Lost Cargo (4 page)

Burke turned on Travis. “She lives there. I don’t know what she just did, but you’re crazy. You’re goddamned crazy. Here you’ve got us following a what, somebody who steals groceries, a psycho with a dislocated jaw, some carnival freak. A rubber woman, somebody who swallows swords. She has something to do with those photos and you’re getting us involved in it.”

“Hey, look—” Travis began.

“She saw us.” Burke’s face grew red and a vein bulged on his forehead. “You went up to her in Union Station. She looked right at us, and she looked right at us again a few minutes ago. She knows we were following her. Goddamn you!”

Travis stared at the metal table where the giant had been sitting and ran his hand through his hair. “I’m having dinner with my family,” he said, reaching for anything that sounded normal, but his words sounded nonsensical. “My sister and her husband are back from London. Hey, man, I had no idea.”

“My time is valuable,” Burke said. “I don’t have time to waste an entire day following some nut all over D.C. I need to finish packing for my trip. Lexie, let’s get out of here.”

She studied the tips of her shoes. “I’ll be home later.”

Burke stared at her. “Well, I’m not leaving here without you. This is not safe. Come on, what’s this about?”

She looked at Travis. “You think it’s in the woods behind that building?”

"Someplace in those woods,” he said.

Lexie tucked her hair behind her silver earrings. “She’s inside. She didn’t go behind the building. I’ll go with you. We don’t have to go that far.”

“You’re not doing this,” Burke said.

Two young women crowded by, one with her head bent over a cell phone. Lexie clammed up as though she didn’t want them to hear. Once they moved on, she turned to Travis. “When do you go to dinner?”

“At six. I have four hours. You’re on.”

“Let’s go then,” Lexie said.

“You’re going to go searching around the damn woods for a
UFO
,” Burke said. “You’re out of your minds. I don’t have time for this.”

“I’m not a child,” Lexie said. “You can stop hovering over me. And if you want to go home to pack your socks, by all means, have at it.”

“You’ll be glad I’m hovering over you when you run into that freak in the woods,” Burke told her.

Lexie laughed and kept walking.

They reached the stone building. The brass plaque by the driveway read Buchanan House. Travis felt his stomach turn over. The woman could be watching them, but the windows all had the blank sameness of drapes and mini-blinds.

The place looked familiar. Yesterday he’d chased the dog across the grounds and down the overgrown path into Rock Creek Park.

He took one last look at Connecticut Avenue. Late afternoon sunlight stretched across the sidewalk. The wide avenue crawled with cars heading downtown. Somebody honked a horn. Footsteps approached. A businessman passed by, hurried to the crosswalk, and disappeared in a crowd of black overcoats coming out of the Metro.

The everydayness of it all tugged at his insides. Like someone in a boat slipping away from the dock, reluctant to let go of the rope and head out on an uneasy sea, he longed to hold onto that sunlit normality until the last second.

Then he stepped on the path to the forest, followed by Lexie and her angry, worried brother.

W
hen they followed the path around to the back of the building, they found nothing there except creaking pines and old oaks. The late sun revealed a forest floor buried in deep drifts of brown leaves and tangled bushes, rolling away under endless trees.

Travis felt foolish. He’d half-expected to spot the black triangle on the horizon, and when he met Lexie’s eyes he could tell she’d expected the same thing. Without saying a word, they turned to the forest and fell in together.

The roar of traffic faded and died out as they left the city behind. Travis listened for any sign the strange woman might be following them, the snap of a twig, the sound of heavy footfalls, but the quiet only deepened, except for Burke, who trudged behind them, complaining. The consultant’s suit and tie, so impressive in Union Station, made him look out of place in the woods, as if he’d stumbled off the sidewalk and gotten lost.

“You’re out of your minds,” Burke fumed to the back of their jackets. “It gets dark in a few hours and I have fifteen thousand things to do. How long are you planning to go on with this nonsense?”

They kept climbing and didn’t answer him.

A minute later he said, “You know, this is also stupid and dangerous. I can’t make a phone call in the park.”

“I just want to see what’s over this hill,” Travis said over his shoulder.

“And that’s the second time you’ve said that,” Burke told him.

The creek had shown up in the photos, so they followed the path that ran along it. The sullen ribbon of water they’d first stepped over grew into a broad, meandering stream. Dying goldenrod and brown grass bent over the widening banks, and leaves swirled on the restless surface. The current quickened. Soon the water splashed and gurgled as it rushed over the stony creek bed, heading deeper into the woods.

Burke fell out of earshot. Travis turned to Lexie, stared at her long hair unraveling from her braid, and caught her looking back at him.

“Why a career in history?” he asked.

She looked thoughtful. “Because I’m interested in the past and why we keep making the same mistakes. Why literature?”

“Because I’m a lazy bastard and I like to lie around and read books.”

She broke into a smile.

“What do you think about the photos?” he asked. “You think they’re real?”

Her face grew serious again. “I don’t know what to think, to be honest with you. My father saw a
UFO
once. He didn’t come out and call it a
UFO
, but that’s what it was.”

“Oh, yeah?”

She turned her collar up against the cold. “He told us he saw it when he was in the army, stationed in Germany. They were on maneuvers in the woods about ten o’clock at night. He said they were in sleeping bags in a clearing, talking and looking up at every star ever made, when one of the stars moved.”

“One of the stars moved.”

She nodded. “That’s what he said. He said it was way up there, really high up. It moved, and it stopped, and it went off at a right angle—in other words, like a big L. And then it stopped and started again until it disappeared among all the other stars.”

“That’s incredible,” he said.

“The soldier next to him saw it, too. My father asked him, ‘Did you see that?’ and the other soldier said, ‘I’m looking at it right now,’ when it moved again. My father said that what amazed him was that it didn’t go in a straight line. It wasn’t anything spectacular. It just crept along and shot off in another direction.”

“It might have been a satellite,” Travis said.

She shook her head. “Satellites don’t stop and go off at right angles.”

“What about the giant and what happened back there?”

“I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. I guess she could be from a carnival, but I don’t know. Look, a deer!”

A doe on the other side of the gorge lifted her head at the sound of their voices and bounded up the far hill, white tail flashing. Five more deer fled after her. Their tawny coats had been invisible against the trees until they moved. He looked around, wondering how many other pairs of invisible eyes had been following them.

The light from the fading sun sank below the treetops. A cold breeze ran through the gorge, scattered the leaves, and whirled up the path. Half-frozen, Travis was ready to admit they were getting nowhere when Lexie tugged at his sleeve.

She pointed across the gorge with a troubled look on her face. “I could have sworn I saw something, but it’s gone now.”

He squinted into the gloom. The hillside tumbled away before them into a chasm filled with boulders and shadows. A large boulder sat on the other side, surrounded by more shadows. Nothing there, but he did notice something he didn’t want to see. The orange glow from the coming sunset was beginning to show through the black tree line.

Burke caught up with them. “It’s a rock,” he said, huffing and scowling. The boulder on the far side of the gorge did look like an ordinary rock. “We can’t use a cell phone and the sun is going down. I know that doesn’t bother you two, but if one of us breaks a leg because we can’t see where we’re going, then we’re screwed. We can swashbuckle around the woods all night long and we’re not going to find anything. There is no
UFO
and there never was one.”

Lexie looked at her brother with disgust. “All you think about is cell phones. Don’t you have any curiosity?”

“That’s a rock,” Burke said. “You’re seeing things because you want to see things.”

“Oh,” she said, “and you didn’t see what happened with that woman back there.”

“I saw some freak from a carnival. A rubber woman.”

Lexie turned to Travis. “Humor me and come with me.”

“Let’s check it out,” Travis said.

They scrambled down the rough slope together, half-sliding through waist-high weeds and briars that were almost invisible in the dusk and scratched their skin and clothes. When they reached the creek, he caught her hand and pulled her to the far bank.

“Ruined my trousers,” Burke called, as if he expected them to do something about it. He grabbed at a bush on the slope. “Ripped the cuff, and look at my shoes.”

After Travis struggled up the embankment, he stopped to take in their surroundings. The quiet hill smelled of damp earth and old leaves. The boulder stood a few hundred feet away at the edge of the clearing. Smaller boulders lay scattered across the gloomy hilltop, while nondescript woods stretched as far as the eye could see. They’d reached an area of Rock Creek Park where few people ever hiked.

“I guess I was wrong,” Lexie said reluctantly.

“Maybe you saw another deer,” Travis told her.

“No, I saw something bigger than a deer,” she said, almost talking to herself now. “But I don’t understand how I could see it one minute and not see it the next.” She headed through the shadows toward the boulder while the sunset flamed up the sky.

“This is ridiculous,” Burke shouted from the brink of the gorge. “There’s nothing here except rocks and a million dead leaves.”

Lexie took a few more steps and held out one hand as if she didn’t quite trust her eyes. Another step and she made an abrupt stop.

“Travis.” Her voice went up ten decibels.

He caught up with her, felt his shoulder smash into an invisible barrier, and jerked his arm back. Glass. Why would someone put up a glass wall in the woods? But it couldn’t be glass. They would be able to see the dust and dirt on the surface. He pressed his hand against the barrier, gingerly at first, then harder. The unseen wall gave off a faint warmth.

On the other side the forest floor ran on undisturbed. He knelt down to examine the ground. No ridge or evidence of construction, nothing.

“I can’t see it, but it’s here,” he told her. “I almost broke my shoulder on it.”

Burke came toward them. “The sun’s setting,” he called.

Seconds later, the invisible barrier shimmered like light rippling over a stream. Burke opened his mouth, but no sound came out. The black triangle from the photographs lay against the wood line, half buried in broken tree limbs, one end plowed into the ground while the rest leaned to the side. Streaks of dirt on the underbelly showed through the weeds.

The sunset deepened. Brilliant orange light spread across the hull.

But the silent triangle had the air of abandonment. Several days had passed since the unknown photographer came across the crash. The oaks and cottonwoods behind the triangle were shedding their leaves, burying the ground, the triangle, and everything else. Leaves clogged the long windows. More leaves drifted over the hull. Wherever the triangle came from, the earth claimed it now. Soon all would be lost in a sea of leaves.

“I can’t believe this,” Travis whispered.

“I
knew
I saw something,” Lexie said. She pulled out her cell phone and began to shoot pictures.

Moments later, the triangle disappeared. Just as before, the barrier blocked them from moving forward. The ancient bolder appeared to sit by itself on the hill.

Travis flattened his hand against the unseen wall. “What is this thing?”

“A force field,” she said, sounding unsure. “I mean, it has to be that. The triangle must have had some kind of camouflage before it crashed and it’s breaking down now. It has to be that or somebody would have found it by now.”

He ran his hand over the barrier. Her theory seemed as good as any other, and with the sun setting they had no time to stand around and think of a better one. Another bright ripple shimmered through the air. The twilight itself seemed to part and the triangle appeared again at the foot of the boulder. This time they stepped through to the other side.

“My cell phone stopped working,” Lexie gasped. “I just took pictures with it.”

“It smells like sulphur here,” Travis said.

The sulphurous smell grew as they moved toward the open hatch. The wind stirred the trees and died out. He put one hand on the cold rim of the waist high opening and peered into the dark interior. Lexie leaned inside with her face transfixed. He quickly reached out, terrified that some nameless thing would attack her, but soft blue lights glowed on instead.

The black triangle was still alive.

His pulse thundered in his ears. The blue light shone across the low ceiling and black walls and radiated from a recessed grid in almost every surface, from the walls to the ceiling and floor, everywhere except a walkway that seemed to float in an optical illusion. The walkway branched off to several black doors, a cabinet, sealed windows, and a single black chair.

But the empty room provided no clues about the mysterious travelers who’d occupied it. There were no personal effects—no galactic travel mugs, celestial chewing gum, or candy bars, no alien photos, sunglasses, or moonglasses—nothing to comfort a weary traveler on a long voyage through space.