Page 13 of King from the Sky

“The window,” Emily said as she rushed over to open it. The window was stuck a bit and she found herself grunting to push it up. Alex lent a hand and the window slid open easily.

Emily began to crawl through the window.

Suddenly the door burst open and Emily saw a man in a black suit and tie with another one of those humongous assault rifles.

“Here!” He yelled as he opened fire.

Alex pushed Emily out of the window as he transformed into the lion and roared to life. The bullet hit the wall where Emily’s head would have been if Alex had not pushed her.

Emily fell to the ground hard, knocking the wind out of her body as the deafening explosion spread out right above her head. She lay on the ground for a few seconds trying to gasp the wind back into her lungs, but failing miserably. Finally, she forced her body to wobble to its feet, while still crouching down. She had to get to her car.

Emily squatted as low to the ground as she could as she heard the fighting raging on just feet behind her in the animal hospital. Her car was still in the driveway unharmed—that was a flipping miracle.

She made it to the car, opened the door, and slid into the driver’s seat. She flipped the ignition and tried to start it up. The car was dead. It didn’t even try to roll over. It was as if her battery was dead. Or the battery was destroyed. That was more like it. Damn. What was she going to do? She had to go back and help Alex if possible. It was very likely that he was about to be killed. There were too many of them; he couldn’t possibly fight them all.

Suddenly Emily saw a man’s body flying out of the window and hit the ground with a sickening thud. His body was followed by a lion/human hybrid leaping from the window and hitting the ground as it broke into a full run.

Emily had never seen anyone or anything move that fast. Suddenly the door to her car was open and she was several feet from it riding on the back of the lion as it sped to a truck parked across the street. The lion opened the door to the truck sliding her inside, her body now resting comfortably in the passenger seat and the lion had transformed into a very naked Alex.

The keys were dangling from the ignition already as he flipped the switch and the truck roared to life. A second later they were speeding down the road with two of the men in dark black suits running across the parking lot looking very angry and annoyed. Their guns were still raised high. They quickly tried to hide them in their coats the best they could and ran back towards the black SUV that was parked in front of the animal hospital.

“What the hell was that?” Emily asked after a few minutes. Her breath had finally returned and she was able to take several gulps of air while trying to process the situation and hoping that some endorphins were being released to quell some of the pain she was feeling in her body. She definitely felt like her rib cage had been shifted somehow and when she did breathe in deeply she felt a sharp pain at the top. She had never experienced a broken bone before and she was not sure what to expect. Hopefully, it was nothing.

“Like I said, that was a government agency— “

“Yeah, I heard all of that. I can put two and two together. But why are they after me? Why did they kill my friend and destroy the animal hospital?”

“Because of me. I’m sorry.”

“What do you mean, because of you?” Emily asked.

“They somehow got wind that I was here and that I made contact with you.”

“How the hell did that happen? How did they know that I saw you or that you told me anything?”

“I don’t know. Think—have you told anyone about me? Anyone at all?”

“I jokingly told the cop at the hospital what you told me, but there is no way in hell he believed a word of it. I never thought he would so I made it out like a joke.”

“That was it, then.”

“What? How?”

“He must have written it in his report.”

“What? No way. Like I said he thought I was feeding him a line and he gave me a nasty look before he ignored it completely,” Emily said.

“Nevertheless, he put it in the report. Maybe he is just that thorough or he thought it was funny enough to have on a permanent record.”

“How the hell do you know so much about the police here?”

“We’ve studied your planet for years. Our people have been here before you.”

“What? How long ago?”

“Thousands of years,” Alex replied.

Emily checked the rear but did not see any signs of the SUV following them. There was practically no traffic at all on the street, which was rare. There were not a lot of things that happened in Buckeye, but there were always young people getting into some sort of trouble or at least packing up their cars to ride into the city.