Caught in Your Wake

by Darien Cox

  “I believe they’d notice and do something about it if we ever drilled into the ground. But with the significant depth of the lake, we can achieve the same goal without drawing their attention. I’m hoping whatever tech they use to block ours is limited to above-ground. The hope is that they’d never suspect we’d go this route to try monitoring them.”

  “They’re a lot smarter than us, you realize,” Christian said.

  “I know that, and I’m sure we’ll find out soon if they’re onto us,” Nolan said. “This is a test run. Ogden wants this, and he’s the boss. This is our job. We’re here to monitor the Whites, whether we’re on good terms with them or not.”

  “But we are on good terms with them,” Christian said. “That’s why this feels deceptive. Shit, you and Elliot got a personal thank you from an actual, full White. You guys have the hybrids over to your house for social visits. Baz is supposed to be our ambassador to the Whites but we’re keeping this from him. It feels wrong.”

  “They’re still an alien race sitting in our back yard, whether we invite Baz over for drinks or not,” Nolan said. “Personal feelings don’t factor into it.”

  Christian snorted. “Okay, Ogden.”

  “Cut the crap,” Nolan said. “This is what Ogden wants and we have to follow his orders. Anyone else have questions right now?”

  Tim huffed. Apparently, everyone else was allowed to ask questions. Just not Tim.

  “So, the Whites don’t actually know you’re doing this,” Myles said. “Putting sensors in the lake to try spying on their transmissions. You didn’t even tell Baz?”

  “No, Sheriff,” Brett said, taking his glasses off and setting them on the table. “We may be at peace with the Whites, but Ogden still feels we have a right to make our own attempts at monitoring their activities. After what happened with the rogue hybrids taking over the base, we’ve learned we have to expect the unexpected and watch our own backs.”

  “But the Whites acknowledged our assistance in that clusterfuck,” Christian said. “They’ve been sharing some of their knowledge with us in reciprocation. Do we really want to rock that boat when the waters are finally calm?”

  “They’ve thrown us a few crumbs since then,” Brett said, “limited technology and what have you, but—”

  “Because we saved their asses!” Elliot interrupted. “A few crumbs of technology is the least they can give us.”

  “But at least it’s something,” Myles said. “Christian has a point. If they find out we’re trying to spy on them they could cut us off completely, or worse.”

  “Worse?” JT shrugged. “The worst they’d do is tell Baz to yell at us. They’re not hostile or violent, Myles.”

  “You don’t know that for certain! I’m still the sheriff of this village and I don’t like the idea of you poking the white tiger with a stick if the fallout could get people hurt.”

  “Oh, here we go.” Elliot rolled his eyes. “Sheriff Hot-bottom gonna start lecturing us about safety again. Can I go get a bagel and come back when he’s done?”

  “Glad you can be so flippant about safety concerns,” Myles said. “You of all people know the dangers. Inserting yourselves into the Whites’ affairs is what almost got your husband killed.”

  “Wow,” Elliot said. “Christian, I think you must be slacking. Did you not give him his morning blowjob? He’s being mean.”

  “I’m not being mean,” Myles said. “I’m doing my job.”

  “Ignore Elliot,” Tim muttered to Myles. “He can’t help himself.”

  “Oh, shut up, Patterson,” Elliot said. “No one asked you.”

  “You shut up, Elliot,” Christian said. “Myles is just doing his job. And for the record I did give him his morning blowjob. And it was a good one. Wasn’t it, baby? You came so hard the Whites probably heard you.”

  Elliot wheezed with laughter. “They probably thought it was a wounded bear.”

  “Nah.” Christian grinned. “More like a really angry bear.”

  “Christian.” Myles shot him a warning look. “Stop.”

  “Yes, please, can you both stop?” JT grimaced, rubbing his eyes. “Now I’m picturing Myles roaring like Chewbacca while he comes and I do not want this in my head. Sorry, Sheriff.”

  Myles’ eyes narrowed, his handsome Irish face flushing. “Moving on. Please, Brett.”

  “Okay, listen,” Brett said, “we have no formal treaty with the Whites, no obligation to tell them everything we do, so technically we aren’t breaking any of their rules by trying to monitor their base.”

  “We have an arrangement with Baz,” Myles said. “Anything regarding the Whites is supposed to go through him.”

  “Baz is great, and it’s beyond cool that we even have the hybrid ambassador as a go-between,” Brett said. “But the Whites are stingy with sharing anything, and it’s still our job to keep an eye on them, especially after we had to save their asses. They’ve got adversaries, and we have no idea if the Greys or the...angry nasties or whoever are only ones. What affects them potentially affects us because of their proximity. They just don’t share enough information with us to allow complacency. It’s not deception on our part. It’s self-preservation.”

  “Brett’s right,” JT said. “If Ogden’s crew hadn’t been monitoring their signals from space and noticed that weird static...if he hadn’t ordered us to put cameras up in the woods we’d never have seen that baby White running around unsupervised. None of us would have known something was wrong in the first place. We’d have missed it. More monitoring isn’t just a good idea, it’s crucial. I agree with Ogden and Brett on this.”

  Myles shrugged, then nodded. “Okay. Good point.”

  “No more questions now, all right?” Brett said. “Please, Nolan. Continue.”

  Christ, how do these assholes get anything done? All they did was bicker. But Tim supposed it was the seriousness of their jobs that made them second-guess every damn decision. His own job, when these idiots weren’t dragging him into their shit, was pretty mellow lately—night shifts excluded. This afternoon he had to meet with his team about new tree growth in a protected part of the forest, then later lead a troop of schoolchildren on a field trip to learn about birds in the nature preserve. Not exactly life or death, alien invasion caliber importance, but at least he and his team didn’t scream and shout over each other.

  Myles claimed the people in this room were effective when it counted, that he’d seen them perform miracles when it came to squashing threats to the village. But Tim had only ever seen them snipe at each other, so it was hard to believe.

  Nolan’s ample muscles flexed within his tight tee shirt as he tapped a wooden pointer on the screen and continued speaking, his chin-length dark hair tucked behind his ears. Tim still found Nolan hot as fuck, but the impossible crush he’d harbored for so long had since faded, and not only because he’d stood witness while Nolan married Elliot on the beach behind JT’s pub.

  Everything changed for Tim the month before that wedding. His entire life turned upside down when he discovered Baz, an alien-human hybrid, critically injured in the forest one morning. Tim had no clue aliens existed then, so at first, he thought he’d discovered a plane-crash victim—half-submerged in the ground, body stretched and distorted, skin paler than death. Strangely tall with long white hair, huge, swollen eyelids, an extra joint in the fingers...he’d initially told himself the victim must have fallen from a great height, frozen, and this explained the physical anomalies. But Baz hadn’t fallen from an airplane. And Tim soon got confirmation of what his instincts had been screaming the moment he’d laid eyes on the creature.

  Not fucking human.

  Not entirely, anyway. Shortly after calling Myles to report his gruesome find, the group sitting in the room with him now had all shown up on the mountain. That’s when Tim learned that the wounded creature he stumbled upon was half human, half alien. Human DNA mixed with that of the tall Whites that used Earth as a stopover base in their intergalactic travels—in
formation Tim was fed in a top-secret briefing and forced to accept as part of his life now, in the space of a single afternoon.

  What followed in the weeks after entailed a lot of late nights and whiskey while Myles did his best to fill him in. Baz the hybrid was a second-generation offshoot of an experiment conducted by the Greys—yeah, those Greys. The big-eyed, bobble-headed aliens of lore were real. According to Myles’ history lesson, the Whites found out the Greys stole some of their genetic material and were playing mad scientist mixing it with human DNA.

  The Whites then executed a surprise raid, slaughtered every Grey they found in the lab, and took the hybrid babies with them. That group of hybrids grew up, had their own babies, and Baz was a product of that. “The Greys are the Dr. Frankensteins of the universe,” Myles explained to him. “Everyone hates them, even the Whites. They’re always screwing around with other species’ genetics without their permission.”

  Yeah, okay, sure. Fucking hell. As jarring as that revelation was, Tim was almost more freaked out to learn that this crew here, who he’d thought were nothing but a bunch of random villagers, knew the alien hybrid personally. That studying the alien presence in Singing Bear Village was their actual line of work, and everything he thought he knew about them was a façade. Nolan wasn’t just a bartender. JT wasn’t just a pub owner. Elliot wasn’t just the village DJ. Same went with Christian’s marina, and the newcomer Brett’s teaching job at the middle school. It was all a front to hide the work they really did in Singing Bear Village. And although conceptually Tim understood the need for secrecy in such matters, emotionally it pissed him off and made him feel duped. Part of him still hated them for the deception.

  It gave him some comfort that at least Myles, who he’d known since childhood, was almost as new to all of this as he was. And he supposed it was good that Myles of all people knew the reality of things in the village, since he was the sheriff. They’d only brought Myles into the fold when he started fucking Christian Boucher and had inadvertently found himself in the path of an extraterrestrial threat to the village. Such threats to the village had occurred more than once, apparently, and though this crew appeared to be taking that somewhat in stride, the knowledge kept Tim up at night.

  In truth, he hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since that day in the forest, the day he was ‘brought through the door’ as Elliot put it. The day he learned the world he knew was not as it seemed.

  For a month afterwards, he’d remained in a state of quiet rage, furious that he’d been left in the dark about something so enormous regarding the town he grew up in, the place he called home, the mountains he tended and protected as forest ranger. Only to discover in a span of hours that those very forests harbored something unimaginable: a vast, underground alien base hidden beneath the mountain range around Singing Bear Village—The Whites. All these years it had been literally right under Tim’s nose as he went about his daily work, and these fuckers here had known. As they passed him on the street. Drank beer with him in the pub. When he’d seen them hiking up on the trails and told them to be careful not to startle any bears. They’d known.

  His fury at being tricked overshadowed his shock initially. But that was only temporary. The shock eventually hit home at the most inconvenient of times—the night of Elliot and Nolan’s wedding.

  At the private party after the reception, Tim had suddenly, and quite disgracefully, begun to fall apart. Only Tyler, one of Ogden’s young soldiers, noticed when Tim started to crack. Everyone else was too busy partying—partying with Baz and his equally freaky hybrid boyfriend. Partying with fucking aliens, while Tim’s equilibrium dizzied and turned the room sideways, his heart beating so fast he couldn’t breathe.

  Baz looked quite different at the wedding party than he had all broken and barely-alive up on the mountain when Tim found him. The hybrid had been a mess that day, swollen eyes purple with bruising, cuts visible along his shredded garment, trails of blood under his nostrils. But when Tim saw Baz that night at the party, his injuries had completely healed, powder-white skin smooth and clear.

  And until the party after the wedding, Tim hadn’t yet seen Baz with his eyes open, which added a whole new layer of shock. Those mesmerizing, terrifying alien eyes, extra-large with a double ring of blue and green around an oval pupil. Baz was crazy-tall and certainly strange-looking, but in truth he was a gorgeous creature when he wasn’t injured. But that made it almost worse, seeing Baz all dressed up and fancy with his long white hair smooth and combed, a similar-looking hybrid companion at his side, like a pair of tall, thin gods carved of marble. Dressed up, hair combed, cocktail in hand, it didn’t fucking matter. Tim’s mind could only see their otherness, a siren warning his humanity on some deep, survival level that this was wrong and did not belong.

  But the hybrids were welcomed in like they were just people. Everyone there acted like it was normal to have two tall white aliens show up to congratulate Nolan and Elliot on their nuptials. Not just that their arrival was normal, but like it was something to be celebrated. Guests shook their hands, even gave them hugs. The aliens drank fucking martinis. The one with the shorter white hair, Baz’s companion, squeezed in next to Tim at the bar, offered his long-fingered hand, and said, “I am Joff. To happy to meet?”

  No, Tim was not ‘to happy to meet.’ He’d stared up into that white face, those odd, luminescent alien eyes, and nearly shit himself.

  The panic attack came so suddenly he barely made it out the door without losing it. He’d come dangerously close to simply curling up in a ball and screaming uncontrollably right there in front of the entire loft full of party guests. But Tyler saw what was happening. And Tyler followed him outside.

  Tyler.

  Just the name made Tim’s breath catch, even now. Tim hadn’t seen Tyler in months, but that hadn’t stopped him from thinking about him more often than was probably healthy. He could still picture the gorgeous young soldier clearly in his mind. Military-style haircut a dark, dusty blond that looked almost brown until the sun hit it. Big gray eyes that didn’t match his boyish face because there was something hard and haunted behind them. And the body. Tyler was shorter than Tim, but perfectly proportioned with tight, rippled muscles. Even though it was chilly autumn weather that night, Tyler had a soft golden tan, not just on his face, but everywhere. No tan lines, so Tim assumed that was just Tyler’s normal skin-tone. How did Tim know Tyler had no tan lines? Because he’d seen all of him—briefly. Only very briefly.

  They’d initially not hit it off at all at the wedding reception. Wanting to get his mind off the pain of having to watch Nolan marry Elliot, Tim was determined to hit on the hottest guy he saw, and that was Tyler. Eerily quiet and mysterious, the cute soldier caught Tim’s eye and that was that—he simply had to have him. He’d met him twice before, but until that night, Tyler didn’t really draw his attention. The first time they met was at the haunted attraction in October, but Tim had barely noticed Tyler since he’d been too busy trying and failing to woo Nolan. Next time was up on the mountain the day he discovered the wounded hybrid. Part of the team that came to retrieve Baz, Tyler had been hostile and all-business that day, eyeing Tim like he was nothing more than a mess that needed cleaning up. Tim didn’t like him. At least he thought he didn’t.

  But seeing Tyler again at the wedding in a black tailored suit? It gave Tim a pleasant chill, like viewing a dangerous but beautiful predator all wrapped in silk. Tim knew instantly that he was going to try his best to get into Tyler’s expensive pants, but he was also hesitant. He’d inquired, and heard that Tyler was into guys, so that wasn’t a problem. And it wasn’t that he felt Tyler was out of his league. Just in a completely different league, a weird, other league. Tyler answered directly to Ogden, the big boss in charge of all the alien shit. And though Tim wasn’t exactly sure what Tyler’s job was, he’d figured out quick enough that it was something spooky.

  Tim had once dated a guy who dumped him after becoming a CIA operative. Ashton had tried to us
e the excuse that his job was just too high-level to share his life with someone as pedestrian as Tim. What a joke. Ashton desperately wanted to be seen as mysterious and behind-the-curtain, but Tim suspected most of his daily tasks involved nothing more dangerous than a paper-cut. Ashton certainly didn’t possess that genuine spark of danger Tim saw in Tyler’s eyes. Tyler was scary because he was silent about his job.

  Even JT and the rest of the village crew seemed slightly wary of Tyler, though they’d obviously worked with him before. They weren’t affectionate with Tyler like they were with each other, but they were clearly familiar enough to accept his presence as a given. And he’d been invited to Elliot and Nolan’s wedding. Which turned out to be both fortunate and devastating for Tim in the end.

  He almost aborted the mission and didn’t bother hitting on Tyler at all, but ultimately talked himself into it. His own wholesome, fair-haired good looks had always served him well enough in the village, so well that he was considered a bit of a slut, a title he wore proudly. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and his job kept his body in good shape. Strutting around town in his well-fitted forest ranger uniform, he’d never had any trouble attracting men—Nolan excluded. So with several cocktails goading his courage and an overinflated ego, he fooled himself into thinking he had a shot at wooing Tyler, this exotic, mysterious young beast in Armani.

  He crashed and burned. Tyler, sounding somewhat bored, told Tim he wasn’t his type. Tim was already emotional—and a little drunk—after watching Nolan make out with Elliot all night, so the exchange made him angry, and he promptly told Tyler to go fuck himself.

  Tyler had simply shrugged, unaffected, which pissed Tim off more. Then somehow, after several more drinks later in the evening, Tyler loosened up and became almost friendly. Or maybe it was because Tim got drunk enough to try approaching him again...he couldn’t quite remember. Either way, they talked, and Tim was surprised to learn that Tyler was in a similar boat, admitting he’d been smitten with Elliot, the way Tim was with Nolan.