The Bones Beneath My Skin

by TJ Klune

  It wasn’t like the others.

  It was like Nate. It was like Alex.

  And it was here. It was in the woods, and there was a man standing in front of it, and it was thinking can you help me? can you please help me? although it wasn’t quite in those words. And Nate saw the moment a younger Oren Schraeder understood what was happening to him, understood what it was he was seeing in front of him.

  The gunfire around them ceased.

  Nate felt no pain.

  He opened his eyes.

  Surrounding them were hundreds of bullets, floating in midair.

  Art’s eyes were wide and angry.

  There was a moment, a brief, terrible moment when Nate felt that anger, felt what she wanted to do. She wanted nothing more than to send those bullets right back where they’d come from, send them into the heads and hearts of the men who thought they could take from her. Before this place, before she’d come here, she’d never understood the concept of violence. Of revenge. Randy had been pretty close when he’d said she wasn’t human, that she couldn’t experience something such as love. But that had been before. Before Cisco Grove. Before the Mountain.

  She knew love. She knew rage. She knew violence.

  And she wanted revenge.

  Alex said, “No. Art. No.”

  And so she let it go.

  The bullets dropped, clattering against the wooden porch, bouncing down the stairs and into the grass in front of the farmhouse.

  The only sound came from the thumpthumpthump of the Black Hawk above.

  And then Artemis Darth Vader was moving.

  She took her first step down the porch stairs.

  The soldiers began to shout.

  Some fired.

  The bullets ricocheted away as if hitting a large barrier around her.

  She looked up at the helicopter.

  It wobbled.

  She jerked her head toward the barn.

  It hurtled toward the snipers.

  They shouted as they scrambled backward.

  The helicopter crashed into the barn, the blades spinning through wood, causing it to splinter and break apart. The front of the barn fell inward under the weight of the helicopter. Nate half expected it to explode, but somehow, it didn’t. It fell through the second floor with a screech of twisting metal and landed on the ground, a great cloud of dust curling up around it as the broken rotor blades came to a halt.

  The men in the yard looked dazed.

  Randy didn’t.

  He reached down to the gun holstered on his thigh.

  Nate was running even before he knew what he was doing.

  He hit the grass just as Randy slid the gun from the holster.

  He was almost to Art when Randy pointed the gun at her head.

  He almost looked… regretful.

  Nate reached Art and wrapped his body around her, shielding her from Randy.

  “Thank you,” he whispered to her. “For everything.”

  A gun fired.

  And it—

  Nothing happened.

  He opened his eyes.

  Alex stood on the porch, rifle raised.

  Nate turned in time to see Randy falling to his knees, a hole in the center of his forehead. His eyes were sightless. A drop of blood trickled down over his nose. He fell face-first into the grass.

  There was silence in the farmyard.

  Then the soldiers raised their guns again.

  And Artemis Darth Vader said, “No.”

  Later, when the police arrived, sirens wailing, radios squawking with bewilderment, there would be confusion. They would find the remains of a helicopter in a barn, bewildered soldiers slowly picking themselves up from the ground where they’d been knocked off their feet, vehicles overturned and lying upside down. The sun would be high in the sky, and when the bodies were discovered inside the half-burned farmhouse, black cloths over their faces, a man lying on the ground with a bullet in his head, a pistol lying beside him, the picture would slowly start to become clearer.

  In the days that followed, there would be reports all over the news, reporters breathlessly exclaiming how a cult had faced off against the military before retreating back inside the farmhouse, where they met their end at the hands of their leader. The pundits would say it was David Koresh and Waco all over again. So-called experts would weigh in, attempting to explain that people in cults (the word uttered with disdain) were often gullible, easily swept up in a grand design proselytized by a man with seemingly endless amounts of charisma and a desire to prey upon those weaker than him. He was most likely a sociopath, they would say. He would think himself a prophet.

  And then there would be the tapes. The tapes where Peter Williams would sermonize his vision of the world, of a change that would come upon the Earth. He would speak of his time in a base called the Mountain (to which there was a resounding of course it’s not real when those in the know were asked about such a place), and while there was the admission that he had been enlisted, it was clearly documented that Peter Williams had been honorably discharged years before due to mental health issues. That he claimed to be Oren Schraeder, a soldier who’d been born in 1940 and had died in combat, cemented the world’s view on Peter Williams’s lack of sanity. Add in that he’d claimed to be possessed by an alien, of all things, and… well.

  He was just a crazy cult leader, they said.

  Just another wacko.

  The stories that poured out of the farm tended to focus on those in the cult, and on the outrage at a military intervention that possibly forced the hands of those who died. Family members came forward, telling tales of woe about loved ones who had one day dropped everything and disappeared. A woman named Rachel cried in many interviews, her children at her side, speaking of her mother, Dolores, how they’d been very close, how her kids who loved their grandmother very much couldn’t understand why she’d had to go away. “How am I supposed to explain this to them?” Rachel asked tearfully. “I mean, how could they ever understand?”

  Others agreed with her, saying their loved ones weren’t crazy, they weren’t like this, this didn’t sound like them, and why would they ever do such a thing?

  It had to be his fault.

  It had to be because of Peter Williams.

  Some had their loved ones buried.

  Others, like Dolores, were cremated.

  Rachel said she’d spread her ashes but declined to answer where.

  When asked what would become of Peter Williams, reporters were told his family had come and claimed the body, but had requested privacy, so no further details were provided.

  A statement was released regarding the downed helicopter. It’d been an ill-timed malfunction. It was similar to the incident that had occurred back in March when a Black Hawk had gone down outside the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center. The entire fleet would be checked to prevent such a thing from happening again.

  Aside from the deceased in the basement of the farmhouse, there was only one other casualty on the raid on the Williams Farm, as it would come to be known.

  A soldier named Randy Forks.

  He’d been shot by Peter Williams before Peter had fallen back into the house and taken his own life.

  He was given a full military funeral.

  A folded flag was handed to his brother.

  Later when the brother was interviewed, he’d said he hadn’t heard from Randy in almost a decade before he died. “Sad,” he said. “Real sad. Randy and me, we never got along. But he’s my family, you know? Sad that it had to end this way, killed by a crazy bastard who believed in aliens. What the hell is wrong with people?”

  A video camera was discovered in the basement where the bodies of the members of the Light of Eve lay.

  But Peter Williams must have forgotten to put a tape inside, because the camera was empty.

  There was no spacecraft in Markham-Tripp, obviously. The comet began to fade as it h
urtled away from Earth. Eventually, it disappeared from the sky. It wouldn’t return again until the impossible year of 4380.

  There was a queer sense of sadness. How could so many people be fooled into believing such a thing occurred and then take their lives because of it?

  “It’s a real tragedy,” a man named Steven Cooper opined on his daily radio show broadcast coast to coast. “A real damn tragedy. It wasn’t time. They came. I know they did. But it must not have been our time. They must not have found us ready yet. But they will, friends. Mark my words. One day they’ll come back, and you’ll see I’m right. Those poor souls of the Light of Eve were misguided. They went about this the wrong way. I don’t know how or why they got it into their heads that they needed to off themselves to see what was plain as day for the rest of us. That Peter Williams must have messed with their heads. Come on, friends. Have you seen his rantings? He claimed to have been possessed by an extraterrestrial. Possessed. We all know that’s not how this works. The Greys don’t possess us. They aren’t capable of such things. This is why UFOlogy is looked at with such disdain! When we have crackpots like Peter Williams, it takes away the validity of our science. Peter Williams was nothing but a hoax. A false prophet. I don’t doubt our government is shady. I know that. You know that. What was the reason they were involved in the siege at the Williams Farm to begin with? Were they trying to avoid another Waco? Why wasn’t this left up to state and local law enforcement? I have my theories. You know I do. You know I always do. Peter Williams suffered PTSD. One too many concussion blasts. It happens. He served, god love him. He did his duty. But he became lost, after. And he got it into his punch-drunk head that he was something more than he was. He deserves our pity, friends. They all do. I think that’s why they came after him. Why the cops weren’t involved. He was one of their own, and they hoped to bring him back into the fold. But make no mistake, friends: by taking their lives as they did, it may well have set those of us that believe back fifty years. They will come, friends. I guarantee it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But they will come. Caller, you’re on the air. What do you think about all this madness—”

  Eventually, they left Rick Cartwright and his family alone.

  The men in uniforms stopped coming to the door, though nondescript black cars followed him for months.

  They wouldn’t tell him much, only that his brother had been a traitor, that it’d cost him his job at the Post, and that he was involved in something Rick would never get the details of.

  He was curious, sure, but he wasn’t like Nate. He didn’t feel the burning need to ask question after question.

  He let it go.

  There were days he wouldn’t even think of his brother at all. He was a very busy man, and he had a family to support.

  But every now and then, he’d stop and think about skipping rocks along the surface of a lake, his little brother’s voice ringing in his ears. He’d think of how Nate had sounded on the phone that late night, and how he’d called him Ricky.

  A woman named Ruth who lived in Washington, DC, watched the news coming out of Pennsylvania, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She was on an extended sabbatical, a decision she’d made after the men from the “NSA” had voiced their vaguely veiled threats toward her. She didn’t know what had happened, didn’t know where Nate was, but somehow she knew the Williams Farm had to do with him. With them. With the man and the girl.

  “You keep running, kiddo,” she muttered at the TV, smoke curling up around her head. “You keep right on running. Don’t you ever stop.”

  She would die seven years later from a heart attack, having never heard from Nathaniel Cartwright again.

  There was no mention of two men and a little girl who’d found themselves on the farm. There’d been a BOLO issued on them, their photos circulated before the Williams Farm was swarmed by the military. A little girl taken against her will. Two men who she was thought to be with. But in the spring of 1995, there was no such thing as AMBER alerts; in fact, the little girl for whom the AMBER alerts would be named wouldn’t disappear until January of 1996.

  The BOLO was eventually recalled. No connection between it and the Williams Farm was ever made.

  It was as if they never were at all.

  chapter nineteen

  But they did exist.

  They had been at the farm.

  “Wait here,” Alex growled at them before making his way into the barn, climbing over a part of the crashed helicopter.

  The porch of the farmhouse was on fire.

  Nate wondered how long it would take to burn.

  The farmyard around them was destroyed. Armored vehicles overturned. Men lay unconscious on the ground. Or at least, he thought most of them were. They’d all been knocked off their feet by Artemis Darth Vader, an invisible explosion that had caused the earth around the farmhouse to crack and shift. It’d been almost tornadic in nature, the aftermath, like a twister had touched down right there in front of the house and somehow managed to save them.

  Art stared out at what her power had done.

  Her hands were shaking.

  Her skin was pale.

  She said, “You almost died. If it hadn’t been for Alex, you would have died. Why?”

  Nate put a hand in her hair. “For you. Always for you.”

  She looked up at him. Her bottom lip was trembling, and her eyes were wet. A tear trickled down her cheek. “You love me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You love him.”

  “Yes.”

  “I know now,” she said. “What it means to be human.”

  He wiped away her tears. “What?”

  “It means having your heart broken. There is nothing more human than a broken heart. How am I supposed to leave you both?”

  He picked her up.

  She cried against his shoulder.

  Eventually Alex came out of the barn. He had their duffel bags over his shoulders. He caught sight of them and stopped, a look on his face that Nate couldn’t place.

  Nate shrugged helplessly.

  “We have to go,” he said gruffly. “While we still can.”

  Miraculously, the truck they’d arrived in had somehow survived the onslaught in the farmyard. Alex threw the duffel bags in the bed of the truck as Nate climbed inside, Art still clinging to him.

  Alex entered the truck, slamming the door behind him. He breathed a sigh of relief when the truck started immediately.

  He put his arm over the bench seat, hand stretching over to Nate and Art as he reversed slowly out of the yard.

  Nate felt Alex’s fingers against his ear.

  They passed police cars and fire trucks with screaming sirens.

  No one paid them any mind.

  Nate looked in the side mirror. Behind them, he could see a plume of smoke rising from a copse of trees in the distance.

  They drove on.

  That night, they stopped at a motel in the middle of nowhere after crossing from Pennsylvania into West Virginia.

  Art was sleeping against Nate’s chest.

  Alex hadn’t said a word as he’d gone inside.

  He came back five minutes later, that same tight look on his face.

  He was angry, Nate had slowly figured out. But Nate couldn’t be sure at what.

  He parked at the end of the motel, keeping the truck in the shadows as much as possible.

  He climbed out again and shut the door behind him. Nate watched as he reached back in for their bags.

  He walked toward the motel door at the end of the row, unlocked the door, and went inside.

  “He’s having feelings,” Art said quietly, startling Nate.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. He’s not very good at those most times.”

  “I think he’s mad.”

  “Probably.”

  Nate sighed. “Are you hungry?”

  She shook her head. “Just tired. Tomorrow we can get bacon. Ton
ight I just want to sleep.”

  “All the bacon,” Nate agreed.

  He carried her inside before setting her down.

  Alex was sitting on one of the beds, face in his hands, shoulders slumped.

  Art went to him, standing at his side, hand on his arm, whispering in his ear. Nate didn’t listen. It wasn’t for him.

  He went into the bathroom and closed the door.

  It was dingy but serviceable.

  He splashed water on his face before daring to look at himself in the mirror.

  He didn’t recognize the person who stared back at him. His hair was shaggier, and he had stubble on his face. His eyes seemed harder somehow. Wilder. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth, trying to stave off the panic clawing at his chest.

  Art was asleep when he came back out, only the top of her head visible under the comforter, snoring loudly.

  Alex was awake, watching the old TV in front of him, the volume low.

  There were overhead shots of the farm. The chyron across the bottom of the screen screamed that MILITARY SHOWDOWN WITH DOOMSDAY CULT ENDS IN DEATH.

  Alex stood from the edge of the bed and switched the TV off. He glanced at Nate, that same pinched look on his face.