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I want to be when I grow up. And it looks like the big time is just going to pass Bobby Lee right on by."
    He’d referred to his on-air handle, which meant that he was stuck inside himself again, dwelling on his own problems, and wouldn’t have any room in his soul for Tamara’s. For their mutual problems. "Now, Robert, we've been over this a hundred times already. Stick with what you like."
    Tamara rubbed Robert's hairy chest and snuggled against his shoulder. "Besides, you’re not getting older, you're just getting better. You'll make it one day, just wait and see."
    Robert's hand dropped to her belly and caressed its way up to her breasts. She felt a small stir under her skin and her pulse accelerated. But the Gloomies hovered in the back of her mind like old ghosts, ghosts of her father and half-buried memories, and bad things yet to crawl from the shadows.
    "Robert, I don't think—"
    She gasped in involuntary arousal. Then the Gloomies crested and crashed like a tidal wave, sweeping the shores of her mind.
    Shu-shaaa .
    She took Robert's hand from her chest and held it. "I'm sorry, I'm just not in the mood tonight."
    Robert puffed like a schoolboy who had been denied a toy. "What's wrong?"
    "The Gloomies. You know."
    She felt him tense in anger and then relax. Oh, just her being crazy again , he was probably thinking. Nothing serious .
    "Honey, that was so many years ago,” he finally said. “You've got to stop blaming yourself."
    "I can't help it."
    Robert sighed and then was quiet as the rain drummed off the roof, its fury seeming to diminish along with their passion. Tamara looked out the window, trying to give her anxiety a shape in the darkness.
    In a few minutes, Robert was snoring but Tamara was more wide-awake than before. She was worried that she would have the dream again, the one where her family was swallowed by . . . by . . . she wasn't sure what.
    She only knew that she was alone with the Gloomies. And she could tell they were ready to dance the night away.

***
    The alien snatched the faint vibration out of the air, testing it, tasting it.
    Maz-zaaa .
    Another symbol. It added it to the shu-shaaa , this planet’s original symbol. The maz-zaaa had been less distinct, as if radiated from a distant constellation. Perhaps it had no meaning. Perhaps none of this planet’s life forms were intelligent enough to combine multiple symbols. Perhaps this planet had nothing to offer besides its nutrients.
    Now that the alien had grown comfortable in the cave, roots spreading through the forest and siphoning energy, it allowed a moment to open its pulsing center to the strange world that surrounded it.
    The oxygen mixture swirled through the vegetation above and a soft hydrogen-oxygen mixture pelted the skin of the planet. Static electricity caused the alien’s tendrils to tingle. A small creature raced across the soil, its passage echoing through the alien’s cave. The vibrations were almost painful, and the alien slipped back into a state of rest, focusing on that strange symbol shu-shaaa .

 
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    It was turning out to be one of those nightmare shifts. First, the printer had gone berserk and started eating the AP feed so he couldn't read the weather copy, and then Melvin Patterson, the station GM, had popped into the studio to chew his rear about skipping around in the playlist. Now this squeaky birdbrain was calling in to report some green lights. Robert Leon, known to WRNC's listening audience as "Bobby Lee," let out a sigh and pressed the phone more tightly to his ear.
    "I haven't heard anything about it, ma'am," he said, wondering why in the hell she had called the radio station. Didn't she have any friends, for God's sake?
    "Ain't you got no other reports of ‘em?" The voice on the other end of the phone screeched like fingernails across a blackboard. "Up around Bear Claw?"
    "Not that I know of. You may want to try the local authorities, ma’am."
    Robert looked at the countdown