The Grays

by Strieber, Whitley

  Crew got an arm free from beneath Wilkes’s weight, reached up, and tore at his ear. For a moment, nothing happened. With all the strength he possessed, he pulled harder. Wilkes growled through his bared teeth. His head twisted to one side, slowly, slowly. Then, suddenly, Crew could not breathe. He saw blackness coming around the edges of his eyes, deep, warm blackness.

  Eight thousand miles away in Cairo, the pyramids lay beneath a night sky choked with smog. Around them, the city roared, an onrushing cataract of light and noise. A furtive jackal that haunted the edge of a nearby slum raised its head, cocked its ears, and whined. Dogs in the flat houses that hugged the pyramid compound began to pace. An old man who had been tending a smoky kerosene heater paused, looked up, then got a ladder and climbed up to his roof.

  Crew drew up both his legs, and kicked Wilkes so hard that he flew into the air. He hit hard but rolled, moving with distressing agility. Crew fought for breath, managed to pull himself to his feet. His throat was partly crushed. He cut off the pain as best he could, concentrating his attention in his crashing heart, willing it to beat strong and steady. He waited, watching for movement in the dust, insisting to himself that he would not die here.

  After a time, he began to hope that the silence he was listening to was the silence of death. Had he won? He watched a last shaft of sunlight creeping across the part of the floor he could see, sunlight that rendered the wheat dust golden. The smell of this place, the dry, faintly sweet odor of grain, reminded him of home.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated on getting strong enough to get out of here. Only after some moments did he become aware that there was breathing that had not been there a moment before, and that it was very close.

  Wilkes hammered him in the face so hard that Crew saw an explosion of lights, immediately followed by a curious sort of darkness. He tried to raise his right arm but it would not come up.

  Fingers explored around his neck again, this time with tremendous speed and power. With a shuddering crackle, his windpipe was collapsed.

  In Cairo now, feral dogs howled, jackals yapped and paced, and the old man in his white soutane and fez crossed his arms over his chest in a gesture that would have been familiar to the pharaohs, and bowed his head toward the Great Pyramid.

  Closer to the structure, a guard looked up from his charcoal brazier and frowned. He called to his companion. Both turned toward the pyramid. They saw, along its vast side, a spatter of pure white sparks. Coming as if from the throat of the Earth itself, a vibrating hum shivered the two men from within.

  They ran.

  Crew was dead. He was still moving, but nothing would enable him to breathe again. Mike watched him, smiling with an artist’s gentle amazement at his completed work.

  Crew’s air hunger increased. His thoughts were distant and unreal. The anguish of suffocation made him frantic, made his sphincters release, and he shat and pissed himself, and rolled in agony on the floor.

  Mike positioned himself and kicked Crew so hard that his head, flying back, caused his neck to snap. He looked down at the sprawled body, then pushed at it with his foot to confirm the obvious.

  He went to the door, opened it, and took two small bottles out of his trousers. One was cracked and oozing. Carefully, he collected the thick liquid in the palm of his hand. He poured the dark purple contents of the other bottle onto the floor, making a tiny hill of the crystals. Then he poured the glycerin from his palm over the potassium permangenate. He stepped out through the door and was gone.

  As he sailed the ancient lays of the Earth, Crew felt absolutely nothing. Objectively, he knew that he was dead, but this had lost its importance.

  In Cairo, the pyramid flickered with blue light. People came out onto the roofs of houses, stopped their cars in the streets, stared at the midnight spectacle. Dogs barked wildly, jackals sang, tourist camels boomed, and horses tossed their scruffy manes.

  Crew knew he had reached the place of ascension, he felt it as a warmth caressing him. All pain fell away and all memory of pain.

  A tourist who had bribed the guards to let him spend the night in the king’s chamber leaped out of the sarcophagus as it filled with blistering incandescence.

  The old man on his roof moved round and round in an ecstasy of graceful concentration, dancing a dance that had been handed down across the generations, not among the Arab invaders of Egypt, but in the secret Sufi ways that were drawn from the old religion, the hidden science that had last sent souls across the chasm of space when Akhenaten and Nefertiti had gone home.

  A light so great that it dimmed the glare of Cairo itself then filled the air. The very stones of the pyramid glowed as if on fire from the inside.

  People screamed, dogs howled, the jackals writhed in agony.

  Then, darkness.

  All returned to normal. The old man bowed again toward the pyramid. Smiling a toothless smile, he went back down to tend his broken heater.

  An image formed in Crew’s memory, of the scents and lights and caresses of home. He turned his face heavenward, following the golden thread of love more and more swiftly. Soon he saw a gentle rain of stars, and knew that this was the passing void of heaven itself. For a few timeless moments, he traveled the perfect physics that was long ago devised for the journey of souls.

  Then he saw the wheeling immensity of the galaxy, a crystal conflagration of stars in blue, white, red, yellow, green, large and small, spread across the silence.

  Below him came the gigantic horizon of a planet, as he sailed out of darkness into the sunlit side. Now he saw broad lands, farms in silver morning.

  He let the weight of his love draw him downward. Soon he could make out individual farmsteads, their thatched roofs clustered together beneath ancient trees. Then he could see, far away, the White City shimmering on the horizon, and carts in the roads going toward it laden and returning empty. Dropping closer, he could hear the great auris singing as they passed one another on the road, and their drovers humming the tunes that gentled their raucous dispositions.

  He came to his own farm, saw it spread below him, its fields rich with bowing wheat. The love he felt was so great that it made him glow, and he heard voices rise below. They could see him coming, a shaft of light dropping down out of the sky. He heard his sons’ shrill voices and his wife’s cries of alarm and joy.

  Then he was over the cool room, set partly in the earth, where his return would take place. He dropped down though the roof, which felt like a sort of smoke of straw. Below him now was a body on a stone table. It was his own body, indistinguishable from the one the humans called “Crew.” It was naked, this body, lovingly groomed.

  The next thing he knew, he was looking out of its blinking eyes. The room was lit by flickering candlelight. He inhaled. Perfect air, clear, faintly scented with the odor of his wife. He lay naked on the familiar stone table. His wife, looking tired in her sweated muslin work clothes, gazed down at him.

  She bent to him, then, and kissed him long, and he was home.

  TWENTY-NINE

  A FLASH FILLED THE AIR, as if a gigantic flashbulb had gone off in the sky. Conner began to count, “One, two, three, four—”

  “What the hell?”

  “Shh! Six, seven—”

  A long roar rolled in, full of thuds deeper than thunder.

  Conner looked from Dan to his mother. “The grain elevator just exploded,” he said. It had to be that, unless somebody had dropped a very large bomb on little Wilton, Kentucky. Nothing else in town was big enough.

  The phone rang. Conner snatched it up. “Hey, Paulie! I know. Okay!” He pointed out the kitchen window. Katelyn saw a great mushroom of smoke rising in the direction of Wilton.

  Within a couple of minutes, a horn started honking out front. “It’s the Warners,” Conner yelled. As he stopped at the hall closet to get his jacket, Dan grabbed the video camera.

  Katelyn did not want to be trapped in a car with the Warners. She went out behind Dan and Conner. “We’ll take our c
ar,” she called. But Conner jumped into the Warners’ backseat with Paulie and they were off. She and Dan went into the garage and got in their car.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I consider that a rescue.”

  “What in hell happened in town, and how do we know it’s the grain elevator? What if it’s terrorists?”

  “In Wilton, Kentucky? Anyway, Conner’s always right.”

  He stepped on the accelerator, seeking to stay close to the Warners’ speeding van.

  MIKE WILKES WAS JUST STARTING his car when the blast took place. There was a gigantic roar and a flash like a sheet of silver-white filling the whole world. Frantically, he switched on the ignition. The car was already in motion when a large piece of the elevator’s tin roof struck it, smashing the windshield and caving in the roof to the point that Mike was lucky even to get the door open. As he crawled out of the ruined car, a segment of conveyer buckets slammed into the snow a foot away. He slid under the car, then, and waited while debris rained down.

  When it finally stopped and Mike came out, he saw that the car was a complete wreck. Worse, he could hear sirens. He had to get away from here.

  The elevator was burning furiously now, the fire heating his back even from this distance. At least he had accomplished his objective. In a little town like Wilton, a spectacle on this scale would draw everybody who could move, and especially the kids. As he had intended.

  He loped in the direction of a line of abandoned stores across the street from the elevator, and ducked down an alley. As he did so, a small fire engine came up and stopped, its horn blaring, its siren whining. It stopped beside the Volvo. As the siren ground down, firemen jumped out and examined the car. An instant later they all looked up—directly toward Mike.

  His tracks, of course, his damned tracks in the snow.

  He turned and ran, ducking down an alley and out into a disused rail yard. A glance backward told him that the antenna still stood, taped as it was to the tank farthest from the collapsed roof of the elevator. The transmitter would be doing its work, now, and would continue until the tank itself disintegrated.

  He threaded his way across frozen tracks. He could not escape, of course, not slowed by the snow and chased by men who were not injured.

  It had been Crew in there, Crew! They would find the body. With arson and murder charges against him, the Trust would disappear from his life. Worse, nobody would know for certain if the kid had survived.

  CHARLES GUNN’S PHONE RANG. HE picked it up, was told by a young voice that there had just been a major explosion in Wilton. He input his code into a satellite access node on his laptop and chose the correct satellite, then zoomed until he had a clear shot of the town from above.

  There was smoke pouring out of a large building. He recognized three circular storage tanks. A grain elevator. He sat staring at it for some minutes.

  What might it mean? Was Mike in trouble or was he succeeding? He was not reachable by phone, so there was no way to tell.

  At that moment, his six-year-old daughter came in. “Mommy says to ask if you want coffee.”

  He drew his little girl close to him. As he nuzzled her flaxen hair, he punched numbers into his phone. “Mr. President,” he said, “the time is now.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, sir, we needed it some time ago.”

  “And it’s going to be a purely localized thing?”

  “Oh, absolutely, sir. Minimal damage.”

  “Thank you, Charles.” The president hung up.

  Charles looked at the phone. What did this mean? He hadn’t cancelled the order, surely. No, he would have said something to that effect . . . wouldn’t he?

  His daughter asked, “Was that the president?”

  He kissed her.

  “Mommy says you’re very important. Are you very important?”

  “What’s important to me is being your daddy, punkin.” He lifted her into his lap. She gazed into his eyes.

  She frowned. “Are you upset, Daddy?”

  He hugged his little girl.

  MIKE WILKES NOTED THAT FIREMEN were not only chasing him now, they were making radio calls, and he could hear a higher-pitched siren, then another. They were getting the police.

  He’d run out of options. He pulled the plane’s remote out of his pocket and activated its GPS. He stopped long enough to input the code series that brought the plane to life. At each stage, he got a positive response. It was out there, thank God, and intact. Then the ETA came in: four minutes and twelve seconds before it could reach this location. Way too long, damnit!

  LAUREN WAS FAIRLY SURE THAT she could sense Conner in her mind. What was amazing about this was that he was nowhere near this base, he couldn’t be. She’d been able to perceive Adam’s mind from no more than a few feet away. “I sense something,” she said to Rob. “The boy is . . . agitated.”

  “He’s seen the explosion. How do you feel him?”

  “It’s like remembering somebody in present tense, if that makes any sense.”

  “Is he in jeopardy?”

  “I’m not sure. He seems agitated.”

  He called Crew’s cell phone again and again got his terse recorded message. Then he phoned Pete Simpson.

  “We identified Wilkes’s car. We located him in the town. I told Lewis immediately. The Mountain says that Wilkes’s car hasn’t moved from behind the grain elevator.”

  Rob thanked Pete and hung up. He gazed out the window. On the horizon, there was smoke. “Look, I’m going to go into town.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  “Not with Mike at large. I need to get this situation into focus for me first.”

  She let him go.

  BEYOND THE RAIL YARD MIKE could see the center of Wilton. Cars came this way, and twenty or thirty people hurried up the broad street that crossed the rail yard and went past the elevator. At least one or two of them were bound to be among his human bombs, and they were walking right into the range of the signal that would trigger them . . . as indeed, was the whole community.

  His bait was working efficiently. There was now little question in his mind but that the child would die.

  Outside, the crowd came closer to the burning structure. Nobody could see the antenna, let alone imagine that it was there, or how extraordinarily dangerous it was.

  The streams from the firemen’s hoses made sleet, which slicked the ground. Sliding, Mike ran toward the crowd, picking out a woman who was hurrying along with her daughter.

  “Hi there,” he said as he trotted up to them.

  Her eyes widened as she looked at him. “He’s hurt,” the little girl said.

  “Oh my God—here, I’ve got my cell.” She began to rummage in her purse. A police car roared around the corner and came straight toward them across the rail yard.

  He grabbed her shoulder, drew his gun, and thrust it into her face. “Shut up,” he yelled. “Don’t move!” He glared down at the little girl. “You move and your mommie gets her head blown open.”

  The little girl began making a shrill, desolate noise.

  Two minutes and eight seconds before the TR would arrive. Getting aboard would be a near thing. He’d have to carry the kid.

  “Take it easy,” one of the two cops approaching him called.

  “Don’t move an inch! One inch and she’s fucking dead!”

  The woman gobbled in her throat.

  The cops froze.

  The little girl screamed at the cops, “Help my mommy!”

  They stayed like that, and a standoff was just what he needed.

  Finally, a warning warble came from the plane’s remote. Mike was brushed with warm wash from its fans. There was no frost visible, because the dehumidifiers would be working to remove every trace of moisture from that exhaust.

  With a swift and controlled motion, he reached around the mother and wove his fingers through the girl’s hair. She howled and kicked and turned red as he dragged her. The remote was chiming, two discordant notes. He thu
mbed the hatch control.

  “Jesus Christ,” one of the cops yelled as the stair came down, apparently out of clear sky. But then, of course, with the eye drawn to it, they could see the plane, a faint outline, its lines visible where the camouflage worked imperfectly. It wasn’t designed to be invisible from this close, not if you were aware of its presence.

  Dragging the little girl by the hair, with her mother walking along, her hands out, begging, her eyes wild, full of tears, he backed up to the ladder.

  The child scrabbled at his hand in agony. An odor of urine rose from her twisting, struggling body.

  All in one motion, he dropped the girl and climbed into the ship. He jammed at the remote, but not fast enough, he had a cop on the damn ladder. The man was looking up at him, trying to bring his gun to bear.

  Mike fired directly into his face, which exploded like a smashed pumpkin when the jacketed magnum bullet blasted it. The body dropped away and the ladder came up as Mike slid to the cockpit and dropped into the seat.

  He hammered buttons, preparing one of the twelve diversions the plane carried. It would eject in ten seconds. Outside, he heard a shot. The plane was not armored in any way and that would do damage, for certain. Immediately, he got an alarm on one of the sixteen exhaust fans. As Mike took the ship up two hundred feet at a sharp angle, the damaged fan shut down.

  The diversion ejected. This was an extremely bright plasma, which would draw the eye of everybody in the area. Gunfire erupted as the cops, deceived into believing that the glaring orb was the ship, shot into it.

  Resistant to the Earth’s natural electrical charge, the coherent plasma shot off into the sky faster than a bullet.

  “Holy God,” a voice yelled.

  “That was a Goddamn UFO!”

  Every eye was scanning the sky in the direction the diversion had gone. Mike turned the ship and moved off, quietly working his way out of town.

  THIRTY