Free The Roswell Conspiracy by Boyd Morrison

wasn’t the drone of aircraft propellers. This was more like the whine of a thousand trumpets blowing in unison. And it was heading straight toward her.
    She pulled up sharply on the reins, and Bandit whinnied as he came to a stop. Fay looked up into the low-hanging clouds hoping to catch a glimpse of the noise’s source. Then, just like heavy seas parted by a ship’s prow, the clouds slid aside, and a flying object like nothing she’d ever seen screamed out of the sky.
    Her mouth agape, Fay struggled to keep Bandit from bolting as a giant, silvery disk descended directly at them. Not knowing which way to go, she kept the horse still. The flying disk had no propellers, just two gaping black openings on either side. The craft had to be wider than the local high school’s football field.
    Before she could decide on a direction to go, it roared overhead, deafening her and spooking Bandit. He reared up, bucking Fay, and while she sailed through the air, she realized that the object that she’d thought was a disk was actually the shape of an oblong wing with no body. Then she hit the ground, smacking her rear harder than her dad would have and rolling away from Bandit’s panicked stomping.
    Fay raised her head in time to see the silver wing plow into the ground a quarter-mile in front of her, spraying dirt into the sky as it skidded to a stop.
    The whine from the craft didn’t end, but she could see no further movement.
    Wincing from her bruised backside, but otherwise in one piece, she cooed at Bandit until he calmed and came to her. She climbed back on and tentatively rode toward the motionless air vehicle.
    She knew she should just ride straight on and tell her father what had happened, but she also felt intense curiosity about the craft. Her father had taken her to an airfield one time to see the Army planes, and they’d all had white stars and numbers painted on the sides. This object had no markings whatsoever.
    When she reached the front of the craft, Fay dismounted the horse and tied him to a scrub brush to keep him from bolting. She could see now just how huge the thing was, the wing standing more than five times higher than her thin frame.
    As she walked along the wing’s length, she ran her hand over its smooth skin, the metal cold to the touch. She didn’t notice the cracked square of glass lying on the ground until she was right next to it.
    No, not glass, because it wasn’t shattered, but it was transparent like a window pane. She looked up and saw the space where the pane would go. The frame around it had been ripped apart from the force of the crash. Although the front of the craft was partially buried in the earth, it was too far above her to see inside without hoisting herself up. Now she wished she hadn’t dismounted Bandit.
    Her heart raced as she tried to decide what to do. If someone was hurt, Fay had to help them, but she was terrified about what she might find. Living on a ranch, she’d seen death and injuries: broken bones, impalements, rotting sheep that hadn’t been discovered for a week. But this was different. There might be injured men inside.
    Her dad had raised her to be tough. She’d become the son in the family after her brother died when she was two. Her father took her shooting and roping, taught her how to shear and hunt and fish. Fay convinced herself she could handle whatever she discovered in there and then report back. It would take only a moment to investigate.
    Wrapping her leather gloves around the frame, she prepared to pull herself up when a silver hand shot out of the opening and grabbed at her wrist.
    Fay fell backward and screamed. She shrieked even louder when she saw the face that peered out the window.
    Although it was the size of a human and had two arms, its bulbous silver head was twice as large as a man’s, framing two circular black eyes and a wide slit where the mouth should have been. The grotesque face lacked any nose. She screamed again when the creature