I was a scientist, not a soldier. I didn’t want to do harm to anyone, not even Dr. Trout. Not Vidar either. If the military found him, they’d kill him.
“Minerva, trust me.”
“He’s dead!”
“He killed himself. I would have let him go,” Vidar insisted.
I believed him. Vidar, impervious to bullets, could have killed the doctor before any time he wanted to. He hadn’t done that and I believed him when he said that he never had the intention to do so. He only wanted to protect me.
He reached for my hand and I grabbed him tightly.
“I’ll get you out of here, but you need to trust me. I only want to protect you, Minerva.”
“How are we going to get you out of here? You’re seven feet tall… and…”
“Purple?”
“Yes. That.”
There were tens of other alien traits he possessed too, but the purple skin had to have been the biggest one.
“I’ve prepared for every contingency. All I need is for you to trust me and for us to find a place to stay at least for tonight.”
“The U.S. government can find us wherever we go,” I whispered.
The weight of what happened settled over me at once, despite Vidar’s hand holding mine, providing a certain measure of comfort.
“We’ll leave now then.”
“How?”
“My ocular implant permits site to site teleportation.”
“What? You mean you could teleport out of here?”
“I can get us five miles from here on the surface, no further.”
“Can you get any more precise?”
“Not with this much magnetic interference from the soil.”
“How does it work?”
“You hold on now.”
Vidar gripped my arm tightly and then he closed his eyes, tapping the side of his temples. Then it all disappeared as if sucked through a needle eye. I tried to open my mouth to scream but no sound came out. We rematerialized on flat earth with fresh forest air. I fell to my knees and a loud wheezing escaped my lungs. Vidar was unaffected from our teleportation.
Teleportation. I’d actually done something that had been a staple in earth science fiction for years. It was actually possible and my scientific mind was desperate for an explanation as to how on earth any of this could be possible at all…
“Are you alright?”
I dusted the dirt off my palms and rose to my feet, nodding despite the nausea threatening to knock me off my feet.
“I think so.”
The sun had already begun to set. I had no idea where we were, but if we were within five miles of the lab, we had to get moving.
“I can give you our coordinates,” Vidar offered, trying to get me stable so we could get moving. He might have been impervious to bullets, but I wasn’t.
