Stargate SG1 - Roswell (29 page)

“I was getting to that.” The lip-biting thing started up again before Howard picked up his tale. “Grandfather died that very same night. The doctor told us he'd had a stroke, but I overheard the morticians talking. One of them said that in all of his years, he'd never seen such a look of horror on a man's face.” Howard's eyes began watering up, and his bottom lip began to tremble.

“Was it something the Masons did?”

The young man shook his head. “I sneaked up to his room. While the mortician was preparing Grandfather for burial.”

“And...” Vala coaxed, fearing he would break down completely before finishing his story.

“He saw something truly beyond the imagination of any sane man.”

“Which was...?”

“He was working on Grandfather's face. Trying to soften his expression for the viewing, I suppose, by massaging his face muscles into a different position. When he opened Grandfather's mouth he found...”

“What?” Mitchell demanded impatiently, almost destroying all Vala's hard work getting the story from him.

Howard jumped in fright. “A small winged dragon wedged inside his throat!”

Although a bit of an anticlimax, given the build up, it prompted Vala into releasing the boy and scrambling for her zat gun.

Mitchell was faster—only because he was actually carrying his weapon—and immediately brought it to bear. “Okay, son, exactly what
is
in the box?”

Alarmed, Howard's eyes grew as large as saucers and he stumbled back away from the chest until he was hard pressed against a stack of barrels. Rather than answer the question, though, he determinedly continued on with the story.

“After a few days, a terrible smell came from the attic. I plucked up the courage to go and see for myself, and found a small jar on the floor, surrounded by a puddle of foul smelling fluid.”

Val had heard of similar containers and so had Mitchell, it seemed, because he had lowered his weapon. “Canopic jar,” he said. “That's how Jackson had a run in with Osiris.”

“You mean Osiris was stuffed in a jar all that time?” Vala grinned. “Oh, he would have loathed that! How wonderful.”

“She.”

“What do you mean, 'she'?”

“Osiris was a 'she'.”

“Took a female host, did he? Well, I suppose I should have expected that.” Vala turned to Howard and treated him to a reassuring smile. “Do you think we could maybe skip all this utterly fascinating ancient history and get to the part where you tell us there's something more interesting in that tea chest than a broken Canopic jar?”

The boy stared unblinking at the chest. “I...I packed some other things that I found nearby.”

Vala stepped closer to the chest. She studied it for a moment and then turned to Mitchell who had, without prompting, raised his weapon again.

“You will only zat me
once
if I do happen to encounter a live Goa'uld, won't you?”

Mitchell hesitated for a teasingly long time before he grinned and nodded. “Only once.”

Cringing, she stepped forward, plunged her hand into the straw. She felt something metallic, which was a relief. She wasn't sure what she would have done had it wrapped around something slimy. Vala withdrew the item and held it up for
I
Mitchell and Howard to see.

It was Herbert George's gold handcuff.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Daniel wasn't entirely happy leaving Sam to enter the base alone, but he knew there was nothing more he could do. And it wasn't like she was breaking into an Ori ship. This was Earth and the only alien elements were that of a different generation.

They'd agreed to maintain radio silence once Sam was in the ambulance. Daniel had edged away from the crowd and backed into the deserted lane heavily shadowed by the setting sun. Once safely out of earshot, he checked in with Teal'c, who confirmed that after a brief delay, Sam had made it through to the base. Walking to the entrance of the alleyway he quickly made his way back along the road. The military were currently engaged in a frantic process of disinformation and cover up, which meant that any minute—

A Buick pulled up in front of the diner and a heavyset, gray haired man climbed out. Red faced and glowering, he slammed the car door shut, pulled on a cream Stetson and strode into the diner.

Daniel quickened his pace, reaching the door just in time to hear the new arrival, presumably Walt Whitmore, the owner of the local radio station KGFL, announce, “C'mon Marc, we'd best get you out of here.”

An hour and a half earlier Whitmore had—if Teal'c's information was reliable—been threatened with the loss of his license if he broadcast his interview with Brazel or mentioned the discovery of the wreckage or bodies. In a monumental blunder, the same authorities—the FBI—would fail to stop the printing of the story the following morning in the Roswell Daily Record. That headline would, in the years to come, position Roswell as the Mecca for UFO buffs and conspiracy theorists, the world over.

Daniel followed Whitmore into the diner. Jack was already at the counter trying to pay his tab. His request was lost amid a growing argument between Whitmore and John McBoyle, the reporter from the competing radio station, KSWS.

“Now hold on there a minute, Walt,” McBoyle objected, standing between him and Brazel. “Unless you've got some sort of exclusive with Marc, here, I've got every right to interview him.”

“It ain't
me
saying you don't got the right, Johnny,” Whitmore responded. “Why don't you go back to the station and ask Lydia what the goddamned FBI did when she tried to put the story out on the wire services? Same as they did to me.” He pulled off his hat and slammed it furiously onto the counter. “They threatened to revoke my license, can you believe that?”

“Lydia Sleppy?” McBoyle stared in disbelief over Whitmore's shoulder. “Hold on a sec. What's going on outside?”

Daniel and Jack both turned and looked. An army truck and a jeep had pulled up at the curb and were disgorging eight or nine MPs. Jack exchanged looks with him, and, with a nod of agreement, indicated they should leave by the side exit.

“Hey, officers,” the waitress declared when a lieutenant and a sergeant strode into the diner, helmets pulled low over the faces. “We don't want no trouble here.”

Sidling toward the rear, Jack tried the side door and found it locked. Seemed the fire regulations of 1947 didn't require fire exits to be
actual
exits. The remaining MPs were piling in through the front door. Daniel glanced behind them. The cook, Casey, was still flipping burgers like nothing was happening, while the waitress, Dorothy, was wiping her hands on a dishrag as she walked out from behind the counter.

“I told you before we ain't closing down at nine just 'cause you got some silly curfew regulations at the base. I got truckers coming through at all hours and they rely on gettin' a decent meal here.”

And that was when Daniel realized that aside from himself, Jack, Brazel and the reporters, the diner was empty of patrons. The MPs seemed to realize that at the same moment, because two of them herded Marc Brazel politely, but insistently, toward the front door. Another two men flanked Whitmore and McBoyle.

The MP lieutenant turned to Jack and Daniel. “Hey, you two.”

“You can't treat me like this!” Whitmore objected. “I'm the owner—”

Ignoring Daniel and Jack for the moment, the lieutenant whipped out his nightstick and slammed it on the counter. “Yesirree, I can. You was warned to keep your goddamned mouth shut.” The nightstick swung around until it was directly under Brazel's nose. “And so was you. All this talk about little green men, huh.”

“They weren't green, ya big ape,” Brazel said gamely. “They was gray!”

Whitmore continued to object to the military's shabby treatment of upstanding citizens who were just doing their civic duty. Something about the Constitution and the First Amendment were thrown in for good measure, but Daniel couldn't hear much more because by then they were outside and the radio station owner was being manhandled into the back of the truck, along with McBoyle and Brazel.

“You.” The lieutenant's nightstick swung around in an arc. He stabbed it in Daniel and Jack's direction as he approached them.

“Who?
Us?”
Jack said, adopting a well-practiced expression of cluelessness that worked so rarely, Daniel wondered why he bothered to try it on anyone. “Names!”

Jack smiled disarmingly. “Ah...names. Mulder and Scully.”

“Where do you live?”

“Colorado,” Daniel replied, before Jack could get too carried away. “We're just passing through town, lieutenant.”

“Where ya headed?”

“New York,” Daniel said without thinking.

“Kinda taking the scenic route, ain't, ya?”

“But there's so much to see,” Jack said. “Little green men, and flying saucers... Oh, and arresting innocent citizens eating in a diner.”

“Jack]”
Daniel hissed in warning, but it was too late. The damage was done.

The MP's eyes narrowed dangerously. “Wise guy, huh?' the lieutenant grabbed Jack by the arm. “Outside. The both of you. You're coming, too.”

Daniel felt the brief moment of tension before Jack allowed himself to be pushed out the door. Raising his hands in surrender, Daniel followed, squinting against the last blazing rays of the sunset. He wasn't worried about a little shoving around, but he was concerned that it could reveal their zat guns and radios.

Although this particular scene was absent from Teal'c's prediction of what to expect, he had mentioned there'd been several accounts of military 'debriefing' that had involved everything from the invocation of patriotic duty to outright threats on family members.

Of course, if Jack had just kept his big mouth shut...

Still, he doubted the MPs would bother to search them. Right now, the best thing was to play along.

“If nothing else,” Jack muttered to Daniel, “this'll save us a three-mile hike back to the jumper.”

“Why did you have to say anything at all?” he hissed in a low voice.

“I hate MPs.” Even as he spoke, Jack was edging away from the truck so that the sun was in the eyes of the MPs.

“You're
a general,
Jack.”

“So? It's the whole tyrannical power-mongering thing they've got going.”

“Pat 'em down, corporal,” the lieutenant ordered.
“I
don't like the look of these two...
itinerants.”

Okay, so much for the non-confrontational theory. Before Daniel had a chance to object, one of the MPs grabbed his arms from behind and shoved them into the air. The lieutenant's eyes zeroed in on the zat.

And that's when Jack decided to shoot everybody.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE