by Tom DeLonge
As if on cue, a man came in, tall, good looking in a regular, corn-fed American kind of way, at least until he turned and revealed a dressing taped to one side of his face. His hand was bandaged too. His hair was short, and there was something about his posture—vertical and square, despite the weariness in his face—that said military.
Despite her desire for a little empty socializing, Jennifer tensed, watching him scan the room. If he were a soldier of some kind, he was apparently off duty. There was no reason to believe he was looking for her. He glanced her way, and their eyes met. His gaze lingered for a fraction of a second, and she looked down, staring at the menu. When she looked up, his eyes were on her again. There was a kindness but also a blankness in his eyes, an emptiness that seemed subdued or tired.
This was a man who needed a beer.
Maybe even, she thought wildly, a little company.
Not that kind of company, she scolded herself quickly. She wasn’t that desperate. And she wouldn’t be confiding in him or anyone else. But if a little light banter would take her mind off the bloody Ash Mountain Speckled Dace, so much the better.
He realized she was looking at him and nodded awkwardly.
“The burgers are good,” he said.
“Thanks, but I already ordered,” she said.
“Oh,” he said. “I thought … Because you were looking at the menu …?”
“Yeah. No.”
“Right. Well, enjoy your dinner.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I hope you’re not the chef.”
His brows creased in confusion and he hesitated. She gestured at the side of her face and nodded at the dressing on his.
“Sorry,” she said. “Bad joke.”
“Oh,” he said, smiling a little bleakly. “No, not a kitchen injury.”
“Sorry,” she said again, meaning it this time, a little horrified by her clumsiness. “That was insensitive of me.”
“Not at all,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“Buy you a beer to make up for it?”
The words were out of Jennifer’s mouth before she had really considered them.
He seemed taken aback, and there was something else in his eyes, something dark and sad which flashed into sight and then was wrestled back down. It intrigued her. And she was sick of being alone.
“Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”
“Good. I’ve had quite the day.”
As soon as she said it, she thought it sounded stupid in view of his dressings on what looked like to be burns. She’d had a weird day, a frustrating day. His had been genuinely bad.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Nothing,” she said, waving it away. “Just, you know, stupid tourist stuff. I don’t seem to be able to make sense of your maps.”
“Ah,” he said, hurriedly moving over and sitting opposite her. “I’m Alan, by the way.”
“Jennifer,” she replied, offering her hand. He shook it with his good hand.
“You’re English,” he remarked.
“I am?” said Jennifer with mock astonishment. “So that’s why I talk so funny!”
He looked momentarily baffled by the joke, even a little stung.
“Sorry,” she said quickly. “Not everyone gets my sense of humor.”
“Right,” he answered, nodding emphatically, as if that would counter the flicker of alarm in his eyes. Nice eyes, she decided. They were somewhere between blue and green and a little smoky, but they looked haunted, weary. “So what are you doing out here? Looking for UFOs?”
He laughed, but it didn’t feel like a real laugh, and her answering laugh was about the same.
“Just passing through,” she said, adding, as she processed that absurd western gunslinger cliché in her head, “to look at the scenery.”
“Grand Canyon?” said the man, nodding, his bandaged hand rising self-consciously to the strapping on his face, then pulling away again.
“What?”
“Did you come to see the Grand Canyon?”
Jennifer had no idea where anything was. She had come to see a dodgy bit of land across the street from a classified airbase. She had no idea the Grand Canyon was anywhere close by.
“Right,” she said. “Yes. The Grand Canyon. Hoping to get there soon.”
“How long are you over?”
“Not sure yet,” she said. “It’s an open-ended trip.”
“Must be nice.”
Jennifer looked at him. Was there a hint of criticism there?
“I’m between projects,” she said, immediately wishing she hadn’t and determined to head him off before he could ask her what kind of projects, which she would have to answer with lies she wouldn’t be able to keep track of. “What about you? You work locally?”
“At the moment,” he said. “Yes.”
Again for a second she saw the bleakness in his face, but he avoided her eyes.
“What do you do?”
He seemed to hesitate again, and there was that momentary sense that he was checking the room and lowering his voice.
“I was a pilot,” he said. “Marines. But I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Right,” she said, mentally pushing herself away from the table.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“You seem … I don’t know. Did I say the wrong thing?”
“No. It’s nothing.”
“Doesn’t seem like nothing,” he said.
“Well it won’t be if you keep pushing.”
“Get you a beer or something, hon?” said the waitress materializing at his elbow.
“Sure.”
“Bud, Bud Light, Miller …?”
“Bud’s fine,” he said, his eyes still on Jennifer.
“And something to eat?” asked the waitress.
“Haven’t decided yet,” he answered.
“You take your time,” she said. “I’ll be right back with that beer. You okay for now, hon?” she asked Jennifer.
“I’m fine, thanks,” she answered, wishing the woman would leave.
“Another beer?” the waitress suggested.
“I said I’m fine. That means no.”
She said it more crisply than she meant, and the waitress looked slightly taken aback as she bustled off.
“Guess you’re not too keen on waitresses either,” said the man called Alan. This time, the criticism was unmistakable.
“I just don’t know why they can’t leave people alone,” Jennifer replied, trying to make light of it, but needled. “In England they serve you and you pay them. Here it’s like they are trying to be your friends. I don’t need that.”
“Just trying to be nice, I guess,” said Alan.
“I understand that but, as I said, I’m not looking to make friends.”
“I’m getting that,” he said. “Not too keen on soldiers either, huh?”
Jennifer sighed. She could play nice like ladies were supposed to, or she could speak her mind, and though she had been ready—even eager—to relax and have a beer with a stranger who didn’t want to talk about secret finance schemes or endangered species, she was in no mood to play the demure school girl.
“You want to know the truth?” she said, sitting back.
“Sure,” said Alan. “I don’t think we could get off on a worse footing, so what the hell?”
“Fine,” she said, bristling. “No, I don’t automatically think it’s wonderful when people sign away their capacity to think for themselves, or make their own moral choices, and rely instead on orders that come from other people with their own agendas, orders that involve killing other people.”
“Those orders come from our democratically elected government leaders, who are protecting the freedoms of the American people.”
“Bollocks,” Jennifer spat. “How many wars has the US fought in the last hundred years that had anything to do with American freedoms? Invading Iraq didn’t. In fact it made more enemies for America, more threats. Everyone can see that. T
he US military protects American business interests, not American freedom. And those interests rarely have anything to do with ordinary people. The US military is driven by corporations, by multinational companies whose sole purpose is maintaining whatever economic landscape will best maximize their profits. Do you know who you work for, Alan? Do you really?”
He was staring at her as the waitress arrived.
“Your beer, hon,” she said.
“You know,” he said, “I think I’ll drink it at the bar.”
As he walked away, Jennifer took a long swallow of her beer and muttered, “Nice to meet you too.”
But she watched him for a moment, and he wasn’t just angry or bitter at the way she’d spoken to him. He was miserable, and she had been too busy climbing on her high horse to see how deep that misery went. Her righteous indignation stalled, but she felt not so much pity as dread, as if he had seen things most people would never have to see, and that somehow chilled her even more than the Little A’le Inn’s hyperactive air conditioning.
45
TIMIKA
Location Unknown
FOR A SECOND, SHE STARED, THE MUNDANE EXPLANATION somehow more surreal than the idea of an actual alien. She reached for the bulbous head, grasped its yielding softness in one fist and pulled. The whole head slid up and off, revealing a pale man with wild blue eyes and a sweaty mop of dark hair. Timika flung the mask away in disgust and punched the prone man hard in the cheek, a thoughtless, spontaneous blow driven by all her formidable anger.
It hurt her hand, but not as much as it hurt him. He’d been trying to get up, and the blow banged his head on the floor and he lay still.
“That’s right,” she muttered to herself. “Pull that Scooby Doo-mask shit on me …”
She took her foot off his back, and saw a vial of clear liquid roll out of his pocket. She’d been drugged. She kicked the fallen man’s knee, but when he did not respond she stepped to the door, aware of the bustle of shadowy movement through the smoked-glass windows, and pushed on it. She could still see no handle and assumed she was now locked inside, but the panel yielded to her touch. For all its high-tech appearance, it was plasticky and thin. She shoved it harder and it moved aside, the force of her action dislodging it from some unseen rail so that it popped out and hung at an angle. The room beyond was cluttered and untidy, the desk behind the smoked windows scattered with soda cans and snack-food wrappers. What was sleek and spacey inside the hexagonal room was, seen from the other side, roughly nailed slats of wood and low tech controls, hung with wires and an old-fashioned microphone in a desk stand.
It was, she realized with a shock of both relief and outrage, a stage set.
The other two “aliens” scrambled away from her. One was tugging its clumsy head off. It was a woman, blond and scared looking. The anxious, uncertain look in the woman’s blue eyes filled Timika with a kind of savage triumph. She raised the scalpel menacingly, and the woman huddled further away.
“Yeah,” Timika snarled. “You’d better run.”
The control room, such as it was, was not much larger than the cell itself, and there was a single exit door, closer to her than to the two terrified “aliens.” Timika tried it, keeping her eye on the scared woman in the corner who, so far, had not said a word. It opened, admitting her to a long concrete corridor lit by a red light in a cage over the door: a warning light that their little show was in progress.
Not anymore.
Timika broke into a trot. The corridor was flanked by other doors with red lamps above them—all dark. It felt utilitarian, like the hallway of a multi-story car park, and it ended in a flight of steps. She went up and found a wider space, more internal doors, a locker room of sorts, and another with windows and desks and computers. It seemed deserted. She would have passed it by, but she glimpsed her own jacket hanging over the back of a chair.
She set her teeth, muttered to herself about people who stole her shit, and burst through the door. There was no sign of her laptop, but she caught up the jacket, feeling the weight of it: Jerzy Stern’s journal was still nestled in the lining.
Good. They weren’t having that at least, whoever they were.
She put a little pressure on her left breast and felt the little key digging into her skin. Despite the electrodes they’d positioned to monitor her life signs, they apparently hadn’t searched her that thoroughly.
Also good.
She followed the corridor round and came to an elevator. She considered it. If her escape had been announced—and she was sure it would have been—using the elevator might leave her trapped between floors. She looked for stairs and found, instead, a narrow shaft with a ladder set into the concrete.
“I guess we go up,” she muttered to herself, unenthusiastically.
The rungs were solid, smooth and rust free, but Timika didn’t like heights. She took a long breath, glanced back along the empty hallway to see if she was being pursued, and started to climb.
She counted the rungs as she went, not looking down, trying to figure how high she was. At thirty rungs, she figured she’d gone at least two stories. The end was in sight. Forty-four rungs brought her to a small concrete chamber with a metal door.
It will be locked, she thought, desperately, and I’ll have to go back down …
But it wasn’t. The door was, she guessed, an emergency exit, and barred on the inside. She released the bar, turned the mechanism with difficulty, and dragged the heavy, squeaking door open.
She was greeted with a howl of cold and a dusting of snow that made no sense at all. It had been chilly in Pennsylvania, considering it was supposed to be spring, but this?
She was outside. But where?
As she stepped clear, she looked back. The iron hatch gave onto what looked like a concrete hut and nothing more. There was no sign of the complex she’d been in below ground. Above it were trees and a road, but these were not the trees or road of the Pennsylvania forest where she’d been abducted. The trees were closely packed hardwoods, silver-barked and heavy with snow, a wild and vast forest, traversed by a road quite unlike the one she’d been driving on.
That had been a narrow ribbon of blacktop with lane markings that wound leisurely through the woods in an undulating wave as the ground rose and fell. This was a dirt track, rutted but straight, shooting arrow-like through miles and miles of unbroken woodland. And the cold, the deep snow? It made no sense. She shrugged her way into her jacket and looked around.
Lose yourself in the woods, or follow the road, and if the latter, which way?
A hundred yards or so along the track was a signpost. She trudged through the softness of the freshly fallen snow, rounded the sign and peered up. It was yellow and battered so that the bare metal shone through and the words on it were …
Greek? Russian? Something like that. Three lines of unfamiliar letters and exclamation points. She stared at it.
Where the hell was she? And, more to the point, how was she going to get out?
The road showed no tire marks. If she set off walking, how far would she make it before she froze to death? She considered the long, straight road through the trees, and the answer floated back to her with a chill certainty.
Not far enough.
She thought furiously. Whatever the facility was, there were people here. That meant supplies and ways of getting them in and out. In other words, vehicles. Somewhere. She’d come up the ladder shaft, but there had been an elevator too. Where did that come out?
She turned around and saw, just beyond the concrete shaft, where a second road, almost obliterated by the snow, cut back toward the underground facility. She took it, her pace quickening. She’d gone no more than forty yards when the trees to her left opened up and she saw, set back from the road and concealed behind a row of trees, a concrete bunker with a wide roll-up door and a collection of concrete buildings behind it. One sprouted a pair of radio masts and three oversized satellite dishes. Parked alongside it was a pair of pickup trucks, and a sno
wcat with skis at the front and caterpillar tracks in back.
Jackpot.
Of course, she’d need keys. It was too much to hope that her abductors had left the doors unlocked and the keys tucked behind the driver’s vanity mirror. But if they hadn’t … The prospect of going back inside the concrete bunkers with its alien-suited people made her flesh creep. Perhaps if she went back to the ladder …
“Stop! Ne shevelis!”
She turned to find a soldier in gray-and-white camo, legs shoulder width apart, some kind of automatic rifle with a banana clip shouldered and trained directly on her. He was young and pale, his face pink from the cold. He wore a fur hat instead of a helmet, but his camo was clearly a uniform, and the points of color on his shoulders and collar were insignia of some sort. She stood very still, her hands rising behind her head.
The soldier called out again, over his shoulder this time, and two more soldiers appeared, one with a pistol, the other armed like the first. The one with the pistol pulled a lapel radio close to his mouth and spoke hurriedly into it. Timika stood very still, dimly aware that it was snowing again, small, icy flakes that blew purposefully in the stiff breeze. She turned only fractionally as she heard the garage door at her back roll up. Two sets of feet. A man and …
Her. The woman who had been one of the “aliens” down below.
She was wearing ordinary clothes now, but the eyes were the same as before, cool, blue. Before they had been frightened. Now they were hard with anger. She muttered a few words to the man hurrying to catch her up—Russian? Timika thought so. She was in Russia. Probably Siberia, from the looks of it. The woman’s eyes stayed locked on her prisoner. The wind blew her hair in her face and she whipped it aside, her gaze freezing hard as she strode closer. Timika watched the eyes, so she did not see the hand with the syringe before it was too late. The woman jabbed her once, a quick, precise and practiced gesture that found her neck a second before the man beside her took hold of Timika’s hands so she could no longer resist.