Darkness had come to the Baja desert.
She found the junction on highway four, and had traveled about 3 kilometers further when she saw the flare of the cigarette in the distant car parked along the road. She quickly turned off the headlights of the Lincoln and drove it slightly off the road, out of sight behind some succulent plants and a few small trees. The road had been a winding one, and she still was unsure just where the airstrip was in relation to the car guarding the roads.
But fortune favored her as the first of the night’s AN-2s came into the area, the 1000 horsepower Shvetsov supercharged radial engine droning through the sky like an enraged bumblebee. It was running without lights, and the landing field lights had been carefully aimed to avoid detection from the ground, but the rumble of the big rotary engine gave away the location of the airstrip, just as if it had been illuminated by searchlights. Isabel saw that she could bypass the vehicle standing guard on the road by cutting across the desert a few kilometers.
As she started out on the trek through the desert night, she reflected on the advantages of being an Ice Princess, the enforced narcissism of two hour a day aerobics sessions and cheerleader practice actually getting her in pretty good shape for such exertions. But in fact, there was only one other upside to being an Ice Princess. If you rejected others first, you could never get close enough to them to be hurt by their rejection.
She knew that Alex could never care for the real Isabel…the alien that she was. This really wasn’t about happy ever afters, for she knew that was not a possibility. Still, she owed him…owed him for six years of wonderful dreams…six years when she could pretend..just for a few hours each night, that it really was possible for someone to love her for herself.
She owed him for those wonderful memories. He could never be hers,...but even so…the thought of his death sickened him. She had to save him…even if she could never have him.
‘I still love him,’ she said to herself with resignation. ‘I guess I always will.’
Forty miles south a Jeep was speeding northward. The Jeep actually was little different from the black Jeep back in Roswell, and as he drove it Max thought of how many times in the last two years he’d dreamed about having Liz in the passenger’s seat, like she was tonight. Those would be DAYdreams, of course. It was too hazardous to dream about such things when actually asleep, what with Isabel and her damn ‘sacred vow.’ If it wasn’t for Alex’s life being in danger…and Isabel potentially placing herself at risk as well, Max would have been enjoying himself quite a lot…watching Liz’s hair being blown by the wind in the open top Jeep.
Liz looked up from the map, the small flashlight from the glove compartment held in her hand.
“I’m pretty sure we continue up highway four for forty or fifty miles…then we’ll need to go east.”
Liz found herself surprisingly comfortable, given the circumstances. They’d worked as partners almost every school day for the last five years. Somehow things always worked for Max. She remembered one time when she would have sworn she’d put the wrong ingredients in a chemical reaction by mistake. Nothing should have happened, the molecules should have just sat there….but nonetheless, they had reacted. Every project that she and Max touched seemed to work out…maybe this one would too.
In the back seat, there was more anxiety. Maria didn’t dislike Michael, she often smiled when she would remember the egg nurturing exercise they had done together. But that was for two weeks…in one of the few classes she had ever shared with him. He wasn’t as much of an unknown as Isabel,…but even so, it wasn’t like Maria knew either of the two all that well. And while she trusted Liz normally, …Liz around Max was never quite normal. The girl had been starry-eyed about him for years. Maria figured she’d escaped death once when Alex had managed to pull himself out of the ropes and free them, had escaped death again when she’d survived the airplane crash, and yet a third time when the Marine had rescued them. ‘How many times do you think you can get away with this?’ she asked herself.
The anxiety on Michael’s side of the back seat was as great as Maria’s. He was pretty sure he hadn’t made the best of impressions on Maria…what with Hank poaching their pretend offspring, and….sacred vow not withstanding, he really did want to make a good impression on her. Yeah…she could be argumentative…but somehow he felt more alive around her…even when they were fighting, than he’d ever felt in his whole life with anyone else. Michael knew he couldn’t be the one to break the sacred vow…but if anyone did, …well…he was already imagining a future that included Maria. Somehow he just couldn’t picture himself with anyone else.
As she got closer to the airfield Isabel could hear the noise being made by the pump,...filling the AN-2s big tanks from the stockpile of 55 gallon drums alongside the airfield. She could hear the men talking as they worked...oblivious to her presence in the area.
She looked at the buildings by the airfield…saw the pole building that had to be the one where the three teenagers had been held captive. She already had her plan…find Alex...untie his bonds, and then backtrack across the desert to where she had hid the car. She just hoped, as she crept quietly toward the hut, that Alex was still alright. And most of all, she reminded herself, she had to do this without ever letting Alex know...without letting anyone know...without breaking her sacred vow.
