“No!” he cried and tried to leap up and run away from the incredible sense of malignancy that was engulfing him. However, he felt as though he were pushing up from under an incredible pressure, as though he were on the bottom of an ocean.
The men stepped over blithely. They each grabbed him by an arm and in the classic gangster/cop make-a-wish move, pulled him up and hustled him along toward the door.
“No!” he cried. “NO!” The desert breeze hit him, and the light and the night and the stars and the moon began to swirl around like a river. He was aware that he was being dragged out into the open, and yet, struggle as he might, he could not break free of their holds. They smelled of Ben Gay and motor oil and that unidentifiable acrid scent from before.
The Winnebago had been parked in a deserted camping area.
Scarborough saw picnic tables and stone and metal barbecues. The men carried him around to the back of the RV, the blind side, and hustled him toward something that sat there like a flattened monolith.
Scarborough gasped. He could not believe his eyes.
Standing there was the bugaboo of his entire career. It was wide, perhaps fifty yards in diameter, and it was made of some silvery alloy that shone in the moon and starlight. The convexity of its lines smoothed upwards to converge into a transparent bulblike top that was pregnant with a soft blue light like a steady gas flame. Reddish light pulsed from within nacelles below its base.
A flying saucer!
Scarborough’s heart seemed to stop, his breath caught in his throat, and his blood felt frozen in his veins. For twenty-five years he had crusaded against belief in such objects, and yet now here it stood before him, in stark reality, just as described by the people he had called UFOols, only it was landed, not sailing across any landscapes.
One of the grey men tapped some sort of device on his wrist.
A side of the craft shimmered. An aperture opened. A ramp angled down. The next thing Scarborough knew, his feet were half walking, half dragging up the ramp. Despite the steep angle and the smooth surface, the men’s shoes seemed to have no problem obtaining purchase.
“No,” Scarborough managed to gasp. “NO!”
Pressure was exerted on his ann. Sharp pain jolted down his spine.
“Shut up. Or we’ll break it!”
Scarborough shut up. These guys acted more like hoodlums than servants of a higher extraterrestrial life form, came the thought through a muddle of terror, disbelief, and yes, awe.
The night cut off around him. The dark of the ship swallowed them up. Scarborough was aware of an increase in the sharp, acrid smell. The darkness was total for a moment, and his fear seemed to engulf him. But then, gradually, some soft, almost reassuring lights dissolved into focus about them, dimly delineating a corridor. Scarborough was aware of the steady, almost relaxed breaths of the men who hurried him along—and of those familiar hypnotic subsonic sounds, much like he’d heard before, riding along in the background like the susurration of the sea. Gentle, reassuring—and yet somehow at the same time disturbing on an elemental level.
A sense of dread began to bloom in Scarborough’s abdomen, like some consuming fungoid growth.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked. He had a sense that he was attempting a demand, and yet it came out as lifeless, hopeless.
The men did not respond for several long beats…
And then, abruptly, without an approach, a doorway limned in red light hovered in front of them.
Voices.
Clatter of metal.
Squeeze of plastic, ripple of flesh, tinkling of glass... Voices.
Harsh threatening voices.
And that acrid smell again, only more focused, more familiar…
The smell of blood.
Scarborough suddenly became aware of a frizzle of energy to either side of him. He turned to the left and before his eyes the grey man, glowing with the distorted light of energy, reduced in size, his features molting and changing.
Suddenly, he had long spindly arms, an oval head, eyes like jeweled almonds that blazed with alien light. Scarborough gasped. The being simply glowed with power.
“No, Scarborough,” said a voice, not from the being’s mouth but in his mind. “Do not look at me. Look... yonder.” A spindly hand gestured slowly, and a finger—triple-jointed—erected and pointed.
Unable to help himself, Scarborough looked.
They stood in some sort of operating theater. Instruments hung down from the ceiling like metal and plastic appendages, oddly slanted and akimbo. Suspended lights flashed and winked. Other aliens, like the ones now at either side of Everett Scarborough, surrounded a porous operating table consisting of an odd assortment of angles and textures that looked like petrified layers of cardboard.
Upon this table, her hands and feet spread-eagled and fastened with clamps, was a naked woman. Her face was turned away, long dark hair obscuring her features. Below swollen breasts, Scarborough could see an enlarged abdomen. The woman was pregnant. Pregnant and apparently undergoing childbirth even as Scarborough looked on.
“Behold,” said one of the aliens in a raspy voice. “Our secret.” As they looked on, Scarborough could see that the alien “doctors” were attending to the woman with strange equipment. The closest held some sort of alien midwife tongs in its delicate hand; with a surprising sureness, they were inserted up the dilated vagina of the woman, assisting the birth of the baby inside.
A pink, mottled head appeared first at the end of the birth canal. And then, glistening with amniotic fluid, the baby slipped out quickly the rest of the way.
But it looked strange, warped, and as Scarborough craned his neck, he could see why. It was covered in some sort of sac.
A shimmering gunk of placenta slipped out as well, a biological afterthought.
With a scalpel, another alien stepped forward and made a slit in the membranous stuff. Greenish stuff spilled out, and tiny hands thrust out into the air, as though reaching out to take a grip of life itself. Gasping, spraying its surrounding with mucous and afterbirth effluvia, the baby struggled up out of its birth sac.
Instantly, as its naked head erupted into the air, Scarborough could see that it wasn’t human. With those onyx eyes, the shape of its head, it was a smaller version of the creatures surrounding it. It opened its glistening mouth and a tiny wail escaped.
Scarborough, finally finding his voice, turned to his captors.
“What does this mean…?”
But before he could get an answer, the woman on the table let loose a shriek and a gasp. A gout of blood poured from between her legs as she spasmed. Her head whipped up, she stiffened, reached out for Scarborough as though for help, and then fell back, her eyes glazing over with death.
Everett Scarborough cried out with disbelief.
With a gargantuan effort, he broke free of the aliens’ grasp and ran up to the table.
The woman’s face, relaxed now in death, was unmistakable.
Her mother’s sculpted nose, her father’s strong chin... those beautiful eyes, closed now.
“Diane!” he gasped.
His daughter!
“Hey, man. You okay?”
He spun around to the aliens—and they were laughing at him.
Outraged, screaming, he turned and ran toward them, reaching for their throats, meaning to rip and tear.
Diane! After all this hell, he’d witnessed the death of his own daughter!
“Scarby, fella! Cool it. Wake up!”
He grabbed the first one by its slender neck. A madman, he pushed in with his thumbs, squeezing and choking.
“Eurrrrghhhhhh!”
“Everett! Stop it! What are you doing?”
Kill the bastard! screamed the thought in Everett Scarborough’s mind. Kill the-
“Jesus Christ! Cut it out, man!”
The face of the alien suddenly turned into the face of Jake Camden, somewhat purpled.
Chapter 2
The big Victorian house stood a
hundred yards from the rocky cliff, brooding over the churlish Atlantic beneath a moody night. Two of its gabled windows were lit, glaring like protuberant eyes in a giant wooden face. Lightning flashed over the flat moors of the island behind the house, briefly illuminating its eaves and porticoes and a tilted weather vane, shuddering over several dilapidated out-buildings.
The woman approached the house, looking up at this ghostlike display without expression. It was just the house and her, it seemed.
The dark structure and the man inside it were her destiny.
To think. This was so much like those books she had read as a precocious child: Wuthering Heights. Jane Eyre. Those Victoria Holt novels, those delicious Gothic romances where a woman is summoned to a mysterious house by a dark and exciting, perhaps menacing man who might bed her, wed her, or kill her.
Yes, she thought.
But this time with a twist.
The woman reached beneath her coat and stroked the AK-47 automatic machine gun hanging snugly by her side.
Chapter 3
“Diane!”
His daughter, lying on that torturer’s table, dead.
He felt like he was King Lear holding his daughter, raging against the storm! Shouting, Howl! Howl! Howl!
Somehow, though, it wasn’t real. And as the deadly seconds ticked off, this alien Scarborough had a grip on looked more and more like another being, only a little more human, whom he’d often wished he’d had a death-grip on-
Still, as color drained into the environment and out of the creature he was choking, and as the woman beside him—where did she come from? —began to bash at him screaming, “Stop! Ev, you’re killing him,” Everett Scarborough supposed he should pause for a moment for a reality check.
He let go his thumb lock.
The man he’d been choking—and it was a man, indeed it was Jake Camden—sucked in a lungful of breath and pulled away, his swath of longish wavy brown hair whipping back, hand going to bruised throat as though checking to make sure it was still there. The man had a weaselly handsome face with shock-blue eyes, prematurely touched on the sides with wrinkles, and a puffy, stubbled face. He wore a loud blue-green-orange Hawaiian shirt over khaki pants and the beginning of a beer belly. He looked like James Woods metamorphosing into Bill Murray.
“I knew you loved me, Scarborough,” he gasped. “But I can do without the gestures of affection. “
“Ev, Ev?” said the woman. “Are you all right?”
“Is he all right?” objected Camden. “Hey! I’m the guy with the chicken neck!”
“You’ll survive,” she said curtly.
Already, Marsha Manning and Jake Camden had developed a warm relationship.
The reality check had done a quick kick-in-the-head to Scarborough, and an early morning Winnebago interior became the room du jour. No strange throbbing sounds, no lights, no grey men turning into ETs, no flying saucer. Just a nice comfortable RV interior, the smell of bacon and pancakes in the air, and a very attractive woman leaning over him with a face full of concern and caring.
“Marsha,” Scarborough said. “I had the most terrible dream.”
She leaned to him, held him. “It’s okay, Ev. It’s okay.”
Normally he wasn’t the kind of man to exhibit this kind of emotion and need. And he certainly wasn’t the sort to accept this kind of mothering—especially in front of the ever-sarcastic Jake Camden. But the events of the past month had been so harrowing, so traumatic and challenging, and he felt so emotionally vulnerable at this moment that he simply gladly accepted Marsha’s comfort. The familiar smell of faded perfume and sweet-musk woman-scent calmed him quicker than a shot of whiskey. She stroked the back of his neck and he only realized then that he’d been shaking, because his tremors stopped with her kind and gentle touch.
“I ... I ... Oh God ...” he said.
“Shhhh,” she said, comforting. “Shhhh.”
“Look, I’m going to go and grab myself a cup of java outside while you folks have your touching reunion,” said Jake. “I just hope there’s room for it to slide down the old esophagus after that old Indian wrestling hold you put on me, Scarb.”
“You do that, Jake,” said Marsha. “Oh, and don’t, burn your tongue or get bit by a rattler or get run over by a truck. We’d miss you too much.”
Jake said, “I’ll just drink the coffee with that milk in the cooler.” No comeback. He could swipe barbs with the best of them, but he knew when to stop with Marsha by now. Like, when it looked as though she was going to clobber him.
Marsha just held Everett for a while, stroking his hair. He laid his head against her chest, and its softness and warmth were all he needed. Finally, she said, “Do you want to tell me about it?”
He hadn’t told her yet about what he’d found in that report he’d taken off Dr. Cunningham’s desk and stuffed into his pocket before they’d escaped that secret part of Kirtland Air Force Base. After they’d found themselves in this recreational vehicle with the tape of instructions and the money provided by the Others, he’d just gone out into the desert and had read it alone.
Could he tell her? Would she understand? Would she still be able to love him, would she still care to be physically intimate with him if she knew the possibilities about the upright Doctor Everett Scarborough, bastion of science and rationality, and general tilter at windmills of malarkey?
“… there is evidence that Everett Scarborough may have ultimately been abducted sometime during his college years, perhaps even programmed by the extraterrestrials, Dr. Julia Cunningham’s report had read. “Indeed, I have been doing blood work and DNA analysis to determine a sneaking suspicion of my own: That Everett Scarborough, in fact, is not fully human.”
That was all there had been. But what had it meant? How could Cunningham have come to those conclusions or suspicions or whatever with the little amount of material that she had. Surely, it was ridiculous. Impossible!
Did he want to tell her about it?
No. Not all of it. The possibilities were just too dreadful, too horrible.
“Look, Ev. It was a dream. Just a dream,” she said finally. “We’ve all been under a great deal of strain and pressure and now that there’s breathing space, it’s only natural that the psyche should want to deal with it the way that it often does. Through dreams… nightmares… working it through, you know? And I’ve often found on my own that if I have nightmares—nightmares that I remember—it’s best to either write them down, or tell someone the details.”
“A confessional, huh? Father, forgive me for I have sinned. Or in your case, Mother...”
“I’m not getting into anything religious here, Everett Scarborough,” she said softly but firmly. “All I’ m saying is that talking it out is an old-fashioned but quite useful psychological tool. And I’m here if you want to take advantage of a friendly, loving ear. If you’re going to get cold and sarcastic with me, though, maybe you should just go and talk to a cactus plant somewhere. And sit on it too, for all I care.” She started to get up.
He found absolutely no pride left inside him to prevent him from calling her back. “Marsha. I’m sorry. Look—knee-jerk asshole stuff, huh? That was the old Scarborough talking. I have changed.”
“I doubt it. I honestly doubt it.” She looked back at him. She was a handsome woman, no doubt about it, with brown curly hair framing soft features and a strikingly feminine figure. She was in her early thirties, but she looked as though she had all the youthful vigor of her vital twenties. She was wearing a red flannel shirt, worn jeans, and scuffed sneakers that she’d found in a drawer of the Winnebago, and Scarborough had to say that she looked very fetching so attired. His natural male response gave him something familiar for his emotions to hang onto. She came to him, folded him up into an embrace. Her chest was warm, ample, and soft, and he let some of his tension leak into her. “Oh, Ev.”
“I don’t know, Marsha. I just don’t know. All I know is that I don’t think I could have made it this far without
you.”
“I’ve done what I’ve done not just because I love you, Ev. I’ve done it to do what’s right. Remember, that,” she said softly, stroking his greying hair. “Now then. What about that dream?”
“I think I could use a cup of coffee first.”
“Sure.” She moved away from him after planting a kiss on his forehead. “One fix for the caffiend. And maybe some breakfast, too. Our very weird benefactors seem to have left us with a full larder! Bacon, eggs, toast, jam? The Manning Special. I have a hard time getting my soufflés to rise, but I fix some mean scrambled eggs and home fries!”
“Yes. I think that breakfast you gave me at your house in Dayton actually saved my life.”
“So I’ll do it again.”
“Better make some for Camden, too. Otherwise, he’ll pout.”
“Camden? I’ve travelled with Jake, before, remember? He’ll settle for black coffee and a honey-dip.”
“The reformed Jake Camden. Better stuff some food into him to cancel some of his more harmful cravings.”
“Well, he’s giving us this time together alone, so we’d better make use of it. I’ll put on the coffee. You get your brain percolating. “
“Yeah. Good idea.”
There was a lot to percolate, a lot to mull over. It seemed like an eternity since that assassin had tried to kill him in that auditorium. The guy had missed his body, but apparently had struck his whole life, exploding it into pieces.
That’s when it had all started.
It was after the assassination attempt by that crazy (and Scarborough was convinced that it was a crazy… there was no reason for any government or nongovernment agency to want to actually kill him at that point) that Diane had come to him and told him the story about seeing that flying saucer with her boyfriend Tim Reilly. Even as he thought back over it, it seemed so confusing.
It had started, of course, long ago. But up until recently, Dr. Everett Scarborough was a world-class authority on Unidentified Flying Objects—as a skeptic, a scoffer, a disprover. A scientist specializing in physics and engineering, he’d worked on Project Blue Book, helping to wrap it up by 1969. Afterwards, a few popular articles had paved the way toward a career as an authority on the subject, a bestselling author, and an in-demand lecturer on the increasingly popular—and hotly debated—subject of extraterrestrial visitors to the planet Earth. His arguments had been solid, well-documented; and aided by a quick tongue, a strong wit and an immense intelligence, Scarborough had been the scourge of the credulous and the believer, be they UFO investigator, or merely UFO enthusiast. UFOols, Scarborough had called them.
The UFO Conspiracy Trilogy Page 76