Lost and Found Read online

  “Or something.” Seeing that the visitor was not about to further challenge Haskell’s departure, Snakeyes relented a little. “Might be pregnant.”

  All of the proverbial chips Walker had collected that evening evaporated like the metaphor they were. Neither of the two blonds was the woman’s husband. Snakeyes was the woman’s brother. Which suggested strongly that the probable daddy of the satellite TV installer’s possibly imminent offspring was likely not to be found in the immediate vicinity. Perhaps not even in the great state of California. Clearly, the situation thus implied was not one to make for lasting familial bliss.

  Walker found himself longing for the harsh comfort and isolation of the sleeping bag lying in the tent he had set up on the south shore of Cawley Lake.

  “Sorrynoharmintended,” he blurted hastily as he slid off the stool and whipped out his wallet in one motion. He ended up overtipping the impassive bartender, but there was no way he was going to wait around for his change.

  Snakeyes didn’t move, but neither did he shift his stance to block Walker’s retreat. He did, however, favor the departing commodities trader with a pithy comment and a withering stare.

  “Don’t bullshit me, dude. But no harm done—that’s for sure.”

  Out in the chill darkness of the parking lot, the hitherto reliable 4X4 chose that evening to not start. Walker’s attention kept shifting frequently back and forth between the glassy rectangle of a door that was the entrance to the bar and the recalcitrant ignition. The entryway remained deserted. When the engine finally turned over, so did his emotions. He backed carefully out of the dirt parking area. All he needed now, he knew, was to back into some local’s precious pickup.

  Moments later he was safely out on the road. Half a mile up the state highway he swung left onto the gravel track that led up to the lake. After repeated glances into the rearview mirror showed an absence of headlights behind him, he finally relaxed.

  Well, it had been a charming if not charmed evening right up until the end. As he put the Durango into four-wheel drive, he realized that he’d actually been lucky. Suppose Snakeyes and the blond brothers hadn’t shown up at the bar? Suppose he’d gone home with pretty Janey to check out her installation skills and brother brusque and his buds had come a-knockin’ on her front door to remind her of her upcoming date with her favorite OB-GYN dude? Yes, it might easily have been worse.

  Instead, he had extricated himself quickly and cleanly from what could have been an exceedingly unpleasant situation. By the time he reached the lake and turned east along its southern shore, he was almost whistling to himself.

  As far as he knew, he’d had the whole lake to himself for at least a day. The last campers, a cheerful elderly couple up from Grass Valley, had packed up and trundled out in their aged camper on Tuesday. In contrast to his increasing unease at the lack of human company, after tonight’s confrontation he found himself looking forward to a night, and perhaps a following day, of isolation. Just him and the birds, the fish, the flowers, and an occasional grazing deer.

  His tent by the lake was undisturbed, the gear stored inside untouched. That was the nice thing about insured rental equipment, he reflected as he braked the 4X4 to a halt, switched off the engine, and hopped out. You could wander off on a hike or a fishing expedition and just leave everything. This wasn’t Yosemite or Sequoia. Cawley Lake was pretty out of the way, even for the north-central Sierras. That was why he and his friends had chosen it as the site of their little bet.

  The compact propane heater soon had the interior of the dome tent toasty warm while the battery-powered lantern rendered the interior bright enough for him to read from one of the paperbacks he had brought along. Not one to stint when it wasn’t necessary, Walker had rented a pop-up shelter large enough to accommodate three adequately and himself in comparative comfort. Having filled up in town on bar snacks, he decided to skip what at that point in time would have been an uncomfortably late supper. After the tension of the near fight, the rented microfiber sleeping bag beckoned enticingly.

  He allowed himself an imported chocolate bar (perhaps made with chocolate liquor whose base component he himself had once bid on) and some cold water, then slipped out of his clothes and into the sleeping bag. Reaching up, he switched off the light, then the propane heater. It would get cold in the tent, but not in the bag. Come morning, he would switch the heater on again before emerging. Anyway, the cold didn’t really bother him. He was from Chicago.

  The territorial night owl began hoo-hooting again, and he wondered at its species. Certainly it was more mellow than the night owls he was used to dealing with back home. Occasionally, something snapped twigs or rustled leaf litter outside the tent. The first couple of nights, the furtive noises had kept him awake. Initial worrisome thoughts of mountain lions and bears gave way to those of coyotes, then beavers, and finally, mice and ground squirrels. Nothing nibbled at his toes. He was not the natural food of the local predators, he reassured himself, and the tent not the kind of burrow they were used to invading in search of prey.

  Subsiding adrenaline had kept him alert on the road. Now, as he relaxed, its effects diminished while those of the Russian lemonade grew stronger. Consciousness faded quickly, along with any lingering concerns.

  2

  The crunching woke him. Lying in the sleeping bag, half awake and half asleep, he struggled to revive his muzzy mental faculties. Had he imagined the sound? Had he dreamed it?

  Sss-crunchh—there it was again. He raised himself up on one elbow, suddenly wide awake. The noise had not been made by a mouse, or by one of the pushy pack rats that haunted his campsite keen on petty theft. It was loud and distinctive and strongly hinted at significant weight being applied to the talkative earth. Bear? he wondered as he sat all the way up inside the tent. Deer?

  Or worse—one or more of the transalpine drunken troublemakers who habituated the sole drinking establishment of metropolitan Bug Jump, California?

  Parting words of reassurance notwithstanding, maybe just seeing off his besotted gravid sister’s temporary gentleman friend hadn’t been enough to satisfy Shorty Snakeyes’s beleaguered ego. How had they found him? Slipping out of the sleeping bag as noiselessly as possible, Walker dressed in silence, working out of a crouch as he fought with the jeans that kept trying to trip him, staring through the gauzy tent material at every imagined shape and shadow.

  It wouldn’t have been too hard to track him down. With Cawley Lake as deserted as it was now, close to the end of the season, there were only so many places a visiting camper was likely to pitch a tent. Doubtless a few local fishermen or hikers had seen him up here. In a small town, word about lingering visitors would get around fast.

  He felt better when he was fully dressed. Somehow, the thought of getting beaten up while stark naked was far more unsettling. Not that it would matter to his doctor. Or to his friends, who upon his return and reappearance in Chicago would torment him mercilessly for weeks with chorused fusillades of well-meaning “I told you so’s.”

  Fumbling in the dark, he found the fisherman’s steel multitool he’d brought with him and unfolded the long blade. Sometimes just a show of resistance would be enough to put off potential assailants. It was one thing to jump some poor tourist caught half asleep in the sack, quite another to confront a fully awake 220-pound opponent holding a knife. If they had guns, however, he would just have to resign himself to taking a beating.

  More rustling noises, near the front of the tent this time. Reaching down, Walker picked up the compact high-beam flashlight. Flash them in the eyes, startle ’em, and then stare them down, he thought rapidly. They shouldn’t be expecting it.

  That the bent-over figure that quickly unzipped the tent flap and thrust its head inside was not expecting to have a bright light shined in its eyes was made immediately clear by its reaction. It let out a startled roar, covered both horizontally flattened eyes with the sucker-studded, flexible flaps that comprised the forward third of its upper appendag
es, sharply retracted the membranous hearing sensor that protruded from near the top of its conical skull, and jerked back out of the shelter.

  Gaping open-mouthed at the unzipped entrance flap, Walker was somehow not reassured by the sudden retreat of the intruder. He did, finally, remember to breathe.

  “What in the hell . . . ?”

  It was not yet October. Therefore, it was still a while until Halloween. It did not matter. Whatever had pushed the forepart of its outrageous self into his tent had not been in costume. You could tell these things. Yet, it could not be real, either. So, if it was not real, then why was he shaking so badly that the inside of the tent looked as if it was under attack by a flotilla of fireflies?

  When his trembling hand finally steadied, so did the flashlight it clutched in a death grip. The firefly armada resolved once again into a single circlet of illumination that waited patiently on the inner lining of the pop-up shelter. Wishing he was at that moment anywhere else, even in Bug Jump’s only tavern, Walker extended a tentative hand toward the tent flap, pulled it aside, and peered out through the resultant opening.

  The creature whose unprotected eyes had taken the full brunt of his flashlight’s LEDs was folded on the ground next to the lakeshore. Standing over it was another of the nocturnal apparitions. This one was holding a device that blinked some sort of dull brown beam rapidly off and on into its companion’s face. The standing being was slightly under seven feet tall and, assuming its density was not unlike that of a terrestrial creature, between three and four hundred pounds in weight. Its enormous eyes were perhaps two inches high and six or seven long. Nearly meeting in the center of the sloping face, where a nose ought to have been, they curved almost around to the sides of the tapering head. Moonlight gleaming off the light purple flesh visible outside the creature’s attire revealed that its epidermis was pebbled, like a golf ball.

  As a partially paralyzed Walker looked on, the creature administering the ophthalmological treatment to its ocularly challenged companion noticed the astounded simian gawking at them from the confines of its small, flexible sanctuary. Raising one boneless arm (or cartilage-stiffened tentacle), it fluttered the end of its sucker flap in Walker’s direction and uttered something in a deep, nasal (particularly interesting, given the absence of visible nostrils) voice that sounded like an imploding garbage disposal.

  “Sikrikash galad vume!”

  Having no intention of being vumed, Walker slapped his left front pocket one time to make sure his car keys were still there, burst out of the tent, heart pounding, and raced for the SUV. Despite his mostly sedentary job, as an ex-athlete he had stayed in very good shape, and he covered the intervening gap at impressive speed. The vehicle’s comforting bulk beckoned to him like the heated entryway of a downtown shopping mall in mid-January.

  Aliens! he thought wildly to himself as he ran. Real, honest-to-God, out-of-this-world, from-off-this-planet extraterrestrials. They didn’t look like E.T. They weren’t slim and short and big-headed, bald, and naked. He was willing to bet, based just on the little he had seen and heard and smelled, that they weren’t genital-less, either. They were solid, loud, oversized, and focused. Nothing about them was in the least bit ethereal. And he had (temporarily, he hoped) blinded one.

  Confronted with the same situation, he had friends back home who would probably have moseyed over, raised a hand or two, smiled ingenuosly, and chirped, “Welcome!” Not Marcus Walker. There were backstreets in Chicago where it would be unwise to do that, too, and instinct told him that it would be unwise to do so now. If these nocturnal visitors wanted company, they could head down the hill to Bug Jump, where their passing resemblance to some of the locals ought to better facilitate any encounter.

  Wrenching open the driver’s side door, he threw himself into the front seat and behind the wheel, slamming the door shut behind him and thumbing its power lock. Clutching the keys, his right hand stabbed at the ignition as if he were trying to gouge the mechanical life out of the steering column. He cursed silently, having occasionally had a similar problem with women.

  A massive shape appeared next to the door and blocked out the moon. Horizontally stretched eyes, like dark rubber bands with pupils, gazed unblinkingly in at him. An actual chill ran down the middle of his back, but he had no energy to spare for shivering.

  The key finally found its way into the ignition. As he jammed it forward, the engine roared to life. The lights came on to reveal two more of the flap-armed purplish giants standing directly in front of the vehicle. They wore what looked in the SUV’s lights like tight-fitting clothes fashioned of pounded pewter. One raised both upper appendages to shield its ghastly longitudinal eyes against the glare of the headlights. The other pointed something at the 4X4’s windshield.

  With a groan of protesting metal, the driver’s side door was yanked open as if he had never locked it. A long, loose flap of soft, heavy flesh thrust inward—a slick-skinned nightmare. Walker tried to put the SUV in gear. Flap-mounted suckers latched onto his shoulder and left arm. It felt as if he were being simultaneously attacked by a dozen vacuum cleaners. As he fought to put the SUV in reverse, he felt himself being pulled out of the seat. For the first time in his life, he was truly and deeply sorry that he had forgotten to fasten his seat belt. He told himself that there had not been enough time for him to do so, even had he retained the presence of mind to remember to do it.

  He did not scream, but he was hyperventilating rapidly, gasping in short, sharp intakes of breath. Unceremoniously, the creature turned and began dragging him across the ground. Staggering to his feet, Walker gripped the limb that was holding him, using both hands to tug at the part between the sucker-lined flap and the massive body. As if surprised by the resistance, the creature turned. Looking for a vulnerable place to kick and finding nothing recognizable, Walker settled for slamming his right foot into the canyon between the two supportive limbs that likewise terminated in sucker-lined flaps (though unlike the upper appendages, these were sheathed in open-topped plates of what looked like black plastic, as if the owner had been shod rather than shoed). The blow had no effect on his captor.

  Should’ve hung on to the flashlight, he railed at himself.

  The creature did, however, respond to this show of physical resistance. The other arm flap swung around and landed hard against the side of Walker’s head. It felt as if he’d been hit with a fifty-pound sack of wet oatmeal. A literal sucker punch, it dropped him immediately. Dazed and stunned, he sensed himself being picked up and carried.

  The other pair of aliens, including the one he had initially strobed, were waiting by the side of their craft. It was not all that big, Walker reflected through the dull, pounding haze that had fogged his mind. No bigger than an eighteen-wheeler. On the way in, the individual into whose longwise eyes Walker had aimed his flashlight reached out to whack him solidly on the back of his skull, setting his head ringing. So much for the theoretical ethical superiority of star-spanning alien civilizations, he thought weakly.

  Then he passed out.

  When he regained consciousness, the first thing Walker saw was his tent sitting where he had set it up, on a slight rise beside the lake. He was lying on the gravel scree between tent and water. It was midmorning; the mountain air cool and fresh, the pollution-free alpine glow casting every gray boulder and contemplative cloud in sharp relief. The air smelled of pine, spruce, and water clear and clean enough to bottle. In a dark, stunted tree, a raucous Steller’s jay was arguing over a nut with a single-minded chipmunk. The rush of white water was a siren call in the distance, where the main feeder stream entered the lake on its far side.

  Recollecting aliens, he sat up fast.

  It was not a good idea. The action should have been preceded by reasoned thought and a preliminary check of his physical condition. Wincing, he felt gingerly of the side of his face where he had been smacked. It was still sore and probably bruised. Of aliens and alien craft there was no sign, not even depressions in the ground w
here their vehicle had rested.

  Fruit juice would do nothing for his soreness, but it would slake his thirst. Making his way back to the tent, he fumbled with his supplies until he found one of the plastic bottles with the bright label. It was half full of orange liquid. He drained the contents, set the empty neatly aside for transporting down to a recycle bin in Bug Jump, and considered whether or not he had been dreaming. The tenderness in his face and head aside, it was hard to believe that he had imagined everything that had happened to him. It had gone on too long, involved too many elements, was remembered in too much detail to be nothing more than a figment of his imagination. Without straining, he was able to replay the entire encounter in his mind: everything from the initial sounds he had detected outside his tent, to the first alien sticking its god-awful face practically into his own, to his ultimately futile attempts at flight.

  What might they have done to him while he had been unconscious? Suddenly frightened, he began checking his body underneath the jeans and shirt, looking for signs of disturbance, entry, exploration. Probing. Isn’t that what aliens were supposed to do? He’d never given the slightest credence to such stories when they had been reported in the media. Like the rest of his sensible, sophisticated friends, he’d laughed them off as fit for no more than the front pages of the shock rags that populated the checkout stands at local supermarkets.

  Amazing, he thought, how personal experience can bring about such a complete change in one’s attitude toward a notorious subject.

  Not that anyone would believe him if he ever chose to talk about what had happened to him, here in the California mountains. He had no more intention of relating his incredible encounter to one of his friends than he would of claiming he had suddenly discovered that eating tofu blended with Ben & Jerry’s constituted a cure for cancer. The story would have to remain with him, and him alone, forever. Unless he made an attempt to contact others who had experienced similar “contact” with aliens and tried to separate possible truth-tellers from the genuine fruitcakes. He was not sure he wanted to make the effort. He was not sure he wanted to know any more about what had happened to him than he already did.