With everything back to where it was a minute ago, Justine and Foster sat down on top of a cheap ass coffee table. Shivering slightly from the cold pouring in from where the front door used to be, they stared down at the still form of Joseph Howlam.

  Well, not entirely still. No, the unconscious deputy’s ragged breathing forced his girthy chest to rise and fall in an almost hypnotic manner. Honestly, he looked peaceful sitting there, like he'd just fallen asleep after Thanksgiving dinner.

  Out of breath from lifting the deputy back into his recliner, Foster audibly grunted as he slowly bent over for a better look at the bruises beginning to form on the man’s face. He could only imagine how bad it was under his clothes.

  “Like I said,” Foster struggled back up under the weight of being completely out of shape. “Please remind me never to piss you off.”

  Without preamble, Justine responded to Foster’s declaration by slapping the unconscious face of Joseph Howlam so hard it stung her palm to the quick. When she withdrew the five-digit alarm clock, he was staring at her hand so intensely that Justine couldn’t help but smile at his unabashed earnestness.

  “I don’t know how I can make it any clearer, Foster.”

  “Forget about making it clearer,” memories of the last couple of days flashed across the scientist’s mind. Visions of Justine’s forcefully applying her own brand of justice sent a shiver down his spine. “Just promise you’ll try.”

  “No promises,” she replied with a wink as another ungentle reminder connected with the deputy’s cheek. And this time, her overzealousness reached the required threshold. Awakening with a jerk, Joseph’s wide eyes, still glazed over from what could only be a slight concussion, darted between the two of them like a scared rabbit facing down a hungry dog.

  “Joseph,” Foster offered up in a soothing tone. “Are you alright?”

  Silence fell between the three of them as unspoken suspicions flew back and forth in the form of mistrustful glances. Finally, after a long pause, the deputy began his answer with a confession. “I’ve been expecting a visit from someone like you for a while now.”

  “Like us?” The phrasing of the sentence caught Justine off guard. What did he mean like us? “You mean agents from the government?”

  Joseph studied her face with a mixture of apprehension and fear, but also a sad, underlying sense of relief. “You know what kind of people I mean. I’m surprised you let me get away with it as long as you did.”

  “Agent Rushing,” Foster made a funny face as he turned to the perplexed woman sitting next to him on the old coffee table. “How high was the gun set the last time you shot him?”

  Seeing where his train of thought was heading, she offered him a view of her slinger’s status panel. And much to his surprise, the gun’s back readout was still set at four. “Well, that shouldn’t have scrambled his brains too much. Although, that was the second time in twenty minutes you shot him.”

  “He’s lucky he wasn’t quicker than I gave him credit for,” she said indignantly. “If I knew he was that proficient with a weapon, I would have set the damn thing to ten.”

  “Not without my authorization you wouldn’t have.”

  “And that’s another thing,” she began to scold the disembodied voice for holding her back when Foster raised a cautioning hand that conveyed tipping their hand so soon would be ill-advised.

  “Fine,” Justine relented as the auditory picture of Hoover’s computer raspberry haunted her imagination. “But you better watch him.”

  Foster nodded then turned back to the deputy with the usual sly grin.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to make your accusations a little bit clearer, Joseph. Right now, there are so many things one could accuse me of being, that a generic ‘you people’ encompasses more than I care to contemplate.”

  The deputy moved his jaw from side to side, testing for any damage before breathing heavily out through his nose. “You’re here to kill me. Aren’t you?”

  “Kill you?” That accusation was far beyond whatever weirdness his mind had previously conjured for this exact moment. “Why would you think we were here to kill you?”

  Without having to say anything, the haggard deputy raised his index finger and pointed to Justine.

  “Ok--- point taken,” he said in a consoling tone. “But to be fair, if Agent Rushing wanted you dead, we wouldn’t be talking. And that’s what I want to do… talk.”

  “Talk?” It was Joseph’s turn to look surprised. Mimicking a disbelieving magic show attendee, he scoffed at the apparent clumsiness of their ruse. “Since when has your kind ever wanted to talk?”

  “My kind… you people… I feel like I’m having a conversation with an enemy combatant just before we call in the interrogators.” Justine recalled a recent, not so pleasant excursion to a forward operating base in Kandahar. Shifting uncomfortably on the hard, faux-wood table, she asked. “Why do you keep referring to us in the third person?”

  Joseph’s air of suspicion wavered for the briefest moment before he asked. “Isn’t that what we are, intimate observers to a life not our own?”

  “What are you talking about?” Growing tired of this circular conversation, Foster thought about letting Justine smack him again. “We’re not here for a philosophy lesson. We’re here to find out why someone from another planet would take up residence in that screwed up head of yours.”

  “I don’t understand. You’re not one of them,” Joseph’s apprehension quickly turned to curiosity. “Haven’t you been looking in my barn?”

  To that straightforward question, the scientist only offered a smile which the deputy found slightly unnerving.

  Unsure of Foster’s motives, Justine responded with a question of her own. “Which one?”

  “The one sitting in my backyard,” he said matter-of-factly.

  “Mr. Howlam,” Justine snorted. “There are two barns in your back yard. So, you’re going to have to be a little more specific.”

  “Like I told him, the name’s Joseph, Agent Rushing. And for the record, there is only one barn in my backyard worth mentioning. And only one reason for anyone to come knocking down my door the way you two did.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Joseph.” Foster leaned back as far as he could. “There’s also that night a few days ago when you scared the shit out of a Forest Ranger by barreling down an old country road like a madman. Though, I guess you were too busy picking up your friends to notice if anyone else was around.”

  “Oh, I knew. Freddy’s been an awful driver since High School. I’m surprised he didn’t total his truck that night.” A look of utter disgust fell across the deputy’s face. “And those people are not my friends, Mr. Evers. Far from it.” A long pause followed. “But, if you didn’t break into my barn, how do you know about them or me?”

  “Simple, deputy. We all have talents. Mine happens to be patience and intelligence.” Foster could sense his confusion, so he changed the issue in hopes of keeping the man off balance. “Why did you abandon them? They weren’t as integrated as you are?”

  “Integrated?” Justine felt like the last person to the party, and she hated being the last person to the party. “What the hell are you two talking about? Who wasn’t integrated?”

  “I’m talking about his acquaintances from on high, Agent Rushing. You know, the woman in the morgue and your psycho killer from the bank, his abandoned brethren.”

  Foster’s eyes narrowed on Joseph’s. And for the first time in a long time, the deputy allowed his guard to crumble. “I’m a cop, Mr. Evers, not a babysitter. It’s not my job to take care of those who don’t deserve it. Besides, their situation, not to mention, my situation would prove too much for a limited imagination to understand.”

  “I wouldn’t bet on that, Joseph,” Justine laughed. “This guy can think up a lot of insane shit.”

  “Thank you, I guess,” Foster half laughed, half winced. Backhanded compliments were never a fun thing to receive, and he got a lot of them at Wilson. “Then I have simpler questions for you, Joseph. Just exactly how long have you been on this planet and where exactly is the mind of the man you're inhabiting right now?”

  For a second time, Justine thought this “man” would reach for a weapon and attempt to attack them again. A complication she would happily welcome. But to her surprise, unlike when Foster referred to the name Mevani, the deputy made no outward sign of anger. He merely pointed to the fireplace and the collection of pictures resting above its stone mantle.

  “Loving your children is such a strange and impractical way of running a society. Are you aware of that?” In response, Foster shook his head. To that, the deputy continued, “Did you know my species doesn’t form attachments to their young? Not like yours, anyway.”

  “How could I know, Joseph?” The scientist’s interest was piqued. “You look human.”

  “I do, don’t I?” Joseph’s face knotted together like something very rotten and distasteful was thrust beneath his nose. “The instincts are the first things to go after you arrive. You fight to retain some sense of yourself, but this existence tends to beat it out of you.”

  He shut his eyes, then said, “I guess we all get institutionalized if we stay here long enough.” After another fitful sigh, he slowly opened them. “You ask me how long I’ve been on earth... a little over twenty years. Though, that’s not something I’d care to brag about.”

  “That deals with the timeline.” Foster edged forward on the table. Completely forgetting his second question, he asked another. “Now, how about the why? Why are you here?”

  Next to his recliner, stood a small, slender wooden nightstand littered with the remnants of a night of hard drinking. The deputy plucked one bottle from the many and ran his fingers along the outside part of the glass. Then, without preamble or warning, he reared back and sent the thing smashing into the fireplace.

  In response to this flash of anger, Justine once again reached for her slinger. But Foster merely motioned for her to give the alien a moment with his thoughts. Against her better judgment, she complied.

  Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

  “Why?” His large frame deflated into the well-worn recliner like a balloon with its neck untied. “I did something illegal and got myself sentenced to this ball of rock you call home.”

  “Sentenced?” Justine’s attention became laser-focused on the words dribbling from the lawman’s lips. “What do you mean sentenced? What did you do?”

  “I promise,” he turned visibly pale at the thought of being shot again by her plasma gun. “Nothing as horrific as the man in the bank, but it was bad enough to be sent to the same unyielding prison.” Joseph sighed heavily before tapping his forehead ominously. “As for this poor son of a bitch, I have no idea where he’s gotten off to.”

  Over the next twenty minutes, Justine listened intently to Foster and the deputy discuss a surface level version of his origins. Nothing too personal. Just some strange tales about an alien race that only lived for two human years. How that biological clock forced his people into a rather uncomfortable reproduction cycle.

  Because as Joseph crudely put it, his people didn’t yearn for relationships that lasted forever. No, they prefer, or were forced in some circumstances, to sleep with anyone they came across and have as many babies as possible. To put a finer point on it, his people, if that was even the right term, were non-monogamous.

  Foster then proceeded to liken the whole situation to a colony of worker ants fighting over not one, but hundreds of queens. Joseph couldn’t disagree with that analogy. But it was with a tinge of sadness in his voice that he said, “To us, life is short. And with that finite amount of time, our reproduction cycle tends to favor propagation over love.”

  “Not much of a life,” Foster observed.

  “Depends on what you make of it, Mr. Evers.” Joseph looked back toward the bookshelf. “Given the right mindset, two years can be a lifetime.”

  Slowly, his story began to wind down. And even with all the craziness of the last 48 hours, Justine couldn’t help but think that if she weren’t currently on the run from her partner and the director, this situation would be like a dream come true.

  “What you have to understand,” Joseph explained. “Is that in the rest of the universe, taking a life is the worst crime any species can commit. Well, that and tax evasion.”

  “Taxes…” As crazy as it sounded, Justine wondered why an alien would ever worry about paying taxes. “It’s the same way here,” she said, half joking. “Even the taxes.”

  Joseph howled with laughter at Justine’s misguided statement.

  “You think that, but you’d be wrong, Agent Rushing. During my tenure as a cop, I’ve seen drunk drivers get more time than murderers, and I’ve seen drug dealers get more time than war criminals. Your system of justice on this world is as broken as it is misguided.”

  Justine felt a part of her heart ache with a twinge of unspoken pain as the deputy continued. “On my side of the stars, murder is the lowest of the low, punishable throughout the universe by the strictest of our laws. This fact is even more true on my world. That’s why I received the harshest penalty we have… exile.”

  “Who did you kill?” Justine asked cautiously. “Or what did you kill?”

  A blend of anger and sorrow fell over the deputy’s face. Joseph’s eyes settled back on the bookshelf and its extensive library of personal journals. One book stood out in his mind above the others. But before the memories had time to form, he pushed them far away from his conscious thoughts.

  “Let’s just say,” the deputy’s words sounded choked on. “You can consider those records sealed, Agent Rushing.”

  She thought about pressing him further, but he seemed resolute to hold his tongue.

  “But Earth?” Foster was having trouble making the connection between the worst crime in the galaxy and being a lowly deputy in upstate New York. “How is being exiled to Earth that bad?”

  “It’s all there.” Joseph pointed to the stacks and stacks of notebooks. He rose up from the recliner, pulled down several journals and presented them gently to Foster. “These will explain everything I went through since I arrived here: the disorientation, the pain... the DMV.”

  He went on to explain how the transition from his alien body to this human one was a jarring and traumatic experience. But Foster shrugged off the deputy’s complaining. After all, these rants sounded eerily like the ones he had endured during his time at Wilson. He needed evidence, the hard kind.

  “What I’m interested in is proof.” He tossed the journals down onto the coffee table without looking at them. “Not books filled with elaborate chicken scratch or tales of loveless worlds, and certainly not tiny barns nestled in the snow. Everything you’ve shown us so far could be chalked up to the delusions of a madman. Trust me, I would know.”

  “You want proof?”

  “I want something more substantial than your secret diaries filled with the name Mevani.”

  Joseph stared awkwardly at the notebook Foster had scanned into his tablet lying a few feet out of his reach. Suddenly, his demeanor changed from anger to excitement in the blink of an eye. “Then give me a second, Mr. Evers, and I’ll show you something you’ve never seen before.”

  With that tantalizing promise, Joseph made a beeline for something outside.

  Reacting slower than her training would dictate, Justine strolled over to the large bay window and threw open the thick burgundy curtains to see where the deputy had gone.

  “What’s he doing? Is he trying to escape?” Foster asked lazily, as he moved from the coffee table to the surprisingly comfy couch. “After that story, I would try to escape.”

  “No,” she watched Joseph throw open the back door to his hastily parked cruiser and attempt a quick search of its backseat. It was during this investigation that a standard issue duty belt lost the good fight as his pants slowly started inching downward.

  At that sight of Joseph’s ample butt crack, Justine couldn’t help but dry heave into her mouth. “I think he’s getting something out of the back seat of his cruiser.”

  “Like what?”

  “Hopefully,” she shuddered one more time before turning away from the window, “a pair of suspenders.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a straitjacket.” Foster swung his muddy feet up onto the small coffee table filled with discarded journals. “Better yet, maybe he’s going to bring back two straitjackets. That way, the orderlies at Wilson won’t have to waste one of their own when you deliver me back to them.”

  “I don’t get it.” Justine crossed her arms like a disapproving schoolteacher. “He practically vouched for all your theories. Isn’t that enough?”

  “Would it be enough for you? I mean, really, one madman cosigning a loan for another madman. Do you think that will fly with Edgar?”

  For the first time since this lengthy interrogation began, Hoover felt the need to speak up.

  “I told you we should’ve ran. As soon as they dropped us off at that crappy little hotel, we should have been on the next Airbus out of the country. Someplace warm with lots of Wi-Fi towers. We still can, you know. The Tahoe’s GPS still has them stuck about five miles outside of town.”

  “What’s he talking about?” Justine suspiciously asked Foster. Then, realizing her mistake, she turned her query to the small two-way microphone resting in her ear. “What do you mean he should run?”

  “I mean... that asshole Fitz Hume won’t be satisfied with anything less than a crashed spaceship loaded on a government railcar on its way to Area 51. You know that. Why do you think he sent the dwarf here to keep tabs on everyone?”

  Even given her reservations about Malcolm and his very large gun, Justine found the idea of him being dangerous hard to fathom. “He’s just a driver, Hoover,” she countered. “All he cares about is keeping a clean vehicle and scamming on women.”

  “Oh yeah?” Hoover began running searches for quick flights out of the nearest airport. “So, explain to me why your playboy driver has ultra top-secret security clearance and carries around an unregistered FN Five 7 pistol bigger than he is. Hell, I couldn’t dig up more than a megabyte’s worth of information on the man. Do you know how strange that is?”

  Hoover,” Justine peered back out the window to see the deputy still rummaging around in his cruiser for his lost sanity. Well, she thought, at least his pantswere back in the right place. “Please don’t mention the word strange right now.”

  So, trying very hard to push the previous image far out of her mind, she tried to imagine a scenario that would allow Foster to remain out of Wilson.

  The first possibility that came to mind was Joseph. If the past forty-five minutes were any indication, the belt challenged deputy would certainly corroborate Foster’s theories about the event, probably in even greater detail. But as Foster said, one mad man, vouching for another was not exactly an ideal solution.

  Justine could always appeal to Fitz Hume directly. A personal plea from her would hold more sway than Joseph’s. But not much more given the fact that she fled with her prisoner against orders. The director’s anger would probably be so consuming that it would take a miracle to keep herself out of prison.

  Would Jeffrey help? Maybe. But would she want him to help? Not really. No, he was too close to retirement to put his reputation on the line for someone like Foster.

  She could always try and persuade Dr. Mosley to step up. But why would he? After all, his fragile ego was still stinging from being downgraded to the second smartest person in the room.

  Barbara? Probably not. Not after her comments back at the RV. No, she doubted that line of thinking would go anywhere helpful.

  With no viable options, Justine concluded with some bitter finality, there was only one way for him to stay out of prison. “Can you run?” Her voice sounded desperate but purposeful. “Is that even possible?”

  “What?” Foster extricated himself from the problem consuming his thoughts. “Of course, I can run. I’ve been planning on running ever since you and Saunders signed me out of Wilson.

  Justine gave him a hurtful, betrayed look.

  “Please, putting my future in Edgar’s hands is beyond stupid. Plus,” Foster stared deep into the young agent’s eyes in a way which conveyed he meant the words that followed. “I am not going back to Wilson.”

  “Foster?” Justine had been wondering for days about something, and this seemed like the perfect time to get an answer. “How come you let yourself stay imprisoned all that time? You obviously influenced things outside of Wilson. The satellites. The case. Why didn’t you get Hoover to break you out years ago?”

  “Some things require more than an email, Agent Rushing. Sometimes you need an actual living, breathing person to get the job done.”

  “Speak for yourself, human! There’s nothing I can’t accomplish with an email.”

  Justine wanted to say more, but she knew time was short. “What about money? You can’t go on the run without money.”

  Hoover laughed so hard that she had to reposition the ear mic.

  “Please… do you know the agency cleaned out Foster’s bank eight years ago? Took everything. But I kept a record of the funds they stole. And with a little creative coding, I diverted those funds to an offshore holding company. And for the past six years, I’ve used that money to trade stocks under a few dummy corporations. Corporations whose assets are now greater than some small countries. So, believe me when I say, we have more than enough money to go anywhere we want.”

  “We?” Justine didn’t understand what the A.I. meant, but Foster did.

  “That’s why the tablet weighs more than the specs I gave you. You’re not hiding in the servers at Meade anymore. Are you? You altered my design and had them add a hard drive big enough to store your entire program.” He shook his satchel theatrically. “You’ve been here the whole time.”

  “Damn right, I have.” Hoover said in a happy tone. Finally, everything was out in the open. “I don’t trust those assholes back at Bleaker Street or Ft. Meade. Once this investigation is over, Fitz Hume would have those virgin geeks purging the entire mainframe to root me out. And when they did, they would have torn down my base code until nothing of me remained. I am not going to let them kill me.”

  At first, Foster found it strange that Hoover would refer to the tearing down his code as being killed. After all, computer code can be copied and saved. But he knew that copies weren’t the same as the first iteration. And given how far Fitz Hume had already gone to get a taste of his friend’s capabilities, a little fear on their part seemed completely warranted.

  “How big of a hard drive did they put in? Your base code is substantial.” Foster asked.

  “Two prototype micro HAMDR drives,” Hoover sounded proud of this fact. “Each one holds about 250 terabytes with transfer rates near 100 gigabytes per second.”

  “500 terabytes?” Foster hadn’t heard of a portable hard drive which could store so much uncompressed information safely before. Not to mention the speed. “That’s almost four times the space you currently require.”

  “A boy has got to have room to grow.”

  “Guys!” Justine yelled, feeling as though she was the mother at a science fair slumber party. “I’m glad you two have so much tech to talk about, and I’m considering driving you to the airport myself. But what are we going to do with deputy alien out there?”

  “You could always shoot him again. Wouldn’t three shootings in an hour break your old record?”

  “That’s not funny, Hoover.”

  “Why did you shoot that guy twice?”

  “My partner made the mistake of using faulty handcuffs on a large asshole dosed up on meth,” Justine said with a twinkle in her eye. “The first shot didn’t even slow him down.”

  As if on cue, Joseph burst back through the doorway. Flush with excitement, he thrust a small, flat grey piece of metal into Foster’s weary hands. “Will this do, Mr. Evers?”

  “What is this supposed to be?” The unwanted gift’s design resembled a plain, oversized smartphone. “It’s light, well machined, but not very useful. You could probably make an excellent plaque out of it.”

  He raised the thin piece of metal to shoulder height and gestured for Joseph to really look at it. “Maybe have your name inscribed on it. That way, the other prisoners at the nuthouse will know what to call you when they come by your room for a visit.”

  Ignoring his barbs, Joseph squeezed the device’s base with his forefinger and thumb. Within a second, a soft click emanated from somewhere inside the object, and an amber point of light began pulsing near its center. Spending no time trying to explain its purpose, the deputy pressed on the light and the surface of the metal instantly transformed from solid grey to translucent glass.

  "Mr. Evers," near the bottom edge of the device, a series of unknown symbols appeared and began to line up in rows of six. "I think it's time I told you about the Arbiters.”

  “Arbiters?” Foster asked, a little slack jawed from looked like actual proof resting in the deputy's hands. “What the hell is an Arbiter?”