Believer E-Book

Robin Brande

• Herausgeber: Ryer Publishing
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

WHEN THE UNIVERSE SHOWS YOU ITS SECRETS, BELIEVE IT.

Five exciting new stories in the DOVE SEASON universe.

UFO biologist Dr. Travis Baird begins a new life away from prying eyes. But he can’t outrun his past—or the alien intervention that changed him.

Investigator Gina Firenzi knows she tapped into something strange the night she saved herself from getting shot. But what it was—and whether she can access again—is a mystery she needs to solve.

Agency analyst Alice Kern wants the truth about her parents’ murder—but only the truth. Is Gina’s new source of information reliable? Or just another pretender claiming she can see into the past?

Marnie Stemple has a new teacher. An alien woman with secrets Marnie longs to learn. But unlocking those secrets requires a leap into the unknown. Is Marnie brave enough to take it?

Pilot Sharman Hix meets someone who challenges her view of the future—and of the role Sharman intends to play in it.

The truth is already here. Whether we believe it or not.

Leseprobe

BELIEVER

DOVE SEASON 4

ROBIN BRANDE

RYER PUBLISHING

BELIEVER

(Dove Season 4)

By Robin Brande

Published by Ryer Publishing

www.ryerpublishing.com

Copyright 2022 by Robin Brande

www.robinbrande.com

Cover art by Bargar/Deposit Photos

Cover design by Ryer Publishing

All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Created with Vellum

CONTENTS

Bear Creek 1972

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Division

Chapter 1

Believer

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Flight Lesson

Chapter 1

The Return

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Coming Soon

About the Author

Also by Robin Brande

BEAR CREEK 1972

1

Travis Baird planted another seed in the loose soil of the window box. His wife, Rosie, loved color. This would be a spring ritual now, he hoped for many years, planting red and pink geraniums that would blossom in June when it really did feel like spring in the mountains.

He could hear Rosie and their seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, inside the little cottage where they had moved a few months ago, just before the start of the spring semester at Mountain State College. The two of them were baking a carrot cake for Travis’s thirty-third birthday.

A birthday Travis hadn’t been certain he would ever live to see.

The position in the biology department at Mountain State had opened up just in time. Travis was at loose ends. He had already stepped down as a botany professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins and quit his position on the team of his former mentor, Dr. Alvin Linsk.

What had once been a project lauded and financed by various governmental and military entities had fallen out of favor in the last year or two. Now there were spies all over the biology department, from the secretarial staff to other professors, all of them looking for ways to discredit whatever findings Linsk’s team of scientists made.

Findings about the existence and movements of alien life forms on Earth. Travis’s territory had been the Four Corners area of the U.S.: Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. Dr. Linsk’s team members were usually the first ones on site whenever there were reports of UFOs or other unexplained phenomena in the area.

Over the eight years Travis had been working for Dr. Linsk, he had identified six different species of aliens. Two of them were highly dangerous and aggressive, but the rest seemed reasonably passive. It was hard to know how long each of the species had been here. Some might have only begun arriving in the past decade or so, others might have infiltrated the planet long ago.

That had been part of the overall project, not only identifying them biologically, but also trying to determine their origins and history.

But Travis was off the team for good now. Even though when he first quit, Dr. Linsk begged him to stay.

There were other scientists still working out in the field, still doing the important investigations. They interviewed witnesses to suspected extraterrestrial visitations, they gathered samples from the area, they took measurements and tested the radiation levels around where alien craft had landed.

But there was a cost to that knowledge. Travis and the other investigators grew sick with mysterious illnesses. It might have been because of the radiation, or it could be because the biological remnants of the aliens’ presence attacked the human body in unexpected ways.

Whatever the reason, the field agents had suspiciously short life spans.

Travis himself had been visibly weakening and wasting away for the past few years, suffering from a series of devastating ailments.

He treasured every moment he could spend with Rosie and Caroline. He expected those moments were rapidly dwindling down.

Until last September.

Travis followed a lead to a different kind of alien. A species he had heard rumors of, but had never encountered himself.

He read a report of man who had been abducted in a farmer’s field in a place called Red Rock, about thirty miles northwest of Tucson, Arizona.

Travis had seen the man with his own eyes. A hale and hearty middle-aged farm hand named Raoul Ortega.

A man who had been dying of cancer until the aliens took him.

The aliens were a species people were calling the Healers. They had to be. Travis hoped to God they were.

He drove out to Tucson on his own, without Dr. Linsk’s or anyone else’s authority, hoping to find where the aliens were.

Hoping from the bottom of his soul that they might be able to heal him, too.

He didn’t tell Rosie. He didn’t want to get her hopes up. He didn’t tell his boss or anyone else.

But from the moment he walked out across the moonlit field where Mr. Ortega had been abducted, and saw ahead of him the alien coming to meet him, Travis knew.

He had already seen and learned things in the past eight years that defied his assumptions about biological science and the Earth and the nature of the greater universe.

But this was about to be an experience that surpassed all the others.

His escort, a woman named Mercedes Fuentes, had the ability to communicate with the alien Healers. She had been speaking to them telepathically for years.

She brought Travis to them and made some kind of telepathic introduction. Then Mercedes Fuentes left and Travis followed the alien life form back to her ship.

There were two aliens that night, both of them humanoid in appearance. Actually, although he hadn’t told Rosie this yet, they looked like beautiful human women. The most beautiful women he had ever seen.

Like a mermaid, Travis had heard Raoul Ortega describe the one who picked him up in her arms and carried him after he collapsed. She had webbed fingers and toes and long silvery hair and large silvery blue eyes.

Travis had no need of a flashlight as he followed her across the nighttime field. Her body glowed like a bioluminescent sea creature. He could have read a newspaper by the light of her silvery skin.

She wore no clothes that he could see, although he realized later that her body was wrapped tightly in some kind of suit that acted as a second skin. It was the suit that was silver. Her true skin was a light pale green. And it was that skin that glowed so beautifully. He could see it coming through more clearly in her uncovered face and hands.

Travis couldn’t stop staring at her. He walked beside her, not paying attention to his feet, but he felt like he was gliding, just as she was, across the rough surface of the clod-covered field.

Her face was more beautiful than a movie star’s. It was … perfection. Everything about her seemed graceful and feminine and exquisite. But she wasn’t the kind of woman a man would lust after. She was too angelic and pure for that.

And what was there to lust after? The alien had no outward feminine shape to draw the eye. No breasts, no indication of her sex at all. But her long silver hair and her flawless face still made him feel sure that the creature was a woman.

And when she spoke to him, he knew it for certain.

“Are you afraid?” she asked Travis in a soft and lilting voice that was as lovely and feminine as her face.

He didn’t answer right away. He wanted to tell the truth, and the truth was he wasn’t sure how he felt.

Elated. That was the word for it.

“No,” he told her, “I’m not afraid.”

She reached down with her warm, webbed fingers and clasped Travis’s hand.

He could feel warmth spreading up his arm and all through his body. Like the feeling of slipping into a slightly warm bath. Not too hot, not something to make you suck in your breath and ease slowly until you got used to it. The warmth felt instantly comfortable—and comforting. Travis could feel a sob want to loosen from his chest.

A memory flashed into his mind. He didn’t know if it was a real memory, or more of an association.

He could see himself, feel himself, as a tiny boy, barely older than a baby. He felt his mother’s arms scoop him up out of a cold cradle and hug him into her warm chest.

He imagined he could feel her heartbeat, steady, reassuring. He felt so safe. So loved. So cared for. Whatever childhood nightmare had woken him up screaming and crying for help was now gone in an instant.

He felt that way now, as if all of the fear and worry of the past few years simply misted away from his mind. He didn’t have to hold so hard to the idea of wanting to stay alive to see Rosie and Caroline. He wasn’t afraid anymore of dying and being alone.

Up ahead he could see a shape in the dark. There was no color or reflection that his eyes could see, just a change to the uniform blackness.

“Will you come with us?” the beautiful alien asked him.

Travis hesitated again. “For how long?”

The woman turned to him and favored him with her calm, angelic smile.

“Not long,” she said. “We will help you.”

Travis couldn’t imagine telling her no.

He nodded and the alien swept her right arm through the dark, and a light came from the shape in front of them.

Travis could see the outline of a ship now, like two clamshells placed together, broad enough at its center that the alien at his side could easily stand at her full height.

At the center, at the widest part, there was a round door shaped like an open mouth.

The light was coming from there. Visible from inside the craft.

He could see the second alien now, standing in the round doorway, smiling in the same pure and angelic way.

She, too, had long silvery hair that reached down to her waist, and the same oddly-shaped eyes, like ovals lying on their sides, and twice the size of a human’s.

Travis paused. He could feel his heart racing. If they were going to kill him…

But they had healed Raoul Ortega. They had abducted him and brought him back healed.

Travis said a prayer he remembered from his childhood. Only the line that seemed made for an occasion like this. Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no evil…

He didn’t believe these aliens were evil. He … hoped they weren’t.

He took a step forward, and then another.

He stepped through the open mouth of the spaceship, and it swallowed him inside.

2

“You have to make a wish,” Caroline told him, just as Travis was about to blow out his candles.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said. “Okay, hold on.” He shut his eyes tightly.

He already had everything he wished for.

Asking for anything more felt greedy.

But Caroline was right. A birthday wish had to be made. Otherwise it was bad luck.

Travis thought the wish privately to himself. Then he opened his eyes and blew out thirty-three white candles. Rosie and Caroline clapped.

They sat in the cozy little kitchen of their cottage. Rosie had painted the dull ivory walls a bright cheerful yellow right after they moved in. She sewed pink gingham curtains for the window and made a matching table cloth for their small round oak table they brought from the other house.

They hadn’t brought very much. Just two beds, two dressers, the kitchen table and three chairs, and a light blue sofa and matching upholstered chair that Rosie’s parents had given them as a hand-me-down when they first got married.

Travis always planned on buying new furniture some day when he was finally earning enough. But that day never seemed to come.

And now he was working for even less than before.

But it was worth it. He and Rosie both knew it. They couldn’t stay in Fort Collins. Not after what happened. And not with all the turmoil in the biology department.

Decisions had to be made, and Travis and Rosie made them. No looking back. Only forward. They were in this together. Their family was all that mattered.

Dr. Linsk had been willing to help them. He made excuses for why Travis remained out in the field for another few months and never returned to his lab or his office in the biology department.

They continued trying to communicate on phone calls, but after a few times of hearing clicks on the line, Travis was too paranoid to continue.

They met once in a neighborhood park on the edge of town.

Dr. Linsk’s expression told Travis all he needed to know.

Of course Travis had changed. Of course anyone with eyes would be able to see it.

He had regained the twenty pounds that he had watched slough off his frame. His thinning, graying hair was now its former thick brown. The lines and creases on his face had practically disappeared. Travis looked twenty-five again. Rosie swore it.

There was a vigor to his step that he hadn’t felt in years. Until September he had been walking with a stoop, like an arthritic old man.

Linsk whispered, “Good God,” and he swiped his hand over his brow. He took out his handkerchief and mopped the sweat from above his lip.

“So you see why I have to go,” Travis said.

Dr. Linsk nodded mutely. There was no question anymore.

They sat at a picnic table under the yellowing autumn leaves of a stand of aspens. Dr. Linsk drew out his pipe and tobacco pouch from the pockets of his brown wool sports coat and took his time filling and tamping the pipe bowl and then lighting it and puffing. Travis was familiar with the technique. Alvin Linsk’s way of stalling, of buying himself time to think before he was ready to speak.

Travis breathed in the woodsy smell of the tobacco as he studied his old boss. Alvin Linsk had noticeably aged in the eight years they had worked together. The top of his head was almost completely bald now. He wore thicker lenses in his black horn rim glasses. His belly had filled out, and now sloped over the top of his trousers. He looked careworn. Travis could understand that. Until a month ago, he had looked halfway to death himself.

But despite all the current turmoil in the biology department and on the investigative team, Alvin Linsk was still Travis’s friend and mentor. And he had university contacts all over the country. There had to be another job somewhere that Travis could take to support his family.