Contact

by Johnny B. Truant

  If Terrence hadn’t made them a new connection despite the way Dan seemed sure that he could, maybe that meant the ships had returned to Vail and killed more than just Vincent.

  A fourth night passed.

  Then a fifth.

  On the morning of the sixth day following Dan’s call — the seventh or eighth total since they’d left the others behind (maybe to die), Cameron stopped his horse at the top of a slowly rising hill made of red rock. The last days had been warmer, and they’d made them mostly without cover, nothing but empty blue sky above. Utah was different from Colorado. Mountains had given way to craggy rocks, sculpted, wind-eroded outcroppings that looked like precariously balanced art. Piper hadn’t liked traveling in the open, but there was no other way. They’d been a cowboy and a cowgirl on the range, with nothing stretching from one horizon to the next.

  But for the past two hours they’d been following a valley. It reminded Piper uncomfortably of the ravine in which they’d evaded and then hid from the Andreus Republic, only far deeper, far steeper, and with walls of red stone rather than soil. They’d been following a road, but it looked seldom used and forgotten, more clay than pavement. It seemed the middle of nowhere to Piper, as they followed the canyon’s meanderings. But Cameron seemed to know where he was going, and by the time he stopped, she knew they must be near — even as out in the middle of nowhere as she felt.

  “This is it,” he said.

  Piper looked around. There was nothing but dust, road, canyon walls, and what seemed to be a dried-up riverbed. The sky above, visible as a strip between the walls, was pure blue.

  “Nice place.”

  “Okay, not literally. It’s around that bend.” Cameron pointed, but the canyon curved ahead, and Piper saw nothing.

  “Then let’s go. And please tell me they have food. I’m sick of beans.”

  Cameron paused. “Just … just remember why we’re here, okay? To find Meyer. To find a way to get him back.”

  “Of course.”

  He looked at his horse but didn’t urge her forward.

  “Cameron, what is it?”

  “The people here. They’re professionals. They know things. Just keep that in mind.”

  “Cameron, what?”

  He said nothing. Just sighed again then nudged the horse with his heel to get her moving.

  As they neared the bend, Piper realized that the path was rising, moving them slowly out of the canyon. It wound up and around, the walls shorter with each passing step.

  The lab Cameron had told her about entered their view. It was the strangest building she’d ever seen. By the time Piper could fully see it, the canyon walls had shortened to the height of a two-story building, maybe one and a half. Set into the wall directly in front of them was a brick facade with a door in the middle, as if someone had walled off the front of a cave and built the lab right inside it.

  But the lab’s appearance wasn’t what stole Piper’s breath: It was the mothership hovering in the newly revealed sky.

  “They think he’s in there, Piper,” Cameron said, nodding at the mammoth sphere floating above the cliff. “The people here? They believe Meyer’s inside that ship.”

  THREE MONTHS LATER

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Piper woke, lying on her side, a soft pillow under her head. One arm was beneath her, sticking straight out. The warm arm draped over her other side, however, wasn’t hers.

  She rolled back and met Cameron’s gaze. He was already awake.

  “I had a dream,” she said.

  “Was it about racial equality in the 1960s?”

  She rolled fully to face him. “No.”

  Something in her expression must have registered. Cameron sat up and propped himself on one elbow.

  “About Meyer?”

  No, it hadn’t been about Meyer. She wished he hadn’t said it — and wished even more that she’d just told him the dream’s contents rather than making him play this guessing game. She was split exactly down the middle on the topic of Meyer. When they’d arrived at the Moab ranch three months ago, Meyer had been all she’d wanted to discuss. She’d pestered Cameron’s father unceasingly, asking question after question, pursuing avenues that Benjamin had already traveled but that Piper’s desperation forced him to revisit anew. When Benjamin grew exhausted, she’d pestered his right-hand man, Charlie. He was less patient than Benjamin; he’d told her to sit down and let the professionals do their work.

  But after those first six weeks in Utah — five weeks longer, at the time, than she’d been told they’d stay — the idea of Meyer had begun to feel like the concept of God. She still believed both were out there somewhere but not in any reachable way — and the impression of Meyer’s distance had only increased in the time since. Eventually, she’d stopped denying her feelings for Cameron, and his for her. But despite her justifications, Piper felt plenty guilty when her mind turned to her missing husband.

  “It was a dream about Lila,” she said.

  “What about Lila? Was it an ordinary dream, or … ”

  A voice in Piper’s head ran atop Cameron’s words: (dream prescient vision prophecy)

  “ … or something else?”

  “I don’t know. But I can … ”

  (hear you see you feel you)

  Piper didn’t finish her sentence. She didn’t have to. Cameron nodded.

  “Can you, too?” Piper didn’t need to explain what that meant either.

  (can you hear me too)

  “I’ve had dreams,” he said.

  “Just dreams?”

  “It’s hard to say. Lila … in your dream. Was she … was she okay?”

  Piper closed her eyes, trying to chase the vision as it fled her awareness. But it was already gone, like water swirling down a drain. She spent an extra few seconds trying to recall the dream, knowing it was pointless. She could remember the mood, but none of its contents. Ominous and tense. Not exactly a big help, considering the way she’d been fretting over Lila’s well-being — all of their well-beings, actually, but Lila’s most of all, since the signal’s death three long months ago.

  How’s Lila? How’s she doing, with her baby and all?

  Tell Piper that —

  She’d filled in that particular blank thousands of times. She’d spun on a chair in Benjamin’s office, hoping to puzzle out what Dan was in the middle of relaying when the radio died. She’d sat on the deck of the old ranch house on the lab’s property that she and Cameron had taken as their own and considered it. Doors to the cliff-bunkered lab and the ranch house nearby were always double locked at night, but she’d contemplated going out into the dark to walk and think.

  “I don’t know if she was okay. And I don’t know if it was a … vision or whatever. I just know I had a dream.”

  Cameron sat up, already pulling on a shirt.

  “We should tell Charlie.”

  Piper rolled her eyes. “I don’t want to tell Charlie. He makes me feel guilty for everything. And I do mean everything. The other day, I walked over to the lab with my coffee, and I said, ‘Good morning, Charlie.’ He looked at me with those bug eyes of his and said, ‘Good morning?’ I almost apologized.”

  “It’s just how he is. How he’s always been.” Cameron laughed. “He’s been my dad’s research partner since before there was really any research. You know how most people show off their vacation photos? Dad would show Charlie photos from the vacations Benjamin and I took together, and he’d bustle off to analyze them. You should have seen the way he descended on King Pacal’s sarcophagus.”

  “King Pacal?”

  “Mayan king of Palenque, famous carving on his sarcophagus showing him in a space capsule?” Cameron shook it away like Piper might shake away a pleasant memory of walking the beach with her mother. “Not relevant. You don’t want to tell Charlie, we tell Benjamin. But Dad’s just going to turn around and ask Charlie. And you know it’ll be worse if you don’t say anything and he finds out later.”

  Mornin
g light was already clearing cobwebs from Piper’s mind. In the seconds after she’d woken, the dream’s meaning had seemed full blown and urgent. Now it felt gossamer thin, like a belief in fairies. The day would be warm, and the ranch had almost no shade from the desert sun except for the few hours it touched the ship’s shadow. The house had bare-bones utilities. They’d only find AC across the red clay in the lab building. But here in bed, it felt warm and pleasant. Hard to believe this place was one of North America’s most feared.

  “I changed my mind. It was just a dream. Really.”

  Cameron dragged on his pants and ran hands through his messy dark-brown hair.

  “Come on. Let’s go.”

  “I want to stay in bed.”

  But then a whispered voice inside her mind:

  (It’s all beginning)

  Piper blinked then sat up. She didn’t remember details of the dream and no longer could be positive that Lila had been in it. She’d been afraid for Lila quite a while during the radio blackout. Anything could have happened to her family in Vail, but for some reason, Lila — for Piper, at least — felt like the center. She didn’t worry about Trevor as much as she worried about his sister. They might all be dead. Maybe even likely, given the last things Dan had said about the killer alien shuttle. But she’d been living under a mothership for a while now and was still alive, somewhat used to its only sometimes-ominous presence. She no longer sprinted and looked up when crossing from house to lab. Maybe that’s how it was in Vail.

  But that phrase. She remembered that phrase: It’s all beginning. Not that it was an unusual phrase; you could say it before the start of a movie. But something about the whisper and Lila set gooseflesh on the back of Piper’s neck.

  She looked at Cameron.

  “Cam.”

  He looked over.

  “Do you remember the story your father told me yesterday, about the first time you played guitar?”

  Cameron nodded.

  “I’ve been trying to remember the name of the company on the pick he showed me yesterday. Your first guitar pick, that he’d saved.”

  “Oh. Gibson.”

  “You weren’t around when he told me that story. And Ben said you didn’t know he’d saved that pick.”

  “I just … ” Cameron’s brow furrowed, as if trying to remember something, looking unsure.

  “I can hear your thoughts again too. Like I could after we first crossed that line of stones.”

  “He must have told me.” Cameron chewed on his bottom lip. “And I’ve always played Gibsons, always.”

  She shook her head, now seeing the pieces fall into place. “What Charlie told us might happen?” Piper swallowed. “I think it’s starting.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  “Mom.”

  Heather looked up, seeming totally normal. This, more than anything, bothered Lila once she stepped back enough to see it. By her old standards, she didn’t look “normal” at all. By pre-invasion standards, Lila’s mother looked ragged, tired, baggy-eyed, haggard, old. She’d always tried to look casual onstage, doing her shows in T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers as if she didn’t give a shit. But Lila had been in the dressing room to witness the careful orchestration of that casual look. Heather Hawthorne came off as a woman who paid no mind to trends or beauty, but was plenty vain in her way and never wanted to look or seem old. Especially after Dad had married Piper, who was a decade and a half younger.

  “What?”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “Is it about Raj? Because I don’t want to hear about Raj.”

  Lila would have rolled her eyes in the old days, but now that felt like too much of an on-the-nose teenager thing to do. She no longer felt like a teenager and hadn’t for a while. Lila felt approximately a billion years old. The six-month-old fetus in her belly that seemed to be streaming unwanted thoughts into her consciousness wasn’t helping.

  “No. It’s not about Raj.”

  “Good.” Something seemed to strike her. “But oh. There’s one exception. If he ever stops wanting to have sex with you just because you’re — ”

  “Mom, gross.”

  “I agree. There are so many less-gross men around. But you chose him.”

  “No, I mean — ” Lila stopped, and this time she did roll her eyes. The simple motion felt shockingly good. Like stretching after a long time in one position. There was something so ordinary about mother-daughter baiting. Ordinary felt good. As awful as it sounded, mocking Raj with her mother was the most comforting thing Lila did these days because it was so predictable. The kind of thing that had happened before living underground like a mole person, before getting knocked up with a spooky baby, before her father had been abducted by aliens.

  And before Christopher. That was its own nest of poisonous snakes.

  An alarm screamed from the front room. Lila’s heart took its customary leap, but then Terrence was running through the living room, past the open bedroom door, shouting, “Air vent, just an air vent!”

  Lila relaxed.

  “There was a day when I didn’t live like this,” Heather said, looking at the ceiling.

  Lila could sympathize. There had been better days for her, too. Days when she wasn’t scared two out of every three waking hours. Days when she hadn’t feared for her sanity. Days when she hadn’t been keeping at least two hideous secrets. Days when love had been simple, and she hadn’t felt blackmailed by her affection. Days when she hadn’t been splitting her time between two boys, enjoying her time with neither.

  “I … I have to tell you something,” Lila said, ignoring her.

  “Is it about Raj’s throbbing curry stick or his sticky mustard seed?”

  “Oh my God, Mom. Can you just be serious for a minute?”

  No. Of course she couldn’t be.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, looking put-out. “I’ll be good.”

  “Because you’re the only one I can talk to.” Lila eyed her mother seriously, knowing it was a risk to lay herself bare at the foot of Heather Hawthorne’s mockery.

  But who else was there? Piper was gone. She was betraying Raj and couldn’t meet his eyes for long (which is why they usually made love with him behind; she said it was more comfortable with her belly, but secretly she couldn’t face him). Christopher had once seemed like a good substitute boyfriend — maybe even a replacement — but somehow she’d ended up feeling more manipulated than loved.

  “Fine. Okay. I’m sorry. I’ll be good. What’s up?”

  Good question. She’d come in here to talk to her mother about the baby. But even in her mind, that sounded crazy.

  Heather surprised her. “Is it about your dad?”

  She blinked. No, that hadn’t been on her mind at all. For long periods of time, Lila forgot the life in which she’d once had a father. Like she forgot a life in which the idea of going outside didn’t fill her with terror. Even three months ago, when she’d wanted to go topside for air, seemed a lifetime away. Now she was trapped. Going up top sounded horrifying. Staying here was awful and claustrophobic. There was no way to win, every day held its own unique agony.

  “Why would you think I wanted to talk about Dad?”

  “Oh. No reason.”

  “Mom?”

  “No reason,” she repeated. “I just … there’s not a lot to think about down here.” She forced a laugh, but to Lila, it sounded like insanity. And these days, she knew what insanity sounded like just fine. And she knew what it looked like in the mirror. “It was either that or Raj’s spicy meat stick.”

  “Mom. Please.”

  Heather sighed.

  “Okay. Fine.” Another sigh. “I guess your dad’s been on my mind.”

  The idea that Lila’s mother was pining for her father? Surprising. Her parents had remained somewhat acrimonious friends, but clearly they’d remained lovers. Still, the idea that there remained genuine affection between them — especially from her mother’s side — was so strange as to be unnerving. But really
, it was sweet. And now that Lila’s attention was shifting to match Heather’s, it felt nostalgic, too. An old memory of her hand in her father’s, a sense that all would be well because he was there to protect her.

  “Do you think he’ll come back?”

  There was a tiny moment where Lila thought she might make a joke, but then it skittered by, and Heather answered honestly. Vulnerably.

  “I don’t know. And you’ve heard what Dan and Terrence say about the people who’ve come home.”

  “Those were the early people. If Dad is still with the … the aliens … ”

  “ … then he’ll be worse? More out of his mind, more on edge, more frightening to us, like the other people who came back and frightened their families?” She closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t say that. I guess I’ve never been very good at the mom stuff.”

  The ventilation alarm had ceased in the living room — surely caused by more hippies blocking intakes. Lila was already used to the sound, seeing as it went off so often and Terrence couldn’t figure a way to permanently disarm it.

  She sat on the bed beside her mother, almost sitting on her feet.

  “Sometimes,” Lila said slowly, watching her mother to survey her response, “I dream about Dad.”

  “Me too,” her mother said.

  Still watching Heather’s face. “The dreams I have are really weird.”

  “Weird how?”

  “Like … he’s almost talking to me.”

  Her mother was nodding slowly. “Hmm.”

  “You ever have dreams like that?”

  Heather watched Lila’s eyes. It felt like a standoff. Each knew something, but neither was willing to expose their mind first. Lila had felt for a while that her mother was sensing some of the same things as her. Or rather, a sense of very, very strong intuition coming from the neighborhood of her uterus.

  “Maybe. But dreams are always kind of funny.”