Alan Dean Foster - Taken 01 - Lost And Found

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ByALAN DEAN FOSTER
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
The Black Hole
Cachalot
Dark Star
The Metrognome and Other Stories
Midworld
Nor Crystal Tears
Sentenced to Prism
Splinter of the Mind’s Eye
Star Trek®Logs One–Ten
Voyage to the City of the Dead
. . . Who Needs Enemies?
With Friends Like These . . .
Mad Amos
The Howling Stones
Parallelities
The Icerigger Trilogy:
Icerigger
Mission to Moulokin
The Deluge Drivers
The Adventures of Flinx of the Commonwealth:
For Love of Mother-Not
The Tar-Aiym-Krang
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Orphan Star
The End of the Matter
Bloodhype
Flinx in Flux
Mid-Flinx
Flinx’s Folly
The Damned:
Book One: A Call to Arms
Book Two: The False Mirror
Book Three: The Spoils of War
The Founding of the Commonwealth:
Phylogenesis
Dirge
1
Marcus Walker loved Chicago, and Chicago loved him, which is why he was in Bug Jump, California.
Well, notin Bug Jump, exactly. As even the locals would admit, one was never actually wholly within Bug
Jump. One sort of hovered around its tenuous periphery, much as the peripatetic mosquitoes of
midsummer zoned around Cawley Lake, where Marcus had pitched his tent.
One of innumerable splashes of impossible blue that spotted the northern Sierra Nevada like shards of a
scattered lapis necklace, Cawley Lake lay at the terminus of a half-hour drive up a road that had been
coaxed from reluctant Sierra granite by the judicious application of hard-rock drilling, well-mannered
explosives, and much road-crew cursing. The bumps and ruts of the road were hell on Walker’s
Durango four-wheel drive, but that didn’t worry the commodities trader. It wasn’t his SUV; it was
Hertz’s. Slamming up and down the steep grade to and from Bug Jump, the 4X4 accumulated scrapes
and dings the way Marcus’s forehead collected sunburn.
All in all, he reflected with satisfaction as he heard the SUV complain through another grinding
downshift, it had been another very good year for Marcus Walker. Even if he had reached the ripe old
age of thirty. Unlike some of his rambunctious yet dismayed colleagues, he did not think it was All
Downhill From Here. Having despite several promising opportunities resolutely put off applying for
admission to the institution of marriage, he retained certain enviable options that were no longer open to
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most of his friends. It wasn’t, as he repeatedly and patiently explained to the curious, not all of whom
were his relatives, that he did not want to get married; just that he was pickier and in less of a hurry than
most. Sprung as he was from a home whose parents had split when he was a teenager, he was
understandably warier than the average successful young man of committing himself to a similar mistake.
The money he made helped. He was not rich, but given his age and experience, he lived comfortably.
For that he could thank hard, hard work and perspicacity. That quick killing he had made in Brazilian OJ
concentrate, for example. He gritted his teeth as the SUV was outraged by a pothole, threatening his
insurance rider. Among the other traders who worked out of the office, only Estrada had followed the
Brazilian weather closely enough to see the possible late frost looming. When it had struck, only the two
of them had been properly positioned to deliver the necessary futures at a favorable price to their
customers.
Then there was cocoa. Not only had trading in cocoa futures done wonders for his bank account, it had
unexpected social benefits as well. Tell a girl who asked what you did for a living that you were a
commodities trader and she might shrug, make a beeline for the next bar stool, smile vacuously and
change the subject, or tentatively try to find out how well it paid. The usual reaction was for their eyes to
glaze over as thickly as the sugar on a Christmas fruitcake.
Telling them you were inchocolate, however, fell somewhere between saying that you had just inherited
fifty million dollars and that you had a brother who was a wholesale buyer for Tiffany’s. Aside from the
beguiled expressions such an admission produced, you could smell the concomitant rise in hormone
production with one nostril pinched shut.
He chuckled to himself at the various images mention of his vocation engendered among members of
both sexes: everything from dashing world-traveling entrepreneur to stultifyingly dull owl-eyed
accountant. Nothing he could say ever changed another’s perception of his profession.
Though the wooded slopes flanking the narrow, winding road were growing dark, he was not
concerned. He’d made the drive from his isolated encampment down into Bug Jump half a dozen times
during the past week and felt he knew the sorry excuse for a road pretty well. Returning uphill after dark,
he’d travel more slowly. It was just that, while he had enjoyed proving wrong all of his friends who had
insisted he wouldn’t last more than twenty-four hours in the Sierra Nevada wilderness without running
screaming for the nearest Starbucks, he had to admit that he did miss human company. While, based on
what he had seen so far, it would be a stretch to so classify some of the local denizens of downtown Bug
Jump, there were enough who struck him as being halfway normal for him to look forward to the
occasional jaunts into the bucolic mountain village.
Thus far he’d spent five nights of his agreed-upon week in the northern California mountains camping out
alone, as promised. With just two more days to go before he drove back to Sacramento to catch his
return flight home, he felt he deserved a bit of a break. There was a grocery store in Bug Jump. There
was a bank-cum-post office combo. There was a gas station. And so, of course, there was a bar.
Bouncing and grinding down the steep slope of half-graded decomposing granite, racing the onset of
night, he was not heading for the bank.
The light that appeared in the sky was bright enough to not only draw his attention away from the difficult
thoroughfare, but to cause him to stop and temporarily put the big 4X4 in park. It idled at a rumble,
pleased at the opportunity to rest, like a male lion contentedly digesting half a dead wildebeest.
Now what the hell is that? he found himself wondering as he rolled down the driver’s side window and
stuck his head partway out. Could it be a meteorite? Living in Chicago, one didn’t see many meteorites.
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One didn’t see many stars, for that matter, and sometimes even the moon was a questionable indistinct
splotch behind the clouds. Watching the bright object descend at a steep angle, he was fully aware he
had little basis for comparison and small knowledge with which to evaluate what he was seeing.
Within the light, he thought he could make out a slightly oblong shape. That couldn’t be right. Falling
meteorites were rounded, weren’t they? Or cometlike, with a fiery tail? Did they blink in and out like this
one as they made their doomed plunge through the atmosphere? It seemed to him that the object was
falling too slowly to be a meteorite, but what did he know about representative intraatmospheric
velocities of terminal substellar objects?
Then it was gone, vanished behind the tall trees. He sat there for a long moment, listening. For several
minutes there was no sound at all. Then an owl hooted querulously. Burned up completely, whatever it
was, he decided. Or hit the ground a long, long ways off. Certainly it hadn’t made a sound. Rolling up the
window, he put the Durango back in drive and resumed his own less fiery descent. He was thirsty, he
was hungry, and if he was real lucky, he mused, he might find someone with whom to strike up a
conversation. While he did not think that likely to involve the latest forward projections for pineapple
juice concentrate or frozen bacon, he was perfectly willing to talk politics, sports, or anything else. Even
in Bug Jump.
Twenty minutes later, the lights of the optimistically self-categorized town appeared below him. Soon he
was pulling up outside the single bar-restaurant. A mix of country music and broad-spectrum pop filtered
out over the unpaved parking area; the only rap to be found here being on the food. Mother Earth had
long since sucked down the original layer of gravel that had once covered the lot. In the absence of rain
the uneven, washboarded surface onto which he stepped was as hard as concrete.
It was Friday night, and Bug Jump was jumpin’. Besides his rented Durango, there were more than a
dozen other vehicles parked haphazardly around the lot. No cars: only SUVs, pickups, and a couple of
sorely used dirt bikes.
Stepping up onto the raised cement sidewalk that flanked the town’s only street, he pushed through the
outer glass door, walked through the insulated double entryway, and then pushed through the second.
His senses were instantly assaulted by a mountain mélange of pumped-up music, loud conversation,
raucous laughter, fried food, and pool cues brutalizing orbs of imitation ivory on a felt field of play. Their
perfectly round glass eyes as dead and black as those of great white sharks, the cranial components of
violently demised ungulates gazed blankly at each other from opposing walls. There was also a bear
head, its petrified jaws parted in a rictus of false fury; old metal traps stained with the rust and blood of
years and furry critters past; brightly illuminated animated beer advertisements that in a thousand years
would no doubt be regarded by awed historians as great works of art; car license plates from other
states gnawed through by rust and time; and much other well-traveled detritus.
Though the rapidly falling temperature of the air outside only whispered of approaching autumn,
Bunyanesque lengths of amputated oak crackled for attention within the Stygian depths of a corner
fireplace fashioned of hand-laid river rock. In a mutually destructive seppuku of air and wood, reflected
flames danced off the insides of triple-paned windows that looked out on the parking lot, vehicles, big
trees, and mountain slopes beyond.
No one paid him the slightest attention as he sauntered toward the bar. As a trader whose work
sometimes took him overseas, he knew how to blend in with the natives. Though he would never be able
to pass for a local, after five days up at the lake his flannel shirt, cheap jeans, and hiking boots were
suitably soiled.
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“Stoli on the rocks,” he told the jaded woman behind the bar. She looked, as he had once heard a
visiting Texas trader say about another lady, as if she had been rode hard and put up wet. But his drink
arrived as fast as one in any fancy drinking establishment in the Loop, and was more honest.
As he sat on his chosen stool and sipped, he contemplated the milling throng with the quiet,
self-contained detachment of a visiting anthropologist. There didn’t seem to be many other vacationers.
Too late in the season, perhaps, what with the local school districts now back in session and the onset of
colder weather. It explained why, except for a few locals fishing for end-of-season browns and
rainbows, he had much of the lake and the surrounding stolid, slate gray mountains to himself.
Halfway through the Stoli, he started grinning at nothing in particular. Partly it was due to the effects of
the iced potato juice, partly to the knowledge that he was going to win the bet with his friends. To a man,
and one woman, they had insisted he would be home before the weekend, his tail between his legs—if
not gnawed raw by blood-sucking mosquitoes, rabid marmots, and who knew what other horrors the
primordial backwoods of California could produce.
Well, they’d underestimated him. Marcus Walker was tougher than any of them suspected. Few knew
of his years as an undersized linebacker at the major midwestern university where he had matriculated.
Filling holes in the defensive line, he’d sacrificed his body many times. Wildlife didn’t frighten him.
Isolation didn’t psych him. After a couple of days of earnest effort up at the lake, he’d even managed to
catch fresh fish for dinner. Without their PDAs, laptops, and cell phones, most of his friends couldn’t
catch a cold.
And on top of everything else, the woman who materialized next to him filled out her flannel shirt and
faded jeans as effectively and impressively as she did the blank space between himself and the next bar
stool over. She was his age or a little younger. Having already essentially won his bet with his friends, he
promptly made a private bet with himself.
“Jack and water, Jill,” she told the bartender. With an effort, Walker forbore from articulating the
obvious gambit. Even in backwoods downtown Bug Jump, she’d no doubt heard it before. The opening
he did use, when her drink finally arrived, suggested itself as spontaneously as had its inspiration.
Sipping from his short glass while trying his best to ignore the unidentifiable fossilized stain that marred
the rim opposite his lips, he opined inquiringly, “Am I the only one who saw the falling star a little while
ago?”
She could have frowned, could have eyed him the way locals doubtless did eye atypical bugs in Bug
Jump. Having rolled the rhetorical dice, he could not take back the throw; he could only wait to see
where and how it would come to rest.
Her eyes widened slightly. “You saw it, too?”
Ah, the Man is still rolling sevens, he thought contentedly. “I’m wondering what it was. When I saw it I
thought, maybe a meteor. But it seemed to be coming down awfully slow.” He swung toward her on the
bar stool.
“I was thinking it was a satellite, or a big piece of one,” she replied, showing unexpected sophistication
as she picked up her own drink. “If the solar panels didn’t burn off right away, they might slow the
reentry.”
It was not the response he had been expecting. Not that he was disappointed. In his book, when it came
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to the other gender, education and looks were not necessarily mutually exclusive. He found himself
wondering what she did for a living. So he asked.
She smiled responsively enough. Her eyes were the same pale cornflower blue as the shallow parts of
Lake Cawley. “Janey Haskell. I work for the satellite TV people. You know: repairs, installs, sales.”
That neatly explained the education as well as her knowledge of satellites, falling and otherwise. “Marc
Walker. I’m visiting—”
“No kidding,” she quipped.
“—from Chicago. I’m in chocolate.”
Her eyes lit up. It was expected. Never failed, he mused. Explaining that he was in orange juice
concentrates would not have had the same effect.
Despite the fact that he had started on his drink before her, she finished her Jack and water ahead of
him. Another seven, he observed happily. He bought her another. When he finished his Stoli, she bought
him his next. He was definitely on a roll. They spent the next few hours chatting and laughing and
swapping stories and buying each other distilled spirits. When the father of a beard who occupied the bar
stool next to him tossed down the remainder of his last shot and lumbered out, she slid onto it with a
sensuous squeak of denim against leather. As she did so, her leg bumped up against his. She did not
move it away.
If he failed to spend the night in the tent by the lake, he knew, he would lose the bet with his friends.
Probing sweet Janey’s increasingly moist eyes, he found himself wondering if it might be worth it. His
friends wouldn’t know, anyway. Early enough in the morning to be convincing, he’d do as he’d done
every day since his arrival: switch on his cell phone pickup and send them the usual pictures to prove that
he was indeed still where he had promised to be.
Unfortunately, after rolling nothing but consecutive sevens on his pass, snake eyes finally decided to put
in an appearance.
The guy’s name might even have been Snakeyes. He was short and ugly and looked a lot like something
that might have scratched its way out of the dirt behind one of the local ranchettes. In contrast, the two
buddies who backed him up were clean-shaven and neatly dressed. At first glance, it escaped Walker as
to why such a pair of clean-cut types would even associate with the perambulating lump of soiled goods
who seemed to be their leader. Maybe they owed him money, Walker thought. Not that it mattered. The
sparks in Shorty Snakeyes’s eyes were not reflections of the distant blaze in the corner fireplace.
“You’re not from around here, are you, dude?”
Oh, Lord. The slightly inebriated Walker fought down a rising chuckle. Next thing, he’ll be asking me to
step outside and draw.
He wasn’t afraid of the jerk, or his friends. But therewere three of them. Not good odds, whether in the
city or the country. He wondered if they had just singled him out for entertainment, or if one of them had
a specific interest in Janey Haskell.
“The lady and I are having a conversation.” While the crowd continued to ignore the looming
confrontation, the bartender did not. She was watching them closely. Not closely enough, he knew, to
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get a cop out here soon enough to put a halt to any real trouble. Besides which, in a violent conflict, any
resident gendarme would be more than likely to side with the natives. Even worse than maybe getting
beaten up, Walker knew that if he could not get back to his camp in time to make his morning video call,
he would lose his bet. And with only two days left to go.
Instead of responding, Snakeyes turned to the increasingly tipsy Haskell. “Beats me, Janey, how you
haven’t fallen off a roof yet and killed yourself.” He indicated one of the two bookending quasi-cowboys.
“Rick, how about you drive Janey home?” The big blond nodded.
“Maybe your girlfriend doesn’t want to go home just yet.” Setting his drink aside, Walker straightened
on the bar stool. As always, he was conscious of the fact that his once football-toughened physique
continued to give would-be troublemakers pause. Whether that would be sufficient to deter the three
intruders remained to be seen.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” Snakeyes informed him tersely. “She’s my sister.”
“Even more reason to find out whatshe wants to do.” Walker, sturdily braced by the amount of vodka
he had consumed, wasn’t about to let himself be intimidated by a brace of mountain bumpkins, even if it
meant the possible sacrifice of his nearly won bet with his friends.
“Whatshe wants to do, dude, is keep the doctor’s appointment she’s got scheduled for tomorrow.” He
eyed the woman, who by now had to be helped off her bar stool by her erstwhile driver, with
unconcealed distaste. “Her test is due back in the morning.”
“Doctor’s appointment? Test?” Taken aback, Walker struggled for clarification amid the haze that
seemed to have settled on his brain. “She sick or something?”
“Or something.” Seeing that the visitor was not about to further challenge Haskell’s departure, Snakeyes
relented a little. “Might be pregnant.”
All of the proverbial chips Walker had collected that evening evaporated like the metaphor they were.
Neither of the two blonds was the woman’s husband. Snakeyes was the woman’s brother. Which
suggested strongly that the probable daddy of the satellite TV installer’s possibly imminent offspring was
likely not to be found in the immediate vicinity. Perhaps not even in the great state of California. Clearly,
the situation thus implied was not one to make for lasting familial bliss.
Walker found himself longing for the harsh comfort and isolation of the sleeping bag lying in the tent he
had set up on the south shore of Cawley Lake.
“Sorrynoharmintended,” he blurted hastily as he slid off the stool and whipped out his wallet in one
motion. He ended up overtipping the impassive bartender, but there was no way he was going to wait
around for his change.
Snakeyes didn’t move, but neither did he shift his stance to block Walker’s retreat. He did, however,
favor the departing commodities trader with a pithy comment and a withering stare.
“Don’t bullshit me, dude. But no harmdone —that’s for sure.”
Out in the chill darkness of the parking lot, the hitherto reliable 4X4 chose that evening to not start.
Walker’s attention kept shifting frequently back and forth between the glassy rectangle of a door that was
the entrance to the bar and the recalcitrant ignition. The entryway remained deserted. When the engine
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finally turned over, so did his emotions. He backed carefully out of the dirt parking area. All he needed
now, he knew, was to back into some local’s precious pickup.
Moments later he was safely out on the road. Half a mile up the state highway he swung left onto the
gravel track that led up to the lake. After repeated glances into the rearview mirror showed an absence
of headlights behind him, he finally relaxed.
Well, it had been a charming if not charmed evening right up until the end. As he put the Durango into
four-wheel drive, he realized that he’d actually been lucky. Suppose Snakeyes and the blond brothers
hadn’t shown up at the bar? Suppose he’d gone home with pretty Janey to check out her installation
skills and brother brusque and his buds had come a-knockin’ on her front door to remind her of her
upcoming date with her favorite OB-GYN dude? Yes, it might easily have been worse.
Instead, he had extricated himself quickly and cleanly from what could have been an exceedingly
unpleasant situation. By the time he reached the lake and turned east along its southern shore, he was
almost whistling to himself.
As far as he knew, he’d had the whole lake to himself for at least a day. The last campers, a cheerful
elderly couple up from Grass Valley, had packed up and trundled out in their aged camper on Tuesday.
In contrast to his increasing unease at the lack of human company, after tonight’s confrontation he found
himself looking forward to a night, and perhaps a following day, of isolation. Just him and the birds, the
fish, the flowers, and an occasional grazing deer.
His tent by the lake was undisturbed, the gear stored inside untouched. That was the nice thing about
insured rental equipment, he reflected as he braked the 4X4 to a halt, switched off the engine, and
hopped out. You could wander off on a hike or a fishing expedition and just leave everything. This wasn’t
Yosemite or Sequoia. Cawley Lake was pretty out of the way, even for the north-central Sierras. That
was why he and his friends had chosen it as the site of their little bet.
The compact propane heater soon had the interior of the dome tent toasty warm while the
battery-powered lantern rendered the interior bright enough for him to read from one of the paperbacks
he had brought along. Not one to stint when it wasn’t necessary, Walker had rented a pop-up shelter
large enough to accommodate three adequately and himself in comparative comfort. Having filled up in
town on bar snacks, he decided to skip what at that point in time would have been an uncomfortably late
supper. After the tension of the near fight, the rented microfiber sleeping bag beckoned enticingly.
He allowed himself an imported chocolate bar (perhaps made with chocolate liquor whose base
component he himself had once bid on) and some cold water, then slipped out of his clothes and into the
sleeping bag. Reaching up, he switched off the light, then the propane heater. It would get cold in the tent,
but not in the bag. Come morning, he would switch the heater on again before emerging. Anyway, the
cold didn’t really bother him. He was from Chicago.
The territorial night owl began hoo-hooting again, and he wondered at its species. Certainly it was more
mellow than the night owls he was used to dealing with back home. Occasionally, something snapped
twigs or rustled leaf litter outside the tent. The first couple of nights, the furtive noises had kept him
awake. Initial worrisome thoughts of mountain lions and bears gave way to those of coyotes, then
beavers, and finally, mice and ground squirrels. Nothing nibbled at his toes. He was not the natural food
of the local predators, he reassured himself, and the tent not the kind of burrow they were used to
invading in search of prey.
Subsiding adrenaline had kept him alert on the road. Now, as he relaxed, its effects diminished while
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those of the Russian lemonade grew stronger. Consciousness faded quickly, along with any lingering
concerns.
2
The crunching woke him. Lying in the sleeping bag, half awake and half asleep, he struggled to revive his
muzzy mental faculties. Had he imagined the sound? Had he dreamed it?
Sss-crunchh—there it was again. He raised himself up on one elbow, suddenly wide awake. The noise
had not been made by a mouse, or by one of the pushy pack rats that haunted his campsite keen on petty
theft. It was loud and distinctive and strongly hinted at significant weight being applied to the talkative
earth. Bear? he wondered as he sat all the way up inside the tent. Deer?
Or worse—one or more of the transalpine drunken troublemakers who habituated the sole drinking
establishment of metropolitan Bug Jump, California?
Parting words of reassurance notwithstanding, maybe just seeing off his besotted gravid sister’s
temporary gentleman friend hadn’t been enough to satisfy Shorty Snakeyes’s beleaguered ego. How had
they found him? Slipping out of the sleeping bag as noiselessly as possible, Walker dressed in silence,
working out of a crouch as he fought with the jeans that kept trying to trip him, staring through the gauzy
tent material at every imagined shape and shadow.
It wouldn’t have been too hard to track him down. With Cawley Lake as deserted as it was now, close
to the end of the season, there were only so many places a visiting camper was likely to pitch a tent.
Doubtless a few local fishermen or hikers had seen him up here. In a small town, word about lingering
visitors would get around fast.
He felt better when he was fully dressed. Somehow, the thought of getting beaten up while stark naked
was far more unsettling. Not that it would matter to his doctor. Or to his friends, who upon his return and
reappearance in Chicago would torment him mercilessly for weeks with chorused fusillades of
well-meaning “I told you so’s.”
Fumbling in the dark, he found the fisherman’s steel multitool he’d brought with him and unfolded the
long blade. Sometimes just a show of resistance would be enough to put off potential assailants. It was
one thing to jump some poor tourist caught half asleep in the sack, quite another to confront a fully awake
220-pound opponent holding a knife. If they had guns, however, he would just have to resign himself to
taking a beating.
More rustling noises, near the front of the tent this time. Reaching down, Walker picked up the compact
high-beam flashlight. Flash them in the eyes, startle ’em, and then stare them down, he thought rapidly.
They shouldn’t be expecting it.
That the bent-over figure that quickly unzipped the tent flap and thrust its head inside was not expecting
to have a bright light shined in its eyes was made immediately clear by its reaction. It let out a startled
roar, covered both horizontally flattened eyes with the sucker-studded, flexible flaps that comprised the
forward third of its upper appendages, sharply retracted the membranous hearing sensor that protruded
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from near the top of its conical skull, and jerked back out of the shelter.
Gaping open-mouthed at the unzipped entrance flap, Walker was somehow not reassured by the sudden
retreat of the intruder. He did, finally, remember to breathe.
“What in the hell . . . ?”
It was not yet October. Therefore, it was still a while until Halloween. It did not matter. Whatever had
pushed the forepart of its outrageous self into his tent had not been in costume. You could tell these
things. Yet, it could not be real, either. So, if it was not real, then why was he shaking so badly that the
inside of the tent looked as if it was under attack by a flotilla of fireflies?
When his trembling hand finally steadied, so did the flashlight it clutched in a death grip. The firefly
armada resolved once again into a single circlet of illumination that waited patiently on the inner lining of
the pop-up shelter. Wishing he was at that moment anywhere else, even in Bug Jump’s only tavern,
Walker extended a tentative hand toward the tent flap, pulled it aside, and peered out through the
resultant opening.
The creature whose unprotected eyes had taken the full brunt of his flashlight’s LEDs was folded on the
ground next to the lakeshore. Standing over it was another of the nocturnal apparitions. This one was
holding a device that blinked some sort of dull brown beam rapidly off and on into its companion’s face.
The standing being was slightly under seven feet tall and, assuming its density was not unlike that of a
terrestrial creature, between three and four hundred pounds in weight. Its enormous eyes were perhaps
two inches high and six or seven long. Nearly meeting in the center of the sloping face, where a nose
ought to have been, they curved almost around to the sides of the tapering head. Moonlight gleaming off
the light purple flesh visible outside the creature’s attire revealed that its epidermis was pebbled, like a
golf ball.
As a partially paralyzed Walker looked on, the creature administering the ophthalmological treatment to
its ocularly challenged companion noticed the astounded simian gawking at them from the confines of its
small, flexible sanctuary. Raising one boneless arm (or cartilage-stiffened tentacle), it fluttered the end of
its sucker flap in Walker’s direction and uttered something in a deep, nasal (particularly interesting, given
the absence of visible nostrils) voice that sounded like an imploding garbage disposal.
“Sikrikash galad vume!”
Having no intention of being vumed, Walker slapped his left front pocket one time to make sure his car
keys were still there, burst out of the tent, heart pounding, and raced for the SUV. Despite his mostly
sedentary job, as an ex-athlete he had stayed in very good shape, and he covered the intervening gap at
impressive speed. The vehicle’s comforting bulk beckoned to him like the heated entryway of a
downtown shopping mall in mid-January.
Aliens!he thought wildly to himself as he ran. Real, honest-to-God, out-of-this-world,
from-off-this-planet extraterrestrials. They didn’t look like E.T. They weren’t slim and short and
big-headed, bald, and naked. He was willing to bet, based just on the little he had seen and heard and
smelled, that they weren’t genital-less, either. They were solid, loud, oversized, and focused. Nothing
about them was in the least bit ethereal. And he had (temporarily, he hoped) blinded one.
Confronted with the same situation, he had friends back home who would probably have moseyed over,
raised a hand or two, smiled ingenuosly, and chirped, “Welcome!” Not Marcus Walker. There were
backstreets in Chicago where it would be unwise to do that, too, and instinct told him that it would be
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 ByALANDEANFOSTERPublishedbyTheRandomHousePublishingGroupTheBlackHoleCachalotDarkStarTheMetrognomeandOtherStoriesMidworldNorCrystalTearsSentencedtoPrismSplinteroftheMind’sEyeStarTrek®LogsOne–TenVoyagetotheCityoftheDead...WhoNeedsEnemies?WithFriendsLikeThese...MadAmosTheHowlingStonesParallelitiesTheI...

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Alan Dean Foster - Taken 01 - Lost And Found.pdf

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分类：外语学习 价格：5.9玖币 属性：146 页 大小：562.25KB 格式：PDF 时间：2024-12-24

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