Both government and corporate higher-ups still wanted Pick to stay on site, so stupidly, Sandy decided he could get home on his own—get a ride-share back to the BRC campus, maybe, to pick up his car. Then he’d stepped outside, and discovered the chaos had ballooned into a full three-ring circus. A near endless sea of agents and soldiers mixed in with dignitaries (was that greying cougar over there the Secretary of State?), surrounded by an outer ring of vans festooned with antennas—most obviously from news crews, some more mysterious.
Dammit. All right. No ride service apps. Wasn’t there a light-rail station about a half-mile from the office, though? He pulled out his phone and checked the map. Closer to a mile, but good enough. He could take the light rail to food. Okay. A plan.
He got halfway to the crowd before two tigers in black suits and mirrored sunglasses moved to intercept him. “Could we see some ID, sir?” the one on the left said.
“Yeah, but you don’t know my name, because I’m not on the list.” He sighed, pulling out his driver’s license. “I’m an engineer with BRC, and the first person who made contact with Amarylis.”
The tiger took the ID and squinted at it. “Amarylis?”
“The giant fox’taur woman. Shouldn’t her name be in your briefing?”
They looked at each other. As the one with Sandy’s ID handed it back, the other one spoke. “Where are you going, sir?”
“Uh, to get food, and then probably home. I have to get to my car, first, so I was heading to the light rail station.”
They exchanged glances again, and the first tiger nodded. “We’ll escort you. This way.” They strode off to the left, motioning him to follow.
He hurried to keep pace. “Why?”
“To keep you away from reporters.”
The other one added, “They’ll eat you alive.” He didn’t crack a smile. “Over here.” He pointed to the third in a row of ten black sedans.
“You’re driving me?”
The first agent answered by holding one of the back doors open. Sandy climbed in; somehow this all felt more surreal than the rest of the day. Was he about to be taken to a secret prison for interrogation?
The two agents got in the front. “Your car is back at the SI office park?”
“Uh, yeah.”
The car set off, navigating past a gauntlet of reporters—a good half of whom tried to intercept the car. At least a half-dozen cameras tracked the sedan’s path.
“This is one-way glass, so they can’t see who you are,” the passenger tiger said.
“So they’re mobbing the car because they think I’m a VIP.”
He took off his glasses, giving Sandy a meaningful all-business stare. “You are a VIP. After we drop you off, do not discuss anything you’ve seen today. Not to the media, not to your friends, not to your sainted grey-furred mother. Not on the phone, not on social media, not in a room alone by yourself that we haven’t swept for bugs first.”
He swallowed. “Okay, got it.”
The tiger kept staring at him just long enough to make it uncomfortable, then put his glasses back on and resumed facing forward. “Are we being followed?” he asked the driver.
“No marked news vans. Possibly one unmarked red hatchback. We’ll cut through Lockheed Martin to lose it. Bravo Base is monitoring air traffic.”
He nodded.
Sandy rubbed his face. This was a spy movie. He was stuck in a spy movie.
The sedan slowed for the checkpoint at the entrance to Lockheed Martin’s parking lot, but the guard just waved them through. Sandy turned to watch the red hatchback, a few car-lengths behind, keep on going. The tiger drove around the base and out another gate. If the hatchback had been following them before, it was nowhere to be seen now.
It took another few minutes to cross the freeway using a different overpass than the one Amarylis had walked over earlier in the day, then to circle back to SI’s campus. Police cars still blocked roads nearby, but the parking lot was largely deserted now—other than more police cars, and more black sedans. “Where’s your car?” the driver asked.
“It’s the hybrid up there.” He pointed.
“Okay. Follow us back out to make sure the police let you through.”
“Uh, sure. Thanks.”
They waited until he got into his car and started it, then led him out of the parking lot, past the police. They turned left at the next intersection; Sandy went straight, heading out of the business park area and onto the freeway. Nobody paid him a second glance when he pulled off and stopped at a taqueria to pick up a to-go burrito. The spy-movie subterfuge of the MIBs seemed to have worked.
When he got back to his apartment, he did something he hadn’t done in at least five years: watched a cable news network. Sandy hadn’t had cable in close to a decade, so had to re-download the streaming box’s news app to watch. He started the stream with a weird, fluttery mixture of anticipation and dread, and sat down with dinner.
Sure enough, the still frame behind the anchor was a shot of Amarylis, he guessed taken by one of the light rail passengers: the angle dramatically emphasized how big she was. The anchor, a serval who didn’t look any older than Sandy, nodded along with a “Science Consultant,” a chubby middle-aged puma woman. He maintained an earnestly concerned expression as he peppered her with absurd generalities like The implications of this are staggering, aren’t they and did you ever think something like this could happen in your lifetime and what do you think this means for the world. She answered each question with a bemused head-shake and the shortest possible response.
After the not-really-an-interview ended, the background image switched to video of Building 4 on the SI campus demolished and burning, and the anchor recapped the story from the top. Sandy listened with half an ear as an “on the scene” reporter—being filmed with the hangar in the background, some distance away—asked more questions than he could answer. It’s confirmed this is related to some kind of “quantum tunneling” experiment being conducted at the Bridgetown Research Center division of Strategic Industries, but what was the purpose of this experiment in the first place? Were they trying for first contact? If this creature is an alien, how could she be speaking their language so fluently? Does that mean they’ve been watching us? Have they been on our planet secretly, despite their size? Are there small aliens hiding among us? What did she mean about weather balloons? Who is this “Sandy” she referred to?
Sandy choked on his burrito.
The conversation quickly moved on, but the anchor’s blithe “we’ll be looking into all these questions and more, Jonathan” now had an unexpectedly threatening air to it. Nobody had gotten him on camera yet, but finding him would be pretty trivial for any reporter, wouldn’t it? He didn’t think there were any other people named “Sandy” working at the BRC campus.
Maybe he could contact Mr. Pick and ask…what? For advice? To crash on his couch? It’s not like reporters wouldn’t be after him within a day or two. To see if he could get back into the hangar and sleep there indefinitely? Probably not a great idea, even if they’d let him. He should probably just stay here and see what the morning brought.
And what if the morning brought a crowd of reporters outside his apartment? He could handle that, right? No comment no comment no comment, fighting his way back to his car?
No. No, he could not.
He bolted down the rest of the burrito, shut off the stream, and pulled up a hotel booking app on his phone as he began throwing clothes into a suitcase. There were plenty of extended stay hotels in the area that often featured bigger, nicer—albeit more generic—rooms for less money than boutique tourist hotels. With any luck, he’d score a last-minute deal at one.
About an hour later, including eighteen comically tense minutes behind the wheel alert for any car that might be tailing him, he unlocked the door to a room at a Bungalow Inn® by Larraby®, set the suitcase on the couch, and fell back onto the king-sized bed, staring at the ceiling.
“Well, you’d been saying you wanted more excitement in your life,” he said aloud. That was a lie. He hadn’t. He’d been wondering if he’d fallen into a rut, if maybe he should finally take a real vacation, but “explode your world and possibly the rest of the world with it” hadn’t been on his short list of ways to relax.
Aliens, close enough to people—normal people? his people?—that they looked like terrestrial animals. Not quite right, though: they looked like people, just evolved from a different terrestrial animal. That upended a ton of theorizing about how divergent alien life would probably be, if it existed at all. It did, apparently in great number. Would the other races be that similar, that close to cats? That…attractive?
God, did he have a crush on Amarylis?
No. Come on. For God’s sake, she was big enough to swallow him whole. Yes, all right, he thought she was gorgeous, and for all of that (and all of her size), surprisingly easy to talk to, with hints of an appealingly deadpan sense of humor…
Okay, maybe a little crush.
He grabbed a pillow and smashed it over his face, groaning, then pushed himself back up to his paws. Unpacking took no time: hang up a few of his clothes, put the rest into the dresser, carry toiletries into the bathroom. This could be a staycation, right? It looked like there was a decent lobby bar. (Not that he drank much, but if there was ever a time to start, this might be it.) And the free breakfast might be better than his normal, even if the coffee was all but guaranteed to be worse. He’d booked the room for five nights; he’d be lucky if his semi-anonymity lasted through tomorrow, but better to have the room available as a fallback than not.
When he turned out the light and climbed into bed, over an hour before his normal sleep time, he wasn’t sure he’d even be able to fall asleep, tossing and turning even more than usual. But the next thing he knew, the too-bright alarm clock read 3:02 AM, then 6:37 AM. If he’d had any dreams, he didn’t remember them. That might’ve been just as well.
He got down to the hotel’s breakfast room at quarter past seven. There were already at least a dozen folks there, a mix of tech dudes younger than he was and interchangeable execs older than he was. A cable news network ran on the TV, showing similar stories to what he’d seen last night; nobody gave him a double-take, so hopefully that meant they hadn’t been running his picture up there. The sound was off, but the captions suggested the President would be holding a press conference in a few hours. He had no doubt reporters were still looking for the mysterious Sandy that Amarylis had mentioned, but at least that mystery didn’t seem to be foremost on everyone’s mind.
The hotel’s free breakfast was better than his normal fare, but only because he’d set himself a dispiritingly low bar. The sausage links were decent and the scrambled eggs were adequate, but the identical assembly-line pancakes had the consistency and flavor of sponges, and the syrup didn’t add much to them beyond desperately needed moisture.
“Do you really believe any of this news about space aliens and wormholes?”
Sandy looked up, startled, but the speaker wasn’t talking to him. It was one of the older executive guys, a black-furred panther, talking at a shouty volume with a younger lynx dressed in jeans and designer T-shirt. “I guess I do,” the lynx said, tilting his head to the side. “The story sounds crazy, but I don’t see any other explanations for what’s going on that don’t sound even crazier.”
The panther slurped coffee from a mug loudly enough to make Sandy fold his ears back. “Not a coverup for some kind of serious accident they don’t want to tell us about? Letting out radiation, some killer pathogen, like that?”
“Nah. If you’re trying to cover up some serious catastrophe you don’t want everyone looking into, you’re not gonna explain it away by saying you’ve brought a giant alien here.”
“Fair point.” The executive laughed. “I’ve seen people say the footage of the alien is fake, though. Could be possible, with AI and all, huh?”
Sandy rolled his eyes, downing the rest of his coffee—as predicted, worse than what he made at home—and heading out to his car.
By this time, rush hour was well underway; the trip took twice as long as he’d expected, and the exit ramp off the freeway quickly hit a virtual standstill. What…oh, they’d set up a checkpoint about a quarter-mile ahead. Terrific.
It took him twenty-five minutes to make it to the barricade. Two highway patrol cars with lights flashing sat on the roadside, under a lighted traffic direction sign alternating the messages AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY and HAVE ID READY. A black sedan with two tiger agent types standing by it had parked past the patrol cars.
ID? Did they mean a driver’s license, or his employee badge? He got out both, just in case, during the three minutes it took for the guy in the Maserati ahead of him to stop arguing with the patrol officer and drive off down the frontage road in a huff.
When the snow leopard cop lowered his head to Sandy’s driver-side window, he didn’t wait before reciting what he’d no doubt spent the last several hours repeating verbatim. “The offices in this area are closed until further notice. You’ll have to work from home until you get an all-clear to return.”
“My name’s Sandy Nelson. I’m with BRC. Strategic Industries. I’m headed back to the airfield.”
“ID?”
Sandy handed him both the driver’s license and the employee badge. The officer immediately handed the license back. “Wait here.” He took the badge over to where the agents stood.
Both of the tigers glanced at it, and one of them shook his head, not bothering to check any lists. The snow leopard started to head back.
Sandy groaned, leaning out the window. “Call Field Director Brickman!”
The leopard slowed down, glancing back at the agents. One of the tigers sighed theatrically, and pulled out his phone.
“Pull over here.” The leopard waved Sandy off to the side of the road, behind one of the cop cars.
Well, that was at least something. Maybe. He parked and waited.
After about three minutes, one of the tigers—the one on the phone—walked up to his car and leaned over. “Who are you again?”
“Sandy Nelson.”
“And how do you know Field Director Brickman?”
“He was one of the first responders from your agency at the BRC campus when our project accidentally brought Amarylis here. I was the first person who actually spoke to her.”
“Who’s Amarylis?”
Sandy bit back several sarcastic responses. “The giant alien.”
The agent’s brow furrowed. He straightened up, walking a few steps away and talking on the phone in low tones. Then he waited in silence for at least five more minutes.
Finally, he put away his phone and leaned back to Sandy. “Sir, Field Director Brickman says he’s denying you clearance to head on to the airfield right now. He said they’d call you when they needed you.”
Sandy’s ears lowered. “But that’s…”
Both the agents and the highway patrol officers were focused on him now, in a forebodingly don’t cause trouble way. He swallowed. “Okay.”
The patrol officer pointed. “Head back along the frontage road.”
As he pulled back into the crawling traffic, he gritted his teeth, wavering between starting to cry and getting very angry.