by Alex Bratton
“Why are you afraid of guns?” he asked suddenly.
Surprised, Mina turned her gaze on him. He wasn’t looking at her, merely staring at the stars as if he had more on his mind than idle chatter. Mina took a deep breath, wondering why he asked this question when he never asked personal questions. She debated telling him then decided it wouldn’t hurt anything.
“Couple of reasons,” she said. “The first is, my dad taught me to handle a gun. He died when I was twelve, and they remind me of my time spent with him.”
“And the other reason?”
“I was a pretty good shot,” Mina said after a minute, remembering a different time. “We lived in an old farmhouse. Lincoln and I would practice shooting empty cans off the fence at the back of the property. Lincoln was older, almost an adult. We were always careful because Dad always drilled safety into our heads. Over and over.”
Doyle smirked, then turned serious. “What happened?”
“There was a neighbor kid who lived down the road. Jared was always over at our house, and he was kind of a bully. A punk, you know? Always got into stuff he shouldn’t have. Dad put up with him, tried to help him because his family was never around. Anyway, one day, he walked over while we were shooting cans.”
Mina paused, wishing Doyle would fill in the gaps for himself. Although the events happened years ago, the memory was always fresh.
Doyle waited.
Realizing he wasn’t going to let her off the hook, Mina cleared her throat. “Anyway, he tried to take my gun from me. Dad had always told me never to let anyone else use it. You know, basic safety. Jared was bigger than I was. Lincoln tried to grab him, but Jared had already wrenched it from my hands. When he did, he caught the trigger, too. The gun went off.”
“Did he die?”
“No,” Mina whispered, “but he was permanently disabled. I felt guilty. Lincoln felt guilty. Dad most of all.”
“Where was your mother?”
“Not in the picture. She left when I was young.”
Doyle nodded again and turned his attention back to the stars glimmering through the thick foliage above.
Mina wished she could look at them like he did, with understanding. “You’re so odd sometimes,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because a typical person would have offered condolences or words of comfort.”
“Maybe I’m not typical.”
“No argument there.”
“Do you want platitudes?” he asked.
“Not if you don’t mean them.”
Doyle looked at her. “Your reaction to a childhood trauma is entirely natural. The fight or flight response is real. You continue to flee years after the original adrenaline has faded.”
“How very clinical,” Mina muttered, irritated.
“There’s no other way to look at it that makes sense. At least you don’t freeze up in a stressful situation. That can mean death.”
Mina turned over on her side, looking at him from across the firelight. He scratched his chest and looked back at the stars.
“Eventually,” he said, “you’re going to have to use that gun, Mina. Eventually, we all will.”
Chapter Three
Darkness swallowed Lincoln as he rounded the turn. In front of him, a gust of cold air blew up out of the tunnel. Alvarez gasped in surprise. Ahead, Schmidt and Carter illuminated the metal staircase with torches, the light only reaching the first few stairs.
The team had wasted too many days looking for the second tunnel opening. As soon as Lincoln could get away from the medic, he excitedly announced he was going back. Initially, he had led his team through the silo, expecting to find the second entrance without trouble, but when they arrived, the silo had only one. Disappointed, Lincoln somehow persuaded Nash to lend him help to scour the mountain, claiming it could be a major clue. Nash, who seemed to have soured on ARCHIE and its burdensome engineers, loaned Lincoln four men to shut him up.
As the days wore on, Nash lost patience. Several days ago, he had ordered the soldiers helping them back to camp to deal with the ever-increasing influx of refugees. Schmidt alone had remained with the team. He seemed fascinated by their work, especially Alvarez. Nash seemed too preoccupied to bother recalling him.
Unconcerned about Nash and his problems, Lincoln insisted his team could find the tunnel again on their own. Although he had marked trees while he’d hiked down the mountain, he had done so sporadically, hindered by his pain. Today, though, the rediscovery of the second tunnel buoyed his steps, his wound forgotten.
Lincoln ran his hands along the smoothly cut walls of the tunnel as he descended. The metal stairs looked crude in comparison to the low, smooth ceiling and walls.
“Look at this!” Ahead, Carter held his torch out in front to examine something in the ceiling of the tunnel.
Lincoln and Alvarez caught up quickly. Then Lincoln saw it—a small, swirling circular pattern, no bigger than a man’s hand, carved deeply into the rock. Beautiful, he thought. He had never seen anything like it before. The pattern had no tool marks around it, no evidence of what had carved it.
“Maybe it was a laser,” Carter suggested.
“Hmm. Maybe.” Alvarez ran her hands along the deep grooves in the rock.
As if out of habit, Carter reached into his shirt pocket for a cigarette, but he had smoked his last one a week ago. He sighed and dropped his hand. “I didn’t say it was a good idea. More like a suggestion.”
“There’s more this way!” Schmidt said.
He held his torch aloft so the others could see the swirling patterns. This time, they intertwined with more until they covered the entire ceiling. Lincoln looked up at them in silence. Here, finally, they had found something worth looking for.
“These must have been here when you came up, Lincoln,” Alvarez said softly, “but you didn’t have a torch.”
Lincoln stretched his hand toward the ceiling, brushing his fingertips across the patterns. He had never seen anything so stunning. A perfect circle cut into the rock, joining fluidly with other circles and swirls, all connected. No two designs were exactly alike, yet they possessed a certain rigidity and structure that conveyed order and intention.
“Do they go all the way down?” asked Alvarez.
“Looks like it,” Lincoln said.
The team descended the stairs into the mountain. Occasionally, Lincoln touched the roof of the tunnel to feel the deep grooves. The stone was cold but not damp. About halfway down, Lincoln almost imagined the rock was warm beneath his fingertips, like the symbols were emitting heat. When he paused to confirm, the stone felt as cold as before.
“Shouldn’t it be damp?” Alvarez asked.
“Every cave I’ve seen has been,” Lincoln said.
No one said anything else until they reached the bottom where the tunnel opened suddenly to a tall ceiling. In the dim light of the torches, the patterns disappeared. Across from the stairway, the rectangular chamber contained more symbols outlining an area the size of a large door or archway. The wall, however, remained solid stone. Nothing opened into the silo.
“Must be why we didn’t find it and you did,” Nelson said, shining his torch on them. “Something made it open and then close, but how? I still can’t figure it out. You were right behind us. Is this where you came through?”
“Must be.” Lincoln examined the symbols. “The stairs were directly in front of the door.”
“At least you thought they were,” Nelson said, pointing to another outline of an arch on the wall to the right. This one had its own unique set of markings.
Lincoln turned to Nelson. “This is substantial evidence that aliens have been here before. You don’t seem as excited about that as I thought you’d be.”
Nelson frowned. “Isn’t it weird that we’re finding exactly what we’d expect to find?”
Lincoln nodded to the symbols. “You expected this?”
“Maybe, but I think we’re asking all the wrong questions.”
“Here’s another one!” Alvarez said. She pointed her torch toward the opposite wall.
Carter shook his head. “There’s no way to be certain which one leads to the silo, but I’d sure like to know why it’s closed now.”
“There must be a switch or something,” Lincoln said. “Especially if we’re going on the assumption that it’s alien. Maybe the door slides into the mountain.”
“I hope we don’t get sealed in here.” Alvarez shivered as she inspected the three sections. The symbols covering them looked the same as the ones in the tunnel, but there was no pattern here, either. “There’s got to be a lever somewhere in here and in Corridor A. We just have to find it.”
“At least we found the stairs again so you’re not crazy, Lincoln,” Carter said, clapping Lincoln on the back.
Their search at the end of the tunnel turned up nothing else.
“We might as well go back,” Schmidt said. “Going to be dark.”
“Wish we could take a picture of those hieroglyphs,” Lincoln said.
“Me, too,” Carter said.
“Wait! We can!” Alvarez pulled out a piece of paper from her coat pocket and turned it over onto a section of the symbols. With a pencil, she shaded over the top of the paper, making a relief drawing of the glyphs.
“At least that’s something,” Schmidt said as he peered over her shoulder.
Nelson walked to the foot of the stairs with his torch. “C’mon, man,” he said to Lincoln, who had started on new relief drawings. “It’s getting late. I’m hungry, and I’m sick of this place.”
Lincoln didn’t look up. “I want as many of these as possible. We still have paper left.”
“Why?” Nelson turned from the stairs and glowered at Lincoln.
Lincoln stopped his shading. “Excuse me?”
The others halted halfway between the tunnel and the door, looking from one man to the other.
“You heard me,” Nelson said. “You still think you call the shots around here, but last I checked, I wasn’t getting paid for this crap. And if I don’t get a check, you’re not my boss. That means I do what I want.”
Lincoln dropped his arms and squared his shoulders. “What exactly are you going to do?”
Nelson glared back. “I’m going back to camp where I will eat, and then I’ll go to sleep in my cold little tent. But at least I’ll feel like I’m on Earth and not some alien craphole.”
“Are you serious? We have a job to do!”
“Oh, wake up! We don’t know what we’re doing here and probably never will. If you want to live inside this godforsaken mountain, then fine, but leave the rest of us out of it.”
Carter stepped between them. “We’re all tired,” he said, directing the comment to Nelson. Then he turned to Lincoln. “How about we leave now and start fresh tomorrow?”
Lincoln scowled. “You too?”
“We’ll come back tomorrow, Lincoln,” Alvarez said quietly.
“Speak for yourself,” Nelson said. “I’m not spending any more time here. If you need me, you can come find me at camp.”
Blood boiling, Lincoln looked from one to the other. They were right, but that knowledge only made him angrier. He let them go ahead as they exited.
Nelson’s mood didn’t improve once they returned to camp. Apparently, Nash had cut rations again and ordered anyone with a gun to learn how to hunt.
“It was only a matter of time,” Carter said as they picked up their reduced rations. “I’m surprised supplies lasted as long as they did.”
“Nash must not expect help or a resupply anytime soon,” Alvarez remarked.
Nelson sat glumly near his tent, away from the others. Lincoln only nodded as they discussed the situation. He wasn’t really hungry, so he got up again and offered his portion to Nelson.
Nelson refused it. “What? You think I’m a child you can placate with extra food? That I’ll change my mind? I’m done, man. Done.” He stood and walked into the trees, leaving his own ration on the ground.
Lincoln considered chucking his remaining food into the woods, but instead, he stalked to his tent, dropping his ration into Schmidt’s hands on his way.
Darkness fell. Fires were put out. Lincoln wanted more than anything to study the symbols in his pocket, but he couldn’t see anything in his dark tent. He heard Alvarez and Carter say goodnight. Then everything went quiet. Schmidt’s buddies weren’t sitting around joking and laughing tonight.
The feeling he was forgetting something nagged at Lincoln. Tired and sore, he closed his eyes to think, but it made no difference. The marks flickering in the shadows cast by firelight kept rising in his mind.
Then he remembered.
Nash. They hadn’t told him they’d found the second tunnel. As far as Lincoln was concerned, Nash didn’t need to know right away. It wasn’t like the colonel could do anything.
Lincoln fingered the drawings in his jacket pocket. What did the markings mean?
Over the next few days, Lincoln and Alvarez made several trips back to the tunnel. They sat for hours with a torch trained on one of the doorways, trying to decipher the hieroglyphs. If they contained a language or code, Lincoln couldn’t figure it out. As soon as he thought he saw a pattern, he would pull out a relief drawing and compare them. He was always mistaken. Sometimes, Carter complained that he was in no shape to climb a mountain two or three times a day. Instead, he spent much of his time fishing.
Nelson ignored Lincoln and his plans altogether. Lincoln made frequent attempts to get Nelson to explain what he’d meant by his comment in the tunnel, but Nelson refused to elaborate. After a few days, Lincoln gave up. I’m not begging him for help.
When he wasn’t working in the tunnel, Lincoln joined the hunt for food. Clouds and rain cooled the mountains, and the hunters always returned cold, wet, and often hungry.
Lincoln always pulled out the drawings while they waited for game. Carter remarked that Lincoln was so obsessed with the symbols that a deer could lie down and die at his feet, and he wouldn’t notice.
More refugees turned up every day, most of them having fled to the secluded areas of the mountains, like this one, for protection. Many told stories of the invaders—giant creatures that stood on two feet with symbols etched into their stone-like bodies. They argued about the color, though. Some claimed the creatures shone gold, while others said gray. One or two survivors had escaped camps the invaders had burned. Their numbers swelled, and Nash’s soldiers all pulled double duty to maintain order. Squabbles began to break out over the lack of food.
“The camp’s too big,” Alvarez said one day. She had come to find Lincoln in his tent before he headed to the tunnel. “I think I’ll go with you today. I don’t exactly feel safe here with all these strangers.”
Lincoln looked up sharply from the drawing he was studying. “Why? What happened?”
“Nothing. I’d like to keep it that way. Every time I have food or water, I feel like someone’s watching me.”
“I know what you mean,” Nelson said.
Lincoln and Alvarez both turned. The hacker stood behind them.
“I think we should leave,” he added.
Lincoln shook his head, ready to argue.
Alvarez spoke before he could. “Where would we go?”
“Doesn’t matter. Food’s going to run out soon. There are too many people here. I was talking to a guy from North Carolina, and apparently, the Glyphs—”
“The what?” Lincoln asked.
“That’s what they’re calling them. Anyway, the Glyphs like to target large camps like this one. If they do, we’re trapped here.”
“There’s always the caves,” Lincoln said.
“I thought you’d say that,” Nelson replied, “but I’m not living in the creepy alien silo!”
“You’ve made that clear. I was thinking of it more as an emergency shelter.”
Carter joined them, wiping his hands on a dirty r
ag, having just finished cleaning a pail of fish. “I’ve thought about that, too, but have you considered that these Glyph things might want their silo back?”
“How do we know for sure it’s theirs?” Lincoln asked.
Nelson snorted, and even Alvarez tried to hide her smile.
“No, I’m serious. We think it’s been here a long time, right? So maybe it’s not theirs.”
“Or maybe,” Nelson said, his voice rising slightly, “it’s the reason they’re here.”
“Then why aren’t they at the camp already? Wouldn’t they have shown up by now?”
“I really don’t know why they’d want it, and neither do you.” Nelson turned to Carter and Alvarez. “Think about what I said. We should leave while we still have a chance.”
“Hey, everybody!” Schmidt called to them as he jogged over.
“We haven’t seen you in a while,” Alvarez said.
“Colonel’s keeping me busy. He’s ordered everyone over. The whole camp. Right now.”
“What’s up?” Alvarez asked.
“He has an announcement.”
They followed Schmidt to a group standing in front of one of the few running Jeeps. Colonel Nash stood atop it. As uniforms and refugees gathered, Lincoln realized just how big the camp had become.
Apparently, Alvarez had the same realization as she stepped up beside Lincoln. “Must be at least three hundred extra people here.”
They crowded in. Lincoln, so absorbed in his own troubles, had not paid much attention to the shabby newcomers, who had arrived at the camp with only the clothes they wore. Although few refugees seemed injured, most had a pinched, pallid look about them. Hunger treated everyone the same. Lincoln had tightened his own belt again that morning. He looked down at his khakis and button-down. When had they last been washed? He couldn’t remember.
“All right, everybody! Get quiet!” Nash stomped on the hood of the Jeep. “As you know, we’ve had to cut rations, but it’s still not going to be enough. We don’t have the ammo to keep hunting, and the game is already becoming scarce, so I’m ordering all the people who aren't military personnel to leave.”
Muttering broke out among the refugees. A few hollered obscenities. Nash held up his hand for silence.