The Day After Roswell Read Online Free PDF

MP
armband bawled. “What the hell are you doing out
here?”
    “I responded with the fire company, ”
Dwyer said as innocently as possible.
    “Well, you get your civilian ass back on that truck
and get it the hell out of here, ” he ordered. “You
take anything with you?”
    “Not me, Sergeant, ” Dwyer said.
    Then the MP grabbed him as if he were under arrest and hustled
him off to a major, who was shouting orders near the generator that was
powering the string of floodlights. He recognized him as Roswell
resident Jesse Marcel.
    “Caught this fireman wandering around in the debris,
sir, ” the sergeant reported.
    Marcel obviously recognized Dwyer, although the two
weren’t friends, and gave him what the fireman only
remembered as an agonized look. “You got to get out of here,
” he said. “And never tell anyone where you were or
what you saw. ”
    Dwyer nodded.
    “I mean it, this is top security here, the kind of
thing that could get you put away, ” Marcel continued.
“Whatever this is, don’t talk about it,
don’t say anything until somebody tells you what to say. Now
get your truck out of here before someone else sees you and tries to
lock the whole bunch of you up. Move!” He faced the helmeted
MP. “Sergeant, get him back on that fire truck and move it
out. ”
    Dwyer didn’t need any more invitations. He let the
sergeant hustle him along, put him back on the truck, and told his
driver to bring it back to the station. The MP sergeant came up to the
driver’s side window and looked up at the fireman behind the
wheel.
    “You’ve been ordered to evacuate this
site, ” the MP told the driver. “At once!”
    The Roswell police unit had already made a U-turn on the sand
and was motioning for the truck to back up. The driver dropped the
truck into reverse, gently fed it gas as its wheels dug into the sand,
made his U-turn, and headed back for the firehouse in Roswell. The Ford
flatbed had already passed through the sleeping town in the moments
between darkness and light, the sound of its engines causing no alarm
or stir, the sight of a large tarpaulin covered object on the back of
an army vehicle rolling along the main street of Roswell against the
purple gray sky raising nobody’s eyebrows because it was
nothing out of the ordinary. But later, by the time Dwyer backed his
field truck into the station house, the sun was already up and the
first of the CMC transport trucks was just reaching the main gate at
the 509th.
    Plumbing subcontractor Roy Danzer, who had worked through the
night at the base fitting pipe, knew something was up from the way the
trucks tore out of the compound through the darkness. He had just
walked out of the base hospital to grab a cigarette before going back
to work. That’s when he heard the commotion over at the main
gate. Danzer had cut his hand a few days earlier cutting pipe, and the
infirmary nurse wanted to keep checking the stitches to make sure no
infection was setting in. So Danzer took the opportunity to get away
from the job for a few minutes while the nurse looked over her work and
changed his bandage. Then, on his way back to the job, he would grab a
cup of coffee and take an unscheduled cigarette break. But this
morning, things would be very different.
    The commotion he heard by the main gate had now turned into a
swirling throng of soldiers and base workers shoved aside by what
looked like a squad of MPs using their bodies as a wedge to force a
pathway through the crowd. There didn’t even seem to be an
officer giving orders, just a crowd of soldiers. Strange. Then the
throng headed right for the base hospital, right for the main entrance,
right for the very spot where Roy was standing.
    Nobody moved him out of the way or told him to vacate the
area. In fact, no one even spoke to him. Roy just looked down as the
line of soldiers passed him, and there it was, strapped tightly to a
stretcher that two bearers were carrying into the base hospital right
through