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The lights swept over them, and then away, continuing to
illuminate the runway, but with much lower intensity now. Wendy slowly lowered
her hand as she looked over at the aircraft. The bizarre thing commanded her
attention so strongly that she wasn't even aware she had taken a step toward it
until she heard Talassy bark at her.
"Back in line! At attention!"
It was still difficult to hold her composure, but she did as
ordered, returning to her position and stance. Her eyes remained locked on the
craft that hovered over the runway, though.
A massive black triangle, easily fifty feet across, hung in
the air like a piece of carved obsidian. Three lights projected out from each
corner, making the ground underneath it almost glow. Other random lights
flashed at various places on its underside. Red. Green. Blue. She tried to look
up the craft, into the sky, but couldn't see anything. Wendy couldn't decide if
she thought the craft was paper thin, or stretched on into infinity, wrapping
everything not touched by its lights with an endless abyss.
She had been privileged a few times to see an experimental
aircraft or ship, so the sight was just another amazing thing to her. The one
thing that made it ominous was the sound. There wasn't any. At least not that
her ears could hear. There was a deep thrumming, something she felt
reverberating through her bones more than something she could actually hear. The
whole thing together unnerved her more than she could ever remember being
before. Even live combat didn't compare to the feeling of fear spreading through her body like millions of worms, wiggling through her veins.
Wendy held her stance and her expression though, standing
rigidly at attention. Sergeant Barclay next to her, however, wasn't faring as
well. His whole body was trembling and his eyes were wide and white.
Then the ramp was down. She couldn't even recall seeing it
lower from the belly of the craft. It just seemed to appear there, in front of
where the man in black was standing. The light shining down it and out of the
craft was every bit as blinding as the lights on the corners of it, and Wendy
couldn't make out any details of what was inside.
Her breath caught in her throat as the creature came down the
ramp. It looked exactly like she'd seen in movies and on television.
It was the size of a child, maybe just over three feet tall
as it walked down to the man in black, but it was impossibly thin and spindly.
It didn't look like it was wearing any clothes, but it also didn't have any
genitals that Wendy could see. The torso was small, but looked healthily
muscular, while the arms and legs could have simply been skin wrapped around
bone. The head was bulbous and round, like a light bulb on top of a stick
figure. At the distance, she couldn't make out any nose or mouth, only the
large, almond-shaped eyes which stood out against the being's light grey skin.
An alien. A Grey. Like they always portrayed as abducting
people. It's movements were smooth as it
gestured and seemed to be speaking with the man in black. Then it turned and
headed back up the ramp. Wendy watched, but the sweeping motions of its limbs
seemed separate from the movement of its body as it glided up and back into the
ship.
The ramp stayed down, as the man in black turned and walked
back to the spread out soldiers. He glared at Wendy a moment through the
glasses, even as Sergeant Barclay continued shaking next to her.
"Alright, they're ready to collect the equipment. Your
job is to make sure it all gets on board. If you see anything get loose and
make a run for it, you shoot it."
Wendy swallowed at that order. Her mind threatened her with
orders of its own, ideas of what kind of cargo was in the truck, what was being
delivered. She nodded to the man in black as a dozen or more of the Greys
walked or floated past, however it was they moved; watched them as they
vanished into the darkness of the hanger. She heard the metal groan as the
doors of the semi's trailer opened.
