Crying and coughing, she began the long trek upward on the narrow circular escape stair. As she trudged along, pacing herself to avoid exhaustion, she wracked her brain to understand how a grass fire next door had spread to the facility. Sparks must have somehow entered the ground-level air intake and started a conflagration in the air-conditioning system.
Three-quarters of the way to the top, she dragged her cell phone out of her pocket, but it was still out of range. She continued on, reaching the surface so winded that she had to stop and catch her breath before she could even manage to open the door that led into the foyer.
She felt it, noted that it wasn’t hot. She cracked it, looked out into the foyer. There were two firemen standing there. Above her head, thuds indicated that another man was on the stairs to the offices.
There was a rumbling from below and smoke came bursting up the stairwell. In an instant, it was fiercely hot, her eyes were burning, and she was choking again, even worse than before.
She had no choice but to act. She could not stay here. Again she opened the door. The intensity of the smoke increased at once. Behind her, the heat rose. Opening the door turned the stairwell into a flue.
The next instant, the door flew out of her hand and the firemen dragged her out, slamming it shut as soon as she was safe.
“Are you conscious?”
“Yes!”
“Okay, dizzy?”
“No, sir. My chest is burning.”
“Is there anybody else down there?”
She wanted to say yes, she wanted them to try to rescue Adam. That could not be allowed, though. These men had no clearances. These men could not enter the facility.
She fumbled in her jeans, drew out her credentials. “That facility is classified,” she gasped. “There’s nobody else in it and it cannot be entered without authorization.”
“This is a fire situation, lady. We’re gonna go in there.”
“No! It’s illegal!” She struggled to her feet, went for her cell phone again. “I’m calling my supervisor.” She punched in the colonel’s speed dial . . . and got his message. “Colonel, there’s a fire here, we’re dealing with a lot of unauthorized personnel and I need somebody here to control this situation!” She hung up.
At that moment, Andy appeared. He came hurrying in and threw his arms around her. Then he held her at arm’s length. “My God, you’re burned, you have no eyebrows.”
The foyer door burst open and fire gushed out with the ferocity of water from a burst main. They got out of there, and the firemen began deploying hose.
“It’s totally out of control,” she said to Andy.
“Where is he?”
“I couldn’t manage to save him.”
“Dear God.”
“They mustn’t find remains. We can’t let them find remains.”
“I know it.”
Her cell rang. “It’s him,” she said. “Colonel, there’s a fire in progress here.”
Silence. Then, very calmly, “What happened?”
“There was a grass fire next door. When I heard sirens, I came over here from my place. The fire didn’t appear to be serious, but I felt that I should be with Adam, so I went down. A few minutes later, the whole facility filled with smoke and fire. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What’s Adam’s status?”
“He’s still down there!”
“Is he dead, then?”
“I would assume so.”
More silence. Then a sound that Lauren thought might be a cry, but it was so loud and so close to the phone that it broke up into a series of shattering electronic noises. Then she could hear him taking breaths. He said, finally, “Okay. You cannot let those people down there. Anything could be going on, this is outside the envelope.”
“Sir, I can’t stop them, they’re ignoring my credentials.”
“I’m gonna blow somebody’s brains out if this doesn’t get handled,” he said, but so mildly that it didn’t seem like the threat she knew that it was.
“Sir, where are you? Can you get here soon?”
“I’m an hour out in my plane, damnit! YOU handle it, Colonel.” He sneered the word. Then he disconnected.
“He is one pissed-off guy,” she muttered.
“Oh, yeah, he would be. You know what we lost here? We lost the most important thing this country possesses, that’s what we lost. And that man is the person who has to take the heat for it. So he is gonna be pissed.”
Mike couldn’t pace in the plane, the cabin was too confined, so he sat rubbing the arms of his seat. He had to report this, he had to do it immediately. He said into the intercom, “I need the code box.” This small, highly sophisticated device transmitted and received in quantum-encoded bursts that could not be decrypted by intruders.
The first officer brought it back from the equipment bay behind his station, then returned to the flight deck. Mike turned off the intercom, then glanced at the flight-deck door to make certain that it was closed.
He pulled out the red handset and punched in Charles Gunn’s secure number. It rang once, part of a second time.
“Gunn.”
“Charles, I’m in condition two-one-zero-one. Do you understand?”
“GODDAMN YOU!”
“I’m in the plane, for God’s sake. It was Glass. Glass let a situation get away from her.”
“Glass. Glass doesn’t matter anymore. Glass is a liability and so are any other support personnel.”
“I realize that, Charles.”
“Well, act accordingly.”
Mike replaced the phone. He stared, thinking. The grays were not sitting still, they understood that there was a threat, and the direction it was coming from.
Okay, first things first. Do the support personnel. Andy was a good man and that would be hard, but Lauren—pretty as she was, he was going to enjoy putting her down.
The Goddamn bitch had lost ADAM!
FOURTEEN
DAN HAD COME HOME REEKING of booze, of all the incredible things, and gone in the living room and begun playing the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth over and over again at blasting volume. He lay there now in front of the stereo in the dark, splayed out on the floor like a great, gangling rag doll. She’d wanted to put her arms around him and mother him a little. His mother had been mostly indifferent to her little boy, and she felt that he needed the reassuring support of his woman right now.
She knew, of course, what had happened: Marcie Cotton had ditched his tenure. She was scared, too, she had to admit, because they could not remain here on just her salary. So what was going to happen to them was that they were going to fall off the academic cliff into the stew of little, tiny colleges and junior colleges and spend the rest of their lives scrimping and scraping.
She looked at the clock. Eight-twenty. She went into the living room, turned on a lamp.
“Please.”
“Dan, you’ve been in here for hours.”
“Please leave me be!”
“Dan, no.”
He did not respond.
She went on. “It’s about time for Conner to get home and I want you to come down out of the tree and face this together.” She had to bellow over the music. “Let’s turn that off, now.” She went to the stereo, flipped the switch. “Enough is enough.”
He rose off the floor, then went to the bar. “What’s in here? God.” He came up with an ancient bottle of crème de menthe, left over from some distant summer party when they’d poured it over ice cream. Earlier, she’d removed the rest of the booze to the garage.
“You already stink of bourbon. I hope you didn’t do this at the Peep?” The Peep Inn was the campus dive, where a professor most certainly did not need to get drunk.
“I did indeed. I consumed alcohol there, in the absurd hope that I could drink myself unconscious before the fall of night.”
“Dan, we’ll get by. Something good will happen.”
Staring at her as if she was insane, he slowl
y shook his head. Then he bared his teeth and rocked back in silent, agonized laughter.
“I got promised tenure by Marcie Cotton.”
She thrust her hands at him, connected with his chest. “Go on! You did not!”
He nodded.
“And you won’t be getting drunk again, so it’s forgiven. Now, Marcie told you? She actually told you this?”
He nodded.
“You’re going to get a yes on tenure! Oh. My. God.”
He stared at her, his eyes hollow, his lips hanging slightly open—an expression that said that this wasn’t the whole story.
“If I needed punishment, how would you go about it?”
What an extremely strange question. “Excuse me?”
“If I’d . . . done something wrong?”
“What have you done? You’ve gotten tenure, that’s hardly a matter for punishment. Is she sure?”
“Oh, yes.” He closed his eyes, shook his head.
She realized, then, that he was trying to say that he had done something with Marcie Cotton. Or no, it couldn’t be possible. You didn’t go to bed for tenure, not even in this sinkhole.
“Dan, are you telling me—what? I’m not getting it.”
“You’re getting it.”
“Damn you!”
The front door opened and Conner called, “I’m home, people,” and Dan said, “I’m so damn sorry, baby. I’m so damn sorry!”
Conner breezed in. “Hi, Mom, hi, Dad. I have just been at an amazing editing session. The Keltons have an awesome video and they’re bringing it over, and Paulie and his parents are coming, and there’s a chance that—” He stopped, looked from one of them to the other. “Hello?”
Katelyn drew breath, drew it hard, trying mightily to contain the rage, the hurt that shuddered through her.
“Mom?”
She went to him. “I want you to go downstairs for just a little while.”
“They got video of the UFO. Everybody’s coming over to watch it on the big-screen TV.”
She did not exactly want a convention just now, but obviously she couldn’t prevent it. “You go down, and we’ll make popcorn when they come.”
“You sound strange.”
She took him to the stairs and closed the door behind him. Then she went back to Dan, who was now slumped on the couch with his face in his hands. “You asshole,” she said quietly.
“Hit me.”
“Dan, I’m not physical. But what I would very much like is for you to go upstairs and gather your belongings and take them with you, and get the hell out of my house.” She curtsied. “If you would be so kind.”
“I don’t know what happened! I don’t know how to explain it.”
“You screwed her for your tenure.”
“I did no such thing!”
“And I find that grotesque. And equally grotesque that you confessed it. What happened to you, you’re not this drunk blubbering jerk I see here! I sure as hell didn’t marry him.”
“Look, I want to ask forgiveness.”
“It’s that easy, you get drunk and you cry and what happens, I kick you around and yell a little and this violation of your sacred trust is forgotten? And if you go to go creeping off to sleep with her in the forenoon from now on, then what do I do? Just bear everyone in this miserable fishbowl knowing my—what’s the word—shame, I suppose. My shame.”
“It left me . . . vulnerable. Somehow, it affected me.”
“What did?”
“That incident!”
“Something weird happens and therefore you go make love to Marcie Cotton?”
He shook his head, waved his hand at her. “I—it made me . . . want her. I don’t know why, but it did. I relate the two things.”
“What in hell are you saying?”
“I don’t know!”
“Dan, I’m an orphan to the violence in my family, and you to the neglect in yours and, Dan, nobody but another orphan can heal either of us, this is why we’re together. But you—you’ve taken something from us, and it is profound, Dan, because trust has a different meaning for people who suffered from betrayed childhoods.”
“It wasn’t over the tenure. It was—” He shook his head. “Oh, my love, it was like some demon flew in and sweated us with his fire. I think, being so tired, so surprised and relieved—I just suddenly found myself in her arms.”
“Don’t tell me about it! For God’s sake, Danny, have some mercy!”
He slumped yet deeper into the couch. He looked so tired, so sunken, nothing at all like the rippling, robust husband she adored. Had adored. He looked like somebody who’d fallen victim to a vampire, shadowy about the eyes, gray of skin.
Her stomach had grown tight and sour with fear, her own skin was so cold she shuddered. This had been her rock, this marriage, in its honesty and the richly sensual capsule of its love. But how could she let him touch her now? How could she bear it?
“Momma, what, exactly, is wrong?”
“Conner!”
“Because something is and I need to know.”
“Conner, please.”
He came into the room. “You two are fighting and I want to know why.”
Figures appeared on the deck, looming up out of the dark, flashlights bobbing.
Conner went to the door. “This is a chance for me. Don’t wreck this.”
Dan got up, started to kiss Katelyn on the cheek, wisely thought better of it, and greeted the Keltons.
“You need to see this, folks,” affable John said. “It really is genuinely odd.”
“It’s not what it seems,” Dan said. “It’s explainable, trust me.”
“Dad, it’s not,” Conner said. “That’s the whole point!”
Dan went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. Chris answered on the third ring. “Have I woken you up at nine-fifteen, old man?”
“We were out with the ’scope. It’s a good night for the Crab Nebula.”
“Speaking of nebulas, the Kelton clan has arrived with what’s probably a pretty nebulous video of that prank.”
“Prank?”
“The affair of the fiery balloon.”
“That could be historic footage.”
“How so?”
“You saw somebody in the field, buddy. And then you didn’t. I think that somebody was an alien.”
He had indeed seen somebody. It was also further support for the prank theory, but they could get to that later. “When you come, you might think about bringing some spirits. Mon femme has stripped our bar.” He hung up the phone, then returned to the living room where the crowd had surrounded the gigantic TV. “We gather round the campfire,” he said, “and see shapes in the sparks. And thus the mythologizing begins.” He sat down. “The Jeffers will be here directly.”
Paulie Warner burst in from the kitchen, followed by his parents and then Chris and Nancy. The energy in the room exploded as the two boys excitedly traded speculations. “It’s the grays,” Conner yelled, “they’re doing an operation right here at Bell!”
“Okay, Conner, sure,” Paulie said.
Terry said, “What we actually have is some unexplained video.”
“Edited,” Dan added. “Most carefully, I’m sure.”
“Not really,” John Kelton said, his voice sharp with annoyance. “It’s actually just pulled out of the camera. Not edited at all. There’s no reason to edit it.”
“We copied it onto a DVD,” Terry said as he dropped the gleaming disk into the player’s open tray. “Beyond that, you’re seeing what the camera saw.”
The player absorbed the disk. This was followed by blackness, then a couple of flashes.
“Fascinating,” Dan said.
“Just wait,” John snapped.
There was a sound of gasping, then crunching. “That’s us running,” Conner said.
“You were really there?”
“Conner was there,” Dan told Paulie.
Another flash, then a blur. Dan was beginning to think that this
might be pretty minimal when suddenly the screen filled with light. And with screaming—as terrible, as powerful, as it had been the moment it happened. Silence fell. Paulie sat close to Conner, Dan was pleased to notice. He heard his own voice shouting, then saw himself and Conner in the light of the thing.
“Conner, you were right there!” Paulie whispered.
It was the eeriest thing that Dan had ever seen. Two faint seams were present, one running the length of the object, the other around its center. Behind the thing, something seemed to be moving in the light, almost as if it was climbing out of an opening that was concealed by the object’s bulk.
“There’s your culprit,” Dan said. “Nancy, be prepared to ID a student who needs disciplining.”
The object rose a bit and seemed to shimmer.
The woman’s voice, which had been screaming and then silent, now cried out more clearly and a cold horror shot through Dan as powerfully and unexpectedly as a lightning bolt from a silent sky. “My God,” he said—whispered.
“What? What, Dan?” Conner was pulling at him.
“Don’t miss this,” Jimbo said.
In the flash of a single frame, the object disappeared leaving behind it the fleeting shot of a figure, barely visible in the dark. The figure seemed to turn, but it all happened so quickly that you could see little. There was silence, blackness. Dan heard his own voice say that he didn’t think they were alone.
“It is the grays,” Conner shouted, jumping to his feet. “I told you, Paulie, it’s the grays!”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Paulie said. “I gotta go to the john.” He headed out of the room.
Dan hardly heard them. His mind was reeling. Because Marcie had been involved, he had recognized her voice in that last scream. But what could it mean? Had she pulled the prank? Maybe she’d gone insane. It would fit with the bizarre seduction, maybe even vindicate him in Katelyn’s eyes . . . eventually. That was going to be one hell of a siege.
But then he thought, what if it wasn’t a prank? What if Chris and Conner were right, and some sort of genuine anomaly was unfolding? Perhaps he and Marcie had both been traumatized by it. Psychological trauma was well known to drive people to sexual activity. It even had a popular name: battlefield syndrome. He was confused and, frankly, afraid. He wished he hadn’t drunk all that booze at the Peep. He felt lousy, his head was pounding, and now he had this bizarre, impossible thing to consider.
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