I pushed the lid up until it locked in the vertical position. Inside the box rested a large transparent tube filled with a viscous liquid. Floating in this liquid was a wizened, blackened corpse the size of a German shepherd. The corpse had an unusually large head, a plain oval face, a tiny slit of a mouth, two even tinier slits on the bump of a nose, and a pair of enormous almond-shaped eyes.
A gasp escaping my throat startled me, and I realized that I was so stupefied by what I’d seen that I had forgotten to breathe.
Dark cloth overalls covered most of the body, but whether the suit was extraterrestrial in origin or had been provided by humans to protect any modesty, I couldn’t tell. The body emitted no aura. This creature was long dead. An inventory tag dangled from the collar. The liquid had bleached the writing but I could still read “509th Bombardment Group, Roswell Air Force Base,” and the scrawl of a long-forgotten colonel together with the date, “7 July 1947.” This thing in the tube could only be an alien. An EBE. An extraterrestrial biological entity.
Holy shit.
I withdrew my hands and the yellow aura effervesced for a moment. I closed the lid. The aura around my hands and arms changed back to its usual orange. The warmth in my crotch dissipated.
So everything was true. A chill made me shudder. Earth’s creatures weren’t alone in the universe. I craned my head back to stare at the trailer ceiling and wonder about the cosmos beyond. We were but dots on a miserable speck of a rock tucked into an insignificant corner of the galaxy.
Disgust with humanity overwhelmed me. We had finally made contact with an alien civilization and this was the best reception provided, to hide the visitors? Why the secrecy?
Angrily, I turned to the second box, broke apart the shipping bands, and opened the lid. Inside rested metallic forms in fantastic shapes, all of a uniform pale color like the dull side of aluminum foil. There was nothing whose function I could recognize, though every piece had this attribute in common, thin conduits about the diameter of a pencil running through them. I grasped one long shape the size of my arm. The surface was hard and unyielding. The shape felt warm, as if heated, and was surprisingly lightweight. The glow of my hand’s aura changed from orange to yellow. I dropped the piece and in reflex wiped my hand on the edge of the box, once again relieved when my aura returned to its normal color.
On the inside of the lid I read a warning label. All the conduits had been purged of Hg-209 with high-pressure steam.
The red mercury in the drums had come from the UFO, which the federal government had no doubt dismantled to learn the aliens’ technology. By now I was convinced that exposure to the radiation from these aliens and their spaceship was what had caused the nymphomania.
I was about to close the lid when I noticed an object of a darker color buried in the tangle of aluminum-hued metal. Risking more exposure to the yellow glow, I reached back into the container and pushed aside the other pieces.
The object had what looked like two handles jutting from opposite sides of an open-ended square box, its width about the size of my two fists held together.
I grasped one of the handles and lifted. The object was also made of metal but of a heavier density and cool to the touch. The dark color was like the blued steel of a gun. The glow around the object was faint and didn’t affect me as had the other piece.
I held the object by both handles and looked through the box. Inside were layers of clear glass or crystal in assorted shapes, stacked together to form a display of some kind. The object didn’t look like a weapon. Perhaps it was a gun sight or a camera. I turned the object over and saw a round notch on the bottom, the logical place for an attachment point. The object had no buttons or switches, so I couldn’t guess how it worked.
I put the object back in the container and closed the lid.
Turning my attention back to the interior of the trailer vault, I inventoried the containers. They contained enough volume to hold the wreckage of a small airplane. How large was the original ship? Was there more debris somewhere else?
What a tragedy. The government had proof of intergalactic visitors and was going to dispose of the evidence as if it were yesterday’s trash. It was like a chimp finding a telescope and, not knowing what to do with it, burying the telescope in the dirt.
Could this secret go even deeper? Were there more alien bodies? Perhaps a survivor kept prisoner, much as a vampire like myself would be if captured by the humans. And had there been more alien contacts after this crash?
A helicopter roared overhead. A searchlight scanned around the back end of the trailer. I retreated behind the boxes and waited to see what happened. The helicopter sounded as if it was landing nearby. Rotor-wash blasted snow into the trailer, then settled, then blasted again as if the helicopter had landed and taken off right away.
Someone approached. A yellow glow illuminated the open end of the trailer.
My kundalini noir buzzed with energy. A second yellow glow? From whom? From what? I glanced to the boxes around me. I was aware of the three nymphomaniacs initially contaminated and the material in this vault. Who else would glow?
“Felix,” called the intruder. The voice I instantly recognized as that of my friend Gilbert Odin. “You’re safe for now. It’s just you and me.”
Gilbert? What was he doing here?
His tall frame came into view behind the trailer. Large eyeglasses sat on the bridge of his nose.
Incredibly, a brilliant yellow aura surrounded him.
I had to repeat the astonishing discovery to myself.
A brilliant yellow aura surrounded him.
I realized this was the first time I’d ever seen him without my contacts.
I waited for him, confused and stunned by his yellow aura. My own aura grew more intense, and the hairs on my neck and arms stood up in alarm.
Swaddled in a puffy down parka, Gilbert strode in his over-boots across the muddy tracks the semi had plowed through the snow. The cackle of radio traffic came from a receiver strapped to his shoulder. “Come out,” he reassured me. “It’s over.”
“What’s over?” I shouted. Anger displaced my confusion. Did he mean I was caught? If so, he was mistaken. I pressed against the steel wall of the trailer vault. Gilbert’s yellow aura wouldn’t make a difference-like any cornered beast I’d kill anyone or anything blocking my escape.
“I’m supposed to negotiate your surrender,” he said.
Gilbert had better have another plan if that was the case.
“Come out,” he repeated.
“Like hell,” I yelled back. I wasn’t about to get into the open and let a sniper measure my skull with the crosshairs of a rifle telescope. “You want to talk, you come in here.”
“All right,” Gilbert said. He climbed over the back end of the trailer. His aura looked like a boiling froth, signaling anxiety and fear. Good, he had much to fear from me.
I searched beyond him and looked for the telltale auras of any companions lurking in the darkness. He was alone. Easy prey for vampire hypnosis.
Gilbert stood and his large body filled most of the doorway. The thick, almost overpowering, odor of cabbage seeped from him. As he straightened up, he turned down the volume of the radio he carried. His right arm suddenly extended and in his hand he held a device that looked like a pistol-bronze-colored, open sights, and a pointed muzzle with rings around the barrel. The way he aimed it at me was proof enough that it was a weapon, something futuristic. Buck Rogers meets Dirty Harry.
His aura tightened close around his form. An occasional spike of heated emotion lashed out, like a flame shooting from a bed of coals. By reading his aura I could tell that he was trying to remain calm and keep panic from overwhelming him. Gilbert may have had this strange yellow aura but he still reacted emotionally like a human.