Isabel had seen more death and violence in the past two years than any decent eighteen-year-old alien princess should ever behold-she had even been forced to kill in self-defense-but she still felt her stomach churn queasily, and she had to look away for a minute to keep from throwing up. Okay, she concluded, nauseous, I'm well and truly in Morton's head now, since he's the only one who would know about this murder, unless Liz Parker has a really gruesome imagination.

With a grunt of satisfaction, Morton stepped back from the grisly remains of his victim and, to Isabel's relief, put his handgun away. "That showed him," he congratulated himself smugly, before kneeling to rummage through the dead man's pockets. "Nobody shakes me down and gets away with it." He removed the biker's wallet, perhaps to make the killing look like a routine robbery, then kept searching until, grunting with satisfaction, he found a folded scrap of paper tucked in his victims back pocket. Morton's name and phone number? Isabel speculated. Or the lieutenant's? In any event, the meticulous killer set the scrap on fire with a lighted match, stomped the spent match beneath his boot, then scowled and spit on the ground by the dead man's body With a callous shrug, he stuffed the other man's wallet into his own back pocket. "So much for that loser," he muttered.

Leaving the biker's corpse bleeding on the pavement, Morton wiped his hands on his jeans and adjusted his cap. Then he swaggered over to the rusty metal door beneath the red neon light. Watching from around the corner, Isabel saw now that the fluorescent crimson letters spelled out the name of a bar: hanger 18.

She gulped nervously. According to popular UFO lore, and confirmed by Michael after his meeting with that old air force vet several months ago, Hanger 18 at the Roswell Army Air Field was where the authorities had originally stored the debris from the '47 Crash, including, briefly, before Nasedo rescued them from the inquisitive scalpels of the army scientists, the gestation pods holding the genetically-engineered fetuses of Max, Michael, Tess, and herself. Why that name? she worried anxiously. Why here, in this creepy back alley of Morton's mind? Seemingly untroubled by the pseudo-historical implications of the name, Morton knocked arrogantly on the rusty door. Moments later, the door opened just a crack, spilling a jagged shard of bluish light into the alley Isabel backed away from the light instinctively, but Morton wasn't looking in her direction. Instead he held a short, muttered conversation with someone on the other side of the door, who opened the door farther and let Morton in. Isabel heard loud music and harsh, strident laughter coming from within the building, until the door slammed shut, leaving her alone in the alley with a dead body and way too many rats.

She hesitated, uncertain what to do, where to go, next. More than anything else, she wanted to wake up, which would send her back to the motel room with Max and Alex, far from Morton's vile nightworld, but she also knew that she had not learned nearly enough yet about Morton's plot. What had the blackmailing gunman managed to extort out of Lieutenant Ramirez? She still had no idea.

Talk about a dreamwalk on the wild side! As much as she longed to exit this sordid nightmare, she realized she had to see what lay behind the flickering neon sign reading HANGAR 18.

Giving the grotesque corpse a wide berth, she crept up to the forbidding metal door. The fluorescent lights sput- tered and hummed, as though the glowing glass tubes were filled with angry hornets instead of ionized gas. Isabel summoned up all her courage and rapped upon the door, timidly at first, then louder and more forcefully. Let me in! she thought feverishly. The sooner she got inside, the sooner she could escape back to the waking world. Open up! She heard bolts being slid back and, moments later, the door opened a few inches. A sinister-looking guy, with greasy black hair and bad skin, leered at Isabel from the other side of a short length of chain that prevented the door from opening all the way. His leathery, mottled complexion hinted at too many years of drugs, booze, or both. Gaunt and emaciated, he wore a rumpled white tuxedo that hung slackly on his withered frame. "Yes?" he asked suspiciously, looking at Isabel as though she hardly belonged here. Can't argue with that, she thought.

"Er, can you let me in?" she asked, flashing an ingenuous smile. "I'm supposed to meet someone inside."Is that so?" Skeptical eyes looked her over, lingering longer than she liked on her chest and legs. His frayed, dilapidated white suit was nearly worn through at the knees and elbows. "How old are you? You got ID?"Terrific, she thought acidly. I'm getting carded in a dream. In real life, of course, her actual driver's license was sitting in her purse back at the motel, but it took only a moment's concentration to produce a reasonable facsimile in this dreamworld. She already knew what date to cite as her birth year; if truth be told, she had sometimes been known to "adjust" the date on her real driver's license using her powers. This was just a variation on the same trick.

She handed the freshly-generated ID to the man behind the door, who inspected it dubiously before returning the card to her. "That'll do, I suppose," he declared, then scrutinized her again. A nasty grin revealed chipped, yellow teeth. "Now then, what's the password?"Password? Isabel was stumped momentarily, then realized that the correct answer had to be lurking somewhere in the psychic framework of this dream. Maybe if she just left herself open to the vibrations, the password would seep from Morton's mind into her own? She glanced up at the flickering red glow of the hangar 18 sign.

"1947," she guessed, free-associating.

"Try again," the yellow grin taunted her.

"Roswell?"You're getting closer," he teased, his smirking tone making her innocent guesses sound dirty.

"Area 51?"Closer…"Isabel racked her brain for more UFO lore. The correct password was on the tip of her tongue, she knew it. What was that other code name for the government's top secret UFO research program, the one mentioned in all those crazy pamphlets and TV specials? Max would know this, she thought, frustrated and wishing that she'd spent more time prowling that goofy UFO museum back home. It was something extremely appropriate, something like "Dreamland?"Bingo," the greasy scarecrow cackled, undoing the chain. "And the little lady wins admission to our humble establishment." The door swung outward and its revolting guardian stepped to one side. "Come on in."Isabel gulped and inched over the threshold, part of her devoudy wishing that she had never hit on the right password. The dingy vestibule just past the door was dark and musty and smelled of cigarette smoke. She eased past the scuzzy doorman, contorting her body so as to avoid brushing against him. Was everything in Morton's dream smelly and disgusting? Isabel had to wonder how he managed to sleep nights. Unless this is just how he likes things, she thought, sickened and repulsed by the notion that anyone, even a cold-blooded killer like Joe Morton, could feel at home in a seedy environment like this.

"Step right up, miss," die doorman directed her, snickering at her obvious discomfort. "Just through the curtain there." Isabel flinched, and her skin crawled, as an overly friendly hand patted her from behind. "Hope you find what you're looking for."Anxious to get away from the doorman's foul breath and dirty chuckles, Isabel ploughed blindly through a thick velvet curtain into… the bright, garishly- lighted interior of an enormous casino. Isabel blinked in bewilderment, taken back by the shocking, surreal disparity between the dank, musty vestibule and the sprawling, jam-packed, pleasure palace she had just rushed into. Flashing lights and candy-colored strips of neon outlined every angle and surface, while country-western music boomed from above, almost but not quite drowning out the clatter of rolling dice, the whir of spinning roulette wheels, and the constant ka-ching of innumerable slot machines. Showgirls wearing nothing but string bikinis, high heels, and tall, feathered headdresses promenaded through the crowd of jubilant high rollers, handing out free cigars and cocktails.