Smith's Monthly #25 Page 8

  Annie, the girl I’ve been in love with since the first grade when she and her parents moved in next door. The actual girl next door, the same one that used to join our baseball games and who helped us build a brick fort in the masonry plant lot one summer.

  Annie, the first girl I ever kissed because her sister told her she had to when we both stood under mistletoe. For the first three, maybe four years that she lived next door, she was just Annie. A good friend, someone fun to be with.

  Then she changed.

  She became a “girl.”

  Now Annie scared the fuck out of me every time she smiled when we met in the hall, every time she said, “Hi, Brad,” in that bet-you-want-to-see-my-tits voice.

  Sure, I wanted to see them. No straight boy in the school didn’t. I’d wanted to see them since they started becoming an issue in the 4th grade, when she started to wear that first bra a year before most other girls had to. That first year I had even asked her to see them, and she might have let me if her damn sister hadn’t been home early that day.

  Annie lived next door to me and her bedroom window faced mine over what seemed like six miles of grass and a chain-link fence. A couple of times I had caught glimpses of her in her underwear and bra through her bedroom window when the summer night was hot and she had left her blinds open. And I want to say right now that there is no truth to the rumor I used to spend nights camped under that window. I only went over that fence once. Maybe twice.

  Too damn scary. And I never saw anything but bra.

  I suppose I sound like a pansy-ass wimp-boy, talking about being so afraid of a simple cheerleader. Usually, I don’t show fear. I ride motocross and can catch some pretty good air at times. And I’ve had other girlfriends, even gone out with Annie’s best friend a few times. Girls don’t worry me that much, and neither does getting hurt or even getting killed. Actually, not much in the world really scares me.

  Except Annie.

  And I might have gone all the way through the last year of high school and kept being afraid of her if not for her stupid-ass jock boyfriend. Rees.

  Rees Trager, cliché. I figured he should have a shirt with that on it. Star of the football team, point guard for the Oregon State high school basketball champions, rich parents, not many brains, and not a single social skill to be found. Add that mixture in to an ego the size of his Hummer and a love of too much vodka and I figured Annie was doomed unless she ran like hell. But I sure wasn’t going to be the one to mention that fact to her. I figured she was smart and would eventually see the light, or should I say, lack of light in old Rees’s eyes.

  I just didn’t expect her to come running to me, dear old neighbor Brad, when she saw that light. But that was exactly what happened.

  TWO

  Two in the morning, Thursday night, Friday morning.

  I’d finishing cramming for a physics test and had just nodded off when someone knocked. Actually, tapped. Lightly. On my window.

  I was dreaming of having Chinese dinner, and the skinny girl I was with was tapping her chopsticks on the table.

  Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Stop.

  In my dream, her breasts grew and they knew how to use chopsticks to click on the table.

  Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  Then a faint voice came from the window before the next tap.

  “Brad?”

  Even half asleep, even tired from cramming too damn many stupid equations into my head, I knew Annie’s voice. My dream of the breasts holding chopsticks vanished like a good meal.

  I scrambled out of bed like someone had just told me there were spiders under the sheets and got to the window without tripping or making enough noise to wake my parents. I cranked up the blinds before I even gave a thought to what I was wearing, which was a motocross tee-shirt and blue-striped boxers.

  Annie was standing in the grass, her head about level with my crotch through the glass window.

  Okay, to be frank, I had dreamed of us being in this position with Annie more times than I could count. Just not like this. And yes, they were that kind of dreams, so sue me.

  Annie stood there, arms crossed over her chest as if she were trying to hold those large breasts from making a break for it through the cold March night. Her long brown hair was really messed up, and from the faint light coming from the hallway behind me, I could tell that she’d been crying. She didn’t have a coat on and she had to be freezing standing there in jeans and a thin blouse.

  I slid the window open, bent down so my face was closer to hers through the screen and said the first thing that came to mind. “You all right?”

  “No.”

  The no sounded weak and sort of shuddery, if that was a word. I couldn’t believe that the woman I feared more than anything in the world was turning to me as a friend. Granted, I had tried to keep the outward appearance of how I felt for her friendly, but I just never figured I would be someone she would come to.

  Yet here she stood. She must really be desperate and in trouble.

  “Meet me in my driveway,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”

  She nodded and started around the back of the house.

  I pulled the blind closed, then in a matter of less than a second, managed to pull on my jeans, grab my coat from the back of my chair, and then get a second coat for her from my closet. I think I got down the hallway without waking my parents, grabbed my mom’s car keys as I went through the kitchen, and out through the side door.

  My mom always left her car parked in the driveway, mostly because she said I kept too much of my bike “junk” in the garage and there wasn’t room. I figured Annie and I could sit in her car and I could run it and keep us both warm.

  I was about to sit in a parked car with the woman who scared me the most, who I had been in love with since the very first moment I noticed girls were different than boys.

  It was a dream come true, again just not in the way I had hoped.

  THREE

  I handed Annie my second coat as I came around the side of the house and found her standing near my mother’s red Buick.

  “Thanks,” she said, then needed my help to get it on. In the faint light from the street I could see that she had brown spots on her blouse, clearly blood. Something really ugly had happened to her.

  “Jump in,” I said, unlocking my mom’s car with her automatic keys and then sliding in on the driver’s side. I had only driven my dad’s Chrysler on special dates, but my mom let me use her car all the time, so it felt like I was home behind the wheel.

  Annie opened the passenger door and sort of climbed in, moving carefully as if she was afraid she might hurt herself. Under the bright dome lights I could see she was a mess. She had a couple of long scrapes along the side of her neck and from what I could tell she might end up with a pretty good black eye.

  I didn’t need to even ask. I knew at once that Mr. Jock, Mr. Big Man, Mr. Drunk, had finally shown his true colors to Annie.

  But I had to be sure, so as she closed the door and stared at the dashboard in front of her, shaking, I asked, “Rees?”

  She nodded slowly as the overhead light dimmed and went off.

  I stuck the keys in the ignition and turned on the car. “It will warm up in a second.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you think you need a hospital?”

  “No,” she said, a little too quickly.

  Then she turned to face me, tears running down her face in the faint light from the dashboard. “I need your help.”

  “Tell me what happened and I’ll see what I can do.” I surprised myself that my voice and my attitude seemed so in control when my stomach was doing a dance.

  She stared at me for just about the rest of my life, thinking about my offer. I could feel my heart beating half out of my chest and I forced myself to keep breathing as regular as possible, just like I did at the start of any race. Even beat up and a mess, even in faint light, even with tears, she was still the most beautiful person I had ever known.


  And this seemed like the first time she had ever really looked at me.

  Finally, she nodded and started into her story. As anything with Rees, what had happened could have been planned by a bad writer on a cancelled sitcom. Out drinking with friends, he wanted her to go parking with him in his Hummer. She had said yes, and the two of them had ended up on the dirt maintenance road that ran beside the old New Trunk Canal.

  Rees kept drinking and when she said no to his lewd advances, as she always did she claimed, he got angry.

  “He pinned me against the door,” she said, now really crying.

  I wanted to reach out and hold her, but I stayed facing her, afraid to move.

  “I kicked him between his legs and that stopped him,” she said.

  “I bet,” I said, and managed to not make a rude comment about how she managed to hit such a small target.

  “I got out and he came after me and started hitting me, holding me in the dirt and punching me.”

  Now she was really crying, her face in her hands. It was no wonder she had blood on her blouse.

  Right about that moment, I almost put the car in reverse to take her to the hospital emergency room, but something about her story stopped me. It clearly wasn’t over yet. It was missing the one element any good story needed. An ending.

  “How did you get away?”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “It’s all right,” I said after a few long minutes of her sobbing into her hands. “You can tell me.”

  She managed, between gasps for air, to say, “I grabbed a rock and I hit him in the side of the head.”

  Okay, now I had finally found something that scared me more than Annie and her big tits. The image of Rees with a caved in skull.

  Two in the morning, from the clock on my mom’s dashboard.

  Dark and silent in the neighborhood around us.

  Annie, the girl of my dreams, sitting in the car beside me, sobbing, because she had just stopped her boyfriend from beating her up by hitting him with a rock.

  And I was too damn afraid to ask the next question.

  The heat had finally filled the car, maybe a little too much. I shut off the car but kept the key turned to keep the dashboard lights on.

  Annie kept sobbing. I wanted to hold her.

  I didn’t want to hold her.

  I was afraid to hold her, afraid to get really dragged into the mess that her night had become. There was no good outcome in my holding her. If Rees was still alive and caught me doing that, I would be dead. And if she had killed Rees, holding her might get me to do something really stupid, like helping her cover up her crime. I had seen more than enough CSI shows to know that wasn’t possible in this modern day and age.

  Finally, I got up the nerve to ask.

  “So what happened next? Where’s Rees?”

  “In the canal,” she said, sobbing. Then she looked up at me and kept going. “I panicked and ran when he rolled off of me and down the bank into the canal. I killed him.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I know. He didn’t come up out of the water, only floated face down away from me.”

  With that she sobbed again, shuddering, her breasts bouncing like no breasts should bounce.

  “That’s why I need your help,” she said. “I walked home. I figure I need to go back and make it look like an accident, like he had been drinking and ran off the road and hit his head and died.”

  “And you escaped with just bumps and bruises to explain him beating on you. Right?”

  She nodded.

  “Will you help me?”

  She looked at me with those cheerleader eyes.

  Up until the moment she did the tap tap tap routine in my chopstick dream, I figured the only thing I was really afraid of was her. Now I knew there were many other things much worse. And hiding a crime from the cops was one.

  No large breasts, no puppy-like love, was enough to make me do that. So I said what any normal, healthy, love-struck teenage boy would say when facing the woman of his wet dreams.

  “Sure.”

  FOUR

  She reached out and touched my arm and it was like an electrical charge had gone from her touch through my heart to my crotch. Mostly, just to my crotch.

  I started my mom’s car and backed out of the driveway, buckling up as I went. “What part of the canal bank road were you on?”

  “Off of 23rd Street,” she said, taking a deep breath and getting some of the old Annie take-no-prisoner’s attitude I knew so well.

  “You know you should just report this, don’t you? It was self-defense. No one would do anything to you.”

  “Except I’d always be known as the girl who killed her boyfriend. If we do this, I’m just the girl who lost her boyfriend in a tragic accident.”

  Not that I should have been surprised, but I was. She had done a lot of thinking in that long walk home. Cold, harsh thinking. And clearly she couldn’t call any of her “true” friends to help her, so why not get that motorcycle kid from next door to do it.

  I knew right then and there where I stood. And if I helped her, I’d have a lot of leverage in her life.

  “You know,” I said, as I headed down toward the canal, making sure my speed was right at the speed limit every moment, “I used to really have a crush on you.”

  “I know,” she said.

  My heart skipped a beat. She knew. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad.

  “I always had this dream,” I said, “of you letting me see you naked.”

  Okay, she kills someone and I suddenly have a ton of courage to tell her things I never would have said two hours ago. Go figure.

  She actually laughed. She had just killed a guy and she laughed. Wow, she was either very cold or I was one hell of a comedian.

  “You help me and you might get that wish.”

  “How about a little down payment?” I said, glancing around to make sure no cops were following. I really, really needed to know just how calculating this girl of my dreams really was.

  She also glanced around, then with a smile, she started to open her bloody blouse.

  “Thanks,” I said, motioning for her to stop. “Always time later.”

  I really didn’t want the reality to change my dreams. It would have never been as good.

  She nodded, gave me that smile that scared me to death, started to put herself back together.

  She was working on the buttons when I turned suddenly into the police parking lot and hit the horn.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded as I drove to the front door of the station, heading for a space that said “Emergency vehicles only.”

  “Forcing you to do the right thing,” I said. “Just tell them what you told me and you’ll be fine. You did nothing wrong. You were in shock when you got home and came to me to drive you to the police station because I’m your friend.”

  Two cops came out of the front door of the station to see what idiot was blaring his horn. I slammed on the brakes, acting as if I had rushed there.

  “You’re a real bastard,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m also your only real friend. You came to me for help. Now you’re getting it.”

  I shut off the car, took the keys and jumped out.

  “Officers,” I said. “There’s been a tragic accident.”

  In the passenger seat, the girl I had been afraid of my entire life sat crying.

  And I felt free from the terror of that smile, of those eyes, and of that chest.

  Especially that chest.

  Sometimes facing your fears and staring them down is the best way to conquer them. They just don’t seem so large after you do that.

  A dead alien ship appears close to human space. But in millions of years, no alien race managed to leave its own galaxy.

  The alien ship originated in a galaxy over two hundred thousand years of travel away. But the Seeders need to know about the alien race, in case they are a threat.<
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  Star Mist takes on the vast scale of the Seeders Universe and expands it even more.

  Galaxy-spanning science fiction at its very best.

  STAR MIST

  A Seeders Universe Novel

  For Kris

  SECTION ONE

  The Beginning Before the Beginning

  PROLOGUE

  THE ALIEN SHIP looked more like a large pile of black and gray garbage smashed together into a large ball than a spaceship hanging there in the blackness of space just beyond the edge of the Milky Way Galaxy.

  Yet Chairman Wade Ray knew it was a ship.

  And that ship was the most important discovery in hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years of human history.

  Chairman Wade Ray stood, his hands behind his back, in the command center of his ship, staring at the image of the alien ship on the huge monitor that filled one wall of the command center. Ray had his long, silver-gray hair pulled back as always and wore a dark-silk dress shirt and dark slacks and soft leather shoes.

  He could feel the tension around him in the huge room like a heavy blanket on a warm night.

  Sixteen people manned stations behind him and not a one could be heard. They all felt as he felt, that what they were seeing couldn’t be possible.

  Tacita, his wife and partner and co-chairman of this ship, stood beside him, also just studying the strange shape of the alien ship. She had her hair extremely short and wore a black silk pantsuit.

  To Ray, she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen and he had been in love with her for more years than he wanted to think about.

  He couldn’t imagine ever not having her brilliant mind and sharp wit working beside him.

  Especially now, when they faced an alien ship.