“Over here!” cried Burton. He was kneeling by a body, with another one beyond him. “They’re alive!”
“That’s the other two,” cried Mack. “That’s Ron Turley, and Bamma McClure!”
“Bamma,” murmured McClellan to himself, wandering farther into the trees. “What did he do to deserve a name like that? Now where’s the coach? If I’m right, we’ll find him, but not the other boy, the Shipton boy.” He leaned momentarily against a tree trunk to remove a cinder from his shoe, then caught sight of a red shirt. “Here’s the coach,” he cried.
The man was unconscious, but seemingly uninjured. As though he’d been anesthetized. In fact, all three of them seemed to have been anesthetized.
When the ambulances departed with the three unconscious men, McClellan sat down next to Angelica Shipton and waved her sympathizers away. For a time he didn’t say anything. He was reflecting on his earlier euphoria, considering whether pride had had any part in it. It was pride that supposedly went before a fall, and oh, boy, was this going to be a fall. From blessing the ET’s to damning them, in one easy circuit.
“Look, miss,” he said gravely. “They took your brother. And it looks like they thought they got you, too, because Mack Dugan called both of you by your names. And, it looks like it was done by those predators we heard about on TV, but it’s not the kind of thing they’ve been doing. I mean, right here, in the open, on the campus isn’t the way they’ve been operating. They’ve been more . . . sneaky than that. So, I got to ask you, why would these predator ET’s want to come after you and your brother?”
Angelica stared at him from tear-bleared eyes, her head moving from side to side in baffled negation. “I don’t know! I have no idea! Why would they? I mean, why us?”
“Your parents, miss. I’d like to get in touch with your parents.”
Angelica shook her head, and began to laugh hysterically. “You can’t,” she said. “I can’t. Carlos tried to call our father yesterday and couldn’t find him. And Mother . . . she’s moved. She calls me, but she doesn’t have a number where we can call her yet . . .”
Back at the precinct, McClellan reported to the captain, only to have the captain murmur, “What’s that stink, Mac?”
“Stink? I can’t smell anything. I’ve got a cold.”
The captain rose and came around his desk, sniffing. He sniffed at McClellan, front and back, then said, “Take off your jacket and look at the back of it. It’s all over goo.”
McClellan removed the jacket. It did have goo on it, like . . . something waxy or tarry. “I leaned up against a tree at the campus,” he remarked, wonderingly.
The captain stared at him for some time, nostrils twitching. “You thought it was a tree.”
Benita—FRIDAY
Early Friday evening, Benita’s phone rang, and she shuddered. Each time she heard the sound, she had a renewed feeling of doom. When she took a deep breath and picked it up, however, it was only Chad, saying he had enjoyed their dinner together and would she be interested in a movie.
What she really wanted to do was scream. Recent events had combined to give her the feeling there were snakes under the furniture, things ready to jump out at her. She tried to shake off the nervy, antsy mood, deciding she’d probably feel better not being alone. Besides, she liked Chad, so she said yes, why not a movie.
Chad had paid her a good deal of attention recently, which both pleased her and made her slightly uncomfortable. He was married. And though she wasn’t even forty, doing without sex had not been a big problem for her. Sex with Bert had not been pleasurable for . . . well, for virtually their entire married life. She found it hard to understand how she had convinced herself she loved him, way back when. Of course, he’d been young, and he hadn’t been the big drinker he turned out to be within two or three years, by which time she had been grateful to be let alone. So, when a man was nice to her, complimentary, as Chad was, and kind in his attentions, it was nice but it also made her apprehensive, as though enjoying the attention, any of it, might be equivalent to committing herself to something unearned, forbidden, or inappropriate. Not that Chad had made a single gesture in that direction, but he was a thoughtful, intelligent man, and as she kept reminding herself, being alone with a thoughtful, intelligent man wasn’t something she was used to.