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road,” He called.
    When Xin opened the door, Pete was leaning into the mini-fridge. He turned to face her with two miniature bottles of whiskey in his hand.
    “I’m willing to bet this is going to be serious, so do you fancy a drink to settle our nerves?” He asked.
    “I think I better had,” she told him. “At the moment, I feel like it could all get to be too much for me before its even begun.”
    Pete didn’t question her. He knew she would tell him in due course. Instead, he took two glass tumblers and emptied one tiny bottle into each. When he turned, Xin had sat herself down on the end of the bed. She had her eyes shut and was massaging her temples.
    “Here, try this. It’ll help,” He smiled at her as she looked up and took the glass.
    She took a gulp and screwed her face up at it, but she followed it with another mouthful regardless.
    “Ok, well I guess I should explain why I’ve been acting like a crazy woman,” She began. “Although, given what I’m about to say, you may not believe me.”
    “Right now, to be honest, I’d probably believe you if you told me it was zombies,” He chuckled. Xin looked up at him, straight faced and wide eyed, and took another swig of whiskey. “Oh jeez, you’re going to tell me its zombies aren’t you?”
    “Well, at the moment ‘zombie’ is probably as good a word as any to describe them, but I don’t know enough to tell you exactly what they are...” When Xin looked up, he realised that his jaw had dropped and quickly composed himself. He pulled a small plastic chair over and sat down heavily.
    “Wow,” Was all he could say. Usually he would have asked if this was some kind of joke, but it was evident from her face that it wasn’t.
    “Just so you know, I’m not an agent.” She looked up and Pete nodded at her to continue. “I’m a microbiologist. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean that I have all the answers to explain as much as you’ll probably want to know. To put it bluntly, all I know is that there have been some ongoing investigations into alien life forms at the Area 51 military base. Something’s gone seriously wrong with some of the experiments though, and there was a security failure...” She was beginning to just let the words come pouring out and Pete was still trying to digest the ‘zombies’ part when Area 51 and aliens were thrown into the mix.
    “Wait, aliens are real too?” He questioned.
    “Yes,” Xin confirmed.
    He watched Xin drain her glass and swallowed a mouthful of his own.
    “Okay, go on then I’m listening.”
    “Well, back in the sixties speculation was growing about the goings on around here. A lot of the sightings and such were actually due to CIA activity, but I’m sure you’ve heard the conspiracy theories about aliens crash landing and the government taking them off to Area 51 and so on.” She looked at him questioningly.
    “Sure, like the ‘alien autopsy’ video that surfaced in the nineties,” Pete nodded.
    “Yes, exactly. Only this wasn’t a hoax. The cover up was good enough, in so far as nothing more ever came of it, and people stopped going on about it. But it’s out there now and some people don’t fall for the lies.”
    “So, is it all true then? The crash in New Mexico was real?” Pete asked.
    “Parts of it are. Roswell was a landing site, but it wasn’t a crash. The spacecraft wasn’t destroyed until after an armed unit had blown it up. The alien wasn’t dead when they found it either. Although, I heard they tried pretty hard to change that.”
    “So, aliens land and they...whoever I mean by they, send the army out to attack? Had it attacked anyone?” Pete was taking the news much better than Xin had expected. If he could manage to still be asking logical questions now, she was pretty sure he could cope with the rest.
    “Not as far as I know, but the powers that be don’t always stick to the protocols you would expect of them.”
    “Okay, so you said they tried to kill it.