Fearless (22 page)

The only thing that Joaquin now knows for certain is that our world will never be the same.

Joaquin stopped jogging and gaped in amazement. Not only had the pilot miraculously survived, he was conscious and moving under his own power. The unlikely survivor hopped down from a pile of rocks and dusted himself off as if he had just taken a tumble on his ATV.

When he spotted Joaquin, he headed over. Joaquin turned his flashlight on the man and frowned as he took in the features of the strangest guy he had ever seen. He was tall, almost as tall as Joaquin. He was young, too. Joaquin thought he looked like a teenager, but of course that was ridiculous. What would a teenager be doing crashing to in the New Mexico desert? The object had been moving too fast to be anything a teenager might pilot.

His broad-shouldered physique was like something out of one of the magazines Joaquin had stashed under his bed. Dirty blond curls framed a flawless, angular face. It was the eyes, though, that told Joaquin there was something odd about this stranger. At first they seemed brown, but when he got a better look he was sure they were gold.

“Hello,” the stranger greeted him casually.

His voice was deep and melodic. The casual tone, though, gave Joaquin pause. It really was like the man was just out for a stroll in the desert at night instead of having fallen out of the sky. Joaquin was dumbstruck.

“
Parlez-vous francais?
” the man tried a second time.

He wasn’t wearing a flight suit or uniform or anything that might suggest where he came from. Instead he wore the remnants of some dark black bodysuit that clung to him like spandex. It was torn and singed in several places, revealing glimpses of the pale skin underneath.

“Uh….”

Joaquin’s brain had seized up on him. No human being could have walked away from a crash like the one that had just happened. But what did that mean? Joaquin dismissed the idea that he was dealing with something other than human. He lived with the comfortable certainty that there was no such thing as aliens. The skeptical part of him was not coming up with a more plausible explanation though.

“
Me llamo Thrace
.”

Joaquin’s jaw worked futilely for a moment. Finally, he managed to say, “Uh, I speak English.”

“That’s good. I was running out of languages to try,” Thrace said with a bright grin.

“Uh, so, uh…. What…. Who are you? How did you...?” He couldn't even form a complete thought he was so stunned.

“I’m an Elf.”

It just didn’t seem possible for Joaquin to become more confused, but yet that casual announcement left him utterly bewildered. “Excuse me?”

Thrace laughed; a merry, lilting sound. “It’s what your people call us—Extraterrestrial Life Form. But ELF is shorter.”

Joaquin nodded numbly. “Extraterrestrial…. You’re an alien?”

“Elf.”

“Whatever. You’re from space?”

Thrace laughed some more. “Certain parts of it, yes.”

“But …. That's.... That's not possible.”

“And yet here we are.”

“But you look human.”

“Actually, from what I’ve been told, it’s more that you look like us.”

Joaquin tried to think of something profound to say, but he was too shell-shocked. “Uh, Roswell is south of here…. Maybe you’re lost?”

Another strangely infectious laugh filled the night air. “No, I’m not one of the Cartusians. I’m actually here to—” He stopped and glanced at the rubble with a frown. “Well, that’s annoying. I’ll be right back.”

“Huh?”

“Just watch. You’ll love this.”

“What are you talking about?”

But the stranger did not answer. Instead, the impossible man did something that so totally offended Joaquin’s sense of reality that he became convinced this was all some sort of hallucination. The blond man in front of him pushed off from the ground and
flew.

The scene took a detour into the bizarre as something else emerged from the rubble. This wasn’t a person, however. It was a machine, though not like any Joaquin had seen before. It tilted and wobbled as it hovered in the air, its disk-shaped frame unsteady from the crash. A series of blue and red lights dotted its shell, blinking erratically. The surface of the robot was scored with char marks and hundreds of dents; the silvery skin was so buckled in some places that Joaquin could see the machinery underneath.

 That damage only delayed it for a few spare seconds, though. A pair of canons appeared out of its upper fuselage and targeted Thrace. The Elf looped through the air gracefully, easily avoiding the blasts of green energy that came at him.

Joaquin knew he should run back to the mine, get his truck and get as far from this insanity as he could. A pitched battle between an alien—or Elf or whatever—and a killer robot insect was not something he should be involved in. Yet he remained rooted to the spot as surely as if his feet were stuck in cement. There were simply too many mind-boggling things occurring, depriving him of the necessary brain capacity to move his feet.

Instead, he brought up his phone and took a quick video of the impossible scene. In seconds, he’d forwarded it to Sylvia. He did that more out of reflex than thought. He shared everything with her, after all—even things that simply couldn’t really be happening.

Thrace retaliated against his robotic foe by dive-bombing the creature and slamming into it with both fists. The force of those massive impacts sent out shockwaves that jarred Joaquin’s teeth. How could the man—this Elf—survive such stunning collisions? How could anyone?

The monster’s hide seemed impervious to such brute force, though. After a dozen thunderous attacks, the creature was not noticeably damaged. Thrace changed tactics.  He paused in midair and held one hand over his head. His youthful face scrunched up in concentration. In moments, bright crackling energy, like lightning, gathered in his grip. It was like he was a pagan god, wielding primal forces with the ease of thought.

Thrace danced away from another barrage of green energy blasts as if they were a mere nuisance. He then hurled a bolt of lightning from his hand like Zeus himself. It arced down, heading for one of the gaps in the monster’s armor. It would have struck true, but the robot did a barrel roll to protect itself. The arc of lightning bounced off the silver hide and grounded harmlessly.

A strange sound filled the air as both combatants adjusted positions. It was the unmistakable sound of Thrace’s musical laughter. He was
enjoying
this.

WTF? Is this some kind of joke?
Sylvia texted.

Wish it was. GTG, aliens attacking. C U later if I don’t die.

The robot attacker produced another canon out of its underside. This one fired projectiles the size of footballs. They did not appear to be intended to hit Thrace as they exploded a few yards from him. Their concussive force batted him through the air like he was a beach ball at the mercy of a stadium crowd, though.

The Elf’s aerial agility was completely neutralized by this new attack. He careened wildly back and forth, flailing uselessly as he tried to regain control. He didn’t get the chance, though. A devastating blast from the laser canons knocked him out of the air and hurled into another mesa.

“¡
Dios mío
, no!” Joaquin hollered unthinkingly.

Thrace bounced off the rock and crashed to the ground. Astoundingly, Joaquin saw him struggling to rise. If he had any doubts left about whether or not Thrace was really an alien, they vanished.

The mechanical monstrosity spun around until Joaquin was quite certain that he was in the horrible creature’s sights. A port opened and a golden light washed over Joaquin, bathing him in a series of grid lines. It was over in a second and the next thing that appeared out of the monster’s silvery body was a new, larger cannon. This one was not glowing a festive green, though. It blazed a fiery, ominous red. The only reason Joaquin could imagine for getting his own special color of laser blaster was that this one was designed to kill him dead.

Joaquin looked for cover, but the nearest boulders were a football field away. He would never make it in time. He started to run anyway, flying over the dry landscape like he had a ball in his hands and the rocks were the end zone. As he pelted across the desiccated ground, he also dodged from side to side, hoping to stay alive for another second, a few more feet….

He heard a high-pitched whirring behind him. It was over. He was going to die. In that moment, with safety out of reach and death a moment away, something occurred to him that he had not been aware of before:
he wanted to live. All of his nihilism and antipathy burned away in that moment as he realized that there was so much more he wanted to do in this world.

For the first time in a long time, he prayed to God. Since the death of his father, Joaquin had refused to speak to God. After all, if the world He had created was this unjust, then He was hardly worthy of Joaquin’s faith. But here in what he was sure was his final moment on Earth, he found himself begging for forgiveness for his sins.

Instead of a blast of deadly energy, though, it was a hard, muscled body that slammed into him. Joaquin had been sacked by some gargantuan linebackers in his time, but Thrace put them all to shame. It was like being hit by a truck. The young man cried out and went crashing to the earth even as the deadly energy blast took Thrace in the chest.

Joaquin already suspected the red energy was more dangerous than the green, and the way Thrace cried out when he was hit seemed to confirm that. For all of the Elf’s apparent invulnerability, the single blast of energy had clearly hurt him badly. Thrace was still moving, writhing on the ground and moaning pitiably. Joaquin feared to think what that cannon would do to his own comparatively fragile body. He wanted to go to his rescuer, but the creature was targeting Joaquin once again. He had to run.

He reached the safety of the rocks just in time. A blast atomized a boulder that was as big as his pick-up truck. Joaquin scrambled to get down further, terrified out of his mind. It all might be for nothing, he realized. The robot might simply obliterate the entire pile of rubble with him in it. But he had to hide and hope for the best.

The next blast exploded the rocks in front of him, flinging him backwards. Stunned and barely conscious, he couldn’t even move. The brief reprieve he had been granted had come to an end. Dimly, he comforted himself with knowing he would see his dad soon.

But the killing blast did not come. Joaquin groaned and shook off his daze. He was covered in bruises, but he wasn’t dead. Cautiously, he crawled up the pile of rubble to survey the scene. Every movement caused him to wince in pain, but he was used to pushing through that barrier. He had to know what was going on.

The hope that Thrace had regained consciousness and dismantled the mechanical beast down to its nuts and bolts was immediately foiled. The robot had turned its attention away from Joaquin. Whether it was so damaged that it didn’t sense that Joaquin was still alive or that it didn’t care enough to be sure, Joaquin couldn’t guess. But for the moment, he was out of the monster’s crosshairs.

Thrace was being bound up in some sort of webbing. Joaquin didn’t know what the creature (or, presumably, its makers) wanted with Thrace but he was ready to bet it wasn’t for anything good.

Joaquin found himself confronting the same choice his father had made, and the irony convinced him that God really did have a sense of humor. He could run, save his own hide and leave Thrace to his fate. He could tell Sylvia it really had been a joke. No one would ever need to know this weird night ever happened. He could go back to his life, to school, to what was normal.

He thought of his father. The helicopter had been full and ready to take off. His men, wounded and battered, had been pulled out after a protracted firefight. They had stayed to give some villagers time to escape. When they did finally evacuate, they had arrived at the chopper to discover that one man was missing. Joaquin’s father had decided to go back for him. It had been that simple for his father—you never left a man behind.

Had it not been for the mortar shell, he would have succeeded. They had been ten yards from the chopper when they had been hit. Had his father left when he had had the chance, only one member of his team would have died that day.

Joaquin had struggled to understand his father’s choice. Now, though, he began to see. Thrace had saved his life. Joaquin couldn’t just abandon him.

He needed to distract the creature for a minute or two. He couldn’t just leap from his cover and holler—that would just result in his death and take all of about three seconds. No, he needed to be more clever than that. He needed an actual plan. He needed to look at the creature as an opposing team and come up with a play to defeat it.

Remembering the sensor the machine had used on him, he got the germ of an idea. The robot wanted him dead. If it thought he wasn’t, it would abandon Thrace to finish the job. If he caused a noise some distance off, the creature would scan that area and, not finding anything, would be forced to investigate. Or, at least, that was what Joaquin was counting on.