by Eric Ellert
She turned around, proud of her control, then heard a little voice in her mind, crowding out the little voice that had told her about the flagpole. He was listening to her thoughts. She frowned.
As if caught behaving badly, Rau looked down at the contents of the trunk, then looked back, embarrassed, but not embarrassed-enough not to look because when she asked, "Does Mr. blue like gardening?" The sound of the words echoed between her ears, and somehow, by the look on his face had echoed between his.
"No, see the radar dish? You can just see the top of it out there, that way. It's still active. No personnel but they come to maintain the equipment once in a while."
"Who? You?"
"No us," she heard in her mind.
He wasn't perfect; she could see his jumbled thoughts. She giggled for a just a second. He always had movies playing in his head; they'd never get along; they had completely different tastes. He flashed a clip of the second, no the third Planet of the Apes movies. It opened with Cornelius and Zira shopping at Bloomindales and it ended with them getting shot on a pier. Yes, it was the old chestnut where they go to the abandoned ship to hide from the bad guys. She'd been to a lot of cities and had yet to hear of any abandoned ships where people could hide, but she got the message. Not the message of the movie, his mind was a jumble of worries and far too many movies, the other message, between the thoughts. like a warning whispered in an otherwise loud conversation. Even your thoughts might be known in a place like this, and whoever watched might do you harm, or might help. It was impossible to say, they who watched wanting such different things than those who were watched. For just a moment, she saw the image of the Nord she'd seen in the laptop, but had to look away. Rau wanted it secret; maybe he deserved his secrets.
Faudron snapped out of it, if any time at all had passed it had been different time on a different scale and she couldn't get the scent of petroleum off her mind. "Can we go look?"
"What's the point? They're just looking for et's. The dish, I'd imagine it's on budget somewhere, but no longer very important to anybody. I mean they probably had to justify building an expensive gadget by using it long past its use, so they could get the funding to build a better expensive gadget."
"About that, you should have told me."
"I couldn't. You found out." He tapped his temples with his fingers." When you find out, you'll find out. And they have an electrified-fence around those buildings. Wolves won't go there. They don't forget the shock. Pig dances happen in that field. That's all they're interested in."
"What's that? I don't like the sound of it. It's like the Wicker Man with stupid people but I can't figure out if you're the pleasant knight or the nut who runs the place."
"I haven't seen that film."
"There, that's it, why are you like that? Would it have killed you to get regular cable and not watch the same couple of movies over and over again?"
"I think you know."
"But I don't think you do. Pig hunt? I still don't like the sound of it."
"Neither do the pigs."
For a moment Faudron had an image in her mind of tall, lean, werewolves soaked in blood and dead pigs laid out all over this field, the werewolves staggering around, almost embarrassed at what they'd done, some lit fuse within them doused by the hunt that they hated and loved and hated and needed. "Never mind; I'll ask Moren."
"You catch on fast."
He opened the trunk. The contents looked like a survivalist's daydream. He pulled out a tracksuit and a t-shirt. He rolled his hand in the air as if to say he didn't carry unmentionables and turned to let Faudron rummage around herself.
He leaned against the doorway as she changed. For a moment, she forgot where she was and was going to make a noise so he'd turn around, but he'd been right, the place did feel as if they were being watched. No, that wasn't it; it felt as if the past had never left and it was a sad unhappy past, with malingering spirits in the rain, like on a Civil War battlefield, spirits angry at being left in the rain, sad they could no longer get wet. Where was there any privacy anyway?
Faudron didn't know what Rau meant when he'd mentioned the Back Beyond but if this place had been up and running since the war. Well, she had heard rumors at home, of experiments, wholes in reality, the laws of physics all stretched and twisted for a couple of minutes at a time, experiments done with hundreds of people working switches one computer might work today.
Faudron stared out the window as she changed. The building next door seemed to date from the early seventies; with a faded-orange and yellow interior that had been fashionable at the time. That would answer the polyester Bruce Lee style blue running suit with the white and yellow stripes down the arms and legs she'd found. You could almost be amused, but if this place had been so secret, even now, what they had done must have been very wrong, the kind of wrong time wouldn't forgive. Maybe they were just waiting for all the participants to die off and let the evidence turn into Art-Bell trucker stories, the kind of weird stuff people say on the radio just to get on the radio and let the midnight worries out of their minds.
She wasn't in the mood to talk to Rau. She zipped up her jacket and stepped over the debris blocking the next building's nearest door. The interior looked so like the films she'd seen of the ground-end of the Apollo program.
Rau entered shyly and leaned against the door as Faudron walked down the long hall with all the spinning magnetic-tape computers taller than she was.
"You know how people think the lights on the bridge of the old Star Trek are stupid?" Rau asked. "Well, NASA mission control had much smaller lights along the walls, much like those, the flashing squares of lights making a kind of code. If you were to project the future from what they knew right then it wasn't such a bad guess."
"Don't Rau. Stop blowing smoke and get out of my head. That was my idea. You know this isn't ever going to work."
"I dream of Jeannie?"
"That's very rude? You've never seen that show."
She stopped, looked down and cleared away some of the grime with her foot. She moved faster as she dragged her foot along, clearing a line twelve feet long, revealing yellow footsteps painted along the floor. "One, two three, no, seven." She moved along, turned, held her breath and stood in the spot. "And nothing."
"What did you expect?"
"I stood here. I know I stood here."
"That's why I like to talk to you about Star Trek lights and listen to you sing the Art Bell song. Maybe we could hide with him? Bet he's got a hell of a bomb shelter."
Faudron leaned back on one of the desks at the far end of the room. "Did I ever tell you about the time I went to a Star Trek convention and Chechov yelled at me? Well, did I, in a way like people don't when they mean do but can't? That must make sense to you, somehow, somewhere."
Rau backed off. He let out a breath as if his lungs would not take another. "You're standing there now."
"You mean like I saw myself there, not a memory, but I saw myself there and."
"There's no explaining to you. Let them turn the switches off; let them do the paperwork; let them put the lights out. And then you can go. They'll reunite all of you."
"And your men of wolves?"
"There's no such thing as werewolves. There's just people who learned how to change shapes, and something, maybe something in them, made them change shapes badly. Nothing magic about it. Just people."
He must have meant people like his people, but she was going to ignore that if she had to ignore it the rest of her life. "Never mind. Come on, Rau, come sit on the grass with me."
"Do people do that?"
"Why do you talk like that? You're people."
***
They sat down by the flagpole and pressed their backs together. Rau opened up a package of c-rations he'd found in the tunnel. "Dubya-Dubya Two peaches. Want some?"
"I suppose." She tried a taste but the peaches tasted and felt like old raisons. "What did your people think of the war?"
"Liked the John
Wayne version better'n than the real thing. I have footage where you can stand in the middle of everything. Our footage."
"You guys were there and you couldn't have helped?"
"They almost did but it was the other side they thought of helping."
"Why? Faudron asked.
"Less likely to get into space because of budgetary constraints and no one wants you there?"
"No? Who's no one?"
"Everybody who's anybody. Did you think we were the only ones out there?" He ate the rest of his c-ration. "Present company accepted. You're not the nicest people they ever met."
She wanted to argue over that but he could be so disarming, unless of course, he just made her think he was disarming. When she got the nerve, she'd have to ask him to turn it off, whatever it was he did when he listened to her thoughts. She got up and gathered all their trash; she couldn't help it, though she wasn't sure where to put it. She looked in all directions then put it in a neat pile on the ground. She wanted to go back to the building. It had been a bad place. She should find out why. But it was pleasant here. Faudron thought there was something caveman about it and envied early people who could simply walk away from other people into the forest of the night.
"We were, they say, wolf-like ourselves and lived in trees," Rau said.
"I don't really want to discuss it now."
"Oh, we know where we came from. Those creatures." He said creatures with hatred. "You call the Greys, played with our DNA and one day there we were."
"You're so sure? That they didn't lie?"
"One might say that of God, that He is good because He said He is good, but eventually, you know the truth." Rau turned around and placed his hands on her shoulders. "We have no souls."
"How do you know?"
"We can see yours. We cannot see our own."
It occurred to Faudron that it might be some kind of rule that you couldn't see your own. She couldn't see hers. So what? "Just for fun, would you like to have a soul?"
"Without which whatever would be the point? Therein lies our problem. We've spent years studying a universe not worth studying."
"Then how did you fall in love with me through a telescope?"
"You flatter yourself."
"Moren flatters me."
"She might have asked before breaking in my house."
"I'm serious," Faudron said.
He got up and went inside the barracks. The trunk creaked open.
She came to the window but by the expression on Rau's face, he'd wanted a moment to himself. He couldn't have it. He had a soul. Asking the question proved it.
Rau pulled out a framed-black and white photo and put it in Faudron's hands. It took her a moment to recognize the faces in the crowd. There were her parents, herself and standing next to her, Rau, or some kid that looked just like him. Some of the people were her's, though hers and his was a strange way to think about it. The Nords were all lean and tall with bemused-looks on their faces, all of them with red hair slicked back and long at the back. Moren too, but she wouldn't think about what that meant. Not here, not until they were far away and safe. No, she had to know now. "But Rau, please."
"Let me finish. If I said I love you what would it matter?"
She felt herself begin to cry then choked it back for spite. He wasn't obtuse; he was rude; he didn't not understand manners; he just didn't have any. But his face was so unguarded. " 'On a night like this I deserve to get kissed at least once or twice.' " she said.
"Moren stole my Walkman too?"
"Collectors' item until she broke it. Well, the lid kind of broke a hinge. Just a bit. You can still use it. Wherever we go."
Rau took a deep breath as if it pained his lungs to breathe and waived her off when she tried to help him.
In a moment the pain was gone from his face as if it had never been. "Born to it as horses are born to stalls. What future would we have? Where would we go? Where would we be accepted?"
She knew any number of people must have had this same conversation, maybe even on this very spot. Some meant it and some didn't, but it was true for everyone. He kept talking; she stopped listening and a second later, Faudron would have listened to and believed anything he said, anything at all.
"How do I know, Moren, if what I feel and know is what I feel and know or what I've been told and trained to know and feel?"
"No one does. They just do. And so what?"
She glanced at the flagpole and the cannon before it. Any number of military installations had flagpoles and cannon much like that but somehow none of them, and she had been to or lived on them all at one time or another pretty much, had one just like that and she knew she'd been here before, and not for just a day. "I'm sorry, Rau, but I don't remember you from before."
"No?"
"But I wish I did." She tried to think of the right thing to say but he hadn't actually said he loved her so she wasn't going to the be the first one to say it twice, ever and never again. "377-77."
"I beg your pardon? You're missing two digits and why would I want your phone number? It doesn't work and you live right next door."
"That was my dad's code; I doubt they changed it. It will get us in."
"What's the point?"
"The point?" Faudron shook her head. "They said no. And my mom."
"Faudron. She's safe. I think she's with my people."
"So, we'll go in and ask."
"Don't press them."
"They'd hurt her?" Faudron asked.
"Yes. Sorry. We'll find out for sure, but you'll have to be patient, after--"
"--Patient? In werewolf town, waiting for my birthday? How could they do this to me?"
"They promised them the moon."
"You mean they knew?" Faudron asked. "I mean always knew that me and Moren had a good chance of getting..x'd...here?"
"I think so."
"About the kids in the corner?"
"Oh, you mean the cemetery, but of course. They just ignored it as I do. Told you. You don't want to know. 19-20 lift off. That's all you should worry about."
***
They strolled across the field, the wet grass giving off a too late, summer smell.
When they came to the fence, Faudron had been right. A keypad stood at eye level, beyond a faux-colonial, red brick building, that didn't quite fit the terrain, more resembling one of the endless highway gas stations or real estate offices they'd put up all over New Jersey in anticipation of the Bicentennial. And strangely, a raft with a macramé-like web instead of a bottom, the kind of thing you found on old ferry's, hung from the building's wall.
"This is just like Roy Rodger's and the Mole People," Rau said. "Beneath the Planet of the Apes and The Mutant A-bomb People From the Moon." He smiled, but kept staring at the forest beyond the building and the tall, green grass as if he could see through the fog.
Faudron wondered if some thinking thing wasn't out there. She'd read of how smart wolves could be, so aware of their surroundings. She'd read of one that had kicked dirt on a row of traps meant for it, springing them all shut. The same wolf somehow knew all the meat left out to trap it was poisoned and carried it off, piled it up and left its spoor on it so the others in the pack would know enough to stay away. She hadn't thought about it before, feeling more or less safe with Rau, but even if they hadn't seen any wolves, it didn't mean they weren't out there.
Rau wouldn't stop talking and she kept missing the numbers on the keypad. "Rau and the tall, red-headed people from some stupid place who talk and talk and talk...shut up."
"Oh, sorry."
Click went the door and they were in.
The plaque on the inside of the door read Fifth Air Wing, Masters of Space and showed a Mercury Capsule going around the earth at a jaunty angle. Inside, everything was intact, dry but forgotten. A yellow phone-box hung on the wall just inside. Old-fashioned, wall-sized, tape memory computers stood along the other walls, dusty, but with a good overhaul, they looked like they might even work. "This loo
ks like old NASA," Faudron said, "But way too far north. I mean, Johnson couldn't get a kick-back up here."
A metal trunk with a blue sleeve sticking out of it stood in the far corner; next to it lay a pile of junk under a rotten, torn-up canvas tarp. Faudron hurried across the room and tore open the lid. The trunk contained two blue space suits.
"Didn't think they made them that color," Rau said.
"They didn't, just one time. My dad told me. I just bet you." She went to the canvas tarp and pulled it off, revealing a Mercury-style Capsule with a thirty-millimeter gattling gun sticking out of the front. "Space shooters, The Masters of Space, Dad used to tell of them."
"What did they shoot?"
"Commie satellites, maybe people like you but the program never really got off the ground...automation killed it, I guess." Faudron checked her cellphone. The water hadn't wrecked it. "Let's take a picture." She put on the space suit, feeling like a little kid and picked up the helmet, put it on and locked it into place.
With a little bit of coaxing, Rau put his on and they took a picture, Faudron sitting half-inside the capsule the way the moonwalk capsule was displayed at the Smithsonian. "Take another one for Moren. Just of you."
"Make a copy."
"It wouldn't be the same. I doubt she'd like me in it."
He paused as if he wanted to say something, but shook his head.
After the flash went off, Faudron tried to move but slipped and her foot went through the capsule's canvas seat. The capsule rolled over. Something aluminum snapped and Faudron crawled out holding a hand out to shield her face in case the capsule wanted to roll across the room. "I think I broke it."
"Can't hear you?" Rau said.
She took her phone back to admire their picture when the phone dialed a number she did not know and the lock on the far door opened with a hollowed-out snap.
Faudron shook the phone back and forth, always believing the battery was filled with liquid and could be made to behave better if stirred. "Why was it still locked?"
"To hide what we did, maybe. You don't remember the screams?"