The Grays

by Strieber, Whitley

  Charles traveled over the mess, heading for the Mall. He moved just inches above the Reflecting Pool, aiming toward the Washington Monument.

  High above, the long snout of the scalar weapon now glowed bright red. Every time Charles pressed the button in the TR down below, the red fluttered brilliant white, and a ball of light shot toward the Earth.

  Tourists screamed and ran across the Mall as the worst earthquake to strike the area since the Mississippi embayment in 1811 rumbled and rattled. The Washington Monument swayed, its sheer marble facing dancing with cracks. Inside, more tourists scrambled down the stairs.

  The monument came down almost gracefully, sinking into its own base as it disintegrated. Marble is a soft stone, and does not stand up well under stress.

  Charles circled the collapsing monument, then moved toward the Capitol. Far overhead, the scalar weapon’s servos emitted flashes as it made fine adjustments.

  Congress was in session when the balconies swayed like hammocks and crashed down into the house chamber. Fortunately for all except the observers, few representatives were actually in attendance.

  The Senate was not so lucky. A ceremony honoring a retiring senator was under way, and three-quarters of the senators were present when the chandeliers began to fall, exploding into the chamber with horrendous loss of life.

  The quake, finally finding a fault line, spread through the area. The tunnel to the Senate Office Building caved in. Then the Anacostia Bridge fell. Everywhere, people strove to keep their feet, tried desperately to avoid falling monuments and falling ceilings.

  Charles continued his mad ballet, paying special attention now to the Pentagon. Inside, people held onto their desks or clung to doors and walls, but the tough old structure would not come down.

  Finally, Charles took his finger off the button. At monitoring stations around the world, the pens of seismographs returned to normal. But the record was clear: an earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale had struck Washington, D.C. Strangely, the epicenter was located very close to the surface, rather than the three to ten miles beneath it that was normal. Stranger still, no fault line was known that could account for the highly localized event, which had been centered, for all practical purposes, on the White House. And yet it appeared to be entirely natural.

  Henry Vorona, who had been in a car on the Anacostia Bridge when it collapsed, drowned with the two men who had arrested him. He died furious at Charles and at life, but also relieved, because he knew that the Trust would now certainly survive.

  The president died, too, crushed beneath the desk he had so proudly accepted as his own, never dreaming that he would come to his end behind it—or rather, under it.

  Charles grabbed altitude and headed off west-northwest as a flight of F-16s scrambled from Andrews screamed past him, their engine noise practically blowing out his ears.

  “Mike, are you still up?”

  “Just about on the deck.”

  “What’s the status of the kid?”

  “Unknown.”

  “Goddamn you.”

  TERRY AND JOHN KELTON CAME out of the woods, both with high-powered rifles. As they strode past Dan, Terry knelt and fired into the trees.

  Lauren leaped through the snow—which here had drifted as high as her chest—leaped and struggled in a slow-motion nightmare, feeling the cold of it sear her in places where she had never been cold. She clawed on anyway, because she knew without fully understanding that this was one of those tiny, secret moments on which a whole future turns.

  She saw John laugh and stride forward so powerfully that the snow seemed to part for him like the Red Sea, as if he was helped in some way by the purity of evil itself.

  “Rob,” Lauren screamed. “Rob, shoot!”

  Rob struggled to raise his gun, his whole body shaking with the effort.

  Three of the Keltons zeroed in on Conner. Lauren saw that they were converging with a fourth, a boy of about fifteen. She recognized him from that last session with Adam: he had the hair, the face, the build of the image of the boy that Adam had put in her mind and that she had described so carefully to Mike.

  “Oh, Mike, you are good at what you do.” He had turned the grays’ own decoy into one of Conner’s assassins.

  She broke free of the drift and ran hard, but all the hunters except the fifteen-year-old were too far ahead of her. “Rob,” she shouted in his direction, “Rob, stop them!”

  Rob stood as still as if he had frozen, and Lauren feared for a moment that he had done just that, but that limp, flopping arm still came up, still carried the heavy pistol. He grimaced in agony, his face now lined with bars of frozen blood.

  She watched the shattered arm rise impossibly higher and higher, the gun wavering in it. Then she launched herself in a final burst and took down Jimbo. He exhaled with a whoosh and fell, and she grabbed his shoulders and kept smashing his head into the ground as hard as she could, so hard that it soon packed the layer of snow beneath it and began to make thudding sounds, and his eyes began to roll.

  Rob raised the gun higher. Higher. And kept raising it up right past the hunters. “ROB! ROB, WAKE UP!”

  Rob’s face worked, his eyes rolling. She looked up to where the gun pointed and cried out, astonished, a red-hot knife of terror stabbing her heart as she saw just a few feet overhead, a gigantic shimmering triangle that looked so much like the sky above that she hadn’t noticed it before.

  The gun blasted and Rob hissed through bared teeth in his agony as the kick flashed torment down his arm. With his mangled left hand he shoveled snow against his face to force consciousness back, and fired into the thing overhead again and again.

  “Alert. Auto destruct in ten seconds. Nine. Eight—”

  As Mike twisted the controls, the TR wheeled away from the clearing, its huge wing skimming the treetops, leaving behind billows of snow.

  “Five. Four.”

  He slid down to the hatch. The treetops were five feet below him.

  He leaped. As he did, he felt a fierce blast of heat from the dying TR. He crashed down among the wide pine branches and landed hard in a billow of snow. He checked himself, got to his feet—and realized that his ankle was broken.

  Rob Langford stood not ten feet away. Mike’s pistol was gone, but he began to hobble toward Langford anyway.

  “Rob, you’ve got to help me.”

  “I can’t do that, Mike.”

  “Rob, you don’t want the whole human race loaded with chains. You’re too good a man to want a thing like that.”

  “They’re not loading us with chains, Mike, they’re giving us wings.”

  “How the hell would you know?”

  As Rob stood staring at him out of filmed eyes, Mike dragged himself closer.

  He watched as if in a balletic nightmare as Rob’s pistol slowly rose from his side, clutched in a hand that looked like gnawed meat, and braced by a burned claw.

  The pistol came to bear. He saw Langford’s teeth grinding, his eyes squinting with effort. He was almost on him now, just a couple more feet.

  But the hammer went back, and he knew he had lost.

  THIRTY-THREE

  THE GUN WENT CLICK. AGAIN, click. Langford dropped it into the snow and Mike reached him, shoved him back, and pounded him in the face with all his might. But Langford was also a powerful, resourceful man, and he fought back, finally hurtling Mike off him with his feet, sending him sprawling in the snow.

  Mike tried to get up. He pushed at the ground and struggled with all his strength to raise himself but he could not. More than just an ankle was broken, he knew that from the blood frothing his lips.

  Then a fist came down, and the lights went out.

  Somehow, Rob got to his feet. Somehow, he moved toward the clearing. He hoped that Wilkes would be out, at least for a couple of minutes. But he knew the colonel. The colonel was one to be reckoned with.

  Screaming in agony, he forced his mangled hand into his pocket. As he got a fresh clip into his pistol, he g
agged, bent double, and retched from the agony of using the hand.

  Step by agonized step, he moved toward the tableau in the clearing. His uniform hung in tatters, blood gushed down his right arm and left a frozen trail in the snow. Now the gun came back up, this time pointing toward John Kelton.

  John raised his rifle but he was not a military man and Rob got off the first round, which sent him flying back thirty feet into the trees. It hadn’t been a fatal shot, Rob saw, as John clutched a bleeding shoulder.

  Snow cascaded down around Terry, who cried out when he saw his dad go down. Mrs. Kelton came rushing through the woods screaming.

  Good, Rob thought, they were distracted. He prepared to shoot them both the moment he had clear lines of fire.

  Dan lay in the sanctity of his wounds, looking into the peace of the darkening sky. He remembered Katelyn on the catwalk in the secret world of their childhood, when the grays had stitched their lives together. He remembered her thin summer nightgown, and that face, Katelyn in the summer of her girlhood, became what he would take with him if now was when he traveled on.

  Lauren got off the inert form of the Kelton boy she had taken down. In that moment, Rob appeared. He looked through his one unswollen eye. Like a stone, the pistol dropped from his hand. His head lolled to his chest. “The others are coming,” he slurred. “Got to stop them, Lauren.”

  As he toppled forward, Lauren shouted, “Somebody help him!” But there was nobody to do that. Rob was so caked with frozen blood he looked like he was wearing the uniform of a butcher.

  She went down to him and embraced him, telling him that she would save him. She ripped off her own parka and put it under his head. He smiled a little. “You’re gonna freeze your ass,” he said. Then his eyes closed in the way people’s eyes close when they are dying and she cried out again, “Help us, somebody help us!”

  Suddenly, the eyes opened. They bored into hers. “You’ve got work to do, soldier.”

  Crying, begging God for his life, she picked up his pistol and ran to her duty in the woods.

  It was dark and silent in among the trees. She peered ahead. Every time she moved, snow came in cascades off the pines. But the movement of others was easy to follow, because their passing had done the same thing.

  She listened.

  At that moment, a shocking and, she thought, totally inappropriate thing happened. She was plunged back into her babyhood, and was walking again for the first time.

  That was Adam’s signature!

  But Adam was dead, so—

  She saw movement in the woods—a shadow back among the branches that had a great, soft eye like a deer.

  At that instant, Conner, who was running blindly, saw Lauren’s face in his mind just as clearly as if she’d been on a TV screen five feet in front of him. Her eyes were full of a very special sort of light, pure blue as the sky, tinged at the edges with a million other colors, the richest, most beautiful light he had ever seen.

  She saw him, also, in that moment, as if at the end of a tunnel of light that wound through the trees.

  She struggled forward in a haze of cascading snow and whipping branches, and the light gleamed on the snow, elusive, disappearing at moments, then coming again.

  Before she could reach Conner, though, a figure was there. The older of the two teens. He had a rifle and he was pointing it. Then Conner came into view. The kid turned toward him.

  Lauren raised Rob’s pistol and in one motion fired, and the shooter flew into the snow and lay still. Then she moved toward Conner.

  He turned toward her, looked from her face to the pistol—and literally disappeared before her eyes.

  She still saw him, but only in her mind’s eye, standing there staring fixedly at her. Like Adam had done, exactly like Adam!

  She went down on one knee, put the pistol in the snow, and said, “Conner, Conner, I won’t hurt you.” She projected an image of herself hugging him. Instantly, an image came back into her head from Conner, of him begging silently with his hands. I won’t hurt you, she said in her mind, in exactly the same way she had talked to Adam.

  There was a flash of movement before her, then another, this one more clear. Then he was standing there again. She threw her arms around him and lifted him to her. Her mind and his mind seemed to swirl together, and it was sheer pleasure and joy, like counting every number to the highest number, and knowing that there would be ever more perfect numbers ahead.

  Katelyn came out of the woods.

  As Conner went to his mother, Lauren asked him, “Where are the other shooters? Can you tell?”

  “Close your eyes,” he said.

  She saw an image of a man lying at the bottom of a ravine with his shoulder bleeding, a woman bending over him. They were huddled together, obviously desperate, trying to keep warm. John and Mrs. Kelton had given up the fight and moved to safety.

  Conner asked Lauren, “What’s happening?”

  “It’s going to end, honey. Very soon, it’s going to end.”

  His face turned red, he grabbed her shoulders. “What is it? Why do they hate me?”

  “Conner, it’s going to end, it has to end.”

  He pushed back from her, his eyes rolling back into his head. “Dad needs us.”

  They began running, then, all three of them coming out of the shock of the moment, realizing that lives still depended on them.

  They found both Rob and Dan, and Terry Kelton nearby huddled in the snow. As it turned out, Lauren had missed and he wasn’t even wounded, just in shock. His eyes were glazed with fear and he kept shaking his head. “What—what,” he whispered, “what?”

  He’d come out of it, whatever Mike had done to him, whatever evil, evil thing.

  Dan was still alive and conscious, and as they lifted him Conner took off his own jacket and tucked it around his father.

  Lauren hurried to Rob. The moment she looked at him, she began to weep. She reached out and touched his graying face. The eyes stared, the lips lay open as if amazed by a death that had been, also, a discovery. With trembling fingers, she closed the eyes. Then she doubled over, gasped, and began to grieve.

  Conner came. “He’s not dead,” he said, as if that was the strangest idea in the world. He laid a hand on his forehead, and Rob’s eyes flickered open. “See?”

  Rob gazed up at her, silent. She looked to him, then to Conner, then back to Rob.

  “Help us,” Conner said. Katelyn was trying to get Dan to his feet.

  “Let me look,” Lauren said. She’d had standard survival and first-aid training, and she saw that he had a bullet-pierced shoulder. The bones were intact. The shoulder, while dislocated, had not been shattered by the bullet. There was blood, though, a lot of it. “You need a hospital,” she said. “Right now.”

  On the way to the car, she saw more movement in the woods beside them. She whirled—but there was nothing there. To her horror, she realized that she had left the pistol behind. That had been stupid but it was also a warning that she was in shock. She had be careful, now, force herself to stay rational for them all. Survival, always, was in the details.

  The movement came again.

  Dan saw it, too. “A deer,” he gasped.

  “Conner?” she asked.

  He waved her to silence.

  They continued to the car, the five of them, following the tracks that had been laid in madness and terror. Dan cried out in pain, but they managed to help him across the Niederdorfer’s fence.

  Once on the other side, he leaned on it. “Give me a second . . . a second . . .”

  “We need an ambulance,” Katelyn said.

  Lauren opened her cell phone. Fortunately, they were close enough to the town for a signal. She called Alfred, got through to Rob’s adjutant, and reported Rob as severely wounded and the pilot as a KIA to a very saddened young man. Then she arranged for air evac. Because of the trouble in the town, it might be delayed, but there was nothing more they could do.

  The Air Force would come and gat
her its dead pilot and take him home in a box, where he would lie in honored earth and the memories of those who loved him. But maybe Rob would live to fight another fight.

  Are you gonna marry him?

  She actually laughed a little. “If I can.”

  Katelyn gave her a questioning look.

  “Terry,” Conner said, “your mom and dad are okay.” He looked at Lauren. “There’s another one out there.”

  “I know, Rob.”

  “No, alive. Near Rob. He’s crawling. He’s trying to get to me.”

  “Can he, Conner?”

  Conner shook his head.

  “What are you talking about?” Dan asked

  “Nothing,” Conner said quickly.

  Lauren heard in her mind, Don’t tell them I can hear their thoughts.

  No, Conner, I won’t.

  Dan touched the implant in his ear. It almost seemed as if he had heard Conner talking again, his voice curiously gentled, coming from the center of his own head. He would have to understand this, but not now. Now he had to save his family. He leaned on Katelyn as they walked, and she whispered, “I love you, Dan, I’ve remembered it all, and I love you.”

  He turned to her. As much as he hurt, those words filled him with a torrent of swirling, strengthening relief. He raised his arms and held her, felt her against him and felt in his depths the love that defined his soul, for his Katelyn.

  She raised her face to his and kissed him, and the kiss seemed to give him new life—until a wrong movement sent a firebrand of agony through his shoulder.

  Tears in his eyes, he managed a smile as he went toward the car. “The spare,” he said. “I’ll change the tire.”

  “We’ll change it,” Lauren said.

  The light was almost gone, now, but they weren’t but two hundred feet away from the car.

  “We’ll drive straight out the Wilton Road,” Katelyn said, “and take you to the hospital in Berryville. Unless this insanity is all over the place? Is it, Lauren, do you know?”