Wild Dogs

Pilot

“Tom, shoot it already!” Billy screams.

It’s three in the morning. We’re thundering down the desert road. I hardly hear him over the wind. I’m on the passenger windowsill of an old RV hanging off the handle above the door. I’m in a housecoat. For the sixth or seventh time, the RV jerks and I nearly fly onto the side of the road.

Billy’s German shepherd between the seats barks at my target.

“Drive straight, I can’t aim!” I holler back.

“Flow with the Tao, Tom! You’ve got a clear shot!”

I’ve never held an RPG before — not that I remember anyway. Billy says I have. He’s known me for eighteen years but I’ve only known him a few days.

He said: “your eyes and hands will remember, just trust them.”

I didn’t.

I grit my teeth. I raise the launcher again. The UFO is matching speed with us up ahead, hovering ten or fifteen feet above the road. It seems to taunt us. The saucer’s the great white whale to Billy’s Ahab and it knows it is.

Every time I have a shot, the blazing disk flashes left, right, up or down. You never know where it’ll go until it’s there. It blitzes around impossibly fast. It won’t line up with the weapon for more than a moment. I’m afraid I’ll miss and blow up a casino in Vegas.

“Shoot it!”

“Piss off! I’m trying!”

More barking.

I take aim and it darts to the right. I aim again. Like lightning it shoots up and back to left.

The tires bite sand and veer back. I flinch and swing toward the road. The bazooka sways down and strikes the door, nearly slipping on the sweat of my palm. Thank God my finger’s not on the trigger.

“Watch the road!”

“I’m watching the thing!”

“I’m watching the thing, Billy, you watch the road!”

“If you were watching you’d have shot it!”

He’s going at least a hundred miles an hour. The dazzling disk flares and glisters with a million neon hues. It looks like a carnival on drugs. I move my finger to the trigger. I start to aim—

Billy strikes a pothole. The front wheel drops and jumps up hard. My finger slips.

Bang!

The rocket shrieks. The saucer blows open like fireworks. The RV tears past it as it strikes the desert dust and barrels end over end flaming and flashing.

“Tom, she’s down! She’s down!” Billy whoops and howls with laughter. “Eat desert, you demon bitch!” He slams the brakes and pulls onto the dusty shoulder. He parks, jumps out of his seat and grabs a shotgun off the floor as he races for the door. “Hurry, Tom!” The door’s left ajar. The dog bolts after him.

I grab the pistol in the footwell and hurry out with bare feet. There’s no time to put shoes on.

The desert air is cool and still. I smell dust, diesel and something else. Sour. Ozone. It’s a new moon. I hear nothing but crickets and the crackle and pop of frayed electrics in the distance — that and the roaring laughter of Billy Drake. When I step around the RV, he’s just a shadow racing with the dog at the downed craft nearly jumping for joy. They’re already quite distant.

He looks back. “Tom, come on! The government’s coming!”

I hobble after him as best I can with the bite of little stones underfoot in the sand. Blazing pulses ripple up and down along the slopes and contours of the thing dug into the faraway rut. It’s a throbbing rainbow inferno. I’ve never seen anything like it.

The closer we creep to the machine, the more blinding its burning halo gets and the deeper and darker the night becomes. It lays askew on its belly, half dug into the torn up furrow it’s scored in the earth. There’s a hole on the underside of the sloped up end, blown open by the rocket. Billy gets there first but waits for me.

He looks at me. “Tom?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t even blink.” He reaches into his pocket and hands me his keys to the RV. I pocket them.

Billy walks under the breach and peers into the saucer’s guts. “Give me a boost,” he says. I grab his legs and heave him high enough to get an arm over the ledge. The dog and I watch him clamber over and vanish.

“My God,” I hear him say.

“What do you see?”

He’s gone a while. When he comes back, he lays flat at the breach’s edge, he says: “Argos, stay.” The dog sits. He reaches down. Pocketing my gun, I jump and grab his hand. He heaves me up and into the wound.

The craft is cold to the touch. Smooth all throughout. I see not a seam, sharp edge or angle anywhere. It’s made of a gleaming silvery metal. Looks like platinum.

The chamber’s dark except for a shaft of bloody red light at the heart. The misty crimson shines down from the cupola and coats a great round console encircled by four seats. Strapped into two of them are a pair of limp humanoid creatures with bald heads hanging limp.

Billy hands me his silver lighter. When I strike it, the whole chamber shimmers in the dancing light. Shotgun ready, he steps to the bodies and the console but he doesn’t look worried. He prods the temple of one with the barrel of the gun, then he prods the other. Neither responds. Dead.

I step closer. In the rosy light, both things look human; but sickly with an unnatural pallor. Both men have thin lips and dark circles around closed, deeply sunken eyes. They’re garbed in seamless black flight suits. Their colorless hands and scalps are completely hairless.

Billy gives me a glance and crouches in front of one. With a thumb and forefinger, he opens its eye. In the murky light, the pupil contracts and flicks up to meet his smirking gaze.

“Got you,” he sneers.

The pupil flicks to me and dilates.

I want to throw up. “Are they human?”

“Not anymore. This is a drone,” he says. “Isn’t that right?” The pupil darts back to him. The drone does not move, nor does it open the other eye.

“What’s a drone?” I ask him.

“Parasite. Fungal organism. This one’s got just enough juice left to sustain these neurons a little longer. It’s infested his whole system. If I cracked his head open, it would be dry inside.”

“Can it infect us?”

“It can’t take unless you want it to.”

Billy stands up, taking in every detail of the craft. He grabs the golden cross around his neck and kisses it. “Do you have any idea how long you and I have been trying to catch one of these?”

I shake my head.

“Almost a decade now. We started hunting them in high school. Got close to a few but I don’t know if I ever believed we’d actually get one.”

“What did we want with them?”

Billy grins at me. “To nab the crown jewel.” He saunters to the console and steps on top of it. He reaches down into a slot in the center and slides out a black cube. He holds it up in the red beam. It’s small enough to fit easily in his hand, though it looks heavy for its size.

Billy smiles at the object and then at me. “Thomas Flint, I present to you the navigation module.”

“How does it work?”

“I only have an approximate notion. I was putting undue trust in hearsay just believing they were real — but I had a hunch.” He narrows his eyes at the cube.

I hear the dog. We both turn to the breach.

Billy stuffs the cube in his jacket pocket. “We’ll play with it later.” We both hurry to the breach and jump down from the ship. Argos stands alert at the edge of the rut. He’s barking frantically at something.

“What’s wrong, boy?” Billy asks.

When I step out of the saucer’s trench and follow the dog’s gaze, I don’t see anything. The halo of the ship stretches away until the desert is engulfed by a pitch black curtain. Argos’ ears are pressed flat. He looks terrified.

“Run.” Billy says.

I take off for the RV with Argos. Billy stays behind for a spell, then tails us.