2012 The War for Souls

by Whitley Strieber

  “Aliens, as per NASA?”

  “Not aliens, as from another planet. Given the distances involved, present thought leans more in the direction of UFOs being projections of some sort from parallel universe or universes. All right here, right around us. Now.”

  “Aw, come on! Mr. President, we don’t need this kind of speculation,” Samson said.

  The president exploded. “General, for God’s sakes, will you shut up!”

  Samson would not be silenced. “I think this man needs to be removed, he’s obstructing—”

  “You listen to him, Tom, god damn you!” The president roared.

  Samson’s mouth snapped shut.

  “Go on, Doctor,” Bo Waldo said softly.

  “Uh, the, uh—the Sumerians called them Annunaki, the Babylonians Akpallus, the Hebrews Nephilim—the list is long. Always, they were powerful, dominating people—somewhat human looking, but with a reptilian cast of eye—who came from another reality. Some were hostile, others more benevolent. Almost as if there were two warring factions, with different agendas for us. They fought among themselves, at one point, and then were no longer present here.”

  “And this relates to our situation?”

  “Maybe the reason that the end-of-world predictions in the old calendars are so exact is that there is something in the astrophysical situation that opens these gateways. Maybe that’s what the lenses are. If so, then we can expect that they’re the worst things it is possible to imagine.”

  Silence.

  He didn’t say it, but as he spoke the words, they just tasted right. He paused, then decided to take the plunge. “Um, I would therefore say that a machine has been turned on. I think, between now and December the twenty-first, we can expect them to become increasingly active, and on that day, to destroy human civilization. Attempt to.”

  The president stood up, went to the window. “Bo?”

  “Sir, we don’t have any information like that.”

  “Tom?”

  “This is—I can’t call it a fantasy, obviously. The things are there. But I think we need to wait a little longer. If we have to fight, we also need to know what to fight, and how.”

  “Al, I want to revise your orders. I want you to do the following. You execute a nuclear strike against the most isolated of these things—”

  Tom Samson leaped to his feet. “That’s out of the question!”

  “Tom, you already have your orders.”

  “Sir, not if I’m seeing this dangerous, impetuous tack you’re taking—no, sir, I will not!”

  “Al, will you execute?”

  “Sir, I’m a notch down in the chain.”

  “I want you people to understand something here. I am not hearing what I need to hear. And I’m not just going to be asking for resignations. In just another minute, I’m going to be carrying out arrests. Here. My Secret Service, your ass!” He glared straight at Tom, and Martin thought that he would not like to be in that man’s shoes.

  Al came to his feet. “Sir, I’ll get the strike going at once.”

  “And you’ll continue to fulfill your oath, Tom?”

  “As I understand it.”

  “‘I will faithfully execute lawful orders…’ That’s the part that’s relevant here.”

  “Sir, I will issue the alerts and the War Warning. But I urge you to address this other matter to the National Security Council and to Robbie. Don’t leave your Secretary of Defense in the dark. And for God’s sake, let the British and the French know—all the empires. Don’t surprise them, Sir.”

  “Nobody’s gonna be in the dark,” the president muttered. “Now, let me tell you something incredible. You know what I have to do right now? I have to go out into the Rose Garden and slap a smile on my kisser and pardon a goddamn turkey! Happy Thanksgiving.”

  He left the room, and Martin thought he would follow that man anywhere. He had completely revised his opinion of the president. He was smart, decisive, and a master of the art of managing powerful men like the ones in this room.

  They followed him out. Martin was left behind, completely forgotten. His role in this meeting would probably be lost to history, but he understood what he had done. If they were going to stop what was about to happen, immediate, decisive action was essential.

  It had been a year since NASA had made its announcement about UFOs, and he wondered, now, if that had been a good idea. If they were aliens from another planet, it appeared a harmless enough thing to say. But if parallel universes were involved, whether or not we believed they were real might have a lot to do with their ability to enter our world. The mind might play a part here, a very unsuspected part. Our belief might be essential to their ability to use their gateway, meaning that NASA could have unwittingly opened a door that had been closed by the wisdom of the past, then sealed with the sacred sites that had just been destroyed.

  He pulled out his cell phone. Would there be a signal in this place? Yes, good. He called Lindy. “I’m coming home, baby.”

  “I thought you were on a plane!”

  “I took a detour. A quite incredible detour.” He looked around, saw a man in the doorway, a Secret Service agent, apparently his minder. “Excuse me, I need to get to Kansas City,” he said.

  “National Airport. TAT and Braniff both go to K.C.”

  “Actually, I was brought here on an Air Force jet, and I thought—”

  The agent smiled. “Our job was to get you here. You’re here.”

  “And that’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Martin, what’s going on?” Lindy asked. “Who are you talking to?”

  “I’ll call you from the airport, let you know when I’m getting in.”

  He swallowed the terror that had been building in him. He just hoped to God he could make it home, that there was still time.

  TWO

  DECEMBER 6 THE LAST GOOD NIGHT OF WYLIE DALE

  WYLIE DALE TRIED TO STOP shaking, could not. He thought he might be more scared right now than he ever had been in his life. He was exhausted, his story had been running through his mind like some kind of out-of-control hallucination and he thought that it was not a story, it was real.

  This was because of the fact that he’d been unable to stop his hands from hitting the keys. He’d watched them like an outsider. No control.

  At least they were no longer moving. He glanced over at the clock. “Holy shit!”

  “What?” came Brooke’s sleepy voice from the bedroom.

  “I’ll be there in a sec.”

  Wiley had been in front of his laptop writing for an incredible sixteen hours. He knew what had been written, but not as if he had been the author. It wasn’t creation, it was transcription. He wasn’t creating a novel, he was writing a history and it was a very scary history and he was afraid it was real, and it wasn’t just a history, it was a warning.

  He turned on the little TV set that sat on the corner of his desk. He watched Fox News for a while, then went up to MSNBC, then back down to CNN.

  Just more of the usual bullshit, an actor gunned down by a posse of outraged fans, a combination hailstorm, tornado, and flood that seemed to have flattened every trailer park in Arkansas. The European empires were gone, and there was nothing about any weird lenses coming up out of the ground anywhere at all, and certainly not under the Great Pyramid.

  He flipped through what he’d written—and found over fifty pages.

  What the hell, you don’t write like this, nobody does.

  What in God’s name had happened to him? It’s hard to create fiction, it takes hours, sometimes, to get a single sentence out.

  His damn knuckles hurt from the pounding.

  He read more. If this wasn’t fiction, then what was it? There was no President Wade, there was only one moon in the sky, and there was certainly no czar.

  This was reality from a parallel universe, somehow bleeding over into a susceptible mind—his.

  The creatures he’d seen in his woods five years a
go—the subject of his notorious book Alien Days—had been scaly, and Martin had described the ancient biblical Nephilim as having a reptilian appearance. There was nothing like that in our Bible, but he’d certainly seen scaly faces, right here in these woods, not a quarter of a mile from here.

  Brooke slipped into the room and put her hand on his cheek. “Wiley, it’s time to come to bed.”

  The spell broke, and his body took over. It had been in this chair for a damn long time, and there was a bladder involved and the bladder had just come to its senses.

  He ran like hell.

  “Wiley?”

  He hit the john just in time and opened up. “Thank you, God.”

  She followed him in. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing, now!”

  “You’ve been in there since breakfast, do you realize that?”

  He finished his business, opened the medicine cabinet, and drank a couple of slugs of Mylanta. Chased it with Pepto Bismol. “Nectar of the gods,” he said.

  “It’s late, it’s time to go to bed.” She caressed him from behind.

  “I need a breath of air. I’m gonna take a walk.”

  “The book is making you crazy.”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, it is, and I’m not ready to go through that again, Wiley. That alien book, that was enough for one lifetime.”

  She referred, of course, to the hated Alien Days. He hated it, too, for that matter. It wasn’t fun, being a laughingstock. “The book I’m writing is not about aliens.”

  “I know you, Wylie Dale, it’s about something weird or you wouldn’t be so crazed. No more saucer crap, that’s bedrock, boy!”

  “It isn’t about aliens, and neither was the other book. I only thought it was.”

  “Alien Days was about a writer being very crazy in public. Embarrassment, that’s what it was about.”

  “There are no aliens.”

  “At last, he faces the truth.”

  “What’s happening is much stranger than the arrival of aliens from another planet. And this book, it’s—wow—it’s possessing me.”

  “You write fiction that you come to believe is real and in the process you drive this entire family crazy, and I’m sorry, no more.”

  “Brooke—”

  “No more! End of story! Books that possess you, that drive you nuts—no, I’m finished, I’ve had it!”

  “Mom? Dad?”

  Nicholas appeared, looking bleary and pissed off.

  “Wonderful,” Wiley said.

  Brooke said to their son, “Dad has a sour stomach.”

  “You’re fighting.”

  “I love your mom too much to fight with her. I just obey.” He made a steeple of his hands and bowed toward her.

  “Except you don’t, Daddy.” Now Kelsey had arrived, his gorgeous little girl. “He has cigars hidden in the woods.”

  “That is not true!”

  Brooke folded her arms. So did Kelsey. Brooke glared. “The aliens you go looking for in the woods, Wiley Dale? Would they be from Cuba?”

  “The cigars are Matt’s,” he said.

  “And he’s out there right now, isn’t he, smoking a Monte and sucking on a bottle of Beam, and that’s the real reason you want to take a walk—to make yourself sick on cigars and hootch.”

  “Cubans are the best cigars in the world.”

  “You’re coming to bed with me. And scoot, you two, the sandman’s gonna be furious.”

  “I’m past the sandman,” Nick said.

  “I’m not,” Kelsey told him. “I’m just a little girl, and I still believe.”

  “Meaning, don’t rain on your sister’s parade.”

  “No, Sir.”

  Wiley went into the bedroom and fished his flashlight out from under the bed where he kept it alongside his shotgun. “I need some space, hon. This thing I’m writing, it’s getting to me, for sure, and I agree with you, we need that not to happen. It’s about us and about people who live in another version of this house in a parallel universe. I think that’s what it’s about, anyway. I’m sort of more of a reader than a writer, here. Reading as my fingers write, as it were.”

  “About us in what sense?”

  “Well, like this conversation. This will be in the book. Because we’re part of the story, somehow. I’m not sure how, yet, but we’re part of it.”

  “Not our names again!”

  Uh-oh. He had to tread carefully here. “Well, uh…hm. The people in the parallel universe aren’t us. They have different names. They live in their version of this house and the town is called Harrow, too, but the people are not the same.”

  “I am so tired of this.”

  “Whoa, slow down. The parallel universe is obviously different. Their McDonald’s has emerald arches. Their Target target is blue. The president’s named James Hannah Wade and the family’s named Winters. We’re the Dales, if you hadn’t noticed. And here, McDonald’s has golden arches, obviously. Plus there is no British Empire, among numerous other things. They have two small moons rather than one large one.”

  “In the part of it that’s set in our universe, what are the characters’ names?”

  She knew him well and she was not dumb. Far from dumb. “Well, of course, I’m using ours—”

  “NO!”

  “Well, uh, it’s us. They’re us.”

  “My kids’ names will not be in another one of your books. You know what Nicholas said? He said you really are the most embarrassing father in the world, and he was right! Saying you were taken aboard a UFO was bad enough, but you included him! When he was all of seven years old. Wiley, where do you get off?”

  “The names are—are—like, they’re just place markers. After I’m done, I’ll change them.”

  “Because it’s an act of vanity to write novels about yourself!”

  “Brooke, goddamnit, that’s a betrayal. You know it happened.”

  “It hurt this family so much, honey. I just can’t go through it again. The kids can’t. Especially not your son. He is so brave but he suffers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The kids eat him alive! His dad got a rectal probe. You try living that down at the age of twelve.”

  “The laughter is the failure, not the book. It happened.” He paused. “It just wasn’t what I thought.” There came to him, then, a feeling—a sort of pull, really. To go back to the office, to sit down…

  But not after sixteen straight hours, he’d be in heart attack country. Stroke country.

  “Thing is, this book—I’m not its author, babes, I’m its prisoner.”

  “You will be responsible, Wylie Dale. You will be!”

  “All right, that’s it! I’m going walking. You’ll be asleep when I get back, God willing.”

  “If I smell the least trace of cigar smoke—”

  “Kelsey’s gotta have Indian blood, the way she follows me and I never see her. But neither one of us is an Indian, my dear, so how do you explain that?”

  “By the fact that you’re two hundred percent hot air and half baked.” She came to him. “Which are two of the many reasons that I’m so damn crazy about you.”

  She kissed him. He was furious at her, but he kissed her back, and she felt so vulnerable and so—so Brooke. He held her tight.

  Noisy though it was, this marriage was a good fit for Wiley Dale. He needed someone willing to come up the side of his head on occasion, and Brooke had no compunction about that. But he was not going to change any names in any part of the book, this one included. “You’re so nice,” he said.

  Little feet went scurrying away. Kelsey could be heard whispering, “We have a kiss. Gawd!”

  Wylie and Brooke managed to swallow their laughter.

  When he went downstairs, she sort of tried to stop him, but he promised to come back soon. He really did need that air. If he didn’t get away from that keyboard and let this thing die down, he’d be up all night.

  He left the house, glad to enter his f
amiliar woods beneath the familiar starry sky—and that good old moon up there, good old friend. It couldn’t be very romantic to have two moons.

  He sucked the air deep to rid his head of the fog that the writing had invoked. He shuddered. It was a mild night, but he felt cold in his blood.

  He had lived Martin’s sense of suffocation down under the pyramid, had cringed in anguish of terror with him as the blocks smashed down around him, had actually not known whether or not he was going to be annihilated.

  Creepy enough, but even creepier was the fact that he could still feel Martin’s presence. See him, sort of. He was down in Harrow, and things had gone very bad since his visit to the White House just—what was it—eleven or twelve days ago?

  He was down in Harrow and he was living in absolutely amazing terror, and Wylie knew that, as soon as he returned to his office, he was going to live that terror, too.

  Thing was, he could sort of see into the lenses, and what he saw there was another parallel earth, a third one, and it was bad news. Real bad.

  He couldn’t see it clearly, but he could feel that it was a fallen world, a real, living hell, and it was seeking to escape itself. He could sense its ravening hunger to escape the ruin it had made of itself.

  Amazingly enough, they’d done even worse than we had. “They’re old,” he muttered to himself, returning to one of the lines of thought that he’d been worrying for years. He thought he might now know the secret of the bizarre creatures he had encountered in these woods a few years back, that were the subject of Alien Days. They weren’t aliens at all. They were from here. But in their version of earth, the dinosaurs had never gone extinct. Instead, that dark reptilian brain had grown and evolved and changed until these sleek creatures had come about—tough, brilliant, and utterly heartless.

  Oh, God. God help the human beings.

  With our compassion and our softness of spirit, we were not going to be a match for brilliant reptiles, not in Martin’s universe or in this one.

  They were going to take it all. They really, really were.

  The woods were dead quiet, the early December night touched by just an edge of crispness. As always, he found himself moving along the old foresters path that crossed the top of the little draw where, five years ago almost to the day, he’d noticed that odd light.