Chapter Text
“Holtz. Holtz. Wake up!”
She blinks at the green numbers on the dashboard until they come into focus. 11.17. She hasn’t been out long, then; Erin’s still beside her, they’re still in motion, the sky’s still dark and sprinkled with -
That isn’t a star.
She’s awake at once, scrambling for the binoculars and shoving her head and half her body out the window to get a better view.
“You see it, don’t you?” Erin asks.
Holtzmann sees something alright. It’s zipping along much faster than they are, changing directions at improbable angles with no regard for the laws of physics.
“We got ourselves a live one!” she crows, flumping back into her seat.
“Oh, thank god,” Erin says, and floors the gas. The desert speeds by, its eerie moonlit charms forgotten as they eat up the miles.
Holtzmann reaches into the back seat for the night-vision camera.
“It’s a freaking UFO, baby,” she tells the lens, before training it on the bright light ahead. They’re not catching up quite fast enough for her; she turns the camera on Erin before too long.
“How do you feel about becoming a pioneer of modern science, Dr Gilbert?”
“Holtz,” Erin complains, but she can’t keep the smile from her face.
“I think she’s excited,” Holtzmann whispers, before setting the camera down on the dashboard and firing up some of their other equipment. It’s acquired a dusting of sand in the past few weeks, but the only extraterrestrial they've discovered so far is a bat.
“Are you picking up anything unusual yet?” Erin asks, sparing her girlfriend a glance. “Temperature? Radiation? Electromagnetism?”
“Need to be closer,” Holtzmann replies.
“I’m working on it, but I think it’s -”
“LEFT” Holtz yells, and Erin, startled, obeys, veering onto a rough side road that heads towards a distant range of hills.
“God, don’t do that!” she says, her heart racing, but sure enough, the UFO starts to move in the same direction. Its flight is smoother now, almost enough to be mistaken for a plane; it should converge with them in a few miles, if they can keep up.
“How did you know where it’s going?” Erin asks. “Are you getting a reading now?”
Holtz doesn’t look up from whatever she’s fiddling with, her brows furrowing in confusion. “Something is going on over those hills, or I have not put this together right.”
Erin’s enchanted for a moment by the way her voice rises and falls at odd intervals, giving even the most mundane sentence – if Holtz is capable of anything mundane - a musical quality. The UFO tears her attention away, its glow intensifying as they – and presumably it - get closer to their destination. Soon it’s so bright she can barely see where she’s going. The hills are looming ahead, a black mass silhouetted against the stars, and their quarry is about to disappear behind them.
Erin hates letting it out of her sight, as if it no longer exists once she can’t see it, but they’re so close she can hear it, a deep throbbing following the rhythm of her heartbeat. It’s more a feeling than a sound, like they’ve entered a distorted version of reality and her senses are all mixed up. She couldn’t pry her fingers from the wheel if she tried.
They’re approaching the top of the pass when it rises up over the edge like a full moon, giving off a glare so blinding they both fling their arms over their eyes. Erin slams on the breaks and they scream to a halt, the car flooded with light and pulsing so heavily she feels as if her head is about to explode. Her eyes are squeezed shut but it makes no difference; she can see the bones in her fingers, as if the light is corroding her body away.
The craft rises higher and higher, its shape becoming discernible as Erin’s vision returns. In the floodlit road ahead, she thinks she sees a figure, a small dark shape the light bends around but doesn’t dare touch. She wants to look at Holtzmann to be sure they’re sharing this unfathomable moment, but she can’t move, or speak, or do anything but sit and wait as the little grey creature comes closer, and closer, and closer.