The Complete Independence Day Omnibus by Stephen Molstad

Author:Stephen Molstad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan Books

9

MRS. GLUCK AND HER DAUGHTER

Okun didn’t understand the precise relationship between the Van Allen belts and the arrival of the spaceships. And he didn’t much care. What was important to him was that the dates matched. Now he had a way of sifting through the rubbish and finding the gold. But he was dismayed by two discoveries. First; there were hardly any real reports. Lenel hadn’t been exaggerating when he said 99.9 percent of everything in the stacks was a bunch of hooey of bullpucky or whatever he’d called it. After several days of combing through the files, they had found about four hundred case studies occurring during the specified five-day periods. Then came the long process of poring over them and throwing out the fakes that happened to have been reported during those times. The scientists ruled out all but sixty-two of the reported sightings and encounters. Only twenty of these had occurred later than 1960. And four of those were mere sightings. That left only sixteen good reports.

One of them was the Eau Claire, Wisconsin incident.

One was the Bridget Jones case, where the central witness was dead.

Then there were thirteen people who claimed they had been abducted. And that’s where things got interesting. All told very similar stories. They had been driving along lonely roads or at home engaged in some quiet activity when they suddenly stopped whatever they were doing. The drivers pulled to the side of the road. The people taken from their homes sat down or stood still. All the abductees described being surrounded by short, quick-moving creatures with enlarged heads. Many claimed they had been flown to a spaceship, where various experiments were performed on their persons. Six of them described a leader who was much taller that the others. Okun knew from other reading he had done that mentions of a much taller leader were common.

But there was one report that stood out from the others. It was about a woman who claimed she had been interrogated about a Y-shape. Her file said she was a person in the public eye, and care was taken to expunge any clue to her identity. But Okun knew her name was Trina Gluck and she lived in Fresno. In fact, he knew her street and house number. Scrawled onto the front page of the document in a handwriting style he was learning to recognize was the woman’s name and address.

Two weeks later, he rode into Las Vegas with the boys. As always, the van dropped them off in front of their bank, Parducci Savings. Nothing on the outside of the building let on that it was a bank. There was no logo, no place to park, no slot for night deposits. Inside, the lobby looked like someone’s living room, with lots of family photos on the walls and too much furniture. There was a counter with two teller’s windows and behind that a couple of doors leading to private offices. These doors were never open. Salvatore Parducci, a heavyset man with an appetite for fine suits and gold bracelets, was the manager.

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