Rory had never wished for his father’s presence more than he did right now. Where had his dad found these things? What were they? Obviously, they were a secret, because this sort of thing didn’t just get mailed from Mexico to an Army Ranger’s private PO box every day, but what was the story behind them? Rory felt like that information would have been very useful to him in his efforts to figure out how to use the doohickey.
He leaned out of the Barcalounger and grabbed it, then sat back and tapped buttons, trying to wake it up again. At first nothing happened. He frowned and toyed with it some more, felt pleased when the lights glowed red, but then he began to chew on his lip. What next? He felt like his understanding of this instrument and the language behind it was just out of reach, that he could learn to translate it all with just a little push, a little more insight.
The lights flickered. He thought he saw a pattern in their sequence and tapped again.
A series of 3D projections burst from the helmet, making Rory jump. They flashed by quickly, but Rory read them as instantly as they appeared, capturing every one of them in his mind, sorting them the way he sorted mechanics or the way he saw every move in a chess game—or five chess games—before the first few pieces had even been taken off the board.
The projections were three-dimensional graphics of a spacecraft and its controls. Buttons, switches, gauges, star maps, a virtual-reality owner’s manual that whizzed by faster than any ordinary human brain could parse. The 3D image flickered to a view of the Earth, as seen from space, which Rory guessed was not something from the owner’s manual, but was either the view from the spacecraft right now or a recent recording. Something blinked red on the planet as the image zoomed in. Landmasses grew closer. North America; the southern United States; Mexico. Then the image became a map, landmarks getting bigger and clearer, as the tracker, or remote camera, or whatever, rushed closer and closer to the ground.
The red blinking expanded into the outline of a specific image. He knew from the owner’s manual what it had to be, what its silhouette indicated it must be.
Another spacecraft.
Taking care with the doohickey, Rory got up and moved to the worktable, studying the hologram even more closely. He nodded in quiet understanding.
There was something wrong with this ship. Its outline looked wrong—buckled.
Instinctively he knew the reason why. This ship had not landed.
It had crashed.
The Iron Horse Motel had laid out the red carpet. Motorcycles crammed the parking lot. Music played loudly. Dozens of bikers were milling about, swigging from bottles of beer and spirits, reacquainting themselves with old friends, bitching about old enemies. An air of festive camaraderie suffused the night, so much so that the handful of people staying at the Iron Horse who hadn’t come to town for the bike festival managed to find themselves mostly charmed by the crowds of bearded, tattooed men and leather-clad, tattooed women, instead of terrified.
The motel’s marquee had been arranged to read: WELCOME RIDERS! CORPUS CHRISTI OR BUST! The M in WELCOME tilted slightly, but not so much that anyone bothered to fix it.
Among the other motorcycles in the lot, the stolen Scouts did not go unnoticed, but those who did take note of their presence only admired them, perhaps envied their owners.
In room 112, the television glowed brightly, the volume just loud enough to be heard over the commotion out in the motel’s parking lot. On the TV screen, a nervous-looking man was entering a suburban house, while a voiceover was saying, “…the forty-one-year-old came to this Texan home to meet our decoy, whom he believes to be an underage girl.”
Cut back to the nervous-looking man, who is clearly surprised and alarmed to be encountered by Dateline journalist Chris Hansen.
“And what are you up to today?” Hansen asked pointedly.
The child predator tried desperately to look casual. “Nothin’. Just came by to hang out.”
“I see you brought some condoms and some Mike’s Hard Lemonade,” Hansen said, his voice casual but his words damning as hell.
Coyle and Baxley were sitting on the edge of the room’s only bed, their eyes fixed on the screen. However, the third occupant of the room, Dr. Casey Brackett, missed the pervert’s response, and indeed the entire encounter. Despite her attempt to fight it, the tranquilizer had done its work very effectively, and even now she was still snoring lightly, a candle of drool at the edge of her lips.
Out in the lot, Nettles stood guard over the stolen Scouts, but his focus had drifted to the nearby Winnebago Super Chief and the bearded redneck who had set up a table in front of it to sell guns and ammo, like he was running a kid’s lemonade stand. Some of the ordnance laid out on the table was state of the art, and it had Nettles thinking. Lynch might be good when it came to card tricks, but he himself was the true hustler of the group.
The gun seller’s business had thinned out enough that the man wandered over toward Nettles and cast an appreciative glance at the motorcycles behind him. He actually licked his lips.
“Those Custom Scouts? How much you want for ’em?” he asked.
Nettles merely snickered, and the guy shrugged as if to say: Ah, well. Worth a try. Clearly, though, his curiosity wasn’t yet sated. “Where you boys headed, anyway?”
“Bikefest,” Nettles replied. “You?”
“Gainesville Gun Show.” He nodded to his guns, then jerked a thumb at the RV. “Anything you need, I got in the Super Chief. I’m not kidding. Anything.”
Nettles’ ears perked up.
McKenna didn’t think he could have slept even if someone had hit him over the head with a sledgehammer. His whole body felt lit up, crackling with the electric need to move, to fight, to extricate himself from the most colossally fucked up scenario he’d ever encountered. If the woman hadn’t been tranquilized, there would have been no way he would have stopped here. Yes, they needed a plan, but he wanted to be far away from the base and the alien and the fucking spaceship that had shot down those F-22s before vanishing. Instead, here they were.
The only upside of the Iron Horse Motel was the damn bikefest, which enabled them to hide in plain sight. Without all these motorcycles, they’d have had to ditch the Scouts—too recognizable—and steal a minivan or something. Still, he didn’t like this environment, not with the Loonies who had suddenly become his new platoon—temporarily, at least. Any one of these guys might be volatile enough to start trouble in a church on Christmas, but surrounded by a couple hundred bikers, all of whom perceived themselves as alpha males… it was guaranteed not to end well.
McKenna exhaled and sidled over to where Nebraska sat on a brick wall, smoking a cigarette. “You, uh… think she’s safe in there with them?”
Nebraska blew out a plume of smoke and gave him a disapproving look. “They’re soldiers. They’d fuck a woodpile on the off chance there’s a snake inside. But sleepy ladies? Nah.”
Motion off to his left caught McKenna’s attention and he glanced over to see Nettles emerging from behind the motel sign, zipping up his pants.
“Hey, Nettles,” Nebraska called, “there’s a toilet in the room, y’know.”
Nettles widened his eyes in shock as if he’d just seen God. McKenna allowed himself a moment of amusement and then sat heavily on the brick wall beside Nebraska. A moment or two of quiet contemplation elapsed, but his anxiousness returned. He wanted to be elsewhere.