Unidentified

 Unidentified. 

The radio screams, an unnatural and uncomfortable noise that rises and rises, unfit for human vocal chords. It’s crescendoing shriek rises like so many cathedral windows shattering before abrupt, eerie silence. The radio hisses and pops with electromagnetic intrusion. This quiet is not natural. Not *empty*. 

Eyes lock in the dark room over green-blue glowing terminals. Codes are exchanged in tense voices, heads dipped in militant focus like warped supplication. The prayers come next. 

Bogey out.

Bogey locked, side-swipe pattern, FIVE-EYE watch online.

Bogey moving. Dropping ten clicks at fifty-plus M.

Dispatching Greeting Party.

Out in the desert a door opens, crimson-dusted ground splitting to omit two black arrowheads. They hurl themselves into the night on pillars of fire. Weapons gleaming like cold, hungry stars. Tiny lonesome homes strewn about isolated prairie shake and waiver at the splitting of the sound barrier, glass dematerialized into so much fine mist by the mightiest machines men have ever built. 

The Unidentified is faster than dreams, than lightning— faster than those mighty interceptors. It plays in the clouds with ease and speed and impossible agility, skipping across dark Arizona thunderheads. It glows like an unnatural red star. Flashes. Blazes. Strange forms bloom and whither across instantaneous heartbeats, uncoiling mirages. When the Interceptors near with prying weapons, their foreign prey vanishes and appears elsewhere, dancing between the jarring lightning bolts that throw stark blue daylight over midnight Sierra Nevada. 

The game is brief. The hunters are fierce and capable, but even for these man made angels, fuel is precious. G-forces pull taut at the fragile human cargo within, arcing upward and upward in an envious climb to the stars, chasing a crimson phantom. In a soundless eruption, the visitor is gone. Vanished.