I closed my eyes and rubbed my temples. I needed to focus, and throwing a pity party wasn’t going to get it done. I stood straight, took a deep breath, and clamped down on my steadily spiraling anxiety.

  It took a few more seconds to get myself back on an even keel. I pulled the pallet jack around and retrieved the pallet holding the Bigfoot burrito, then placed it in the open area near the hangout. I carefully rolled the burrito off the pallet, making sure I didn’t accidentally unwrap it in the process. Part of the body had to have been sticking out of the ends, apparent only because the tarp seemed to be wrapped around nothing. So, still invisible. Was that a natural ability, or some piece of technology? Or was Bigfoot actually made out of energy? That seemed unlikely, and it wouldn’t explain the dust disappearing as it made contact.

  Come to think of it, the flour might not work out any better, unless we could sprinkle it faster than whatever process was at play could make it disappear.

  I was staring down at the burrito, lost in thought, when a voice from behind made me jump. “Hey, bud. What’cha got there?”

  I turned to find Patrick grinning at me. Red-headed, just under six feet, with a slightly crooked nose from a sucker-punch he’d received as a teenager, Patrick had a clean-cut look that often fooled people into underestimating him.

  I pointed. “I promised you an alien.”

  “And an invisible one. I will accept no less.”

  I stepped back and gestured with a sweep of my hand. “So unwrap it.”

  Patrick looked from the pallet to me then back again. Doubtless this wasn’t going quite the way he’d expected. With a sardonic smile, he sidled up to the burrito and found the loose end. Taking a corner of the tarp in both hands, he gave a quick tug upward. “Ungh.”

  “Yeah, sorry, it’s pretty heavy,” I said. “Here, I’ll give you a hand.”

  We both got a grip on the tarp, and with a “One, two, three, heave!” unrolled it.

  To reveal: nothing.

  “Cute,” Patrick said. “Funny. How’d you do that, anyway? It really looked like there was something—”

  Patrick’s comment cut off as he apparently realized that the weight of the bundle was a contradiction, with nothing but tarp visible. He moved crabwise toward the end of the tarp, feeling with a foot as he went. And came up against something.

  Patrick gave me a frankly freaked-out look, then prodded more with his foot, hopping around the invisible object as he progressed. Finally, he looked up, the freaked-out expression even more pronounced. “Wow, uh … this isn’t a practical joke, is it?”

  “If it is, we’re both victims. Any thoughts?”

  “Me? I just got here. Oh, and I brought flour.” He pointed behind me to a plastic shopping bag. “I think I can guess what you have in mind. And I’m guessing we don’t want any awkward questions?”

  “Not sure there are any other kind in this situation.”

  “By the way, nice dents on the truck. Did you do that?”

  “That’s Chewbacca’s fault,” I replied. “And also how he ended up wrapped in a tarp.”

  Patrick’s eyebrows went up. “Come again? Chewbacca?”

  “It’s got fur. I think. And it’s tall, and heavy. And the torso’s too long. I keep going back and forth between Chewbacca and Bigfoot. I guess I’m waiting to see if it’s wearing a bandolier.”

  Patrick laughed and picked up the bag containing the flour, then placed it on the ground beside the corpse. I couldn’t help noticing a slightly shrill note to the laugh. My friend wasn’t as blasé about the situation as he let on.

  “Whatever’s making this thing invisible also worked on the dust I tried sprinkling onto it. So, I’m not sure how well this is going to work. But we have to start somewhere.”

  Patrick pulled out his phone and waved it. “Let’s get a video of the whole process. Maybe we can pause it and get a better look.”

  That was an excellent idea. I fumbled around the drawers under my workbench until I found my tripod and phone mount. A few minutes’ setup and we had Patrick’s phone ready to record.

  “Let’s do this.” Patrick set the phone to recording, then we each grabbed a handful of flour. Being careful not to block the phone’s view, we quickly sprinkled flour over the area.

  “Son. Of. A. Bitch,” Patrick said. There had been a momentary impression of a long body before the whole thing faded out, flour and all.

  I wiped off my hands, patted myself down to get rid of drifting flour, then grabbed Patrick’s phone and stopped the recording.

  Patrick, meanwhile, was frowning at the pallet, hands on hips. “Why do the flour and the dust go invisible, but not the tarp? Or the pallet?”

  I shrugged. “How the hell would I know? We don’t even know what’s causing the invisibility yet. Maybe it’s a mass thing. Or size.”

  I handed Patrick’s phone to him, and he flicked at the screen until he had the video playing back. He pressed pause just as the form was at maximum visibility. As we got a look at the body, Patrick started to laugh. “It’s a squirrel. A giant squirrel! Just your plain everyday roadkill.” His voice trailed off as he began gasping for air between the guffaws. I could feel my face getting red, but I was determined not to give Patrick the satisfaction of a reaction.

  Finally, Patrick’s snorting and gasping died down. Ignoring his behavior, I pointed to a spot on the paused video. “Utility belt.”

  Patrick chuckled. “Look at the bright side—no bandolier.”

  “A giant squirrel kind of ruins the metaphor anyway,” I said.

  “Ya think? C’mon, let’s see if we can get that utility belt off by feel.”

  “I’m going to record this too,” I said. I took Patrick’s phone and put it back on the tripod.

  We stepped to either side of the pallet and knelt.

  “Uh,” Patrick said, “It is dead, right?”

  “No, it’s just resting.”

  Patrick hesitated, then smiled. “Sure. Okay, let’s do this.”

  We quickly located the belt, it being apparently the only article of clothing on the body. I had a momentary image of accidentally groping the alien’s genitals and had to suppress a shudder.

  “Can you find a buckle?” Patrick asked.

  “No. It’s … hold on.” I closed my eyes. “It’s easier with my eyes closed. Now I’m not fighting what I think I see.” I groped around the belt until I felt what might be a latch. A push, a twist, and the item came free.

  As the belt fell open, the corpse abruptly became visible. Under a layer of dust and flour, a being slightly over seven feet tall lay haphazardly across the pallet. The tail was definitely too meager for any self-respecting squirrel, but the face and the short, strong rear legs were definitely reminiscent of the breed. And of course, it was completely covered in fur, which varied from gray to a light yellow.

  Patrick pointed at the head. “That doesn’t look healthy.”

  I looked where Patrick had indicated and had to agree. The head was partially caved in, but whether from the impact with the truck or from the subsequent landing was uncertain. Not that it mattered. Dead is dead, and nothing terrestrial would have survived that kind of head injury. Unless the brains were somewhere else, Chewbacca was almost certainly deceased.

  I scanned the rest of the corpse. “This either.” I pointed to part of the hip area, which seemed to be pulp. Caked blood covered both injuries.

  “Nothing on Earth would have survived this,” Patrick said, echoing my reasoning. He experimentally squeezed an arm. “No muscle tone. It feels room-temperature-ish.”

  “And it hasn’t moved in hours or made a sound.”

  Patrick held a hand in front of the alien’s face. “No breath. Granted, we can’t make too many assumptions about an alien, but this one sure seems dead.”

  I slowly sat back onto the floor. “And the belt says intelligent. Which means I just killed an interstellar visitor. Cripes.”

  “Not one of your better days, I’ll give you that. But it was an accident, right? He, er, it was invisible. They can’t hold that against you.”

  I responded with a sickly grin. “I guess it’ll depend if they’re more like Vulcans or Klingons.”

  “Speaking of which, where are they?” Patrick asked. “No one has tried to radio him—it. No one has shown up to either offer us a reward or vaporize us. Shouldn’t there be some kind or reaction? A search party or something?”

  “Hmm. We can’t extrapolate too much, but yeah, you’d think there’d be some kind of procedure in place for a crew member getting injured or killed. Or captured.”

  “Maybe he was alone,” Patrick suggested.

  “Like a lone explorer? It seems unlikely, but … ”

  “But like you say, we can’t extrapolate too much.”

  I gave Patrick a smile in reply. “Yeah, that. Meanwhile, we have what we have. Help me get the belt out … ” We both lifted and managed to get the alien’s torso off the belt for long enough to pull it out. I picked it up and took it to the workbench.

  The belt and its various attachments were obviously some serious tech and yet works of art at the same time. The overall color was a metallic robin’s-egg blue, with very fine purple accents done as a kind of filigree over the surface. The devices lacked sharp edges in favor of asymmetrically rounded angles. It was almost Victorian. Or maybe steampunk. And some of the items appeared to be clipped on.

  In a few minutes, we’d figured out what could be detached and what couldn’t. There were four small devices that were meant to be operated independently, and two panels that were permanently attached to the belt. Some inscribed squares on the panels and devices were likely buttons.

  One device had a slider that seemed to set it to three different levels, colored red, purple, and blue. There was also a button that had a symbol on it. “Look at this one,” I said. “Diverging lines. Shower on, shower off?”

  “And I don’t really get the significance of the colors,” Patrick added. “It looks like a gun, sort of, except for the odd location of the shower button.”

  “Well, maybe it fits the alien’s hand,” I said. “We should check that.”

  “Uh huh.” Patrick held up a second item. “What might be a small display screen, up and down arrow buttons, and V and I buttons. I doubt those are from our alphabet, so V and I shapes must mean something to Chewbacca. It has a sort of a grid that could be a speaker or mike. Communicator?”

  “Mmm. This one only has a screen. No controls.”

  “Touch screen maybe?”

  I nodded slowly. “Could be. It’s bigger than the second one.”

  “This one also has just a touch screen,” Patrick said. “But the whole gadget is bigger.”

  “And the last one. A smaller display screen, and the V and I buttons again. I wonder if those are on and off?”

  “Sure, but which is which? And the big question: do we want to push any of these?”

  I peered at the devices. “Well, it’s unlikely that any of them is a nuclear bomb. I don’t think we’re going to kill ourselves. But what if one of them is a panic button or communications device? Do we want to call up this thing’s buddies to come find us standing over its corpse?”

  “Huh,” Patrick grunted. “Good point. I vote no.”

  A voice interrupted us. “What in the hell is that?”

  Both Patrick and I jumped in unison, then spun around.

  Natalie.

  I’d known her almost as long as I’d known Patrick, which meant basically all my life. Natalie had been described in school as what you’d get if you added caffeine to a squirrel. The comment wasn’t entirely unfair, either. At five foot nothing and lightly but athletically built, Natalie would never be considered physically intimidating. But she could out-run, out-climb, and out-curse most people, and she never backed down from anything or anyone. She’d more than earned the nickname “Mighty Mouse.”

  And as one half-wit in junior high found out, she had a left jab that was almost too fast to see.

  We’d had several on-and-off romances during our high school years, yet we always seemed to settle back into a comfortable friendship. I don’t think I’d ever not had a crush on her, but we got along far better when we weren’t involved. Eventually I’d decided that having Nat as a lifelong friend was better than having her as a girlfriend for a while.

  Since the thing with MIT, I’d been unable to face her and had found myself avoiding contact. There had been a few awkward conversations that had gone nowhere, but Natalie seemed unfazed by any of it. I, on the other hand, was embarrassed about my behavior toward her, which just made me avoid her more.

  Patrick, meanwhile, gave her a wide smile. He didn’t have the specter of an expulsion from his lifelong dream college hanging over his head and had kept up an easy friendship with her.

  I looked away and mumbled, “Oh, uh, hi, Nat.” Good job, Jack, I thought. Mature as ever.

  “Don’t Hi, Nat me,” she said. Then she pointed. “What. Is. That?”

  “Chewbacca.”

  “Yeah, no.” She examined the corpse. “For one thing, Chewbacca had no tail. This looks more like a squirrel. Where’d you get this?”

  Patrick barked a single laugh. “Did you see the front of the truck?”

  Natalie stared at me, her eyes widening. “You ran over a giant squirrel?”

  “That seems the most likely hypothesis.”

  My dry delivery broke the tension, and all three of us giggled. Again, I thought I detected an undertone of hysteria in Patrick’s laugh.

  “So is this why you haven’t been answering my texts?”

  I sighed and looked down for a moment. “No. Look, I’m sorry, I’m just having trouble facing people right now. The MIT thing—”

  Nat cut me off. “Chrissake, Jack. You think I believe the accusations? I know you better than that. They’ll figure it out eventually, and you’ll be cleared. You just watch.”

  Natalie had always been like that. When she was on your side, she was all in.

  “Three Musketeers,” I said.

  “Damn right,” she replied. “One for all … ”

  “And all for me.” Patrick finished the cheer with his standard line, and Nat and I laughed dutifully.

  “So you’re stalking me, then?” I asked.

  “You have a problem with that? Just as well I did. You seem to be in over your heads.”

  “Wait, what makes you think that?” Patrick said.

  “It’s a given.” Nat gestured at the corpse. “Now, getting back to the Wookiee in the room … ”

  I grabbed my rolling office chair, plunked myself down, and gave her the whole story.

  Nat stared at me for almost a minute after I was done. Then she slowly let out a breath and said, “Wow. When you screw up, you do it big. And you’re sure it’s intelligent?”

  “It had a belt with some techy stuff.” I pointed to the items on the bench, and Natalie moved over to examine them.

  “So what are you going to do with it?” she said, slowly turning one of the objects in her hand.

  “Huh?”

  “You’ve got a dead alien. In your barn. Can we agree this isn’t a normal thing? So what do we do? Give it to science? Call the cops? Email that Ancient Aliens guy with the hair, from the History Channel?”

  “That would be the sensible thing to do.” I looked at Patrick, then Natalie, then the corpse. “Except for the Aliens guy, I mean. But no. None of the above.”

  Patrick laughed. “That’s my boy.”

  I pointed to the items on the workbench. “If this thing really is an E.T.—”

  “Which seems the most likely hypothesis,” Natalie said. “Seriously, why haven’t you phoned the cops? Or the military? Or something?”

  “I’m going to,” I said. “At least that’s what I keep telling myself. But once I do that, it’s over. It’s a given that I’m not going to be invited to be part of the task force or whatever they form to study it. It’s an E.T., Nat. We have this one chance to touch history. I guess I’m being a little selfish, but I don’t want to just hand it over before I learn something.”

  Patrick made a head motion in my direction. “What he said.”

  “Aaaaaanyway,” I continued, “if it’s an E.T., then it’s possible that it has a spaceship. Or a wormhole generator. Or a time machine. Or an interdimensional gate. Or something even more bizarre. And I betcha one of those devices will get us into it.”

  “Assuming we can find it,” Patrick replied. “I mean, the alien was invisible. And no one has reported a flying saucer sitting in a field, as far as I know.”

  “So we’re going to be searching the entire county for an invisible spaceship?” Natalie asked.

  “We?” Patrick and I said in unison.

  “What, you think I’m going to just shrug and go home, while you guys go find a flying saucer?” She glared at us. “Three Musketeers, assholes.”

  I exchanged a glance with Patrick and we both grinned. Trying to derail Nat when she had made up her mind was a good way to get run over. Or worse. All our lives, Nat had made a point of keeping up with the boys and had never asked for special treatment, or a handicap, or a head start. To even suggest it was to invite her wrath.

  “I have to admit,” she said, “I’m not really ready to settle down into a boring, generic small-town life just yet, either. Not without one big adventure, anyway. Maybe this is it.”

  “Gee, I dunno, sounds risky,” Patrick replied. Nat and I both rolled our eyes. No one was fooled. Patrick would always be the first one to jump into the deep end.

  Nat put her fists on her hips and glared down at the body. “So what’s the next step?”

  I held the corpse under the arms and Patrick supported the feet while Nat held the freezer lid open. “This guy is heavy,” Patrick groaned.

  “Stop complaining. You’ve got the easy end.” I gave a final heave and the corpse settled into the freezer.