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They all looked back at the commotion their sighting had caused. This far away, they were invisible in the dark, but they weren’t going to take any chances.
“I think we’re going to need to stick to night time outings. With this shiny coating, we’ll draw too much of that kind of attention in the daylight.” Jake suggested.Property of Nô)(velDr(a)ma.Org.
Sam thought that was good advice and nodded with a smile. Besides, he was too charged up to think about sleeping.
“Where do we go now?” Brenda asked. She was still riding the high from the running and from the energy she got from the magically charged and enhanced wheat field.
Sam looked to the far horizon and saw a distant flash. He reached out to take Jeannie’s hand. She smiled the moment she picked up his intent through their connection. Words were redundant. She reached for Brenda’s hand, and that woman held Jake’s hand. They all shared a grin.
Storm chasing it was.
-=-
Colonel Crane watched in frustration as the four silver beings raced away at inhuman speeds. “Who fired his weapon,” he barked.
“Corporal Yablonski, sir,” his sergeant replied.
“Yablonski! Sergeant Tennison will be drilling you on basic weapons handling tonight,” he growled.
“Yes, Colonel!” returned an embarrassed and worried response.
“Do we have a visual on them? Anything on the new radar tech?” Crane asked.
“Negative Colonel. They scattered the radar too widely to get a read on them.”
“Did anyone see which way they went?” he asked in frustration.
“Thataway, sir!” Yablonski said anxiously, pointing across the field.
Crane looked to his sergeant. “Get a team over to the other side of the field to see if there’s any evidence of their passing through. I doubt they’re still there.”
The woman rushed off to send one of their trucks to perform the search.
The Colonel walked up to the personnel carrier and spoke to the driver. “Green! You were closest. What did you get on the camera?”
The driver tapped the tablet mounted on the dash of his truck and frowned. “Just a lot of weird reflections, Colonel. There wasn’t a lot of light at first, but even when we had the headlights pointed in their direction and swung the spot at them, the picture went to shit!” He tried rolling the frames by slowly, but none showed the target clearly.
“Dammit!” Gordon snapped.
“I don’t know why the camera is so messed up, but what we saw were four mirror-like silver people standing in the wheat,” Green said. “One was shorter than the others.”
“What were they doing, though?” Gordon asked as he stared out at the field.
One of the other soldiers from the first truck trotted up to the Colonel. “I don’t see anything where they were standing, but it looked like they were picking something up.”
Gordon looked at the two harvesters positioned like they were going to venture out into the field. The cab doors were open as well. “Get me the names of the two drivers. They might have witnessed the pseudo-clouds in battle.” The team was supposed to arrive before the clouds met, but they’d been delayed as their new radar imaging tech was delivered to the airport late.
Corporal Dane, standing next to him, rushed over to the first big machine and climbed up to the cab. He spotted a photo pinned to the window. A young and happy couple, the man with a goofy smile and his shorter, thick wife beaming a blissful smile at the camera. There was another man in the background. He plucked the picture from the window. There was writing on the back. Then he spotted some sandwiches resting on the seat. He left his lunch?
He looked over at the other harvester and saw his sergeant climbing down with a lunch bag in her hand.
Dane climbed out and down and followed Mick back to the Colonel. Mick was showing him the contents of the lunch bag. There was a letter inside, a bill from the cable company, and a highlighted circle on the bill around the total.
“We have a name. Jake Miller. His address isn’t too far from here.” Crane said with satisfaction.
Dane displayed the picture he found in the harvester he climbed into. “This may be the driver of the other vehicle. The names Sam, Jeannie, and Jake are printed on the back.”
The truck that had investigated the other side of the field returned, and Yablonski hopped out to rush over to the Colonel. “We found evidence of them breaking through the gate on the other side, but they left no trace on the broken gate.”
Crane looked at Green. “Isolate the sharpest frame from the video showing these beings.”
He looked to the sergeant. “Start doing a sweep. See if you can find anything these beings might have been here to collect. I’m taking a team with me to this Jake Miller’s place to see if he can shed any light on what they saw.”
He walked back to his truck, and his driver moved them back out onto the highway. It only took fifteen minutes to reach the farmhouse, and they pulled off onto the dirt driveway. As they climbed out of the truck, Gordon shone his flashlight across the yard, and something caught the light and reflected it back. He stopped and walked out onto the grass and found a large thermos lying on its side. Close by was a set of keys and a wallet. The tattered remains of a woman’s tracksuit and shredded men’s jeans were found as well. Next to the thermos were two piles of clothes, a man’s and a woman’s, not torn but in good condition.
Crane’s driver, Corporal Dulane, walked up to stand next to him. The stocky young man looked at the clothes and back to the Colonel. “They got undressed on the front lawn?”
Gordon picked up the wallet and checked the ID. Sam Lagrange. There was a picture of his cute, cherubic wife inside as well. She was shorter than the others, and it suddenly clicked in his head. “I think we may have found our silver people.”
His driver found the wallet in the back pocket of the intact jeans. “Jake Miller,” he read aloud. “I guess they didn’t need clothes anymore?” Dulane asked.
“Look at the condition of these clothes.” He paused to absorb what he was seeing. “Jake Miller lived here. The other two didn’t. They probably ran here. We saw how fast they move. These clothes are destroyed. The fabric probably couldn’t endure the speed.”
“Colonel! We found something!”
Crane turned towards the house and saw the front door was open, and Specialist Green was standing in the doorway. The Colonel joined the Specialist and followed him inside. They stopped in the living room. “Signs of a struggle?” Green asked. There was minor damage on either side of the room, and in the middle on the floor was a fine gold mesh with small, dull yellow stones at the wire’s intersections. The gems contained visible inclusions.
“Is this amber?” the Specialist asked.
“Don’t touch it barehanded but get it into a sample container. We’re taking it with us,” Crane explained, then took another look around. There was a tiny piece of foil in a lunch bag on the floor. He looked closer at the shiny piece of metal and noticed it wasn’t wrinkled as tin foil would be. “Put that bag and the foil in a sample container too.”
He saw more pictures of the two couples. He pulled one from a frame as it showed all four people facing the camera. These had to be the people they saw. “Let’s go people, we have to move.”
He made his way outside and looked for an address in Sam’s wallet. He looked to Dulane. “Get me an address for Sam Lagrange.” The Corporal nodded and rushed back to the truck.
Once Specialist Green was in the truck with the sample container, they headed off to the other home. It proved to be a trailer, and Crane let himself in with the keys he brought with him. Inside, they found more of the mesh. A piece of furniture was broken in the bedroom as well.
They hustled back outside and drove back to the field. Once they were parked, the Colonel went to speak with the sergeant. The men were still doing a sweep of the area. Gordon dug out the picture of the four people. He gestured for Mick to join them. He showed her the photo as she’d been at the front with Green.
“Based on body shape and height, could these four people be the ones you saw?” he asked.
She looked at the image, and slowly she began to nod. “Height wise, they look like a match. It was hard to make out any features though, as the reflections were insane… sir.”
Crane nodded to her and moved back to his truck. He looked to his driver. “I need you to get me everything available on these four people. Names and addresses of family, friends, coworkers, anyone who might offer them shelter.” Dulane nodded and went to work.
Crane didn’t really believe they would seek out family. He didn’t think these four beings were the same people anymore. He looked out over the field of wheat as he contemplated this latest development. The Glass People were odd enough, but this was something completely new. The next phase?
It had been Colonel Devlin’s theory that they were looking at preliminary attempts at some kind of invasion. The people of Earth were being replaced with these alien monsters. Devlin told him they were lucky the replacements were so easily identified. If they looked human, there’d be no way to stop them. The Colonel told him they would have to act decisively to protect their country, and the world would follow their lead.
He would have to return to Washington to report this new type of invader to the Director and the other two men, whose names he still didn’t have.
He frowned. He didn’t like investigating unexplainable shit.
Or having to report it to mystery men.
Lorelei Reichenbach, a young up-and-coming artist in high demand, sat alone at the small bar set up in the corner of the art gallery. She felt drained, disappointed, and worse of all, lonely.
Her latest showing had been another smash success, with all three of her paintings being snapped up by collectors after a feverish bidding war. When it looked like the bidding on the third painting would result in a fight between two Octogenarians, Lorelei was forced to defuse the pressure in the room with a quiet little song she sang just under a perceptible hearing level. Her ability to control others with her singing was a new talent for her, but she was quickly learning its limits. Living in such a dynamic city with so many wildly different people, she’d had plenty of opportunities to hone her skills and had mastered subtle techniques for managing people around her. The biggest drawback of her new expertise was that she’d caught herself manipulating Emily, her lover.
When she realized what she was doing, it stung like a brutal slap. She couldn’t forgive herself for breaking the promise she’d made to herself. The next morning, she broke up with the beautiful blonde and sent her on her way with enough money in her bank account to carry her comfortably for six months. She eased Emily’s heart and mind with a song for her final manipulation. Emily had a good job, and with her skills and looks, she’d be fine. Emily wouldn’t be alone for long.
The same couldn’t be said for Lorelei. While she’d received plenty of compliments for being tall, svelte, and lovely, she wasn’t as approachable as Emily. A small part of that might be due to how her mood lately matched her choice color palette, dark and cool. She preferred dark blue-black lipstick and nail polish and black eyeshadow.
It was more likely due to how the important people in her life, aside from Emily, had all failed her, leaving her with trust issues. She’d built a wall around herself.
She sighed as she was just procrastinating. It was time to go home, but her condo was empty, and she wasn’t looking forward to sleeping alone again. She could easily find someone to warm the sheets with her, but her skin crawled at the thought of manipulating a stranger to have sex. She wasn’t feeling strong enough tonight to do it without relying on her abilities.
So, alone it was.