It was twenty minutes before Rodney pulled up; headlights off and rolling slow to keep the noise down.
She jumped in on the passenger side.
“What took you so long?” she asked.
Rodney pointed his thumb to the back seat.
“Hey, Annie,” Rick Horton said.
“Jesus… hi Rick.”
Annie shot Rodney a look he chose to ignore.
“He called as soon as we hung up, for the same reason. He was on the way.”
Rick was, in Annie’s estimation, a creep, but he was a creep Rodney called friend, and she couldn’t do much about that. He was also only on the way to Annie’s house if Rodney took a roundabout way to get to her, which was contrary to the urgency she felt was required when it came to first contact with aliens, and she didn’t like at all the idea that Rick would be one of the humans they would meet, either initially or at any subsequent point in their stay on Earth.
But, it was Rodney’s car.
“What do you guys think it was?” Rick asked. He was unbelted, leaning forward and talking through the gap in the front bucket seats. It was a totally creeper move because his face was next to Annie’s left shoulder and his eyes could look right down her shirt. There wasn’t much to look at down there, so far, but there wasn’t nothing. Rick’s understanding of personal space was discomfiting. Also, he had alcohol on his breath.
“I think it was an alien ship,” Annie said. “I watched it park.”
“Me too! This is the balls!”
“Sit your ass back,” Rodney said. “I don’t want to brake and send you through the windshield. I like this windshield.”
Rick sat back, and Rodney looked to Annie. “Where you thinking?”
“The Dewey farm, pretty sure.”
The Dewey family farm was a couple of miles away, set back off Tunney Road a few hundred feet. Bob Dewey had ten acres across three fields. Pastureland was as good a place as any to set down a starship and the angle seemed about right from her perspective.
“Just look for the lights, yo,” Rick said.
“It turned its lights off before touching down,” Annie said. “I saw it happen.”
“They gotta put out a porch light or something to see where they’re walking. Imagine, you come from planet whatever, land here, and step in a cow chip right away. They’ll probably blow the whole planet up for that.”
“So they’ll have lights, you’re saying,” Rodney said.
“I don’t think they do,” Annie said. “We’d see it through the trees.”
Rodney took his Chevy down the dirt road leading to the Dewey farm, cut the lights, and rolled to a stop at their property fence. Only one of their fields was visible from this spot. The other two were hidden behind the homestead.
“I don’t see anything,” Rodney said. “You?”
“No, but it was right around here.”
Annie got out and climbed onto the hood of the car, and when that didn’t get her high enough she stepped to the roof.
Just barely, she could see the tree Rodney fetched her from. It obscured her bedroom window from view, but close enough. This was the line she’d looked down when the ship landed. The car was pointed right at it.
“What do you think, Magellan?” Rodney asked.
“Straight that way,” she said, pointing in a direction that was, legally, trespassing. “We’ll have to walk it, unless you want to take out that fence.”
STUMBLING through muddy cow pastures lit only by a half moon, with Rick Horton, wasn’t anything close to Annie’s idea of fun, but Rodney seemed aware enough of her discomfort to keep himself between them as they all stumbled along. Annie marked a tree as a destination point and kept that in front of her while they meandered, wishing she’d thought to bring a compass and a flashlight.
Rick would not shut up, and his volume control was wanting. He seemed to be a connoisseur of every movie involving aliens ever made, and was using this knowledge to draw conclusions regarding what they might find.
He was behaving like the kind of idiot nobody would seriously consider bringing along for an endeavor like this. Annie was still pissed at Rodney about it.
They reached the tree she targeted without discovering anything alien. On the other side of it were more trees.
“Keep going?” Rodney asked.
“It’s around here somewhere,” she said.
“KLAATU BARADA NIKTO!” Rick shouted.
“Shut the hell up, Rick,” Rodney said.
“It’ll bring ‘em out.”
“Seriously, man. I’m gonna make you wait in the car, keep it up.”
“How deep do you think these trees go?” Annie asked.
“Never been through here,” Rodney said. “Couldn’t say.”
Annie was trying to pull up a map of the town in her head.
“Tunney loops, right? If we keep walking straight we’ll hit it. There’s gotta be a clearing or two between us and that.”
“You sure it came down anywhere around here at all?”
“As sure as I can be. Let’s keep walking. We could spread out a little.”
“Good way to get lost.”
“Or eaten,” Rick said.
“Shut up, Rick.”
THEY DECIDED on a plan that kept them ten feet away apart, as a means to cover more ground while not being eaten by predatory aliens.
Every few feet they’d do a call-and-response (“Marco!” “Polo!”) to keep from getting too spread out. They walked through the woods like this for about twenty minutes.
Then they found it.
Rick was the first to the scene. He was on the left-most flank of their search perimeter, and the ship had come down in a field to his left.
“Guys…” was all he said at first. It was the most subdued thing to come out of his mouth all evening, so Rodney and Annie knew right away something was different.
They reached the clearing in a couple of minutes. Rick hardly moved in that time.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I was kidding around, but it’s here.”
The squat black ship was sitting in a ring of crisped grass. The ground was still smoking a little. There was no impact crater.
“I kind of can’t believe it either,” Rodney said. “What should we do now?”
Annie was equally dumbfounded. It was one thing to actively pursue something like this, but another entirely to actually discover it. She hadn’t been thinking about the consequences of their quest because she was too caught up in its execution.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I didn’t think this far.”
Rick cupped his hands around his mouth. “Hello?” he said.
“Hey, c’mon,” Rodney said.
“What? It’s what we’re here for, right? We come this far.”
Rodney looked at Annie, who shrugged.
“Hello?” Rick said again. “Maybe they’re in cryo-sleep or something. We should just go up and knock.”
“It’ll be hot,” Annie said. “From re-entry.”
“Doesn’t feel hot to me,” Rick said, holding his hands out. He was about twenty feet away.
“Hot to the touch, dumb-ass,” Rodney said.
“No, he has a point,” Annie said. “He should be able to feel it from there. We all should.”
“See? Come on, let’s go knock. Maybe we can open it up.”
“That seems like a super bad idea,” Rodney said. “Someone more qualified and, like, with a Geiger counter should do that.”
“Rod, there’s nobody else here. We’re the first, so man up and let’s do this.”
Rodney looked dubious, but Annie had to agree with Rick. There was really no turning back at this point. If it was radioactive, they’d already been exposed.
“I’m with him, Rodney,” she said.
He sighed.
“All right, together. We do it together. Agreed?”