Pete Cawdron - Feedback

A handful of grainy pictures seemed flimsy as far as explanations went, Jason thought. They were hardly credible as evidence. Jason didn’t want Lachlan to tell him anything he wanted to know, he wanted Lachlan to tell him everything, regardless of whether Jason wanted to know about it or not. Somehow, Lachlan’s promise felt contrived, murky. The trust Jason had felt in the truck was eroding, washing away like the mud in the rain.

Within a minute or so, a recreational vehicle pulled up beneath the overpass, but it didn’t stop either, slowing just enough for them to hop in as they jogged beside the side door.

The RV was nondescript. Dents and scrapes spoke of careless driving. The top rear of the vehicle had crumpled slightly where someone had tried to back up under a low ledge. They probably had to let the pressure out of the tires to free the jammed RV, Jason thought, looking at the crushed, accordion like metal, his mind running faster than his body as the three of them ran to keep up with the vehicle.

The side door was open, it had been clipped back in place. Rain had soaked the carpet in the stairwell. Lachlan got in first, followed by Jason, while Lily brought up the rear again. The RV was already beyond the overpass when Lily finally got on board. Torrential rain broke as she shut the door of the RV behind her.

The RV was spacious.

Fake wooden veneer lined a kitchen on one side. There must have been a bedroom beyond the kitchen, but the door leading to the rear of the RV was closed. Jason could hear voices from back there.

Lachlan moved up next to the driver, talking with him as he sat down in a plush leather seat while windshield wipers swished back and forth across the vast glass window. The driver signaled as he pulled back onto the highway. Lachlan scolded him for that, hurriedly getting him to switch off the turn signal as he said something about aerial surveillance.

Lily squeezed past Jason, resting her hands gently on his hips as she stepped around him and perched on a couch covered in a floral pattern. Jason hated being touched. Most of the time, he’d flinch if someone came up and grabbed his waist like that, but with Lily he had no such reaction. Funny, he thought. Subconsciously, he was more at ease with her than he would have consciously admitted.

“Here,” she said, patting the soft, dry, cushioned seat beside her.

Jason sat down next to her. Lily pulled out a couple of plastic water bottles from beneath the coffee table in front of them and handed a bottle to Jason.

They were seated facing forward, with the kitchen behind them. A pair of matching seats faced them. Beyond those seats lay the open cabin of the RV, with Lachlan sitting beside the driver. His radio hissed and he pulled it from his hip and began talking into it. Jason would have loved to listen in, but he wasn’t close enough to distinguish the words being spoken.

Lily sipped at her water.

“Well, this is nice,” Jason said, relaxing for the first time, allowing his body to sink into the soft cushions.

“Much nicer than the truck,” Lily agreed.

That they could make small talk was surreal after everything else that had happened that evening. In any other context, their conversation would have been banal, just courteous pleasantries being exchanged. Now, though, they both seemed to be grasping for normalcy, clinging to the fleeting illusion that reality would correct itself. What happened had to be a dream, Jason thought. Please let it have been a dream. Let me wake up in the morning to the sound of traffic and pigeons cooing on my windowsill. He sighed, letting out his breath in resignation, knowing that there would be no such awakening.

Beads of rain streaked at an angle along the side window, the angle corresponding to their speed on the highway. The storm outside was getting worse. Lightning lit up the cloud bank overhead.

The folding door concealing the bedroom behind them opened.

Jason turned, startled to see a woman walk out followed by two men. One of the men was carrying what looked like a television quality video camera. Lachlan ended his exchange on the radio, and rose to join them.

“Jason,” he began. “This is April Stegmeyer of the Washington Post, John Vacili, a cameraman from PBS, and Special Agent Jim Bellum from the FBI.”

Jason stood, shaking three surprisingly warm and friendly hands. Bellum and Stegmeyer sat in the chairs opposite Jason and Lily, while Vacili lifted his camera onto his shoulder and peered through the viewfinder. An obligatory red LED lit up, indicating the camera was recording their conversation.

“The FBI!” Jason said. “This is wonderful! This is just what we need. We don’t have to run anymore.”

“It’s not quite that simple,” Bellum replied. He had chiseled features. The angles of his jaw and cheekbones could have been carved from stone, and his gruff voice had a ring of authority. “I’m here to protect you, but you won’t be safe until we’ve gone public with your story.”

“My story?”

To Jason, there was no story. As far as he knew, his story had only started earlier that evening when he’d foolishly jumped on the back of a motorcycle. At least he thought it was foolish. He seemed to be running from something but he didn’t know what. As far as he knew, he had nothing to run from.

“It’s wonderful to finally meet you,” April Stegmeyer said, pulling a handheld voice recorder from her pocket and clicking record. Another red LED glowed. Stegmeyer and Vacili, it seemed, weren’t taking any chances on missing anything that was said.

Stegmeyer put the voice recorder on the table, but to Jason’s surprise, she didn’t put it in the center of the coffee table. She placed it to one side, next to a small vase with fake silk flowers. Jason had noticed them when he’d first sat down. It was one thing to have fake flowers, it was another level of cheap to have fake silk fake flowers, and in his opinion defeated the purpose of even having flowers at all. The recorder, though,was now slightly below the rim of the small vase and Jason understood what Stegmeyer was doing. She wanted to obscure the intrusion, to lessen the appearance of an interrogation. She must have wanted him to relax and forget about the recorder, but placing it the way she did had the opposite effect on him. Overt would not become covert. His analytical mind would not allow such deception to slip by, regardless of intent. That just wasn’t the way his mind worked.

Jason had never seen Stegmeyer before, but he knew of her, having occasionally come across articles she had written on the Internet.

April looked to be in her mid-fifties, perhaps early sixties. She had certainly aged gracefully. Curly grey hair brushed against her shoulders and her makeup was tastefully done. She had a warm and inviting smile. He wanted to believe she was sincere, but warm smile or not, she was acutely aware of his every move. Every facial expression and choice of words was being captured on video and audio for later analysis. But why? And for whom? Who would care about a college grad student struggling with his masters?

Jason wondered if this was how the media twisted people’s words? Record enough footage and you’re bound to catch a smirk here, a poorly chosen phrase there. String them together and you can make any story you want. Take a couple of hours of footage and splice it down to a minute or two, and you can make someone out to be anything you want, monster or hero.

“It’s OK,” Stegmeyer said, apparently reading his thoughts. “You can trust us. We’re all here to help.”

Jason nodded in reply. Against his better judgement, he wanted to give her the benefit of the doubt, but he wasn’t sure quite what was expected of him.

“What can you tell me about the alien craft?” she asked.