The Stickmen

by Edward Lee

  Just another innocent who’s gonna die because of something he doesn’t understand.

  Garrett felt impotent, useless.

  He had done his job, though, hadn’t he? Swenson’s last vital order had been carried out, and so had Warrant Officer Ubel’s.

  Ubel’s instructions repeated like a whisper in Garrett’s mind. If Danny Vander is not allowed to set off that ADM at exactly the right time, then… Christ, I don’t know what will happen. Who knows what those things might do in retaliation?Garrett had nixed the threat; he’d killed Sanders. So now Danny Vander would be able to set off that bomb at the proper time.

  And he’d die.

  Garrett understood the influence that the aliens must have over Danny, and he couldn’t forget that they’d influence Swenson too. But in all their clear psychical and technical superiority over the human race, Garrett sorely doubted that they had the capability of communicating the proper timer and fuze instructions to Danny in a way that would allow him to escape. Even if the bomb had instructions, how could an eight-year-old kid discern all the details?

  “Fuck!” Garrett suddenly shouted, and punched the wall in frustration. The wall had barely dented—he’d struck a stud—and then his knuckles throbbed in pain. Dickhead! Break your hand why don’t you? That’s just what you need!

  It was futile to be angry. There was nothing he could do. What ever it was that needed to happen tonight in all likelihood would happen. Not even Garrett was sure what that could be, but he knew it was crucial. Danny Vander would die, but something more important than Danny, than Garrett, than anyone on the planet, would be served.

  That’s just the way it is, Garrett thought.

  He meandered around the house, fully aware that the dead bodies upstairs would have to be tended to in some way. Garrett himself, of course, could not be present to explain…because who would believe such an explanation? No, a simple “anonymous” phone call to the base security office would suffice. He’d leave the post soon, and stop at the nearest payphone. And that would be the end of it. No one in authority would ever figure it out, and that was fine. It would look like some kind of militia murder, and Sanders’ body would never be able to be officially identified except by the highest cells who knew all about this already. Case closed.

  Garrett helped himself to a beer from the Vander refrigerator (he doubted that the general would mind), then sullenly shuffled about and smoked, perusing the family room without really seeing anything.

  Walking through a bad dream.

  The house sat totally silent; Garrett felt edgy. There was something unnerving about being in a house that had three dead bodies upstairs, wasn’t there? The darkest musing caused his heart to skip a beat. He was the only one alive in the house. What would he do if he heard someone coming down the stairs?

  Garrett flinched.

  His mind was trying to spook him, but he knew it was only remorse. Why didn’t he just leave?

  He tapped an ash in the sink, then cocked a brow toward the other side of the kitchen.

  What’s…that?

  He noticed two doors.

  One of them was obviously an exterior door which lead out to the back yard. But the second door stood slightly ajar.

  Basement? he wondered.

  When he approached and pushed it open, he found exactly that. He flicked the light switch next to the wall and was looking down a flight of wooden steps.

  He took them down, found a typical basement. Mostly storage for old stuff that had outlived its usefulness but no one had the heart to throw away or give to Good Will. Lots of cardboard boxes and old lamps and chairs with sheets draped over them. He turned on another light from a dangling string. And stared.

  There, along the farthest wall, Garrett easily noticed a number of disarranged moving boxes. They appeared to have been pulled out, pulled away from the wall. Garrett walked closer and leaned over. He squinted.

  This is where Danny hid the ADM, he knew at once. Swathes of dust on the floor had been plowed away when the boxes had been pulled out, and it was clear it had happened very recently. The boxes left lines of dust from their movement.

  “So that’s where Danny stowed the bomb,” Garrett voice aloud. The words echoed dully. A short flight of wooden steps lead to a pair of cellar doors which, when pushed up, provided an exit to the basement. It was all right in front of him now: Garrett knew that he was looking at Danny’s route with the bomb.

  When he went over to the cellar doors, he wasn’t surprised to find a broken Master padlock. He mounted a few of the steps, pushed up one of the cellar doors, and was next peering out into the night.

  He’s out there, somewhere, he thought. An eight-year-old kid with a tactical atomic explosive device…and I have no way of finding him.

  Still glum, Garrett came back in, let the cellar door flap shut. He was about to go back upstairs and leave the house, but then he noticed the short work tale erected off to the side. He turned on another overhead bulb and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just a regular workbench with a vise mounted in the corner. Various tools hung from clasps in peg board sections on the side wall. Big deal, he thought. But then he noticed the corner of a folder sticking out from under a package of sandpaper. Garrett withdrew the folder and found it filled with sketches.

  Garrett began to flip through the sketches. Looks like Danny had an interest in drawing… Though clearly rudimentary, it was damn good artwork for a kid; in fact, when Garrett thought back to the files Swenson had given him, and the CIA’s Physiological Science Unit’s artistic renditions of the Nellis crash based on eyewitness accounts—he decided that, if anything, Danny’s drawings were better.

  And definitely based on the same theme.

  He’d drawn several versions of the ship, to the same specifications and levels of detail related by witness descriptions from over thirty-five years ago. The long, narrow fuselage, all black, a cylinder in the sky. The thin illumination element running underneath like a thread of light. The bizarre trapezoidal shapes on the sides that could only be windows or viewing ports. Next came a salvo of drawings depicting the beings themselves: tall, lanky stick-figures, nearly flesh-less, a creepy stub for a head. Worse was the face…if it could be called that. No features whatsoever, save for a single slit for eyes.

  But what bothered Garrett more than any of that was the meticulousness with which Danny had drawn the only part Garrett had actually seen for himself.

  The beings’ hands.

  They were identical in configuration to that of the forearm bone he’d found in the storage garage.

  Just two multi-jointed fingers joined at a narrow wrist.

  Garret shuddered.

  Several more drawings showed a young boy—obviously Danny’s depiction of himself—standing on a hillock at night, gazing up at the cylindrical vehicle. Another sketch of the figures standing over Danny’s bed, leaning over, and several more of Danny standing in a place that could only be the inside of the craft.

  The kid must’ve been shit-scared, Garrett considered, then wondered how well he would handle the same situation.

  Probably not very well.

  The final few sketches, however, were easily the most curious.

  What the hell is this?

  Garrett peered at the next drawing. It was Danny carrying a fat suitcase-like container away from a fence that had been pried apart. The bomb, Garrett realized. He had a theory for everything else, but not this.

  How did an eight-year-old kid bust open a twin-layered electrically charged fence, break three unbreakable high-security locks?

  That’s what I wanna know? Garrett thought, urgently examining the sketch.

  Then he noticed something curious. In Danny’s own sketch of himself lugging the bomb away from the fence…

  What’s…that?

  There seemed to be something on his hand, the hand that gripped the slot-like handle in the ADM’s case. But…what was it?

  A glove? Garrett wondered. .


  He couldn’t be sure; the details of the drawing were minute. But there was definitely something on the figure’s hand in the drawing, the hand carrying the bomb, and it could’ve been a glove, or…just something odd that seemed to be covering Danny’s hand.

  Then:

  Wait a minute, Garrett slowly thought when he flipped to the final sketch in the stack. Is that a…

  The last sketch was simple and stark. A grainy black shape with an oval opening at one end and two long…fingerlike shapes extending from the other end.

  Like a glove.

  For a two-fingered hand, Garrett thought.

  Garrett stared, cruxing, contemplating.

  This was very interesting.

  But then the full reality snapped back into his power of cognizance. What difference did it make? There was nothing Garrett could do. Even if he could figure these sketches out completely, the fact remained that Danny Vander was already on his way to Area November, Depot 12, to set off the ADM in a crudely nuclear detonation that would surely vaporize his eight-year-old self in a single five-million-degree second.

  Garrett didn’t know where Area November, Depot 12, was. And there was no way to find out.

  Therefore, he was helpless to save Danny Vander.

  So what am I worrying about it for? he reasoned. If I could do something, I would. But I can’t…because I don’t know where Danny went.

  That was it. That was the final truth.

  I might as well just get out of here, go home, get back to my life. I did my best, but the final pieces just didn’t work out.

  For some reason he couldn’t quite define, he picked up the pile of sketches, placed them back in the folder, and prepared to take them. Some last vestige, at least, if this little kid he would never meet but who was carrying out a paramount task nonetheless.

  Something to remember him by.

  An innocent kid…

  Another confused anger welled up, though, even though he realized it was a futile emotion. Whatever these things were, and from wherever they came—

  Fuck them, Garrett thought. Fuckers…

  Swenson’s last order had been fulfilled. And these beings, sure, they were getting what they needed, but they were doing so at the expense of a little boy—a little innocent easily manipulated human boy.

  What right did they have to do that?

  With all the hypotheses and common-sense deductions that any alien race capable of traveling to earth would have to be superior—

  It’s all shit.

  They’re just as self-serving and selfish as we are.

  Garrett, at least, knew this: if his own survival depending on the sacrifice of a little boy…he’d say to hell with it. He wouldn’t let a little boy die to save his own skin.

  `He wouldn’t. He simply knew it.

  He lit a cigarette, spewed frustrated smoke into the cramped basement. Maybe people were the same everywhere overall. On this planet or any other.

  No compassion anywhere.

  The whole thing’s just so…fucked up.

  He placed the folder of sketches under his arm and turned to leave, turned to put this whole nightmare behind him, when—

  CHRIST!

  A stab of pain shot into his head like a slaughterman’s air-bolt gun. Garrett’s face contorted into a twist of agony. At first he thought that someone must’ve shot a bullet into his head, but when he collapsed to the basement’s cement floor, he vision showed him that he was undeniably alone.

  Then the pain in his head trebled, and trebled again, such that he lay completely paralyzed. Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes, his face a rictus. His mouth froze open but he couldn’t even muster a whimper much less a scream.

  Garret knew he was having a stroke.

  He knew he was going to die.

  But he didn’t know that he was wrong—

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THIS IS AN AIR FORCE SECURITY SERVICE

  SECURITY PERIMETER

  ONLY CLEARED AIR FORCE PERSONNEL MAY PROCEED

  PAST THIS POINT, BY ORDER OF AFR 200-2

  In the smeary red backup light, Danny read the bold words on the warning sign at the bottom of the ramp, but he thought little of it. It didn’t matter. After tonight, what good would words be to him? Unless there was heaven.

  Danny hoped so.

  It was obvious that no one had entered this place for a long time. Cobwebs festooned the metal walls, and he could see heavy streaks of rust breaking out from blisters of powder-blue paint. Danny could actually smell the rust down here.

  But…

  Where do I go now? he asked himself.

  Now that he’d come all the way down the ramp, it was just a small metal-walled room that he stood in, dark in the weird red light. Just four walls, no doors. He knew, however, that this wasn’t the place where he was supposed to set off the bomb.

  He knew because the Stickmen had told him.

  That’s when he noticed the small glass panel on one of the walls. He had to stand on his tip-toes to open the panel, and then he had to squint through the red light to read.

  MAIN POWER, read a tiny plaque inside. And just below the plaque was a handle.

  Danny stretched his arm up and pulled down on the handle. He grunted, gritting his teeth, but the handle wouldn’t budge; it was probably locked up with rust. For a few seconds, Danny felt frantic but then he nearly laughed at himself.

  He reached up with his other hand—the hand with the glove on it—and pulled down on the handle again. The rust in the handle’s slot, hard as cement, ground and broke, then the handle thunked to the bottom.

  Bright white lights snapped on, filling the small metal room. Danny flinched, shielded his eyes. Now the floor seemed to hum, and he could hear distant clicks and snaps and sharp noises below him, underground. Now, with the lights blazing, Danny easily spotted the circular red button on the wall opposite.

  Danny pressed the button, and then came a loud CLACK!, then a steady groaning sound like a motor running.

  Wow…

  The metal-walled room was a room at all, not really. It was an elevator.

  The entire “room” began to lower.

  As the top-edges of the walls separated from the ceiling, Danny could see wheels turning and long fat cables extending. The squeaky hum follow him down for what must have been fifty feet, while the floor jiggled. Then another, louder, thunk.

  The floor shuddered to a halt. Flecks of rust drifted down, dusting Danny’s head in its red-black grit.

  Here, Danny thought.

  Deep.

  He stepped off the elevator platform into another room of blue-painted metal walls infected by outbreaks of rust. More bright white lights blared. He set the ADM case down and approached a very large white door that had sections and hinges like the garage door back at his house.

  Stenciled lettered in black paint read:

  AREA NOVEMBER

  (POST PLAT: 413, GRID: 66-798)

  DEPOT 12

  UNAUTHORIZED ENTRANCE PUNISHABLE BY DEATH

  Another rubber-tipped handle stuck out of a slot in the wall. Danny yanked it down.

  More humming and clanging. More rust sifted out from overhead.

  As the big hinged door began to rise.

  Eventually the door’s slatted sections were reeled overhead, leaving a wide open doorway before him, beyond which more white spotlights beamed down. Danny picked the ADM back up and walked forward into a another room, this one formed of not painted metal walls but painted slab concrete.

  This was the vault, Danny knew.

  This was the depot.

  The depot itself looked about as large as the multi-purpose room back at school. Every step he took forward echoed loudly around his head; Danny thought of the night-birds outside, and the bats. It seemed to take a long time to walk to the center of the depot.

  And it seemed to be an awful lot of space for just this.

  The depot vault was big enough to house at least a hundr
ed cars, but all that sat in the middle of it were three long, thin wooden crates lying next to each other.

  The crates looked weird: eight or nine feet long and only maybe a foot and a half wide. There was a part of Danny’s psyche that couldn’t imagine what the crates contained.

  But there was another part of Danny’s psyche that knew exactly what the crates were.

  Each crate had a stenciled label:

  THESE CONTAINERS ARE THE

  PROPERTY OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE MATERIALS COMMAND

  DO NOT TOUCH!

  THIS MATERIAL IS BOOBY-TRAPPED!

  UNAUTHORIZED OPENING OF THESE CONTAINERS

  WILL RESULT IN A FATAL EXPLOSION

  Again, Danny knew even though he didn’t. The Stickmen had told him in his mind. This was just a trick to scare people away.

  I know, he thought. Just like he knew his own address.

  Danny knew that the long wooden crates weren’t really booby-trapped. And somehow he knew more. He knew that someone from a long time ago had hidden these crates here—and old bald man who was dead now—and that this man had put the phony booby-trap warning on the crates on purpose.

  The Stickmen had told him that.

  Besides, he didn’t really need to open the crates anyway.

  I just need to blow them up with this bomb, he reminded himself.

  Danny knelt at the ADM, and removed some things from a canvas sack attached to it. He looked closely at the things close inside the sack: a roll of tan-colored wire, a small box with a clock on it, and a smaller box with square protruding button.

  He didn’t know what any of these things were.