“Think again,” Rick spat, and tightened his fist as hard as he could, crushing Roberts’ throat. Then, as a grotesque, rattling gurgle rose from the man, Rick grabbed his belt with his left hand and hoisted upward. Suspending Roberts in mid air only for a moment, Rick slammed him back down with as much force as his muscles could expand.
The back of Roberts’ neck slammed against the porch railing, snapping instantly.
Then Rick turned around and staggered back to the window he had just come crashing through. Aside from the Foster family, a distraught Charlie and Rosemarie attempting to comfort and shield their children from the sight of four dead men bleeding out onto their living room floor, he found Cornelia and Lacy approaching him.
“You know,” Lacy said, reaching the window first, a stainless steel Beretta 9mm handgun at her side, “you couldn’t have done this with your fancy little Italian sports car. But what I can’t understand is why you two didn’t stick around and ask if the Mindbending Dorian didn’t have any weapons on his plane.” Then she lifted the Beretta and winked at him. “Would have saved you some stress.”
“There was another one of them out in the woods,” Rick replied flatly.
“Was,” Lacy said with another wink.
Rick heard footsteps on the porch a moment later. Turning to see who it was, he found Dan Knight approaching, tucking what looked like a massive Desert Eagle .44 magnum into his belt.
“So,” Knight said evenly, “anyone mind telling me what the hell happened here?”
6.
Rick, Cornelia, Knight, and Lacy were sitting on the benches inside the little gazebo next to the Foster house. It was a quiet spot to let some of the adrenaline burn off. Inside the house, they saw, the Fosters had their lights back on. In fact, Rick noted, it seemed like every single light must have been on. He wondered if the family had called the police yet.
“And the kicker is,” Knight spoke up at last, a couple of prolonged moments of silence having passed since he and Lacy were given the full story of Henry Roberts and his gun-wielding friends. “The thing is,” he said, a distant, angry, disgusted look on his face, “that I think he was right.”
Rick saw Cornelia reacting to those words as if she had been given a backhanded slap. “What?” she asked. “Coming in here and taking these people—”
Knight shook his head with an annoyed glare. “Taking them hostage and trying to kill them? No! Come on! Of course not….”
“But his take on all this,” Lacy said, “is right on the money.” She cast a quick glance toward the house as she paused. “Why her? Why that kid? What makes her special? Better than everyone.”
“I don’t know,” Rick said, feeling like his receding adrenaline rush had given way to a bone-deep exhaustion and a slowly pulsing headache. All that and frustration. These were valid things Knight and Lacy were saying, except he didn’t know how to respond. The person who’d dragged them out here, talked them into flying in from Hawaii, was now clueless as to what kind of sense to make of Sally Foster. “It makes no more sense than the rest of this whole globe phenomenon, but—”
“But it’s something new?” Knight asked bitterly.
“But it will get us dragged down to yet another police station and held until God knows how long?” Lacy asked.
“Remember, we have a U.S. senator on our side here,” Cornelia replied. “He’s still out there at the airport.”
“And yes,” Rick said, “this is all something new. It’s some kind of a direct interaction between people and the globe. At last! Something we’ve never seen before.”
Cornelia nodded vigorously now. “Yes, I think that’s what we need to hold onto now and—”
“And just look at it the right way?” Knight cut her off. “Go and study that kid? Call Murakami and her doctor friends in here to run every test on her find out that…Surprise! We have no idea why she was healed while these globes have no effect on anyone else in the world.”
“Maybe she heard a buzz,” Lacy said with a tone of angry sarcasm.
And Rick heard something again. A creaking. Something metallic and vibrating.
“This is a wild goose chase again,” Lacy said, and shook her head. “This thing is jerking us around. Except last time we got to go to Hawaii. If we would have stayed there at least we could have caught some waves, worked on a tan while we learned absolutely nothing new and had gun and knife wielding crazies trying to kill us.”
“No!” Cornelia insisted. “Wait a minute! Maybe it’s a progression of some sort. First the globes, then the people experiencing the hum, and now it’s a physical effect.”
Rick thought he felt the vibration all around now. As if something was affecting the gazebo all around them. “Do you hear that?”
The look that came back from Knight was openly contemptuous. “What? Are you hearing a buzz too?”
Lacy replied with an equally derisive chuckle.
Except now one of the M-16s that had been taken from the Roberts gang, the weapon leaning against the bench Rick and Cornelia sat on, started to vibrate. Had Rick not grabbed it, the weapon would have fallen over.
“Yes,” Cornelia said. “I hear it too.”
“It’s probably the wind,” Lacy said, and shrugged.
But as Rick held the M-16, he thought he felt the slight snap of electricity against his fingers, the kind of sting created by a static charge picket up from a rug.
“No,” he whispered.
“It’s something else,” Cornelia said, looking around now.
Knight’s hand went to the gun in his belt, and Rick definitely saw him flinch when he touched it.
“Can you smell that?” Cornelia said, and got up. She quickly wandered away from the gazebo. “It’s all around. Like ozone.”
“Yeah,” Rick said, and followed her. “It’s like everything around us is electrified.”
“What’s happening?” they heard a yell coming from the direction of the house. Turning around, Rick saw Charlie Foster approaching. “It’s like the house is shaking apart,” he said, the look of stressed bewilderment melted onto his face. “Like all the nails…you know, all the metal things, everything holding it together is shaking.”
Behind him, Rosemarie and the two kids rushed from the house.
Then, as soon as they all climbed down the wreckage of the smashed stairway, Rick noticed Sally stop dead in her tracks and point to the sky.
“Look!” Cornelia’s voice called out, and when he turned to her, Rick saw her staring and pointing in the same direction as Sally Foster.
What they were both looking at appeared to be a glowing orb of some sort coming closer and closer from the horizon. Moving in complete silence, it grew somewhat in size, except it was hard to judge just how large it actually was or how far away.
When he reached Cornelia, Rick heard her say, “It’s coming here,” very quietly. Then he felt her hand against his, her fingers quickly slipping around his hand.
But a moment later, as it indeed came to slowly hover almost directly over the Foster property, the orb split in two. Then it divided yet again, then once more, and once more again. Five identical points of light formed a ring in the sky straight overhead.
“What is that?” Rick heard Lacy gasp behind him.
“Maybe another progression?” Cornelia whispered.
Indeed, yet another change in the spectacle took place, with zigzagging bolts of what looked like lightning flashing from the orbs, zigzagging across the sky, arcing between the orbs.
Then, less than a minute later, a concentrated field of light spread across the area ringed by the five orbs, growing in intensity, spewing its own lightning bolts through the air, toward the ground, toward the orbs. From within this brightening inner zone, they all watched in stunned silence as what appeared to be an enormous globe of some swirling, light-pulsating, somewhat metallic
, somewhat transparent, material slowly floated toward the ground.
Hard to tell…hard to estimate…hard to characterize…the thoughts shot through Rick’s mind. It was difficult still to estimate how high up the object was, especially since it soon stopped its descent. Five, six hundred feet, perhaps? It was also impossible to guess what it was made out of. How can I guess what something that’s capable of this would be made of…? or even decide if the thing was solid or some kind of a phenomenon of pure energy.
Except for the light. One thing that was certain was the brightness of the object kept glowing, bathing everything all around, until Rick thought that every pore on his body, every cell inside of it, was being shone through by light that felt like a solid, tangible form now.
He tried to turn to Cornelia, but he wasn’t sure if he was capable of movement. He wasn’t sure if he even felt like he had a body. All around him now was nothing but that intrusive, all-consuming light.
7.
Rick thought he was inside some type of an enclosure, a hall of some sort, a physical place, yet his awareness of it came from some sensory input other than his eyes and ears. The most accurate description he would ever be able to give of the experience was that it felt “dreamlike.” Nothing more concrete than that. Only “dreamlike.” He knew there was solid ground under his feet, that there was a roof over his head—somewhere high above, but how far away was impossible to tell—and even the fact that this space had borders all around, at some unknowable distance. Yet all of these physical, solid things were made of bright white energy. Rick just knew it.
And he heard a voice with crystal clarity.
“You did well,” the voice spoke. “You came and you did well.”
The voice was surprisingly youthful, Rick noticed. Clear spoken, loud, apparently human…but with a voice like that of an adolescent male.
“You and your friends came as I…I hoped you would. I’m glad I was right.”
And then Rick saw the speaker.
Indeed, he appeared to be a perfectly average-looking youth of about seventeen, perhaps eighteen years old. His face was, in some odd way, unremarkable in every possibly feature. Aside from the fact that his hair appeared to be a light brown color against all the white energy all around, there was nothing about him that Rick thought would ever be in any way memorable. He appeared to be dressed in some type of a body suit that was just as white as everything else Rick’s mind registered.
So average…so why is he so familiar?
“What are you?” Rick mouthed the words, and he was glad to be able to hear his own voice.
“One who wants to warn you,” the…kid? The stranger? The being…? spoke. “And, most of all, to apologize.”
“What is this all about?” Rick had to ask immediately. He had to get to the point quickly, he knew, before he would lose all his faculties and have some kind of a breakdown.
Is a nervous breakdown even possible here?
The being’s—for some odd reason a part of Rick’s brain wanted to process this thing speaking to him by referring to it as “the kid,” but he knew that would not have been accurate—facial expressions took on something akin to the look of sheepish, regretful embarrassment. “A mistake,” it said, sounding again exactly like a deeply contrite human eighteen-year-old. “A mistake has been made. By me. But now the people of your world are about to feel its full ramifications.”
Oh, only now we will feel the full ramifications?
“The globes!” Rick said quickly. “Are they about to hurt people?”
The being shook its head. “No. Your people are about to make the next mistake. And it has the power to….”
“The power to what?” Rick blurted out, an irritation spiking through him as the thing in front of him let his voice trail off. There was that quality to his voice again, Rick realized. Like a kid who knew it had screwed up and now tried to find the best way of explaining. Human! the next thought coursed through Rick’s mind. He has an effect on me the same way a real person would.
“To cost millions of lives,” the being said, this time with a level of firm conviction. Again, like a human who knew there were no more ways of dancing around the truth and knew it could earn points by being honest. “You have to stop them.”
Wherever he was, whatever state he was in, Rick could still feel the sensation of an adrenaline spike, of panic. “Stop who? From doing what?”
“Please believe me that all this was not my intention when….”
“When what? When you created the globes?”
The being nodded, again looking contrite. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“First you must save your people.”
“Save them how?”
“You must tell your companions that locations in…New Mexico, in Taos, in Bristol and all similar places must not be attacked.”
What the hell is he talking about? “Attacked? Who’s attacking what?” Rick asked, another frightening realization dawning on him. Since leaving Hawaii, he hadn’t been keeping track of world events. Had the situation in the Philippines escalated into something much worse?
“Your companions know,” the being said. “They have been communicating with your military. People you have been working with.”
“My companions…Knight?”
The being that looked like an average college freshman nodded. “Yes. This should not have been. It has all been a mistake. But my…people? Others wouldn’t have approved. But I felt your world needed it. I was wrong.”
Rick’s mind kept reeling. “Your…people?”
“That’s the phrase you would use.”
“So there are more of you?”
A slight nod again. “Yes. Always have been.”
“What?” Rick found himself saying, growing ever more certain that perhaps a nervous breakdown was very much possible even here, whatever this place might have been. “What are you…?” he mumbled, about to say “people.” “Aliens?” he said very tentatively instead.
There was a look of confusion on the being’s youthful face. “In a way,” he said at length. “We have been called so many things over time. We have looked so many ways.”
Unbelievable, was the only thought that formed in Rick’s astonished mind. “So this…it’s not what you look like?”
“No. This is what I…what I made myself look like to you.”
To put me at ease? Rick thought. But this bit of information also made sense. It explained that feeling of familiarity Rick had. The being created an image to register in Rick’s brain, acting almost like some sort of a composite-sketch program, something that could choose among various facial features, creating something that registered a reaction in the viewer. He also wondered if this otherworldly thing could access his mind, his memories, perhaps drawing on his subconscious recollections of people he had seen throughout his life—people he had been friends with, people he liked—and created this composite creation.
But Rick had to shake his head. “You need to make me understand,” he demanded. “What was all this, the globes, those people hearing the sounds…the…the hums? What was it all about?”
“A sign,” the being said. “It was supposed to be a sign…but it never should have been. You should not be going to Taos. My…people…my companions, can do irreversible damage to your world if the military’s plans are carried out. I tried to correct the mistakes. I created the false experiencers of the signals….”
“All these other people who can hear the hums,” Rick thought aloud. “Radar chaff. So that was correct. To hide the real experiencers.”
“You must stay away from Taos.”
“No!” Rick wanted to insist as strongly as he could. “Wait a minute! You owe me some clear answers.”
“At another time.”
And, once, again, all that Rick cold see, hear, feel all ar
ound him, inside of him, was formless, brilliant energy.
8.
“This is…it’s incredible!” Cornelia gasped. “A progression. It doesn’t make any sense to me. But…but one step leading to the next.”
She, actually, was the first one to speak. Knight and Lacy, along with the Fosters, sitting around the gazebo—where Rick was told he had reappeared—were all dumbstruck by his disappearance and reappearance almost as much as they were by his story.
As Rick looked around, he wouldn’t have been able to even take a wild guess at who would be the next one to say anything. Expressionless, frozen stares studied his every movement. In a way, it was a good thing that they were still the only ones on the property, that the local police could not be summoned by the Fosters from the house. As it turned out, Henry Roberts and his gang had cut the telephone landlines and smashed all of the Fosters’ cell phones when they attacked. In the shock and confusion of the aerial light show and Rick’s disappearance, Cornelia, Knight, and Lacy hadn’t yet gotten around to using any of their phones to call anyone out to the property. But one thing Rick was quite sure of, though, was who he wanted to do the talking next.
“What’s in Taos, New Mexico, Dan?” he asked.
As there was little reaction from Knight, Rick shifted his gaze to Lacy.
“Taos?” Cornelia asked.
“Yeah, Taos,” Rick said, but kept watching Knight and Lacy.
First there was the look of recognition from Lacy and her effort to avoid eye contact. Then Knight ran a hand over his head and gave it a slight shake. When he did make eye contact with Rick, his focus seemed to have the intensity of a laser that could cut through steel.
“Maybe the real answers,” Knight said quietly.
“So it’s true,” Rick said.
“Well, if your little glowing friend told you,” Knight replied, his voice carrying both weariness and menace at the same time.
“What’s true?” Cornelia asked, the astonishment and confusion ringing through her words. “What’s going on here? What about Taos?”
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