Jess didn’t follow sports much except during the Olympics. She looked at Fay, who shook her head.
“No, I think it’s because you remind me of that man on the reality show. The handsome bald one. I can’t remember which one now. It’ll come to me. But you do look a little like my husband. He had your type of muscular build.”
Tyler knew Jess’s background, but Grant gave her a new once-over at this tidbit of info.
“My grandfather was full-blooded Maori,” Jess explained. “That’s why you’d think I was Nana’s adopted grandchild.”
“Nonsense,” Fay said. “She looks exactly like her mother, who looked just like me.”
“And it seems like she got her sense of adventure from you,” Tyler said.
“That’s why she’s so good at coming up with the company’s tour packages.”
“Like what?”
Jess ticked them off using her fingers. “We’ve got six bungee-jumping locations, skydiving tours, kayaking trips, heli-skiing, white-water rafting. Just about anything you can name. Except jet boats. And we’re working on that.”
“Sounds like you’ve got a budding empire,” Tyler said.
“It’s in full bloom,” Fay said. “Jess’s company made twenty million dollars last year.”
“Okay, Nana. They don’t need all of the details.”
“I’m just so proud of you, honey.”
“I know.”
Now it was Tyler giving her a new appraisal. “Well, we’ve gone through a lot to get to this point, Fay. What exactly is it that you wanted me to take a look at?”
Fay went to her satchel and removed a hunk of silver metal the size and shape of a Frisbee cut in half. One edge was a smooth curve while the other was jagged, as if it had been hacked apart with a rusty can opener. Jess had seen it a hundred times, but now the attack gave it greater significance.
Fay gave it to Tyler, who held it carefully so that he didn’t cut himself, weighing it with his hands. “Too strong to be aluminum. Feels like a titanium alloy. Or possibly magnesium. I’d have to take it back to a lab to make sure.”
“Can you tell me if it’s from a spaceship?” Fay asked him.
Jess noticed Tyler’s lip curl at the ridiculous question, but he inspected the object carefully before answering. “It definitely looks like it’s been involved in a crash of some kind.” He pointed at the tears in the metal. “You can see evidence of explosive impact here, along with some melting of the material. But this could be from an aircraft. I’ve seen thousands of pieces like it.”
“From sixty-five years ago?”
“Well, no. My expertise is on recent accidents. But I have seen wreckage from old World War II bombers. Maybe that’s what you found.”
“Oh, no. This is definitely from the Roswell crash.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I found it there.”
“Perhaps a plane crashed in the area.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Fay,” Tyler said. “I’m having a hard time believing this came from a spaceship, but it’s not because of you. I’m just an inveterate skeptic. If this is from Roswell, why are you just investigating it now?”
“She’s been investigating it for the past five years,” Jess said. “Ever since my grandfather died.”
“I didn’t tell Henare—that was my husband—about my experience at Roswell until very late in life. I thought he would send me to a loony bin, so I told him about it only when he was dying. I was shocked when he said I should go on that quest, that he’d be with me every step of the way. Since then I’ve been trying to track down the origin of what I learned at Roswell. I was hoping you could point me in the right direction. All I want is an answer. I don’t care what it is, but I’d like to know before I end my days on this planet.”
Grant stopped cutting the sandwiches, and Tyler guzzled the rest of his beer. Though they hid it well, Jess saw the dubious look they exchanged.
“Fay,” Tyler said, tossing the bottle in the recycling bin, “I’m happy to take this piece of metal back to Gordian and test it every way we can. But I can tell you now that unless we find it’s made of some material that we’ve never seen before, the results will be inconclusive.”
“Did you show that to anyone else?” Grant asked. “The guys at your house today must have heard about it somehow.”
Fay gave them an embarrassed look. “Oh my goodness, I did talk about it, didn’t I? When you told me it would be three months before you could see me, I didn’t think it would hurt to go to Roswell for the annual UFO festival and see if I could get some information from the people there, although plenty of them are kooks.”
“Who did you talk to?” Tyler said.
“Lots of people. You could tell that ninety percent of them were just what I thought Henare would think of me: crackpots, all of them with wild tales that I knew were absolute hogwash, but there were also lecturers and authors there who’ve spent years researching the incident.”
“Did any of them seem to take a particular interest in your story?”
“Sure. I don’t know if they believed me, but a lot of people were interested.”
“Did you show anyone your artifacts?”
“No, but I did mention the piece of wreckage in an interview.”
“There’s even a video,” Jess said.
“What video?”
“I can show it to you after lunch,” Fay said.
“Do you know anything about the multicolored metal Foreman and Blaine were after?” Tyler asked.
Fay shrugged. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“You mentioned in the house that you had ‘artifacts’ plural. Is the second one another piece of wreckage?”
“Not wreckage really. But it’s from the crash.”
Fay pulled out her real treasure from the satchel, a battered piece of wood in a plastic sheath.
She handed it to Tyler, who peered at the engraving. His eyes lit up when he recognized the drawings etched into the smooth wood. Jess wasn’t surprised that he knew what they were.
“Where did you get this?” he said.
“At Roswell. The same day I picked up that piece of metal from the wreckage of the spaceship.”
“You found it in the wreckage?”
Fay looked at Jess, who nodded for her to continue.
“It was given to me,” Fay said. “By an alien who survived the crash for a short while.”
Grant, who had been taking a swig of beer, coughed as some of the liquid went down the wrong way.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Did you say alien?”
Tyler furrowed his brow at Jess, but she was glad to see that he didn’t immediately dismiss the statement. He obviously was willing to listen to more.
Jess picked up two of the plates and nodded for Grant to get the others.
“Let’s take our lunch into the dining room,” she said. “Nana has a tale to tell you.”
NINE
July 2, 1947
Fay galloped across the grassy plain atop her Appaloosa, Bandit, trying to outrun the approaching storm. With darkness falling, her father would soon come looking for her, and he’d tan her hide if he found out she’d gone riding without finishing her after-school chores. As she felt the hot wind in her face and watched Bandit’s silky mane toss from side to side, Fay thought it would be worth the risk.
In just a few days, he’d be yanking her from everything she’d ever known in her ten short years. She’d never even been out of New Mexico and now her father wanted to uproot the entire family so he could go run his cousin’s sheep ranch near someplace called Lake Wakatipu on the other side of the world. And the worst part was that they’d have to leave Bandit behind. She’d argued that it wasn’t fair, but nothing she could say would change his mind. The best she could do was spend as much time as she could with her beloved horse, so she’d taken him for long rides every evening whether her dad liked it or not.
But he’d be
extra mad if she got stuck out in a thunderstorm. Flash floods could happen in the blink of an eye, and to get home she’d have to cross many arroyos on the Foster sheep ranch where the foreman, Mac Brazel, let her ride undisturbed.
The clouds rolled in, lightning piercing the sky every few minutes. She was still seven miles from the barn and safety. At this rate she’d be soaked by the time she got there, and there’d be no way she could hide what she’d been doing if she walked into the house drenched and covered with the smell of horse. Then her behind would get the belt for sure. She pressed her heels down and urged Bandit to go faster.
A new sound intruded over the pounding hooves. Faint at first, the hum grew steadily, coming from the west behind her. Too constant to be thunder, it sounded like an engine, but no one would be idiot enough to try to drive a truck through the uneven terrain.
Fay looked over her shoulder to see where it was coming from, but the plain was empty to the horizon. The sound grew louder still, and she realized that it wasn’t coming from behind her. It was overhead.
With White Sands Proving Ground only thirty miles away, she’d heard some of her friends talk about planes that sometimes flew high above the Army base. Two years ago, she’d even heard the faraway boom of something her father later called an atom bomb. That had gotten the kids talking when the news had been made public. To them, nothing was better than a government secret, unless it was a secret weapon that could destroy an entire city.
But the noise she heard now wasn’t a bomb, and it wasn’t the drone of aircraft propellers. This was more like the whine of a thousand trumpets blowing in unison. And it was heading straight toward her.
She pulled up sharply on the reins, and Bandit whinnied as he came to a stop. Fay looked up into the low-hanging clouds hoping to catch a glimpse of the noise’s source. Then, just like heavy seas parted by a ship’s prow, the clouds slid aside, and a flying object like nothing she’d ever seen screamed out of the sky.
Her mouth agape, Fay struggled to keep Bandit from bolting as a giant, silvery disk descended directly at them. Not knowing which way to go, she kept the horse still. The flying disk had no propellers, just two gaping black openings on either side. The craft had to be wider than the local high school’s football field.
Before she could decide on a direction to go, it roared overhead, deafening her and spooking Bandit. He reared up, bucking Fay, and while she sailed through the air, she realized that the object that she’d thought was a disk was actually the shape of an oblong wing with no body. Then she hit the ground, smacking her rear harder than her dad would have and rolling away from Bandit’s panicked stomping.
Fay raised her head in time to see the silver wing plow into the ground a quarter-mile in front of her, spraying dirt into the sky as it skidded to a stop.
The whine from the craft didn’t end, but she could see no further movement.
Wincing from her bruised backside, but otherwise in one piece, she cooed at Bandit until he calmed and came to her. She climbed back on and tentatively rode toward the motionless air vehicle.
She knew she should just ride straight on and tell her father what had happened, but she also felt intense curiosity about the craft. Her father had taken her to an airfield one time to see the Army planes, and they’d all had white stars and numbers painted on the sides. This object had no markings whatsoever.
When she reached the front of the craft, Fay dismounted the horse and tied him to a scrub brush to keep him from bolting. She could see now just how huge the thing was, the wing standing more than five times higher than her thin frame.
As she walked along the wing’s length, she ran her hand over its smooth skin, the metal cold to the touch. She didn’t notice the cracked square of glass lying on the ground until she was right next to it.
No, not glass, because it wasn’t shattered, but it was transparent like a window pane. She looked up and saw the space where the pane would go. The frame around it had been ripped apart from the force of the crash. Although the front of the craft was partially buried in the earth, it was too far above her to see inside without hoisting herself up. Now she wished she hadn’t dismounted Bandit.
Her heart raced as she tried to decide what to do. If someone was hurt, Fay had to help them, but she was terrified about what she might find. Living on a ranch, she’d seen death and injuries: broken bones, impalements, rotting sheep that hadn’t been discovered for a week. But this was different. There might be injured men inside.
Her dad had raised her to be tough. She’d become the son in the family after her brother died when she was two. Her father took her shooting and roping, taught her how to shear and hunt and fish. Fay convinced herself she could handle whatever she discovered in there and then report back. It would take only a moment to investigate.
Wrapping her leather gloves around the frame, she prepared to pull herself up when a silver hand shot out of the opening and grabbed at her wrist.
Fay fell backward and screamed. She shrieked even louder when she saw the face that peered out the window.
Although it was the size of a human and had two arms, its bulbous silver head was twice as large as a man’s, framing two circular black eyes and a wide slit where the mouth should have been. The grotesque face lacked any nose. She screamed again when the creature climbed over the window’s sill and landed next to her, breathing heavily before collapsing to its knees. Blue fluid bled from its stomach. It put its three-fingered hands to its head, shaking it back and forth as if it were trying to decapitate itself. After a moment, it gave up and sank to all fours.
With a guttural tone, the thing babbled at Fay in a language she’d never heard. She shook her head in disbelief, and before she could scramble away, the creature lunged at her and grabbed her leg. She tried to twist free, but its grip was too strong. He crawled toward her and took her hand.
Fay was scared beyond reason, sure that the thing was preparing to eat her, but instead it stood and pulled her to her feet. Without letting go of her hand, it loped toward Bandit, babbling nonstop the entire way, as if it were terrified about something inside the downed craft.
She struggled but couldn’t break free. When they reached Bandit, the creature patted the horse on the neck, then threw Fay onto the saddle. To her dismay and surprise, the thing climbed awkwardly up behind her and lashed the reins, launching Bandit into a canter with surprising skill.
It was only then that Fay realized that the whine from the craft was getting louder by the second. They fled across the plain in the direction of a slope leading down to an arroyo a half-mile ahead. For some reason, the creature was desperately trying to put distance between them and the craft.
Lightning flashed, followed seconds later by the crack of thunder. The storm would arrive in minutes.
When they reached the slope, the creature dismounted and pulled Fay off, leading them down into the dry streambed, soon to be swollen with water from the coming storm. With one hand on Bandit’s rein, it pushed her against the twenty-foot-high vertical wall of the arroyo and covered her body with its own. As it did so, a tremendous blast like a thousand thunderclaps split the air.
The thing hadn’t been trying to kidnap her. It had been trying to protect her.
Bits of debris rained down around them, but none of them were large enough to injure them or the horse.
After a minute, the thing rolled over and lay on its back, wheezing with great effort. Its shaking hand snaked behind its back and withdrew something from a hidden pouch. It pressed the object into Fay’s hands.
No longer terrified by her savior, she looked down and saw with astonishment a weathered piece of wood no bigger than a schoolbook. On it was an engraving of a rough triangle with a large dot on the left side next to a squiggly line coming from the triangle’s center. Carved on the reverse side were four simple images recognizable as a spider, a bird, a monkey, and a person.
She stared back at the creature. “You want me to give this to someone?”
/> The creature pointed at her. The gift was meant for her.
“The Army, maybe?”
At the word “Army” it violently shook its head and shoulders and pointed at her again. The piece of wood was for her alone. Then the creature spoke with a voice so warped that Fay could barely understand the syllables.
“Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um.”
Fay shook her head. It sounded like gibberish. “I don’t understand.”
It repeated the phrase again slowly. “Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um.” It gestured for her to repeat it, and she did so three times until she got it verbatim.
With its hand shaking even more forcefully, the thing drew a figure in the dirt. It was an upright rectangle. Inside the rectangle the creature wrote a K, a backwards E, and a T before it was too weak to go on.
It raised one hand to Fay’s face, and she didn’t recoil. The hand stroked her cheek once, then fell away.
The shaking stopped and the labored breathing abruptly ended. The creature that had saved her life was dead.
Fay bawled at the thing’s sudden end. She stayed crouched over its motionless body until the rain began to gush from the sky, washing away her tears.
She couldn’t stay, and she couldn’t move the heavy corpse. She’d have to leave it where it was.
The thing obviously didn’t want her to report what had happened, but she couldn’t just leave the creature there for no one to find for days or even weeks, its body at the mercy of scavenging coyotes.
Fay knew that Mac Brazel and little Dee Proctor rode the fence line every Thursday, so they’d be coming in this direction the next morning. She could leave clues that would lead them here.
She climbed onto Bandit and took one last look at the creature, who now seemed so vulnerable and unthreatening lying against the streambed wall. She kicked and Bandit trotted up out of the arroyo through the water coursing down in a torrent.
As she topped the slope, Fay was amazed to see that virtually nothing was left of the craft but small chunks littering the ground around her.
She picked up a dozen of the silvery metallic scraps and rode Bandit toward the fence line, scattering pieces behind her every few hundred yards. The shiny metal would lead the way back. When she reached the fence, she dropped the last few bits where she knew Mr. Brazel and Dee would see them.
The Roswell Conspiracy Page 6
