Thomas Cook: Taken

The colonel looked up sharply as Owen burst into the room.

“There’s something you have to see right now,” Owen said.

The colonel stared at him irritably. “You have an important reason for interrupting me? One that’s going to stop me from stripping you back to sergeant?”

Owen smiled. “That super-secret spy balloon of yours?”

“ ‘Mogul.’ What about it?”

“Want to see what it crashed into?”

At the crash site, the colonel’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Could it be Russian?”

Just then, Owen emerged from inside the ship, carrying a body in his arms. “Russian?” he echoed.

Owen’s eyes rested on the alien figure briefly before they returned to Colonel Campbell. “I don’t think so.”

Within minutes, a vast array of soldiers and technicians had arrived, all at the colonel’s command. A large truck, fitted with a cable pulley and a stanchion, stood ready to retrieve the ship. Four bodies lay on a tarp near an ambulance.

Owen and the colonel stood together, staring at the bodies.

“You going to let them give this to the press, too?” Owen asked.

The colonel shook his head. “It was one thing when it was a lie. We could control that. Now that it’s real, there’s no way we can let it get out.” He paused. “Who found this?”

“A father and his sons out hiking,” Owen said.

“Can you clean up?”

Owen nodded to the right, where, in the distance, Watkins and his sons stood, surrounded by soldiers. “I already have.”

“I appreciate you coming right to me with this,” the colonel said. “When the time comes, you won’t be forgotten.” He remained silent for a moment, considering the situation. “We’ll have a press conference. We’ll say this debris is from a weather balloon. That there are hundreds in the air at any given moment.” He smiled. “That it was made in Cleveland, not in outer space.”

Owen glanced at the alien bodies before them.

“When I went inside the craft, there were five seats,” Owen said. He looked at the swirl of activity around him, soldiers everywhere, tents, lights. “But there are only four bodies, Colonel.”

Colonel Campbell nodded. “I’ll have my best men put on it.”

Owen paused before continuing. “I was wondering, sir, what you’re going to do now.”

“Do? About what?”

“And as far as the craft is concerned, and the bodies, I could…”

Colonel Campbell looked at him sharply. “What craft?”

“Sir?”

Colonel Campbell peered at Owen sternly. “What bodies?”

“But I…”

“You, Captain, are not involved in this… situation.”

“Yes, sir.”

Campbell nodded toward the craft. “A weather balloon crashed, Captain. That’s all anyone needs to know.”

Owen nodded crisply. “Yes, sir.”

“Including you, Captain.”

“Of course, sir,” he said stiffly. Like hell, he thought, like hell you’re going to freeze me out.

Russell placed the board across the closed front door and nailed it into place while Kate stood by, watching him worriedly.

“How are we going to get out?” she asked cautiously.

“It doesn’t matter as long as they can’t get in,” Russell answered. He turned quickly and rushed into the den. He had to protect himself, he knew, and he had to protect Kate and Jesse. They had come for him, and they would come again. He had something they wanted and they wouldn’t stop until they got it. He could feel them around him. Their eyes hung invisibly in the air and their fingers reached for him from the clear, crisp breeze. In the whispering leaves, he heard the falling tumblers of their ever-calculating minds.

“Russell, look at me,” Kate pleaded.

Russell ignored her and drew a pistol from the drawer of his desk and began to load it.

“Russell, no!” Kate cried. She reached for the pistol and the cartridges spilled onto the floor. Was it Kate? Or had they slapped his hand? He dropped to his knees and frantically began gathering up the scattered cartridges.

Kate stared at him brokenly. “What’s happening to you?”

Russell peered at his wife. He could see the terrible worry in her face, the dread. He knew what she thought.

That he was crazy. But he wasn’t crazy, and he knew it. They had come for him. They had pierced his skin. He knew they had done these things, and that they would come again… for him. But how could he expect Kate to know what he knew? She hadn’t seen them. No one had seen them. He was as alone as if he were floating high above the earth, drifting in the empty darkness, unreach-able, burdened with a terrible knowledge he couldn’t share, and which no one else could understand.

A voice called to him from some distant chamber of his memory, Lights !

He recalled the blue lights he’d first seen in the skies over Germany, the men who’d been with him that day. “My crew,” he whispered.

“What?” Kate asked.

“My men,” Russell said. “I have to find out what happened to my men.” He sat down at his desk, retrieved the old crew list he’d brought back from the war and frantically began going through it.

“What are you doing?” Kate asked.

“I have to know,” Russell said.

“Russell, please.”

Russell looked up at her through the haze of his own exhaustion. “I’m no good to you, Kate. No good as a husband or a father.” His eyes returned to the list. “I have to find out what’s going on.”

He was not sure when Kate left the room, only that she’d eased herself out cautiously, as if to let his madness run its course. Perhaps she’d listened as he’d dialed the first number, tracked down the first of his crew. Dead. Then the second. Dead. And the third… until.

When he looked back at the door, she was there again, watching him.

“They’re all dead,” he told her. “Except Johnson, my copilot. He’s at Fort Bliss.” He could hardly believe his own words. “He’s the only one who’s still alive.”

As Colonel Campbell led the team of scientists down the corridor, he recalled the way Owen’s body had gone taut as he realized just how thoroughly he’d been cut out of the loop. Not that he’d had a choice in the matter. The job ahead required people the colonel could trust, and Owen was not such a man. True, Owen was observant. He’d noticed the five seats in the craft. But that did not make him trustworthy. Especially in regard to the extremely sensitive matter the colonel now faced.

“The craft has the material-evaluation lab baffled,” the lead scientist, Dr. Goldin told him. “And as for the bodies, we’ve dissected the one that was dismembered and we can’t find anything that would be analogous to our own internal system.”

“What about the other three?” Colonel Campbell asked.

“We’ll start on the second one, to see if we missed something,” Dr. Goldin answered. “It’s a shame really.”

“What’s a shame?” the colonel asked.

“To have to ask the dead instead of the living,” Goldin replied, and stepped forward to open the door of the dissecting room where, atop a cold steel table, the alien sat alone, turning slowly to stare at them with knowing eyes.

Sally Clarke briefly eyed the man at the end of the counter, then returned to the story she was reading in Famous Fantastic Mysteries . The story was called “We Are Not Alone,” and it was about aliens. It wasn’t all that great a story, Sally decided, as she glanced over the top of the magazine again, her gaze settling on the man at the end of the counter. He’d been sitting there for a long time, and she’d filled his coffee cup at least twice. He hadn’t said much to her, but there was something about him, a sadness and loneliness that was, she thought, sort of like her own, the kind that got you up in the middle of the night and drove you out into the yard and lifted your eyes toward the heavens, where you hoped to find something waiting, perhaps the answer to a question you still couldn’t frame.