Touched by an Alien

We’ve got your back for as long as you need us.”
    With that, Hughes, Walker, and Jerry grasped each other’s wrists. More secure and also more manly looking. I took Jerry’s hand in my left and Christopher’s in my right, and we were off.
    We came to a halt not at the Science Center but about half a mile away, in a wash in front of a large drainage pipe. It was hidden from the Center by a variety of cacti. The sun was starting to set. I hoped this was going to help us.
    I was getting used to this mode of transportation, so my stomach was only flipping around, but the pilots were retching. Christopher glanced my way, looking smug. “You wanted to run.”
    I shrugged. “It passes.”
    “Like bad booze,” Walker gasped out.
    “Not that we’d know anything about that,” Jerry added.
    “Me either.” I didn’t want to wreck my reputation, whatever it was. “So, how do we get in?”
    “We crawl.”

CHAPTER 50
    WE ALL HAD TO GO ON HANDS AND KNEES . There was a little water but not much. Just enough to make our lower legs and hands wet. I did my best not to focus on what was probably growing in the water.
    Christopher went first, then me, Jerry, Walker, and Hughes, bringing up the rear. The pilots all had flashlights with them, so Christopher had Walker’s, and Jerry and Hughes had theirs, all turned on. It was eerie but not all that scary in reality—I had four men surrounding me, so I was good. “Won’t they know we’re coming in this way?” I figured someone had to ask.
    “No one knows about this other than me and Jeff.”
    “Wanna explain that?”
    “No, but I’m sure you’ll badger me until I do.” Gee, he knew me well already. “We weren’t based here when we were kids. We were … with my mother at East Base. But we would come out for visits. There was nothing to do, and my parents were always in high security meetings.”
    Or they wanted to be alone, which would make sense. And who wants two young boys with you when you’re finally seeing your spouse after weeks or months of separation?
    “So we wandered the Science Center. We discovered this drainage pipe when we were seven.” He chuckled. “Jeff didn’t trust that the adults wouldn’t try to stop us from playing in here, so we set up traps and a warning system to tell if anyone other than us came through here. No one ever did.”
    We continued on and hit a fork in the pipe. There was a baseball bat, mitt, and ball leaning against the right-hand fork. They were covered with dust and spiderwebs. “Warning system?”
    “No, we weren’t supposed to play ball in the Center. We smuggled these in here. We used to play in the wash.” He touched the mitt. “I could throw the ball two hundred miles an hour, and Jeff could hit it. It went what seemed like miles. I haven’t thought about this stuff in … years, really.”
    My heart ached for both of them. They hadn’t really had childhoods, just stolen bits of one here and there. “Bring the bat and the ball.”
    “Why?” Christopher sounded confused.
    “Weapons,” Jerry answered for me.
    “I’ll take them,” Hughes called. “Less likely for me to hit anyone with the bat in the back. Unless you want it, Commander.”
    “No, that’s fine.” Christopher handed the ball and bat back to me, but slowly, as if he didn’t want to let anyone else touch them. “Mitt, too?”
    “Only if it can block bullets.”
    He chuckled. “Don’t think so.”
    We left the mitt and moved on. We came across various traps little boys would set—none of them dangerous and also none of them tripped. Christopher was right—no one had come down here since the last time he and Jeff had, which, from the dust, looked to have been twenty years easily.
    “This doesn’t really drain water?”
    “It used to, before we arrived. Our engineers diverted the water runoff to recycle it, and this pipe wasn’t part of that plan.”
    Poor pipe, discarded along with the their childhood. I was getting awfully sentimental about a long piece of metal, but it had been a trying couple of days.
    We were crawling in silence when I heard something. “Hughes, you okay back there?”
    “Fine, why?”
    “I heard something. I thought you might have knocked the bat into the pipe.”
    “Nope. I didn’t hear anything,” Hughes added.
    The others chimed in. Only I had heard something.
    “You’re just a little jumpy,” Walker suggested. “It’s natural.”
    I didn’t feel any jumpier than I had for the past