The Roswell Conspiracy (8 page)

Her mouth agape, Fay struggled to keep Bandit from bolting as a giant, silvery disk descended directly at them. Not knowing which way to go, she kept the horse still. The flying disk had no propellers, just two gaping black openings on either side. The craft had to be wider than the local high school’s football field.

Before she could decide on a direction to go, it roared overhead, deafening her and spooking Bandit. He reared up, bucking Fay, and while she sailed through the air, she realized that the object that she’d thought was a disk was actually the shape of an oblong wing with no body. Then she hit the ground, smacking her rear harder than her dad would have and rolling away from Bandit’s panicked stomping.

Fay raised her head in time to see the silver wing plow into the ground a quarter-mile in front of her, spraying dirt into the sky as it skidded to a stop.

The whine from the craft didn’t end, but she could see no further movement.

Wincing from her bruised backside, but otherwise in one piece, she cooed at Bandit until he calmed and came to her. She climbed back on and tentatively rode toward the motionless air vehicle.

She knew she should just ride straight on and tell her father what had happened, but she also felt intense curiosity about the craft. Her father had taken her to an airfield one time to see the Army planes, and they’d all had white stars and numbers painted on the sides. This object had no markings whatsoever.

When she reached the front of the craft, Fay dismounted the horse and tied him to a scrub brush to keep him from bolting. She could see now just how huge the thing was, the wing standing more than five times higher than her thin frame.

As she walked along the wing’s length, she ran her hand over its smooth skin, the metal cold to the touch. She didn’t notice the cracked square of glass lying on the ground until she was right next to it.

No, not glass, because it wasn’t shattered, but it was transparent like a window pane. She looked up and saw the space where the pane would go. The frame around it had been ripped apart from the force of the crash. Although the front of the craft was partially buried in the earth, it was too far above her to see inside without hoisting herself up. Now she wished she hadn’t dismounted Bandit.

Her heart raced as she tried to decide what to do. If someone was hurt, Fay had to help them, but she was terrified about what she might find. Living on a ranch, she’d seen death and injuries: broken bones, impalements, rotting sheep that hadn’t been discovered for a week. But this was different. There might be injured men inside.

Her dad had raised her to be tough. She’d become the son in the family after her brother died when she was two. Her father took her shooting and roping, taught her how to shear and hunt and fish. Fay convinced herself she could handle whatever she discovered in there and then report back. It would take only a moment to investigate.

Wrapping her leather gloves around the frame, she prepared to pull herself up when a silver hand shot out of the opening and grabbed at her wrist.

Fay fell backward and screamed. She shrieked even louder when she saw the face that peered out the window.

Although it was the size of a human and had two arms, its bulbous silver head was twice as large as a man’s, framing two circular black eyes and a wide slit where the mouth should have been. The grotesque face lacked any nose. She screamed again when the creature climbed over the window’s sill and landed next to her, breathing heavily before collapsing to its knees. Blue fluid bled from its stomach. It put its three-fingered hands to its head, shaking it back and forth as if it were trying to decapitate itself. After a moment, it gave up and sank to all fours.

With a guttural tone, the thing babbled at Fay in a language she’d never heard. She shook her head in disbelief, and before she could scramble away, the creature lunged at her and grabbed her leg. She tried to twist free, but its grip was too strong. He crawled toward her and took her hand.

Fay was scared beyond reason, sure that the thing was preparing to eat her, but instead it stood and pulled her to her feet. Without letting go of her hand, it loped toward Bandit, babbling nonstop the entire way, as if it were terrified about something inside the downed craft.

She struggled but couldn’t break free. When they reached Bandit, the creature patted the horse on the neck, then threw Fay onto the saddle. To her dismay and surprise, the thing climbed awkwardly up behind her and lashed the reins, launching Bandit into a canter with surprising skill.

It was only then that Fay realized that the whine from the craft was getting louder by the second. They fled across the plain in the direction of a slope leading down to an arroyo a half-mile ahead. For some reason, the creature was desperately trying to put distance between them and the craft.

Lightning flashed, followed seconds later by the crack of thunder. The storm would arrive in minutes.

When they reached the slope, the creature dismounted and pulled Fay off, leading them down into the dry streambed, soon to be swollen with water from the coming storm. With one hand on Bandit’s rein, it pushed her against the twenty-foot-high vertical wall of the arroyo and covered her body with its own. As it did so, a tremendous blast like a thousand thunderclaps split the air.

The thing hadn’t been trying to kidnap her. It had been trying to protect her.

Bits of debris rained down around them, but none of them were large enough to injure them or the horse.

After a minute, the thing rolled over and lay on its back, wheezing with great effort. Its shaking hand snaked behind its back and withdrew something from a hidden pouch. It pressed the object into Fay’s hands.

No longer terrified by her savior, she looked down and saw with astonishment a weathered piece of wood no bigger than a schoolbook. On it was an engraving of a rough triangle with a large dot on the left side next to a squiggly line coming from the triangle’s center. Carved on the reverse side were four simple images recognizable as a spider, a bird, a monkey, and a person.

She stared back at the creature. “You want me to give this to someone?”

The creature pointed at her. The gift was meant for her.

“The Army, maybe?”

At the word “Army” it violently shook its head and shoulders and pointed at her again. The piece of wood was for her alone. Then the creature spoke with a voice so warped that Fay could barely understand the syllables.

“
Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um
.”

Fay shook her head. It sounded like gibberish. “I don’t understand.”

It repeated the phrase again slowly. “
Rah pahnoy pree vodat kahzay nobee um
.” It gestured for her to repeat it, and she did so three times until she got it verbatim.

With its hand shaking even more forcefully, the thing drew a figure in the dirt. It was an upright rectangle. Inside the rectangle the creature wrote a K, a backwards E, and a T before it was too weak to go on.

It raised one hand to Fay’s face, and she didn’t recoil. The hand stroked her cheek once, then fell away.

The shaking stopped and the labored breathing abruptly ended. The creature that had saved her life was dead.

Fay bawled at the thing’s sudden end. She stayed crouched over its motionless body until the rain began to gush from the sky, washing away her tears.

She couldn’t stay, and she couldn’t move the heavy corpse. She’d have to leave it where it was.

The thing obviously didn’t want her to report what had happened, but she couldn’t just leave the creature there for no one to find for days or even weeks, its body at the mercy of scavenging coyotes.

Fay knew that Mac Brazel and little Dee Proctor rode the fence line every Thursday, so they’d be coming in this direction the next morning. She could leave clues that would lead them here.

She climbed onto Bandit and took one last look at the creature, who now seemed so vulnerable and unthreatening lying against the streambed wall. She kicked and Bandit trotted up out of the arroyo through the water coursing down in a torrent.

As she topped the slope, Fay was amazed to see that virtually nothing was left of the craft but small chunks littering the ground around her.

She picked up a dozen of the silvery metallic scraps and rode Bandit toward the fence line, scattering pieces behind her every few hundred yards. The shiny metal would lead the way back. When she reached the fence, she dropped the last few bits where she knew Mr. Brazel and Dee would see them.

But two remnants of the crash she kept with her, safely tucked into her vest. One was a curved piece of silver craft itself, its jagged edges wrapped in her bandana. The other was the strange wooden carving.

She wouldn’t tell anyone what she’d seen. Something about the way the creature pointed at her gave her the sense that she would get into all kinds of trouble if she volunteered the story.

If the creature wasn’t washed away by a flood, Mr. Brazel would find it. He would come across the wreckage, too, and then tell the government authorities about it. After it made the news, she imagined that the discovery of such an alien craft would be the talk of the town in nearby Roswell.

TEN

After Fay finished her story, no one moved. Tyler stared at his empty plate and mulled over what he’d just heard. Grant had a look like he was trying not to show he thought she was nuts. Jess twirled her knife back and forth in her fingers and kept her eyes on the table.

“Why didn’t you tell anyone about this back in 1947?” Grant asked.

“I was afraid. When Mac Brazel reported the spaceship wreckage, the Army came in, covered the whole thing up, and convinced everyone Brazel was crazy. If people wouldn’t believe the ranch foreman, why would they believe a ten-year-old girl? I don’t even know what they did with the alien body. Took it back to Area 51, I suppose.”

“But you went to the UFO festival a couple of weeks ago. Why?”

“I had tried on my own for five years to find the truth, and I never got any closer to answering my questions. I was at a dead end. I had nothing to lose. Or so I thought.” Tyler felt Fay’s eyes fix on him. “I can tell you don’t believe me.”

He ran his hand through his hair, trying to think of a way to put his next words delicately.

“I like you, Fay,” Tyler said.

“Oh, this isn’t going to be good.”

“You really think you met an alien?”

“He certainly fits the description of other encounters that have been reported: the gray body and huge head, the bulging black eyes, the slit for a mouth.”

“And you believe those stories?”

“I can tell you don’t believe in UFOs and aliens.”

“I believe in UFOs. They’re unidentified flying objects. Anytime someone can’t figure out what something is flying through the sky, it’s a UFO by definition. That doesn’t mean they’re spaceships from another world.”

“How can you be so sure?” Fay asked. “‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’”

“Sounds familiar,” Grant said to Tyler, who squinted as he tried to recall which Shakespeare play the line was from.

“
Hamlet
, Act One,” Jess said to Grant, then looked at Tyler. “Did you take
any
English courses at MIT?”

“Just one,” he said. “Science Fiction and Fantasy. I can give you a great analysis of the human compulsion for self-destruction symbolized in
A Canticle for Liebowitz
.”

“So you’re a science fiction fan who doesn’t believe in aliens,” Fay said.

“It’s the fiction part that’s important. I do believe it’s probable that alien life exists in other parts of the universe. It’s even likely that some of that life is sentient and intelligent. Astronomers are finding new planets all the time. Eventually, we’ll confirm that some of them are capable of supporting life.”

“Then why is it so impossible to believe that some of those civilizations have visited Earth?”

“I didn’t say it was impossible. I’m not an absolutist. Shakespeare was right. I don’t know everything. But I’m also a scientist, so I go by evidence. No one has yet produced incontrovertible video, photographic, or physical evidence that spacecraft have visited us.”

“Don’t we have stealth aircraft that you can’t see on radar?”

“Yes.”

“Then why couldn’t the aliens have something similar but more advanced?”

“They could,” Tyler said, “but then you run into another issue. Current scientific knowledge states that faster-than-light travel is literally impossible. An alien civilization would have to send ships that take thousands of years to get here.”

“Maybe they did,” Fay said.

“But why do the ships always land in Podunk little towns in the middle of nowhere? No offense.”

“None taken. Maybe it’s because they know humans have itchy trigger fingers, so they’re trying to feel us out. Maybe they’ve been in our solar system for hundreds or thousands of years just observing us.”

“Why?”

“They could be waiting us out. Seeing if we kill ourselves. Then they can just move in.”

“They’ve been waiting for thousands of years and have never made their presence known?”

“They
have
made their presence known,” Fay said. “I may not have a college degree, but I’ve been studying this for years now. There are eerie similarities among cultures around the planet. Simultaneous development of key technologies. Common structures like pyramids built by the Egyptians, the Inca, the Mayans, the Cambodians, the Indians. I’ve been all over the world and seen them with my own eyes. You can’t just dismiss the strange coincidences. What I find hard to believe is that humans could build such advanced structures and technology with the primitive tools they had.”

“I don’t think that gives much credit to human ingenuity and creativity. We’re a pretty smart bunch of people. I’ve been around the world, too, and I’ve seen things you would have a hard time believing if you hadn’t been there.” Tyler exchanged a knowing look with Grant, who’d been with him to witness those incredible sights.

“And what about my own experience?” Fay said, exasperated. “Are you saying I’m making it up?”