I slithered into the cab and bared my fangs to the driver.

He hollered into his radio microphone and groped for his holster. With my right hand, I grabbed him by the throat while my left hand twisted his wrist until he yelped in pain. The truck weaved across the road, left and right.

I reached around him, popped the door open, and shoved him out. Grasping the rim of the big steering wheel, I straightened the truck’s path. Waves of steam curled from the punctured radiator.

The guard in the Humvee let fly another burst that pinged harmlessly against the thick windshield.

Chortling with glee, I accelerated and rammed the rear of the Humvee. The Humvee careened back and forth across the highway. The guard flopped in the hatch like a sock puppet before dropping inside. I rammed the Humvee again. It swerved, tipped on two wheels, and rolled over.

The temperature gauge on the instrument panel sprang into the red zone. I had perhaps a minute before the engine seized.

Up ahead, the Suburban spun around. In my rearview mirrors, another Humvee raced closer to box me in.

I flicked off the headlamps and running lights. I veered to the right and smashed the darkened semi and trailer through a barbed-wire fence bordering the road.

Using vampire vision, I navigated around the largest of the big rocks littering the plain. The truck bellowed as it crashed over the treacherous ground. The trailer groaned on the fifth wheel. I dropped into low gear and flogged the engine, dragging us through the snow.

The transmission started to grind. The engine whined. The tachometer redlined. The truck bogged down and stopped with a wheeze and a grunt of steam.

I kicked open the door and stood on the running board. The Humvees were a half-mile away, picking their way around the stones that had pummeled my truck. Searchlights washed over the glistening snow.

I had but a few short minutes to find out what was hidden in the trailer. Unfastening a pick ax lashed to the back of the cab, I dropped to the snow and hustled to the trailer. A padlock the size of a clay brick held the rear doors. I jammed the thin end of the pick head between the lock and the hasp. I twisted the pick and turned until the handle broke.

A gentle tap-like the tripping of a bomb fuse-whispered from behind the doors. The stink of polyurethane and isopropanol farted into the air. I sprang upward and landed on top of the trailer roof. From under the rear of the truck, out shot streams of foam the size of railroad ties. The streams snaked on the ground and melted a swath through the snow. The foam set and hardened. To anyone caught in it, it would be like getting doused with instant-setting concrete.

Just to make sure that no more surprises waited, I stamped my foot on the roof of the trailer. Nothing happened. I jumped up and down once. Again, nothing happened.

Certain that this booby trap had run its course, I dropped from the roof and balanced on the knots of hardened foam. I grabbed the pick head with my bare hands and twisted again, grunting, and flexed my legs to get better leverage.

The padlock cracked apart. I flung the pieces aside and unbarred the doors.

A second metal door protected the cargo. The seal of the Department of Energy warned me not to proceed.

Stop me.

This door I grasped by the hinges and tore it loose. I stepped over the threshold and into the deepest secrets of Rocky Flats.

I ENTERED AN ARMORED VAULT. Six black boxes the size and shape of coffins were lashed with cargo straps to platforms on the floor trunnions. Along the left and right walls stood black metal drums marked with radiation symbols and placards announcing Hg-209, red mercury. Were these the boxes and drums the RCTs discovered just before they first became contaminated and then went sex crazy?

I stepped between the first two of the black boxes. A pair of metal shipping bands secured each of the lids. I chose a box and plucked at the bands with my talons until each band snapped apart with a twang.

Poised on the edge of my destination in this mystery, I hesitated, out of apprehension that what lay in the box was either nothing but disappointment, a hoax perhaps, or the kernel at the heart of the darkest of conspiracies. Could this be proof of the spaceship, the Roswell UFO, as the vânätori had claimed?

In the distance, the flashing lights and headlamps of the convoy escort flicked across the snow. I didn’t have much time before the security force closed upon me.

Breathless, as if reaching into a lion’s cage, I raised the lid. The aura about my hands changed from orange to yellow, exactly as it had earlier in the presence of Dragan’s red mercury. Startled and suddenly afraid, I closed the lid. Thankfully, my aura returned to orange.

The effect seemed temporary. In any case, since I might already be contaminated, there was no point in stopping. I raised the lid again, and again my aura turned yellow. And the more I opened the lid, the farther the color change progressed down my arms.

The auras of the contaminated RCTs had turned an identical hue when the nymphomania took hold. Just as before, when Dragan had brought the vial of red mercury close to me, an electric twinge now shot along my spine and down to my crotch, filling my groin with a pleasant warmth. I couldn’t help but smile despite my apprehension.

I pushed the lid up until it locked in the vertical position. Inside the box rested a large transparent tube filled with a viscous liquid. Floating in this liquid was a wizened, blackened corpse the size of a German shepherd. The corpse had an unusually large head, a plain oval face, a tiny slit of a mouth, two even tinier slits on the bump of a nose, and a pair of enormous almond-shaped eyes.

A gasp escaping my throat startled me, and I realized that I was so stupefied by what I’d seen that I had forgotten to breathe.

Dark cloth overalls covered most of the body, but whether the suit was extraterrestrial in origin or had been provided by humans to protect any modesty, I couldn’t tell. The body emitted no aura. This creature was long dead. An inventory tag dangled from the collar. The liquid had bleached the writing but I could still read “509th Bombardment Group, Roswell Air Force Base,” and the scrawl of a long-forgotten colonel together with the date, “7 July 1947.” This thing in the tube could only be an alien. An EBE. An extraterrestrial biological entity.

Holy shit.

I withdrew my hands and the yellow aura effervesced for a moment. I closed the lid. The aura around my hands and arms changed back to its usual orange. The warmth in my crotch dissipated.

So everything was true. A chill made me shudder. Earth’s creatures weren’t alone in the universe. I craned my head back to stare at the trailer ceiling and wonder about the cosmos beyond. We were but dots on a miserable speck of a rock tucked into an insignificant corner of the galaxy.

Disgust with humanity overwhelmed me. We had finally made contact with an alien civilization and this was the best reception provided, to hide the visitors? Why the secrecy?

Angrily, I turned to the second box, broke apart the shipping bands, and opened the lid. Inside rested metallic forms in fantastic shapes, all of a uniform pale color like the dull side of aluminum foil. There was nothing whose function I could recognize, though every piece had this attribute in common, thin conduits about the diameter of a pencil running through them. I grasped one long shape the size of my arm. The surface was hard and unyielding. The shape felt warm, as if heated, and was surprisingly lightweight. The glow of my hand’s aura changed from orange to yellow. I dropped the piece and in reflex wiped my hand on the edge of the box, once again relieved when my aura returned to its normal color.