“Angry, sure, and so they delivered a lesson.” The woman was too optimistic to be unrepentant.
“Angry, my ass.” Caroline glanced back at their passengers. “Somebody could’ve been killed! Everybody could’ve been killed.”
“Me. I’d say that was a pretty stern warning,” Ross contended. “You’d better be sure who you’re contacting and how you go about it. Next time they might blow up more than trees and cars. There are some things mankind isn’t meant to understand.”
Caroline frowned at him. “You really believe that, Ross Ed?”
“Well, no. But it sure makes sense when they say it in all those films that turn up on the Late Show.”
“I wonder what they were?” Once more the woman curled up close to her husband. “Besides ill-tempered, I mean.”
“Let somebody else find out.” The young man eyed Ross hopefully. “You’ll take us back to Show Low? I’m positive that from there I can wire my parents for airfare home.”
“Yeah, sure. Why not?” Ross settled back in the captain’s chair. “We’ll drop you off in town. It’s on our way to Lubbock anyway.” He winked at Caroline and then, wondering exactly how the hell it popped into his head, he added, “They were Ceryutians.” She gaped wordlessly at him.
“Yes, Ceryutians. I’m certain of it. Fourth planet out from the eighth star in the L’Sariax Sector.”
“Is that a fact?” The husband’s reply was challenging. “And just how do you happen to know that?”
“Hey, if you’d seen a Ceryutian before you wouldn’t have to ask. They’re famous for their tempers. It was bad enough to draw them off course, but the fact that it was to a backwater primitive world like Earth made it much worse.”
“Why, that makes perfect sense.” The wife giggled. ‘tell us another one, mister.” When Ross Ed didn’t reply, she turned solemnly to her mate. “I told you we shouldn’t have gotten involved with the Circle, Bobby. We should have listened to the Swami Rajmanpursata. Why, I was near his meditation center in Brentwood just last week and—”
“All right already.” Her husband dropped his head into his hands. “So the Swami was right. As soon as we get back home we’ll discuss the whole business with him and see what he has to say.”
“That’s my Bobby-guy.” It grew very quiet in back.
They were back on the main forest road when Caroline looked over at Ross and inquired, “Ceryutians? Eighth planet of the fourth star?”
“Fourth planet of the eighth star. L’Sariax Sector.” He spread his hands helplessly. “Hey, I just call ’em as I see ’em.”
“Uh-huh,” she replied slowly. “Ross, have you ever stopped to think how you see them?”
“Not really. Sometimes stuff like that just son of comes to me.” He grinned infectiously. “Guess I’ve got a good imagination.”
“Sure you do. You’ve also spent several weeks in close proximity to a real, genuine, dead alien. Ever think the two might be connected?”
“I try not to think about this whole business to much. Huns my head.”
“Hey, the camera!” exclaimed a voice from the back. Glancing rearward, Ross Ed watched as the woman withdrew an exceedingly compact Nikon from her brassiere. She checked one of the windows on top and beamed excitedly. “Twenty shots! I’ve got twenty shots. Wait till the skeptics at PSYCOP see these!”
“Way to go. Sues.” Her hubby beamed.
Ross Ed didn’t join in the celebration. Something told him the woman was the proud posscssor of twenty clear, sharp-toned pictures of a grayish-blue fog bank. So were all the others who’d escaped with their equipment intact, including the videographers. Hours and hours of tape of dense, impenetrable, unremarkable, and decidedly unalienistic fog. Not all the illumination propagaied by aliens dead and alive was as straightforward as streetlights. Several emited on wavelengths that were more than a little unkind to photographic enterprises.
How he knew that he cou1dn’t have said. It just sort of seemed to make sense.
One conclusion anyone could have made: whatever he was. Jed was not a Ceryutian. Not even a distant cousin. He was no more related to the long-armed stompers than Ross was to the longhom on his uncle BuckJin’s ranch. Probably less so. Having witnessed a demonstration of Ceryutian manners, Ross Ed felt good about that.
It just went to show that if you insisted on phoning home, you damn well better make sure you didn’t get a wrong number and inadvertently agitate some perfidity. Evidently there were some badass beings out there.
THIRTEEN
The sun was showing itself through the trees when they finally dropped their passengers off outside the main market in Show Low. As they disembarked, the couple was arguing about whether to make the first call to his parents, her parents, or their swami.
From Show Low, Ross and Caroline continued north on the highway toward Interstate 40. There’d been no sign in town of inquisitive army types, but having been cornered once, Ross didn’t want to take any chances by lingering over breakfast. With Caroline in agreement, they whizzed through the local McDonald’s and McBreakfasted their McButts out of town as quickly as possible.
When they finally reached the interstate without incident, Caroline broached the idea of sticking to the back roads, just to add some insurance. Impatient as he was to reach the coast, Ross Ed reluctantly conceded the efficacy of her suggestion (though he didn’t phrase it quite that way … as he readily conceded, she was the smart one).
Passing through Holbrook, they disdained the interstate in favor of State Route 77 north.
“We can swing west through the Navajo-Hopi reservation.” With little traffic and a straight road ahead Caroline was able to relax behind the wheel. Outside, the last pines had given way to spacious vistas of ruddy sandstone and distant mountains. “There’s nothing up here but tiny towns and local police. We’ll take two-eighty-four over to one-sixty and swing down by the Canyon. That way we can lose ourselves in the tourist traffic and not have to take 1-40 until we’re well past Flagstaff. If they were going to establish a checkpoint on the interstate, that’s where it would be: this side of Flag or the other. Either way we’ll bypass it.” She looked over at him.
“It’s either that or keep heading north.”
“here ain’t no ocean in Utah.”
“I know.” Reaching over, she placed her right hand on his left. “Salt Lake City’s a long way from San Diego.”
Reacting to the van’s approach, a cottontail leaped off the road and into a culvert. Red-tailed and Swainson’s hawks patrolled the pavement in search of fresh roadkill.
“This country makes west Texas look lush,” he observed.
“Pretty, though.” Raising her hand, she pointed to her right. “The Painted Desert is off that way somewhere.”
As they drove they were confronted by a living history of the American pickup truck, either hurrying in the opposite direction or speeding up to pass them from behind. From time to time isolated homes and house trailers poked satellite dishes above the rugged hills, spying on ESPN. CNN, HBO, and their fellow entertainment acronyms from sites in gullies, washes, and miniature plateaus. Many of the new homes were partnered with a stumpy hogan, their entrances facing the rising sun in the traditional manner.
The deeper they traveled into the reservation, the more isolated they felt. For the first time since he’d fled El Paso, Ross Ed began to feel at ease. This was one place where he didn’t expect the army to come looking for him. With luck, the military’s neatly dressed, excessively polite representatives would be hunting for him in the vicinity of Tucson, hundreds of miles to the south.
