Chapter 2

The way Cassie's property is set up, you can only take a vehicle so far up. There's a gate that blocks the rest of the road, and you have to walk a few hundred yards to get up to her house or the barn. Her dad had said that was so road noises didn't scare the animals, but it also meant that when I stopped at the gate, Cassie's parents had no idea she was home till she physically walked in the door. I shifted into park and shook Marco awake.

He cursed me out a bit as he snapped awake, but I ignored him and just got out of the SUV and looked up at the sky. He turned to look out the passenger window and his mouth dropped.

For several minutes, we watched the falling stars. They rained down like embers cascading off a sparkler, more or less the same color. Predominantly white-yellow, here and there, there were sparks of red. I had never seen a meteor shower in person before, and the intensity of it dwarfed anything I had seen online.

I was vaguely aware that my friends had gotten out of the SUV. Marco was next to me, Tobias and the girls behind me. I felt Cassie's fingers on mine, and I reflexively opened my hand so I could hold hers. Rachel was recording it on her phone, but I'd left mine in the center console. Marco had forgotten his at home.

"Whoa…" Tobias said in a hushed tone.

The meteor shower faded as abruptly as it had started, save for one last glowing spark.

The last meteor was far off, but not like any other shooting star I had ever seen. It was different than every other streak that night, and it looked different than anything I'd ever seen online. All the others had just zipped by in rapid, blink-and-you'll-miss-it streaks, but this one wasn't fleeting. It was a brilliant blue spark, carving a luminescent line down, almost perpendicular to the horizon.

Putting it like that, it doesn't really have any magnitude. I know it sounds like I was just standing in the street, watching a light in the sky. But there's something intangible about that moment I just can't put into words. I know that's kind of a cop out, but the only thing I can say is that it was like watching a miracle in slow motion. I mean, people see shooting stars all the time, but when do they ever just zoom over your town? It was one of those moments where time seems to slow down. I know we were only standing there for a few minutes, probably less than five, even. It felt like we'd been watching that one falling star all night.

It was Marco who broke the reverie.

"Um, guys…? You realize that's not a meteor, right?"

"Ha ha, nice pun," Rachel said with a touch of acid. "Seriously, can you not just enjoy the moment?"

But I was looking at his face now, and I knew when he was being serious. I think Rachel did too because she pressed him. "Okay, what do you mean, it isn't a meteor?"

He hesitated, like if he just came out and said it that he knew we wouldn't listen. He had put two and two together already. That was what Marco did. And he was trying to find a way to tell us that we had all gotten six instead of four.

"Whatever that is, it isn't moving fast enough to be a meteor."

"Looks pretty fast to me."

"Rachel, meteorites hit at thousands of miles an hour. More than fifty times the speed of sound. Sometimes closer to eighty or more. If that was a meteor, we'd have all heard the loudest sound in the history of California before Tobias even told us to look up."

Tobias got it before I did. "Are you saying that's an aircraft?"

Marco shook his head again.

"No. When Jake stopped the car, it was definitely too high to be anything else. But it hasn't hit the ground yet, which means it is actively fighting the force of gravity. It definitely came from space, but… someone is hitting the brakes."

"A UFO?" Cassie asked.

Marco just nodded. He knew he was right, but still couldn't say those words out loud.

Rachel had a look on her face that I swear had to be a reflection of my own. What Cassie said - or rather, what Marco had walked her into saying - was totally impossible. But he had very carefully let us work out the math ourselves. It had come from space. We had watched it streak down from the night sky from an infinitesimal speck of light to the electric blue spark that now hung over the Pacific, growing brighter with each passing second. Marco is big on physics and sci-fi, so if he said a meteor would be faster, I was sure he knew that as a fact.

But I just couldn't wrap my head around the fact that we were watching an alien spaceship. I mean, really, who the hell could?

As it turned out, Tobias could.

"Guys, the UFO is turning." He said it casually, like he was telling us the time. There was no euphemism to it. He didn't say the object was turning, or that the anomaly was turning. He just accepted it for what it was. It's how Tobias is, I guess.

I saw it too. What had started as an almost vertical line of blue light was now arcing, course correcting, and leveling off. It was clearly not falling; it was flying. The light seemed like it was growing brighter and brighter. Like it was coming at us now. I mean, I wasn't panicking that it was going to hit us, I just mean up to then, it looked like a meteor that would eventually hit the Pacific Ocean. Now it had pulled up, still losing altitude, but definitely going to make landfall.

That was the moment it clicked for all of us that this thing really was a piloted craft.

We were staring to the west, which is significant because there really isn't much west of Cassie's property. The Moore Creek hiking trails pick up directly from her street, and there isn't much beyond that aside from a few tracts of farmland and state parks. All the lights from Santa Cruz were behind us, so we had a pretty good view of the stars at Cassie's place.

I could see now that the light wasn't a solid glow. It was flickering and intermittent, and as the light got closer, I had the sickening realization that I could make out parts of the ship. It was too far away to make out any real detail, but I mean it was like a car on the highway. You know, when at first all you can see is the glow of the headlights. Then eventually as you get closer, you can see that there are two headlights. And eventually you can make out the outline of the car itself, even if the lights still blind you to all the rest of the car.

In this case, I realized the blue light was the glow of what had to be unbelievably powerful engines.

It was about then that the panic that I'd pushed to the back of my mind started to crawl to the front. The ship was getting closer and closer, and I felt like maybe we should get in the SUV and take off.

But I didn't say anything.

It wasn't that I wasn't afraid. I mean, part of me was more awestruck than terrified, but I was as scared as I'd ever been at the same time. I guess the fact that the ship wasn't doing anything kinda influenced me a bit too. It didn't descend and start firing lasers or anything. Actually as it got closer, I could see the blue lights of the engines falter more frequently. I could make out yellow sparks that I couldn't have made out two minutes ago.

I could see smoke.

"It's going to crash…" I said.

I said it before I was sure, but no sooner had the words left my mouth then the blue lights dimmed and the ship dipped sharply. It lurched sideways almost, like a car that had started to hydroplane, before the engines glowed bright again and the ship corrected. The craft was less straight now, shaking left and right, before dipping once more.

But right before I thought it would slam into the ground, the ship levelled off once more. The blue glow dimmed, and the ship slowed. I could feel an almost static charge, even though the ship had to be still a mile off. That should've worried me, but honestly what bothered me was the fact that I could feel the ship and yet still not really hear it. Not that the ship didn't make a noise, but I had been waiting for the kind of whooshing sound you hear as jets pass overhead and that noise just never came. Instead there was an odd humming at the limit of my hearing, like the high-pitch whine an old TV makes as it warms up, a not-quite audible noise.

The ship was close enough now that I could see more details of the ship. It seemed oddly tube-shaped, with wings shorter than I expected. It was made of a lustrous, dark substance. It could have been made of black glass, the way it caught the ambient starlight.

It was about half a mile away, hovering over the open clearing of the Moore Creek Preserve, when another burst of gold sparks exploded from the side of the ship. It lurched to left and dropped altitude once more. It didn't hit the ground, but it stopped moving. It just hovered there, half a mile from the barn, maybe twenty or thirty feet above the ground. The part of the Moore Creek Preserve that borders Cassie's property is predominantly open fields, but there are a few wooded creek beds, and it was over one of these little valleys that the ship came to a stop. Then the engines blinked rapidly and finally gave out. The ship descended about halfway and then fell out of the air as though an invisible cable had snapped.

And just then, all the streetlights went out, and Rachel's phone went black.

Yeah, that wasn't ominous or foreboding. Not at all.

But before I could consciously decide to do anything, Tobias had started running. He bolted down the hiking trail that cut through the thick outcrop of trees at the edge of Cassie's property. The rest of us looked at each other and somehow we were following him. No words, no conscious decision, just feet running along the footpath in the dark.

The tree branches overhead were creepy. Silhouetted against the faintest blue-grey glow of the night sky, they looked liked cruel hands, shaking menacingly in the heavy Pacific breeze. I could hear owls and insects in the night. Any other night, it would just be the sounds of an early summer night, but then it just seemed creepy. But more ominous by far was what waited for us when we emerged at the other side of the trees.

The ship was much smaller than I would have imagined. All told, it was maybe three or four times the size of my SUV, smaller than a school bus. It's design seemed to be vaguely segmented. The front end was a smooth, aerodynamic, oddly egg-shaped pod. The pod transitioned into a rather tubular structure around the middle, though flatter at the bottom. Marco said later that he thought it looked like a Twinkie, and I really have no better words for it. The tube tapered in the back, almost like a coach's whistle. On either side of the tube were short, almost stubby wings. Flying through space, I learned later, doesn't require much in terms of aerodynamics. The limited surface area of the wings wasn't meant to fly but rather to steer like the rudder of a ship. It was meant to land, not to fly. An escape pod.

At the end of each wing was almost something like a pontoon. Each pontoon seemed split horizontally with a glowing blue stripe. The glow was all but faded now, but those pontoons seemed to be the engine. It reminded me somewhat of the starship Enterprise. White smoke or steam billowed out of both of them, as though the blue glow were cooking the air around it. This despite the fact that I could feel no ambient heat.

There were no windows or visible doors, and the whole ship appeared to be made out of a dark red obsidian material. I could see large parts of the ship that looked like they had been partially melted and scarred. Here and there, sparks burst from one of the pontoons. Finally the last of the blue light faded.

The last thing I noticed was the fin on the top. It was placed like the tail fin on an airplane, but rather than curve toward the back, this fin curved toward the front. Along that fin was what appeared to be a cannon of some type.

I stared at the weapon for a long moment, suddenly much more aware of the unknown risks we had all taken. I thought of every alien encounter I had ever seen in movies or comics and I wasn't reassured whatsoever. We looked at each other again and I could see the fear on everyone's faces.

Tobias looked at me. He seemed to be the only one of us able to find any voice, but he looked me dead in the eye as he asked, "Should we try to make contact with it?"

I could think of any number of reasons why that was a bad idea. Very much against my will, I thought of the xenomorph from the Alien franchise. I was aware suddenly that everyone else was looking at me, waiting to see what I did.

When did I become the go-to guy for crash-landed aliens? Wasn't Tobias the one that had run over here at full-tilt?

My mouth didn't want to form words. I was terrified and my mind was moving too fast to form coherent thoughts. But at last, I got the words together. "H-h-hello? Are… Do you need help?"

"We come in peace," Marco said softly.

Rachel elbowed him in the ribs. "We won't hurt you," she said.

For a few seconds, nothing happened. But then invisible seams appeared in the hull of the ship and the front pod thing opened. The light from the interior of the ship was bright enough that at first all I could make out of the alien was a vague, black mass. But as he stepped out, I got the odd impression that the alien ship had been piloted by a deer.

The alien stood on four strong legs; legs that really did look very much like those of a deer until you looked closer. Then you could see the cloven hooves were different, that the fur wasn't right. The neck was too long, too thick. It was almost like a second torso, and I could make out that the creature had what appeared to be not-quite human arms, tucked awkwardly in front of the other legs. The alien had a roughly human shaped head, though it had fox- or bat-like ears and bright-green eyes. It had what looked to be small horns or antennae on its head, but as they moved, I realized they were a second pair of eyes set on tubular stalks.

The alien had no mouth that I could see. The face was almost moth-like, with the large eyes, the antennae-like second eyes. Where the nose should have been were just three vertical slits, and were the mouth should have been was an odd, almost hollow looking gap. It reminded me, oddly, of the front of Darth Vader's helmet.

The alien looked at us. Maybe it was as scared of us as we were of him. He didn't really look evil, though appearances aren't much to go by anyway. He looked honestly like some hybridization of a deer and a furry blue moth, like what a moth would look like if it had bones rather than an exoskeleton. Covered in blue fur, he had a whimsical, somewhat elfin appearance, and though the eyes were a bit creepy at first, they had a sense of calm wonder. He looked curious more than threatening. I think that was what kept us from panicking or bailing.

He took a few steps toward us, and the voice in my head - the voice that had been telling me non-stop to turn and run for the last who knows how many minutes - was oddly silent. Fear was slowly ebbing away, replaced by a sense of unimaginable curiosity. There was a sense of caution to it, most assuredly. But whereas five minutes ago I was worried this unknown alien might eat all of us, now it was like having a new puppy and wondering where it's going to go next. If he had looked like a monster, we wouldn't have stayed. But he looked harmless enough, and we didn't run. I wonder sometimes how much different things would be now if we had.

Tobias put a hand out, slowly. Yeah, I know that sounds like a cliché E. T. moment, but I swear to god, Tobias reached for it.

The alien staggered forward two steps, clasped Tobias's hand.

And then the alien collapsed.

Some people do really well in high-stress situations. There are the obvious examples, like firefighters and paramedics. They go through a lot of training to be able to handle extreme circumstances, but the bottom line is that it's something of a rare trait in general. You hear on the news about people that are in car accidents or house fires and just somehow instinctively just knew what to do. They react, and somehow manage to make rational decisions faster than others.

Cassie is one of those people.

She immediately placed her arms on Tobias's shoulders and moved him to the side. In less than two seconds, she not only knew what she had to do, but she had enough wherewithal in the situation to move Tobias, and to take a fraction of a heartbeat to do it gently. She could've pushed him out of the way and no one would've thought it rude given the circumstances, but that just wasn't Cassie.

She had untied the flannel shirt from her waist and was using it as a makeshift bandage, holding pressure to the wound we now saw in the alien's side. I'm not sure what kind of internal organs he may have had, but if it had been a deer, it would have been a gash from the last ribs to about the hip bone, and it was oozing an almost-black purple liquid. His blood looked like ink, and Cassie had it all over her hands.

She was that kind of person.

She wasn't squeamish, didn't hesitate. She knew she could help - or at least she knew she could help better than anyone else in the moment - and so she did.

"Jake, help me hold pressure here."

And I did. I'm not sure what the others were thinking then. Marco looked stunned, like the reality that a bleeding alien had landed in a small valley of the Moore Creek Preserve hadn't sunk in yet. Tobias had tears in his eyes. Rachel had a hand on his shoulder.

I held the pressure as Cassie had instructed. It was right then, crouched by the alien's hind legs, that I noticed the tail. It was surprisingly long, thick and muscular at the base, before tapering sharply about a third of the way down into a much thinner, more whip-like tail. At the end, there was a ten-inch blade, shaped like a scythe.

"Aww, shit," Marco sighed.

Up till then, I had thought of the alien as helpless. But I realized suddenly how dangerous things could turn. I put the thought out of my head. It wasn't willful ignorance. I wasn't trying to convince myself there was no danger. It simply didn't change anything. He needed help, tail blade or no tail blade.

"What do we do?" I asked.

Cassie now looked scared. Rushing to the alien had been a reflex. She was the daughter of vets. But, and I cannot stress this enough, Cassie was not herself a vet. She could change a bandage on a deer, she could hide a med in a piece of chicken to dose a fox, but she couldn't perform emergency veterinary surgery. All she knew to do was to stop the bleeding and she had as much guess as far as step two as any of us.. "I- I don't know. He's really bleeding, Jake. I'm not sure what to do."

"Should we get your parents?"

"I'm not sure they could help him, Jake. This wound is deep and who the hell could possibly understand his anatomy?"

"Do we have any better options?" I didn't snap, it was just a question.

Cassie shook her head. "No, you're right. My mom could probably get every emergency vet in California out here with a few phone calls."

"Cassie, there's no power and no cell service," Rachel said. "I rebooted my phone, but it's not finding the network. Not even 911 works. I can't imagine your mom's landline would have any better luck."

"Must be some kind of EMP." Marco added. I don't think he was trying to be helpful so much as just thinking aloud, but an electromagnetic pulse definitely fit the bill for the blackout.

"Cassie, your dad has an diesel generator in the barn, right?" I asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"If Rachel can reboot her phone, then the generator should be able to turn on the lights in the barn. Your mom can operate, can't she?"

Cassie nodded nervously. "Yeah, on Earth animals. Her specialty is big cats, Jake. I don't know what she can do for him."

"Let's go wake up your mom and find out. Can we move him or do you have gurneys or skiffs in the barn?"

"We should go."

We all turned to Marco.

"We can't just let him die, Marco." I said it with a finality I hadn't known I had. I realized abruptly that I'd made a decision already, and I wasn't backing down from it.

"Guys, I'm sure people saw that meteor shower before the blackout. The power is still out, so I think that's the bigger priority for the first responders. But I'd bet money that, sooner or later, someone is going to find this. And when we get Cassie's mom so she can bring her vet friends over to play alien autopsy, we will probably be detained by some government acronym for weeks or months. It could be the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, DHS, it doesn't really matter. We will probably be shuttled through all them one after another, over and over again. All while we spend who fucking knows how long in quarantine while the CDC runs every conceivable test on every bodily fluid and tissue they can put under a microscope. We do not want to be here when the fucking Men In Black show up."

I stared at him for a long moment. None of us said anything. Marco had stood there this whole time, analyzing everything for likely outcomes, and what he said was probably all true. Part of my hesitation was because I wanted to tell him off. I wanted to tell him he was full of it, that he was wrong. But there were no holes in that argument. Someone was going to find this. Cassie and I were covered in alien blood. They would probably cordon off most of the county. The National Guard might be here tomorrow. Hell, they might be here in an hour for all I knew. Marco was absolutely sure that he was right, and I trusted his judgment. Our lives would be flushed down the toilet the second anyone found out we were here.

"No," I said.

"Jake, come on you know I-"

"Marco, I know you're right. We probably will all regret this tomorrow. But I don't give a shit right now. I'm not going to stand here and let him die just because it might be easier on me personally. You want to bail, go. None of us will judge. You know the way. Hell, I can give you the keys. Take Tobias and Rachel with you. I don't want to see any of you screwed over because of this." I looked at Cassie and saw her resolve before I added, "Cass and I will stay."

Marco stared at me, glanced at the keys hanging from my outstretched hand, then looked at the alien again. "Damn it. Cassie, where are the skiffs?"

"It doesn't matter. We're not going to be able to move him without help. I'm going to go get my mom."

The second she stood up, an alien hand grabbed her by the wrist.