The Sheriff
Chapter 27
XXVII
Stepping out of the portal, Michael found himself in a vacant quarry. He looked around but saw no one. In fact, the place virtually exuded an eerie, almost surreal emptiness of sound or life of any kind. Not even a bird or a cricket seemed to be around to break the silence.
"That's odd. I distinctly asked the portal to take me to Jim Valenti."
Suddenly, the silence was broken by a gunshot… then a sound like something hitting the ground. Michael hurried to where the sound had come from and saw something… apparently a body… in the quarry. Half climbing, half sliding down the rocky slope, he made his way to the unmoving man below. As he turned him over, he gasped…
"Jim!"
Michael lifted his hand and saw blood on it. He tore at Jim's shirt and saw that Jim had been shot. Pressing two fingers to the carotid artery on Jim's neck, Michael felt for a heartbeat. Feeling none, he began to give CPR, alternately pounding on Jim's chest and breathing into his mouth. But after a couple of minutes, he knew that Jim was beyond his help. He was dead.
In the eerie quietness that seemed to come over everything again, Michael heard a gun click behind his head. He spun around and blasted the bullet out of the air at the very moment that the shooter pulled the trigger. But if the shooter was astonished, Michael was equally at a loss for words. He stood there for several moments, his hand still in the air and his mouth open in shock…
"You?"
"Shut up and put your hands up over your head where I can see them, alien!"
"What the hell! No! No way! In case you didn't notice, your bullet just got blasted out of the frikkin' air. You're not the one in control here," Michael said displaying the palm of his hand menacingly. "You even move again and you'll be vaporized before you know what happened!"
"Just shut up," Kathleen said, edging down the quarry toward Michael. "I'm the one with the gun here."
"It might as well be a pea-shooter," Michael reminded her.
Kathleen frowned. "Alright, so you've got powers… but can you stop a barrage of bullets? This pistol's automatic. It's the equivalent of an UZI. Do you know what that is? If I wanted you dead, you would have been."
Kathleen pulled out a walky-talky and balanced it against one ear as she held her gun trained on Michael with the other hand. "I'm calling for backup."
Faster than Kathleen saw it coming, Michael blasted the gun out of her hand and the walky-talky out of her other hand. Kathleen let out a small scream. Michael was unsure if it was from the surprise or from the heat of his blasts, one of which had clearly burned her gun hand.
"Sorry, but I can't let you do that."
"That was government equipment," Kathleen exclaimed threateningly. Then taking stock of her situation, she asked, "Are you going to kill me, too?" She wasn't sure why she bothered to ask. Of course, he was going to kill her. She knew that. She was at his mercy; and if there was one thing she had been taught in the unit, it was that these aliens did not know the meaning of the word mercy.
"What do you mean, 'too?'" Michael asked. "You're the freak that shot Valenti! Not me!"
"I didn't shoot him," Kathleen said. "I heard a gunshot, and when I got over here, you were standing over him."
"But I don't have a gun," Michael said. "You do."
Kathleen looked at her burned hand.
"Okay, you did," Michael corrected.
"So did he," Kathleen said, pointing at Jim. "But I doubt he killed himself. Somebody killed him."
Michael nodded. "Yeah… so if it wasn't me… and it wasn't you… Who was it?"
"The aliens," Kathleen said, still looking at Michael with suspicion. "You… or one of your buddies."
"Who taught you to be so afraid of things you don't understand," Michael asked. "Was it the secret alien unit that you work for?"
"You seem to know a lot about me. Too bad I don't know as much about your kind," Kathleen replied sullenly. I didn't get into this unit to kill e.t.'s, but I've been shown what your kind has done. I've seen pictures of the handprints on mutilated bodies. I've heard about your ruthlessness… I've seen it. Why shouldn't I be… cautious?" Kathleen reached down at her feet and picked up a piece of something that looked like skin. It vanished in her hand. Michael's jaw dropped a couple of inches…
"Skins? Here? But if the royal four were never here in this time… why skins? What did they come here for?"
"Don't play the innocent," Kathleen said. "An Earthling wouldn't be able to put that 'I'm so innocent' crap over on me, and neither can you."
"You weren't afraid of me in a different place and time," Michael said.
Kathleen scowled and tried to smile to show that she wasn't afraid, but her fear was palpable in spite of her masterful attempt to hide it.
"What different place and time?"
"I'm going to show you," Michael said. "Portal!"
Kathleen gasped, momentarily distracted by the unexpected apparition in front of her, and Michael shoved her into the portal. "The palace on Antar," he said simply.
**********
As the portal disappeared, Kathleen looked around her at the now alien landscape. In some ways, it was not too unlike what she was familiar with on Earth, but there were differences. For one thing, in the distance, she could see an ocean… a golden colored ocean. And in the sky, she thought she saw more than one moon. And in both directions, extending outward like the sides of a large "V" from the planet she was on, she saw several other planets lined up, faintly but clearly visible even in the daylight.
"What did you do to me? Where am I? Why did you kidnap me?"
"I think it's called 'abduction' when we do it, isn't it," Michael asked with a touch of sarcasm.
Kathleen nodded. "So why did you abduct me? Are you going to tie me up and torture me?"
"Don't tempt me," Michael said. "Actually, I needed to bring you here to show you that we're not monsters. We're just like you. We're not on Earth to hurt anyone."
"You could've fooled me," Kathleen said with a bit of forced bravado. "What about the mutilated bodies? The handprints?"
Michael shook his head. "I don't know. Maybe the skins… I don't know…"
"What's a skin? You keep saying that."
"That piece of skin you found… It was from an… alien, I guess… but not like me. They shed their skin, because it was grown for them. They can't live in Earth's atmosphere without a specially-grown 'husk.'"
"You're freaking me out," Kathleen said. "And I didn't think anyone could do that! So what you're saying is that there are bad aliens and good aliens? You expect me to believe that?"
"Aren't there bad Earthlings and good Earthlings?"
Kathleen thought about it a moment. "I guess so."
"Of course there are! You know there are! Why wouldn't aliens be the same?"
"Because they're aliens," Kathleen said. "Because they're all here to infiltrate us and take over our planet…"
"Here? Your planet?"
Kathleen looked around and paled slightly. "Well, not here, I guess… Earth, I mean. Where are we?"
"Antar," Michael said. "My planet. You like it?"
"How did we get here? How do I get back?"
"I thought you didn't believe in alien mercy. You think I'm going to send you back?"
Kathleen shook her head, and Michael suddenly realized that she really did not expect to survive this, much less ever return home. Suddenly, he felt an uncomfortable streak of compassion for this person who had threatened to shoot him just minutes before.
"Listen," Michael said, opening the door of the palace that led to the terrace on which they had appeared, "You must be thirsty. Let's go inside."
Kathleen still did not trust Michael, but she was pragmatically resigned to her fate, whatever that might be. She followed Michael into the palace. Michael led her to the foyer where Zan and Ava were sitting together on a sofa reading the daily CoruzAntar newspaper.
"Zan… Ava…" Michael said in Antarian. "We have a visitor… from Earth."
"Urth?" Zan repeated, looking up at Kathleen.
"Eluymer," Michael corrected.
"Sit down! Sit down!" Zan said to Kathleen in Antarian. She didn't understand, but Ava rushed to get Kathleen a pillow to lean on, and Kathleen sat down and nodded gratefully.
"This is Kathleen Topolsky of Eluymer," Michael said. Then to Kathleen, he said, in English, "Kathleen, this is Zan, the King of Antar, and Ava, the Queen of Antar."
Kathleen was initially stunned but then found her voice… "Oh, uh, thank you… It's a pleasure… I think… your majesties."
Zan smiled. "Did she come willingly, Michael? She looks scared… and her hand appears to be burned."
Michael shrugged. "I had some things to prove to her. It was the only way I knew how. Maybe you could look at her hand?"
Zan reached out and took Kathleen's hand in his own left hand. She reflexively pulled back, but he calmly took it again and placed his right hand over the top of it. As he did, her hand began to glow with a greenish light, and the pain of the burn –and all the redness- disappeared as she watched.
"Thank you," Kathleen managed to say with quiet shock in her voice, as she looked at her hand and saw that it no longer had a trace of a burn on it.
"Kathleen and I have been a bit parched by the afternoon sun on Eluymer, and we're both very thirsty. If you'll forgive me, Zan, I'll go get us something to drink."
Ava was up in a flash. "I'll do that, Michael. You relax with your guest." Ava rushed off toward the dining area and returned in no time with two large glasses of yellow water.
"What's this?" Kathleen asked, looking at it suspiciously; but her thirst got the better of her, and she sipped it without waiting for an answer. Michael translated Kathleen's question.
"It's water," Ava said. "It's directly from the Golden Sea… but don't worry… It's been desalinated. The Golden Sea water is the purest and best that exists."
Michael translated Ava's remarks for Kathleen, but she had already finished the water and was asking for more.
"I guess you've never seen yellow water before," Michael said with a smile.
"Sure I have," Kathleen said between gulps, "but I wouldn't have drank it!"
Michael chuckled. "Well, where I came from, I would have offered you a glass of iced tea, but since I never grew up on Earth in this time, Antarians have never seen tea and haven't developed a taste for it or synthesized it here. So you get yellow water."
"It's great!" Kathleen exclaimed. "Yellow or not, it's the best water I've ever had!"
"You're not afraid we'll poison you?" Michael asked.
"Well… if you're going to then you're going to… and I'm thirsty. I might as well enjoy it. It tastes divine! At least I won't die thirsty."
"It is good," Michael agreed. "I've got to get the process for desalinizing it when I return. We drank spring water where I came from. It's clear… like Earth water. But this is really good!"
Kathleen finished her second glass of water and leaned back thankfully on the pillow. Then she looked at Zan and Ava… and at Michael.
"Why did you bring me here," she asked Michael. "If you're not going to torture me or kill me or study me… what do you want with me? I'm being treated like a guest… I don't understand."
Michael translated Kathleen's remarks for Zan and Ava, and Ava replied in Antarian.
"She said that you are a guest," Michael translated for Kathleen. "As long as you're here, you'll be treated well… as a guest."
"Why," Kathleen asked again.
"You wanted to shoot me back there," Michael said, "and I couldn't let you do that."
"Well, I know that, but you could have just killed me."
"Yeah… I could have." Michael nodded. "But that would have just messed up my plans something terrible."
Kathleen looked at Michael quizzically. "What plans? You have plans for me?"
"Yeah. It's probably a good thing that you're sitting down and have a pillow behind you, Kathleen, because what I'm going to tell you could be hard to believe… for you."
"What?" Kathleen looked at him suspiciously.
"In a different… branch of time, I guess you'd call it… I grew up on Earth. So did Zan and Ava here. We were teenagers going to Roswell High School, and you were… well, doing what you're doing now… working for the FBI trying to catch aliens… us. But in that branch of time, you found out what the Unit was really doing to us, and you tried to help us. This got you locked up in an insane asylum where no one could ever find you again but your ex-associates. And they did torture you. Ava rescued you. She was a teenager then… Now, in this timeline, she and Zan are in their nineties. That's a whole story in itself, though."
Kathleen gasped. "You mean I let you run to get me a glass of water and you're ninety-something? How old do you live to be?"
Michael translated, and Ava smiled. "We're quite fit, thank you. And we could live to a maximum of two hundred fifty or so… if we're lucky. The average is closer to two hundred. We're almost in the middle."
"Not quite yet," Zan corrected her.
Ava smiled again. "Zan will never admit that he is getting older. He still rides his yoriths and goes fishing in the Stareen River at least a few days each month. We both stay active."
Michael translated again for Kathleen, and she shook her head incredulously.
"If Ava rescued me in this other time your talking about… what became of me? I know the people I work with. I wouldn't have been able to just reappear in society."
"No, you couldn't. That's why Ava… We called her Tess there… brought you here to Antar. You married Jim Valenti and you made your lives here."
"Wait… Wait a minute! I married Jim Valenti? Sheriff Valenti?"
"Yeah."
Kathleen laughed.
"What's so funny," Michael asked.
"Me marrying Valenti! Well, I guess he is kind of good looking… and I have been trying to get closer to him. But it was to get information… you know?"
"Was it?" Michael asked.
"Yeah," Kathleen said. But as she thought about it, she knew that that wasn't entirely true. She did like Jim. But it was too late now…
"Jim's dead," Kathleen said.
"Maybe," Michael agreed.
"No maybes," Kathleen said. "I saw him… I know dead when I see it. Jim was dead. Unless… you can bring him back like you healed my hand…" She looked at Zan.
"No." Michael shook his head. "He's dead. In this time, he's not coming back. We can't do that. We don't have that power. Kryys could have done it… if he'd been there… in this time… but he wasn't. He isn't."
"If I'm right about where you're going with this," Kathleen said, "you're about to ask me to go with you to some other time or something… ?"
"Sort of," Michael agreed, "but not exactly. I'm going to return you to Earth in your own time… exactly where you came from."
Kathleen's heart jumped for a moment, but then she was surprised to realize that she actually felt a twinge of regret and sadness that she would be returning to what she had left… Jim was dead. The idea of going somewhere where he might be alive again was oddly enticing even if it did sound totally crazy.
"The only thing I need from you," Michael said, "is for you to want the life you had on Antar in my time. You have to want to return."
Kathleen was silent for a long time. Then she asked…
"Was I happy in your time… with Jim?"
Michael smiled. He told her about her son, Danyy, and his pawgor and about Jim's adventures on Antar and how she and Jim had helped save the children from the Ghors. After Michael had finished telling her everything he could think of that might make her want to return, he sat back and watched her face.
"What would I have to do to return… you know… to that life," Kathleen asked.
"I don't know yet," Michael said honestly. "I just know that you have to be willing to return or you won't. And Jim has to be willing to return."
"Well, I think that's probably preferable for him, don't you?"
Michael nodded his agreement. "But no one can predict human behavior. He could prefer to be dead rather than go to another planet that he doesn't even remember or know."
"Not if I'm there," Kathleen said with a grin. "I think I can say that with some certainty."
Michael just smiled.
"You ready to go back?"
Kathleen nodded. Michael called the portal. Kathleen looked around her and touched Zan and Ava on the hand with a smile. They understood and smiled back at her. Then Kathleen kissed Michael on the cheek quickly and stepped into the portal.
tbc