Lost Cargo (29 page)

How many times had he seen the door in his childhood dreams?

He’d been dreaming about it all his life. It was the Third Eye. It was his grandmother Antoinette seeping through his bones.

“No,” Monroe said aloud in the cab.

“Wrong way?” the driver said.

“No, no, keep going.” The shining door blotted out the side of the cab driver’s head. Monroe squeezed his eyes shut. The damnable light was still there as if it had burned itself into his eyelids, so he opened his eyes, trying to stay sane. He thought about Annie as the apparition spread over his field of vision.

One small slip of paper and they would start a new life.

The cab pulled up to Buchanan House. Monroe paid the driver, opened the door, and gulped a lungful of cold air, blue light in both eyes now. Ice crunched under his shoes. No, glass. Somebody had smashed in the front doors. One lamp in a deserted lobby. A shout in the night.

Someone on the roof. Travis, dangerously near the edge.

More shattered glass. Monroe rubbed his knuckles into his eyes, trying to rid his sight of the light that blazed now like a blue sun. Through the lobby, to the elevator, to the top of the building, down the hall to the stairwell. He tore open the exit door and found the rooftop and Travis on his knees where the pitch of the roof sloped toward the gutters.

“Don’t come out here,” Travis screamed over his shoulder. “Go back inside!”

“My jacket,” Monroe called. “I need my jacket. My God, what’re you doing up here? Are you crazy?”

He took a few more steps and then saw the girl with her arms splayed out as if she lay on the edge of the world. His mouth fell open. Travis inched down, arms out, unable to reach her.

Something gurgled behind them. A huge statue stretched its wings, a gargoyle, some kind of enormous bird carved on the corner the roof, come to life.

It was the thing that plummeted off the Taft Bridge.

Then he looked up and saw the door streaming with blue light.

T
he alien pilot stood in the black triangle’s door, silhouetted by glowing blue light, and like a fisherman of old, he cast a great net. The blue grid flowed out of the triangle into the night. Light flashed from its brilliant meshes as it raced with terrible swiftness over the frozen roof.

“No,” Travis gasped.

He tried to shield Lexie and lost his footing. The fiery net seized him. Hot, hot pressure. Dazzling, blinding blue. The meshes surged, and he lunged toward Lexie, snared beside him in shining strands. Missed. Scraped his knuckles on the roof, and rolled, entangled in a gluey rope he’d mistaken for blue light. The net tightened. Then the glowing strands swallowed his lower body in brilliant blue.

He could no longer feel his legs.

Lexie screamed and ripped at the meshes. Twenty feet away, Monroe fell on his knees, trapped in blue, struck silent, eyes on the black craft over the roof. Blue light streamed from the open door. The ragged hole from the crash had disappeared, as if the hull had grown back like living skin.

The monster rose over the rim of the roof, beating her wings, twisting and slashing, legs trapped in a river of luminous blue. Ice scattered. She screamed and went down and beat her wings sideways against the stones.

The pilot hurled a flat gray shape over his head in her direction. It formed its whole body into a point and pinned one wing into the net.

“Kree-ee-ee-ee,” the monster screamed as a boiling cloud of creatures swarmed out of the ship. When they struck her, she gave a long, murderous cry as if she were calling to her own kind light years beyond the earthly sky.

The cry deepened to a gurgle as her neck melted into her shoulders. The feathers on her merciless face lengthened into nightmarish strands, quivered, and shrank back. Powerful claws changed into blunted knobs of flesh. Bones grew rubbery and lost their shape. The cruel beak disappeared.

The net tightened. Her flesh segmented. Gray muscles reddened to the bloodied hue of intestines. The creature twisted. Where a bird once struggled to fly, a huge worm writhed with its flesh entangled in glowing blue rope.

Lexie screamed. The net closed as the pilot drew in the meshes and the strands receded into the floor. The worm thrashed, coiled, and uncoiled, throwing itself toward safe footing, but the more it struggled, the more entwined it grew. Segments of muscular flesh rose from below the surface, still fighting. Finally, the last segment went under. The outline of the worm’s body remained for a horrific moment, coils and tubular mouth and tail almost bristling with life, until the last traces of the image disappeared.

Travis fought to keep his chest above the sea of blinding blue. Terrified, he watched Monroe grab the open cabinet door. Blue sloshed over his friend’s arms. The cabinet’s long, thin drawers flew out. Gold balls and restraints and light bars scattered left and right and bubbled down in the blue ooze.

Monroe twisted, striking out, reaching, missing, and finally closed his fist over a gold ball. Light flashed into his eyes. Seconds later, his face went blank as he sank under the surface of the glowing floor.

The black triangle rose. Its wide windows slid back from floor to ceiling until the front of the triangle became transparent. Travis stared at the city of his birth. Thousands of people were sleeping below, oblivious to the strange craft flying over the streets, and he wondered if this would be his last sight of Washington. Hot blue liquid rose in waves to his shoulders. When the light lapped at his chin he reached for Lexie’s fingers.

No
, he thought, freezing, terrified it would engulf them.

The sleet began to fall again. They were gliding soundlessly over the zoo. Wild deer nosed the frozen ground behind the gates, but as the triangle passed overhead the deer didn’t look up. They flew over the stone lions guarding the Taft Bridge and swooped through a cavern of office buildings that blended together in the night.

The triangle wheeled and ascended.

This is it. We’re never coming back
. They leveled off, though. Travis felt his heart lurch with relief. The harbor appeared and beyond it the pale spires of the cathedral on the hill. Ice-laden trees on the riverbank bent over the silver-brown water as if they had succumbed to the weight of life.

The buildings on the far bank grew misty as the black triangle turned along the river. Blocks of government buildings came into sight, and beyond their rooftops, the city’s famous marble monuments gleamed with ice.

The distant lights of a plane appeared downriver. Surely the pilots would see the triangle and report it to the air traffic controllers. Radar would pick it up. Surely somebody would do something to save them. The plane approached. The lights grew bigger and brighter as if the plane was about to run into them. But it flew over the black triangle, engine screaming, climbing toward the heavens.

They didn’t see us
, Travis thought with frightened wonder.

The alien pilot stared on into the night. Instead of heading down the river, he flew toward the curving walls of the Watergate Hotel. They swooped over the head of a man in a black overcoat on the sidewalk. The man looked up, frowning, and lowered his eyes as if he was shrugging off a dream.

He doesn’t see us, either. We’re invisible
.

The camouflage force field.

Washington, D.C. fell away beneath them. The storm clouds closed over plotting politicians, law firms and lobbyists, police and petty thieves, symphony and opera houses, universities and hospitals, rich neighborhoods and slums, until the last of the great city’s lights dwindled and disappeared.

The black triangle rose toward the stars.

“Where are we going?” Travis asked.

The alien pilot turned to face him. It wore a one-eyed mask.

“What is this?” Travis asked. “The net captured that worm. What’s this about, some kind of transport? What happened to Monroe? And where’s Lexie’s brother? Is Burke in here behind one of these doors? Lexie needs a doctor. She’s lost a lot of blood and that thing tore up her arm.”

The pilot came closer and removed the mask. A pale blue face with deep folds and six eyes met his gaze. It was the same alien he’d encountered on a dark street days ago. Underneath his terror he was amazed that the alien had survived. The alien’s eyes were filled with memories. Stars. The black abyss. Shimmering galaxies and bright solar systems, planets with cratered deserts, turbulent oceans, and boundless skies. Just as before, he saw the net in their gaze. Its meshes blazed, filled with monstrous things with wide mouths and horns and tentacles. Cages. Transporting terrible things in cages.

You’re destroying your planet
, an alien thought said in his mind.

“I know,” Travis said aloud, ashamed.

After you destroy everything, where will you live?

When Travis shook his head, the alien stared at him with its strange cluster of eyes. It seemed to be sizing him up.

You could come with me
.

And do what? Chase down unspeakable things and haul them through the stars? How completely over the moon crazy was that? Travis felt a pang and realized he wanted to sign on the dotted line. Almost. He stared at the alien and then at Lexie, who’d fixed her glassy eyes on him.

“You know, if it was up to me, I’d say buckle up, let’s go. But Lexie’s here, and she’s lost a lot of blood, and she needs a doctor, and I’d never go anywhere without her. She means the whole world to me, my world, anyway. It’s our home down there, and as rotten and screwed up as it is, maybe on its last legs, we have to go back and take a stance… stand up for something.”

He could see the stunned look on Lexie’s face.

Blue light rippled across the floor.

“She needs a doctor. She really does,” Travis said. He sank down. Brilliant hot blue closed over his face and filled his nose and eyes. Just before he lost consciousness he saw Burke dreaming at the bottom of the sea of blue.

Ruthless cold stung his skin and gnawed through his clothes to the center of his bones. Travis opened his eyes. He found himself propped against a chimney with his stiff legs stretched out before him.

Dawn was rising through the woods. The moan of the wind and the bang of a delivery truck door broke the quiet. He was back on the frozen roof at Buchanan House.

For a moment he almost believed the night had been a dream.

Lexie stirred beside him. She was leaning against his shoulder like a disheveled, waxen doll, her hair and eyelashes silver with frost and her coat encrusted with ice. He wondered how long they’d been there and looked around for Burke, but he didn’t see him anywhere. Something was digging into his back. The camera bag, of all things. It must have been swept up in the net.

Lexie moved her hands to her face. His heart raced. He’d made a fool out of himself again, declaring his feelings for her. She was probably going to laugh at him.

“Travis,” she whispered. “There’s a body in the woods.”

T
he body lay in the gorge, half-hidden by rocks and frozen trees. Branches obscured the face, but the head lolled to the side as if the eyes had been watching something move across the night sky. It looked like a man from the width of the shoulders. Whoever it was had pulled his knees up to his chest, trying to keep warm.

Travis stared in horror. It couldn’t be Ian. It had to be somebody else, anybody.

The brutal wind blew over the roof. He circled his arm around Lexie to support her and moved into the quiet building, down the long hall, and into the elevator. His ribs ached, a deep pain that made him wonder if his ribcage was coming apart. When the elevator began to descend, he stared at the bloodstains on Lexie’s skin. First thing, he had to get her to a hospital.

Lexie reeled and leaned on his shoulder.

They reached the lobby. “I’m calling an ambulance,” he said, steering her to an armchair. She nodded and sat down. As soon as he started to call, though, she got up, wobbled toward the front doors, struggled outside, and got down on the sidewalk, feeling around in the ice.

The fire department came. By the time the ambulance lights were flashing over the building and he was standing outside with her, she’d found what she was looking for in a pool of slush. She stood up with the smashed camera in her hands.

“The pictures,” she said with glazed eyes.

The bang of the ambulance doors. The siren through the city. Outside again in the brittle cold. Wheeled into a emergency room. Pastel yellow walls. Signs in three languages. People rushing. Curtained cubicles. Machinery. All his life he would remember the antiseptic smell, the nurses in their white pants and sugary patterned smocks, the metal bed, somebody from Registration who asked for his signature on a page of swimming words. A tall doctor prescribed pain medicine, and somebody else in white put an IV in his arm and explained why he was doing it, but Travis shut his eyes and the voices washed over him.

“Who was in the woods?” he asked the doctor, and then he realized it was a cop.

The cop leaned on the bed rail. “Ian Mitchell, You know him?”

His stomach turned over. “My brother-in-law. What happened to him?”

“We’re trying to figure that out. Maybe you can tell us.”

An ominous thing to say. “What does that mean?”

“He’s in surgery,” the cop said. “How’d you get these injuries?”

Ian was alive. For an excruciating minute Travis struggled to come up something the cop would believe.

“An animal,” he said. “Some kind of an animal attacked us.”

Hours later, released, loaded with pain meds, Travis took the elevator and found a room with green walls on the hospital’s second floor. Late afternoon sun filtered through the blinds. Ian lay in the sole bed with his eyes closed and his hair plastered to his ashen skin, hooked up to a monitor with an oxygen tube threaded below his nose. His brother-in-law looked as close to dead as you could get without a tag on your toe.

Then he realized Lisa was by the bedside in a chair half-hidden by the door. She must have gone home to get her own insulin. He started to go in and stopped himself.