I’m cut off from the world, and even though I’ve only had the nanites for a day, I feel small and alone.
Probably because I am.
“Weapons down,” the chorus of men says, the monotone command far more unnerving than a shouted one. It says, if we have to gun you down, there won’t be any emotions, or hesitation.
With no choice, I lower the assault rifle to the ground and follow it up with the handgun on my right hip, and the knives on my left hip, my chest, and leg. When I’m fully disarmed, I raise my hands.
“Now what?” I shout to the men, turning in a slow circle, trying to find a single man who might be in control. But their faces are hidden, and I suspect I’d see the same blank stare in all their eyes.
Even the choppers, moving in a perfect circle overhead, their eight machine guns tracking my position, appear to be under the Others’ direct control.
Five mercenaries snap out of their rigid positions and hurry toward me, weapons raised.
“Don’t move, don’t move, don’t move,” the lead merc shouts, sounding very human now, repeating his message three times the way a military man does. These mercs have their orders, but are no longer under direct control. I hold still, watching the three men approaching, knowing that any sudden movement on my part will probably result in a well-ventilated death.
The mercs fan out as they approach, flanking me as though I still pose some kind of threat. The bright LED flashlights mounted to their weapons make me squint, even in the early morning light that’s growing brighter by the moment.
They’re racing the sun, I think. The Others don’t like their business seen by the light of day, and that must extend to the acolytes working on their behalf. Granted, the battles at the ranch and the gun shop took place in broad daylight, but there were no witnesses to either event. But here, in clear view of Dulce’s three thousand residents, not all of whom have made deals with the Others, the odds of exposure increase with every passing minute. As soon as the sun crests the horizon and bathes the mesa in light, anyone with a camera and a zoom lens will be able to capture video of the eighty eight mercs and their lone adversary—not to mention whatever comes next.
“Hands down and together,” the lead merc says.
I follow his instructions, but say, “You don’t need to do this.”
“Left us with no choice, asshole.” He cinches a pair of plastic cuffs over my hands. Pulls my helmet and face mask away. Drops them to the ground and doesn’t bother stopping the helmet from clattering down the slope. “You think they were just going to let you waltz in here? Now we’re all screwed.”
“You’re afraid of them,” I say.
“Fuckin’ A,” he says. “You know what they can do. You’ve seen all these fuckin’ zombies. I don’t want them in my head. Don’t want them pulling the strings. But it’s better than a war we can’t win.”
This guy believes every word of what he’s saying. He either has incorrect views about the Others and what they can do, or he knows something that Lindo, Kuruk, and I don’t.
I’m about to argue with the man, but he’s already chosen a side. A few words from me aren’t going to change that, and even though the Others aren’t in direct control of him right now, I suspect they can hear everything I say.
“You’re right,” I say, slathering my words in faux remorse. “I didn’t know. Didn’t understand. I thought I was helping the kids.”
“Those kids. The ones offered to them. There ain’t no helping them.” He gives me a shove. “Now move.”
I catch his use of the word ‘offered’, suggesting that the Others’ taking the children has at least some degree of morality attached to it. Complicity on the part of a parent, or some long dead ancestor, does not justify the sale of children into slavery.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
“Up.”
Another shove gets me moving. Scrambling over the loose rock is harder with my hands bound, but I manage.
“What did they offer you?” I ask, hoping to gain a little understanding before I die.
“Jack and shit,” the man says. “Up until now they’ve tolerated us. You know that. We clean up their messes and make a profit doing it while keeping the status quo. The moment you showed up in Santa Cruz, things have gone FUBAR. First at the church. Then the ranch. A war with these fuckers benefits no one. We’re alive because they allow it. They want a blood sacrifice, so what? We get to exist. We collect you and bring you to them, the rest of the world gets to keep spinning in ignorant bliss.”
The merc’s point of view reveals he doesn’t just know about the church and the ranch, but he was a party to both firefights. As a result, he’s more emotionally invested in my demise, especially since he blames me for his current predicament. But that doesn’t mean he can’t be reasoned with, and since he’s the only man talking, I think he’s in charge.
“What’s your name?” I ask him.
“Last name you, first name fuck.”
“You have kids?”
“Why would I have kids?”
The way he says it tells me that he has nothing against children, but is against bringing them into a world where they can be sold to non-human entities. He’s working with the Others, but detests them.
Screw it, I think. If the Others are listening, let them hear me. My fate is all but sealed already.
“They’re human,” I say, drawing a mocking laugh from the mercenary.
“You have no idea, do you? Up to your nuts in acid, and you think it’s orange juice.”
“Not literally human,” I explain. “Human in the sense that they are flesh and blood, capable of making mistakes. If that wasn’t true, there wouldn’t be crash sites. Aeron wouldn’t exist. There would be nothing to reverse engineer.”
He laughs again. “You know, Aeron only exists because of a spelling mistake.”
I’m not sure what he’s talking about, so I remain silent, trusting in the human instinct to never leave a song, sentence, or thought unfinished.
“It was Aaron,” he says. “Let me guess, Cruz told you about how Aeron and Chimera were born out of the Roswell crash. About consulting experts?”
I hadn’t thought about his story since then, but I now know it was part of his ruse. Chimera didn’t exist until years later, when Lindo first started taking action. If Aeron is really Aaron, then… “There were two kids in the crash.”
A tug on my shirt stumbles me to a stop. “Right here.”
I scan the loose stone around me, noting nothing of interest. The circle of mercenaries keeps their gaze locked on me, but their weapons lower in unison.
The merc tugs down his mask, revealing the face of an aging man with a white mustache, spliced and perhaps maintained by a collection of electronic implants—in his eyes, and head, and cheeks. I look over his armored body, which shows no outward signs of aging or deterioration. How much of him is still flesh and blood?
“The changes to my body are a little more obvious,” the man says.
“You’re Aaron,” I guess.
“Was a time Cruz and I were like brothers. Then he decided to live the life of a servant, and I wanted…more. Our paths cross on occasion. We fight sometimes. But he never put all of us at risk. Not until you.” Aaron gives me a shove. “Tell me where he is. Before I turn you in. And maybe I can talk some sense into him. Talk him out of whatever you’ve got cooked up.”
“You don’t know…”
The merc steps to the side, looking over my shoulder. “They’re coming.”
I spin around, looking for some sign of the Others’ approach. There’s nothing here but stone and tree husks. No cave. No entrance. No trace of a secret door.
Then I remember that the Others need none of those things to move in and out of the mesa.
“Where is he?” Aaron asks, urgent. Worried. Whatever problems this man has with me, and however much his ideals might conflict with Lindo’s, there’s a reason the two men have never gone to war. They care about
each other. Freed from the Others by chance, they must have survived those horrific early years, on the run from cryptos and the government by leaning on each other.
They’re like brothers, I realize, and I decide that even though Aaron has screwed me, every captive below this mesa, and every person living on Earth, he deserves the truth.
“He’s dead,” I say. “They killed him.”
The news staggers the man, but he shakes his head and closes his eyes. His voice fills my head, though he hasn’t spoken a word. Where are you? Tell me you’re miles away from this shit.
Even though he’s speaking to me through some preexisting telepathic connection, which I think has more to do with his implanted tech and my nanites than actual telepathy, I can hear his desperation. So it’s with a bit of sadness that I say, “What’s left of Cruz is right in front of you. He gave them to me before he—”
The sound of shifting rock spins me around.
A shout escapes my mouth as a Gray, its big black eyes burrowing into me, its long spindly arms and fingers reaching, dives out of the cliff and tackles me down the steep grade.
I fall through the first warm beams of morning sun, and then plunge into a chilled, endless darkness.
44
Despite my eyes being open, I’m lost in a frigid black soup that feels like the atheist’s vision of death, but without the endless bliss of non-existence. When my head throbs, I know I’m still alive. Lights dance in my vision when I sit up, fading as gravity tugs the blood down and away from the wound on the back of my skull.
Understanding makes me angry.
That Gray asshole tackled me through the mesa, plunging us through solid stone and into wherever I am now. The impact, which opened the gash on my head, now stinging and warm with blood, knocked me unconscious.
Can you stitch me up? I ask the nanites. I’m not sure if they can, but it doesn’t hurt to ask. The back of my head starts to itch, but that’s not unusual for an open wound filled with rocky grit.
How about some night vision? I ask. The question comes without too much thought. If I’d thought about the consequences, I might have thought twice. Unlike getting a satellite feed or data from the Internet projected into whatever part of my brain decodes visual information, seeing in other spectrums requires alterations to the device used to gather light—my eyes. Or in this case, my left eye.
I’m rocked back to the stone floor, clutched by the worst migraine I’ve ever experienced. I roll to my side and retch as an invisible hand grasps my eyeball and squeezes. The pressure is intense, and I’m pretty sure I feel my eyeball melt away before being reformed, sending out fresh tendrils into my brain.
And then, all at once, the pain subsides.
I can see.
In shades of green.
Please tell me you’re intelligent enough to have fully upgraded the eye.
My vision shifts through multiple spectrums. I’m disoriented by it at first, but the nanites go to work on my mind. Viewing the world like I never have before becomes second nature. The shifting of colors and views of the world reminds me of something. A movie, I think. Something Wini made me watch, with a human-hunting alien.
I shift back to night vision and try to embody the spirit of that movie, but in reverse.
I’m in a cave. The path behind me is sealed by a rock fall. A wire hangs from the ceiling, running down the tunnel ahead. Steel-caged lightbulbs hang from the wire every thirty feet.
This is a man-made tunnel. And when I see the first body, I know where I am.
This is where the Green Berets attempted to infiltrate, using the tunnel created by a mining operation that had no idea what they were truly digging toward.
All that’s left of the body is a rag-clothed skeleton. I search it for weapons and find none. Whatever equipment the man carried has been removed. Spotting his dog tags, I take hold of the chain and yank. The move doesn’t work out quite the way it does in the movies. Instead of snapping free, I decapitate the man.
“Sorry,” I whisper and hold the tags up. “Alex Maddern.”
I pocket the tags and move a little further into the tunnel. I don’t think I’m walking into a trap. They brought me here. If the Others wanted me dead, the Gray that tackled me could have finished the job. My being here, in this place, serves a purpose. And since there’s no other direction to go, that purpose lies ahead.
It doesn’t take long to find another body. I’m about to remove his tags as well when I spot a dozen more men up ahead. How many men did Lindo say died here?
Sixty.
I leave the man’s tags and head intact and tip-toe my way past the fallen bodies and their tangled, dead branch limbs.
The eight foot-wide-and-tall tunnel’s smooth walls grow rough as I descend deeper into the mesa. The layers of dead come to an end as the tunnel narrows. This is as far as they made it, I think, and then I step past. A hundred feet further, I find the tunnel’s end. It’s a small opening, large enough to crawl through. Three bodies dressed in blue coveralls lie around the opening.
The miners who breached the Others’ subterranean domain.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone dug a hole in the wrong place. These three were unlucky, but I don’t think they were the first. Humanity has a long history of mythical creatures and monsters emerging from the underworld. I wouldn’t be surprised if these stories—like those that have people looking for aliens in the stars rather than beneath their feet—were created by the Others to keep people away. The tactic is different, but the storytelling and manipulation matches their modus operandi.
The tunnel ahead narrows to a claustrophobic squeeze, but it’s short-lived. Sliding through on my stomach, I emerge into a cavern like a baby being born from stone. I drop to an unforgiving floor covered in loose rock that mirrors the mesa’s exterior.
The wall behind me is flat and smooth, worn down by millennia of erosion, but decorated at some point in the more recent past. The cave paintings are primitive, but they show lines of people carrying children over their heads. I follow the line of people to a crude mountain framed in beams of light, several bright stars, which I think are probably UFOs, and an image of a spindly biped I take for a Gray.
Joseph Smith wasn’t the first Southwesterner to cut a deal with the Others.
The rest of the cavern is a vast open space, leading downward. A foot-worn path winds through the rough stone, marking the way that generations of people followed, delivering children for the Others’ needs.
Is this what they want me to see?
Are they trying to show me that this is just the natural order of things?
Do they want me to join them? Serve them? Like Aaron does?
I suppose, as a human connected to the world at large, I might have some perspective to offer them. Perhaps some insight on how to remain hidden in an increasingly technologically advanced world. But they must know who I am, and the path that brought me here. What could they possibly offer me to make me betray humanity?
Then again, maybe Joseph Smith put up a fight?
Maybe the ancient ancestors of the Apache living on this land did as well.
Even Aaron seemed displeased by his new arrangement.
In the end, they all folded.
But I’m not them, I tell myself.
I try not to focus on the idea because it casts a bright light on the fact that I have failed. My mission has shifted from taking the Others down on a grand scale to resisting whatever temptation they’re about to throw at me. Resistance won’t free Jacob. Won’t rescue Isabella from her fate. Won’t change a system in place since before the first human civilization emerged from the wild.
Change requires more than resistance.
It requires action.
So I press on, determined to protect my secrets, the people I love, and the masses no one else will fight for. I grin, knowing the surge of confidence comes from Jacob. If not for him and Lindo, I’d be just another terrified person at the mercy
of a power beyond comprehension. But now I am more.
I won’t just resist.
I’ll fight.
And probably die like all those soldiers in the tunnel behind me, but at least I will have tried.
The cavern echoes each footfall, announcing my presence to the beings who already know I’m here, and given the tingling in my forehead, are tracking me even now.
The path leads to another tunnel, this one glass smooth and round, carved into solid rock by a technology foreign to humanity. I step into the cylinder and head for a literal light at the end of the tunnel. By the time I reach the end, I’m prepared for anything the Others might throw at me.
Maybe they’ll kill me.
Maybe they’ll open my head and pry the nanites out.
Maybe they’ll make an offer most men couldn’t refuse: wealth, power, immortality.
I step into the large space behind the tunnel like a conquering hero strutting through the gates of a subdued city.
Only there’s no one there to witness my bravado. What there are, are UFOs, parked in a line, hovering above the smooth floor without any trace of power flowing through them.
They’re showing off again, I decide. Trying to make me feel powerless and small. In human terms, this would be a show of force, like when nations perform military drills, or when men work out in public, grunting with each heave so people can’t help but notice. Like a peacock strutting for a mate, they say, ‘look how amazing and powerful we are.’ But when it comes to people, this kind of behavior reveals insecurity, and is most often a bluff.
Perhaps it’s the same with the Others. If it is, what are they hiding?
What are they afraid of?
Spotting a second tunnel on the far side of the domed, football field-sized cavern, I head for it without giving the UFOs any direct attention. There are no open hatches, and they’re hovering twelve feet above the floor. Even if I understood how they functioned and wanted to attempt to abscond with one, they’re just out of reach.
The Others Page 27