The Fellowship for Alien Detection by Kevin Emerson Page A

planned next interview stop on her field study plan. It was near Mammoth Caves National Park, which Haley hadn’t thought much of until she’d made this connection to the towns and lights being put underground.
    â€œLast sign I saw said one hundred fifty miles. So, a few more hours. Why, are we late?”
    â€œNo, but I got a message from my source there, and she needs to meet later,” Haley lied. “So, we have a few hours to kill, and I just noticed, there’s a park called Super Fun Wet! coming up in, like, fifty miles. It’s got waterslides, bumper boats, and go-karts.”
    Liam jolted upright like a risen zombie. “GO-KARTS, YEEAHHHH!” he moaned.
    â€œOh, right!” said Allan. “Jill, didn’t we go to one of those out in Kansas, back during our cross-country drive?” He was referring to the fabled journey he and Jill had taken back in their twenties to move Jill from Oregon to Connecticut, photographic evidence of which still hung in a collage frame in the guest bathroom.
    â€œThat’s right!” said Jill. “I’m still mad at you about that stunt you pulled with the go-karts.”
    â€œHello, people?” said Haley. “So, we’re gonna do that, then. Some family fun, okay? Also, they have Wi-Fi, and I really need to do more research.”
    This was the absolute only reason Haley was suggesting this stop. To buy time so that she could initiate Part Three of the plan, and that was . . .
    She didn’t know yet. Part Three was going to have to come from whatever she could find in this last-ditch search, some new clue that might get her closer to uncovering the real story. The way she figured it, she had forty-eight hours left before Alex would know that she hadn’t turned around. At that point, not only did the debit card turn off, but Alex would no doubt start calling her parents. And then of course Haley would promptly be in huge, massive trouble, but . . . she didn’t care anymore. If she could just crack this story open before time ran out, it would be worth any amount of punishment.
    â€œSounds great!” said Allan. He turned back to Jill. “It was not a ‘stunt’ I pulled. I’m just a superior driver.”
    While he and Jill went back and forth playfully, and while Liam pretended to drive a go-kart from his seat (complete with high-pitched screeching noises as he took sharp turns), Haley returned to staring out the window and simmering in her anxious juices. She watched the new road, the new parts of the map, sliding by, with every mile getting closer to a mystery, and yet with every minute getting closer to having to turn around. Unless she could find some way to keep going.
    Bardstown, KY, July 4, 12:33 p.m.
    Two hours later, in the feathery shade cast by a plastic palm-frond umbrella, at a white table stained in brown-hued blotches of, at best, old ketchup and mustard, beneath the froth of squealing voices, water splashes, lifeguard whistles, frying burgers, and arcade game blips, while her family was tossed to and fro in the unnaturally blue water of a giant wave pool, Haley had her first experience with what Garrett Conrad-Wayne referred to as Scheduled Serendipity.
    Most people , Garrett Conrad-Wayne said, wait around for good luck to just randomly find them, as if luck is excrement from a bird that is just winging along going about its day, and it just so happens that, through a combination of wind and velocity, and due to no fault of your own, you are standing in the right place at the right moment for that smear of excrement to hit you on the head .
    The journalist knows, however, that luck is more like the excrement of a reclusive, flightless nocturnal ground bird, and it will only splat onto your head if you position yourself directly under the right branch of the right tree in the right part of the jungle at the right time of night .
    Haley wasn’t sure if bird poop was the