Not Alone

by Falconer, Craig A.

  “What do you think?” Dan asked as soon as they were gone.

  Clark closed the drawer he had been about to search. “Every door was locked from the inside,” he said. “So either Walker left through his bedroom window, or someone came in through it.”

  “Why would he leave through a window?”

  “Exactly. But a professional would have spotted the cameras and taken the footage, so I dunno.”

  “Either way,” Dan said, “we can’t let Ben go, right? In case he finds Walker and tells him we know. Like you said… right?”

  “Right. Not until we know for sure what’s going on with Walker. We’ll bring Ben back to ours, have a look at the footage, and take it from there.”

  After six or seven minutes spent searching through drawers and cupboards, Clark called time.

  Emma was waiting for them at the front door.

  “Is Ben still loading stuff?” Clark asked, a hint of concern in his voice.

  Emma’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean where the hell is Ben?”

  “He left.”

  “He what?”

  Emma looked between Dan’s eyes and Clark’s, as though she was missing something. “He took the computer and the phone and the dog,” she said, “and then he left. Just like you said.”

  “We were bringing him back with us,” Clark said. “Fuck. Why did you let him go?”

  “Because that was the plan! Was I supposed to guess that you changed it?”

  “You’re supposed to not fucking let him leave, is what you’re supposed to do,” Clark shouted.

  Dan closed his eyes. Just as it had on the only other occasion when Emma and Clark had seriously clashed — when Clark first got home from Iraq — the intensity of their argument brought forth vivid memories of his parents fighting. It was almost uncanny to see and hear how many of Henry’s mannerisms and speech patterns Clark took on when he started arguing.

  “Who do you think he’s going to tell, anyway?” Emma asked, slightly less aggressively.

  “Walker,” Dan said before Clark could say the same thing. “If he finds Walker, he’ll tell him we know. And then we become Walker’s problem.”

  Emma shook her head. “You’re overthinking it. Even if Walker left on his own, and even if Ben finds him, they know we’re not going to talk just like we know they’re not going to talk. There’s no upside. For anyone.”

  Neither Dan nor Clark said anything.

  “Look,” Emma continued, “I can’t pretend to be in control of this or even to know what’s going on. But there are only two possibilities: either someone took Walker because they already know — in which case Ben doesn’t matter — or, more likely, Walker decided to go somewhere else for some totally mundane reason.”

  “You really think he would have left through the window?” Dan asked.

  Emma shrugged. She reached into her pocket and lifted out the camera console’s memory card. “One way to find out.”

  D plus 38

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  Shortly after 3am, Emma inserted Richard Walker’s memory card into the camera console in Dan’s kitchen. She opened menus and performed gestures on the touch screen too quickly for Dan or Clark to see what she was doing, but within a few seconds they were all looking at a simple message:

  “Three flagged incidents (low sensitivity). Review now?”

  Emma pressed yes. At the next pop-up, she chose “Most Recent.”

  The first incident that played on the screen began as Clark’s car arrived. With low sensitivity selected, the system considered their whole visit one distinct incident. Richard’s primary camera was mounted to a tree facing his house. Clark’s headlights illuminated the house, flagging the beginning of an incident.

  Instead of rewatching what they’d just done, Emma skipped to the second incident. This incident, from around thirty minutes after the launch disaster, showed Ben Gold arriving in his car. They watched as Ben desperately knocked on doors and windows, exactly as he’d told them.

  Emma’s finger hovered over the “Proceed” option.

  “What do we want this to show?” Dan asked.

  After several seconds of thoughtful silence, Emma answered: “Walker coming out on his own and leaving in another car, long before the launch disaster.”

  Clark nodded. This would still mean Walker was out there somewhere, but he couldn’t think of a better scenario.

  “Press it,” Dan said.

  Emma did.

  As usual, the footage began just before the sudden change which the system flagged as an incident.

  “Shit,” Emma said.

  “What?” Clark asked. As far as he could see, nothing had happened yet; the dim light of the moon barely illuminated the house.

  “Look at the time-stamp.”

  Clark looked. So did Dan. They both saw that this incident occurred just twenty minutes before Ben’s arrival.

  “That was the time of the launch,” Dan said. “Give or take a few minutes.”

  “What does that mean?” Clark asked.

  Emma shushed him. Dan shrugged. They all watched to see what happened next.

  After ten seconds of footage, the entire screen turned white. It was a sudden and brilliant white, provoking their eyes to blink. Only the time-stamp overlaid in the bottom corner remained visible during the seven-second flash.

  “Some kind of interference?” Emma said.

  “Maybe,” Clark said. “What kind of light source would fill the whole screen evenly like that?”

  No one knew.

  The time in the corner continued to tick.

  “Is there sound?” Dan asked.

  Emma rolled the volume wheel on the side of the console from minimum to maximum. Immediately, the sound of frenzied birds rang out.

  “Go back,” Clark said. “We might have missed a gunshot.”

  Before Emma could rewind, the flood of white disappeared. With Richard’s field-facing motion-activated floodlight having been triggered by the swarm of fleeing birds, the house was now clearly visible.

  After another ten seconds, the incident ended.

  Emma navigated through the console’s menus and began playing the footage where the incident left off. Knowing the time of the incident made this straightforward, even if nothing else was.

  Hundreds of birds continued to protest loudly at whatever had startled them. When nothing else happened, Emma switched to the next camera and skipped back to the start of the incident.

  This second camera faced outwards from Richard’s kitchen at the back of the house. Again, very little was visible in the moonlight. And then, as had been the case with the first camera, the entire feed turned white for seven seconds. They listened carefully for a gunshot or any other noise. None came. The flash brought with it an immediate cacophony of frenzied chirping. When the all-white interference faded, the area outside the kitchen was now visible courtesy of the floodlight. But other than more birds fleeing the scene and tree branches swaying in the breeze, there was nothing to see.

  Emma moved on to the third camera. No one had to say anything; they all knew that the two remaining feeds were from the cameras inside Richard’s house.

  The first internal camera was mounted above Richard’s kitchen door, facing the hallway. This was good, Dan knew, because the feed showed every other internal door. Whoever came or went, they would see.

  The feed began with Rooster sleeping against Richard’s bedroom door.

  “It better not flash white,” Clark said.

  Seconds later, it did.

  Though there were no voices under the blanket of absolute white, whatever caused the flash — if something so persistent could be called a flash — also prompted Rooster to begin barking manically. He sounded more aggressive than scared at first, but when the flash faded he was jumping up at the front door in a desperate effort to escape.

  “Okay,” Emma said. “I’m officially f
reaked out.”

  Clark stood with his hand covering his mouth, his fingers scratching an itch that wasn’t there.

  Dan’s eyes were glued to the camera console. “Last one. If we don’t see Walker, we have to run through more incidents on high sensitivity. Maybe he left last night when there was no moonlight and it was too dark to trigger an incident on low?”

  “Maybe,” Emma said, “but something’s still happening here. Something is still causing the feeds to go white and something is upsetting the animals.”

  Dan pointed to the console, encouraging her to tap the screen. As soon as she did, everyone leaned closer.

  “Holy shit! There he is.”

  Sure enough, the fourth and final camera showed Richard Walker asleep in his bed. The camera was mounted inside his bedroom, above the door. The red numbers on a digital alarm clock beside the bed provided the only light, but it was enough. Richard’s loud snoring played through the camera console’s speakers.

  “He’s going to be gone when the flash stops,” Clark said. “Something’s going to happen and we won’t see shit.”

  “We’ll hear it,” Emma said.

  Clark couldn’t argue with that. He paid close attention.

  Richard’s snoring stopped when the flash obscured the feed. Rooster’s barking immediately filled the silence. But then another sound began; as best as Dan could have described it, it sounded like a much softer version of the old 56k modem noise.

  The noise ended when the flash ended.

  Richard Walker’s bedroom door was still closed.

  His bedroom window was still closed.

  His bed, however, was empty.

  “Told you,” Clark said.

  Emma and Dan stared silently at the screen.

  “Fucked if I know what it means, but I told you.”

  “Seven seconds,” Emma said, shaking her head incredulously. “What the hell happened? How would it even be possible for him to leave that quickly, never mind for someone to take him?”

  Clark shrugged. “Someone must have messed with the feeds.” Like Emma, he knew no more now than he had before viewing the footage. They both turned to Dan after a few seconds of fruitless thought.

  “I dunno,” he said, as though he had been accused of something.

  “What are you smiling at?” Clark asked him.

  “I’m not. I’m just tired.”

  Clark’s eyes narrowed. “Seriously, what are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” Dan insisted. “I just need a few hours of sleep. Wake me if you find anything else in the footage.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be here, too,” Emma said. She then moved towards Dan and gave him a very one-sided hug. “None of this was your fault,” she whispered in his ear. “The whole leak… it was an honest mistake.”

  “I’m fine,” Dan replied. “But thanks.”

  Dan heard Emma’s worried whisper to Clark as he walked away — “Will he be okay? I can’t even imagine how he must feel…” — but he managed to ignore it. Safely out of their sight, he felt a return of the confused but hopeful smile that Clark had noticed moments earlier.

  He then climbed onto his bed, opened his tablet’s browser, and typed three words into the search bar:

  “Alien camera interference.”

  WEDNESDAY

  D plus 39

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  Dan yawned himself awake after a longer than expected sleep. His tablet’s screen told him it was 08:43.

  Not yet fully awake, Dan rolled over and grabbed the tablet to check the latest news. The top story, which Dan knew nothing about, was Ding Ziyang’s speech from the DS-1 launch site. Apparently irked by speculation that Chinese engineers were to blame for the accident, Ding explicitly blamed the explosion on “an unclear external factor.”

  In mild defiance of William Godfrey's guidelines, Ding point-blank insisted that the accident was not a result of human error. No invited reporters were foolish enough to push for questions, so this was all the news networks had to run with. Inevitably, fears of hostile alien intervention soon filled the void.

  William Godfrey had since tried to downplay Ding Ziyang’s comments, telling the public there was no reason for alarm. Godfrey walked a fine line, keen to calm growing fears over alien hostility but loath to step on Chinese toes with any overt insinuation that the failure was the result of a terrestrial technical oversight.

  The next article concerned the economy, discussing the strict withdrawal limits American savers would face throughout the day as their government sought to avoid the kind of turmoil that a full-scale bank run had already caused on the other side of the Atlantic.

  Dan sat up. He reached for the notebook on his bedside table, in which he had scribbled some findings from his late-night research into alien camera interference. Several high-profile “abductees” claimed to have attempted to record their frequent experiences but failed due to inexplicable technical hitches.

  None of the cases Dan found mentioned a white flash or a successful sound recording, but he still couldn’t see a better explanation for the footage from Richard Walker’s bedroom. Clark and Emma would never believe him, but he couldn’t shift the thought. Like Emma said herself, how else could Walker have left or been taken silently and without a trace in just seven seconds?

  Dan walked over to the calendar on his wall — Earth From Space — and drew a big red X through the previous day’s square. He had been doing this since finding out when his dad would be home from hospital. Amid a whirlwind of chaos and confusion, performing this simple routine act calmed Dan’s mind.

  Four more days.

  A moment later, Dan heard an odd noise coming from the other side of his door. It wasn’t a frightening noise, but it was out of place. He opened his bedroom door and saw that the source of the noise was exactly what he thought: a dog.

  And not just any dog…

  Rooster.

  “Is Ben here?” Dan asked. Emma and Clark — and no one else — sat in the living room, each clutching several sheets of paper. A metallic blue box lay open on the coffee table.

  “Hello?” he said. “What the hell is going on?”

  Emma and Clark shared a brief look, as though deciding who should speak. Clark took it upon himself to deliver the news. “Dan…” he said, his voice breaking.

  “Yeah?”

  “Ben’s dead.”

  D plus 40

  Drive-In

  Birchwood, Colorado

  Maria Janzyck stood in her old spot at the old drive-in having been redeployed to Birchwood by ACN overnight in the wake of the DS-1 disaster.

  Now, a full hour after the first reports came through, her bosses had finally given her the go-ahead to deliver the breaking news.

  “This just in,” Maria announced. “A body has been found in the staff parking lot of the IDA building in nearby Colorado Springs. Unofficial comments from responding officers suggest that the death was a suicide, and the deceased has been informally identified as Ben Gold. Stay tuned to ACN for more on this extraordinary developing story.”

  D plus 41

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  “Suicide?” Dan asked, praying for a yes.

  Clark nodded.

  “Definitely?”

  “According to the police who found his body,” Emma replied. “They said he used a homemade exit bag.”

  “So how come we have all this stuff? And the dog?”

  “Ben left everything in the shed,” Clark said. “He was gone before we even knew he was here. Emma heard Rooster barking when she opened the back door an hour ago.”

  “And none of this is your fault,” Emma said, striving to make that clear before Dan blamed himself. “Ben got himself into this and he took himself out of it. That’s on him.”

  Dan thought for a few seconds. Though he didn’t much like himself for it, the dominant thoughts in his mind were posi
tive. After all, Ben hadn’t just gotten himself into this whole mess; he had gotten Dan into it. And as uncomfortable as Dan was with the idea of protecting a lie, he could at least breathe easily knowing that the elimination of Ben Gold — the only other person likely to crack — meant that control was back in his hands.

  “Fuck him,” Clark said. “He made his bed.”

  Dan found himself quietly agreeing with Clark’s harsh appraisal of the situation until something dawned on him. “Wait. He was in our car a few hours before he died. That means his clothes will have bits of our skin and hair all over them.”

  “It won’t come to that,” Emma said. “But if it does, which it won’t, we’ll say he came here to apologise for not spotting Walker’s cover-up then said he was going away.”

  More than her words, Emma’s relaxed tone convinced Dan that he was worrying too much. His full attention then turned to the suitcase-sized box on the coffee table. “What’s in it?” he asked.

  “These are declassified interrogation transcripts from the two real U-boats,” Clark said, holding up the stapled-together sheets he had been scanning through. “U-530 and U-977. There are police reports about other sightings, too. I guess the highlighted parts are what they used to make up the story about the third U-boat.”

  Emma held out the sheets she was holding. “These are the two alternative Kloster letters he mentioned last night. Same stupid handwriting, same paper, same seals on the envelopes. I don’t know what they say, but I can make out some of the words: Walker, Kerguelen, Toplitz… pretty much what you’d expect.”

  Dan walked over to examine the box. Stacked neatly beside it, he saw several gold bars. Golden rather than gold, in fact; they were as fake as everything else. He quickly browsed the remaining contents of the box. There were several folders identical to the Kerguelen folder but for their labels. Dan saw the Slater folder Ben had dropped face-up on the street. He looked inside. It was empty. So were the others, whose labels were blank.