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33
LIKE AN ALIEN INVASION
“They should treat it like an alien invasion.”
Morgan’s words kept coming back to Eliza on the plane. Outside the window was a mystery nightscape—a blur of clouds parting now and then to reveal… darkness. Were they over the Atlantic? How crazy to not even know that much for certain. How often did this happen to people, this not knowing where in the world you were?
Eliza shivered and drew her forehead back from the cold windowpane. There was nothing to see out there but cloud tatters and night. If this were a book or a movie, she thought, she’d be able to read the stars and get her bearings. Characters always had just the right random skill set to master the situation at hand. Like, Thank god for that summer on an uncle’s smuggling boat and the handsome deckhand who taught me celestial navigation.Ha.
Eliza had no random skills. Well, she did a mean horror-movie scream, apparently. Useful, that. Oh, and she was handy with a scalpel. When she’d taught the undergrad anatomy lab back at her university, a student had joked that she probably knew all the best places to stab someone, and she supposed she did, though it was not a skill she had ever had to call upon.
So basically, the sum of her special skills amounted to stabbing with great accuracy while horror-movie screaming. She was practically a superhero!
Oh god. It was the fatigue. She estimated that she was into hour thirty-six of keeping awake—not counting her brief doze in the lab—and it was no easy thing. The soft sounds of Dr. Chaudhary’s snores from across the aisle were torture. What would it be like, to be able to nod off without fear?
Who would she be, without the dream? Who was she anyway? Was she “Eliza Jones,” whom she had created from scratch, or was she, immutably, that other self, molded by others, and crushed by them, too?
People with destinies shouldn’t make plans.
Such were her thoughts when she detected the plane’s first pitch of descent. She put her face again to the cold windowpane and saw that the darkness outside was no longer entire. A dawn flush clung to the contours of the world, and… Eliza’s brow furrowed. She leaned closer, tried angling her face for a better view. She had never been to Italy, but she was fairly certain that this was not it.
Italy didn’t have… a desert, did it?
She glanced at the agents seated several rows back, but their faces gave away nothing.
Jostled by turbulence, Dr. Chaudhary finally woke and turned to Eliza. “Are we there?” he asked, stretching.
“We’re somewhere,” Eliza replied, and he leaned toward his own window to peer out.
A long look, a lift of his eyebrows, and he settled back into his seat. “Hmm,” was all he said, which, in the parlance of Dr. Chaudhary, translated roughly to: Very strange indeed.
Eliza felt as if her rib cage had flinched up against her heart. Where are we being taken?
By the time the plane’s wheels touched down on a desolate stretch of desert runway, the sun had cleared a ridge of mountains and revealed a land the color of dust. The single building that served as a terminal was squat and fashioned seemingly of the same dust.
The Middle East? Eliza wondered. Tattooine? A sign, hand-painted, was illegible in exotic, curling letters. Arabic, at a guess. That probably eliminated Tattooine.
An official in some kind of military uniform stood off to the side of the runway. One of the agents conferred with him and handed him papers. And in the shadow of the dirt building, two more men leaned against an SUV. One was an agent in the requisite dark suit; the other was dark-ski
“A Tuareg,” noted Dr. Chaudhary. “Blue men of the Sahara.”
The Sahara? Eliza looked around with new eyes. Africa.
The agents said nothing, only led them to the vehicle.
The drive was long and strange: stretches of perfect featurelessness punctuated by marvelous ruined cities, the occasional laundry line or drift of smoke hinting that they were still inhabited. They passed children riding camels, a flock of walking women in headscarves and shabby long dresses of a dozen sun-bleached colors. At a place as featureless as any other, the vehicle left the road and began to bump and rock uphill, sometimes fishtailing over the scree. Eliza’s knuckles were white on the strap above the door, and all thoughts of angels were left behind with the airplane.
This was something else altogether, she suddenly knew, with a piercing and utterly unscientific breed of knowing that she thought she’d left behind. A dark foreboding gripped her, unleashed from the closet of memory, of childhood, when she had believed with a child’s guilelessness what she had been taught to believe: that evil was real and was watching, that the devil was in the shadow of the yew hedge, waiting to claim her soul.
There is no devil, she told herself, angry. But whatever she’d convinced herself of in the years since she left home, it was hard to believe it now, in light of current events.
The Beasts are coming for you.
“Look.” Dr. Chaudhary pointed.
Uphill, stark against the shadow of distant mountains, appeared a fortress of red earth. As they drew nearer, tires grinding over rocks, Eliza saw that more vehicles stood outside its walls, among them jeeps and heavy military transport trucks. A helicopter, off to one side, idle. There were soldiers patrolling, dressed in dusty desert camouflage, and… she caught her breath and turned to Dr. Chaudhary. He had seen them, too.
Cutting down a path from the fortress: figures in white hazmat suits.
Alien invasion protocol, thought Eliza. Oh hell.
One of the agents made a phone call, and by the time their vehicle came to a stop near the others, a man with a broad black mustache was there to greet them. He wore civilian clothes and spoke with an accent and an air of authority. “Welcome to the Kingdom of Morocco, doctor. I am Dr. Youssef Amhali.”
The men shook hands. Eliza merited a nod.
“Dr. Amhali—” began Dr. Chaudhary.
“Please, call me Youssef.”
“Youssef. Are you able to tell us why we’re here?”
“Certainly, doctor. You’re here because I asked for you. We have… a situation that exceeds my expertise.”
“And your expertise is?” inquired Dr. Chaudhary.
“I am a forensic anthropologist,” he replied.
“What kind of situation?” asked Eliza, too quickly, too loudly.
Dr. Amhali—Youssef—raised his eyebrows, pausing to take her measure. Should she have remained the silent assistant, the obedient female? Maybe he heard fear in her voice, or maybe it was just a stupid question, considering his field. Eliza was well aware what forensic anthropologists did, and what must have brought them all here.
And when he lifted his head, just slightly, and sniffed the air, wrinkling his nose in distaste, Eliza smelled it: a ripe rankness on the air. Decay. “The kind of situation, miss, that smells worse on a hot day,” he said.
Bodies.
“The kind of situation,” Dr. Youssef Amhali continued, “that could start a war.”
Eliza understood, or thought she did. It was a mass grave. But she didn’t understand why theywere here. Dr. Chaudhary gave voice to this question. “You’re the specialist here,” he suggested. “What need can you have of me?”
“There are no specialists for this,” said Dr. Amhali. He paused. His smile was morbid and amused, but underlying it Eliza detected fear, and it fed her own. What’s going on here?