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.