Austin eased his truck up to the curb at the end of the cul-de-sac. Both he and Jynx were dusty and scraped up from the fraying steel winch cables. He desperately needed a shower. Jynx wore a pale raccoon mask matching her sunglasses. She was obviously tired, but fighting it, too excited by the day's haul. Climbing out of the cab she swung her backpack over her shoulder, sleepwalking towards her house. A few steps away she realized that Austin wasn’t following. She waited a moment as he dusted off his jeans. “Well, alright,” he said, standing beside the truck.
“You want to come over?”
“Aw,” he scratched the back of his head, finding a bit of gravel. “I need a shower.”
She nodded and glanced down at the text message on her phone. “Mom left me pizza money.”
Austin glanced back at his house, brushed a little more dust from his arms, and shrugged. His mom’s car was gone. “Yeah, alright.” He followed Jynx.
She strolled straight past the front walkway and around the side of the house, apparently headed for her clubhouse. Austin was too tired to complain. It was probably better to hang out in the clubhouse than to drag a dust storm into her mom’s living room.
Jynx’s house was built back in the fifties, back when everybody in town had a bomb shelter in the backyard. Although a few of the neighbors had covered theirs over, Jynx was about eight when she and Austin had set out to find hers. Austin had a cheap orange-plastic-handled metal detector that his grandfather had sent them the year before. They found copper irrigation pipe fittings, some nails near the shed, a fistful of change buried in the crabgrass lawn, and a rusty gold-plated bracelet which they were both certain was worth some money, but somehow just managed to miss the buried hatch near the center of the lawn. They dug a few dozen holes before Jynx’s mom got home and found them in the backyard with a couple of shovels.
Nikki had finished her double shift at the hospital and returned home to discover that her daughter and Kelly’s kid had dug up half her lawn. She found them both in the center of the yard, close enough to the hatch that they probably might have found it eventually. Stepping through the sliding glass door with her glass of chardonnay, she walked out into the center of the lawn. She checked her bearings against the kitchen window and a scraggly old Sega palm near the fence and pointed at a spot in the grass. “Here.” She took the shovel from Austin, checked her alignment again, and planted it in the ground, stomping it in deeper with one of her sensible white leather nurse shoes. “It’s right here.” She walked away. “Cheesy mac with hot dogs in a half hour, kids. I’ll call your mother Austin. Amber, baby, make sure he fills in all those holes, hon.”
Jynx traipsed across the dried lawn to the steel hatch in the middle of the yard. Located in the center of a rock ring, and surrounded by a couple of lawn chairs, it might look like a firepit to a casual observer. The camouflage was entirely accidental. It had been nearly two years since Austin had ventured into the clubhouse. Instead, the two of them sat around in the lawn chairs, close enough to the hatch that they could still hear the music, or so that Jynx’s Wi-fi signal worked.
They had a club for a while, the Tough Guy Club. Austin named it, and Jynx didn’t seem to mind, seeing as how most of the kids in the neighborhood were boys anyway. Even Jeremiah was a member for a couple of years. Jeff Parker and Justin Land were a couple of boys who lived at the other end of the cul-de-sac. They spent most of their time skating, but when the weather got cold, they’d climb down into the bunker to play video games. Ashley hung out there but flatly refused to be any part of a club that called themselves the Tough Guys. Somewhere on the shelves of the bunker, there was still a small pink three ring binder loaded with a few years’ worth of effort, the Tough Guy Club sticker collection.
Austin didn’t go down there as much since Jynx started growing up. About the same time she started “developing”, her mom started giving him disapproving looks when he crawled out of the hatch. Despite the fact that there was nothing romantic between them, it was fairly clear that hanging out in her underground lair was starting to look suspicious. It quickly became her space entirely, and she spent more time there than in her own bedroom. Something about the stillness of the subterranean hangout calmed her anxiety and it had become more of a bedroom than a clubhouse.
Jynx had done some serious remodeling since Austin had last been down there. She had pulled down most of the posters that the Tough Guy Club left behind; the cars, bikini girls, and skate posters that they’d hung up. In their place she had put up a few pieces of genuine art along with photographs torn from an astronomy magazine. Most of the images looked like pastel clouds speckled in stars.
She had always maintained a bed, but she had somehow built a raised platform against the far end of the shelter, a bed that spanned from wall to wall, covered in throw pillows and her childhood stuffed animal collection. A few cartoon-printed bedsheets pinned to the ceiling suffered as curtains to enclose her bower. Piles of blankets, quilts and bedspreads lay in a crumpled mass around the edges leaving a single occupancy space at the center. Jynx plucked the old flashlight and the scrap piece of the wreckage from her pink knapsack and tossed the pack onto another unoccupied bunk. She placed the antique flashlight on a knickknack shelf like a trophy. Moving as if she were hypnotized, she retreated into the far end of her clubhouse and curled into the collected bedding. Like the coyote dens they found at the edge of the dry lakebed, Jynx had built herself a nest.
Austin slid onto a bench at the dining table, pushing aside a collection of textbooks and papers left over from finals. After four hours of digging that thing out of the wash, he was exhausted. He flipped the manual open to the section on the battery and electrical system, rereading a few paragraphs that he had practically memorized. As much as he wanted to keep Jynx company, he was ready to take a shower and sleep, but Jynx was all wound up, still playing with the hunk of scrap that she’d dug out of the busted airplane part.
If that thing had been some sort of flying saucer, as she seemed to think, he figured that he ought to be able to see some moving parts of some sort in there. After they’d managed to winch it out of the wash a few feet, he’d had the opportunity to peer inside the hull, looking for an engine or propellers or gears of some sort, but he’d seen nothing. There were no alien markings, no strange language inscribed in the metal. Sliding up inside there, he saw nothing but twisted metal from the hull inwards, the shredded metal of an armory hit or the collision into the hillside. It was empty, like a fuel tank, but had struts and an internal structure with what appeared to be enclosed boxes and something big in the center. If he had assumed it to be a jettisoned fuel tank, he couldn’t imagine there was too much space for fuel, and most of the fuel tanks he’d seen weren’t shaped like that. They looked more like a big sausage bolted to the bottom of a fighter plane. If a fuel tank had been hit, there would probably be nothing left of the tank or the plane, just shrapnel spread all over the hillside.
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More than likely, it was the radar array off one of the big military jets he had seen fly over on occasion, those big airliners with the disk bolted to the roof. That there was no other wreckage there, no fuselage hull or wings of any sort just seemed to confirm that. Whether it had been hit by a missile, or just damaged on impact, there was a good chance that the military was going to want it back eventually; perhaps a pilot cut it loose in flight and nobody had ever bothered to collect it. Her little hunk of metal was probably an access panel of some sort, thickened with insulation maybe, to dampen radio interference.
She turned it over in her hands, looking for a power button or a cable jack slot. The piece was entirely clean and smooth, with not a blemish or mark on it. “What if it charges wirelessly?” she asked.
Austin snorted a laugh. “Alien technology with Bluetooth?”
Jynx hopped up off the bed and cleared off the shelf with her phone charger on it, setting the slab on the little rubber pad. For a moment she watched it, waiting for it to light up or make a noise of some sort. Instead, it just sat there, inert. “Maybe it just needs a few minutes.”
Hanging out with Jynx over the years, he had grown accustomed to playing along with her, humoring her in her little imaginary games. He had been her trained dragon when she was a princess, her grizzled old wizard when she was a knight. He raced her when she wanted to run and sat quietly beside her in the library when she wanted to read. He didn’t want to pull the old refrigerator out of the wash, he knew it was junk, but she had wanted it so badly. This thing, this great hunk of twisted metal that he had just spent his entire day and a few favors collecting with her, was probably just more of the same, a big hunk of junk that would just end up rusting away with the rest of the junk that they’d collected over the past couple years.
He liked hanging out with her, but he began to wonder if Jeremiah was right when he said that Austin was just spoiling her by playing along all the time. As tired and cranky as he was, he didn’t feel like playing a game. He was sunburnt, and dirty, and his hands were stiff and raw from the ragged winch cable. He snorted a laugh. “Maybe there’s a magic spell of some sort to turn it on, or a mummy cursed it.” He chuckled softly, but she didn’t respond. When he glanced up from his book, she was glaring at him from her little nest. “I’m being serious, Austin.”
Maybe he was being sarcastic, but she was just being silly. “Then be serious, Jynx.” He shut the book and felt himself go limp, too beat up to play along. “There are Army bases everywhere around here. What are the odds that little green men crash-landed right in the middle of the Nevada triangle and hitch-hiked their way back to Mars?”
Jynx bristled slightly, setting her jaw.
“I mean, think about it. The Army shoots a Martian invader out of the sky and just never bothered to pick it up? They send half the Air-force out to pick up a weather balloon. I doubt that they’d blow something up and just leave it.” Honestly, he didn’t imagine them ditching a radar array out there, either, but it was a hell of a lot more believable.
Jynx just scowled. Raccoon dust lines around her eyes and a fixed glare, he wasn’t going to get away with dismissing her so easily. “You saw that thing. You looked inside. You know that it’s real.”
Austin poked at a few little pastel stuffed toys lined up on a shelf. He shrugged. “It’s real, Jynx. It’s a thing, but we still don’t know what it is.” There were also some strange local accounts of close encounters, but it was best to assume that most of those were test flights off the military bases. Mr. Vickers’s Museum was full of old Hollywood set photos, autographed pictures of some B-movie actors posing alongside some person in a rubber alien suit. “What if it’s a prop from an old movie? You know they used to film sci-fi stuff out there.” The simplest explanation was probably the best.
“You saw it, Austin. It’s not made out of cardboard, or whatever.”
It was true that it was fairly solid, and ruggedly built, and it didn’t rust like steel or oxidize like aluminum, but it could be some sort of plastic. It made sense to Austin that a radar array might be made out of a non-conductive material of some sort. Just because he didn’t understand it didn’t make it space men. “I just don’t want you to be disappointed when the Army shows up and wants their stuff back.”
Jynx huffed and slumped backward, glowering at him for a moment.
“We can ask Mr. Vickers the next time we see him. He’s an expert.”
“I am not taking it to…” Jynx trailed off, scowling.
Austin waited for her to finish, sorry that he’d said anything. It was her find, after all. “He’s an expert, Jynx.”
“Shh!” She raised her hand to stop him.
“What?”
“Do you hear that?” She sat up on her elbows, looking around the room.
“Hear what?” Austin said, following her gaze.
She scootched to the edge of the bed, hanging her feet over. “It’s like a humming sound.”
Austin listened intently. Having spent little time in the underground lair, he was not so familiar as she was with the ambient sounds. He heard the ventilation fan humming, and the timer switch for the lights buzzed softly from the wall beside the ladder, but nothing else.
Jynx stood up from the bed and crossed over to where the hunk of metal lay. The scrap piece hummed softly. “I think it’s powering up,” she said, reaching tremulously towards it.
Austin rolled his eyes. She wanted it to be real.
Touching the slab of metal, she yelped and froze. Her eyes, wide at first, flit rapidly, as if she were speed reading something invisible that hung before her. She raised her hand and stared intently at her palm, her usual practiced meditation, trying to focus. She whimpered once and then she collapsed, crumpling to the floor like a dropped doll.
“Very funny.” Austin took a little stuffed tiger off the shelf and tossed it at her, but she didn’t move. “Knock it off, Jynx.”
The clubhouse was entirely still, Austin listened to the fan and the little wall-mounted timer.
“Jynx?” he asked. “Jynx?” he called, a little louder, but she still didn’t move. “Amber?” he pleaded, hoping to rouse her with anger. She remained on the floor, pretzeled against the kitchenette cupboards. “Quit messing around.” He strolled over to her side, sure that she would jump up to scare him at any moment. He nudged her with the toe of his boot. “Alright, Jynx. It’s not funny.” She might have gotten a heat stroke. People fainted from that, but they hadn’t been out there all that long, and she’d been drinking plenty of water all afternoon.
He was afraid to touch her, at first, faintly aware that if she’d broken her neck, and he moved her, she might be paralyzed for life. “Come on.” He knelt down beside her, realizing that she was tangled awkwardly. She looked uncomfortable. He shook her, gently. She was entirely limp. He sat down and pulled her into his lap, tugging her up to his chest. As a dead weight, she seemed impossibly heavy.
Curled around her, cradling her against his chest, he gently patted her cheek. She didn’t move, didn’t stir. Her eyelids continued to flutter as if she were dreaming. Remembering his CPR training from health class, he ran through the steps, checking her pulse and holding his cheek beside her nose to feel her breath. She wasn’t dead, she was just unconscious.
His mind raced through his options. “Come on, Jynx. Get up.” If he called her mom at the hospital, she was going to be pissed, but maybe she could get an ambulance. His own mom? He could probably call her in a pinch. Mr. Englehorn would be home. He could go to Mr. Englehorn and ask for help. He patted her cheek again, a little harder. What if she had just passed out? She might wake up at any moment. People faint. He’d never actually seen it happen, but it happened in the movies, sometimes. He slid backwards, towards her bed, dragging her with him. The least he could do was get her up off the floor. He wrapped his arms around her chest, trying to lift her to her feet, but her arms flopped up and she shrugged out of his grip. He struggled to drag her up onto the platform, the both of them collapsing backwards into the bed.
Austin listened to her breathing, slowly and steadily. Her eyelids fluttered gently as if she dreamt, and she lay warm and dusty in his arms. She didn’t seem to be seizing. She might wake up at any moment. Austin glanced over at the digital clock hanging from the ceiling. He could always go get Mr. Englehorn in a half hour, or so. If she didn’t wake up. He pulled one of the blankets over them both while he lay there. Exhausted and uncertain, he drifted gently to sleep holding her.