Alphas in the Wild (27 page)

“Not bad,” she replied. “But I’m tired. I’ll camp here tonight and head back to McClure tomorrow.”

“Now that you mention it,” he drawled, “think you might have enough energy to run up to the pass?”

Sara didn’t feel like
running up to the pass
. It was another four miles and fifteen hundred feet of climbing. “Uh, not really,” she murmured. “At least not tonight.”

“Come on, Sara,” he’d urged. “We’ve been getting odd reports from that area. I’d like some firsthand data. You move fast. You could be there in well under two hours.” There was a pause, then Lonnie added, “It won’t even be dark by then, princess.”

Maybe it was the
princess
that did it—her father used to call her that. Sara gathered what she thought she and Jake would need for a few days, stashing all her extraction gear behind a boulder pile. Then she shouldered her pack and struck out for Muir Pass. Lonnie was right, she did move quickly over the trails, her long-legged stride capable of eating up over three miles an hour uphill, more if she was coming down.

Distracted as she replayed the tragedy on Mount Darwin, Sara was surprised how quickly she reached the hut. It was still twilight. Plenty of time to get herself situated.

She dragged herself back to the present, settled on her spot on the floor, and picked up her pen again.

...The extraction was long, but uneventful. No point in describing it here. Once it was over, my boss sent me to Muir Pass to check on reports he’d been getting of unusual activity. While I wasn’t anxious to do more traveling that day, I do know how to follow orders. Jake and I reached the hut around six-thirty. I pushed the door open and, as always, was greeted by whichever of the resident rodents chose to take a stand. Jake made short work of them while I shoveled last season’s snow into poly bags so we could melt drinking water. Dredging my tent out of my pack, I smiled at the small, satisfying clicking sounds the segmented poles made as they nested into one another.

I didn’t know then it might be one of my last smiles ever.

So much of setting up camp is automatic, I’m surprised I even noticed. What did grab my attention, though, was Jake. While he sleeps next to me after I turn in, he usually prefers roaming about when I’m getting our camp set up. Not that night, though. Oh, he started wandering all right, but before I was even done with the tent, he was back by my side whining, with his ears back and his tail tucked low.

“What’s the matter, boy?” I asked, but of course I didn’t get an answer.

Some of you reading this might wonder why I didn’t just bed down in the hut. Well, huts are always, always cold. It’s actually far warmer in my down bag and my double walled tent than in a stone hut. In a winter snow storm, I might use one of the widely-spaced huts that dot the Sierras, but never in the summertime or autumn.

Just as I was settling in to melt some of the snow I’d gathered for water and dinner, the light—or what was left of it—began to look really odd, all flickery with iridescent fingers reaching down out of the sky. Searching for a reason, I glanced up and froze. Right above Jake and me was this really large thing that could only have been a spaceship. It was oblong with blue and green lights lining the long sides, and white lights at either end. It was huge, maybe over two hundred feet, though it’s hard to measure things when they’re in the sky. Jake clung to my side like a shadow as I stared upward in utter and absolute disbelief. He head-butted me toward the open door of the hut, so I told him he could go inside if he wanted. Pretty silly to tell a German Shepherd that. They’re trained to die by your side, so, naturally, he didn’t go anywhere.

The ship altered course. It had been heading pretty much due east, but it began circling and getting lower and lower. In the meantime, I’d grabbed my radio but, for some odd reason, I couldn’t get anything out of it. Usually, high places like the pass have great reception. I checked the battery indicator, and it said eighty percent, so that wasn’t the problem.

At first, the ship looked exotic and, well, fascinating. I majored in ecology and wildlife management eons ago. As I studied the ship, I tried to tap into some of that scientific training to figure out how something that non-aerodynamic could fly.

I should probably tell you I’m—or, I used to be—a helicopter pilot. I got my training during a brief stint in the military right after college. I’m pretty sure that’s why the Park Service hired me in the first place since they were short of Rangers who could fly back then. Anyhow, I’m getting off track here. I’m not sure how long I spent gawking at the thing in the sky. It was mesmerizing in a weird sort of way.

As it got lower and lower though, I began to get scared. Really scared. At one point I crooked my fingers into a sign against evil I haven’t used since I was a child. Then one of those unnatural light beams sweeping the ground found a pica and vaporized it. One minute the little guy was there, looking hopefully at me as I pulled dried food packets out for dinner. The next he was gone in a poof of smoke, leaving this icky, burned smell.

Well, that certainly mobilized me. I dove through the door of the hut and huddled next to Jake on one of the benches. I did leave the door open a crack, though, so I could still see. As soon as I was inside the hut, the damned thing altered course again. It stopped circling and resumed its easterly trajectory, despite being, probably, a thousand feet lower—too low to clear the passes next to either Wallace or Echo Cols. Even though I willed it to crash, I’m sure it didn’t. I would’ve heard something...

Sara skimmed over what she’d written. She wanted to make sure she hadn’t missed anything important, at least up until when the ship appeared. Laying the paper aside, she shivered. It was nearly as bad reading as it had been to live through. It also shed a whole new light on what she’d labeled as rock fall when she was descending from Mount Darwin. Maybe it had really been some kind of detonation.

She bit her lower lip. No point dancing around the issue. Not
detonation
, a dry rather clinical term, but bombs. The noise on Mount Darwin sounded like bombs, and maybe that’s what they’d really been.

“Crap. Crap. Crap. What the hell is going on?”

Jake whined sympathetically and moved closer to her. She arranged her sleeping bag, laying it out on a foam pad on the hut’s floor, before leaning into the dog’s warmth. Things had only gotten creepier since her retreat into the hut. Another shudder racked her, and she got inside the bag, trying to regroup.

She’d been in tough situations before. Hell, backcountry life was one tough situation after another, but she’d never felt so out of control.

Right after the ship left her line of sight, she’d retrieved her mostly-erected tent and shoved it sideways through the door of the hut. Once it was upright on the stone floor, she’d gone back outside and tossed her other belongings—scattered on the dirt, snow and rocks—after the tent. It didn’t take a genius IQ to understand there was something about the stones of the hut that masked her presence from whatever was in that ship.

The next day, Sara packed up at first light and headed anxiously down the trail with Jake at her heels. She hadn’t gotten a quarter of a mile, though, before the dog began to whine. Scanning the surrounding mountains, she didn’t see a thing—until she glanced upward. The ship, the fucking abomination of a ship, was on its way back. With the memory of the vaporized pica fresh in her mind, Sara sprinted up the switchbacks toward the hut. Fear clawed at her, making her stomach ache. As she ran, she fought against a helplessness that threatened to immobilize her. Once she and Jake got back to the hut, she sat inside it for a long time, trembling.

They’d beaten the ship to Muir Pass by the narrowest of margins, not an experience she was anxious to repeat.

Days passed.

Four long days, where it required every ounce of Sara’s willpower not to simply take her chances and make a dash for freedom. Despite trying the radio regularly, it never came back to life. There were other things that worried her too. Like no other hikers on the Muir Trail. It was only mid-September and there should’ve been at least twenty to thirty backpackers on that part of the trail each day. She remembered the wilderness permit rosters transmitted via satellite to McClure Meadows daily. Yes, there certainly should have been hikers. There weren’t any airplanes, either. This part of the Sierra was on an east-west flight trajectory across the country. Normally, planes passed over regularly.

Sara experimented. The longest she was able to stay outside, before the ship reappeared on the horizon, was sixty-five minutes. Sixty-five minutes wouldn’t even get her back to Evolution Lake. She needed at least two hours to make the nine-and-a-half miles to McClure, and that would have to be running, not walking.

Lying in her sleeping bag at night, she wondered if it was the same ship. If there were more than one of them, what did that mean? Had the United States been attacked by alien life forms? Was that why there were no other hikers and nothing else in the sky?

...I tried to leave, but the ship chivvied me back. I don’t mind telling whoever may be reading this, I’ve never been so frightened—ever. And I don’t scare easy. If it hadn’t been for Jake, I would’ve really lost it. By the fourth day, I was running out of food and fuel for my stove. No fuel meant no water. Jake was out of kibbles. He was pretty handy at catching rodents, but I had to do something. And that something meant leaving the hut. I didn’t know if I’d be smarter making a run for my cabin at McClure, or if I should head for the LeConte Ranger Station, two-and-a-half miles closer. If I got lucky, I just might be able to make the seven miles downhill to LeConte in ninety minutes. My other option was to climb out over Echo Col and head for Lake Sabrina where there was a paved road and, maybe, people.

I thought about it a lot that night. The next morning thunderhead clouds brewed on the western horizon. I didn’t know if the alien craft could see though cloud cover, but I packed up everything to be ready and, for the first time since I was a child, I prayed. Not to any sort of organized type of deity, just to whatever might be out there listening to a forty-something woman, who desperately needed help.

By ten, the clouds were thick, and it started to snow. This weather might give us our only chance to escape. We’ll be heading toward LeConte since it’s closest, and likely to have food. I’ll bring these pages with me and add to them as I can...

W
ondering if she’d ever see the Muir Hut again, Sara pelted down the trail, careful not to twist an ankle on the slick, wet rocks. She scanned the skies anxiously, but the clouds were so dense she had trouble seeing the trail at times, let alone what was above her. Keeping a close eye on her watch, she was grateful when she passed the small string of no-name lakes below Wanda Lake in forty minutes and got herself below timberline shortly thereafter. She figured it would be much harder for the ship to find her and Jake as the protective canopy of the forest thickened.

Panting, and dripping with sour-smelling sweat, Sara followed the winding side trail to the LeConte station and banged peremptorily on the door. She wasn’t surprised no one answered, but she was taken aback to find the door locked. LeConte should still be manned. While a station was manned, it was always left open, unless the Ranger left a note telling travelers where to find him. The board by the door, magic marker dangling by its string, was blank. Heart thrumming like a trip hammer; she yanked her pack off her back and dug into the recesses of the top compartment for the master key that unlocked all the stations. As soon as she got the door open, she called for Jake, who’d gone off to hike his leg against a tree.

What she found inside shocked her. Sara knew Stuart Palmer. He’d spent just about as many years at LeConte as she had at McClure. Of an evening, they often spoke on the radio. A wiry, mousy character, Stuart—with his bald head and sharp, dark eyes—was always neat as the proverbial pin, yet his station looked as if a tornado had blown through it. Papers, dishes, clothing, and park paraphernalia mingled together on the rough, wooden floor. Sara’s tolerance for clutter was pretty high, but the stark departure from normalcy in that small cabin made the mess appalling.

“What the fuck happened here?” she blurted, casting about for something, anything, to explain the chaos. Jake bounded into the hut then stopped cold as he, too, seemed to sense the wrongness troubling his mistress.

Sara pushed her pack inside. Drawing the door shut to keep the snow-rain mix out, she stepped gingerly through the mess and stripped off her parka, shaking it briskly over the stone hearth. When it was as dry as she thought it could get, she hung it on a hook near the cold stove. Next she laid and lit a fire. Thank God there was kindling and wood near the stove. At least that part of Stuart’s tidiness was intact. She pulled Jake’s pack off, pumped some water for him from the kitchen sink, and culled through Stuart’s debris for clues, staring with the corner where the radio was.

Without much hope, she tried to raise headquarters, but all she got for her efforts was static. When she began reading the dispatches, though, her heart fluttered oddly and her knees buckled, depositing her unceremoniously on the floor.

There
had
been an attack, a major one. Alien ships—squadrons of them—had bombed both the east and west coasts. Pandemonium reigned.

As best as she could tell from thumbing through dispatches that had begun right about the time Lonnie ordered her to check out Muir Pass, millions were dead. Everyone who wouldn’t surrender to the aliens and adopt their lifestyle—whatever that meant—had been killed. Apparently Earth’s world leaders had reneged on some sort of ultra-secret intergalactic trade agreement. But the dispatches stopped right after mentioning it, so she couldn’t figure out what the aliens were so upset about.

Sara’s fingers trembled as she clutched the flimsy pieces of paper. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes. No wonder her radio hadn’t worked atop the pass.