“CALM. DOWN!? Do you mock me?”
His sudden change from animal sounds to perfect English catches me off guard.
“I do not mock you. I’m just trying to get the situation under control and try to help you. I think you're injured.”
“Yes,” he agrees in oddly perfect, accent-less English. “Of course I am. That’s what happens when you string a big metal dream catcher across the bloody road.”
“Are you human, sir?” That’s not a question I usually ask, but on this occasion I feel as though it’s relevant, and necessary.
He shakes himself as if the question is a gross insult.
“Do I LOOK human?”
“No. But you sound human.”
“Small mouth noises do not a human make, human.”
So we have ascertained that he is absolutely not human. Okay. Good. That’s okay. It’s alright. I look over my shoulder, expecting to see the pier being stormed by soldiers or heavily armed feds. Where’s the national guard when you need them?
Oh. There they are.
I see black cruisers, SUVs, humvees, and what might even be a tank rumbling down the palm tree ridden coast. A helicopter beats overhead, blades making the sky thud.
“Looks like we’ve got company,” I quip.
He groans and moves to sit up. The motion seems to take great effort and be significantly painful.
“Easy,” I tell him. “You should probably stay still until we can get you to hospital.”
“I am not going to one of your human hospitals. My people will come for me.”
“Okay. Well. That makes sense, I guess.”
Every girl dreams of making alien contact. Well, maybe not every girl, but this girl certainly always has. I became a cop because I wanted to do something that mattered, and something that was dangerous and weird. A job where I’d never be bored.
I’m not bored now. I’m so far from bored I don’t think I can even see bored from here. And I cannot take my eyes off this guy. I’m somewhat assuming his gender, but I’ve never seen anything as vigorously, unapologetically male as this.
I have to keep my head about me. I can’t get caught up in romantic notions and twisted desires, no matter how many of them may be flooding my animal brain at the sight of this handsome alien.
It is in my training to appear to be an ally. I’m not quite sure what form an ally would take for a creature like this, but I’ve been on enough crash scenes to know he’s probably stressed and disoriented, no matter how calm he may seem. It’s like Jerry, really. They’re both pretending as hard as they can that they’re okay.
He looks at me with those furious yellow eyes, his brows drawing down across them, his slitted pupils making me feel as though I am caught in the glare of a particularly dangerous predator.
He points to where the ferris wheel used to be.
“Who put that there!?” His tone is offended and annoyed, like a drunk who is shocked to discover that a power pole has inserted itself into their vehicle.
“The ferris wheel? It was built in 1909. It’s been here for over two hundred years.”
“Absolutely stupid place for it, if you ask me.”
“Nobody asked you.”
This is not standard negotiation and de-escalation. I should probably be agreeing with him. Coddling him. Telling him that yes, it’s crazy that there’s a ferris wheel in the way of his spaceship. Maybe he’s not the only one in shock. Maybe I’m a little off my game. I get the distinct feeling he could kill me without hesitation if he wanted to. He’s built so powerfully, so incredibly overscale. And he’s yelling at me, as if this is somehow my fault, though he must know I didn’t construct it personally.
“I come here, to do a simple invasion, and you humans have put damned great pointless wheels all over the place!”
He’s deeply aggrieved.
“Do you have any idea how much that ship cost?”
“I don’t.”
“More than the gross domestic product of your entire planet several times over.”
“That’s a lot.”
“It was a lot.”
“So you came here to…”
He stands up on shaky feet, rising above me. I wish he wouldn’t do that. I can imagine that at any moment there will be a bright red dot appearing on his forehead. Assuming they still use red dots.
“Conquer your planet. Enslave your people. The usual.”
“Ah, yes. The usual.” My voice quavers as I look up the very impressive length of him. He could conquer the hell out of me, I think to myself.
“I’m joking,” he clarifies as I stand staring at him with my mouth open, sort of like a stunned codfish. “I was passing through on my way elsewhere. I had no intention of making contact with this backwards little planet. I was trying to take a short cut.”
I have seen many people take short cuts of the kind he has taken over the years. They quite often don’t survive them.