"Are you all right?" He peered down at her, skeptically, worriedly. Or maybe he was leering. Maybe he was thinking...it was hard to tell what the hell he might be thinking when over there...over in the ditch, claiming every damned bit of her attention?
"That was one hellatious fall
"Who the hell are you?" she demanded, trying again, trying a little harder, to sit up. "Are you from the Air F...Force?"
"You need to take it easy," he insisted, holding her down with the hand that didn't hold her hat. An almost electrical, decidedly sizzling touch that seemed at once infinitely familiar and yet totally strange. A touch that did nothing at all to ease the spinning, whirling feeling of unreality inside her head or to calm nerves that had instantly, possibly irreparably, gone on full and agitated alert. "Be quiet for a minute. Take time to make sure you're not hurt before you..."
"You are from the Air Force. You've got to be, because there's no other..."
Or was there? Another explanation?
One that had been bandied about nearby Roswell for years, one she'd heard almost every other day when she'd been growing up in Roswell, and which some of the locals truly believed? One that to her mother, and consequently to her too, had been no more than the nonsensical ravings of descendents of people who'd let themselves get badly carried away one, and made complete fools of themselves in front of the entire world?
The man kneeling over her laughed. He smiled again, and there was definitely a power in that smile. "Do I look like I'm from the Air Force?" he asked, seeming to want to use that smile to wipe her memory clean again. To wipe it completely from existence as if it had never been.
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