Contact

by Johnny B. Truant

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  Trevor was asleep, dreaming about bowling with Christopher in a non-apocalyptic world. Turns out that Christopher — in dreams anyway — liked the same kind of nachos as Trevor, like they made at the Brunswick Lanes alley, where they squirted that overly tangy sour cream that squeezed from the machine in a star. He and Christopher both had dates. Trevor’s was Piper. She kept sitting on his lap between frames. Christopher’s date was some blonde named Candace. She had a giant wart on her hand, and a large part of the dream seemed to center on Trevor’s indecision about whether or not to point the wart out to Christopher. But he was also on his way to a 300 game, so …

  “Trevor.”

  “Mmm.”

  “Trevor.”

  “Mmm!”

  His eyes came open. He rolled on the cot, annoyed at being yanked from the dream, and found himself staring up at his mother. Lila’s cot was empty. Heather was on her knees at the cot’s side, her hair a black bird’s nest.

  “What?”

  “You need to tell me — what have Christopher, Dan, and Terrence been talking about, for our ‘long-term plan’?”

  Trevor wondered if he was still dreaming. His head felt like it weighed ten thousand pounds, and here was Mom, asking him about planning. Was she tired of being a comedian, planning a change to goal-oriented motivational speaking if the aliens ever left Earth and let the planet get back to business? Long-term plan? In the dark, middle-of-the-night room, her words barely made sense.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean!”

  His mom seemed to realize her mistake — her voice too loud and tremulous in the quiet bunker, so she looked nervously side to side and smoothed her hair with one hand, the other playing with the neckline of her nightshirt as if it needed something to do. Her eyes were too wide, missing their usual insults. Without her caustic manner, she seemed like another person, soft like a crab with no shell. Trevor felt embarrassed, as if seeing her naked.

  Then, whispering a little, closer to her normal voice: “You’re one of the guys. You hang out with them all the time. They have a plan, right? We’ve been here six months. We can’t be planning to stay forever.” She laughed, and it sounded off-kilter. “God, we really can’t be planning that.” Eyes darting. “When they went up that one time. When they brought back video of the big rocks around the house. They were planning something then, weren’t they?”

  Trevor watched his mother, unsure. Dan and Terrence were sticking to their story: they’d gone up for recon and to plant something called “sonic whistles” among the tents to drive the topsiders away — devices that Trevor had never heard of and was pretty sure didn’t exist. Sonic whistles sounded like an overly convenient, artificially humane solution to the pressing need to clear space on the lawn so they could breathe below. They sounded like something people might make up to tell other folks who couldn’t handle harsh realities, like how parents told children their dead pets had gone to live on a farm.

  He’d told Christopher to stop bullshitting him, and Christopher had admitted they’d taken explosives. They’d only managed to plant one, and blowing it now would only hurt people and possibly enrage the alien ship that had killed Vincent.

  “They were going to plant sonic whistles. To scare those people away.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Trevor. This is important.”

  “I’m not … I’m telling you the truth, Mom.”

  “Could you find out? Could you find out what they were really doing?”

  “They weren’t doing anything, M — ”

  She shook him by his shoulders, her mouth twisting. “Stop it! This is important!”

  Her face returned to normal almost immediately, but for a moment she’d been transparent. Trevor had been worrying about his mom for a while as her habits and moods shifted and changed. This midnight encounter, with only a small, glowing night light to dispel the shadows, was only confirming the new oddity. They’d been down here too long. Trevor had found new friends and fared well, he thought, but Lila was moody and strange, Raj followed her like a servant or minion, and their mother had become … well … this.

  “Okay, okay. They were … don’t be mad.”

  “I won’t be mad. I promise.”

  “Christopher says they were going to use some of Dad’s stash to … well … level the house.”

  “His stash?”

  “Some of that military stuff. Bombs, pretty much.”

  “Bombs?”

  “Explosives? I saw a crate in there once when I was nosing around. The plastic stuff.”

  “Plastic explosive? He had plastic fucking — ”

  Trevor shrugged, now sitting up. “You know Dad. You saw the gas masks. And there’s Uzis in there too, all sorts of stuff.”

  It was really no big deal. Trevor was used to certain necessities of living in the New World. Vincent was dead, Morgan Matthews’s brains had stained the living room, and a bunch of people had been fried topside by the alien ships. They’d lived through a riot on the way to Vail and cleared a nest of bad guys from the house before getting inside. Things were different now.

  She took Trevor by the upper arms, her face serious.

  “This is very important, Trevor: how close is your sister with Christopher?”

  Trevor blinked. It was the last question he would have expected. The way Heather was now, he thought she’d been about to ask for a weapon to do something stupid — in which case it would be Trevor’s grim duty to rat her out to Terrence, who kept the arsenal’s key. But she’d turned on a dime, now asking about her daughter’s social life.

  “Christopher?”

  “They seem to hang out. Like the two of you do. Are they close?”

  Trevor knew more about that than he should, too. As much as he didn’t want to hear about his sister’s sex life, it did seem to be part of the bro code to swap tales about girlfriends, and Lila just so happened to be both. Trevor hadn’t told Christopher who he had the hots for, of course, and had instead openly pined for celebrities amid the guy talk. But he knew what Christopher and Lila had been up to behind Raj’s back. It made being around Raj uncomfortable. And honestly, it had also greatly changed Trevor’s opinion of Lila. She’d been nicer to Raj than ever since the botched topside mission, and they’d been together as much recently as they’d been before everything started. In Trevor’s opinion, Lila should break things off with Raj, or Christopher. But she’d been playing both. And according to Christopher, she was totally into him, and they did all sorts of dirty stuff when they could find a place and a time and somehow get away with it. Lila acted differently, but of course she would, considering all she had to hide.

  “I dunno. They get along.”

  “Do you think she could convince Christopher to do something crazy?”

  According to Christopher, he’d definitely nudged her into some crazy stuff.

  “Crazy like what?”

  “Like with the explosives!”

  Trevor cocked his head, not understanding.

  Heather ran a hand over her hair, looked around the quiet room and especially at Lila’s empty cot, then whispered to Trevor.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Sure.”

  “I need your help, Trev. You’re with me, right? Because you’re my boy.”

  “Of course.”

  “Your sister isn’t right, Trevor. She’s … ” His mother sighed then tapped the side of her head with a finger. “It’s not her fault. She’s pregnant, so she’s got the hormones. And living down here is stressing us all. Especially since … ” Her eyes trailed upward, and Trevor assumed she was imagining the ships. “Look. I have to tell you something.”

  “Okay.”

  “She thinks her baby is talking to her.”

  “She what?”

  Heather nodded, her eyes serious. “She told me. Lila says she’s been seeing and hearing things for almost the whole time we’ve been here. She says she knew about that Morgan gu
y before they all came. Didn’t know the others were against him, of course, but she knew about him. She’s told me a bunch of stuff she thinks happened with Piper and Cameron — ”

  “Are Piper and Cameron okay?” Trevor blurted.

  “She’s crazy, Trevor.” She patted his arm, dismissing the question. “Well, that’s not fair. She’s … troubled. And she’s my daughter, and I love her with all my heart. But something’s wrong, Trev, and we both need to keep that in mind. Can you do that?”

  “Um … sure.”

  “But I’m worried. Your sister seems sure that there’s something wrong with this place. With where we are now. It’s a ‘power source’ or something. But she’s convinced — and I do mean convinced — that the baby (which she says is ‘still hooked into the universal mind’; those were the words she used) is telling her to cut off that power source. To ‘plug the hole’ in some way. And I’m worried that if she has Christopher’s ear, and if there are explosives, that … ” She trailed off, but Trevor understood plenty.

  He didn’t know what to say about any of this. Lila had definitely acted moodier and more distant as her belly swelled. She was hooking up with two guys at once, for shit’s sake — inside a closed ecosystem populated by seven people total. That alone seemed suicidal.

  But explosives? Destroying the bunker? To Trevor, that seemed a bit much. For one, everything was locked down. Terrence had even jury-rigged the arsenal, much like the kitchen door, so nobody was getting in without permission — a sensible precaution, given how much nerves had thinned. And second, Trevor just didn’t think Lila was that far gone. She’d seemed depressed if anything. He’d found her bleak, not nuts. And while she’d admitted to hearing and imagining things, Trevor had a hell of a time believing that she could possibly think her baby was talking to her.

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine, Mom.”

  Heather watched Trevor for a wary second then grabbed his arm and dragged him out of the room. His feet fought for purchase, baffled at his mother’s freakish strength. She’d never been large and recently had looked downright sinewy. But still, Trevor took a few uncertain seconds to gather his balance, sure that if he fell, she’d simply drag him.

  They went through the living room, finding it empty. The bunker had fallen more somber since Vincent’s body stayed upstairs — not because he’d been the life of the party, but because the stakes were so suddenly real.

  Lila was nowhere to be seen. In with Raj or Christopher, the flip of a coin.

  She dragged him through the main room, toward the area housing the dead generator. It was a somewhat concealed door, obvious only from the short end of the large room. Trevor had mostly forgotten it, seeing as nothing in there — from generator to batteries — worked. If the wind turbine and solar panels went dead now, they’d be in the dark.

  She let him open the door then pulled a flashlight from a shelf and clicked it on. It wasn’t burned, so someone had placed it in here after the fire. The light speared a second, smaller door at the chamber’s far end that Trevor had never seen. His mother squeezed behind the generator to reach it.

  Trevor did the same. The living room door closed behind them, and all the little noises — the incidental clicks of electronics, Dan’s snoring, the tick of the bunker’s single manual clock — fell silent. He’d never realized the door was as thick as it was, and as soundproof — but then, with a generator that only seemed prudent.

  Once through the second door, Trevor heard a new sound: a trickling, like distant water.

  Heather trained the beam on the concrete floor. In the middle, a tiny pit had been chiseled with some sort of tool. At the bottom of the small funnel-shaped pit was a tiny black hole, as if the concrete excavation had finally punched all the way through. That, Trevor thought, was where the water sounds were coming from.

  The flashlight clicked off. In the blackness, Heather said, “Look down.”

  Trevor did. Now that the lights were off, he could see a tiny and extremely dim amber glow rising from the hole.

  He knelt. Listened. Then he put his eye near the hole — not against it; that felt somehow wrong — and tried to see what the glow was coming from. He caught a vague motion that might have been water before looking up.

  The flashlight clicked on.

  “There’s something down there,” she said. “And whatever it is, Lila seems to be convinced we need to destroy it.”

  Trevor stood, looking down, wiping at his face. How long must it have taken to chisel a hole in solid concrete? Even working behind two thick doors, it couldn’t be done in the middle of the day or you’d be seen. It would have taken nights and nights and nights of work. Work done in the quiet dark, slaving away a grain of rock at a time. The thought made him cold.

  “Lila did this all by herself?”

  She laughed. “Oh, no, honey. I did it.”

  Trevor met his mother’s eyes: pits of shadow in the gloom.

  “I had to. Because whatever’s down there, that’s what your father said we must protect.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  There was a knock on the door, despite the late hour.

  Cameron looked up to see Benjamin with Charlie behind him. “Yes?”

  “Piper here?”

  “She gets tired after sunset. She’s back at the house, probably asleep.”

  “You let her cross the lawn alone in the dark?”

  Cameron shrugged. They’d ridden horses 250 miles and slept in the woods for a week. A spooky Utah ranch had nothing on Piper.

  “She’ll be fine.”

  Benjamin entered the room Cameron had co-opted as his occasional office, pulled out a wooden chair, and sat on it backward in front of Cameron. Charlie stood like a coat rack.

  “Cam, for years, this was one of contemporary Earth’s most paranormally active spots. Probably a place of experimentation — the way someone out there kept tormenting that poor family, what with the animal mutilations and psychic phenomena. You know there was a time they went away for five minutes and came back to find their two prize bulls locked in a cattle trailer?”

  “Seems a good place for bulls.”

  “Not together. They’d just about torn each other apart. The door was so dented they had to pry it open, and the bulls damned near gored them sprinting out. Stuff like that happened all the time. It’s a mistake to be complacent.”

  “Piper is — ” He stopped then keyed on something else his father had said. “You don’t think it’s a place of experimentation anymore?”

  Charlie, still standing, said, “So it’s a coincidence that one of the motherships stopped exactly over our lab?”

  Benjamin looked up. “Hell, Charlie, sit down. You know I hate it when you fail to get social cues.”

  Charlie pulled out the room’s last chair and sat as if posing for an 1800s photograph.

  “Until the Verdine family agreed to sell the property, we were limited in how much we could know, based mostly on anecdotal reports and the investigations of — honestly — a lot of weirdos. And that’s coming from me.”

  He smiled, proving he wasn’t too good for self-effacement.

  “But once we were able to poke around,” he went on, “we realized what we’d already sort of expected was true.”

  “There’s a money pit here,” Charlie said.

  Cameron looked from one man to the other, not understanding.

  “In the 1700s,” Benjamin said, “some kids in Nova Scotia headed out to this little unoccupied spot in the middle of nowhere called Oak Island because they’d seen some mysterious green lights dancing around its shores. Once there, they discovered a curious indentation in the ground and began to dig, excavating what seemed to have caved in. They found a few things that were rather strange, like a mat made of coconut fiber, and I think we all know that was an odd find for Nova Scotia in the eighteenth century. But the pit itself was much more interesting: a giant layer cake, with oak planks made into platforms every ten feet. Between the platforms were f
lagstones, foreign to the island, just like the coconuts.”

  “Okay,” said Cameron, unsure what any of this had to do with Utah.

  “They only went down thirty feet after a lot of digging, but over the years other people got curious about the weird pit on Oak Island. People who threw a lot of money into that pit, hoping to dig deeper. Names like John Wayne and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Layering continued the deeper they dug, with these wood platforms every ten feet, down to at least two hundred feet.”

  “At least?”

  Charlie ticked his head toward Cameron. “Nobody’s made it to the bottom.”

  “Nobody?”

  Benjamin shrugged. “They’ve tried and tried. Six people have died over the years. Excavations have come from the top, drilled in from the sides. They’ve tried to drop cameras. Nothing works.”

  “It keeps flooding,” Charlie explained, picking up a marker from a dry-erase board and sketching a series of lines. “Someone built a rather ingenious hydraulic system under Oak Island to booby-trap what everyone assumes is some sort of a vault.”

  Charlie sketched a crudely oval shape to indicate the island as seen from above, drawing arrows at three points around its periphery.

  “At one point, treasure hunters poured red paint down the shaft and it came out from at least three vents around the island. It’s a puzzle box, and nobody knows where all of the canals and inflows are. They only know that every time someone tries to excavate, it floods and collapses.”

  “There are all sorts of theories as to what’s down there,” Benjamin said. “My favorites are crown jewels, the original works of Shakespeare, and — the granddaddy of them all — the Ark of the Covenant. I started having my doubts when, in just the past few years, more pits were discovered. Not at the ‘brain’ points I was showing you earlier, like Vail and Giza, but at places like Oak Island and … well … Moab, Utah, at the most haunted place in North America. Though sadly, nobody credits us with that title.” Again, he smiled.

  “What does this have to do with — ”

  “Nothing. You asked.” Cameron pointed at the ceiling. “But like Charlie was saying — at least I think it’s what he was saying; he’s such a complex personality … ” They both looked over at Charlie, his bug eyes staring at Benjamin from beneath what looked like an Amish haircut, his hands flat on his knees, his slacks pressed, and his shirt buttoned to the top. “ … we didn’t get lucky with this lab. We bought the property and built here because we assumed that when contact was made, the ships would come to places like this first. Places with ‘money pits.’”