Will Hill - Battle Lines

Donny finished the last of his burgers, felt his stomach rumble appreciatively, and settled himself in his chair. The two friends would stay like this until they fell asleep. Eventually, one of them would wake up and rouse the other, and they would stumble into their tent to see out the rest of the rapidly cooling night. It was a familiar routine, and one they enjoyed immensely.

“What’s that?” asked Walt.

Donny grinned. The first time they had come up here, almost a decade earlier, they had spent most of their first night claiming to see something in the distance, trying to make each other jump. But they had never seen anything in the famous Area 51 skies apart from regular military jets and helicopters, and Donny had no intention of falling for this old routine.

“Nothing,” he said, without even turning his head. “Just like it was nothing last year, like it’s always been nothing. Don’t even try it, Walt.”

“I’m serious.”

Something in Walt’s voice made Donny look round. It wasn’t fear, or even unease; it sounded more like incredulity. He turned his head slowly and saw Walt pointing towards the northern horizon. He followed his friend’s finger and looked.

In the distance, a tiny red light was moving smoothly through the night sky. It was perhaps half a mile away, little more than a pinprick in the darkness, but it was darting quickly through the air, seeming to change direction rapidly. Then Donny realised something else.

It was moving in their direction.

“What the hell is that?” he said.

“No idea,” replied Walt, his gaze fixed on the approaching light. “It’s small, whatever it is.”

“No sound either,” said Donny. “No engine. Listen.”

The two friends fell silent. Out on the highway, a car rumbled quickly past. But from the north, the direction the glowing dot was coming from, there was no sound of any kind.

The light swirled and swooped through the sky with dizzying speed. It accelerated in one direction for a second or two, appeared to stop dead and hover, then zoomed away in another direction entirely. It flickered, as though it was rapidly turning on and off, then shot towards the ground, so low that it seemed to scrape the desert floor, before rocketing back into the sky. And it was getting closer, second by second, to the two watching men.

“Can’t be a plane,” said Donny. “Too quiet. Too quick.”

“Maybe a drone?” said Walt. “Some new model?”

“Maybe,” replied Donny, but he didn’t think so. The speed and the angles of the light’s movement were too fast, too sudden, for even the smallest remote aircraft. He stared at the dancing light, fascinated, then felt the breath catch in his throat as it accelerated directly towards them. It swooped low, and now, for the first time, Donny could hear something: the rattling of desert sand as whatever it was passed above it at incredible speed. He opened his mouth to say something to Walt, but didn’t get the chance.

The glowing red light hurtled through their campsite, barely two metres above their heads. Their barbecue thudded to the ground and their tent fluttered heavily in the rushing air, its canvas sides rattling out a suddenly deafening drumbeat. Plates and cups and empty beer cans leapt into the air and Donny raised a protective arm across his eyes, feeling his weight shift as he did so. His gaze was still fixed on the patch of sky through which the light had passed at incredible, unbelievable speed, and he overbalanced, hearing the plastic of his chair rip as he thudded to the ground. Walt was beside him immediately, dragging him to his feet, then shushing him before he uttered a single word. The two men stood in the middle of their scattered campsite, listening intently, scanning the skies for the red light.

There was no sign of it in any direction.

It was gone.

“What. The. Hell. Was. That?” asked Donny.

“I don’t know,” replied Walt, his eyes shining with excitement. “I’ve never seen anything move like that. Never. And I…” He trailed off, still staring up into the sky.

“You what?” asked Donny. He was beginning to smile at the incredible weirdness of the moment, glad that he had shared it with his friend.

“I thought I… heard something,” said Walt. “When it passed through, just for a second. Something crazy.”

“What was it?”

“Laughter,” said Walt, a smile of embarrassment rising on his face. “It sounded like a girl, laughing.”

Fifty metres above their heads, Larissa Kinley floated in the cool air, a smile of unbridled pleasure on her pale, beautiful face.

It had been reckless to swoop through the little campsite, and it was almost certainly a breach of regulations, but she didn’t care; she knew full well that neither of the men had been able to see her at the speed she had been moving, just as she knew they wouldn’t be able to see her now, even if they happened to look directly at her. The matt-black material of her Blacklight uniform disappeared completely into the darkness of the desert sky. And neither man was looking, in any case; they were chatting excitedly to each other, their words perfectly audible to her supernatural ears. She savoured their conversation for a few moments, then spun elegantly in the air and flew slowly back towards the wide white expanse of the dry bed of Groom Lake.

Larissa loved the desert.

Its vast expanse made her feel tiny; made her feel free. She would obviously have been forbidden from flying during the hours of daylight even if doing so wouldn’t have caused her to burst into flames, but once the sun was down, she was allowed to take to the skies. Such freedom was wonderful after more than three months in Department 19, where her every movement was scrutinised and subject to seemingly dozens of rules and regulations. Part of it was simple geography: the Loop was hidden away in the middle of one of the most densely populated countries in the world, whereas NS9 sat at the centre of several hundred square miles of land that belonged to the US government, land that no member of the public was permitted to enter. Everyone knew Area 51 existed, but no one knew what really happened there, and the military were quite happy to let the UFO conspiracies run and run; they worked as a fantastically efficient red herring.

She had been in the desert for almost three weeks. When Cal Holmwood had told her that she was being sent on secondment to NS9, she had immediately assumed she was being punished for something. It had seemed unthinkably cruel that the Interim Director, who was fully aware of the situation that had developed between herself and Jamie Carpenter, would send her halfway around the world to do a job that any number of Operators could do just as well. But she was beginning to revise her opinion of his motives.

Larissa missed Jamie and Kate and Matt; her friends made her happy, and Jamie made her positively blissful at times. But they were often the only things inside Blacklight that did. She was a vampire member of an organisation whose sole reason for existing was to destroy vampires, and although she had proved herself time and again since being allowed to join, there were plenty of Operators inside the Loop who still looked at her with barely concealed disgust. Part of it was the fact that she had spent her first days there in a cell on the detention level, part of it was the perception that she had endangered the life of Jamie’s mother to serve her own needs, but mostly it was the mere fact of who, and what, she was. She was surrounded by hostility, and suspicion, with no indication that either was going to end any time soon.

At NS9 she had instantly been given a fresh start, the clean slate she knew she would never be granted at the Loop. She had been made to feel welcome and valued, and had made friends, so quickly and naturally that it had surprised her: men and women whose company she enjoyed, who made her feel normal and gave her energetic self-loathing a rest. As she drifted over Papoose Lake, descending slowly towards the wide-open doors of the NS9 hangar, she saw one of them waiting for her in the long rectangle of yellow light. She slipped easily to the ground and smiled at Tim Albertsson, who grinned back at her with his perfectly straight, perfectly white, all-American teeth.