Ground Zero rj-13

by F. Paul Wilson

  Goren hesitated.

  “You never know,” Jack added. “We might bring down whoever torched your place. Give you a chance to get right with the law.”

  Though Jack doubted very much that would happen, it wasn’t impossible.

  Goren finally nodded. “All right. Maybe somebody should know. But I gotta warn you: Some of what I’m going to say will be hard to swallow. You may think I’m crazy.”

  “Don’t count on it.”

  He turned to his daughter. “Wait for me down at the parking lot, Alice.”

  “I want to hear this too.”

  He shook his head. “It’s better if you don’t. I wasn’t supposed to see what I saw, and someone tried to kill me because I did. You’re safer not knowing. Go. Wait by the cycle.”

  She hesitated, then started to walk off. Jack didn’t like the thought of her hanging out alone down there. He pulled out his keys.

  “Here.” He tossed them to her. “Sit in my car.”

  She made a two-handed catch and stared at him with a confused expression. He understood. She’d tried to shoot him a moment ago, now he was offering his car.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Ain’t life screwy?”

  She entered the tunnel with a couple of backward glances. When she was out of sight, Goren pointed to the far side of the quarry.

  “Let’s talk over there.”

  They found a couple of neighboring boulders and seated themselves. High on a hillside far off to his right, he could see the famous Hollywood sign. And directly before him, a familiar cave mouth.

  “Ro-Man’s spot! And the place where the Blood Beast hid!”

  “Yes-yes.” Goren looked annoyed. “Christ, I thought you wanted to know what happened in the wreckage.”

  “I do. It’s just—”

  “Well then, let’s get to it. I want this over and done with so I can get back to Alice.”

  Jack sighed. So much film history . . . he’d have to let it go for now.

  “Okay. I know the basics. You were part of a team of four—”

  “Right. Alfieri, Lukach, and Ratner. Good guys, all of them.”

  “And I know that Lukach called up and said you heard voices. ‘Experts’ later wrote that off as some acoustical trick, but I’ve got a feeling you’re going to tell me different.”

  His expression was grim as he nodded. “Oh, yeah. Ohhhhh, yeah.”

  3

  “There!” Lukach said, his voice muffled by the half-face respirator. “I heard it again. Listen.”

  Ernie tried but couldn’t hear much past the roaring in his ears.

  What was wrong with him today? This was his fourth trip into the foundation of WTC-4 and he’d been fine the first three. But today . . .

  Sweat oozed from every pore, soaking his hair under the hard hat, darkening his shirt, fogging his goggles. His heart pounded like a wild animal against the cage of his chest. He felt shaky inside and out, and didn’t seem to be able to draw a full breath. He fought the urge to pull off the respirator mask. The dust down here could be toxic.

  Something else was toxic as well . . . something he couldn’t identify, couldn’t smell or touch, but he could sense it. It hadn’t been here yesterday, but sweet Jesus, it was here now.

  Or maybe it was because they’d never been this deep—seventy feet below street level now. Like the towers, WTC-4, the nine-story building that had squatted next to the south tower, had six underground levels. No one had wanted to trust the weight of the Trade Center to the sediment and landfill at the site, so they’d excavated down to bedrock for the foundation. That’s where Ernie and the crew were now—level one, the very bottom.

  He’d never had a panic attack, but he sure as hell felt panicky now.

  Why?

  It had started as soon as they’d reached this new search area. A little jittery at first, then building and building until . . .

  “It’s coming from over there,” Lukach said, pointing to a pile of rubble. “And—damn! Turn off your lights.”

  Alfieri and Ratner doused theirs along with Lukach, but Ernie left his on. He did not want to be in the dark down here. Not today.

  “Hey, Goren,” Lukach said. “You deaf? Put it out.”

  Ernie couldn’t tell them that, at age fifty-one, he was suddenly afraid of the dark, so he took a breath, held it, and hit the off switch.

  Lukach’s voice floated out of the blackness. “See? See what I’m talking about? There’s light on the other side of that mound.”

  Light? Any light would be welcome. Ernie squinted through his fogged goggles and saw it. Faint as could be, a dim, barely visible glow lit the upper edge of that pile.

  “Got to be another team,” Ratner said.

  “Yeah? Last I looked, that’s east of us, and we’re just about as far east as you can go in the foundation.”

  “Then who’s there?” Alfieri said.

  Lukach turned on his light. “Good question. Especially since there ain’t supposed to be any ‘there’ over there. Let’s go take a look.”

  No-no-no, Ernie thought. Let’s not. Let’s not go near there. Let’s turn around and get back up to clean, pure sunshine.

  But he couldn’t say that, because he couldn’t tell them why they shouldn’t go there. He didn’t know.

  “Maybe we should wait for backup,” he said, holding back as the others moved ahead.

  “ ‘Backup’?” Lukach said without turning. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

  Ernie forced himself to follow, but trailed a good dozen feet behind. When they reached the pile of crushed masonry and began to climb, he hung back, watching, waiting, trembling. He saw Lukach reach the top first and motion the others to join him. Ernie saw them pointing, heard them babbling but couldn’t understand what they were saying.

  Finally Ratner turned and waved him up.

  “C’mon, Ernie. Y’gotta see this. It’s some sort of tunnel.”

  Tunnel? Tunnel to where? The way he was feeling, it had to be a straight shot to Hell.

  Steeling himself, he made the climb. When he reached the top he saw what had excited them. Below, on the far side of the mound, near the floor, part of the foundation wall had fallen away, revealing an irregular opening, maybe half a dozen feet across. Light flickered from within.

  The fires of Hell. No, not Hell . . . something worse.

  What was he thinking? Where were these ideas coming from?

  He tried to shake them off but couldn’t . . . right now he wanted nothing more than to turn and run. But he was part of the team. He couldn’t leave these guys.

  “Let’s go,” Lukach said.

  “No-no-no!” Ernie said. “We should get backup!”

  “Fuck backup. I’m going down.”

  With Ratner and Alfieri on his heels, Lukach quickly descended the far side of the pile and picked his way to the opening. When he reached it, he stopped and stared, then stepped through, shouting, “Hey!”

  Ratner and Alfieri followed.

  Raised voices echoed from the opening, one of them unfamiliar. Had they found someone?

  Fighting the fear, he eased down the pile and crept to the opening. Every step was an effort. He felt as if he were struggling against a hurricane-force wind roaring through that opening. When he reached it he dropped to his knees and peeked around the corner.

  4

  “Next thing I saw was the ceiling of a hospital room.”

  Oh, hell, Jack thought.

  “That’s it?”

  “That was it then. The doctors told me I’d been spewing word salad—that’s what they called it—for days. Now I could talk and make sense but I couldn’t answer their questions about what happened down there. I had a hole in my memory running from the instant I leaned in to take a look to that moment in the hospital.

  “When they told me that the guys were dead, crushed in a cave-in, I cried. Later I figured that’s what I’d been afraid of. I sometimes get premonitions—little things, you know, like someone coming fo
r a visit—and maybe what I was feeling was one of those, but scary because it involved death.”

  “What did they think it was—shock-induced amnesia?”

  He nodded. “Something like that. They said I was in what they called ‘a fugue state’ when they found me.”

  Pissed, Jack rose from the uncomfortable boulder and brushed off the seat of his jeans as he paced about. This was looking like a major waste of time.

  “Well, if you can’t remember, that brings up the question of why someone would try to off a guy who had amnesia.”

  “Because my memories of that morning returned.”

  Jack stopped and looked at him. “Why the hell didn’t you say so?”

  “I’m saying so now. They sent me home on three head drugs that made me feel like crap, but I hung with them, hoping I’d get my memory back. I lived in East Meadow then. That’s a town on—”

  “Long Island. I know. Go on.”

  “Well, this detective from the city named Volkman kept coming around, asking me questions I couldn’t answer. He told me some people were saying an explosion had caused the cave-in that killed my buds and did I know anything about that, or had I seen any explosives, and so on.”

  Something wrong there.

  “He traveled all the way from Manhattan to chat with you?”

  “Yeah. Lots of times.” Goren shrugged. “Maybe he had nothing better to do, maybe he was trying to make a name for himself. whatever, I couldn’t help him. Until . . .”

  “Your memory came back.”

  “Right. Happened in a flash. Suddenly I found myself reliving the whole thing. I was back at Ground Zero, in WTC-four’s foundation, peeking around the edge of the hole. I was barely aware of Lukach, Ratner, and Alfieri standing about twenty feet away, talking to half a dozen workers wearing dark coveralls and respirators. I couldn’t pay any attention to them because my eyes became glued on this . . . thing.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “I don’t know. It was big, maybe a dozen or more feet long and, say, half that wide.”

  “Cylindrical?”

  “Could have been. Hard to tell under that tarp.”

  Jack had once seen an Opus Omega pillar with those dimensions . . . a concrete column . . . and it had contained the body of a woman he knew.

  “Was it upright, like a column?”

  “No. It was on its side on a dolly attached to a backhoe.”

  “A backhoe? How’d they get one down there?”

  “Through a tunnel. And I don’t mean a hole shoveled through the dirt. This was big and wide with an arched ceiling all done up in brickwork.”

  “A subway tunnel?”

  Goren nodded. “The only thing it could be.”

  “Well, the E train had a World Trade Center stop.”

  “But that was under building five.”

  “The PATH then?”

  “The PATH comes under the Hudson from the west. This tunnel was heading east.”

  Jack shook his head. He knew the subway system backward and forward.

  “There’s no other line down there.”

  “Right. And I didn’t see any rails in that tunnel, just a dirt floor.”

  “Then . . . ?”

  “I’ve done a lot of research since then. A number of subway lines were started down that end of the city and never completed. I think that was a branch of one of them, but I’ve never been able to find a record of it.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” Jack said, thinking of the disappearing Aswad.

  “But none of that mattered at the time. I don’t remember wondering about the tunnel, or the backhoe or much of anything else. All I could see was that . . . thing. My eyes were glued to it, I couldn’t look away . . . I felt this roaring in my ears, this buzzing in my head . . . my vision was fading in and out . . . I felt like all the energy was being sucked out of me.” He looked at Jack with a tortured expression. “I was sure, I mean I just knew I was dying.”

  “But you were wrong.”

  There I go, he thought. Master of the obvious.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know that then. I realize now that I was just passing out. But as everything was going black, I heard shouting. I looked over to where I’d seen my guys and saw them being clubbed to the ground with pry bars and such. That was the last thing I saw. After that I was out.”

  Jack wanted to know what happened next but didn’t bother asking. Goren couldn’t remember things he hadn’t seen. He resumed his pacing.

  Bizarre . . . bizarre . . . bizarre . . .

  “That thing under the tarp,” Goren said after a while. “It was an alien artifact, wasn’t it.”

  Jack looked at him. Goren was obviously a sensitive, and if his frame of reference was UFOs, it would be natural for him to think that. Jack knew the truth and had no doubt Goren had seen an Opus Omega column. But he didn’t have time to get into that. And besides, the guy wouldn’t believe him anyway.

  So he played dumb.

  “What makes you think I know?”

  “Just a suspicion.”

  “What makes you think aliens were involved?”

  “The way it affected me. The other guys didn’t notice a thing, but me . . . I sensed it right away. It was causing my panic attack.”

  Jack continued his impression of a psychiatrist. “Why do you think that was?”

  He looked away. “I’ve always suspected that I was abducted by aliens when I was a kid. I’m sure of it now.”

  “Oookaaay.”

  Goren’s head snapped around, his expression angry. “Go ahead. I’m used to it. But I was out camping with my folks when I was six. They woke up and I was gone. They found me a mile away, naked, turning circles till I threw up and passed out.”

  Using Occam’s razor, Jack could come up with a half dozen explanations off the top of his head, none of them involving space aliens.

  “Do you remember the aliens?”

  “Of course not. You never do. Or at least you’re not supposed to. But they either implanted something in me or added some of their own DNA to my system. whatever the case, something inside me, something they inserted in me, responded to whatever was under that tarp.”

  Jack knew it had been the Otherness he’d responded to, not aliens. But he wasn’t about to open that can of worms.

  “Can you remember anything else?”

  Goren shook his head.

  “Think,” Jack said. “Picture the scene. You’ve got your three friends, you’ve got half a dozen bad guys, you’ve got the . . . the artifact under the tarp . . . what else?”

  Goren squeezed his eyes shut. After a moment, he said, “As I picture the artifact, I can see someone standing in the background. They’d strung lights along one wall of the tunnel and he was as far back as anyone could be and still be visible.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “Just watching, I think. I remember him because he looked like he didn’t belong.”

  “Why not?”

  “He wasn’t dressed like the others. They were in dark clothing, he was in a much lighter color. The light wasn’t good, but he seemed to be in white.”

  Probably one of the Dormentalist bigwigs, possibly even Luther Brady himself overseeing the operation.

  “Anything else?”

  Another moment of deep concentration, then, “The guys were standing around a hole in the bedrock. It was five or six feet across. They must have pulled the artifact out of that.”

  No, Jack thought. They’d come to bury a pillar. Opus Omega was all about inserting them in specific locations.

  Goren shot to his feet. “Oh, Jesus! Do you think . . . ? I’ve heard talk about the government being involved in the Trade Center attack, but could they possibly have done it just so they could dig up an alien artifact?”

  The idea stunned Jack. Not because he believed Goren had seen government operatives digging up something. More likely he’d seen a group of Dormentalists preparing to bury another of their damned Op
us Omega columns.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Goren was saying in a hushed, awed tone. “All these years I’ve been thinking what monsters they were to collapse the tunnel on those guys. Now . . . I mean, the truth is so much worse. They brought down the towers and killed thousands just so they could get to that artifact. I’d heard Majestic-twelve was ruthless, but I never dreamed . . .”

  Majestic-12 . . . the UFO crowd’s name for the government’s secret, alien investigation unit. But Jack knew who was in charge of Opus Omega—the Dormentalist Church.

  Could it be? Could the Dormentalists have been behind 9/11?

  Jack hated to think so, but he’d seen what they were capable of, so it was possible. With their international membership, they had global reach. But could they have infiltrated al Qaeda? Could Wahid bin Aswad, Weezy’s Man Who Wasn’t There, be a Dormentalist?

  Goren said, “That would mean my own government killed Marilyn!”

  Where’d that come from?

  “Monroe?”

  “What? No, my wife.”

  “Tell me how that happened.”

  “Marilyn had gone to bed—she was a secretary at the high school and had to get up in the morning. Me, I couldn’t sleep so I went out for a walk. I got a coffee at the 7-Eleven and as I was on the way home it hit me like a ton of bricks. I mean, suddenly it was all back, everything I’d seen. I ran home and called Detective Volkman.”

  “The cop from Manhattan?”

  “Yes. He’d given me his cell number and said to call him any time day or night if I ever remembered anything. I didn’t know what else to do, so I called him.”

  Jack winced and shook his head. “Big mistake.”

  “I know that now, but I had no one else to turn to, and I had to tell somebody. I told him I’d got my memory back. He said to write it all down in case I forgot again and he’d be right over to take a statement. Ten minutes later four men busted in and knocked me down. They held a funny-smelling cloth over my face and that was it—I was gone.”

  Jack nodded. “And then they torched the place. You’d be found burnt to a crisp with no sign of injury or foul play.”

  “I guess so, but I woke up with the house burning around me. Maybe the drugs I was on interfered with whatever they doped me with, I don’t know. I got up and ran to the bedroom but it was like a furnace and I could see Marilyn in the bed, burnt.” He blinked, swallowed. “She never had a chance.”