Her eyes popped open when a bright light streamed through her window accompanied by a strange whooshing sound, almost like the sound a jet might make as it flew by. As she came back to consciousness, she realized it must be a car pulling up in the driveway. Molly heard the doors slam and a moment later a brisk knock at the front door downstairs. She sat up, trying to catch each word.
“That was… fast,” Mom said to whoever was at the front door.
“Yeah,” Dad said, sounding puzzled, “I haven’t even called you yet.”
“Yes, sir,” a stern voice she’d never heard before replied. “You say you saw something?”
Molly climbed out of her bed, and clambered over to the open window. Below, she could see Mom and Dad talking to two men in black suits. She couldn’t make out their faces against the bright headlights of their black Ford LTD.
“I’ll say,” Mom said, sounding more than a little panicked. “It looked like a… like a cat, but it wasn’t a cat, it was—”
“More like a big frog,” Dad blurted out, interrupting, “with hair. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“The creature you saw,” the stranger with the stern voice said, “is an unlicensed Tarantian, from Andromeda Two. Very rare, very dangerous.”
“Tarantian.” Molly rolled the strange word around in her mouth as she said it quietly. The word sounded like a secret, and now she knew it.
“He’s cute now,” the man in the black suit continued while his partner silently scanned the yard, “but when these things hit puberty, they turn into real monsters.”
There was a strange sound like someone huffing in frustration combined with a cat purring. Slowly, Molly looked to her left, and jumped back from the window in surprise. The little creature that had been next to her jumped back, too, as if it was just as shocked to see her there.
The creature that had been standing on the sill next to her was small, about the size of a dog, but broad-shouldered. Its skin was covered in a fine down of gray fur. A wild mane of turquoise, green, and purple hair sprouted up above ping-pong-ball eyes that bulged out of a face that reminded Molly of a cross between a bulldog and a shovel. The tiny alien put a finger to its lips for Molly to stay silent. Its big bug eyes pleaded with the girl. She had to agree with the stern-voiced man: although the little guy was really ugly, he was also very cute.
Molly noticed the little Tarantian was trembling in fear. She also noticed, to her amazement, that she wasn’t.
“Is there anyone else in the house?” the stranger in black asked.
“Just our daughter,” Mom answered. “She’s sleeping.”
“Shhh,” Molly whispered to the little extraterrestrial. “Don’t be scared. It’s okay.”
There was a brilliant flash of light from outside the window. Molly and the Tarantian hopped back up on the sill and looked out the window.
One of the black-suited men was holding a slender silver wand in his hand, and Mom and Dad were staring at it, as if in a daze. He put the device away as he spoke to Mom and Dad. “A raccoon, that’s your problem, folks. Make sure those trash can lids are on tight—and,” he added, “we were never here.”
Molly watched the black-suited men walk back to their idling car. She noticed they had brought backup with them, two more Men in Black—a slender, young black man and an older, gruff-looking white man with a very craggy face—leaned against the hood of their own black LTD and nodded to the other two agents as they pulled out of the driveway and sped away.
Molly turned away from the window to the little Tarantian and knelt down to meet his big, dark eyes. “We gotta get you out of here,” she whispered. “Come on.”
She opened her bedroom door quietly and padded down the hallway, motioning for the Tarantian to follow her. Reluctantly at first, the alien accompanied her toward the back of the house. Near the door to Mom and Dad’s bedroom, Molly struggled to raise a window. The little Tarantian lent a hand and the window slid up easily. Wow, he’s strong, Molly thought.
Molly gestured toward the open window. Beyond it, the city skyline at night glimmered like a million stars. “Go on,” she said. “It’s okay.” The alien regarded the window and then Molly once again. “I’m Molly,” she said tapping her chest.
“Mol-ly,” he said. She smiled and nodded.
The Tarantian leapt onto the open window’s sill. He paused before he departed, turning back to the little girl, gratitude in his saucer-like eyes. “Kabla nakshulin,” he said with great formality, then launched himself from the window to the roof of a neighbor’s house, like a bouncy ball. He ran a few feet on his short, stubby legs and jumped skyward. Molly lost sight of him once he cleared another neighbor’s house and seemed to vanish into the brilliance of the swollen moon. Molly waved goodbye, her eyes filled with wonder and starlight.
“Young lady, what are you doing up?” Molly spun to see Mom standing in the hall.
“That creature, the one you saw, I let it go,” she reported.
“Creature? You mean the raccoon?”
“You don’t have to lie.” Molly shook her head. “I saw the policemen, the guys in the black suits?”
Her mom looked genuinely puzzled for a moment and then seemed to dismiss Molly’s behavior. “Honey, parents never lie. Now go back to bed. You’ll forget about it by morning.”
“No, actually,” Molly said, “I won’t.” She stomped past her mother back toward her bedroom. She paused and glanced back at her confused mother. “Well… kabla nakshulin. It means ‘goodnight’ in Tarantian.”
Back in her room, Molly jumped back into bed, trying to match the small alien’s fantastic leaps. She fell a bit short. She picked up A Brief History of Time again and began to read with a renewed eagerness to understand the universe, to understand the way it all worked. She glanced out the window at the sky full of twinkling mysteries, and turned the page.
3
SOME YEARS LATER
The walls of Molly’s Manhattan apartment were covered in college diplomas and yellowed old tabloid newspaper articles. Surrounding her framed degree in astrophysics (she’d minored in quantum mechanics and anthropology), were crumbling newsprint containing stories with lurid titles like WHO ARE THE MEN IN BLACK?, ALIEN BAT-BOY DISCOVERED IN JERRY SPRINGER AUDIENCE, AND MYSTERY UFO OVER WHITE HOUSE.
Molly had grown into a confident young woman. Her dark eyes and hair lent her a natural beauty she was dimly aware of, but her focus was on other things. She sat before a bank of monitors, wearing a coat over her rumpled white blouse and thin black tie, ready to be out of the door at a moment’s notice. Her hands danced over the keyboard, her eyes flickered from screen to screen. “You’re not getting away from me this time,” she muttered.
She had been saying that for most of her life. As a child, and then a teen, she had sought out and studied every scrap of information about extraterrestrials, planets, galaxies, and the seemingly mythological “Men in Black” that she could find, from scholarly works and scientific papers, to supermarket tabloids and the dingiest corners of the Internet.
She had excelled at college, driven by her obsession to find out the truth about aliens and the MiBs. Once she’d graduated, she had flirted with the notion of joining the FBI, CIA, or NASA, but decided that such agencies were either fronts for the MiBs, or deliberately kept in the dark about their existence. She’d even considered teaching to pay the bills, but soon realized such a career would put too much of a demand on her time and take her away from her search. She had been supporting herself through the gig economy, taking contract IT jobs, research assignments, and proofing mathematic and engineering formulas for grad students, and even professors. It paid her rent, and gave her the freedom to continue the search she had so long been pursuing—the search she was confident was going to end today.
A monitor beeped and Molly spun in her chair to read the data that flashed on the screen: ALERT: HUBBLE TELESCOPE: PERSEID METEOR SHOWER—TRAJECTORY UPDATE. ENTER PASSWORD.
Molly smiled and
began entering a password. “Okay, let’s see where you are now.”
In response to the password, a new message box appeared: WELCOME BACK PROFESSOR ARMITRAGE. Next to the greeting was a photograph of a middle-aged man, apparently the real Professor Armitrage.
Molly tapped in a series of commands and a display appeared that was labeled as NEAR EARTH OBJECTS. It was tracking the speed, path, and trajectories of numerous meteors. The tracking system beeped again as one of the objects in space suddenly performed a radical change.
“I didn’t know meteors could change speed and direction. How about you, Lilly?” Molly’s long-dead houseplant gave no response except to drop a withered leaf. Molly shrugged, “Yeah, well, you’ve always been a skeptic. Lighten up, man!”
The object Molly was tracking vanished from the screen. She quickly made a note of the exact coordinates. “Not a meteor after all, is it? Definitely an unauthorized landing.” She jumped to her feet and began to riffle through stacks of tabloid newspapers, scanning the headlines quickly. She wore a black skirt and combat boots. Molly stopped at a copy of the World News Daily, nodding at the headline: “Real Housewife of Queens—‘I want back my Alien Ex!’” The photograph with the story showed a woman holding three babies, all of the children had a look about them—like they just might be from another world. A smaller headline for the same story declared: “Alien Ex Jimmy says, ‘I’m coming back, baby!’”
Molly grinned as the realization hit her. “This is it. It’s really happening!”
She quickly downloaded the Hubble data on the last known coordinates of the missing “meteor” to her phone. She gave Lilly the last of her water as the data ported over. The plant thanked her by dropping another desiccated leaf. Data in hand, Molly grabbed her wrinkled black suit jacket off the back of her chair and her black backpack as she dashed outside to meet her destiny.
Out by the curb she flagged down a taxi, still looking at the data on her phone screen. She spoke to the cabbie—who looked like a reject from the Jersey Shore cast—from the curb. “I need to get to Brooklyn,” she said to him.
The driver snorted in frustration. “Gonna need an address, lady.”
“Forty-five degrees inclination,” Molly read off the data, “sixty-two degrees declination.” The driver looked like she had just hit him over the head with a very heavy math book, and then he scowled. Molly did a quick equation in her head. “Okay, down under the Manhattan Bridge.”
The cabbie nodded, and Molly leapt in. He hit the button on the meter and the cab sped away from the curb.
4
Molly directed the driver to a quiet, deserted street that ran parallel to the Manhattan Bridge. She climbed out of the cab and handed the cabbie a twenty. “Keep it running,” she told him.
She walked down the street, checking and rechecking the coordinates on her phone. Most of the houses she passed were boarded up and seemed empty; a few were covered in graffiti. One or two of them still looked like they might have occupants. At the end of the street was a large underpass. Just before the bridge, a series of heavy, orange construction barriers squatted across the road. Past the barriers was a tall, chain-link fence that closed off the end of the road.
Molly walked between the barriers and into the shadow of the underpass, up to the fence. She could hear the rumble of the traffic on the bridge and the cooing of the pigeons flocking together on the structures above her. The metal signs bolted to the Con-Ed fence announced, in series, HIGH VOLTAGE, DO NOT ENTER, and CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE.
Through the fence Molly could see sections of the street had been jackhammered in numerous places and open trenches were everywhere. She saw a dump truck and a back hoe parked near a pair of blue plastic portable toilets. She couldn’t spot any of the Con-Ed maintenance people, nor any other people at all. More importantly, there was no sign of any illegal alien space ship.
She checked the coordinates on her phone again and confirmed she was in the right place. She looked around and sighed. Nothing. The frustration and disappointment washed over her. After a moment, Molly spun and walked back toward the taxi. The pigeons, startled by her sudden movement, erupted into flight all around her. She ducked and turned away to avoid the madly fluttering birds, and stopped. Two of the birds were flying straight at the electrified fence—she gasped in horror, and waited for the sparks, but the birds flew on, unscathed, through the fence as if it wasn’t there, and vanished from sight.
She paused and walked back to the fence, near the warning signs that threatened swift and certain death if the chain-link was touched. She took a deep breath, preparing herself for the worst, and slowly reached out her hand toward the fence, closer, closer… and then she found that she wasn’t even touching the fence; her hand had passed right through it as if it wasn’t there, just as the pigeons had done. She couldn’t see her hand or wrist on the other side of the “fence,” but she could still feel them. Molly pulled her hand back and it magically reappeared. Stunned, Molly wiggled the fingers of her hand and then leaned in closer to the fence with her face. She closed her eyes as her head, neck, and part of her shoulders all vanished as they touched the chain-link. She opened her eyes and after a second of taking the scene in, a look of revelation and relief spread across her features. “I knew it.”
The street was not torn up. There was no construction site, no work trucks. Instead, right in front of her was an alien space ship; it had crashed in the middle of the street. And they were there. The ones Molly had been searching for, chasing, and missing for most of her life—the Men in Black.
There were several black Lexus sedans parked in front of the ship and a cadre of MiB agents, their backs to Molly, confronting the alien pilot, weapons trained on him. Molly psyched herself up for a second to do what she was thinking of doing next. Then she stepped through the illusory fence entirely and quickly took cover behind an abandoned junker of a car that was parked at the curb nearby.
The alien, a scraggly-looking humanoid who bore a distinct resemblance to the three babies in the tabloid story she’d been reading some minutes ago, had his hands up and was shuffling nervously. “Whoa, hey, this is Earth? My bad, guys!”
“Yeah, yeah, Jimmy,” the lead MiB agent replied in a distinct Brooklyn accent. “Tell it to O back at HQ.” The lead agent approached Jimmy and escorted him into the back seat of one of the Lexuses as he called out to the other agents, “Get a containment unit in here. I’ll escort our Zamporan friend back.”
Molly smiled and whispered, “Yes, you will.”
She slipped back through the fence camouflage field as the MiBs secured Jimmy and his ship. She hurried back to the cab waiting near the entrance to the street, taking off her coat as she did so, and tossing it into the back seat of the cab. Underneath the coat, she was wearing a rumpled black trouser suit, white shirt and tie—the makeshift MiB uniform she had assembled for just such a moment as this. She climbed back into the taxi. Two MiB Lexus sedans drove past as she closed the door.
“Don’t lose them,” she instructed the cabbie.
* * *
A short while later, in a more salubrious part of town, Molly paid off the cab. She was dressed in her best MiB disguise, and almost pulling it off—except for the scuffed boots and backpack. She had been dressing up like this since she was ten, stealing Dad’s suit jacket and ties.
Down the block and across the street, the sedans belonging to the mysterious Men in Black were parked in front of a formidable edifice of concrete. Carved into the face of the building was “Brooklyn Battery Tunnel Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority.” The Battery Tunnel was the largest underground tunnel in North America. The Brooklyn building was one of four ventilation stations designed to provide a fresh air system to the tunnel. It was genius for the Men in Black to use the building and its vast underground networks as a base of operations. It was sure to give them unobserved access to so much of the Five Boroughs.
“Here we go,” Molly said. To her, this building was a holy shrine. She
ditched the backpack behind a bush and stepped off the curb, so close to the goal she had been seeking all her life. She needed to act and sound like she belonged here. She strode across the street like she owned it, and put on a pair of sunglasses as she entered the building. Her heels clicked on the marble floor as she walked toward the bank of elevators. An old security guard, a bald black man, was sitting in a chair in front of a wall-sized fan that was slowly rotating. There was an equally massive vent on the opposite wall from the fan and the guard. He was reading a tabloid newspaper, but looked up as Molly approached.
“They bring in that Zamporan yet?” Molly asked as casually as one might discuss last night’s ball game. “Guy tried to sneak in behind a Perseid meteor shower. Amateur hour, am I right?” She walked past the guard, who did nothing to stop her.
“Right as rain,” the guard said. “Came in a couple of minutes ahead of you.” He went back to reading his paper. Molly couldn’t help but smile a little as she pushed the button for the elevator.
I am Jane freakin’ Bond, she thought. She tried to stop herself pushing the button again, but she couldn’t resist. There was a ding, and the elevator doors opened. Molly walked inside, turned, and watched the old security guard poring over his newspaper until the doors closed and she began to descend.
Without looking up from his tabloid, the guard keyed the walkie-talkie on his belt. “Code Black,” he said, licked his finger, and turned the page.
The back wall of the elevator was transparent. As Molly descended, the solid concrete of the Battery Building disappeared to reveal a huge complex below her. What she saw was a dream come true. The MiB New York headquarters was a sprawling cathedral of chrome, white marble, and light. The facility was several stories in height and Molly could see the offices and terraces that were part of the curved and illuminated walls overlooking the central floor. Hundreds of black-suited agents and support staff hurried about below her amid massive silver columns. The apparent seal of the MiB organization—three oval, intersecting orbital rings, each with two dark, equidistant dots that appeared to be electrons—was set into the marble floor at the heart of all the activity. Work desks were set in long, seemingly infinite rows along one side of the main floor. All the monitors, including the massive view screens that hung everywhere, were oval-shaped. They reminded Molly of giant electric eyes.
Men in Black International Page 2
