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Not Alone

Page 64

by Falconer, Craig A.


  The dash-cam which had recorded the folder pickup was present, memory card and all, as was a hardback book on the Nazi expeditions which had inspired Kloster’s tallest of tales.

  The presence of this evidence in Dan’s own living room was salt in his wounds, but the Polaroid pictures of Kloster with the half-finished Kerguelen sphere pushed him over the edge. He collapsed onto the couch.

  “There’s something else,” Clark said, deciding there was no sense in comforting Dan now only for him to get upset all over again in a few minutes. “I put it in the kitchen. It was wrapped up with your name on it, so I didn’t open it.”

  It took all of Dan’s energy to stand up and traipse into the kitchen. Emma put her hand on his shoulder as he passed.

  On the table, he saw a parcel — roughly the size of a ream of copier paper — wrapped in thick brown paper. “DAN” was scribbled in black ink. He tore into the paper, keen to get it over with. With so much to come to terms with so quickly, Dan had forgotten what other evidence Ben told him about. Because of this, it came as a surprise when he threw the wrapping paper to the ground and saw two metallic plaques.

  These plaques were identical to their two world-famous analogues in all ways but one: they were completely blank.

  Ben had taped a small scrap of card to the top plaque. “Your call…” was all it said.

  “Holy shit,” Clark said when he realised what Dan was holding. “We could—”

  “Don’t even say it,” Dan cut him off.

  “Dan,” Emma said softly. “People are panicking because they believe a lie we spread. If it takes another lie to put things right…”

  “No.”

  “You know she’s right,” Clark said. “Sometimes one more lie can clean the rest up. We could figure out a way to engrave a new message that says the aliens are friendly or that they’ve already taken care of the asteroid. We can fix this.”

  “I said no. There’s no way.”

  “When the hell are you going to grow up and realise that some things are more important than how you feel?” Clark snapped.

  “No! No! No! It’s bad enough that you ask me to keep my mouth shut… but this? There’s not even a discussion. I will die before I do this. Seriously: if you two want to do this, I’m in your way.”

  Neither Clark nor Emma had a reply.

  Dan took the plaques into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

  * * *

  After half a day of self-imposed isolation, Dan returned to the living room with the plaques in his hands. He saw Clark sitting in the armchair.

  “Where’s Emma?”

  Clark turned away from the TV, which showed William Godfrey talking to a reporter above a “Tensions Grow In China” banner on Blitz News. “She took the dog outside,” he said.

  Dan sat down on the couch.

  “You don’t have to hold those plaques all day,” Clark said. “I’m not going to steal them.”

  “We have to destroy them,” Dan said.

  “Fine. If we’re not going to do anything with them, then you’re right; we can’t keep them lying around. Put them in the box. We’ll burn the paper and take care of the plaques tomorrow. Acid or something.”

  “Thanks.” Dan placed the two plaques inside the blue box.

  Clark muted the TV. “Thanks? Thanks? This isn’t a favour, Dan. This is me doing whatever it takes to get us out of a situation you got us into and won’t even talk about cleaning up. So save your fucking thanks.”

  Without so much as looking at Clark, Dan went into the kitchen, took two bottles of water, and returned to his bedroom.

  * * *

  Clark went to bed at 1am, more than forty hours since he last lay down.

  Emma fell asleep on the couch minutes later; though enough time had now passed since the launch disaster and Richard Walker’s sudden disappearance to assure her that anyone who wanted to silence them would have done so by now, she still wasn’t quite ready to spend a whole night in a house alone, however nearby.

  Rooster, who had taken a quick shine to Emma, curled up on the floor beside the couch.

  Emma woke up thirsty at 3:07. She rose to walk to the kitchen in the dark, brushing against Rooster’s tail as she went. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  As Emma turned toward the kitchen, she saw light escaping from under Dan’s bedroom door.

  “Are you still up?” she asked, quietly enough not to wake him if he wasn’t.

  He didn’t reply.

  Emma decided to walk closer and ask again. But when she neared Dan’s door, Rooster let out a sudden yelp.

  “It’s okay,” Emma reassured him. “It’s just Dan.” She leaned against the door and held the handle, ready to open it slightly and reach in to press the light switch.

  With no further provocation, Rooster began to bark like a dog possessed. He then dashed rapidly towards the front door, running straight into it several times in a row.

  The commotion roused Clark, who appeared at his bedroom door in a panic of his own. “What the hell’s wrong with the dog?”

  “I don’t know,” Emma said. “I was just asking Dan if he was awake because I saw his light was still on.”

  Clark looked at Emma’s hand on the doorknob. He looked at Rooster, going crazy to get as far away as he could. And then his mind turned to the events of 24 hours earlier, when the same dog had exhibited the same fear when Emma stood with her hand on a different door: Richard Walker’s.

  “Step away from the door,” Clark said quietly.

  Emma stepped away.

  Immediately, Rooster stopped barking.

  Emma and Clark both stared at the dog. Their eyes then slowly moved to Dan’s door, and finally to each other. Neither said anything for a few seconds. Amid the silence, Emma saw something in Clark’s expression that she had never seen before: fear.

  She had seen him upset plenty of times, helpless, even… but not scared; never scared. This amplified her own fears tenfold.

  Clark stepped away from his bedroom door and towards Dan’s. He stopped right beside Emma. “I’ll open it,” he said.

  She nodded and moved further back.

  Clark reached for the handle and pushed the door open quickly.

  As Rooster’s barking reached new heights, Clark turned towards Emma. His expression was more than scared now; it was petrified.

  Emma knew what Clark was going to say before he said it, but that didn’t make the words any easier to swallow:

  “He’s gone.”

  Part 8

  Discovery

  “Faith is to believe what you do not see;

  the reward of this faith

  is to see what you believe.”

  St Augustine

  D plus 42

  McCarthy Residence

  Birchwood, Colorado

  “Cameras,” Clark said, running into the kitchen. He handed the console to Emma. “Hurry up!”

  Emma navigated the console’s menus as quickly as she could and soon had the feed from Dan’s bedroom. It began ten seconds before the flagged incident.

  Clark saw the time-stamp: just over an hour ago. He watched the console’s screen more helplessly than he had ever watched anything in his life.

  He didn’t have to say what he feared might come next; Emma feared it, too.

  “Thank God,” Emma said as the recording showed Dan slowly getting out of bed. That he left of his own accord raised new questions over where he might have gone — not to mention why — but it was infinitely better than the unspoken alternative that the feed might have flashed white and returned with Dan’s bed inexplicably empty.

  Clark was halfway to the front door by the time Emma reacted. “Keep watching and see which way he went,” he called as he ran. “I’m going to tell Mr Byrd so he can help us look.”

  “Okay,” Emma replied.

  Seconds later, Clark shouted to let her know that the car was still there. This greatly limited how far Dan could have travelled, particularly
given the driving rain and gusting wind that had picked up in the last few hours.

  Clark knocked loudly on Mr Byrd’s front door. After ten seconds that felt more like ten minutes, he knocked again. “Come on! It’s Clark.”

  The porch light above Clark’s head lit up and the door opened. “Jesus,” Mr Byrd said. “Give me a chance, will you? What’s wrong?”

  “Dan’s gone.”

  Mr Byrd looked as though he had misheard.

  “We’re going to look for him. I need you to keep an eye on the house and call me if he comes back.”

  “Of course,” Mr Byrd said. “Do you want me to report him as missing?”

  “Not yet. I’ll do it if I can’t find him.”

  “Do you think he could be sleepwalking again?”

  Clark hesitated. “I hope so.”

  “Let me know,” Mr Byrd said.

  Clark ran through the pouring rain and into the house, picking up his car keys. “Which way did he go?” he called to Emma, who he correctly assumed was still in the kitchen at the camera console.

  “Right,” Emma replied. This didn’t really help; turning left at the end of their driveway led only to Emma’s house and two others. Everything else — namely the drive-in and the main road out of Birchwood — lay to the right.

  “Did it look like he was sleepwalking?”

  “Maybe,” Emma said. “I don’t know what that looks like. He didn’t put on his shoes or anything, though. He didn’t even get dressed.”

  Clark breathed an audible sigh of relief; Dan would be freezing cold and soaking wet, but at least he wasn’t on his way to clear his conscience.

  “I’m just checking the last two feeds to see what he has in his…”

  “His hands?” Clark asked, frustrated by Emma’s abrupt silence.

  She didn’t reply.

  Clark ran to the kitchen door. “What?”

  Slowly, Emma lifted her eyes from the screen and looked at Clark. “He took them,” she said. “He took the plaques.”

  * * *

  Clark grabbed his phone from his bedroom and dialled Phil Norris. Mercifully, Phil picked up.

  “New Ker-grillin’ doesn’t do deliveries,” Phil joked, sounding wide awake despite the hour.

  “Dan’s missing,” Clark said.

  Phil’s manner changed immediately. “Since when?”

  “An hour ago. He left on foot.”

  “In this weather?” Phil asked. The weather might have seemed an odd thing to pick up on given the urgency of the bigger issue, but the downpour truly was exceptional in its ferocity.

  “We think he might be sleepwalking. When he went through the phase, he always stuck to roads.”

  “Well he ain’t been here,” Phil said, speaking from his security office at the old drive-in; the same room in which he had kept watch over Jack Neal all those months ago. “There’s still some press in trucks with their lights on at the edge of the lot, but I’ve been watching on the cameras and he hasn’t shown up.”

  Clark hesitated. “Phil,” he eventually said, “if Dan does show up there, I need you to make sure he doesn’t talk to the press. Restrain him if you have to.”

  “You want me to go out there? In this?”

  “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important,” Clark said. He wisely kept the rest of his thought — it’s only fucking rain — to himself.

  “And you want me to subdue him if he resists?” Phil asked, sensing the worried urgency in Clark’s voice.

  “Try not to hurt him, but don’t let him go. Whatever it takes, he can’t talk to the press. If you find him, call me as soon as you can.”

  “Sure thing. Same for you, okay? Let me know when you find him.”

  “I will,” Clark said. He ended the call.

  “Do you have a proper flashlight?” Emma asked, as though she had been hanging on to the question throughout Clark’s call.

  Clark hurried out to Henry’s shed without replying. He returned, flashlight in hand, to find Emma standing by the door with Rooster at her feet.

  “He’ll be scared if we leave him by himself,” she said.

  “Whatever. Let’s go.”

  Rooster lay quietly on the back seat as Clark sped through Birchwood. If Dan hadn’t passed the media crews parked outside the drive-in, he could only be walking down the main road out of town. It was late enough and dark enough for it to be plausible that no one had seen him, but Clark knew that wouldn’t be the case for long.

  Five minutes outside of Birchwood, Emma said what Clark was thinking: “He can’t have gone much further than this.”

  Clark kept driving, with one eye on the mileage. At six miles — closer to the IDA building than their house — he pulled over and put his head in his hands.

  “Turn back,” Emma said. “Go slower. It’s dark; we might have missed him.”

  “He always stuck to the road,” Clark said. “He only sleepwalked a few times, but he always stuck to the road.”

  “But what other roads are there? Apart from the turn to the drive-in, there’s only…”

  “Walker’s,” Clark realised.

  “He wouldn’t go there, would he?”

  Clark answered by accelerating towards the off-the-beaten-path farmland Ben Gold had led him to the previous night.

  “Would he be there by now?” Emma asked.

  “He should be,” Clark said, still accelerating. “It’s only three miles and he left well over an hour ago.”

  “But why?”

  Clark hesitated. “Maybe he thought of something we left behind that could expose everything.”

  No one said anything else until the car’s headlights brought Richard Walker’s house into view. Richard’s car was still there and everything else looked just as untouched. Clark pulled up beside the house and got out. The rain lashed all around him. Emma stepped out and began to shout Dan’s name. Rooster barked in protest at being left alone.

  Clark shone his powerful flashlight in every direction. After seeing nothing of note in three directions, he pointed towards the cornfield. There, unmistakably, he saw that a narrow strip at the edge of the field was flattened. The trail was too wide and pronounced to be anything but human.

  What the hell are you doing, Dan?

  Clark left the flashlight’s beam on the beginning of the flattened corn — the beginning of a makeshift path into the field — and turned back to Emma. “Get in the car,” he shouted, making his voice heard over the thunderous rain. “Driver’s seat.”

  They were only a few feet apart but Emma had to raise her voice to a ridiculous level just to be heard: “No. I’m coming with—”

  “Get in the car!”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” Clark yelled. “I don’t know what I’m going to find.”

  D plus 43

  Stevenson Farm

  Eastview, Colorado

  The path grew less and less distinct as Clark continued into the cornfield. He held Henry’s multimillion-candlepower flashlight in one hand and pushed aside stalks of corn with the other.

  “Dan!” he yelled over the sound of lashing rain and stalks crunching underfoot.

  No one yelled back.

  Clark’s corn-pushing hand eventually reached open air. “Shit,” he muttered, thinking he had reached the far side of the field without finding Dan.

  He hadn’t.

  When Clark shone the flashlight to see what lay beyond the field, he realised that he wasn’t standing at its edge at all; instead, he was standing at the edge of a circle within in it.

  “What. The. Fuck.”

  Judging by the height of the corn on the other side of the circle, Clark estimated it was roughly twenty feet in diameter. Far from huge, but more than substantial enough to freak him out. The corn immediately in front of Clark’s feet looked expertly flattened. He moved the flashlight around. It all looked expertly flattened.

  And then, to Clark’s right, he spotted a statue-still figure sitting cross-legged at the
edge of the circle.

  Dan.

  “Dan!” Clark yelled, running straight over. He looked down at his younger brother, sitting barefoot in nothing but a drenched white T-shirt and boxer shorts. Though totally unresponsive, Dan’s eyes were open. His hands were clasped, resting on the two metal plaques which lay on his lap.

  Clark shone the flashlight’s powerful beam directly into Dan’s face at close range. Though Dan’s pupils constricted, he neither squinted nor lifted his hands to block the blinding light. Clark moved it away quickly.

  The look on Dan’s face was difficult for Clark to discern. It wasn’t blank; it wasn’t entranced; it was just… normal. Unsettlingly normal. His eyes were neither focused nor absent; they were instead almost disturbingly relaxed, as though he was looking at something right in front of his eyes. Something that wasn’t there.

  Clark put the flashlight down and took the plaques from Dan’s lap. Dan made no attempt to hold onto them. Clark then tucked the plaques into the back of his waistband — the best option he could think of — and lifted Dan by the shoulders. Dan neither resisted nor cooperated.

  Clark had plenty of experience lifting dead weights, but not of carrying 6'3" soaking wet sandbags. Nonetheless, he raised Dan up in a fireman’s carry, carefully picked up the flashlight, and began to walk.

  Dan’s head turned as Clark moved, maintaining a direct line of sight to the centre of the circle.

  As soon as Clark stepped out of the circle, Dan came to.

  “C-C-Clark?” he said weakly, teeth chattering in the cold. “Where are we?”

  “It’s okay. We’re gonna get you home.”

  “Wh-what happened?”

  “It’s okay,” Clark said again, shouting to be heard.

  Dan shifted his weight slightly. His whole body shivered, belatedly reacting to the freezing air and stinging rain. The top edges of the plaques dug into the small of Clark’s back as he walked.

 

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