The Grays

by Whitley Strieber

  “Captain, we gotta go in there,” one of the firemen said.

  “Don’t do it, Harry, that’s an order. You’re gonna see the walls go any minute.” He grabbed his bullhorn. “Okay, folks, back it up! Get those cars outa there!”

  CHARLES GUNN CALLED THE WHITE House. “Mr. President, I need that scalar pulse, sir. I don’t understand why it hasn’t gone in.”

  “I don’t want to do it, Charles.”

  Charles’s heart quietly skipped a beat. “Excuse me?”

  “Charles, I’m not going to pull the trigger on Americans just on your say-so. It’s not enough, Charles.”

  It was as if he was talking to a different man. “Mr. President, the whole future of mankind is riding on this.”

  “You didn’t tell me the truth, Charles. I know the kind of damage this is going to cause, and I’m just not going to do it. How dare you lie to me like that.”

  “Sir, I didn’t—”

  “You lied and you were willing to destroy the lives of millions and wreck the country! You’re gonna have to find another solution, Charles, this one’s too expensive, and I have to tell you, I’ve got a problem—a major problem, Charles—with your even recommending such a course of action. You don’t walk in here and do a thing like this, ask me to wreck my country and try to trick me into doing it.”

  Charles hung up the phone. He had to take a tremendous personal risk if he was going to cut false orders. There was plenty of precedent for it. Dean Bracewell had done it in back during the cold war when he’d moved elements of the Sixth Fleet from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea in violation of détente in order to pull an asset out of Roumania. The problem was, there was no real way to accomplish it without getting caught. Reagan had been furious at Bracewell, yelling at him, “The next time you try to start World War Three, mention it to me, first!”

  Given the magnitude of what Charles was going to do, there would be more than a White House tantrum. At the least, he’d go to jail for life. Maybe he’d even suffer the death penalty.

  So he’d get Henry Vorona to do it. It would be easier for him, anyway, given that he was active CIA. He’d tell Vorona that the president approved, but wanted the orders to flow this way.

  Problem solved.

  DRIVING TOWARD TOWN, KATELYN AND Dan had fallen into another silence. Despite Conner’s pleas, she was beginning to feel that Dan had just sort of slipped out of her soul. She should have found forgiveness for him, but she simply had not been able. Halfway to town, with the smoke now towering before them like a storm in the evening sky, Dan silently took her hand. She let him, but could not think why.

  IN THE WARNERS’ CAR, CONNER tried to keep the thoughts of others out of his head, but it was hard. He kept feeling like somebody else, also. One moment he was himself, the next he seemed to have a huge, complicated memory of things that had never happened to him, of flying in the stars, of being hideously lonely, of something that was terribly, terribly wrong. Except one thing was not wrong: he remembered Amy who was sitting right beside him, as if he’d known her for a thousand years. He remembered her in life and between lives, in the green rambles of death, planning this life together.

  He shuddered. How could he be thinking about things like this? He knew the secrets of the dead and the ages, knew them certainly. In a flash, he could see back huge distances in time, to bright inexplicable fortresses and death-serpents swarming ancient skies.

  And he could see the people around him, really see them, and it was wonderful and terrible, it was very terrible, because their secrets were as much a part of him as were his own.

  It was like spying on their souls, he decided, looking across the walls they had built around their soft central needs.

  “That is so awesome,” Paulie said, looking at the rising smoke.

  “Yeah,” Conner agreed. It was an act, though. To appear to be himself as he had been, he had to pretend.

  His memories of last night were foggy but he knew that something very incredible had happened.

  “Dad, can you step on it please?” Paulie asked.

  “We gotta watch the snow.”

  At least they weren’t all full of hate. They were thinking about the grain elevator. Mr. Warner was worried about not getting there in time for Paulie to take pictures. Mrs. Warner was making plans to keep the boys from going too close. She was telling herself that she’d yell at them if she had to. In Paulie’s mind there was nothing but smoke, fire, and eager excitement.

  Conner put his hands over his face and totally relaxed, blowing out a long breath. His bones seemed to tickle, and the feeling of the air on his skin changed. He had to learn to tune this stuff out. He’d messed up with Mom and Dad, shouting at them about their marriage secrets.

  He could hear their inner voices especially well, Dad’s perfectly. He knew that this was because of Dad’s implant, and he felt a question now: somebody—was it called the collective?—was asking him if he wanted others implanted. They would implant anybody he wished, and he would be able to hear their thoughts perfectly, no matter where they were.

  He shook it off. It hadn’t been a voice, but more thoughts entering his mind that were not his own, like smoke joining other smoke.

  He tuned in to Dad by simply wanting to hear him. There came a tremendous burden of woe, a river of Mom’s face and her skin, long streams of memories, such happy memories, of walking down Oak Road in the summertime, of moments in bed that he modestly turned away from, of a train trip they must have taken before he was born . . . and then this sad, sad thing that had happened with Marcie Cotton—

  —and he saw why: the grays had needed the family to stay here in Wilton, and they had made certain that Marcie would give Dad tenure. He saw the two of them whirling round and round in a dark place together, saw sparks of golden soul mingling, and understood what had happened.

  It made him angry at the grays, because they had hurt Marcie and Mom and Dad just to get what they wanted. You better understand that I’m calling my own shots now, he said in his mind.

  Instantly, there flashed before his eyes a vast wall of gray faces, eyes gleaming, arrayed in rows as far up and as far down as you could see.

  He cried out in surprise.

  “What’s the matter?” Paulie asked. “Scared?”

  “Nah.”

  As Mr. Warner, stuck behind a truck, slammed his hands against the steering wheel the color around him changed. The air flickered with red and then took on darkness, especially around his head. He hammered on the horn and flashed his lights.

  “John!”

  Purple light filled the car, gushing off both Paulie and Amy. Conner saw it coming out of himself, too, pulsing out of his chest with his heartbeat. He looked down at it and told it to go away, and as it did, so did the fear he had felt at Mr. Warner’s outburst.

  “Sorry, sorry, folks. That guy was intentionally hassling me, he—Jeez, it’s Len Cavendish, too. He must have gone nuts. I hope he can still unstop sewers.”

  Conner watched the familiar Cavendish Plumbing truck weave off down the road. Tim Cavendish had been in the passenger seat, and he had locked eyes with Conner, and Conner had heard a thought, kill, directed at him.

  He shook his head, trying to shake away the feeling of it, and the memory it had evoked of the awful time in the playground at recess.

  Since it was impossible to hear thoughts and see emotions, both of which he was doing, he decided that when he got home he would go online and learn everything he could about schizophrenia. If you’re schizophrenic, he thought to himself, you have to diagnose yourself and figure out a treatment protocol. If you need medical attention, you have to tell Mom and Dad.

  He would start at the New England Journal of Medicine and read all the recent monographs on childhood schizophrenia. Then he would go into the neutraceuticals literature. If there was a cure or a useful treatment, he would find it.

  As the sun dropped lower, the western sky turned dull orange behind the skeletons of tree
s.

  A car coming toward them suddenly sped up and smashed into the rear of the car in front of it. As they went on down the road, Conner could see the two drivers get out and start fighting like maniacs. There was a lot of black haze around the cars, the evil smoke of their rage.

  He had the strange, sickening feeling that it was somehow connected to him, as if the cars had been . . . after him. On their way to Oak Road.

  That must be part of the schizophrenia, a paranoid aspect. There were drugs that controlled schizophrenia itself, but not paranoia. Paranoid-schizophrenia was still difficult to manage.

  He had known for years that he might be susceptible to problems like this. He squirmed in his seat next to Paulie. He did not want to see his beautiful mind destroyed. He watched purple fear gushing out of his chest like a waterfall, and disappearing down through the floor of the car.

  He decided that he was definitely going around the bend.

  They got to the fire and Paulie practically threw him across the street getting out of the car. He was tremendously excited, racing toward a cluster of their friends, waving his new camera, and yelling.

  Conner noticed more of the black haze, and saw that Will Heckle was as black as night. Was he coated with smoke or something?

  Conner was afraid of Will. That was not right, that he would look like that. He stayed close to Paulie. “Awesome,” Paulie breathed, looking up at the massive structure with flames shooting out of it.

  It was a marvelous fire, but Conner really did not like the way Will and now Steve Stacy and another of the older kids were looking at him. A lot of people sounded crazy, their thoughts roaring like a maddened troop of chimpanzees screaming at each other in the zoo. He began to look around for his parents, to cast for his dad’s thoughts in the screaming turmoil around him. Dad he said in his mind. But, of course, Dad couldn’t hear him, that was just the schizophrenia talking.

  KATELYN HEARD A CRACKING SOUND a good deal louder than the fire. Then she saw, at the far end of the elevator, that somebody was down, and a cop, young Tory Wright, was standing over him. “That looks like Dr. Bendiner,” she said.

  “It is Dr. Bendiner. I wonder what in the world—”

  Tory Wright skullwhipped the old man with his nightstick, and Dr. Bendiner’s head flew from one side to the other with the blows.

  “My God, he’s going to kill that old man!” Katelyn yelled. She started to run toward them. The rest of the crowd totally ignored what was happening. Then two townies started fighting, and a fireman suddenly threw down his hose and stalked away, leaving it spraying like some mad snake, the brass head a lethal projectile.

  “What is going on here, Dan?”

  “We’ve gotta get Conner.” He looked around, but it was hard to see through the icy haze being generated by the spraying hoses. “Conner!”

  Katelyn saw Marcie about fifty feet away. She froze, not knowing if she should go to her or what she should do. Marcie looked at her. A slight smile trembled in her face, vulnerable, ashamed. She took a step forward.

  Katelyn did the same.

  “Katelyn, forgive me. I don’t know what happened. I can’t explain it and I’m deeply ashamed, Katelyn.”

  As the fire roared and the water thundered, the two women embraced.

  “Something happened, Marcie,” Katelyn said

  Sleet swept over them. “I know it, I had—oh, Katelyn, what’s going on? Something is not right!”

  Without warning, the hose the fireman had abandoned seemed to rear up before them like a cobra. Katelyn leaped away, but it smashed into Marcie’s face and slammed her to the ground.

  “My God, it hit her! Help her,” she screamed at the firemen. “Help her!”

  Dan saw she was badly hurt and ran to her, and found her jaw shattered and blood bubbling out of her mouth, and her eyes filmed and uncomprehending. “Marcie,” he cried, going down to her. “Help me, this woman is dying! She’s dying!”

  Katelyn saw a fireman staring . . . but not at Marcie. He looked off into the crowd, into the blowing ice haze. She looked around again for Conner, still did not see him. She ran to Dan. “Dan, we’ve got to help her!” But Dan heard something, he heard it in his left ear, as clearly as if a radio had been turned on there. It was Conner’s voice: Dad, I need you!

  The implant—he realized that it was there for Conner, to help Conner. He went to his feet. “She’s beyond help. Katelyn, Conner is calling us, I can hear him, it’s the implant, Katelyn. We’ve got to find him!”

  CONNER STOOD ABSOLUTELY STILL, STUNNED by what he was seeing. Kids, adults, a lot of people, were looking not at the fire but at him. They were stealthy but they were very definitely surrounding him. He could hear a sort of grumbling whisper, as if they had lost all humanity, and turned into snarling animals that had only one enemy on this earth . . .

  This was not making sense. It had seemed sort of understandable at school, but not here. Nobody should care. They were here to see the fire of the century, not to go after some kid. Turning slowly round and round, he watched them. Any moment, one or another of them was going to jump him. Kill, he heard, once or twice, but most of the thought was more primitive than words, it was an incoherent snarling, and every time he moved, it rose, got more sinister . . . and they came closer.

  AS CHARLES GUNN REACHED THE flight deck of TR-A4, the control surfaces flickered to life. Immediately, he turned on the plasma engine and watched the batteries charge. Because it was daylight, he’d need to use camouflage the whole way. He was going to Wilton himself. He wanted to be low and close, there just wasn’t any other way. Also, there was a possibility that he might be able to reach Mike using the ship’s super-secure sideband system that was capable of keeping TRs around the world in touch with each other, and was not accessible to outside tracking.

  Henry was working on the scalar weapon orders. He’d probably be able to start pulsing in about an hour—unless, of course, the president, who was by no means stupid, had taken steps to close the many back doors into the Pentagon’s operations system.

  “Charge,” the plane said in its soft female voice.

  “Deploy shield.”

  “Done.”

  He hit the button on his throat intercom. “How do I look?”

  “You’re ready to proceed, sir.”

  “Open the doors.”

  As he watched the monitor, the huge hangar doors opened. He would move out, then go straight up to minimize the number of people who would observe a very strange phenomenon—a gigantic triangular shadow, apparently cast by nothing. A close look would reveal the ship, but protocol required daylight takeoff to use full plasma and all fans to ascend to fourteen hundred feet immediately. At this altitude, the shadow would be too diffuse to be seen except from the air, and the air above Andrews was, because of this operation, at present entirely clear of aircraft.

  “Sir,” came a voice in his earphone, “return to the hangar, please, sir.”

  It was base ATC. What in the world were they doing interfering? “Excuse me?”

  “We have new orders, sir. TRs are grounded effective immediately.”

  The president had closed the operation down. Charles acted with characteristic speed and decision: he immediately took the TR up. Inside of thirty seconds, it was completely undetectable, not by radar, not visually, not in any way at all.

  Incredibly, his cell phone rang. For a moment, he was furious. Voices inside the TR were damped, but if Andrews had deployed its sonic scanners, they might pick up that ring. He fought it out of his pocket and opened it.

  “Charles, I’m being arrested,” Vorona’s voice said. “He’s pulling us in, all of us.”

  Charles thought fast. Then he saw, instantly, just how to contain this. “Henry, stay calm. Do you have the scalar’s codes?”

  “Yeah, but they’re busting in my door right now!”

  “Give me the codes.”

  “This isn’t a safe line, this is—”

  “Do it!”

&nb
sp; “Code of the day is B Bravo C Charlie Z Zero G Gremlin N, then one niner one in six three three eight nanosecond timed sequence.”

  The line disconnected. Okay, his next act was to activate sideband. He had the TR moving away from Andrews at its top speed of 320 mph. “Mike?”

  He waited. Nothing. He punched up the signal-seeking equipment. “This is TR-A4 for TR-A1. Mike?”

  There was a carrier out there, but Mike wasn’t answering. Maybe he wasn’t aboard the TR.

  Charles decided that he had to trust Mike to do his job. His first priority now was to save the Trust.

  A TR was richly endowed with communications. In fact, an entire subset of controls for the scalar weapons would turn on as soon as it was fully deployed. This way, a TR could stand in close and watch the effect of scalar pulses that it was triggering, and make fine adjustments in their strength and angle while remaining entirely unaffected by the earthquakes they were causing on the ground just a few feet below.

  Charles went into the plane’s operational manual and read as he flew, pressing buttons on a console.

  Far overhead, rocket servos on the scalar weapon began once more to fire as his commands redeployed it. He had no idea that the grays had sabotaged its previous deployment, but this didn’t matter because it would seek to its new coordinates from wherever it happened to be. As he worked, its long, black snout swept back across the blue of the ocean, back to the land. It stopped, then, and with tiny bursts of the servos, began to move about as if it was hunting for something.

  When a city appeared below it, the motion stopped.

  On the TR, Charles watched a screen. He pressed buttons, and the image became clearer. He zoomed again, and the image was clearer still: he had pointed the scalar weapon directly at Washington, D.C.

  He turned the plane on its axis and headed directly into the D.C. no-fly zone.