The Sonderberg family doesn’t know it yet, but this isn’t going to be any ordinary road trip. A quiet drive down Interstate 40 becomes a trip into an alternate reality when they pick up an unassuming hitchhiker. It turns out the family has just given a ride to an alien who has the fate of the universe resting on her shoulders. Now the Sonderberg family must fight evil alongside their new alien friend in a desperate attempt to save the world they love.
Excerpts
From the book...
1
Desolation is magnified at seventy miles per hour. At that
speed, colors that are normally separate and distinct tend to blend
together like the test pattern on an old TV. Sharply defined objects
melt into one another, precluding identification, forestalling
recognition. Landscapes adopt the illusion of reality.
It's worse in the desert because there is so little to focus on. Those
creatures that don't hide usually spend the daylight hours sleeping.
For
most of the year the plant life is dressed in a blistered gray hue that
seems designed to confuse the eye. Nothing moves except the tormented
air that rises in waves from the frying-pan pavement in front of you.
In summer, when the thermometer in the Mojave creeps past the 110 mark
with threatening regularity, all activity ceases. Like the sidewinders
and the kangaroo rats, the desert's human inhabitants have gone to
ground by eight A.M., embracing the protection of dark buildings and
overstressed air conditioners.
Once you get out past Barstow, driving east, civilization vanishes for
hundreds of miles except for one tiny outpost called Baker. The map
will
insist you're still in the United States of America, but if not for the
nondescript ribbon of concrete known as Interstate 40 you might as well
be crossing the Gobi, or the Sahara, or the Namib. Brothers in
emptiness. Parts of the Great Southwest Desert are as deadly empty as
Arabia's Rub' al Khali.
If anything stands out it's the absence of black. Everything is painted
light or white. In the Mojave black is the color of fools; sometimes
dead ones. Now and again travelers convinced that living in the
twentieth century has endowed them with immunity break down out in the
desert. Travelers neglectful of water. Transient visitors who perish of
dehydration despite aerial surveillance and thermos bottles and
air-conditioning and CB radios.
Dull the desert can be, but it slays the thoughtless and carefree as
efficiently as any gilded Toledo blade. Indifference makes it no less
lethal.
* * *
The Sonderbergs had no thoughts of dying, though there were
times since they'd left Los Angeles when Frank thought of doing some
killing of his own, if only in the metaphorical sense. It was his own
fault and he knew it. Normally they flew to Las Vegas. He'd decided
they'd do it differently this time. Among the things that had inspired
this changeling journey was the fact that Wendy was now old enough to
appreciate the beauty of their unspoiled surroundings. That she had not
the slightest intention of doing so was no fault of his. He ought to
have known better.
Straightening slightly in the captain's chair enabled him to see her in
the rearview mirror. Sixteen and pretty, she was convulsing on the
couch
that folded out to make a bed. Her head snapped from side to side, her
torso twitched violently at the waist, and her feet massaged the floor.
Eyes shut in private rapture, she was moving to the electrified rhythm
of an unpronounceable group of heavy-metal leprechauns, delivered
exclusively to her ears via the tiny wire that connected earphones and
Walkman.
Though he would never have said so among peers, Frank didn't consider
his daughter's musical taste all that bad. It wasn't so very different
from what he'd been chastised for listening to when he was her age. But
it was one thing to appreciate, another to be addicted.
About the Author
Alan Dean Foster has written in a variety of genres, including hard
science fiction, fantasy, horror, detective, western, historical, and
contemporary fiction. He is the author of the Star Wars®
novel The Approaching Storm. He is also the author of numerous
nonfiction articles on film, science, and scuba diving, as well as the
novelizations of several films, including Star Wars, the first
three Alien films, and Alien Nation. His novel Cyber
Way won the Southwest Book Award for Fiction in 1990, the first
science fiction work to ever do so.
Foster's love of the faraway and exotic has led him to travel
extensively. He's lived in Tahiti and French Polynesia, traveled to
Europe, Asia, and throughout the Pacific, and has explored the back
roads of Tanzania and Kenya. He has rappeled into New Mexico's fabled
Lechugilla Cave, eaten panfried pirhana (lots of bones, tastes a lot
like trout) in Peru, white-water rafted the length of the Zambezi's
Batoka Gorge, and driven solo the length and breadth of Namibia.
Foster and his wife, JoAnn Oxley, reside in Prescott, Arizona, in a
house built of brick that was salvaged from a turn-of-the-century
miners' brothel. He is presently at work on several new novels and media
