Escape: Omega Book 1 (Omega: Earth's Hero) Read Free

direction he’d come and then back to the direction he’d been traveling. Not a soul in sight.
    “Jesus, Lord in heaven,” he muttered under his breath, his words a little sluggish, his tongue a bit thick. “All you had to do was tell me to stop drinking. I would’ve listened. Honest.” Vernon Dodd almost made it back into his truck before he either fainted or passed out. His head struck the door of the truck and he crumpled. One thing was for sure. Long after the goose egg on his head healed and the hangover was gone, he’d never forget the blazing blue sky.
     
     

 
    Chapter 2
     
    Several miles away, due east, laid the home of the Reddick family. George Reddick was a teacher at the Roswell school. His wife, Clarice, was a housewife, and his son Darrin a highly inquisitive and mischievously curious ten-year-old. While George and Clarice were tucked tightly in their bed, Darrin was involved in more interesting things.
    Though his father was a learned man—George Reddick was a man of history and philosophy, and while these subjects did, indeed, interest his son—Darrin was much more taken with the relatively unknown subject of astronomy. That is why, at fifteen minutes to midnight, he had been out in the back, the cool night air washing over him, staring at the high canvas of the Earth through his homemade telescope. While the aesthetic value left much to be desired, the overall effectiveness of the instrument was superb by current amateur standards. Made of a length of steel pipe and one three-inch round lens, it hadn’t required all that much work. The eyepiece itself was purchased through a mail-order science catalog. Darrin would have been tempted to construct the piece himself, if only he had possessed the precision tools necessary to do so.
    Using his homemade contraption, Darrin caught the blue flame as it raced across the sky. It was more than fortunate he did so. He had just let loose a big yawn and was tidying up his area. The night had turned cooler and a thunderstorm was rolling in. Call it either divine intervention or just dumb luck. The result was the same. Darrin’s brown eyes grew big as he dropped the small notebook and pencil he used to mark his observations.
    “Holy Moly!” Darrin looked away from the sky, blinked several times, and placed his eye back on the scope.
    The phenomenon began to shimmer and then fade away so quickly that, when it was gone, Darrin doubted its existence at all. But, after his vision had adjusted to the dark sky, he discerned a thin ribbon of light falling away and down. Darrin pulled back, and with the naked eye, the young stargazer watched as the track careened down and down and down. He felt the shake under his foot; saw the small trees with their leaf-covered branches quiver as if a strong gust blew through.
    The idea that something important had just happened dawned on Darrin.
    He realized the chances that anyone within a one-hundred mile radius had been scanning the sky at this exact moment were slim to none. As far as he knew, he was the only individual in Roswell that had even a passing interest in the stars, as was the root of many of his frustrations. Books on astronomy were very hard to come by, and the need to discuss his observations with another was, at times, maddening. Though he was only a decade old, Darrin Reddick knew he was different from the other kids. Perhaps he was no smarter, perhaps he was. The main thing was: he was infinitely more serious about his hobby.
    Craning his neck as the trail vanished and the tremors ceased, Darrin looked to the left and to the right, and then finally back to the house to see if the vibrations had disturbed his parents. No lights flashed on, and the small house seemed as quiet and as still as before. Now, with him the only one awake, there was but one thing to do: go find out just what in the world it was he had seen.
    His father owned a Ford, but there was no way in the world Darrin was daring enough to use