2
BRANDI
The blare of sirens woke me like the world was ending.
I bolted upright in bed. The klaxon alarms in the distance weren't a drill; we didn't have any scheduled, and we certainly didn't run them at night. But this was Idaho, where the most excitement we ever got was when a prop-plane accidentally flew over our airspace.
A gunshot, far away. Then another, then three automatic shots in a row.
I was out of bed and across the room in seconds, retrieving my sidearm from the drawer and then loading it. The motions were automatic and practiced, and I accomplished them without thinking. I pulled back the curtain enough to glance outside, but couldn't see anything but the neighboring house and the grass yard and bushes in between.
I pawed stealthily to the front room, leaving the lights off to shield me with darkness. Crouching down by the front window, I could see lights inside houses flicking on all across the base, and shouting coming from the north. Toward the vehicle entrance.
I ran through scenarios in my head, but none of them made any sense. I'd been through basic like everyone else, and could put three rounds in a body at a hundred yards with a grouping the size of my fist, but I'd never really thought about this type of scenario. All of my worse fears involved missile locks and exploding engines.
The phone on the wall rang, sending me jumping into the air like a cat.
I picked it up and said, "What the hell is going on?"
It was my XO on the other end. "Not sure, sir. Proximity sensors were triggered at the base entrance. The two Airmen on duty say..." He trailed off.
"Spit it out, Johnson."
"Sorry, sir. They say two civilians approached the gate and asked to speak with someone in charge. When the Airmen turned them away... the intruders disappeared."
I let the last word linger on the line.
"Disappeared."
"That's right, sir. In the blink of an eye before them."
All the fear I felt left my brain. I glanced at the clock--10:00pm. Guards drinking on duty was rare, but it did happen. It'd never caused a base alert, though.
Disappeared in the blink of an eye. Fucking ridiculous.
"I'll get dressed," I began with a sigh, but my XO cut me off.
"No, sir. All officers are required to sit tight while a base sweep is done."
"Like fucking hell I am! I'll be at the command building in five minutes."
"Sir," he insisted, "you're the acting Air Base Wing Commander, and if there is an attack you may very well be the target."
I slammed the phone down with the full intention of striding out into the open anyway, but then I saw movement outside my window. I peered out just in time to see two guards with M16 rifles standing on either side of my door, facing away.
I opened the door and said, "What is--"
The guard's voice boomed like he had a megaphone in his throat.
"SIR PLEASE REMAIN INSIDE AND AWAY FROM THE WINDOWS UNTIL THE THREAT IS ELIMINATED."
The intensity of his gaze and voice was enough for me to immediately close the door in obedience before I realized what I'd done.
"I don't know if I'm being protected, or imprisoned," I muttered.
I considered going out the back window, but that wouldn't be very becoming of an officer of my stature... and besides, there was another guard standing out there blocking my way. I spent an angry minute pacing in my living room, then retrieved my book from the bedroom and sat on the couch in defeat.
My eyes moved over the words, but didn't actually read. All I could do was listen to the blare of the sirens, and the shouts of men and women who weren't completely useless running around outside. It served as a reminder of what my position entailed these days. Even when there was a modest amount of excitement on the base, I was forced to suffer it with boredom.
Oh God. The paperwork for this sort of thing was going to be monstrous.
I groaned and turned on the TV to drown out the other sounds, but then quickly turned it back off. Even if it were only a false alarm, it wouldn't do for rumors to spread that the Base Commander watched Gilmore Girls while braver men and women risked their lives.
Instead, I began fantasizing about what I would do to the drunk Airmen who'd caused all of this. Colonel Elliot would have had their asses for breakfast if he were here, and as a woman I couldn't appear softer than that. My XO would have an idea as to a proper punishment, and whatever that was I'd tack on a few extra days or weeks or months. And honestly, sitting there in the middle of the night being treated like a damsel in distress in her own goddamn base, I was looking forward to being the bad guy.
The people appeared out of thin air.
One moment I was alone in the living room, and then atoms were coalescing together like foreign mist, clumps that became solid and formed legs and torsos and arms and heads. The one on the left ended up being a middle-aged woman in jeans and a red plaid shirt. The shape on the right formed into a handsome man, chiseled with muscle from head to toe, which I got a good look at before his clothes appeared and covered him.
I blinked several times. Like watching an optical illusion, my brain struggled to process what I'd seen.
And then the people were more than simply cardboard cutouts; the woman shook her head as if dizzy, while the man stood perfectly still, his head the only thing that moved, twisting to face me.
A lot went through my brain in that moment, the possibilities I considered. That this was some new technology from Russia or China. That I was having a seizure. That some impossible trick was being played on me by the other officers on the base. But regardless of the root cause, I had guards only 20 feet away that could help within seconds.
I opened my mouth to shout for help, but the man spoke into my head.
Please do not be afraid.
I couldn't explain how I knew, but it was the man speaking. The calmness in his eyes, and the words themselves, made me close my jaw.
""We're here peacefully," the woman said quietly. She extended her hand. "I'm Joanna, but you can call me Jo, on account of everyone else does. And this is Arix, with an X. Not Eric with a C." She smiled as if that were a private joke.
I looked between them and said, "How..."
"Have you heard of Elijah, Wyoming?" Jo asked. "Place with all the UFO weirdos?"
"Uhh," I said, glancing toward the door. The guards were just on the other side, and all I had to do was yell...
"I am going to do something," Arix--what kind of a name was that?--said, then nodded to himself.
He returned to my head, and this time he came bearing gifts.
I was suddenly bombarded with images, or memories. It was like that moment after you'd woken from a dream, when it was still fresh in your head but fuzzy at the same time. They also came rapid-fire, and even though I absorbed most of them my attention only caught glimpses of a few:
Arix showed me a craft approaching earth, then smashing into something resembling a giant tin can with antenna and solar panels attached to the side. The craft, a spacecraft, trailed fire and debris as it crashed through the atmosphere, breaking apart and landing in a snowy forest. A beam of light emerged from the wreckage.
And then the beam of light was a man, the same Arix form I saw now, being taken care of on a human couch in a human cabin.
And then there was a stand-off in the snowy woods with two men, and as Arix approached the men they pointed an object at him and he exploded into particles of light.
A shootout ensued, at a different cabin, and the men surrendered but a woman was shot, the same woman in front of me now, Joanna who insisted I call her Jo, and her gunshot wound suddenly repaired as though putty were being spread by an artist.
And another beam of light came, and spoke with them, and eventually took off into the sky with incredible speed.
All of this and more I saw in the blink of an eye, in a thousandth of a blink of an eye, in the time it took for a radio wave to pass from one antenna to another.
The weight of the memories made me dizzy, and I leaned forward to cradle my head in my hands. When I looked back up, both of them were still standing there.
"What the fuck," I said.
"Yeah," Jo said. She reached forward to touch my shoulder, but I flinched and hopped up.
"I need a minute."
Aliens. They existed. Fuck that, they were right in front of me, in my house on my base. And they'd just appeared out of nowhere, because apparently they could do that.
Shit: what if one of them had had a weapon? Maybe my XO's insistence as to my safety wasn't so crazy after all.
Or maybe I was the crazy one, hallucinating all of this.
But the memories were fresh in my mind, and I probed them like an eight year old poking the spot where a tooth had just fallen out. I felt the truth of the memories as if I'd experienced them myself. Like I'd been there.
I paced back and forth while the two of them watched, and all the while the sirens continued blaring outside.
"Putting aside the impossibility that there are aliens, and that two of them are standing right in front of me..."
"Actually, I'm human!" Jo said cheerfully.
"...why are you here? And not here, as in earth. Here here, in my house. On this base."
Jo grimaced like she was going to impart news I didn't want to hear. "Maybe we should sit down?"
"I'm fine standing, thank you."
Jo looked at Arix, and he nodded.
"My people are called the Karak," he explained. "As I've shown you, my visit to the surface was entirely accidental. An unintended crash landing. But two of my fellow Karak are coming to earth. Tomorrow. And they wish to speak with a human with military experience."
"Yeah, but why me?" I asked, although I knew the answer: because I was in charge of the base.
But that's not the answer they gave.
"Arix touched the minds of every human on this base," Jo said gently. "None were suitable."
"Suitable for what?"
Arix answered with shocking bluntness. "For the majority of men and women at this location, the probability of insanity upon receiving the memories I have shared with you was nearly 100%."
"So does that make me more or less crazy for accepting it?"
Arix smiled, showing white teeth. "Your probability of insanity was only calculated to be 61%."
"Thanks for taking that risk without warning me first," I muttered. "And to think my mom said science fiction books were a waste of time."
"So that's the gist of things," Jo said. "Make sense?"
"No, not at all. What do they want me for? The two... Karak." The word tasted strange in my mouth.
"Hell if we know. We just got the communication a few hours ago, and rushed over here from our cabin. All we're supposed to do is take you to the meeting place."
Arix stared past me, and put his hand on Jo's arm. "It is time for us to leave."
She smiled apologetically at me. "Nice meeting ya! Get some sleep. Tomorrow's gunna be a big day."
"Wait!" I blurted, sticking out a hand as if that could stop them. "You didn't even ask if I would do it."
Arix stared at me. I mean really stared at me, with more than his eyes: he knew me more than I knew myself, my intimacies and secrets and everything in between.
"You will," he finally said. "See you on your morning jog."
And then their bodies were falling apart like leaves from a tree, particles of multicolored light that shifted and changed and then disappeared entirely, leaving me staring at the TV on the other side of where they had been.
There was a soft knock on my door, and then it opened.
"Sir..."
I whirled. "Yes?"
The guard frowned. "Everything alright, sir?"
I collected myself and said, "Yes. Why wouldn't it be?"
He stared a heartbeat longer. "The base is clear. Looks like it was a false alarm after all. Thank you for your understanding--you can get some sleep now."
"I'll do that."
But I spent the night sitting on my couch, staring at the place on the floor where the two strangers had appeared and disappeared, and wondered if I really had gone insane.