Majestic

by Whitley Strieber

  At that moment, though, the only thing on Will's mind was his now desperate effort to get this body where it belonged before it was reduced to gristle and liquid.

  He realized that Van had strengthened his position on the base by sending Colonel Blanchard on enforced leave and placing the much more rule-conscious Jennings in command.

  He did have one hope, and that involved Jennings. The man was so bound by the chain of command that he was likely to report first and await orders rather than do anything overt when Will arrived on base with the body.

  Will's fear was that the Air Force would commandeer it. Admiral Hillenkoetter was obviously in no position to prevent this. In return for his support in other matters, the President was likely to continue to side with General Vandenberg.

  As they bounced along toward Roswell Will tried to find the view he had seen last night. Sure enough they swept across a small range and there it was, the town now washed by morning sun. He had been here, flying on wings of dream.

  He shuddered, remembering the freedom and the fear. Two feet away from him the strange body rode in its canvas shroud. Given the incredible pressures of the situation, I find it remarkable that Wilfred Stone was functioning at all. But he was functioning, and well. As a matter of fact he was acting with considerable intelligence and decision.

  The others had very intentionally shattered his model of reality. He no longer knew what to think about them or what they were doing.

  Still, he acted. He tried.

  They landed on a round helicopter target, and two medics trotted over to take charge of the corpse.

  "What are your orders?" Will asked, as if only mildly curious.

  "Place the object in the meat locker pending transport."

  That sounded extremely suspicious. "Transport to where?"

  "Unknown, sir. You'll have to ask the exec."

  Jennings was moving with unexpected swiftness.

  Will accompanied the bundle to the kitchen of the officer's mess, where it was placed in a walk-in freezer. He then went to the HQ building and called on the lieutenant colonel. He was annoyed to find that he had communicated with Ramey and already had orders to transport the bodies and everything else immediately and under guard to Eighth Air Force HQ in Fort Worth.

  He was a tight, intense man and he obviously intended to exert the authority he had been given. "I have a direct, written order," he told Will. "I don't even know your credentials."

  "You know I'm CIG, and I obviously report to Admiral Hillenkoetter."

  "Then the admiral will appreciate the way we do things in the Air Force."

  What Will did at this point was completely outrageous.

  Without another word he went directly down the hall to the intelligence offices. Joe Rose had his setup there, a cubicle with phone and a typewriter.

  There was a set of keys to Rose's rented Chevy hanging on the wall, left there according to standard station procedure. Will picked up the keys and went over to the officer's club.

  There was no guard on the meat locker in the kitchen. They weren't expecting him to turn into a body snatcher.

  But that is just what this audacious man did. It's too bad that he had to use his best qualities, his quick intelligence and decisiveness, to outsmart the Air Force instead of understand the others.

  When the odor from inside the locker hit him he almost passed out.

  He drove into the town with the bundle on the back seat. It was already a hot day and the inside of the car was sweltering.

  He went up Main Street to the Gawter Funeral Home, chosen because it was the first one he found.

  "I'd like to see Mr. Gawter," he said to the young woman at the reception desk.

  "Who?"

  "The owner."

  "Mr. Steinman. Mr. Gawter died three years ago." She made a call, glanced up. "Is this in reference to a bereavement?"

  "Yes." In a sense, it was.

  "I'm so sorry for you. Mr. Steinman will meet you in the Contemplation Room. He'll show you our memorials and explain the different plans that we offer here at Gawter. Is your dear one still at the hospital?"

  "No," Will replied evenly, "he's in a bag in the backseat of the car." Macabre though it is, Will Stone has a very definite sense of humor.

  She blinked very rapidly for a moment. Then without a further word she conducted him to the "Contemplation Room," which turned out to be a showroom where coffins were lined up like late-model Buicks. A man of about fifty in a dark-blue suit approached. He was wearing a sad smile.

  Will introduced himself and showed him his CIG credentials.

  "This is a national emergency," he said. "I'm commandeering your place of business and your services forthwith. You are to close your doors at once for the duration of the time I am here. And if you ever speak to anybody concerning what you are about to witness you will be committing high treason and will be punished accordingly. Do you understand me?"

  Steinman's lips opened with a dry rasp. In those days nobody would dream of impeding a government official in pursuit of his duties.

  "I want you to send all your workers home until one o'clock this afternoon. Tell them that I am a federal mortuary inspector."

  "Yes. Please come with me to my office."

  They were soon watching the last of his six employees hurry out of the back of the building. Will got the bundle from the car.

  He'd never been backstage in a funeral home before. There were three porcelain embalming tables in the preparation area, which was air-conditioned with an evaporative cooler. The result was that the air was warm and damp instead of hot and dry.

  Each table had a drain in one corner, and was so angled that any fluids would flow right into it.

  "Where do the drains go?"

  "City sewer."

  "I want every bit of fluid from this body saved."

  "I'll get a bucket."

  Will put the bundle on the table. It was so carefully tied that he had to cut the knots with his penknife. When Steinman came back he was confronted with the little man.

  The odor was overpowering. Steinman handed Will a tube of Baume Ben-Gay. "Put a dab under your nose,"

  he said. Will informs me that it didn't help.

  Steinman opened a glass-fronted cabinet which contained trochars and rubber gloves and packages of Rock-Hard Cavity Fluid.

  He put on some rubber gloves and lifted one of the arms. It was then that he noticed something very wrong.

  No doubt it was the extreme lightness of the limb. He gasped and looked at Will in consternation. "What happened here?"

  Will did not answer directly. How could he? "What can you do to slow down decomposition?"

  "Embalm him or freeze him."

  "I have to take him somewhere. Is there a freezer truck?"

  "No truck can maintain temperature low enough to stop decay in a cadaver this far gone. It has to be frozen solid."

  Will had no choice but to go for embalming. He saw that he would have to drive the thing up to Los Alamos himself.

  "Sir, is this—may I ask—a child?"

  "This is the body of a soldier."

  Steinman peered at the face, then looked at Will. His eyes were stricken. "What happened to this man?"

  Will tried for a believable answer. "An atomic accident. The rest is classified."

  "Lord, Lord. What hath God wrought?"

  Will had to get out of that room. The odor was just too much. He stood for a moment in the hall, gasping for breath. But he didn't dare leave Steinman alone with the body so he soon went back in.

  "It's a mistake to leave the room when you have a stinker on the table," Steinman said casually. "Got to get used to it twice."

  Will describes the humid, sultry atmosphere of the preparation room as feeling like rotted grease. He slopped too much Baume Ben-Gay under his nose, inhaled some of it and went into a sneezing attack so violent he was afraid it was going to turn into a virtual epileptic fit. The powdered eggs he'd swallowed earlier for br
eakfast threatened to come up while he was Still trying to control the sneezing.

  Then he saw the mortician start trying to open the little man's coverall. It was silver with dozens of pockets and flaps and buttons on it.

  While he fumbled around in complete confusion Will finally brought himself under control.

  "Where's the zipper on this thing, anyhow?"

  They couldn't find a zipper. There were no buttons, except on the pockets and the flaps. The little man was like a cheap doll that had been sewn into its dress.

  "We'll cut it," Will announced. Steinman brought scissors, which were hopeless. Then he got a surgical scalpel. It didn't work either.

  He looked hard at Will. "Mister, I want to know what's going on here. What is this?" He gestured at the corpse.

  "I told you. A soldier—"

  "Who got himself shrunken in some kind of atomic accident? And his coverall is made of cloth that won't cut and he looks like a cross between an angel and a troll? Mister, I want to know what all of this is about or I think that I am leaving this area. Why aren't you in some government facility? The Roswell Base is a mile from here. And there is the national laboratory in Los Alamos."

  "The deterioration is happening far faster than we anticipated. You have the best facility in southern New Mexico."

  "Is it some sort of spaceman? Is that what you are bringing in I here?"

  "I don't know what in the world you're talking about," Will tried to butter his voice with scorn. "That nonsense belongs in the back pages of the newspapers. I have a dead man here, and he has a family that loves him."

  "Which reminds me of the matter of payment."

  "You'll be paid five hundred dollars."

  "Well, that is good."

  "So let's figure out how to get this damn coverall open and get on with it before we both suffocate."

  Inch by inch they examined the garment. There were no seams anywhere. When Will touched it he could feel the slight, bony skin beneath and his flesh crawled.

  "I found it! Damn, this is a cunning thing." Steinman had made a small opening in the cloth. As he pulled it got wider. It made a curious ripping sound, but he wasn't tearing anything. The two sides of the open seam were covered with strips of what looked to Will like stiff fur. It was composed of tiny hooked hairs that tangled when they were pressed together. The seam they made was almost invisible.

  I don't know whether mankind invented Velcro independently, or if MAJIC secretly leaked the technology to the rest of us.

  They opened the garment and lifted it off the body.

  And it was a perfect body. Heartbreakingly perfect. The size of a boy of about ten. The skin was gray-white and completely hairless. The genitals were about as formed as those of a three-year-old. But they were there, uncircumcised. There was no belly button.

  "My God, this is a little boy!"

  "I told you—"

  "You told me there was an accident. A soldier—shrunk I thought. Somehow."

  "A boy soldier. Doing a very brave work for the good of his country."

  "You people have gotten to killing children with your damn atomic shenanigans? For shame!"

  "For America!"

  "Let me tell you something, Mr. Government. You people forgot what America was a long time ago. This boy in this here uniform—there isn't anything in the world important enough to bring his young life to an end like this. And what did you do to his face? Operate on his eyes? Why, he's no more'n a human guinea pig."

  Will made a note that Joe Rose was to work on this man, make certain he kept his lip buttoned.

  "Embalm this cadaver, Mr. Steinman."

  "I'll do it, but I need a death certificate. I want to know where the parents are and where to ship this child.

  There's no way this little fella is leaving here in the back of a Chevrolet!"

  After Steinman had made his incision a brownish-red fluid drained out into the bucket Will had put under the table. He collected the fluid in a jar.

  Steinman brought out a syringe and a large bottle of embalming fluid. As a test Will had him swab some on the skin. When there was no reaction he let him fill the body with the fluid.

  "I'm going to get a pine box," Steinman said. "It's all I have available for a child. I'd have to order a nicer coffin from San Antonio or somewhere." He gave me a sad, lost look. "We don't get many dead children in here."

  The moment he left Will wrapped the body in the rubber sheet that covered the table. Bundling the uniform, carrying the specimen jar and the body, Will took everything out to the Chevy and drove off.

  As he left he saw Steinman standing on the front steps of the Gawter Funeral Home, looking angry.

  Steinman never revealed what he knew, and Will has no record of what may have happened to him.

  My supposition is that Joe Rose did his work well, and the funeral director took the story of the government man and the strange little child with him to his grave when at length he became one of his own corpses.

  July 12, 1947

  CLASSIFICATION TOP SECRET ULTRA

  Central Intelligence Group

  EMERGENCY REPORT ON MISSING MILITARY PERSONNEL

  Prepared by Field Headquarters Unit, Los Alamos

  Central Intelligence Group

  Copy 1 of 1

  FOR IMMEDIATE TRANSMISSION

  Circulation: The President; the Secretary of Defense; Joint Chiefs of Staff; Director, Federal Bureau of Investigation; Director, Central Intelligence Group

  To be passed by hand and destroyed on return to CIG

  Purpose

  The purpose of this report is to assess the significance of the disappearance of two military personnel in connection with extraterrestrial alien activity within the borders of the Continental United States.

  Background

  1. Burleson, Charles, PFC 0998721943, USA, 53rd Inf. Sta. Ft. Bliss.

  Disappeared during nighttime maneuvers on Fort Bliss 7/8/47.

  2. Flaherty, Michael, PFC 549112174, 1395th MP Company, RAAFB. Disappeared while on sentry duty at the site of a crashed alien disk in southern New Mexico at approximately 0335 on the night of 7/10/47 .

  Detailed Analysis

  1. PFC Burleson

  PFC Burleson disappeared during or after a night of unusual flare or light activity reported during field training maneuvers by a detached squad of 4

  Platoon, D Company. There was no indication of any morale problem. Private Burleson was absent at squad muster at 0.600 hours 7/9/47. A search was made of the squad bivouac area without results. The search was extended by the squad to nearby ravines and gullies , also without results . As there were no roads out of the area it was assumed that the soldier had met with a mishap. No trace of this soldier has been found.

  2. PFC Flaherty

  PFC Flaherty was detached for sentry and guard duty at the site of an alien object crash near Maricopa, New Mexico. He was part of a six-man unit under the command of S/Sgt. Peter Dickson . PFC Flaherty had four years experience as an MP and had a series of highly successful evaluations. He had a K-Type Security Clearance and was cleared to serve posted guard duty at nuclear weapons depots and in secured armed nuclear weapons storage locations. PFC

  Flaherty had no charges or negative comments in file, had never been AWOL or on charges of any kind. He was a bachelor age 23 . He did not drink or smoke

  . He had received a high school diploma and had plans to study civil engineering after his period of service. He was on his second tour of duty.

  On the night of 7/10/47 PFC Flaherty disappeared, apparently into the night sky. Despite a wide air and ground search over a 72-hour period no trace at all has been found of PFC Flaherty.

  Conclusion

  We conclude that both of these disappearances were the probable result of unknown alien activity. This conclusion is based on their known habit of causing bizarre disappearances, as per "Intelligence Estimate on Flying Disk Motives" prepared for limited Top Secret distribution 7/8/47. In both cas
es, there was apparent alien activity in the area.

  Recommendation

  It is urgently recommended that the following actions be taken: 1. No nighttime military maneuvers to be conducted in areas where flying disk activity is being observed by the military or reported by the public.

  2. All nighttime guard duties throughout all military commands to be placed on War Alert status until further notice, all sentries to be briefed and armed and to move in squad formation only.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Chronicle of Wilfred Stone

  I drove north into a fierce afternoon. As long as the car was in motion I had the wind, so the fact that the car stank of formaldehyde and rot wasn't unendurable. The merest whiff of it bothered me, however. My impulse was to light a cigarette but I was already half sick from too much tobacco and coffee.

  It was just me and this road and the thing in the backseat. The previous night obsessed my thoughts. What had happened out on that desert? I remembered the enormous, glaring eyes of that owl, the impossible flight

  - I was hit by a bout of shaking worse than a malarial ague.

  It was all I could do to get my foot onto the brake and get the car pulled over to the edge of the road. Mike Flaherty's screams were thrashing me.

  All of a sudden I was just so afraid.

  And I couldn't talk to a soul about it. By doing such odd things to me the aliens had isolated me from my peers.

  They were breaking me, and I knew it. The devils were out to destroy my mind.

  The minute the car stopped the stink became overwhelming.

  I jumped out and went a little into the desert. The heat almost took my breath away. It was as if the sun was actually squeezing me. I crouched down, instinctively covering my head. The smell was in my clothes, clinging to my skin, making my insides crawl with disgust.