The Stickmen (28 page)

Garrett didn’t want to miss it.

He’d picked a good spot just past the
highest rise. The forestbelt extended past on either side, and now
they crouched down behind a substantial hillock. Two miles distant
lay the hidden dell that was Area November, Depot 12.

Garrett lit a much-needed cigarette, then
glanced at his watch. They sat with their backs to the bank.
“Whatever you do, Danny, keep your eyes closed and don’t look
toward the depot.”

“I guess it would hurt our eyes, huh?”

“You bet.”

“But if we can’t look at it, what are we
waiting to see?”

“We want to see what happens
after
the bomb goes off. I think it should be pretty neat.” Another
glance to his watch.
Ten seconds…
Garrett put his arm around
Danny. “It’s almost time, sport. Don’t be scared.”

“Will it be loud?”

“I—” The question puzzled Garrett. “I don’t
really know. That depot’s pretty strong and deep. We’ll find out in
a few seconds…”

The next lapsed of time seemed more like
several minutes. Then a loud
bang!
echoed from behind them.
“This is it!” Garrett exclaimed. “Close your eyes and hang on!”
Garrett held the boy tight against him.

The earth beneath them seemed to tremor
slightly, and instead of a cacophonous explosion, what Garrett
heard instead was more like a long crackling roar. He felt the air
temperature around him rise, and even with his eyes closed and his
face pointing away from the bomb, he sensed a flash of light. Then
came a vast rustling—
shock wave,
he thought—as the trees
around them began to shake slightly.

What neither of them saw was the small
spectacular fireball that rose from the depot over a mile
distant.

Garrett waited for the roar to drone down,
then he looked over his shoulder. “Okay, Danny, it’s safe to look
now…”

The boy turned around, and they both peered
over the edge of the hillock.

A proverbial mushroom cloud unrolled upward.
Garrett was surprised how small it seemed. The mushroom’s head
looked filled with dark throbs of light.

Trace fires had broken out around the woods.
Garrett wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected small movements in
the distance.
Damn it! Too far away, too dark!

Then the darkness gradually turned to
light.

“Look!” Danny shouted, pointing up.

An immense wedge of broad daylight seemed to
cut through the night.

Good God,
Garrett thought.

A long black tube in the sky, hundreds of
feet long. A drone pressed Garrett’s ears as the vehicle hovered,
then began to descend several hundred yards down the field.

Garrett and Danny’s hair blew around as if
in a stiff breeze. Garrett note dark-red light wafting like smoke
from what he guessed was the ship’s engine vent, and the queer,
trapezoid-shaped window at the opposite end.

And then he noticed—

“There they are!” Danny exclaimed. “They
came out!”

Garrett peered.
They’re still alive,
he thought. All of the speculation turned out to be true. Under the
craft’s intense illumination, he could see the three thin figures
walking away from the exploded depot and into the middle of the
field. They walked a bit further, then stopped, their post-like
heads looking upward.

The vehicle landed, and in only moments, its
long-lost passengers had been picked up.

And the ship was gone.

EPILOGUE

Distant car horns honked from the street
below. Washington, D.C. looked like a pattern of glitter beyond the
open window.

Garrett was back.

Ever the typified journalist, he sat at his
disheveled desk in a sleeveless t-shirt, a lit cigarette hanging
off his lips. He was typing madly on his computer keyboard…

Of the minutia of this case, I can only
really speculate. It’s my assertion, however, that the deceased
General Norton Swenson, formerly of MJ-12 and the Air Force Aerial
Intelligence Commander, was quite right in his decades-old
prediction. The skeletons from the Nellis crash weren’t dead bodies
at all. They were three alien bodies in hibernation. The detonation
of the (Small) Atomic Demolition Munition at the Edgewood Arsenal,
via its radioactive flux, sufficed to rejuvenate the skeletons,
whereupon they were picked up by a rescue ship.

Garrett paused, looking absently toward the
window. Then he glanced into his kitchen, where Lynn and Jessica,
both in jeans and rather provocative tube tops, fastidiously
prepared dinner.

Jesus, those girls are hot. They could make
the Pope kick out a stained-glass window…

“How’s it coming in there, oh great
investigative journalist?” Lynn called out.

“Great. I’m almost done with the rough
draft,” he answered. “
Psi-Com’s
gonna be
damn sorry
they fired me. Bunch’a boneheads. They got dog food for
brains.”

He grinned to himself at the thought of
vindication, then got back to typing.

Dr. Jessica Truini, Deputy Medical Examiner
for the District of Columbia, has already performed initial
post-mortem analysis of the alien forearm. That forearm remains in
my possession, and once the proper precautions have been taken, it
will be released to public scrutiny. What also remains in my
possession is a small cylindrical device which seems to be some
sort of handheld anti-gravitational implement that the aliens gave
to Danny Vander during one of his abductions. It was this device
that enabled an eight-year-old boy to shatter military-grade
security locks, tear open an electrified fence, and carry off the
300-pound ADM in his bare hands.

“Hey, Harlan,” Jessica called out. “You want
your potatoes mashed or scalloped?”

Garrett frowned, snapped out of his train of
thought. “Mashed, please.”

He began typing again.

The ADM itself, being of very low yield
inflicted no extensive damage to the perimeter. A Field Assessment
Team from the Army Chemical Corp, Radiological Branch, discovered
only minor irradiation of the area. No big deal considering the
military, for decades, has been testing nuclear weapons hundreds of
times more powerful, on U.S. soil. Perhaps that’s what the aliens
were originally investigating in the first place, over thirty-five
years ago when the first ship crashed on the Nellis Military
Reservation near Las Vegas, Nevada. I don’t guess anyone’ll ever
know for sure.

“Hey, Harlan?” Lynn again. “Do you want your
string beans steamed or stir-fried?”

Garrett sighed, then quickly saved his file
and shut down his computer. Too many distractions right now, but so
what? He could do the final polish later.

He could make history later.

“Stir-fried,” he said.

“So are you finished with your
ground-breaking article?” Lynn inquired.

“Even amid all the distractions around here,
yes,” he replied, and lit another cigarette. “But of course this is
going to be more than just an article, it’ll be a book too. New
York Times best-seller list here we come. Only thing I’m stuck on
is the title.” He paused in reflection. “Hey, girls, how’s this
sound…
The Truth About the Nellis Crash
?”

“Stinks,” Lynn answered.

Garrett smirked. “Okay. Then how about this?
The Mystery of the Edgewood Arsenal
?”

“Clunker,” Jessica contributed.

Who asked you anyway?
Garrett
thought.
Bimbos. Neither of them know a good thing when they see
it…and the good thing is sitting right here.

Lynn could be heard chopping the ends of the
string beans. “But, you know, it’s really too bad about the little
boy.”

“Yeah,” Jessica added. “The poor kid. He’ll
never be the same after all that happened to him. I guess he’ll
just get put in an orphanage or something.”

Garrett’s spirit nosedived. The whole thing
was a happy ending…except for the part about Danny. Two nights ago,
after it had all gone down, Garrett had had no choice but to drop
Danny off at the MP station. Too many questions would have been
asked if he’d actually taken the boy in himself. But Garrett had
promised to keep in touch. What else could he do?

“I talked to him on the phone today,”
Garrett finally answered. “At least his father left him
well-provided for. But he’s got no aunts or uncles or grandparents,
so it looks like he’ll go into the Army’s foster-care program.”

“That’s gotta be really tough for a kid that
age,” Lynn said.

“Yeah,” Garrett muttered. He knew it wasn’t
a good idea to say it…but he said it anyway. “I’ve been thinking
about it, you know?”

“What?” Jessica asked.

“I was thinking about maybe…adopting him
myself.”

Lynn and Jessica cackled like witches.

“Oh, that’s funny?” Garrett objected.
“What’s so funny about it?”

“Be real, Harlan,” Lynn said.

Then Jessica: “Yeah. You’re not exactly
qualified to adopt a child, Harlan.”

Garrett glared toward the kitchen. “Oh? And
why not?”

“There are state adoption regulations,” Lynn
said. “Things like minimum-income requirements.”

“Face it, Harlan,” Jessica added. “It’s a
nice thought, but if you make $6000 in a year,
that’s
a good
year.”

“And you’d have to make a lot more than that
to adopt a child,” Lynn finished with her two cents.

Garrett ground his teeth in frustration.
“Hello? Girl geniuses? It’s true that in the past I haven’t exactly
been pulling down the big money. But after I sell this article for
fifty grand and the book for half a mil—then I think I just might
meet the minimum-income requirements to adopt a kid. Ya think?”

More cackling laughter bubbled from the
kitchen.

“That’s what you said about your Martin
Luther King Assassination story,” Lynn reminded him.

“And that big book you wrote about Area 51,”
Jessica said. “How much did you get for those winners, Harley?”

Nothing,
Garrett admitted. But that
didn’t matter. “You’re both just being arbitrary. This story’s
gonna
sell,
and it’s gonna sell
big,
and I can’t
believe you two bird-brains can’t admit that. You’re forgetting
what’s in my freezer, aren’t you? A severed
alien
forearm
?”

“It’ll be debunked, Harlan,” Lynn assured
him. “I mean,
I
know it’s real,
Jessica
knows it’s
real, and
you
know it’s real—”

“But you’ll never be able to prove it,”
Jessica tacked on.

Garrett waved a disgusted hand at them.
Fuck you both very much. Bitches.

Then Jessica piped back up. “Let me ask you
something even more important. How do you want your steak?”

“Rare,” Garrett replied. “Rare and bleeding,
the same way the both of you left my heart.”

Still more laughter cackled from the
kitchen.

“Laugh all you want,” he invited. “But look
what I’ve got. Not only have I got the story of the century in my
hands, not only an I about to bust open the truth about the
existence of extraterrestrial life to the whole world… I’ve got my
ex-wife and ex-fiancé cooking me dinner.”

“Two out of three ain’t bad,” Jessica said.
And burst out into more laughter.

Women can be SO malicious,
Garrett
thought. But what did it matter to him anyway?
I’ll show them.
I’ll show them both, and then we’ll see who’s laughing. When I’m
rich, they’ll both be crawling back to me on their knees.

“I can’t wait,” he muttered under his
breath.

“What was that, Harlan?” Lynn asked.

“I said…I have to go to the bathroom. Be
right back.”

Garrett went to do his business, determined
not to let their sour grapes get to him. Why should he care what
they thought. Garrett
knew.

Garrett knew that
this
was going all
the way.

Yeah…

Garrett had never voided his bladder with
more satisfaction.

When he came out of the bathroom, he called
out, “Hey, girls? Is that beer cold yet?”

But no answer followed.

“Girls?”

Still no answer.
What is this? Where The
Boy Aren’t?
He walked into the kitchen.

“Gossiping about me behind my back, huh?
Probably trading tales about my pre-eminent skills as a lover—”

Appetizing aromas filled the air. Grade-A
t-bone steaks sizzled in the fry pan. But neither Lynn nor Jessica
could be found.

What is this rinky-dink bullshit?

He turned, then, and looked into the tiny
laundry room

You gotta be—

Garrett stared in confusion.

Lynn sat in the corner.

Tied up. Gagged. Her eyes wide with
fear.

“What the—”

A familiar metallic sound clicked behind
him, and before he could even think about reacting, a pistol barrel
was being pressed firmly against the back of his head.

Jessica’s voice flow like dark smoke. “Hands
in the air. Slow.”

—
shitting me…

Garrett obeyed the command, after which he
slowly turned to see Jessica pointing a pistol in his face.

“I’m surprised you didn’t figure it out,
Harlan,” she said. “I told my station chief you probably would, but
we decided to chance it anyway. We don’t have any solid ties with
DIA; I couldn’t be sure what
she
would do.”

Jessica gestured toward the tied-and-gagged
Lynn. Then she lead Garrett at gunpoint back into the living
room.

Garrett felt his whole life crumbling around
him.

“She was setting you up, Harlan—”

“Looks to me like
you’re
the one
setting me up,” he offered, hands high.

“—but I had to beat her to the punch, make
my move now.”

“Make your move for what?”