“It’s all right here, Frank,” she shouted, opening the papers. “I read ‘em every week, though Brian doesn’t like it when I buy ‘em. Aliens are all around us, and they’re gettin’ ready to make their move. It says here in one of these papers-I’m not sure which one-that the aliens have agents here, people who are renegades and who are workin’ for ‘em. Well, this story says that sometimes the aliens get mad at their agents and kill ‘em, but you never find the bodies. That’s why so many people are reported missing each year and they’re never found. Well, hell, this is as good a place as any to take ‘em and kill ‘em, right up there on Crawford Hills.”
Jay nodded his head and looked around the cluttered kitchen, at the sink overflowing with dishes, the half-opened cans of cat food on the floor, the piles of newspapers. A black-and-white cat with one gray paw jumped up to the sink and started licking from a water-filled casserole dish. He wondered if Mrs. Tate had any thought, any inkling, when she was young, that she would end up here, old and alone, living in a big house at the edge of a wilderness, huddling in fear some nights because of aliens in the backyard. He could see how her mind might have started slipping. She was almost a mile from her nearest neighbor, with only a thin electrical line and telephone cable connecting her to the outside world. He wondered what it was like up here when the winter storms started, when the electricity failed, and when the town plows couldn’t make it up the steep hills.
“What do you think, young man? Jay, that’s your name, ain’t it? Do you believe in aliens?”
Jay coughed, trying to think of a polite answer. “Well, ma’am, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one.”
Mrs. Tate giggled. “When you get to my age, young man, you won’t believe what you’ve seen over the years. Where are you from, anyway?”
“ Newburyport, originally.”
“That’s in Massachusetts, ain’t it?”
“Yes, it is.”
She frowned. “Now, Frank, he seems like a nice boy, but wasn’t there anybody local you could hire? I mean-”
The chief interrupted her. “Oh, come on, Aggie, don’t pick on him. He was the best qualified and he’s doing a good job. Listen, do you have any of your cider around? I’m a bit thirsty.”
Jay declined the offer of a drink from Mrs. Tate after he saw the old woman dump gray water out of a glass in the sink and then fill it up with cider from a jug in the refrigerator. Jay’s stomach did a slow roll, but the chief drank it down in one long swallow.
“Ah, good stuff, Aggie. Still make it from the apples out back?”
“Of course I do. I won’t have store-bought cider in my house.”
“Deer still stealing your apples?”
She waved a wrinkled hand at him. “Oh, of course, especially now winter’s on its way, but I don’t mind. There’s enough for all of us.”
The chief got up from the kitchen table and Jay joined him. “Don’t you worry now, Aggie, we’ll be out there tonight.”
And Jay thought, Great, a date with great potential stopped in its tracks by a UFO-believing old lady.
The lights were a chain of bright dots against the sky, arching about in a semicircle and settling down against the bulk of the hill on the other side of the ravine. The lights flared up for a moment and then they started moving, like a lazy snake, down the side of the hill, a chain of ten or eleven. Jay watched them, his hand on his pistol, and he realized he had been holding his breath.
“Chief?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I see ‘em.”
There was a rustle of leaves and branches, and he saw the form of the chief standing up. Jay stood up as well and joined him. When he got to him, he could smell his pipe. It was a comforting feeling.
“Looks like flashlights,” Jay whispered.
“Could be. But they sure move awfully fast. Let’s go at them, Jay.”
The chief started making his way down the side of the ravine, to the stream and the slope of the other hill. Jay followed, keeping an arm out to fend off low branches and brambles, but even then he felt an occasional sting on his face as a branch whipped at him. It was slow going and his back felt tingly, as if something was drawing a target on him. God, he thought, as he struggled to keep his balance, if this had been happening at his old job he’d have at least two or three cruisers for backup, but this was it, the entire on-duty Crawford police force, heading towards God-knows-what. He supposed the chief could have called the county dispatch for a deputy sheriff or a state trooper to swing by, but he was sure the nearest unit was at least a half-hour away.
They reached the stream, and Jay’s boots sank into a stretch of mud, making a squishing noise as they forded the shallow stream. The lights were now above them, up near the peak of the slope. They were white and wavering, and occasionally one would dart out, like a thin searchlight beam. He tried hard to swallow, to clear his throat, but his mouth was very dry and his tongue seemed to stick to the roof of his mouth. All he could hear was his own harsh breathing and the snap and crunch of branches being broken and leaves being stepped on as he and the chief made their way up the hill. He reached down to his weapon more than once, but each time his hand touched the cool metal of his pistol he would draw back. This was no time to draw out his weapon, not here, where a trip or a fall could fire off an accidental shot.
The chief stopped, an arm out at his side. Jay came up to him, smelling the stench of sweat. He wondered what was going on in the chief’s mind.
“Jay, what do you think?” the chief whispered.
“Not sure, it might be-”
The world seemed to explode.
A line of three or four lights suddenly blazed forth in an orange flare above the other lights, and the ravine echoed and reechoed with hollow booms. The chief grabbed at him and Jay fell to the ground with him, scratching his face and hands in the process, and he thought, We’re being shot at, first time ever in our job, we’re being shot at. Someone is trying to kill us both, and a rational part of him listened to a whiz-scrape-scrape as a bullet flew over them, passing through the tree branches.
Everything seemed to move too fast. He got up on his hands and knees, trying to decipher what in hell was going on, and there was another barrage of gunfire. The chief tugged at his holster belt.