Unknown (Unknown Series Book 1)

by Wendy Higgins

  “Enjoy your cookies.” Tater’s way of saying get lost.

  “I will,” I snarled.

  I went to bed that night with a belly full of too much sugar, and a mind full of precious metals, wondering what might have happened if Tater hadn’t interfered. And then I gave my mind permission to imagine the possible scenarios. I fell asleep still cursing my brother’s name.

  At eighteen, after I graduated, I attended nursing school to get my Associate RN degree. I stayed busy with an overly-full class load, hanging with Remy when I could make trips out to the University of Nevada in Vegas, or whenever she visited home.

  Mom and Dad didn’t care that I still lived at home; in fact, I don’t think they were ready to be empty-nesters. They gave me space and I took care of my own laundry. I offered to try and make dinners, but Mom and Abuela wouldn’t hear of it. They were total control freaks in the kitchen. Abuela cleaned up all around me while I did something as simple as making a sandwich, wiping crumbs before I was even finished.

  Nursing school was awesome. It was freeing to be in classes about things I wanted to know, rather than boring stuff I was forced to learn. Give me arteries, clots, and bone structure any day over Shakespeare and geometry.

  At twenty, I graduated nursing school but jobs were scarce. Our small county clinic wasn’t hiring. I went down to Clark County and the hospital H.R. rep told me their nursing staff was pretty full too, but they needed EMTs and I could be put on the nursing waiting list. So, I took EMT training to become a paramedic.

  I felt a driving need to stay busy and useful, and to push myself to the limits, much to my mother’s chagrin. But my trainers commended me for being able to think and react quickly in dire situations, and to still manage a kind, compassionate bedside manner for the injured and their panicking family members. I’d finally found my calling.

  It was only a matter of time before work calls began to break my heart. I couldn’t tell anyone the things I’d seen. I’d once tried to tell Mom why I’d come home with bloodshot eyes, trembling, but partway through my story she covered her face and shook her head, begging me to stop. Yeah, I saw some awful stuff.

  I was crying in my car after a shift one night when a fire fighter who’d been at the scene knocked on my window. Ken—I think it was short for something Japanese. My stomach gave a small swoop. Ken had been trying to get me to go out with him since we met. Remy thought I was crazy—she’d taken one look at his face at a party two weeks ago and declared I needed to date him, stat. I wiped the tears from my face, but it was no use. He leaned down, resting his forearms on the ledge. I looked up into his beautifully slanted brown eyes, at the black hair long enough to tuck behind his ears.

  “It won’t always be this hard,” he promised. “Hang in there.” I’d heard it from Julian, too, about how I had to build scar tissue around my heart, otherwise I’d imagine every patient as someone I love. “Look, I know this sounds fucked up, but you can’t think past the scene in front of you—you can’t think of their lives. You have to look at each call matter-of-fact, mind over matter.”

  I nodded, but stared at the steering wheel.

  “You wanna . . .” He cleared his throat. “Go get a coffee or something?”

  “Ken.” I made myself face him. Remy was right—he was incredibly good looking, but I couldn’t help but hold back. I felt bad every time I rejected him, but my heart was on the other side of the world. “I think I should probably go home. But thank you.”

  He patted the car door and gave me an understanding smile. “All right then. Get home safe, Tate.”

  I tried to avoid Ken after that, but it was hard when we kept ending up at the same scenes together. Each time, he looked at me with hope in his eyes. Hope that I continued to smash. He was right about what he’d said about the job, though. Eventually the shock lost its power, and I was able to partially numb myself. But only partially.

  In late winter, I got a letter from Rylen with a question thrown seemingly innocently into the mix—something he’d never asked me before—Any man lucky enough to steal your heart these days?

  The way my heart danced, I could have run a hundred sprints around the house. I worked up every ounce of nerve and wrote back: By now you must know you’re the only man who can have my heart, Rylen Fite.

  I nearly chased down the mailman the next day to get the letter back from him. I called Remy and could hear her jumping up and down on her springy bed as she laughed maniacally and cheered.

  “Finally! It’s about dang time, Amber! I’m so freaking proud of you!”

  But I didn’t share her excitement. I was in full panic mode. I had ruined everything. Rylen was going to tell me he didn’t think of me like that, and then everything would be strange between us. He’d probably stop writing me. When I shared these fears, I could sense Remy’s eyes rolling back in her head through the phone line.

  “Way to ruin my euphoria,” she said. “I refuse to listen to any more of your negativity. You will lift your chin and speak to me only of rainbows and true love’s kiss until Prince of the Potato Fields responds. Mm-kay?”

  I snorted, still shaking on the inside. “Yeah, Fairy Queen. Mm-kay.”

  “Many thanks, Unicorn Princess.”

  Five weeks passed. It always took a long time to receive a response, but this time seemed especially long. I felt like my stomach was plummeting down over a hill every time I thought about it. Of course, my paranoid mind began to wonder if he was avoiding responding. Was he trying to find a kind way to let me down? The only time I wasn’t overthinking was when I was at work. And that day, in particular, was crazy.

  We got a call to a house in the middle of nowhere. Rural land. Hundreds of acres of crops: alfalfa, barley, corn, and oats. As we raced up the gravel road, kicking up a cloud of dust, my redheaded partner, Julian, pointed out at the field. About a quarter of a mile away there seemed to be a huge area smoking.

  “Fire?” I asked.

  He shrugged, staring. “Could be a controlled burn, but it’s in the middle of the field.” Thankfully the fire department would be coming soon too. We peered out, trying to see what could be causing the faint circle of smoke, but it was hard to see anything through the tall corn stalks.

  “That is weird as hell,” Julian said. I agreed. The call came from an older man, who said his wife had come in the house barely breathing, white as a ghost, and unable to talk. He thought she was having a heart attack.

  We skidded to a stop in front of an old two-story, white farmhouse. I jumped from the back of the ambulance with my pack and sprinted to the front door. It was hot—the sun seemed to sizzle on my skin. An older man answered, a worried look on his face. He pointed to the couch, where a gray-haired woman sat. Her face was nearly as gray as her hair, but at least she was upright. Make that tilting. I ran in and knelt beside her, reaching for her wrist. She was cold and clammy, her pulse weak but fast.

  “Ma’am, can you tell me your name?” I asked. Sweat dotted her brow and lip.

  “She hasn’t spoken since she came in,” the man told us.

  Julian shone a quick light in her eyes, which were unfocused. “Dilated,” he said. Her chest rose and fell irregularly with shaking breaths.

  “She’s in shock,” I said. “Ma’am, we’re going to check you for injuries. I’m Amber, and this is Julian. We’re going to take care of you.” I lifted a bottle of water to her lips and she drank a sip, still with a vacant stare, dribbling slightly. Julian grabbed a throw blanket from the back of the couch and wrapped it around her.

  Her husband stood close, watching.

  “Sir, did you see anything happen?” Julian asked him.

  “No. She just came stumbling in like that.”

  “How about out in your field?” I asked. “What happened out there?”

  His face scrunched. “My field?” He walked to the window and pulled the flowered curtain aside while I got the woman to take another sip. The man gasped raggedly.

  “What in the Sam he
ll . . . ?”

  Sirens from afar and tires on gravel told me fire and rescue were arriving.

  The woman’s chest lifted with a sudden intake of air and she said in a scratchy voice, “The aliens.”

  My heart gave a hard pound of surprise. Julian and I looked at each other.

  “Come again, ma’am?” Julian said.

  Her husband rushed over and fell to his knees in front of her. “What is it, Gracie? What did you see out there?”

  “His face . . . was handsome . . . but his arms.” Her eyes grew unfocused again and she began to shiver violently.

  “What about his arms?” her husband asked.

  The woman met him eye-to-eye and her gaze seemed to clear. “He had four.”

  What the what?

  The screen door burst open and four men rushed in. Two in firemen uniforms and two in suits. FBI or a state investigative unit? Why were they here for a routine call? They surveyed the room and then nodded at Julian and I.

  “She’s in shock,” I told them.

  One of the men stepped forward, nodding. “Thank you both. We’ll take it from here.”

  Julian and I shared another glance. We weren’t usually dismissed so quickly.

  “She needs fluids and warmth, possibly oxygen—”

  The man shut Julian up with a hard pat to his shoulder. “We know how to handle shock, son.”

  Alrighty, then. The four men converged on the couple in the small space, so Julian and I headed out. One fire truck and two unmarked cars stood outside. Men were walking through the field. A strange sense of trepidation chilled me. I was glad to climb into the ambulance and leave.

  We were quiet for a long time until I said, “Okay, was that weird as shit or is it just me?” Julian had been an EMT for a couple years longer than me.

  He shrugged and chuckled. “I’ve seen weirder. People do fucked up things, or see fucked up things, and then their brain deals with it in fucked up ways.”

  I let out a deep breath and tried to relax. I pulled out my work laptop and began to type up the incident report. I included every detail, including what the woman had claimed. I usually didn’t check back on reports after I filed them, too worried that what I’d find out would be bad news, but I’d definitely be looking into this one tomorrow.

  My phone dinged with a text and I looked down to see a message from Ken. It had been nearly a month since he’d contacted me.

  Not to be a stalker, but I saw ur schedule and ur off Sat. Dinner? U have to eat, Tate. May as well eat with me.

  Julian asked, “Who’s that? Your friend Remy? Let me know next time you and her go out. I might just happen to show up.”

  He winked at me from the driver’s seat and I shook my head, smiling. Last time we’d gone out had been at a fire fighter’s house party. No cop friends were there, so everyone turned a blind eye to Remy’s underage drinking—and in all fairness, she looked at least twenty-one. Remy met Julian shot-for-shot. She nearly drank him under the table, but I had to carry her out and babysit her all night. I didn’t care for a rematch. I shoved my phone back into my pocket without responding. I’d let him think the text was from Remy. Julian didn’t know about Ken’s persevering attempts for a date, and I wanted to keep it that way.

  I was still weirded out when I got home that evening. Until I saw the letter waiting for me on the table with Rylen’s messy script. My heart leapt, then sank, then leapt again as I opened it with shaking fingers.

  His letter began: Dear Pepper, Haha, very funny. You’d better be setting your sights higher than that . . .

  And he proceeded to talk about the massive tropical birds he’d seen, one of which sat on his shoulder at an outdoor bar and didn’t want to leave him. There wasn’t another single mention of my bold admission. He’d written it off as a joke.

  “What’s wrong, Amber?” Mom asked. She was looking at the letter, which I’d crumbled in my sweating fist.

  “Nothing.” I forced a smile and went to take a long shower. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough water or soap in the world to wash away the strangeness and disappointment of the day. I texted Remy right away and spent the next hour scrolling through her tirade of male-bashing texts as they came in. Hearing her call Rylen a bone-headed, cave-dwelling, award-winning-idiot-of-the-century didn’t make me feel any better. Because deep in my heart I knew I would never have the nerve to tell him again. Because maybe he wasn’t dismissing it as a joke. Maybe he was gently telling me he wasn’t interested in me like that. The spark of hope I’d been holding onto for so long had dimmed.

  I was tired of feeling this way. Tired of the roller coaster of hoping and then having those hopes crushed. I couldn’t keep living like this.

  As I sat on my bed, filled with a sense of loss, I pulled out my phone and read Ken’s text several times through.

  Okay, I texted back, let’s have dinner.

  The next morning when I arrived at the hospital, the first thing I did was to open my laptop and search for Grace Fondent’s file to see if any information had been added. Nothing came up. I double checked the spelling of her name. I typed in Gracie instead. Still nothing. Baffled, I went to my supervisor’s office.

  She held up a finger as she finished her phone conversation, then hung up and smiled at me. “What can I do for you, Amber?” Her phone rang again, but she ignored it.

  “I can’t find one of the files from our run yesterday. Grace Fondent?”

  “Ah,” she said. “The FBI are taking over that case, so we passed the file along to them.”

  The FBI? Why? Utterly bizarre.

  “I thought we kept files of all our stops, even when they get passed to an agency?”

  “Sweetie, when the FBI asks you to delete a file, you do it without question. It’s best if you put it out of your mind. Understand? Criminal activity is touchy business. Don’t speak of it to anyone again. Even me.”

  Criminal activity? Did they think Grace Fondent started that fire in her field? Even if she had, why would it be FBI business? Insurance stuff, maybe? The phone rang again, but this time she answered it, giving me a final smile before turning her attention away. I backed out of the room, unsatisfied and even more confused than yesterday.

  I stopped for fuel on the way home and went inside the gas station for a bottle of water. As I stood in line I grinned at the local papers on display and the magazines with pictures of green alien heads and fuzzy pictures of round UFOs. My eyes landed on one article title in particular: HANDSOME ALIENS WITH FOUR ARMS!

  The back of my neck prickled sharply. I stepped out of line and picked it up off the rack, ignoring the scoff from the man behind me. I flipped through until I came to the article. A New Mexico woman, age 59, was quoted: “I was out for a walk ‘cause I couldn’t sleep, and I saw a big group of people sort of wandering near our property line. I stood real quiet behind a tree, ‘cause I’d never seen so many people out our way before. There were hundreds of them, all moving the same direction. Nobody made any noise. But one of them, he looked my direction. Even in the dark I could see he had a face like an angel, with a full head of dark hair . . . but his body . . . that’s when I got scared. He had four arms. I looked around ‘cause I thought I was going crazy, but it was the same for the others. Some of them had four arms, some three. Only a couple had two. I ran straight home and called the police!”

  The magazine slipped from my hand with a clatter against the floor. My heart was pounding. The gum-chomping cashier and the man checking out stared at me. I bent down and grabbed it, trying three times before I got it back into the slot on the rack. I don’t even remember paying for my drink or driving home. Next thing I knew I was sitting at the dinner table with everyone chatting around me.

  “Bad day at work, hun?” Dad asked carefully.

  I blinked. “Have you noticed all the alien stuff in the tabloids lately?” I asked.

  Dad chuckled and Mom gave me a funny look.

  “There’s always alien stuff,” Dad said. “We’r
e a stone’s throw from Area 51.”

  Not really, it was a couple hour drive, but I knew what he meant.

  “It just seems like more than usual lately.”

  They got quiet, exchanging worried glances, as if I might finally be cracking under the pressure of my job.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Yeah, bad day at work.”

  This seemed to appease them; my bad days being something they were accustomed to. Abuela put a giant scoop of yellow rice with diced veggies on my plate. I picked at my food as I thought about Grace Fondent and the woman from the article. There had to be a logical explanation for why they’d both seen multiple-arm beings. My mind turned and turned until it hit me. Grace Fondent must have done or seen something awful, just like Julian said. But she also must have read that stupid tabloid this week, and for whatever reason her mind replayed it and made it her reality.

  Relief trickled through me, clear and sweet. I nearly laughed at myself for getting so freaked out. I put a helping of black beans on my rice and relaxed.

  Remy was more excited about my date with Ken than I was. I swore to her I’d call her the minute I left him. My stomach was a bundle of nerves when I showed up at the Japanese steakhouse, but his bright smile put me at ease right away. Time to relax. Enjoy his company.

  “Want a drink?” he asked, nodding to the cocktail list.

  “I’m only twenty,” I whispered.

  He winked. “The owner is my uncle. And the bartender is my cousin.” I looked around.

  “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.”

  “Don’t worry about it. They’ve been serving me since I was sixteen.”

  My eyes went wide and he laughed. I agreed on a fruity rum concoction in the belly of a porcelain Buddha glass. And after dinner, he got me to try a shot of sake with him at the bar. I tried, and failed, not to think about how Ry had been drunk on sake when he got his pepper tattoo.

  You’ll always be like a sister to him. Move on.

  The shots were gross, but they warmed me up inside and I found myself smiling. A lot. I switched to beer, and we sat there talking for two hours. Mostly work stuff, which was kind of nice to be able to blow off steam and tell the stories that other people in my life could not handle hearing. He stopped drinking and bought me another.