The beat-up mountain bike rounded a bend and Clive Altmayer started pedaling again. He was riding first, riding fast, with his best friend Ray behind him. They’d left the asphalt of the city streets behind them half an hour ago and were pushing deeper into wooded hills beyond the city limits. It was the afternoon. The sun was in their eyes. “Come on!” yelled Clive.

The path they were on was becoming less pronounced.

“You sure it’s out here?” yelled Ray.

“Yeah.”

They were trying to find the meteorite that Clive had seen from his bedroom window last night. (Had claimed to have seen, according to Ray.)

“Maybe it burned up. Maybe there’s nothing to find,” said Ray.

Oh, there’s something, thought Clive. But he didn’t say it. He just sped up, climbed the rest of the hill with his butt off the bike seat, then let gravity pull him down the other side of the hill, feeling every gnarled tree root on the way down. He was good at finding his way and he always trusted his instincts. And his instinct told him there was no way that what he saw last night coming like fire out of the sky had burned up. It had to be here. And because it did, he would find it. He was already imagining spotting the area of scorched earth where the meteorite had made impact, the small crater, the black soil and the prize: the handful-chunk of space stuff that had come crashing into the Earth for him to find. He wondered how heavy it would be, how shiny it would look. How utterly alien it would feel…

Clive looked back. Ray was falling behind. “Pick up the pace!” Clive yelled, then turned his head to face the way forward again and howled as momentum carried him into the lowest part of space between the hills and up the next hillside. The path was completely gone here, subsumed by the surrounding wilderness. Even though Clive knew they weren’t all that far from the city, from his house and his everyday life with his father and his brother, Bruce, and his friends and the teachers at the high school he had started attending last year, if he stopped thinking of those things and thought only of what surrounded him, the trees and rocks and dirt and the unknown, he could imagine he was in some faraway land, its first and most famous explorer. It didn’t matter that if he kept going in this direction he’d eventually get to Bakersfield, and then to Kensington, where his orthodontist lived. It didn’t matter that if he turned back, he’d be home in about an hour. What mattered was the feeling of intentionally getting lost in the space between the trees…

And so they rode, meandering like this, for another hour, Ray looking at his watch and suggesting they should turn back, and Clive insisting they go on, that they were almost there, just one more hill to climb and they would—

“Whoa!”

Clive turned his bike sideways, bringing it to a violent halt.

“Holy freakin’ moly,” said Ray, stopping alongside.

Both of them looked down from the hilltop they were on to the clearing below, or what today was a clearing but yesterday had been just another patchy bit of forest, because it all looked so freshly disturbed. The few upturned trees, the soil which looked like someone had detonated it and then let it rain back down to the surface, the clear point of impact. The only thing missing was the meteorite itself.

“Maybe somebody got here before us,” said Ray, trying to comfort Clive.

But Clive didn’t need comforting. “No one’s been here. It’s probably just still buried in the ground,” he said. “Leave the bikes. Let’s get down on foot.”

They descended the hill, almost sliding, slipping, falling from excitement, which originated from Clive but had gripped Ray too. Clive sometimes had wild ideas that didn’t amount to anything, but once in a while they did, and that’s when life bloomed. That’s what Ray liked about his friend. Cliive was not afraid to be wrong. What’s more, having been wrong, he wasn’t afraid to risk being wrong again because he always believed that being right once-in-a-while was reward enough.

It was quiet at the bottom.

The trees loomed on all sides, making Clive feel like he was in a bowl and the treetops were looking down at him. Without speaking, they crossed the untouched part of the forest floor separating them from the impact site.

Clive was first to plant his foot on the upturned soil. Doing so, he felt a kind of reverence—but for what: nature, the world understood in some general interconnected sense? No. The reverence he felt was for the immensity of outer space. He was awed by its size and unchartedness. How many hours he’d spent staring up at the night sky, trying to fathom the planets and suns lying beyond. And here, almost beneath his sneakered feet, was a tiny piece of that beyond, a visitor from where his imagination had spent countless daydreams.

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“You’re sure this is safe?” said Ray.

“Uh huh,” said Clive.

“It’s not like super hot or radioactive or infected with some kind of space virus?”

“No,” said Clive, Ray’s words barely registering as he slowly approached the crater where the meteorite had hit.

He dropped to his knees and began digging with his hands.

Ray watched him—until something in the surroundings caught his attention. Briefly. A movement. “Hey, Clive.”

“What?”

“What kind of animals are out here?”

“Coyotes, turkeys.”

“Bears?”

“I don’t think bears would stick around with the amount of noise we were making,” said Clive, still digging without having found anything.

“Let’s say one did. Would it be fast?”

“I don’t know.” He punched the ground in frustration. “There’s nothing here.”

“Maybe it burned up,” said Ray.

“If it burned up, then what caused all this?” said Clive.

“Clive…”

“Yeah?”

“I think we should go. Get back to our bikes, you know. I, uh—I think there might be a bear out there.”

Clive stood up. “Where?”

“There,” said Ray, pointing to the edge of the clearing, where the trees looked somehow thicker than before.

“I don’t see anything,” said Ray.

“I’m pretty sure I did.”

“We should have brought a shovel. I should have thought to bring a shovel,” said Clive. “It has to be here.” Then he saw it too—a flash of motion along the perimeter of the clearing, just behind the first line of trees. Reflecting the sunlight.

“Did you see that?” asked Ray.

“I did,” said Clive.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” said Ray.

But instead of moving away from the spot where they’d seen the flash of motion, Clive began edging towards it, curiosity pulling him to where good sense would have certainly advised against.

“Clive!”

“Just a minute.”

Closer and closer, Clive stepped towards the trees. His heart beat increasing. Sweat forming on the back of his neck and running down his back. It was humid suddenly, like he’d entered a primeval jungle. “Clive, I’m freakin’ scared,” he heard Ray say—but heard it weakly, as if Ray was talking to him from behind an ocean. And Clive was scared too. There was no doubt about that. But still he took step after step after step. That was the difference between them. Ray acted like a normal human being. Frightened, wanting, above all, safety. To return home. Whereas Clive desired knowledge and understanding. To Clive, the most terrible thing was to be on the brink of a discovery and turn back from it in fear.

There it was again! A spear of motion.

(“Clive! Clive!” the words bubbled and popped and soaked into the atmosphere.)

Clive reached the first trees—and continued past them, deeper…

Deeper—

Until there it was:

The meteorite. A stretched-out sphere. Matte and off-white, bone-coloured. Nestled in a clump of grass. Dirtied with mud. As alien as Clive had imagined it.

He squatted, wiped sweat from his brow and reached out to touch it.

Cold, it felt.

But not cold as death.

Not cold in the way grandmother had been when he’d touched her in the casket. Cold as a rock that had been formed millions of years ago in the crucible of the hottest volcano. No wonder, thought Clive. For it had come from the void itself.

Then something shrieked and Clive, instinctively turning his head, became aware of two things at once: the object which he had just touched—had started to crack, and in the surrounding area a dozen-more similar objects lay scattered, some whole yet others already opened and empty. Eggs, thought Clive. “They’re eggs!”

The crack on the object before him deepened and expanded, running down the side of the shell. Which broke, and from within a small black eye filled with malice stared at him.

Clive got up.

More shrieks: behind, beside…

The scaled face to which the eye belonged pushed through the shell, cracking it further until it fell away entirely, revealing a small reptilian body that reminded Clive simultaneously of a bird. It had the same regalness, inhumanity. And, hissing, exposing its tiny rows of teeth, the newly-hatched creature lunged at Clive—who batted it out of the air, and turned and was already running back to the clearing, back to Ray, whose screams just now were returning from beyond the ocean.

The lizard-creature chased him on its little legs.

“Ray! They’re eggs! Eggs!”

And in the clearing there were more lizard-creatures, and Ray’s face was bloodied and he was holding a stick, swinging it at the beasts and screaming.

The woods around them were awake with slithering motions.

“Oh God, you’re alive!” Ray yelled when he saw Clive burst into view. “I thought you were dead! What the freak are these things?”

“I don’t know, but we need to get the hell outta here.”

“They’re fast,” said Ray.

“Not as fast as our bikes, I bet,” said Clive.

Together they scrambled up the hillside to where they’d left their bikes, taking turns beating back the lizard-creatures, whose agile serpentine bodies nevertheless flew at them like primordial arrows tipped with sharp teeth that tore their clothing and their skin until, tattered, bleeding and nearly out of breath, they scampered, one after the other, onto the hilltop, mounted their bikes and rode like wildfire toward the city.

The lizard-creatures couldn’t keep up—or at least didn’t want to—and soon enough Clive and Ray were free of immediate danger, which meant they could slow down and think and talk again.

“What just happened?” asked Ray.

“I’m not sure. I have an idea but it’s kind of crazy.”

“How crazy?”

“Those lizards back there. I’ve never seen lizards act that way before.”

“Me neither, Clive.”

Then Clive told Ray everything he’d seen past the perimeter of the clearing: the egg-shaped objects, the hatching, the empty shells. “I think that whatever I saw shooting through the sky last night brought these things to Earth. These eggs—these lizards—they’re not from here. Not from our planet. They’re aliens, Ray. Space lizards.”

“We need to get home,” said Ray.

While we still have one, thought Clive. But he didn’t say it. He just sped up, and the two boys pedaled back to the city in cosmic dread.