Steve’s shorts: Escape from Earth, Part Three of Four…
[Not all my stories have their origin in what-ifs. I began this little novella even before my first novel that I wrote the summer I turned thirteen. I won’t say how many years it took me to finish it, but it has a certain teenage innocence about it still. Enjoy!]
Escape from Earth
Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore
Part Three: On the Road
Chapter Eight
Saki walked around the parking lot and stretched her legs while Lucas went inside the roadside diner for takeout. When he came out, he saw that a motorcycle gang had surrounded her.
“We’ll give you a good time,” said the biggest leather-jacketed ogre. The gang name on his back said Devil’s Wheels. These Devil’s minions all looked like Vikings, although some shaved their heads.
Lucas had an idea about what the man meant by a good time. “What’s going on here?”
Big man studied Lucas. “Stay out of this, dickhead. The woman just wants to have some fun with us, right honey?”
“No,” said Saki, “no want smelly beasts near me.”
“Smelly beasts?” said another gang member with a testosterone-charged snarl. “That’s a bit insulting, right Big George?”
The circle closed in on Saki. Before Lucas could act, Saki took the disk from beneath her blouse and held it facing away from her. She spun. All the gang members staggered and fell to the ground unconscious.
Lucas saw the people in the diner who had been watching the altercation through the windows. Not good! “Let’s get out of here, Saki.”
Ten miles down the road he pulled off the highway and parked under a few trees. He handed her a bag containing a burger and fries.
“Not dead,” she said.
Her bad English was second nature to him now. “I know. The people in the diner will soon know that too. But they’ll also know something strange just happened. Someone might investigate.”
She nodded. “Stun them too. Bad men. Not like you.”
He smiled. Stun? A new word for her. “I should hope not. You sensed what they wanted to do, didn’t you?”
“Easy. Primitive planet. Feral humans. All emotions.”
Lucas checked his watch. “We’ll make Albuquerque and change cars.”
“Change? This one OK.”
“Not after the bikers or diners describe it,” he said.
***
In New Mexico, Lucas made a bad deal at Happy Horatio’s Used Car Emporium, trading his pickup for a Land Rover that had seen better days. He didn’t have to spend any money on the Rover except for plates and sales tax. They found a motel.
“Al-boo-ker-kee,” said Saki, rotating around to see the surrounding mountains. “Nice.” She hooked her arm in his. “Tomorrow see. Too tired now.”
They went to bed early. Saki wasn’t too tired to get frisky, though, and he responded. As she fell asleep with her head on his chest, he was thinking that their last meal was the late lunch. They would be starving in the morning.
Bright sunlight was streaming in the window when he awoke. He took a quick shower, dressed, and left her a note that he had gone to find food. When he returned, she was in the shower.
“Soft water,” she said, stepping into the room with only a towel wrapped around her hair like a turban. She sniffed. “Good smell. We eat?”
Lucas split the food. He had gone overboard, but they wolfed it down. It was her first experience with breakfast burritos and hashed browns. She liked them. She liked the questionable coffee too.
“How far now?”
“One long day or two short ones. You’ll have to be my navigator.”
“Explain please.”
Lucas told her that he had no idea where her people were. He didn’t know the LA area even if she gave him the name of a location.
“Yes. I show. But use Google too. Need roads there.” He brought up a map on his cell phone and handed it to her. She played with it a bit and handed it back. “Hills above valley. That road.”
A road into the San Gabriel Mountains’ Angeles National Forest was displayed on the cell phone’s screen. “That’s pretty good. I can get us there. Once there you need to be more specific.”
“Can do,” she said. “But maybe not on map.”
“We’ll find it,” he said.
Chapter Nine
“Don’t you need a search warrant?” the motel owner said to Needham.
“Is the room empty?” he said. The owner nodded. “Then we don’t need a warrant.”
“It hasn’t been cleaned.”
“Even better,” said Carpenter.
The latex gloves and booties went on as the owner stood at the doorway and watched them. A bit later, Carpenter brought the wastebasket out of the bathroom.
“I’m guessing these condoms were to protect the woman with the long hairs left on the towels,” she said. “Maybe that girl from the diner is with him. The clientele of the diner didn’t mention Lucas, though.”
“The others will track down the bikers. They didn’t want to be prosecuted for attempted gang rape, so they took off. Too many witnesses. I wonder how the woman did that?”
“She’s obviously an ET,” said Carpenter, mocking Needham’s suspicions. “You know, maybe this is only the ex-girlfriend getting back together with Wright to have a road orgy, and the sister doesn’t approve.”
“An explanation for why the sister was acting peculiar way back when,” he said. “But remember Mack’s bright light? I like my ET theory better.” She laughed. “Let’s bag things up and move on.” He turned to the motel owner. “Did they say where they were going? Excuse me. I have a call.”
Needham stepped outside and learned that the bikers were still on the lam. “I don’t want to backtrack,” he said to his office, “so get two more out here to follow up. They can get the bikers to talk by dropping all charges. We just might be onto something, so Carpenter and I will try to catch up with our Bonnie and Clyde. Send me any intel when you have it.”
“You don’t know if they’ve done anything wrong,” said Carpenter, stepping out into the hot sun. “This might just be an elopement and escape from a controlling sister. Older sisters are like that sometimes.”
“The voice of experience? They’re twins, you know.”
“I bet Janet is still older than Lucas. And I don’t trust the sister. She definitely was hiding something.”
“Don’t let the estrangement with your older sister influence your opinions on this case,” said Needham.
***
They went to the local office in Albuquerque.
“I want to put out a BOLO on that pickup,” said Needham. “They’re heading west, and it would be useful to know where.”
They were already in the parking lot ready to leave when his cell phone rang. “You’ll want to come back inside,” said the agent-in-charge they had just spoken to. “The local police have the pickup and its driver in custody. They’re bringing her in.”
Her? Where’s Lucas? Thinking the worse, they returned to the office.
But a local woman had recognized a good deal when she saw one and had purchased the pickup right off the lot. The used car dealer had just detailed the pickup. No chance for DNA, but they now had the license plate of the Rover.
“Let’s change that BOLO,” said Needham. The dealer also provided a description of the couple. The man’s description matched Lucas; the woman was not the ex-girlfriend.
“They’re on the run,” said Carpenter. “No one would make that bad a trade.”
“Agreed. Still doubt my ET theory?”
“Stop channeling Mulder. This is real life.”
“The truth is out there,” he said, starting their car.
Chapter Ten
“The FBI is after you,” Janet said. “They interrogated me again. Different ones. Gorillas. Not so nice.”
Lucas had his sister on speaker phone. He looked at Saki. Did she understand?
“What did you tell them?”
“Nothing, but I think they were suspicious. I sensed that with the first ones too. I’m a terrible liar.” Lucas told her about the incident with the motorcycle gang. “That’s not good. If that deputy hadn’t seen that flash, nothing would have come of it, but now they’ll put two and two together. Cops don’t believe in coincidences. Or shouldn’t, if they’re any good at their jobs.”
“I think you’d better go buy some burn phones. I’ll do the same.”
“You mean those prepaid cheapos? I’m way ahead of you, brother. You should smash the one you’re using now. They probably have the NSA listening in to our conversation. They’ve had months to set that up.”
“I don’t think they can do that anymore without good reason, but we’re thinking along the same lines.”
“You look out for Saki, get her where she needs to go. The sooner she’s with her own people, the better off she’ll be. I don’t like this at all.”
“Agreed. Ten-four, Sergeant Wright. You’re never wrong.” That was a joke from their childhood.
Although he was worried, Lucas decided to take two more days for the trip. First, he thought it wouldn’t do any good to arrive late at night and be looking for Saki’s people while he was tired and bleary-eyed. Second, he might not have more nights to spend with the exotic ET woman. That last reason was selfish, of course.
They found a Motel 6 off I-10 in Phoenix, had an early dinner, and relaxed a bit watching TV. “Evil,” said Saki, seeing the latest ISIS atrocity. “Feral humans. Reason we watch you.”
“Watch?” said Lucas. “Your people were watching us?”
She nodded. “Worried. Your people can leave planet now. Decisions needed.”
“You’re trying to decide what to do about us?”
Another nod. “Feral humans dangerous.” She pointed at him and then to herself. “Related. Many years big group lost. Not know alive until later.”
“Your people had a shipwreck on this planet?” A third nod. “How many years ago?”
She thought a moment, stood and went to the desk, and returned with the notepad provided by the motel and a pen. She wrote: 50000?
He mulled that over. He couldn’t remember exactly, but he thought the first records of Cro-Magnon man were from that era. Were all modern human beings descendants of shipwrecked ETs? What about the Neanderthals and other primitive homo sapiens? If he had time, he would have her write all this down—she wrote much better than she could speak, not uncommon for someone learning a new language. But there was no time.
She put a forefinger on his forehead. “Think too much. Need your body. Now.”
***
Lucas stopped in front of the simple gate. “You sure they’re in here. It might be private property.”
“Was empty house, other buildings,” said Saki. “Open gate for you.”
She hopped out of the Rover, studied the gate, and lifted, swinging it in to the side of the gravel road. He leaned out the window.
“Close it after I’m through. If your friends are here, they wanted it closed.”
A sedan would have problems with the back-country road, but the Rover had none. They were still bounced around, though, because the old vehicle needed new shocks. After a few miles, they pulled into an area surrounded on three sides by a house, barn, and shed. The original redwood siding was still intact, but weathered, while the roofs were in bad condition, the barn and shed more than the house.
“So, where are they?”
“Wait. They come.”
Sure enough, Saki and Lucas were soon surrounded by a group of six people. Lucas saw no weapons other than disks like Saki wore. That was enough for him. He stepped out of the Rover palms up.
“I’m helping Saki,” he said.
“We know,” said a swarthy man with a beard. “I’m Joli. Relax. The disks are scanning the car. The authorities could have hidden tracers.”
“They’re too far behind,” said Lucas.
“But they’re persistent. They called for reinforcements to interview your sister and the bikers who were at that rest stop. They could have called ahead to Phoenix. Or Los Angeles. Where did you stop in the Valley?”
“A Jack-in-the-Box. I was watching the Rover all the time.”
“I want you to drive it under those trees. Sat photos or air reconnaissance might spot it otherwise. We’ve kept this place looking exactly as we found it.”
“Understood,” said Lucas, getting into the Rover again. He leaned out the window. “You speak English better than Saki.”
“She speaks as well as the others, if not better. I’m a linguistic specialist. And also leader of our little group. Welcome, Lucas Wright. We think you can help.”
Chapter Eleven
“This is one huge road orgy,” said Carpenter upon discovering more condoms at the Motel 6. “Maybe Lucas is just off to have a good time in SoCal with your ET.”
Needham was sitting on the edge of the bed reading the report about the interview with the bikers.
“Unless we have a case of mass hysteria here, this report says that the woman is too weird for words. They felt like they were drifting to sleep. Maybe hypnotized or something.”
“I guess we won’t get anything from the current squeeze’s DNA then,” said Carpenter.
“No priors, if that’s what you mean. But we do have some DNA results from the last motel that are weird. Lucas’ current squeeze, as you call her, has a very clean genome with no junk DNA. Maybe not an ET, but not quite human either.”
Carpenter stared at him agog. “Still insisting the deputy’s flash was a UFO? C’mon, Needham! Those DNA results must be wrong. The lab’s fucked up before.”
“Many times. But they did a triple check in this case. And I revise my statement.” He stood and put the cell phone away. “She’s human but not our kind. Maybe we are Scully and Mulder.”
“Oh, please. When we find these two, we’ll look back and laugh at this conversation.”
He shrugged. “It’s an explanation for everything so far. But you’re right. Let’s not hang around here.”
***
At the LA FBI office, Needham received an admonishment from Washington. NORAD, NASA, DHS and various VIPs had received a status report and reacted. The bosses didn’t like it when they couldn’t see much progress and phones kept ringing off the hook. So much for going quietly into retirement.
“Help me out here, Jewel,” Needham said to the agent-in-charge, a woman he’d known and liked for a few years. His same age, she was on the fast track to better positions in the organization and had left him far behind. “They’re all over my back. I don’t have the personnel to do much here on my own. It’s too big an area.”
“We need more intel, Art. You don’t even know they’re here. They could have just gone through and be halfway up I-5 on the way to Seattle by now. Let the bolo work for you.”
“It is. No sightings of that Rover is useful intel. They must have stopped somewhere and gone into hiding.”
“How would they know you were on their tail?”
“The sister,” said Carpenter. “They interviewed her again. She must have contacted her brother.”
The agent called Jewel nodded. “It’s a big area, like you say, and a big state. They could be anywhere. Give me something to work with. You don’t have much time for that, I know, before they decide the case isn’t worth your per diems.”
“What about IT help?” said Carpenter. “They might be in hiding, but they might still use the internet.”
Jewel nodded. “That’s more doable, at least for a while.”
***
[Like mystery, suspense, and thrills? Have you tried the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series”? Some of the books are more thriller than mystery, but in either case the two NYPD homicide detectives, often with viewpoints that are yin and yang, make an astonishing crime-fighting duo. There are six novels in the series that starts with The Midas Bomb, already in its second edition and available in all ebook formats and paper (Create Space)—other books in the series are Kindle (Amazon) only.]
In libris libertas…
