WA 6 final draft

Acrid smoke drifted up from the cracked asphalt, stinking of tar and brimstone. Detective Lucas Zorran and Officer Jean-Paul Rosseau stood with their guns at the ready, and behind them assembled a battalion of policemen, looking less than confident. About twenty feet in front of them was a gaping hole in the major roadway, a column of smoke twirling lazily from its center. Huge cracks emanated from the impact point like strands of a spider web. The fallout from the impact was everywhere: broken windows, pieces of tires, the flaming shells of cars, chunks of brick walls.

"Can you see anything, Zorran?" whispered Rosseau shakily. He was a tall, lanky young twenty-something with a shock of floppy brown hair and an over-eager way about him. His brown leather greatcoat flapped about his knees.

"Nothing but smoke. Keep your eyes open, Officer. We could be in very deep trouble in a few seconds," advised his senior officer. Zorran was a bald black man with a fierce gaze and a personality stereotypically suited for army life (though he'd left the army at the age of 22). He wore a white coat and had his Sig Sauer pointed at the crater. Slowly the smoke was beginning to lift. There was a huge, bulky shape poking through the smoke.

Zorran and Rosseau took a few steps towards the object, skirting the enormous cracks and debris. As the object came into focus, Jean-Paul let out a small gasp. It was a chunk of pure white metal, smooth but for the slight dent on the bottom from striking the ground. It seemed like it hadn't suffered any damage at all from its trip through Earth's atmosphere. It was round on one side, but the other side had wires and bits of machinery poking from it, as though it had been torn from another structure. It looked, for all the world, like a piece of a flying saucer.

"Wh-what the hell is it?" gasped Rosseau, his gun hand shaking wildly. Zorran put a hand on the younger man's arm before he could put a bullet in the mysterious object.

"I don't know, Officer. Might be part of a space shuttle, or maybe a piece of the ISS. One thing's for sure. I've never seen this kind of metal in my life, and I've worked on and off with NASA for seventeen years. I know all of the latest technology they're developing and whatever this stuff is, either they've been keeping it all hush-hush, it's a prototype, or..." Zorran paused and rubbed his broad forehead; he felt a headache coming on.

"Or... what, sir?" asked Rosseau softly, excitedly. "Maybe it's part of a UFO!"

"Son, it is a UFO. We don't know what the hell this thing is or where it came from, it was flying - or falling, at least - and it is clearly some kind of object."

"But maybe, sir, maybe? It could be part of an alien spacecraft, couldn't it? I mean, satellites have more or less proven that there's at least signs of life on other planets, so -"

"Officer, will you shut up for a minute and just let me think?"

"Oh. Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

"Be quiet. Now, I think... yes, I think I'll do that. I'll call my friend at NASA and ask her to come up here. Yeah. All right. Rosseau, you have a phone on you?"

"Oh yes - let me see..." Rosseau clumsily put the safety back on the gun and fumbled in his pocket for his pink cellphone, which he tossed to Zorran. He stared down at the carnation-colored device in his hand.

"Rosseau, was that really the only color available when you bought this thing?"

Rosseau went as pink as the cellphone. "It looked different in the magazine picture, sir." Zorran rolled his eyes and flipped it open with one hand, dialing the number of his NASA contact while keeping his gun trained on the white bulk in case it decided to do anything surprising. Tracy Morris, who was the head of Research & Development at Goddard Institute of Space Studies, picked up on the fourth ring.

"Whoever it is, make it snappy, 'kay? I've got a lot of work on my plate and a deadline," she snapped in a clipped, professional voice.

"Geez, Tracy, sorry I got you at a bad time," smiled Zorran.

"Lucas, is that you? Hey! How are you, baby?" she laughed, instantly melting into the warmer, more sociable voice that she used outside the office.

"I've been doing alright, but -"

"When are you going to come see me again?" she interrupted.

"Um, I was actually going to ask you to come down and see me - us. We've found something out in Barre, and I think you're going to want to check this out."

"Something like what? A piece of a shuttle? A meteor? A... UFO?" she snickered.

He knew she meant the last one as a joke, but he said, "The last one actually."

There was a moment of silence on the other end. Tracy knew Zorran almost never joked and was rarely sarcastic. "I'll come right down," she promised, and hung up. That was it. He had piqued her scientist's curiosity, and she would stop at nothing until she found out what it was.