Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (48 page)

Whoever it was pounded at the door again. “C’mon, man. I know you’re in there.” Sikes corrected himself. It wasn’t someone. It was Theo Miles.

But Sikes kept staring at the flickering television screen. He had had his set on most of the past week. He supposed most every television set in the world had been on most of the past week. As if something important had happened last week. As if anything could have been as important as what had happened when Sikes had arrived at the station house with Amy and Uncle Frank and Randolph Petty’s silent killer. Jesus, Sikes thought. I still don’t even know his name.

“Sikes, for Christ’s sake, give me a break! I got suspended, too, remember?”

Not that there had been a lot of choice on all those televisions, Sikes knew. Almost all the footage had been the same, no matter what channel he had turned to.

The thing, the flying saucer, the starship—whatever it had been that had crashed in the desert that night—there were only a few different shots of it that anyone had managed to get before it had blown itself to kingdom come the next morning. There were plenty of aerial shots, of course. Every news helicopter in California’s Southland and Inland Empire had made it out to the Mojave that day, playing chicken with the military choppers and the jets.

The daytime aerial shots were truly bizarre, showing the things that had been on the . . . the ship, gathered together in tight little clumps across the face of the desert, as if they had to keep as closely packed outside as they must have been packed inside. The lowest count Sikes had heard was that something over two hundred thousand of those things had come out of whatever it was. Some were estimating even higher—as many as four hundred thousand.

“I’ll shoot off the lock, Sikes! I really will!”

There was plenty of footage of the military, too. But in the staging areas only, nothing to show what they were doing where it mattered, inside the limits of the quarantine zone that had been set up—huge ditches that had been gouged into the desert floor and pumped full of gasoline, then set on fire to make the Mojave look like Kuwait City all over again.

Sikes swore at the screen each time the cameras showed the aerial night shots—the miles-wide ring of fire cutting a lopsided circle into the black desert floor. He knew just the kind of people who were responsible for such a senseless, cruel action—he had shared a safe house with them on the night the thing had crashed.

The official explanation for the gasoline was to prevent contamination, as if space germs had to crawl across the desert and couldn’t float through the air like every other kind of germ. No, Sikes knew that the gasoline had nothing at all to do with preventing the spread of any space disease. It was an act of intimidation, pure and simple. With emphasis on the
pure.

Sikes thought if he had just landed on another planet and someone set a moat of gasoline burning around him the first night down, he’d be ready to take the next flight home. He was sure that that was the real reason the fire had been set. But the whole point that the military had seemed to miss was that there wasn’t going to be another flight home. That particular airline was deader than Pan Am.

Sikes jumped as a gun went off in his hallway. His front door swung open. “Domino’s,” Theo said as he burst in, then slammed the door behind him. It wouldn’t stay shut, though, and slowly swung open again.

Theo stopped in front of Sikes, slipped his gun back into his shoulder holster, then screwed up his face as if he had stepped into a barnyard. “Christ Almighty, boy, have you taken one step out of here in the past week? It stinks like you’re already dead or something.”

“Or something,” Sikes agreed.

“Oh, I get it,” Theo said knowingly, “we’re going to be like
that,
are we?”

“Get me a beer,” Sikes said.

Theo went over to the blinds and pulled them open, making them rattle obnoxiously and flooding the apartment with harsh light. Sikes kept staring at the screen. Some intrepid soul had gone into the desert with a home video camera that first day and had managed to get back without having her tapes confiscated by the military. In the background of most of the shots she had managed to get, a tall tendril of white smoke hung in the pristine desert air—the aftermath of the early-morning explosion. In the foreground were the first close-ups anyone had managed to get of the things—five of them all huddled together, squatting on the desert floor.

In the footage they looked to be as frightened as the camera operator had said she was. They were dressed in colorless tatters, everyone wearing the same thing, with huge swollen skulls that were covered with what looked to be birthmarks or radiation burns or scabs or something. And they gibbered away in what some experts were already saying was nothing more than animal sounds and not a true language. Every time the camera had pointed directly at them, they had cowered. The most common pronouncement was that the things didn’t know what was going on any more than people on Earth did. A lot of the creatures seemed to be dying, too. Always with their hands stretching out, as if asking for something that people couldn’t give. Or didn’t know how to give.

Theo came out of the kitchen. “Don’t you have any real food in this place?”

“Beer or Jack Daniel’s,” Sikes said. He sort of felt sorry for the poor things. “The number for Pink Dot is on the fridge if you want some Twinkies or something.”

“What would you do if Kirby came over?” Theo asked in frustration.

“Kirby’s never coming over here again,” Sikes said matter of factly. That particular call from Victoria’s lawyer—the first of many—had been waiting on his answering machine when he got home, suspended. Perfect end to the perfect day, he had thought at the time. Not only was Victoria planning to lay charges of reckless child endangerment against him, she was sending Kirby to school in Switzerland. Sikes decided that meant their reunion was off. Oddly enough, he hadn’t been as upset as he thought he might be.

Theo muttered something Sikes didn’t bother to try to interpret, then he went back to the kitchen.

Back on the television, where the really important things in life were taking place these days, as far as Sikes was concerned, other than long, wavering telephoto shots, there wasn’t much to see. The military had virtually sealed off a two-hundred-square-mile stretch of the desert before the second night had come. Most of the correspondents on the news shows had concluded that the reason the military had been able to move into action so quickly to secure the area was that they had drawn up contingency plans for just such a scenario. Barracks for the National Guard were already being built on the third day. More damningly, Wolf Blitzer reported from the Pentagon that within fifteen minutes of NORAD determining that the most likely touchdown spot was the Mojave Desert, B-52s carrying nuclear weapons had been scrambled, and they had been continually overflying the quarantine zone ever since. That had been one of the last reports Blitzer had filed from the Pentagon. After the fourth day the news reports had dried up completely. The only substantial break had come on the sixth day, when it was obvious some sort of explosion had occurred inside the quarantine zone, and a Pentagon spokesperson had confirmed that an army Sikorsky transport helicopter had been lost due to mechanical failure. Fourteen people had died in the crash, but their names would not be released. They had not been military personnel.

Sikes could hear Theo doing something in the kitchen but didn’t care to know what. He flipped through the channels. One of the locals was showing the demonstrations at the United Nations. They had been going on ever since the world had finally figured out that the United States was not going to let representatives of any other country get within a hundred miles of the Mojave. Some of the protesters carried signs calling for the things in the desert to be nuked. Some carried messages of peace for our space brothers. There were a lot of fistfights.

Sikes changed the channel. Another station was running an interview with two women who claimed that the things in the desert were the result of alien/human breeding experiments, just like the experiments they had been subjected to when they had been abducted by large-headed monsters covered with spots and taken to the very same spaceship that had crashed in the desert. They were quite clear on that. They all recognized the spaceship as the exact one they had been beamed up to. Sikes had seen the interview before. He didn’t turn on the sound and kept flipping.

Elsewhere an evangelist held up drawings based on the home video footage showing that what most people thought were spots on the creature’s heads were actually the horns of Satan. Across the bottom of the screen ran the chapter and verse citations for Bible passages that described how Satan would send his demons to the Earth in fiery disks. The evangelist said that the Apocalypse was near and that, the creatures should be destroyed at once. Sikes kept flipping.

A retired military officer outlined for an interviewer, with helpful diagrams, how a possible attack on the space encampment might proceed once the army had established that the aliens’ intentions were hostile. And their intentions could not be anything but hostile, the retired officer insisted. By destroying their transport vessel, the creatures were clearly announcing that they were on a suicide mission—possibly the precursor to a main invasion fleet that even now could be assembling on the other side of the moon.

Sikes had seen it all. Heard it all. He had watched television for a week and knew all the players. He kept hoping that someone would be able to break through the quarantine zone and manage to snag an interview with one of the things itself. He was tired of hearing
people
speak. It was all useless garbage anyway. Nothing mattered anymore.

He flipped back to the channel that was running the home video footage in slow motion while a zoologist drew Xs on the screen to show how the creatures’ joints and musculature might work. Theo came in carrying two plates. Sikes sniffed the air.

“I’m surprised you can smell anything,” Theo said. He dropped the plate on Sikes’s lap. Sikes was wearing gray boxers and his favorite, worn-out gray Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. Now he was also wearing a bit of the peanut butter on stale bagels that Theo had dished up.

Sikes picked up one of the bagel halves. One of the creatures had its face frozen on the screen. “Boy,” Sikes said, “don’t you think they’re wishing they came down someplace else?”

Theo pulled up a hassock and sat on it, facing Sikes and not the television. “I figure they came to the right place, all right. Though I tell you, when they started showing those first shots of all those poor saps swarming out of that thing, I was real pissed off.”

Sikes rolled his eyes. “Let me get this straight. We lose a perfect collar, we get suspended, we let a cold-blooded murderer walk free while the captain reams us out
in front
of the killer, and
you
get pissed off because a UFO crashes in the desert?”

Theo patted his chest. “Hey, I spent my entire youth waiting for the saucers to land. I was out there in my backyard just praying for them to come down and get me. Yessir. Let’s have a visit by advanced beings. Let’s get the cure for cancer, the secret of living in peace, free energy, no more hunger.” He shrugged. “I mean, that was the whole spiel back then. If they managed to get here in their saucers, then they had to be advanced, right? So anyway, there I am at home, watching the tube like everyone else, waiting for these super-advanced beings to come forth and plant their flag and take care of all of us—and what the hell do I see when we get our first good look at them?” Theo shook his head. “They were
white,
Sikes. No offense, but goddamn every single one of them was white.” He smiled again. “But then another couple of days go by, and it becomes obvious they don’t know what the hell they’re doing here, and that makes me feel better. I figure the way those guys look, they must be from the bottom rung back where they come from, and they just stole that saucer from somebody else, that’s all.”

Sikes licked peanut butter off his teeth. He hated peanut butter. But he hadn’t realized how hungry he was. “Saucer theft, hmmm? I wonder if we could book ’em for it.”

Theo stared at him in silence. After a while Sikes stared back. “What?” he asked.

“Well,” Theo said, “could be you and me are going to be able to find out the answer to that question.”

Sikes didn’t understand.

“We’re off suspension,” Theo said. “Orders straight from Willie Williams himself. All vacations canceled. All disciplinary suspensions not involving firearms also canceled. For the emergency.”

“What emergency?” said Sikes. “Whenever they get around to talking about something other than that thing in the desert, all they say is that the crime rate in Los Angeles is lower than it’s been since the night they started bombing Baghdad.
Everyone’s
staying home to watch the news.”

“Not us,” Theo said. He nodded at the screen. “We’re going out there.”

“The Mojave?” Sikes was more awake than he had felt in days.

“Every police force in the state has been asked to contribute personnel to the AQF. That’s the Alien Quarantine Facility. The captain said he sure as hell doesn’t want us on the streets, so he ‘volunteered’ us.”

“I’m not going out there,” Sikes said.

“We don’t have a choice, son. Besides, it’ll look good when we come up for our review hearing.”

Sikes slammed his fist on the arm of his easy chair and made the beer cans on the floor rattle. “I am
not
going to any review hearing, Theo. The fix is in. I know it.”

“So what are you going to do? Quit on me?”

“Damn right.”

Theo stood up, cracked his neck with a roll of his shoulders, then walked over to Sikes and picked him out of the chair by a fistful of Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. “Do I have your attention?” he asked.

“It’s all a crock,” Sikes said. “Put me down.”

“So you can go back to rotting in this pisshole? I don’t think so.”

Sikes pulled Theo’s hands off his shirt and stood looking as if he belonged out in the desert with the other frightened, bedraggled creatures. “Don’t you get it, Theo? We
had
them. Amy, Uncle Frank, Petty’s killer. You and me and Angie and even Grazer—we worked together. We broke the case. We made our arrests. And we had the evidence.”