Near the crest of the hill, Lee said, “Stop.” About a half mile to the south, Highway 360 rose up the side of the bluff. A galaxy of lights had descended onto the hillside, framing and pointing the way to the gap. The Gap. Lee rolled down the window. Martin turned off the headlights.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I think we need to know what we’re up against before we get any closer,” said Lee.
“Do you have time?” Martin asked.
“I’ve got a few minutes, and…” He held his phone up for Martin to see. “Two bars.”
“Told you,” said Martin. He killed the engine and rolled down his window, letting in the murmur of a crowd, not very far away. He couldn’t see the road at the nearest point, or the promised gate, but it couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards east. Staple gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, Martin met Lee in front of the truck, and they set off.
“Remember where we parked,” said Lee.
Their walk took them up a gentle slope that, after a few moments, peaked, and Martin let out a low whistle.
“Oh, wow,” said Lee.
A Super Bowl of people, at least for the middle of nowhere Montana, lined the road from the top of the bluff and down the hill, breaking only at a brief dark gap for the Deaver Creek bridge. Like an aerial view of a river through a city at night, the banks of the road twinkled with thousands of flashlights, headlights, iPhones, and cameras. Two narrowing columns trailed off to the north, steady parallel streams of faithful pilgrims, wide awake in the night.
“Is this your fault or mine?” asked Martin.
A Highway Patrol car rolled cautiously down the middle of the road, lights flashing but with no sirens.
“Oh, definitely yours,” said Lee. “Is that the gate?” At the base of the dark slope, and to the north, there might have been a thickening of the fence.
“Only one way to find out,” said Martin.
They found the gate a few minutes later, at the bottom of an increasingly well-defined set of tracks rolling down the slope. The roadsides were compacted with people. And some early-bird Waker had neatly parked a six-figure motor home on the pullout, stretching like a castle wall from ditch to crowded ditch on the other side of the gate. The roof of the RV bristled with people manning cameras and telescopes.
“What do we do?” asked Martin. “We can’t blast our way through that.”
“I could ask them to move,” said Lee. “Besides, it’s time. I’ve got to get on the air now.”
“You go over there and you’ll be mobbed,” said Martin.
“Maybe not,” said Lee.
“Maybe there’s another gate farther north,” said Martin.
“You really want to waste more time searching for another gate?”
“No,” said Martin.
“Then trust me and get that truck of yours down here,” said Lee, dialing. He waded away through the grass with his phone to his ear. When he looked back and noticed that Martin hadn’t moved, he said, “Hurry.”
~ * * * ~
When Martin finally reached the Screwmobile, he hung on the hood for more than a minute to catch his breath, his gut heaving. Martin stripped off his sweat-soaked FastNCo. polo, longing to be free of the polyester. He put his hands on his head and paced, stumbling, his breath returning slowly.
In his bag behind the seat, the only other shirts he could find were more FastNCo. polos. He struggled one on over his clammy skin, hating his flab, hating the rasp of the stitched logo.
Martin started the truck. As he waited for the plane of icons to appear, a cheer rolled up from the road. Martin switched on the AM/FM radio, already tuned to the station out of Billings. As he set off for the top of the hill and the easy track down the other side, he recited with the broadcast, “From Virginia Beach to Yreka, from the Rio Grande to the Upper Peninsula…”
As Martin crested the hill, people were clamoring off the roof of the RV as if late for a Black Friday sale. They handed their tripods down to a forest of waving hands. People spilled out onto the road, making way for the RV. Some of them had linked hands, and were stepping back slowly, keeping the crowd in check, clearing a path.
The show intro ended, followed by a few seconds of silence. And then Lee, Lee as he should be, but breathless and clipped by the cell phone’s range, spoke to Martin through the truck’s radio. “I’ll be right with you. The danger of live radio is that sometimes things don’t go as planned. I beg your patience, Waker Nation.”
Familiar pan flute and synthesizer bumper music toodled out in place of Lee. And over that, a prerecorded announcer’s voice said, “Please stay tuned. We are experiencing technical difficulties. Beyond Insomnia with Lee Danvers will return shortly on the Weirdmerica Radio Network.”
The RV’s lights glimmered on, and it maneuvered back and forth in the tight pullout. It soon squirmed free onto the road, and backed north, leaving the lane clear for Martin to make a turn south toward the portal. A solitary figure in the middle of it all waved and pointed, directing the crowd like a conductor. The recording repeated.
Lee lifted his arms as if for a finale, and through the magic of radio, the gate opened. Several men had lifted it off its hinges and swung it into the field, pivoted on the chained end.
Lee hustled through his own personal Red Sea up the hill toward Martin with his phone still pressed to the side of his head. “This is amazing,” called Martin, when they converged about a hundred yards from the gate. But Lee put a finger to his lips. He opened the passenger door but didn’t get in. The pan flute toodling ceased and was replaced by a rustling and air buffeting into a microphone.
“Waker Nation, welcome to Montana,” said Lee, and a few seconds later the radio repeated it. A cheer erupted across Big Thunder Valley.
“Folks.” Lee waved frantically at Martin to turn off the truck’s radio. “I can’t tell you how excited I am about tonight’s show and to be able to share this unprecedented, potentially historic, moment, not only for Beyond Insomnia, but for our planet and very species, with you. Since the discovery of this phenomenon, top scientists, in cooperation with the Weirdmerica Radio Network and wakernation.com, have been analyzing the collected video evidence, as well as completing geologic surveys, magnetic resonance scans, studying satellite thermo-photography, and…”
Oh my god, thought Martin. He just makes this stuff up.
“…believe they have determined the properties of the phenomenon. Today, at an emergency symposium in…in…”
“Great Falls,” Martin suggested.
“…in Great Falls, Montana, these scientists assembled a package of instruments that are designed to activate, study, and potentially pass through the phenomenon to communicate with whatever is on the other side. I have been given the distinct honor of riding along for the delivery of this instrument package to the phenomenon itself. And I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to bring you all with me. It’s time for the rest of the world to wake up and see that the Waker Nation is the smartest audience of any radio show in the world!”
After a few seconds of delay, the crowd roared. Lee stepped away from the truck and took it all in. He gave Martin a grin. “Tonight,” he said as the cheers faded, “we—not a government, not a military, not NASA or the ESA, no church, or secret cabal—yes, we, We The People, will be the first to reach out our hands in friendship to an extraterrestrial intelligence, to knock on their door and welcome them to our world as one!”
Another thunderous roar.
He was Mick Jagger.
“Are you ready?”
He was Barack Obama.
“Then let’s get started!”
He was William Shatner.
He climbed in the cab. “Wakers, I’m here with a very special guest. George Henr…in…son, from the University of New Mexico at Las Cruces. George is a physicist who worked with JPL on the Dawn Probe to the asteroids Vesta and Ceres, and has been selected by his colleagues to deliver the instrument package to the phenomen
on. Let’s wake up and welcome him to the show.”
As the assembly cheered, Lee fumbled with his phone. It beeped and he held it out on his palm.
“Welcome, George,” said Lee, then nodded to Martin.
“Um. It’s a pleasure to be with you tonight?” said Martin. Lee shook his head, chewing his lower lip, and gestured for more. Martin shrugged. “We are excited to be able to study this phenomenon with so many from your audience.”
Lee gave Martin a thumbs-up. “So much of science is done in a lab, with few witnesses. It’s a unique opportunity for people to see the work that you do. Can you tell us a little bit about what we can expect to see tonight?”
“Um, yes.” Martin threw his hands up, but Lee egged him on. “We will approach the phenomenon, or the portal, as some call it, from the northwest, coming up the hill from Deaver Creek. We will need everyone to stay back, off the road. There is no danger from the portal itself, but we don’t want to run over any of your guests.”
“I’m sure we all thank you for that,” said Lee, then waved for more.
“We will activate the…instruments…which repeat the frequency ranges we’ve obtained from our scans. This will activate the portal. Then we’ll send in the probe.”
“If it works, it should be quite a show,” said Lee, “so everyone have their cameras ready. George, will the photographic evidence collected here today be valuable to your research?”
“Absolutely?” Martin shrugged. “We are setting up a database for photos and videos to be submitted to the research project, all through wakernation.com.”
Yes, mouthed Lee and gave Martin another thumbs-up. “Excellent. Also, tonight we’d like to welcome a new sponsor who’s woken up and smelled the coffee. FastNCo. hardware has graciously provided the delivery vehicle for the instrument package tonight. FastNCo.’s fastening hardware can be found across the nation, so be sure and follow the FastNCo. trucks to fine retailers for the best-quality products for the professional, the do-it-yourselfer, or the visitor from another world. Let’s hear it for FastNCo.”
Before the resulting cheer, Martin heard a rumbling, more distant than the Screwmobile’s engine. Oh my god, thought Martin. The portal. But he stayed awake and no swirl of light appeared.
“Folks, I think we’re about ready,” said Lee. “George? Are we a go?”
Martin opened the door and stood on the doorframe to get a better view.
“George?” Lee asked again.
A line of red and blue flashing lights was approaching from the north, followed by even more lights. Not the streams of hiking Wakers with flashlights, but headlights, bright and high. A convoy of lumbering trucks.
“We have to go, now,” said Martin.
“We’ve been given the green light,” said Lee.
Martin headed west as fast as the field would let him, but kept an eye to the north. Lee grabbed onto the door and almost dropped his phone. “Let’s have a countdown, Waker Nation. T minus one minute.”
“Too long,” Martin cried. The crowd across the road, blocking 360 to the north, began to thin. Martin heard a whoop and a bloop of a siren, and an unintelligible PA announcement, and floored it. The last thirty yards were smoother than the rest, but the compacted gravel of the pullout was a welcome sensation under the truck. Martin barely braked as he bumped out onto the road—and shouted until he knew they hadn’t flipped over and murdered a bunch of Wakers.
“Ten…!” called Lee.
The open-mouthed crowd raised their arms and voices as the truck raced by. Flash. Flash. Flash. Cameras from every direction. Constellations of supernovas lit their path.
“Nine…!”
One patrol car squeezed through the Wakers in Martin’s rearview mirror, then another. Lee stopped counting, seeing the chase. Objects in mirror may be closer than they appear. “Go. Go. Go,” he said.
“I’m going,” said Martin.
A third patrol car broke through.
“Wakers. They’re trying to stop us…they’re trying to stop you from knowing the truth,” said Lee.
The speedometer climbed, but not nearly fast enough. Martin hoped to be more than exceeding the legal speed limit by the time they reached the bridge and the base of the hill. He couldn’t let the patrol cars catch him on the slope.
The crowd counted off three, or maybe four, as they thumped across the bridge. The patrol cars neared, but then backed off. People had begun to crowd the road. Whether stepping out to hail their guru’s passage, or deliberately trying to slow the evil government vehicles in the cause of scientific justice, the Screwmobile gained ground.
“Hold on,” Martin called as he made the corner. He could make out the individual faces of the people he would kill if he took the curve a whisker too fast.
Martin whooped when he hit the bottom of the hill at eighty-three miles per hour, leaving a slipstream of cheering, waving, flashing Wakers in their wake. The patrol cars gained the hill, but the crowd still bogged them down.
“You know what you’re doing?” called Lee.
“This one to seal us in, and this one to activate the portal,” said Martin.
“Shouldn’t you do that now?” asked Lee. The Gap loomed closer and closer.
Martin tapped the icon to activate the environmental field, partly hoping nothing would happen. This dampened the crowd noise, but not much. “The windows,” Martin screamed. “Roll up the windows.”
They cranked frantically, shutting out even more of the crowd’s roar. Then Martin stabbed the portal icon. A single patrol car raced up in his mirror, having beaten the crowd.
“Did it work?” asked Lee.
On both sides of the road, as if in slow motion, people slumped, falling into piles of humanity. The patrol car slowed.
A singularity flickered into existence in The Gap. In a millisecond, a maw gaped open, swirling like an electric toilet bowl. Martin’s scream, and Lee’s, and the Screwmobile’s straining roar melded in the swirl and chaos.
Light shot out like a chameleon’s tongue and yanked them in.
Chapter 26
Disconsciousness.
Extrusion of life and light.
Existence snapped back into darkness. The myriad flashes and flashlights had been replaced by the dashboard lights and a swath of stars so thick it would have made Martin want to run the windshield wipers, if he hadn’t still been so busy screaming.
He separated from the seat, weightless, but forced himself back in place with both hands on the steering wheel. Lee braced himself against the ceiling.
The RPMs raced toward the red. The empty Diet Mountain Dew cup drifted out of the cup holder. The radio box wanted to float away, but Martin elbowed it against the seat.
They both stopped screaming at the same time, as if in rehearsed agreement.
“Are we dead?” asked Martin, letting his foot off the gas.
“God, I hope not,” said Lee. He checked his phone, then showed it to Martin. “No Service,” it said. “I guess I’m off the air.”
“Could be worse. They could be charging you roaming fees,” said Martin.
Lee laughed. “I’ll probably get better ratings with this dead air than I’ve ever had. Where are we?” The Milky Way spread out ahead of them, but an object loomed in the mirrors—not so much visible, more an absence of stars.
“I suppose I press this now,” said Martin, and tapped the docking icon, even as Lee raised serious wordless doubts.
They accelerated, but backward. In unison, Martin and Lee zipped their seat belts across their shoulders. The truck turned, slowly, to face their destination. An asteroid, or some kind of roughly natural body, hung nearby, dwarfed by the unnatural, scale-defying object.
The Screwmobile’s headlights illuminated the thing like a firefly over an aircraft carrier. Parts, for it couldn’t all be taken in at once, resembled shopping malls stuck onto hives of aircraft hangars, and not the little ones, but the Goodyear Blimp-sized ones. Those clusters were glommed fractally onto a dr
unken parade of airports, convention centers, and domed stadiums. Every facet, large and small, too many to count, had been decorated with a logo, the sight of which made Martin’s mouth water. He felt a nascent sense of desserts, indulgent but at the same time wholesome.
“This has got to be the place,” said Martin.
“I probably should have asked this earlier, but what’s the plan when we get in there?” asked Lee.
Martin felt for the staple gun. “Find Cheryl and get out,” he said.
“That’s it?” asked Lee.
“Sue me. I’m a little out of my element here,” said Martin. “I thought you were going to get some blurry footage.”
Lee unzipped his bag and extracted his iPad. He held it up to the windshield and scanned the view. Martin leaned over to watch the screen.
“It’s 10:23 Mountain Time on…I can’t remember the date…” Lee narrated. “And we’ve passed safely through the portal. I don’t know where we are, but there’s an asteroid or ice body close by. I’ll try and get a shot of it. We are approaching, by the apparent use of some kind of tractor beam, a large ship or space complex. As you can see…” Then he shut it off.
“What?” asked Martin.
“Screw it,” said Lee. “No one’s ever going to believe us anyway. That’s if we make it home.” He looked as if he wanted to toss the iPad out the window as so much fodder for Native American tears. But he stuffed it back in his bag and zipped it all shut.
“What about the proof?” asked Martin.
“No one wants proof,” Lee replied. “The truth’s never interesting.”
“Profound,” said Martin.
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
“Okay, shut up now,” said Martin.
“Are we speeding up?” asked Lee. Within the radius of the towering clusters, the stars vanished, replaced by constellations of logos. “I think we’re definitely moving faster.” Lee edged away from his door as they neared a nasty protrusion—a couple of dozen flame-broiled Burger Kings stacked, pagoda-style, on top of a petrified Staples Center. Lee let out a little noise as they sailed past, ridiculously close.
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