whole set-up smelled worse than coleslaw left out in the sun. The thing was, his job was not guessing what these situations were or were not. His job was to stop these situations becoming
