“All of us, sir?” one of the privates asked. Not Private Donnelly; he appeared to know the drill.
The Captain gave the young man a broad, fake smile. “You’re the lucky ones. Yep, everybody goes.”
“But my wife…”
“We’ll take care of that,” the captain said.
Neil helped Mavra sit up and brushed the hair from her face. “Feeling better?”
“Where are we?” she said.
“Airport. We’re going to get on the plane now. Let me help you.” He got up from his seat and held her hand the whole time. At the rear of the vehicle, he handed her off to the captain. “You know you’re going with us now,” Neil said. “She came in direct contact.”
“I know,” the man said as he helped Mavra down. He turned and said, “Follow me.”
The area had been locked down. Soldiers stood along the entire periphery of the area. Two other troop carriers were parked nearby. One was getting washed down already. The engines on the C-5 were running, and a slew of soldiers stood around the plane. They were ready to get out of there. His guess was that the aliens were either already on the plane or had been boarded onto an earlier jet. But why waste a trip? He followed Mavra up the stairs to the rear passenger deck.
“The seats all look to the rear,” she said.
“Yeah,” Neil said, “it’s a C-5.” Three seats about mid-way back and on the right were open. Soldiers stood just behind them. “Should be a quick flight.” He let her have the window seat. The captain sat in the seat across the aisle from Neil and quickly removed hand sanitizer and squirted it into his palms. Neil wanted to tell him that if she were contagious, it was already too late because Neil had seen him rub his eye not moments after helping her from the troop carrier. He turned from the Captain and said to Mavra, “You feeling any better?”
“Much,” she said. “I think it’s the lack of sleep or something.”
“You don’t think those things…” He let the statement stand.
Mavra shook her head. “I’m sure they tested every last thing they could in that lab room at the college. Which means this is a bit overboard.”
“Unless they found something and didn’t tell us.”
“I don’t sense a problem,” she said.
“But you’re tired.” Neil didn’t want to hand his whole understanding of the practical matters of the situation over to Mavra’s feelings about it. He reminded himself of her hit rate. No, she didn’t know for sure and neither did he. And neither did Harkins, or he wouldn’t have ordered for them to go for testing, which is what Neil was sure this was about. Precaution at the least.
“I still don’t sense anything. I’m not worried. But you’re right, I am tired. How long did they say this trip was?”
Neil shrugged. “Once airborne, about two hours, maybe less.” He patted her thigh. “That would be from about now,” he said as liftoff occurred.
“All these guys are going?”
“Yeah.”
“Will we have our own suite?” Mavra said. She kissed his cheek. “We never did get time to go back to the hotel last night. I could use a good shower first…” She nuzzled his neck with her nose.
“I love you,” he whispered.
They kissed again.
Neil unbuckled his seatbelt and got up. Several soldiers stood at the same time. “Seriously. Where am I going to go?” Neil said. No one said anything, so he explained with a shrug, “The bathroom.”
The soldiers sat down and Neil walked to the lavatory and opened the door. He noticed a curtain had been pulled across the rear area and decided to check the space out on his way out. Inside the bathroom, he took a quick pee and washed his hands. He looked tired in the mirror. His hair stuck out in all directions. He cupped some water in his hands and splashed it over his face, then ran his wet fingers through his hair to plaster it down the best he could. He didn’t mess with it long, before he dried his hands with a few paper towels and turned around to leave. He pushed the slide open and pulled on the folding door. In a smooth motion, Neil stepped, turned, and reached for the curtain. He pulled it back and lowered his head into the space.
Two soldiers were sitting on uncomfortable fold-down seats. A large container that looked like the dog kennel they had used before sat on the floor with a military issue wool blanket over the top.
“Sir?” one of the soldiers said.
“Sorry,” Neil said. He popped his head back out and went back to his seat.
“Find out what you wanted to know?” the captain asked.
“I did.” Neil rested back into his seat, snapped the seatbelt into place and closed his eyes. He slipped his arm around Mavra as she turned her back into him. The armrest was up, so she could get comfortable. “Might as well sleep,” he said.
Mavra mumbled something. She was already half way there.
***
Kek-ta shivered in the corner of the cage. There was nothing they could do and they both knew it.
Chit-Chit-ta kept quiet.
She wondered what he might be planning. She wondered where they were being taken, and for what purpose? “I’m frightened,” she whispered.
“Do you still trust the alien?”
“It wasn’t its fault,” she said. She twitched her ears. “It may not even matter anymore.” With her hands around her stomach, she grinned at Chit-Chit-ta. “I’ll do anything you ask, but please make a plan to escape. Please get us out of here.”
CHAPTER 14
AT EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Neil, Mavra, and the rest of the soldiers from the plane followed an armed escort to a temporary dorm.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Mavra said before they even went inside. The place they were led to didn’t appear to be a normal dormitory, long and skinny and several stories high. Instead, it sat squat and square, and very wide. It looked rather new.
As soon as they stepped inside, Neil said, “There’s a medical facility nearby or inside here somewhere.”
“You smell something?”
“Sure do.”
They followed Master Sgt. Clarke. At the entrance, a young woman in a lab coat checked names and pointed either to the left or the right. Mavra and Neil were escorted by a different young woman in a lab coat down the right hallway, which stretched away from the front and around a corner. Rooms lined the outside wall only. Mavra noticed the lack of windows as they walked down the hall. “We’re trapped,” she said. The one feeling she didn’t like was feeling trapped.
“You’ll be staying here,” the young woman said as she stopped next to their door. “Someone will come for you soon.”
Mavra nodded. Not ten feet down the hall a double door led into the large center area of the building. They were close to the operations room, or medical rooms, if Neil was right about the smell. “We’re not trapped yet,” he said after closing the door behind them. “We’ll have to wait and see whether we have any freedom. But now’s not the time to find out.”
“Okay, but I feel trapped already,” Mavra said. “Whether it’s true or not.”
“You’ve said it enough, sweetheart. Try to relax for now. By the way, quarantine is a form of surveillance. We’re not going to get around that.”
“I wish I had my cards.”
“And I wish I had my computer or my workbench…even my reader.”
She walked around the small room and touched the desk, the back of the chair, the single three-drawer dresser. She poked her head into the bathroom. There was a shower, sink, and toilet. Then she turned back to the room and stopped next to the bunk beds against the outside wall. “What do you think they mean by soon?”
“A couple hours. They’ll feed us lunch for sure,” Neil said. There was a knock at the door, and a woman’s voice asked permission to enter. “Maybe sooner than lunch.” He winked at Mavra and opened the door.
Mavra looked at the woman’s nametag first off. “Shall we call you Dr. Bursk?”
“Yes, please,” she said. Neil closed the door behin
d her as she sat a small medical bag on the desk and opened it. She looked at Mavra. “I understand you touched the…um…”
“We just call them aliens,” Mavra said. “No one has named them yet.” She saw Neil laugh silently behind the doctor.
“May I see your hands?” In a moment, Dr Bursk pulled on plastic gloves and reached for Mavra’s outstretched hands.
Noticing that Dr. Bursk wasn’t going to be swayed by humor, Mavra placed her right hand, the one that the female alien had held so tightly, into the doctor’s hand, palm up. “You going to take a skin graft or something?”
She held up a tool. “This is like a crumb remover, similar to what waiters use in fancy restaurants. I’m going to scrape it over your palm and collect any microscopic particles that may still be there.” She looked up at Mavra. “I know you’ve traveled and touched other things along the way, probably washed your hands, but anything that you picked up will most likely still be present…more than you can imagine.” She scraped Mavra’s palm, placed the tool into a plastic bag and zipped it shut before placing it back into her bag. She repeated the action with Mavra’s other hand.
Neil stepped around her. “I’m surprised no one did this earlier.”
“I’m going to take blood next, but I’d like for you to go into the bathroom and wash the area thoroughly first.”
Mavra walked into the bathroom. “With soap?”
“Everything you’ll need is under the sink on the first shelf,” Dr. Bursk yelled in.
Mavra listened as she cleaned up.
Neil said, “They’ve already checked out the aliens and found nothing important, so why do this now?”
“Dr. Altman, you must know that the research doesn’t end with your first findings. Especially since these aliens are maturing at such a fast pace. We don’t know what changes they might have gone through, what new chemicals are present in their bodies, on their skin. How their metabolism interacts with our environment.”
“She told you,” Mavra said as she walked past Neil.
“Has anything been found?” Neil said. “I noticed the aliens were pretty quiet in that plane. I suspect you tranquilized them and tested them right away before exposing the whole crew.”
Dr. Bursk smiled at him as she got Mavra ready for her blood work—her first show of emotion. “You are very astute. To answer your question, no. We haven’t found anything different. But as you know, that doesn’t mean we won’t.”
“So, how long do you keep us here? How long do you continue to test the aliens? What are you going to do with them?” He took a step toward her. “You can’t kill them.”
Mavra perked up. “No. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Now, now, no one said anything about destroying the aliens in order to test them,” Dr. Bursk said as she slipped a third test tube over the back of the needle to be filled. “There. Hold this over your arm and bend it for a few minutes.” She placed the blood samples into a plastic bag and put that into her medical bag. She pulled out a flashlight and with her thumb lifted Mavra’s eyelid. “Look up.”
Neil stepped away and lowered his chin as though thinking deeply.
Mavra let the doctor go through the rest of the brief physical.
“All finished with you,” she said.
“I’m next?” Neil said.
Mavra got up and let the doctor go through her process with Neil. At the end, the doctor thanked them and left.
“You got pretty quiet,” Mavra said.
“Routine stuff. I feel bad for the aliens.”
“What can we do?” Mavra tapped the desk as Neil paced the rest of the room. She knew to stay out of his way. “I don’t like how she said destroy instead of kill,” she finally said.
“You know, it’s one thing if there’s a crashed spaceship—and I’m not saying there is or that I know anything like that—but if the aliens had been dead already, that would be one thing. But these two are alive.” He wrinkled his cheeks, questioning his own words. “I don’t know what it is, but for some reason…” he shook his head from side to side and closed his eyes for a moment. “I don’t see any reason to harm them. They’re here. It’s not their fault their race left them behind.”
Mavra didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t like Neil to allow his feelings to outweigh his scientific curiosity. She stared at him while he talked about what little they might learn about the aliens if they were destroyed.
“Destroyed,” he said.
“It’s such a cold word. But we don’t know for sure what they’re going to do? I don’t sense anything in particular except that we can’t leave and I don’t like that.”
“Clouding your reception,” Neil said. “We’ll give this some time. I have to think about this too.”
“Now, that’s my Neil,” she said. Mavra lay on the bottom bunk and closed her eyes, but not for long. She heard him walking in circles like a caged cat. He tapped the desk, scratched his head. He was a noisy pacer. She sat back up. “This really bothers you,” she said.
Neil pulled out the desk chair and sat down, placed one elbow on the desk and rested his chin on his fist. He stared at the wall, not at Mavra. “They’re innocent,” he said.
“You were innocent, too.”
“Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s because I know how it feels to be an experiment, tested to see what might happen, how I’d react.” He swiveled in his seat toward his wife, but still didn’t look into her eyes. “My whole childhood I was different, and I knew it. My mom played out her theories on me. Do you have any idea how often I was connected to all kinds of electronics? Wires everywhere to test my brain, my heart…my reactions.” With his elbows on his knees, Neil lowered his face into his hands. “They shouldn’t have to go through that. I don’t care where they’re from. What’s worse is that they’re orphans. They have no parents.”
She got up from the bed and placed a hand on his back. “I know, honey. I agree.” She took a deep breath. “They wouldn’t destroy the aliens with her being pregnant would they? I mean, if she is pregnant.”
“Maybe procreation is their second mission. You know, if the first one, signaling their own species, doesn’t pan out.” He shrugged. “It’s not going to pan out. We know that.” He patted her leg and sat upright. “We’re the only ones who seem to care about them as living beings. We’re all they have.”
Mavra let Neil’s head push against her stomach. She bent over him as though protecting him. She seldom saw him in a vulnerable state, and something about it both worried her and made her love him even more. She reached for his hand and looked at his watch. “Let’s rest for a half hour or so. They’ll be coming for us at lunchtime, like you said. Maybe we can get some information then.”
“Sure,” he said.
She pulled him toward the bunk and let him lie down against the wall and lay on her side next to him, her arm over his chest, her head resting on his bicep. She listened to his heartbeat and wondered what went on inside his head, both sides. How did he keep them separate, yet allow them to communicate with one another? She didn’t fully understand how it all worked. There must have been some synapses shared between both sides, but which ones? How?
Before long, the awaited knock came to the door and a young man’s voice announced that it was lunchtime. Mavra rolled out of bed and Neil rose behind her. When she opened the door, she found a soldier standing outside. He held no weapon.
“This way.” He turned and walked past the double doors to the far end of the hall and made a quick left. Two more doors opened to the left and he led them through those doors into a cafeteria style eating area. “Bland,” Neil said. “You can hardly smell the food.”
The soldier stepped aside and let them get into line with other familiar faces.
Mavra scanned the room and decided to sit next to a few of the women and men wearing lab coats. Neil was right, the potatoes had the most flavor, even though there was chicken on her plate. She wondered how they could eat that way day after
day. Perhaps the main chow hall on the base was better. She poked at her broccoli, ate a few pieces of the cardboard chicken just for the protein, and tried to shovel a third forkful of mashed potatoes into her mouth before giving up completely.
Neil had practically finished his plateful of food, leaving some potatoes and a little broccoli, but none of the chicken.
“You want mine?” she said, pointing at her plate.
He stood. “I’ll get more.”
While he was gone, Mavra asked one of the lab technicians how the day was going. A young girl in her mid-twenties answered. “Pretty well. It’s amazing that we get to be involved in something so, so…” She let the sentence stand unfinished.
“So alien,” Mavra said.
The girl smiled. “Yeah.”
“Did they come out of their deep sleep easily enough? I mean, after they were tranquilized.” She took her cue from Neil’s observation.
“One of them did,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“The female took a little longer to wake up. And the fetus—”
A young man sitting beside her placed a hand on her arm to stop her.
“Fetus?” Mavra pressed.
“I’m sorry,” she looked at her partner, “we’re not supposed to talk about it.”
Mavra turned to the young man. “Well, that’s just not true. We were specially called in to work on this case and we’ve been security cleared for access to everything.”
“Then why aren’t they letting you into the lab?” the man said.
From behind her, Neil said, “Because Mavra was in direct contact with the alien in an open environment and needed to have blood samples taken first. Her welfare was on the line.” He spoke to Mavra. “You didn’t tell him that we have full clearance from General Harkins?” He looked at the young tech. “I’m sure you know him?” Neil remained standing until the young man answered him.
“Yes, sir. I didn’t know.”
“It’s all right,” Neil said as he sat down. “Back to the question. You indicated that the female was, in fact, pregnant, and that it took her longer to come out of her tranquilized state. What about the fetus?”
Backyard Aliens Page 13
