Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse

by Huff, Stephen Donald

  Perhaps because it has become highlighted by the beam, a long, serpentine tentacle snaps down from overhead to snatch the creature off the door with a terrified squeak. As we hiss for The Kid to extinguish the flashlight, we realize one of those tentacle-wielding predators must be perched on the roof above our heads.

  We back away from the windows as darkness returns, but the display has not passed unnoticed. A large, bristling insect-like monster drops to the tarmac in front of us, its many feeding tentacles coiling and uncoiling in the dim light. Back and forth it sways, its evilly gleaming eyes crisscrossing the windows to search the interior shadows of the building.

  Instinctively, we freeze for the duration. Several minutes pass breathlessly before the thing moves away, once more distracted by the flying frenzy flitting back and forth across the parking lot.

  From deep inside the interior shadows, we watch the show with mesmerized terror, while alien vocalizations dominate the night. Clearly, this part of the world is overrun with strange, otherworldly creatures, and we can only guess how and why. My own thoughts return again and again to reflect on Terminus. Adding these two events together, I formulate a sinister conclusion.

  Perhaps an hour later, when the frenzy seems to move deeper into the desert to leave us in relative peace, we all return to our sleeping spots in silence. Because nobody speaks, I know they are thinking the same black thoughts. Even as I hope to find answers the following day, I wonder what I will do in the event of failure.

  Having passed a restless, largely sleepless night, we rise early in the morning. First thing, we all visit the windows alone or in pairs to find the tarmac empty.

  Silently, we wonder where those nocturnal alien bugs go to sleep during the day and, like me, most of them appear concerned for our pending adventures given the previous night’s display. After refreshing ourselves and eating, we return to the truck with the rise of the sun to discuss our plans. To my surprise, I find none are pushing to return to The Village. Having arrived, everyone wants to explore the site to determine what, if anything, Area-51 has to do with Terminus, the alien, and all those weird bugs crawling around the desert.

  Back in the truck, we back out of the service bay and The Kid pulls the rolling door shut behind us, in case we want to use the same facility one more night. Our initial exploration circles the BX. We find a modestly endowed baseball diamond, tennis courts, a gym, and other recreational amenities. Across a sand-driven road, we see a truck lot with several vehicles parked inside, most of a normal configuration and a few that sport specialized trailers clearly intended to support esoteric field operations, perhaps related to research. Behind this facility, we see a sprawling electrical sub-station, which seems overpowered for the size of the base.

  During the first hours of the morning, we drive around the airstrip, encounter a handful of jet fighters and transport aircraft, most with developmental equipment attached, all abandoned and gathering desert sand. The buildings are nondescript and, for the most part, windowless. Many are hangars or in some other way devoted to the service of aircraft, large and small.

  We see no bodies, but we see plenty of dried, black blood sign. Whatever happened here during Terminus, someone or something came along afterward to remove the corpses.

  Once we cover most of the surface area without venturing into the buildings, we return to the baseball diamond to re-orient ourselves and discuss our options. Sitting in The Guide’s small office, I spread the gold foil map across the top of his desk to scroll it back and forth, up and down, virtually exploring the hidden structures we cannot see.

  In time, we notice a pattern to the underground passageways. They are apparently secured by multiple internal gates, while access is restricted by a limited number of entries.

  I point to the southwestern end of the Groom Lake saltpan. There, an isolated set of structures juts out into the alabaster basin at the end of a short road defended by a pair of gates and a ring of fencing. Most of the subterranean corridors radiate from this location like the irregular spokes of a wheel.

  “This is where we begin,” I announce, tapping the foil, which I have zoomed to the first level of hidden passageways. Then I move my finger along a particular underground hallway to a large void beneath the saltpan that can only be a buried hangar. “We’ll make this our first destination. It will be barricaded and locked, and these won’t be flimsy chain-link fences or glass doors like we see above ground. They’ll all be set into reinforced concrete and made from steel. The Guide’s lock picks won’t help. Neither will The Girl’s magnum.”

  The Engineer offers, “I saw some oxy-acetylene rigs in the garage. There are bound to be some cutting tips mixed in with the welding gear. We could use those to hack through the doors.”

  “We should grab some sledgehammers, too, in case we need to demolish something made of concrete. Chisels, also. That sort of thing.” Chief fingers the bristles of his five o’clock shadow. “Since we have nothing but time, it won’t be too much trouble. I’m more concerned about the bugs. Who knows where they go to roost during the day? Maybe they like those dark, confined places best of all.”

  “Maybe,” I hedge, “but I suspect not. We won’t get inside easily. Dumb animals won’t get in, at all.”

  “What about the spaceman?” This from The Guide, speaking softly for all his distraction, his busy eyes as ever fixed on his camera displays. “If those guys wanted in, you can bet they got in. Years ago.”

  “Undoubtedly. So, we’ll go armed,” I conclude, re-folding the foil and handing it over to The Girl for storage in her bottomless luggage. “If worse comes to worst, it will simply be a short vacation. At best, we’ll get some answers.”

  “Yeah,” grunts The Engineer, pushing away from the desk, “even if the only answer is that this ain’t the place to look.”

  After collecting the requisite gear and driving to the select location, we gather before the bumper of the truck, confronting the small, non-descript, single-story building that is our destination. It resides at the end of a sandy one-lane road that at first appears to be pressed into the pebbly soil. Our exploration ultimately reveals its construction in concrete, which has been poured, textured and painted to resemble the desert medium while remaining resilient enough to support heavy traffic. Indeed, on closer examination, we determine that the building is, in fact, not a single story, at all. Rather, it has been cleverly sunken into the desert at the end of a descending apron. Standing at its base, we see it is actually as tall as many of the hangars behind us. Further, while the structure’s façade reveals a single pair of doors embedded in the far right side of the building’s frame, we quickly determine that the remaining face of the building can slide wide in collapsible panels to allow something huge to pass in or out of it.

  Additionally, the security barricades approaching the building are of increasingly resistant construction. First, we use a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters to hack through a chain spanning a fence gate. Second, we use the torch to slice open a padlocked cable stretched across the roadway just inside the gate. Next, we must use the torch to cut through a carbide steel deadbolt sealing one of the facade doors, and we find this to be an especially difficult undertaking, since the lock is inset into an equally durable butt plate. Ultimately, we must resort to cutting around the door’s hinges so we can pry it out of the frame backwards using a stout crowbar.

  Inside, foot traffic once passed through a narrow corridor caged in steel plate and a series of manned and unmanned security checkpoints associated with increasingly prohibitive control features, which elicits a collective groan from our little troupe. As we debate the most efficient way to cut through it all, Engineer sparks the torch and begins burning through the wall in a low arc that, when finished, resembles nothing so much as a mouse hole. With the aid of the crowbar and sledgehammers, we punch our way through into the dark cavern of the hangar, itself.

  Shining our flashlights around cautiously, we first make certain the echoing volume is
free of alien bugs. To our disappointment, we also determine it is also quite empty of anything else that might inform us. Signs point to fire extinguishers, secured one-way exits and other safety features, but nothing obvious tells us how they used the interior or why. In fact, only the structure, itself, informs us.

  Rather than terminate at the rear wall, the gradual descent of the apron continues on an even grade through the massive front door. Outside, the building’s architects employed the ramp to conceal the true height and utility of the building, itself, while inside the plunging floor appears to have served the same practical purpose.

  The Engineer whistles softly, shining the beam of his powerful light from left to right, top to bottom to fully encompass the width and height of the corridor. “They could have moved the Hindenburg through here with room to spare.”

  “Hindenburg?” mumbles The Kid. “What’s that?”

  “A huge airship from a hundred years ago,” I reply. “It was the floating equivalent of the Titanic.”

  “Yeah,” breathes Chief appreciatively, “and they both met similar fates.”

  “What the hell did they haul through here, do you think?” The Engineer motions for us to temporarily abandon our heavy gear, and then he starts down the ramp, his footsteps tapping with a staccato rhythm to lead us all behind him. Answering his own question, he adds, “I don’t think it’s an accident they situated it alongside the runways. It also might have something to do with the extraordinary length of the strip crossing the Lake. To be so long, something fast probably landed there. Something not necessarily designed for aerial flight.”

  “Why do you say that?” I ask.

  He shrugs, though his form is scarcely visible for the shadows and low light. “Aircraft like jets and prop planes need wings to maneuver through the atmosphere, but spacecraft don’t. At the same time they provide lift, however, wings also add drag to the structure. I’m not an aeronautical engineer, of course, but it seems to me a transatmospheric, reusable vehicle of some kind would benefit from reduced flight control surfaces, making it faster going up but more difficult to maneuver while coming down. Hence, the need for a longer landing run. Judging from your foil map, I’m guessing the tarmac crossing that saltpan is two or three times longer than required by a jumbo passenger jet.”

  Following The Engineer, we descend beneath ground level. The rear wall of the hangar passes overhead.

  I ask, “Couldn’t it also be necessary for something very large? Something that is simply many times bigger than a jumbo jet?”

  “You mean something big enough to need a building like this one?” From our suddenly reserved Guide.

  Engineer nods. “Big, maybe. Or heavy. Very heavy.”

  Chief grunts, “Or both.”

  “It’s a funny thing, too,” continues Engineer as he walks down the ramp, ogling the extreme engineering supporting the structure from its sides and top. These features are visible only at the extreme verge of our light beams, and we cannot see to the end of the tunnel in front of us.

  When he stops talking, overwhelmed by his awe for this extreme example of civil engineering, I prompt, “What? What’s funny?”

  He shakes his head to clear it and re-center his thoughts. “The roadway leading to this facility. At first glance, it looks like a one-lane dirt road. In reality, it’s eight lanes of concrete, probably double-thick and heavily reinforced, covered over with a painted, textured surface to look like a one-lane gravel track. They went to a lot of trouble to conceal this space. It’s a hidden spot within a hidden spot. Why?”

  “Yeah,” muses our Asian comrade, his pinched voice suspicious and sly, as though he has for the first time begun pondering a rather nasty thought, “what’s waiting for us down there? And do we really want to find it?”

  “Who cares?” groans Chief. “If we do find something and it ends us, then at least we’ll go knowing what happened. Maybe why. That’s more than billions got during Terminus.”

  “Right,” confirms The Engineer. “We push on. Go for broke.”

  For the first time, I realize we are speaking in whispers. The oppressive darkness and overbearing construction has buried us deep. We speak in the hushed tones deserving of a tomb. I wish I could hope to survive it, but I don’t. Since we found the spaceman and the map, I don’t care much for anything except learning, if I can, why I did what I did. Should I find the time or opportunity, of course, I would like to get some payback. Otherwise, I can’t find the interest or temperament to care what happens after.

  We walk in silence from there. The tunnel is long. And deep. We descend continually until I determine we might be forty meters underground.

  At this point, perhaps a kilometer further into the saltpan overhead and situated where the ramp levels again, we encounter the first obstruction in the passageway. This is a massive pair of rolling doors designed to stack vertically in panels and then fit into spaces recessed to either side of the corridor. It remains open at the center, a gap of perhaps half a panel. Wide enough to pass a bus. Maybe two. We collect to one side of it like ants crawling through a pantry, shining our lights into the gloom.

  The Engineer is the first to gasp. He plays his light up, up, up. The spacecraft is huge. American. Alien. Both. English markings. Otherworldly markings. U.S. technology. Technology from another, infinitely more advanced era and place.

  “Son of a bitch,” growls Chief. “It’s true. All true.”

  “What?” asks The Guide softly, awestruck by the sheer size and bulk of the craft resting on bulging tires before us.

  “The so-called conspiracy theories. They say we’ve been reverse engineering captured flying saucers here for decades. Nobody believed. Everybody said they’re just nutjobs and nothing better to do with their time. This clinches it, though. If it doesn’t, I don’t know what would!”

  From behind, an unexpected voice startles us. Gruff and vulgar, his tone base and his accent heavy, Russian I think, an unannounced male announces, “Americans don’t know the half of it.”

  THE ENTERPRISE

  We spin to confront this new perceived threat, our individual weapons ready in one hand and our lights flashing in the other. We see a stocky man dressed in foreign fatigues standing before a doorway set into the side of the massive corridor behind us, a portal we missed for all our distraction with the towering barricade and its disturbing revelation. From the Cyrillic text, I confirm my suspicions of the man’s nationality. The stereotypical Russian soldier, he is broad shouldered and tall with deeply set eyes of slate, a bushy mustache and craggy facial features. Unarmed save for a pistol strapped to his belt, he greets us with his hands splayed wide, palms facing us, his knees slightly bent. He blinks in the direct shine of our flashlights and turns his head slightly, but he remains unafraid.

  His accent is thick, but his English is nevertheless readily interpretable. He says, “Be calm. Be calm. No threat here. Not here.” Then he smiles thinly, “But through there… much danger. Better to follow me. Yes?”

  Without lowering his guard, Chief growls, “What the hell is a Russian doing down here?”

  “Down here?” queries the man with disconcerting joviality. “Down here? Everywhere! It’s no secret. Not to the rest of the world. Only you Americans don’t know. I will tell you. I will tell you everything, but come! Follow! Quickly!”

  The stranger backs toward the door and stretches his right behind him to pull it open, motioning with his left for us to follow. Light pours into the gloom from the opening. When we hesitate, his jovial expression falls away to be instantly replaced by one of the most menacing and hostile faces I have ever seen, despite Terminus.

  Tilting his chin low to regard us through his bushy eyebrows, he hisses, “If you want answers, you don’t have a choice. No choice at all. Choose as you please, but I cannot allow you to interfere with this operation. Not when we have come so far. Please… come.”

  We exchange glances. We shrug. We follow.

  He pulls the door ope
n for us, nodding and grinning, that happy face returned. “Good! Very good! You make a good choice!”

  Inside the pedestrian-sized hallway, our Russian host follows, saying, “Of course, it is not so good that you cut open the doors up top. Not so good, at all. By tonight, they will know you are here, but tonight was always going to be too late for them! Too late by hours!”

  “Too late for who?” Engineer asks the obvious question.

  “Oh, come now,” enthuses The Russian, “we know you know. We saw you using your map. Technology like that doesn’t come from home.” He pushes through our small crowd to stand before us, and he points through the ceiling tiles, “It only comes from up there. Way… way… up there.” Softly, he claps his hands together, and then he announces, “Still, you are the first to come so far. Very surprising, really. Not after Terminus, for sure, but before Terminus, yes. Most Americans,” he sighs, turning to lead us toward a right angle in the passageway perhaps half a kilometer distant, “they happily, as you say, drank the Kool-Aid. Have been drinking it for generations.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” from Chief.

  “Them! The bugs! You saw them last night. We know this. They waylaid you on the highway. We know this, too. In fact, we Russians know many things you do not. Americans, they know nothing!”

  Before my comrades can intervene to provoke a conflict or muddy the discourse, I ask, “How long?”

  Facing away from us, confident we must follow, he shrugs. “Seventy years? Since long before your so-called ‘Roswell incident’. You know it?”

  “Of course,” whines The Engineer, “everyone knows that story.”

  “Yes. The whole world knows, and all of us except you Americans know the truth.”

  “And that is?”

  “You saw that thing parked in the hangar. That doesn’t help you to guess?”

  “It was real?” mumbles The Kid. “The flying saucer was real?”