Lost Cargo Read Free

though,” Travis said.
    “It’s cracked on the side.”
    Travis leaned in. “Oh, yeah, look at that. They must’ve dropped it.”
    “There’s no ID or anything?” Monroe asked.
    “No, nothing. I want to check the photos. You have software, right?”
    Monroe gave the camera back. “Not for that, I don’t. I have a card reader, but I don’t have time right now. I’m meeting Annie.”
    Not that he didn’t meet his girlfriend Annie every day.
    “I’m not a camerahead, but I can handle a card reader,” Travis said.
    Monroe hesitated. Travis knew he didn’t want him on his precious Mac.
    “Well, I’ve probably got a few minutes,” Monroe said.
    They clomped down the wooden steps from the kitchen into the basement apartment. Monroe wasn’t into knickknacks other than a framed photo of Annie Wong and a rock from his Mississippi hometown on his desk. The apartment just seemed to be a place to store his clothes. They turned on a few lights that cast shadows from the pipes across the concrete walls. House Beautiful would have run screaming.
    “Okay, here goes,” Monroe said.
    He ran a slideshow. Autumn woods. A park service sign for the Melvin Hazen Trail and Rock Creek Park. The creek with a common gray bird on a stone. Another shot of the same bird lifting its head. Somebody was really into birds. The pictures were full of rich detail. More birds followed, some in flight and some so camouflaged in the underbrush they were almost invisible. A spectacular hawk with a very dead mouse in its talons. A black triangle on the ground.
    “Christ, what’s that?” Travis said.
    Monroe stopped the slideshow. “You got me,” he said, and went to the next photo. The black triangle again.
    The strange craft lay at a bad angle in thick weeds and had no cockpit, no wings, and no visible insignia. The streaks of mud on the hull, the broken tree limbs, and crushed weeds were so real that Travis could almost touch them. Behind the triangle the woods faded into the horizon.
    “Looks like a UFO ,” Travis said.
    “You’re not pulling something, Maguire, because I’m late already and I don’t have time for this crap.”
    “Come on, man, I just found the camera ten minutes ago.”
    Monroe gave him a skeptical look and continued the slideshow. Over a hundred and fifty shots of the triangle from all angles. Wide windows. Ripped metal. Gouges in the forest floor where the thing had plowed across the ground. The pictures returned to the woods with a series along the creek. Then a figure appeared in the trees.
    Travis leaned forward.
    The picture was slightly out of focus, as though the photographer had taken it in a hurry. A towering woman with gigantic girth was striding toward the camera. Her pale chopped-off hair brushed the collar of a long gray garment that flared over her feet.
    Monroe enlarged the section. In the close-up they could see her small eyes and massive neck and how her features twisted as she squinted at the photographer. There was something frightening about her expression, but Travis wrote it off. A lot of people weren’t photogenic.
    Did she know about the crash?
    “That’s it, the last one,” Monroe said. “Maybe a military plane came down in the woods.”
    “It’s not a military plane. Look how narrow it is. What’s the date on them?”
    Monroe clicked on a picture. “Yesterday.”
    “And what about the sumo-wrestler woman? What’s her date?”
    “Yesterday, like everything else.”
    “So what’s this thing doing in the woods?”
    Monroe leaned back and gestured with one hand. “Well,
something
happened. That’s obvious. You know, I’ve got an open mind and I’m not going to say that UFO s don’t exist because I just don’t know. The main thing here is even if you think that UFO s are real, a UFO just can’t crash in the middle of the nation’s capital without people knowing about it. First of all, it would never get past the military. It wouldn’t happen.”
    “Unless, of course,