“I’m just trying to picture you in one of those outfits.”
Like I picture your butt in your football pants, Sam thought.
“You know how much you love football?”
“Sure.”
“That’s how much I love science. You think of playing professionally, don’t you?”
Alex’s shoulders dropped, as if the air had been sucked out of them. “Until yesterday, anyway.”
“Well, that’s the same way I think about being an astronaut. Not as funny as it is ironic. I so wanted to be an astronaut and find out the truth—like Scully and Mulder said: the truth is out there.”
“Who? What?”
“The X-Files.”
“Oh, the TV show.”
“You’ve never seen it?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Not even a single episode?”
“What did I just say?”
Sam shrugged, left it there. “Anyway, being an astronaut, that’s what I dreamed of—until yesterday too,” she added.
“Because why go to them when they’re coming to us?”
“It does change the way you look at things. But I meant it makes me want to be an astronaut even more, because now I know there really is something out there. Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
Alex stopped walking and Sam almost plowed into him. To her surprise, he took her face between his hands.
“Not silly at all.” He grimaced. “At least, no more silly than me still thinking about playing pro football. Hey, you know what I’m craving now more than anything?”
“A hot shower?”
“A PowerBar.” His eyes widened, expression veering in mid-thought. “Do I smell?”
“Can’t tell. I’m holding my nose against the way I smell.”
“Okay, a shower and then a PowerBar.”
“You know, this is stupid,” Sam found the courage to say finally.
“What?”
“Laboratory Z. Going there. It’s been gone for eighteen years.”
“According to Meng Po, it was part of a complex.”
“Meng Po?”
“The flash drive inside. And the complex will still be there.”
“Doesn’t mean we’ll find anything.”
“Doesn’t mean we won’t.” Alex stopped, picked up again with his eyes on the road ahead. “And I need to see it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do. Maybe it’ll help me think, sort all this out.”
“Anne Frank,” Sam said without meaning to.
“You helped me with her diary,” Alex recalled. “For history.”
“English, actually. You were studying the memoir.”
“I thought it was a diary.”
Sam let the remark pass. “The book always scared me, her cooped up in that attic with the Nazis outside on the street, sometimes knocking at the door downstairs. Cooped up and surrounded by monsters. That’s what made it so scary.”
“I think I get the point.”
“The story didn’t have a happy ending, Alex. They get her in the end. She loses to the monsters.”
He reached out and drew her in close against his shoulder, a car engine sounding behind them. “Well, Anne Frank didn’t have me.” Alex stuck his thumb out too late for the driver to notice and the car, a souped-up Camaro, thundered past. “Damn!”
Sam eased herself away from him. “Let me try.”
“Yeah,” Alex grinned, “good luck with that.”
They heard the squeal of an engine and swung to find a battered old van cresting the hill and rumbling toward them, belching a curtain of white smoke out its backside as it veered to the shoulder with a set of four nearly bald tires spraying gravel and stones into a brief tornado.
“What’d you say?” Sam winked, jogging ahead of him toward the van.
72
T-H-E-N-D C-O-M-E-S
THE OLD VAN’S ENGINE rattled, its front end shimmying toward a stall when Alex yanked its passenger door open to a grinding squeal.
“Where you kids headed?” came a voice as cracked and worn as the van’s faded upholstery.
“Back to the city,” Alex said, leaving it there while Sam was still composing the answer in her mind.
“Well, climb in,” the voice continued. “Meter’s running. Let’s go.”
Alex climbed in first, positioning himself in the middle and ceding the window to Sam. Squeezing inside next to him afforded her first clear look at the driver. He had pinkish, sunburned skin that was mottled and patchy dark in spots. His hair was a splotchy mess of gray spikes and waves. It looked self-trimmed, somewhere between a brush cut and military-style crew cut. The driver’s eyes were bloodstained in spidery lines that circled the tired blue pupils, which looked as if someone had bleached the color out of them. The van smelled of old weed and cheap aftershave baked together into the fabric, thinly disguising the musty odor of stale sweat and unwashed clothes.