Page 11 of Love at First Sighting

Carter

Subject and Special Agent are both ill prepared to hike up a mountain.

With the help of El’s phone flashlight and my actual flashlight, we may stand a chance of making it, but I have rocks in my shoes, and this suit is going to have to go to the dry cleaners after all. There has got to be an easier way to take photos.

“You good back there?” El calls. She fumbles with her next step and I shine my flashlight on her. There’s a sharp rock sticking out of the bramble in front of her.

“Careful.” I wave the flashlight around the area to attract her attention there. “And yes, I am good.”

“You were right. I should have worn better shoes.”

As El takes another step, she kicks a rock loose, sending more dirt and mud tumbling down on me. Yep, definitely dry cleaning.

“Well, why didn’t you?”

“What if someone sees me?” she shouts back. “What if I have to take a picture or something? I can’t have the internet thinking I forage berries!”

I’m not fully sure how foraging berries is a career killer, but what the fuck do I know? I’m just following a hot girl up a mountain at night and trying my hardest to not look at her ass. So far, not so good.

Special Agent clearly needs to get laid.

“This was easier during the day,” she clarifies.

“I simply can’t imagine that. Why not take pictures at the overlook? You wouldn’t have had to go far at all.”

She pauses. She wouldn’t have encountered what she suspected was a UFO. Her life would have gone on as it was. I’d still be fixing the printer and teaching Toby how to do expenses, at maximum.

“You can’t shoot something at an overlook—everyone will know—and there’s a clear line between a micro-influencer and a macro-influencer. I knew this would get me a good shot, so…I climbed up here.”

“Perfectly reasonable.”

The hills part, and a small path cuts through them. I’m so grateful to be on semi-flat land.

“Okay, so I was coming up on this bend here,” she says, guiding me down a curve in the hillside.

It’s eerily quiet out here, much like the night my dad and I were taking pictures.

I’d just gotten the camera for my tenth birthday and was trying to learn and push the boundaries of what it could do.

I was constantly playing with lenses and lighting, and that was my first attempt at nighttime photography.

I wonder what would have happened if one thing had been different that night.

If I’d taken a picture of another part of the sky or come another time.

Each what-if comes as another gut punch as I imagine my dad in memories of birthdays and graduations and visions of the future—marriage, kids. But he’ll never be here again.

El and I have the chance to find answers and close painful chapters. That begins tonight, as we approach the clearing in front of us.

I vaguely recognize the setting from the darkened backdrop of El’s video, but it looks different in person. Most importantly, it’s got a big No Trespassing sign on full display. The text is badly faded, but it’s easy enough to guess what it says.

“Uh, El, you do know we’re not supposed to be up here, right?”

“Yeah, I’ve gathered.”

“Oh, good.”

I survey the site in front of us. The overlook is quiet and desolate, with dry dirt hills and even drier brush lining the ground. A hill crests in front of us, and that’s when I spot it.

A door.

“El?” I nudge her shoulder.

“Huh,” she says. “I didn’t notice that before.”

The door in the hillside looks like it’s hiding some kind of underground bunker, much like the one we have below the PIS office.

LA is full of all kinds of offbeat architecture and new pseudo-environmentalist designs, but as we step closer, I realize this isn’t someone’s house.

This is a government archive. No…judging by the logo on the door, it’s a PIS archive.

“Shit.” I sigh.

“What?”

“This…this is one of the archives we use.” I rub the back of my neck. “The PIS office isn’t very big, so we don’t store our old files on-site. We store them in regional locations, and I think this might be one of ours.”

El narrows her eyes. “And you didn’t know about this before?”

“Not the exact location, no. My security clearance hardly gets me into a post office.” We’ve always been told it’s on a need-to-know basis, and I’ve never needed to know. “Look.”

I take careful steps forward, wondering if there’s any kind of security setup, but I don’t spy any cameras attached to the building.

El and I approach the door. “This was the logo I saw on the craft. It’s your logo. The piss logo.”

“ P-I-S ,” I correct.

“The letters with the three stars. This was etched on the inside of the thing that crashed, but it was cut off. I only got the first two letters. Whatever this was, it belonged to you guys. Like a security drone.”

Logically, it makes sense, but PIS having any kind of advanced technology when our cars are practically heaps of scrap metal and we hardly have a working Keurig machine makes no sense.

I’m hearing her, but for the first time since I saw El’s video, I’m not really believing her.

I might buy that she did see a UFO before I buy that anyone at PIS can navigate a drone. Or even knows what one is…

“A drone?” I laugh. “El…do we look like we have drones ? You’ve seen my car. I wear suspenders, for fuck’s sake. We do not have drones .”

“Then explain this.” El holds up her phone, and the burnt PIS logo stares back at me.

It’s damaged enough that I could debate it, but the longer I look at it, the harder it is to deny.

It’s the PIS logo, loud and clear. “This is your logo, like on your badge. Guarding a door with that same logo on it.”

Her voice picks up speed and I recognize the desperation in her eyes as the same desire I have to know what happened to my dad. I don’t believe her, but I have to try.

Trying to believe her means trying to accept the fact that the things I don’t know about PIS could be worse than I thought.

For an organization with one foot in the Stone Age and the other hardly sticking a toe into the Cold War, I figure I’d know if they had any kind of advanced technology.

They would probably ask me to fix the damn drones or complain when they crashed one into a side of a mountain.

I’ve never been naive enough to believe my bosses weren’t doing suspicious shit.

I know it comes with working for the government, especially when my job is to keep secrets.

We all pretend we don’t know anything about aliens, and legally have to say we don’t, but the most important thing we can do as PIS agents is exactly what we’re told.

Marcus taught me on day one that everyone who tries to speak out about their sightings ultimately regrets it.

“El, I…”

“You believed me before,” she asserts. “Please. You’re the only person who does. The only person who doesn’t think I’m crazy.”

That draws me back in. Crazy . A word used to discredit so easily.

PIS has always had a penchant for hit pieces, for digging into someone’s history of mental illness, for casting social mobs on people until they shut up.

I think of how many people I tried to tell about my accident.

No one believed a wounded ten-year-old when he said he saw something strange.

“I don’t think you’re crazy. You’re right. There’s just…I have a lot of questions, El. PIS is not a high-tech place. I am their IT department. We don’t have scientists; we have a bunch of old guys and wannabe cops who stalk people.”

“So, what do we do now?” she says. And she sounds so damn sad that we’ve hit a brick wall. I have to do something. I can’t give up here.

“Can I show you something?”

El nods.

I reach inside and open up my camera roll.

I uploaded and saved the photo quickly when I got home that night, at my dad’s request. We made two copies and he told me to keep the photo very safe and not tell anyone about it.

I’ve never understood what it meant, but I knew it was the first thing I’d grab if my house were on fire.

He’d always been paranoid, and I knew it likely came from working a job where he knew and kept too many secrets.

I fully uploaded the photo onto my phone the other night, knowing I’d need the best version to reference now.

“This…” I start, then halt. It feels like I’m passing a part of my soul to someone in a way I never have before.

Not even Marcus knows about this picture or what I saw that night.

And I sure as hell haven’t whipped this out with other girls.

Nothing kills the mood like a photo that reminds me of my dead dad.

Half the women I’ve dated didn’t even make it to the point where they learned I had no parents.

El’s already set her eyes on the photo, so it’s too late to turn back now. “This is what you saw?”

Her voice is soft—so much gentler than anything else I’ve heard from her. It makes me want to trust her to handle me with care.

“Looks a lot like what you saw, huh?”

She nods. “Almost identical. How do you know it’s connected?”

“I…” I begin. “Right before we were in the accident, I swore I saw something just like it again, but…my memory of that night isn’t reliable. I hit my head pretty hard, so who knows.”

A jolt of pain radiates up my arm and to my temple, and I wince. It’s psychosomatic at this point. Remembering too hard hurts. El’s gaze traces around the scar on the side of my head. I’m handing her puzzle pieces. I know she’s bright enough to put them in the right places.

“I tried to mention it, but…I didn’t get very far.”

“No one believed you, either.” She sighs.

“No…” The word whooshes out of me. “No one believed me, either.”

As I put the phone away, my finger slips and the camera roll slides to the next picture—one of the ones I took of El during my goose chase the other night. Holy shit.

“What is that? Is that me ?” El gasps, grabbing my phone from me.