Isabel had seen more death and violence in the past two years than any decent eighteen-year-old alien princess should ever behold-she had even been forced to kill in self-defense-but she still felt her stomach churn queasily, and she had to look away for a minute to keep from throwing up. Okay, she concluded, nauseous, I'm well and truly in Morton's head now, since he's the only one who would know about this murder, unless Liz Parker has a really gruesome imagination.
With a grunt of satisfaction, Morton stepped back from the grisly remains of his victim and, to Isabel's relief, put his handgun away. "That showed him," he congratulated himself smugly, before kneeling to rummage through the dead man's pockets. "Nobody shakes me down and gets away with it." He removed the biker's wallet, perhaps to make the killing look like a routine robbery, then kept searching until, grunting with satisfaction, he found a folded scrap of paper tucked in his victims back pocket. Morton's name and phone number? Isabel speculated. Or the lieutenant's? In any event, the meticulous killer set the scrap on fire with a lighted match, stomped the spent match beneath his boot, then scowled and spit on the ground by the dead man's body With a callous shrug, he stuffed the other man's wallet into his own back pocket. "So much for that loser," he muttered.
Leaving the biker's corpse bleeding on the pavement, Morton wiped his hands on his jeans and adjusted his cap. Then he swaggered over to the rusty metal door beneath the red neon light. Watching from around the corner, Isabel saw now that the fluorescent crimson letters spelled out the name of a bar: hanger 18.
She gulped nervously. According to popular UFO lore, and confirmed by Michael after his meeting with that old air force vet several months ago, Hanger 18 at the Roswell Army Air Field was where the authorities had originally stored the debris from the '47 Crash, including, briefly, before Nasedo rescued them from the inquisitive scalpels of the army scientists, the gestation pods holding the genetically-engineered fetuses of Max, Michael, Tess, and herself. Why that name? she worried anxiously. Why here, in this creepy back alley of Morton's mind? Seemingly untroubled by the pseudo-historical implications of the name, Morton knocked arrogantly on the rusty door. Moments later, the door opened just a crack, spilling a jagged shard of bluish light into the alley Isabel backed away from the light instinctively, but Morton wasn't looking in her direction. Instead he held a short, muttered conversation with someone on the other side of the door, who opened the door farther and let Morton in. Isabel heard loud music and harsh, strident laughter coming from within the building, until the door slammed shut, leaving her alone in the alley with a dead body and way too many rats.
She hesitated, uncertain what to do, where to go, next. More than anything else, she wanted to wake up, which would send her back to the motel room with Max and Alex, far from Morton's vile nightworld, but she also knew that she had not learned nearly enough yet about Morton's plot. What had the blackmailing gunman managed to extort out of Lieutenant Ramirez? She still had no idea.
Talk about a dreamwalk on the wild side! As much as she longed to exit this sordid nightmare, she realized she had to see what lay behind the flickering neon sign reading HANGAR 18.
Giving the grotesque corpse a wide berth, she crept up to the forbidding metal door. The fluorescent lights sput- tered and hummed, as though the glowing glass tubes were filled with angry hornets instead of ionized gas. Isabel summoned up all her courage and rapped upon the door, timidly at first, then louder and more forcefully. Let me in! she thought feverishly. The sooner she got inside, the sooner she could escape back to the waking world. Open up! She heard bolts being slid back and, moments later, the door opened a few inches. A sinister-looking guy, with greasy black hair and bad skin, leered at Isabel from the other side of a short length of chain that prevented the door from opening all the way. His leathery, mottled complexion hinted at too many years of drugs, booze, or both. Gaunt and emaciated, he wore a rumpled white tuxedo that hung slackly on his withered frame. "Yes?" he asked suspiciously, looking at Isabel as though she hardly belonged here. Can't argue with that, she thought.
"Er, can you let me in?" she asked, flashing an ingenuous smile. "I'm supposed to meet someone inside."Is that so?" Skeptical eyes looked her over, lingering longer than she liked on her chest and legs. His frayed, dilapidated white suit was nearly worn through at the knees and elbows. "How old are you? You got ID?"Terrific, she thought acidly. I'm getting carded in a dream. In real life, of course, her actual driver's license was sitting in her purse back at the motel, but it took only a moment's concentration to produce a reasonable facsimile in this dreamworld. She already knew what date to cite as her birth year; if truth be told, she had sometimes been known to "adjust" the date on her real driver's license using her powers. This was just a variation on the same trick.