Escape: Omega Book 1 (Omega: Earth's Hero) (2 page)

“Gladys, what in the world?”

Barney turned to see just what had shut this girl up. He saw exactly what she did.

Barney swallowed hard. “G-Get in the car.” He started to move, but noticed his sweetheart was still as a statue. “Get in, Gladys. Get in now!” he shouted.

Barney grabbed her, scooped her up under an arm, and threw her inside the front of the car, with him crashing down on her just as the Chevrolet rocked on its springs like the invisible hand of God had just slapped a little toy car. The frame creaked in protest and wind beat against the windows like a tornado.

Barney’s eyes clamped tight even as the car stilled. After all that, the last thing on his mind was a goodnight kiss.

With one headlight of the ragged old Ford pickup busted out, the road was hard enough to see. Add to that the rotgut he’d been drinking and Vernon Dodd was having a hard time keeping his truck on the road. Having worn out his welcome down at Freddie’s Oasis, just a small box of a bar just outside the Roswell city limits, he was now taking swigs from the bottle of Seagram’s 7 he kept up under the seat for when he really, really needed a drink.

Tonight, ole’ Vernon need not just
a
drink, but the
whole
bottle. With every sip, the remaining headlight dimmed more and more. That, and the road had doubled and was now tripling as he took another long pull from the bottle. To say Vernon was in a nasty mood was quite an understatement. In his opinion, he had every right to be.

“Earnestine,” he muttered. With the hand holding the neck of the Seagram’s bottle tight, he wiped away a tear. Vernon was one of those poor souls that, at times, could go from a raging maniac drunk to a slobbering, sobbing fool faster than two shakes of a dog’s tail. This happened to be one of those times.

Vernon wasn’t an educated man. Having dropped out of school in his fourth year, after his pa ran off, never to be heard from again, he’d never sought out to further his schooling beyond the skills necessary to eke out a living as a handyman.

Bringing his drunken blobbing under control, he realized he hadn’t even turned on the radio. Sometimes music helped, sometimes it didn’t. Might as well give it a try, he reckoned. The fifteen-year-old truck had seen much better days. Rust had already eaten through the fenders and the engine had a cough as if it smoked a pack of Lucky Strikes every mile it rolled. It didn’t matter. It was his free and clear. Well, at least ever since his brother died. With not a penny owed on it, and Vernon the only living relative, he claimed what he felt was rightfully his. Not that anyone really cared. While he spent not one red cent more on it than was absolutely necessary, he kept the engine running well enough, and the radio was in tiptop shape.

The bottle was just about empty, but he took a drink. As soon as he switched on the radio, he wished he hadn’t. This far out in the middle of nowhere you didn’t get many stations, but the one Vernon found he wish he hadn’t.

He took another swig of the Seagram’s as the twanging opening bars of Tex Ritter’s
Long Time Gone
filled the cab of the truck. Placing the bottle between his legs, he pulled a smoke from the pack in his pocket. These hand-rolled jobs were sure to kill him if the drink didn’t. But the best he could figure, a man had to go sometime.

His was the only vehicle on the road, and he didn’t think twice when he let go of the wheel, using his knees to steer. Vernon couldn’t get his match to catch. Finally calling that one a lost cause, he tossed it out the window. Just as he was reaching for another, the whole world burned bright blue. The light was so blaring he thought a lightning bolt had hit him. The hum of rushing air and the chugging rumble of the aging Ford engine drowned Tex Ritter’s crooning drawl. Vernon slammed down on the brakes—which didn’t work right away—and forgot about the steering wheel altogether. The Seagram’s bottle flew from his lap, splashing its remaining liquid all over the floorboard. When the brakes did engage, the tires crunched on the gravel and the whole jalopy swerved and slid off the side of the country road. Plumes of gravel dust billowed up. There was a loud pop as one of the overworked tires finally gave up the ghost and blew out, and one last jarring crash to the whole fiasco. The twang of
Long Time Gone
disappeared. Static on the AM station, and then it was as if an invisible hand spun the dial. Static intermittent with indiscernible words, sounds of explosions, even the roar of a tiger, then more static. The statics cut out and the strangest words yet filled the cabin of the Ford. The timbre and resonance was much better than the tinny speakers should have been able to produce. Yet, there it was, foreign words booming into Vernon’s excited head. 

Doused in liquor, cigarette bit in two but still in his mouth, Vernon threw open the door and jumped out. His legs were rubber from almost flipping the pickup as the dangerous mixture of liquor and adrenaline coursed through him. Blue flame bent across the sky westward, like some crazy motion capture of the setting sun, if the sun were ten times larger and a completely different color. Vernon didn’t know anything about motion capture techniques, however, and didn’t particularly care.

What Vernon did care about at this particular time was the spreading wet warmth in the crotch of his pants and the slow trickling trail down his left leg. Even that didn’t distract him from the sight he beheld. He didn’t so much as spit the hand-rolled cigarette from his mouth, as it simply fell. Vernon was stunned and felt his fingertips tingle.

He looked to his left, to his right. Nothing. Nothing at all. He turned in the direction he’d come and then back to the direction he’d been traveling. Not a soul in sight.

“Jesus, Lord in heaven,” he muttered under his breath, his words a little sluggish, his tongue a bit thick. “All you had to do was tell me to stop drinking. I would’ve listened. Honest.” Vernon Dodd almost made it back into his truck before he either fainted or passed out. His head struck the door of the truck and he crumpled. One thing was for sure. Long after the goose egg on his head healed and the hangover was gone, he’d never forget the blazing blue sky.

Chapter 2

Several miles away, due east, laid the home of the Reddick family. George Reddick was a teacher at the Roswell school. His wife, Clarice, was a housewife, and his son Darrin a highly inquisitive and mischievously curious ten-year-old. While George and Clarice were tucked tightly in their bed, Darrin was involved in more interesting things.

Though his father was a learned man—George Reddick was a man of history and philosophy, and while these subjects did, indeed, interest his son—Darrin was much more taken with the relatively unknown subject of astronomy. That is why, at fifteen minutes to midnight, he had been out in the back, the cool night air washing over him, staring at the high canvas of the Earth through his homemade telescope. While the aesthetic value left much to be desired, the overall effectiveness of the instrument was superb by current amateur standards. Made of a length of steel pipe and one three-inch round lens, it hadn’t required all that much work. The eyepiece itself was purchased through a mail-order science catalog. Darrin would have been tempted to construct the piece himself, if only he had possessed the precision tools necessary to do so.

Using his homemade contraption, Darrin caught the blue flame as it raced across the sky. It was more than fortunate he did so. He had just let loose a big yawn and was tidying up his area. The night had turned cooler and a thunderstorm was rolling in. Call it either divine intervention or just dumb luck. The result was the same. Darrin’s brown eyes grew big as he dropped the small notebook and pencil he used to mark his observations.

“Holy Moly!” Darrin looked away from the sky, blinked several times, and placed his eye back on the scope.

The phenomenon began to shimmer and then fade away so quickly that, when it was gone, Darrin doubted its existence at all. But, after his vision had adjusted to the dark sky, he discerned a thin ribbon of light falling away and down. Darrin pulled back, and with the naked eye, the young stargazer watched as the track careened down and down and down. He felt the shake under his foot; saw the small trees with their leaf-covered branches quiver as if a strong gust blew through.

The idea that something
important
had just happened dawned on Darrin.

He realized the chances that anyone within a one-hundred mile radius had been scanning the sky at this exact moment were slim to none. As far as he knew, he was the only individual in Roswell that had even a passing interest in the stars, as was the root of many of his frustrations. Books on astronomy were very hard to come by, and the need to discuss his observations with another was, at times, maddening. Though he was only a decade old, Darrin Reddick knew he was different from the other kids. Perhaps he was no smarter, perhaps he was. The main thing was: he was infinitely more serious about his hobby.

Craning his neck as the trail vanished and the tremors ceased, Darrin looked to the left and to the right, and then finally back to the house to see if the vibrations had disturbed his parents. No lights flashed on, and the small house seemed as quiet and as still as before. Now, with him the only one awake, there was but one thing to do: go find out just what in the world it was he had seen.

His father owned a Ford, but there was no way in the world Darrin was daring enough to use it. Instead, he had a bicycle that he kept well maintained himself—mechanical engineering was also a talent of his—and he went to the shed for it now. Pulling the bike out and walking it up the long, narrow gravel drive to the county road, he kept looking over his shoulder to the house. The light in the sky had shaken him to the point that paranoia was a real and decisive thing. He wanted nothing more than to begin his venture without disruption. Something had come to Earth, either returning from a launch or originating from somewhere in space. Either way, it was incredibly intriguing to him, and he didn’t want his parents waking up and discovering him not in his bed before he could get far enough away.

A mile down the road, pedaling like crazy, and Darrin wasn’t yet breathing hard. Working around the house for his allowance, combined with his very young age, gave him good endurance. Two miles further, he was beginning to have second thoughts. It was dark out here on this country lane, and he was beginning to consider turning back. He went as far as coming to stop and putting his feet down to support himself and the bike. The storm was growing closer. Even if he raced back home as fast as he could, there was a chance he’d be drenched by the time he made it. What would he have to show for sneaking out then? Nothing, that’s what.

Between claps of thunder, he heard, off in the distance, the low grumble of engines. If not for the absolute quiet of the desert, the sounds would have been lost. Not even the wind stirred. Roads, both paved and not, crisscrossed the land out here, and while the engines could have been from anything, in the purpose of a million different tasks, there was something in Darrin that told him these weren’t eighteen-wheelers or farm trucks out this late in the evening on some innocuous job. Somebody else had seen the same thing as he. Straining his ears, he couldn’t distinguish how many different engines he heard, or even in what direction they traveled. He did know this: if grown-ups thought whatever had shot through the sky was important enough to investigate, then so did he.

Throwing caution to the wind, as well as the very real possibility of extreme parental punishment, Darrin trudged on. He was another two miles from home when he first saw the lights off to the left. Dim, but visible, the lights were coming from behind a rise down in a plain of land that should have been completely empty as far as he knew. Darrin didn’t know who the land belonged to, but he knew there were no lights out there. In this part of New Mexico, electrical lighting was still a luxury, but the luminescence looked man-made. He took a side trail off the road, coming up to a rise near the lights. Here he heard the truck engines more clearly, as well as muted shouts, no doubt blocked by the rock that rose from the ground in haphazard fashion all around.

Darrin laid his bike down quietly beside a boulder that rose twenty feet into the air. He wasn’t sure what waited beyond, but he would take every precaution to see it before it saw him.

Carefully, softly, he hugged the base of the boulder and began to move to the other side.

He’d ridden several miles and was sweaty and tired, but that didn’t account for the hammer in his chest that he realized was his heartbeat. There was a little fear in him, but there was something else to keep it company. Something that made him lick his lips with his dry tongue: excitement.

Somehow, someway, Darrin proceeded without incident.

There was no way to prepare for what he saw.

In a bottom, about thirty feet from the boulder he hid against, there were half a dozen military trucks. They were the big kinds, with tarps over the back where troops rode. Parked in a circle, their huge headlamps provided light for what looked to be forty soldiers to work by. Darrin wasn’t sure what they were doing, but they looked like a colony of ants set to work by an exacting queen. Quick, hurried movements and efficient mannerisms evidenced such. The center of the activity was a small chrome structure no more than a few feet off the ground. Straining, Darrin saw that the object rose from a large hole… meaning that. By the size of the exposed portion and the circumference of the hole. it was most likely deep. and what it held big. The ants continued their work as if telepathically linked. and Darrin couldn’t help but admire their conformed grace. But…

…speaking of ants…

A yell escaped his mouth. Realizing his mistake, there was no way he could capture it.

Little pinpricks of fire ran up Darrin’s leg. He looked down, but couldn’t see much in the meager light. He did see a large earthen mound that he’d almost managed to miss. There was small clump knocked out of the base and the boy’s quick mind processed what had happened. The fire ants bit as if they hadn’t eaten in a week. The burn was unbelievable.

Biting down on his lower lip as hard as he could, tears brimmed in his eyes. He used both hands to try to shake off the red ants, but in such darkness, it was just like swatting at invisible flies. His hands weren’t off limits to the little angry pests, either, but nothing could be done about it. When the pain subsided, Darrin remembered shouting.

He moved quickly away from the anthill, still hugged up to the rock. He tried not to imagine stepping on a similar hill, or worse yet, a rattlesnake’s nest.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a sight that stopped him cold. Fifty yards away, amidst the bustle of the men, one lone man stared straight at Darrin. A thick, barrel-chested older man,  dressed differently from many of the soldiers, was giving Darrin a cold, frightening stare.

Surely he can’t see me,
the boy thought
. It’s impossible.
Then he remembered the events that led him out to the deserted piece of land. Was anything really impossible to Darrin anymore?

What must have been the officer in charge of the group held his gaze, as if it were noon and he could see the intruding boy as clearly as if he were ten feet away. Darrin didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even breath.

A young soldier ran up to the older officer and his attention diverted. Darrin made his move and hustled to the other side of the boulder, giving the ant mound a wide berth. He’d be lost in the darkness if the leader of the soldiers decided to come have a look or worse yet, send a squad to investigate. That being said, Darrin wasn’t ready to leave. He would hide as best he could, but there was no way he was getting out of there until he saw what mystery that strange crater held.

What Darrin Reddick did not know, however, was that what he would find out in the desert, among the soldiers, would change the course of his life.

“Captain,” someone called.

“Oh Christ—”

“Arms at the ready—”

Captain Fallow looked on. Men scurried this way and that. Confusion had descended upon his little operation in the blink of an eye, and he had to struggle to understand just what was happening. The peaceful desert night just become a whole lot rowdier.

From below, in the crater, an eerie light bled out over the dirt mounds surrounding the hole. Strong enough to dispel the spotlights, men scampered away as if a bomb was about to detonate.

“Stand your ground, soldiers,” Fallow commanded, but only few listened.

A soft, gentle sound: water through a drainpipe. Steam roiled up from the front of the buried ship. 

Fallow drew in a single deep breath. His chest rose high and he steeled his nerves. “I said stand your ground, soldiers.” Again, if anyone heard, they failed to acknowledge. A private, his eyes locked on the wrecked spaceship, stumbled and fell into Fallow. Hard. The captain threw the younger man down and went for his pistol on his side.