Finder

1 Travis Baird scrambled up the loose dirt incline in the light of a waning moon. His brown leather everyday shoes weren’t suited. He should have bought outdoor boots in town, but he’d been in too much of a hurry after the call this morning from Dr. Linsk. Get out there now, Travis. Be in position before it’s dark. Travis’s white Rambler station wagon made the trip from Fort Collins to Cortez, Colorado in about ten hours with four stops for gas. Travis’s wife, Rosie, had the foresight to pack him three ham and cheese sandwiches and a thermos of coffee before he left, and he only wished she’d packed more. He didn’t have time for dinner. His stomach was rumbling. It was his first time out in the field. Alan Mayner was usually the one sent out, but Alan was in the hospital with appendicitis. The job fell to Travis. He needed to get it right. Dr. Linsk was going to hire only one of the biology post-docs to help him with his work as an advisor for the Agency, and Travis needed it to be him. He believed in the mission. And he had a wife and new baby girl to support. Travis’s foot slipped on the dirt. He dug in with his fingers and kept scrambling upward. He wished he could see the terrain better, but he couldn’t risk his flashlight. He didn’t want to draw any more attention to his presence than he had to. Information about the UAOs—the unconventional aerial objects—sometimes came in hot on the roar of a rumor. But sometimes, like now, it trickled down slowly, until by the time Dr. Linsk got word of it, the sighting was already over a week old. Apparently there was a lot of talk among the locals, but nothing had made the Cortez paper yet. The sheriff had discouraged letting the story out. Instead he asked around discreetly with his counterparts in other areas who had faced similar problems. Other sightings. Even a purported crash near Horsetooth Reservoir. Sheriff Hoyt took their advice and called Dr. Linsk in the biology department at Colorado State University directly. That was good. It meant word might not have reached the Agency yet. Dr. Linsk didn’t want anyone in the Agency to hear about it until he sent one of his own to check it out. If it was only a hoax, he wouldn’t bother any of his superiors with it. He’d forward the information to the national hotline set up for kooks and frauds and be done with it. But if it was real. The Agency needed to lock it down right away. The fact that more than a few locals knew about it, that was what worried Travis. He didn’t want to meet up with any curiosity seekers who could jeopardize the integrity of the scene. If there even would be a scene tonight. He’d have to wait and see. Everyone used to think the visitations were one-offs. A sighting in Utah or Nevada or New Mexico near one of the military bases. The cigar-shaped crafts, visible even in daylight, that seemed to create their own misty clouds around them. The silvery disks that peeled off the main crafts and then darted at unlikely speeds, evading any attempts to shoot them down. There had been a visitation out at sea just a month ago. A hundred sailors stood on the deck of a Navy ship and stared at the red and white lights that flicked in and out directly above them for almost an hour. Observing. Us observing them, them observing us. Then the lights jetted off so impossibly fast it was as if they disappeared from the sky. The U.S. military didn’t have aircrafts that moved like that. As far as they knew, no one else in the world did either. But the ocean sightings were someone else’s territory. Dr. Linsk’s was Colorado. Travis finally topped the ridge. He could see only dark shapes in front of him, trees and low scrub faintly lit by the weak moon draped with clouds. He walked forward slowly, quietly, listening for any sound of voices. He appeared to be alone. Maybe the locals had gotten tired of waiting. Or maybe it was the cold. Watching for alien spaceships was a lot more appealing on a mild night. Travis found the trunk of some kind of evergreen tree and sat with his back against it. He looked up at the sky and waited. What happened in New Hampshire last fall changed what they all thought they knew. These visitations weren’t one-offs after all. Not necessarily. A husband and wife, the Fullers, were driving home from a party one night on the isolated dirt road that led back to their farm, when suddenly their truck lifted off of the road. Just rose into the air several feet. Not because it went over a bump or for any other natural reason. The couple had driven that same road a hundred times, and it was always as straight and solid as the Fullers themselves. But now they were suspended in the air, lifted by some unseen force. Mrs. Fuller screamed. Mr. Fuller might have, too. The truck floated forward about a quarter of a mile, then bounced back down to the road. Mr. Fuller pressed his foot hard against the gas, trying to outrun whatever just happened, but then the truck floated up again and the two of them clutched each other and shrieked. Mr. Fuller stuck his head out the driver’s side window and looked above them. A round object, flat on top with a sort of dome in the center of the bottom, hovered above them, an eerie blue light shining down from it onto the Fullers’ truck. The truck bounced down again. This time the Fullers were silent. Mr. Fuller drove slowly, carefully, while he whispered urgently to his wife about what he saw. “No, don’t look!” he shouted, but too late. Mrs. Fuller stuck her head out to see. The blue light hit her straight in the face. Mrs. Fuller howled with pain. Her eyes felt like someone had stuck them with burning pokers straight from a fire. “I can’t see! I can’t see!” Mr. Fuller turned the truck around and raced his wife back to town. The unconventional aerial object, whatever it had been, disappeared and left them alone. The ophthalmologist who was called to the hospital said he’d never seen injuries like that in all his thirty-four years of practice. The skin around Mrs. Fuller’s eyes was so swollen he could barely pry them open even a little to look. When he was finally able to shine a light on them, he said her pupils looked like blood-filled marbles. They took two weeks to return to normal. Mrs. Fuller was blind that whole time. They weren’t sure she’d get her sight back, but she did. And then the Fullers, intrepid husband and wife that they were, spent the next seven weeks driving up and down that same dark, lonely road hoping it might happen again. It did. One night around midnight they felt the familiar lift again of their truck. This time both of them had the sense to keep their heads inside. They gradually started telling friends and family. More people began driving the no-longer-lonely road. Four more people met with the mysterious craft and had their vehicles plucked off the ground. And that’s when the Agency sent out a new directive to all its teams urging them to be patient and send someone to stick around known sighting locations to see if it might happen there again. The glowing white UAO here in Cortez had been seen by multiple witnesses a week ago. They said it descended toward the ridge with a strange jerking motion and then settled there for over an hour. The next morning Sheriff Hoyt found indentations that might have been from the base of the craft. All the vegetation around those indentations had been burned in a perfect circle ten feet around. Like maybe a craft had touched down or lifted off. Locals talked about coming up here the day after and scooping up handfuls of the alien dirt to keep for themselves. They started showing it around. More people climbed the ridge to collect jars of the dirt. Travis had no hope that by now there would still be any samples worth collecting. He would have to wait for a second visitation.