The Grays (5 page)

He nodded, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. She followed him into an office that had clearly been carved out of what was once the master bedroom.

“This place was built in 1908 by Indy’s only cattle baron,” he said as he dropped down behind his desk.

There had been no exchange of salutes. But he was her superior officer, so she brought her hand to her forehead and said, “Lieutenant Lauren Glass reporting as ordered, sir.”

He looked up at her. “Obviously. Please go to the scrub room and get prepped.”

“Excuse me?”

“The scrub room. You’ll find it at the base of the shaft.”

“Sir, I have to explain to you, I have no idea what’s going on here. I would like a little more information, sir.”

“You’ll get the hang of it.”

“Uh, look, what is this scrub room? What do I have to scrub for?”

“Listen, I know you don’t understand any of this. We were planning to bring you along as your dad reached retirement. Nobody thought it would be like this. But we have a desperate situation, Lauren.”

She found a chair. “Sir, I’m sorry to disabuse you, but I have not been on any training program in any way, shape, or form. I am not prepared for whatever this is. I basically have no idea what you’re doing here at all, but whatever it is, it killed—” She had to stop. Her grief, appearing suddenly, had choked her on her own words.

“Lauren, I knew your dad for a long time. So you’ll know that what I’m about to say is not meant to be hard or callous. It is what your dad would say to you if he could talk right now. Your dad would say to you, ‘Soldier, you have a duty. Do your duty.’ ”

“Sir, respectfully, you tell me in one breath that my predecessor is a KIA, then you tell me to proceed into whatever situation he was in with no training or prep whatsoever. Sir, I would like to understand this order a little better. I know that I am dealing with somebody called Adam, and my father dealt with him and with somebody called Bob, and my father died as a result. That is the extent of my knowledge.”

He stood up so suddenly that she did, too. He turned his back on her and strode to the window. “There is no training, and there is no time. I want you down there now, because we have a situation, Lieutenant, and I believe—no, I know—that you are the only person remotely available to us who might be able to help.”

When he attempted to smile at her, she saw that coldness again, this time
more clearly than she had at the grave. This was a driven man, she thought, a fanatic. And she wondered, should she trust a fanatic?

Well, Dad had. This was his commanding officer, this frosty man with his carefully decorated office and his fabulous car.

He showed her to a small elevator that opened under the front stairs. “There’s a very skilled man at the other end who will be there to help you.”

She stepped into the dim interior and descended. It felt as if it was moving fast, and continued for more than a minute. When the doors opened, she found a chunky young man in a white sterile suit waiting for her . . . and saw that he had been the fourth man at the funeral.

“I’m Andy Morgan,” he said. “Welcome to the facility.”

“This place is
deep.”

“We’re two hundred and eighty feet down. Deep in the bedrock.” He tapped a foot on the floor. “Basalt.”

Faintly, she could hear another voice. It was groaning and sounded tired. Also angry. She looked around but saw nobody.

“Who is that?”

Andy Morgan shook his head. “You’re good,” he said.

“Who’s moaning? What’s going on in here?”

“Lauren, listen to me. You’re going to meet him in a moment. Sort of meet him. What you’re hearing is coming through a six-foot-thick tempered steel wall that is further protected by a high-intensity electromagnetic field.”

“Then how can we possibly be hearing it? Because it’s perfectly clear. And the man is in agony.”

“I can’t hear it.”

“But that’s crazy. Listen to him, he’s wailing!”

“The fact that you can hear his thoughts is why you’re here.”

“What thoughts? He’s crying!”

“You need to go in there,” Andy Morgan said. The same tone, she thought, that he might have used if he had told her it was time for her to do her wingwalk, or perhaps go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Behind him was a steel door, armored and locked with great, gleaming bolts. Why in the world would anybody be that locked up? What did they have in there, some kind of deranged superman? She tried to conceal her total and complete mystification, not to say her fear, and to concentrate on what she needed to know, here, on a practical basis. “Now, is this person going to be violent?”

“Baby, he is
flyin
’ in there! He’s been bouncing off the walls ever since the colonel bought it. Excuse me! Since your dad passed away.”

“Before I go in there, I think you’d better tell me exactly what happened to him.”

He lowered his head. “Nobody told you?”

“They did not.”

“Okay. Your dad got a scratch.”

“A
scratch?”

“That caused an allergic reaction so intense that he bled out.”

She did not need to think very long about that. She sat down in one of the two chairs that stood before the control panel. “I’m not doing this.”

He was a gentle-looking guy, more than a little overweight, with sad, sad eyes. “They sent you all the way down here without telling you a damn thing, didn’t they?”

“That would be correct.”

“Okay, I’m going to level with you. Have you ever heard of aliens?”

“Yeah. No green card.”

“The other kind.”

“Oh, that stuff. I have no interest in that stuff.”

“Perhaps you had better see your dad’s office.”

“God, I’d love that.”

Across the small room was a door. The nameplate holder was empty. He unlocked the door and she saw a small, windowless space that had a steel desk, a couple of chairs, and a cot. There was a bookcase, also, and it was filled with books on electromagnetism and, of all things, UFOs. She read the titles,
Intruders, Communion, UFO Condition Red, UFOs and the National Security State
, and dozens more.

“You can pick what you’d like to keep. We’ll ditch the others.” He lifted a picture that was lying facedown on the desk. “I knew you’d want this.”

It filled her heart and her eyes, the picture of the two of them taken when she was twelve. They were at Cape May, New Jersey, she was wearing her new bathing suit, and her Boston terrier, Prissy, was still alive. For a moment she smelled the salt in the air, remembered a radio playing down the beach, and heard the breeze fluttering in their cabana.

He took the picture and set it on the desk. “This is your office, now.”

“There’s an alien down here.”

“And your father was his empath, and you will be his empath.”

“Meaning?”

“You are going to find that you can see pictures he makes in his mind, and describe what you see to us.”

Her father had kept quite a secret. “I should have been trained.”

“Your dad wanted to wait until you’d had a little more Air Force. You know, you sign up and you wear a uniform, but really becoming part of this crazy organization takes time. Your dad wanted you to have that time.”

“I’m an Air Force brat down to my toes.”

“He knew that. He respected that. But duty is something different. I mean, our kind of duty. Keeping a secret so big that it is a kind of agony. Above all, knowing every time you go in that room over there, that you might die. Every time. But doing it like your dad did, on behalf of the Air Force, the country, and future of man.” He took the picture from her, looked at it. “We need you to get in there and calm Adam down. If we can’t get him to pull himself together, he’s going to literally be busted apart by knocking into those walls in there. Considering that he’s been doing this since your dad passed, we’re desperate, Lieutenant.”

Either she took up her dad’s sword or she let it lie, and let the meaning of his life lie with him in his grave.

There was no real choice here. Never had been. She took a deep breath. “Okay, what do I do?”

He drew her through a steel door into a tiny dressing area. She stood naked in a shower with nozzles on the ceiling and walls, turning slowly as instructed with her hands raised over her head while green, chemical-stinking liquid sluiced over her.

Still wet, she donned an orange isolation suit and what felt like asphalt gloves, they were so thick. “He’s electromagnetically active,” Andy explained. “If you touch him, he’ll extend into your nervous system and take over your body. You don’t want that.”

“No.”

“Cover your face with Vaseline. And here’s an epinephrine injector. If you get the least feeling of even so much as a tickle in your throat, press it against your leg and get out of there.”

As she dug into the Vaseline container, she reflected that her father’s hand was probably the last one to do this. She could almost feel him beside her right now, telling her not to be scared, to remember her duty, that he was with her every step of the way.

Then something changed. The room, the guy—everything around her disappeared. She was suddenly and vividly in another room. It had
stainless-steel walls, a black floor, and a fluorescent ceiling. There was a man on a table, naked, surrounded by people in full protective gear, sterile suits, faceplates down, the works. The man was purple, his chest was heaving, and blood was oozing out of his eyes, out of his nose, down his cheeks like tears.

The hallucination, or whatever it was, was so vivid that she might as well have actually been standing in the place. She could even hear the air-conditioning hissing, and the muffled voices of the doctors behind the masks, who were trying to save the man on the table.

He gasped, gasped again as they set up an IV. A nurse intoned, “BP 280 over 200, heart rate 160, basal BP rising, glucose 320 rising, we have another infarction—”

There was a high-pitched whine and blood began spraying out of his skin, spraying their face masks and their white sterile suits, beading and running down to the floor as he bled from every pore, a haze of blood pink and fine, like it was being sprayed from a thousand tiny high-pressure nozzles affixed to his body.

Then his head turned and she saw his face, and an ice cold spike stabbed her straight in the heart.

In that instant, the vision of her dad’s death ended.

She realized that she was still in the basement room she had entered in the first place, and Andy was supporting her under her arms.

“Sorry,” she managed to mutter, regaining her footing and stepping away from him, “I—uh—I think it’s the . . . depth.”

“If you say so.” He put an arm around her.

“Back off!”

“Hey, okay! Okay. I’m just trying to help, here.”

She blew out breath, then shook her head. That had been vivid. That had been real vivid.

Andy watched her. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m not okay. No.”

“Uh, was that a seizure, because—”

“It’s my business, okay!”

“Okay! Sorry.” He paused, then, and when she said nothing more, continued. “I’m going to open up the cage itself. When you enter, you’ll see a chair and a table. Sit in the chair.”

“That’s it? That’s all I get to know?”

“It’s all any of us know. Frankly, what your dad did, and what we know you can do, is not understood. You just have to do it.”

“And what if I can’t?”

“You’ve passed the test.” He went to a small keyboard and keyed in a combination. “I’ll be in the control room. You’ll be able to see and hear me, and vice versa. If you get into trouble, I’ll pull you out. But obviously things can happen fast in there.”

He left the dressing room, closing the heavy outer door behind him. A moment later, his voice returned, tinny, coming out of a ceiling speaker. “You reading me?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, the door’s opening now.”

There was a loud click, then a whirring sound, and the wall of the little chamber slid back. She saw before her a room lit by what appeared to be ultraviolet light. It reminded her of the Animals of the Night exhibit at the Cleveland Zoo, where the vampire bats and things were deceived into thinking it was dark during the day. “Are there any lights?”

“Don’t worry about seeing him. You won’t. If you get so much as a glimpse, count yourself lucky. Pay attention to the corners of your eyes.”

“The corners of my eyes . . . you mean use my peripheral vision?”

Then the air hit her. It was dry
—real
dry. She could feel her face shriveling, it was so dry, feel her lips starting to crack. The function of the Vaseline was now clear, and she grabbed another handful of it right in the glove and slathered it on.

The room open before her was not large, maybe twenty by twenty. It looked like it had rubber walls. There was a window on the far side, and Andy could be seen sitting there at a control panel. His face glowed green from the instruments before him.