The Stickmen (27 page)

“All right, Danny. Go ahead and push the
button, because, like I told you, I want you to do it too. But if
you push that button now, you and I will both die. There’s a way
that you can still do it…but live. You’ve been having headaches,
right?”

The boy’s eyes fixed on Garret. “Y-yeah. How
did you know that?”

“But you only have the headaches when the
Stickmen talk to you, right?”

“Y-yeah.”

“Well, the same thing happened to me a
little while ago. The Stickmen talked to
me.
” Garrett was
sweating, trembling. He’d already beaten death once tonight. Maybe
twice was too much to ask. “My name’s Harlan,” he said. “I’m not
here to hurt you, and I’m not here to stop you from setting that
bomb off. The Stickmen don’t want you to die for them, Danny. But
the way that they communicate with you—the way that they talk to
you—it isn’t sophisticated enough to tell you all of the details.
If you listen to me for just one minute…”

“No!” Danny shouted. “You’re trying to trick
me! I’m blowing it up
right now!
”

The boy’s face reddened, then he—

snap!

—pressed the firing switch. The click, like
a tiny bone snapping, was all Garrett needed to hear to know that
his life was over. Het really wasn’t sure if he’d pissed in his
pants or not—what did it matter? A reflex caused him to close his
eyes, grit his teeth, clamp his hands over his ear, but that didn’t
matter either.

God…forgive me for my sins,
he
thought.

At least he could take some comfort in
knowing that he would die so quickly, his nerves would not have
time to register pain.

Shit, I’ve had a pretty good life, so what
the fuck am I complaining about?

A second ticked by, then two, then
three.

Garrett knew he would be foolish to hope for
a misfire. He knew that the ADM—however “atomic”—relied on
conventional explosives and conventional fuse-mechanisms to
properly detonate. This might take another second or two.

Garrett stood there, frozen, eyes squeezed
shut, waiting for the big boom.

And he stood there like that for twenty more
seconds. Nothing happened.

No explosion.

Oh, man, this has been a long day,
he
thought.

Danny was looking frantic at the ADM
assembly, pulling on wires, shoving against the transport case,
clicking and clicking and clicking the plastic firing switch.

Either it’s a dud,
Garrett reasoned,
from being in storage for so long, or—

“Danny?”

The child was futilely smacking his hand
against the 1.5 kiloton atomic demolition munition.

“Danny? Listen to me.”

Danny cowered, looking up at Garrett.
“Something went wrong,” he sobbed. “And you’re going to kill me
now! Like the man at the house wanted!”

“No, Danny. It’s nothing like that,” Garrett
assured him. “I understand why you might think that. I understand
that you can’t trust anybody but yourself. Believe me, I’ve felt
the same way for a long time.”

“Stay away!”

Garrett spread his hands. “If I was going to
hurt you, I could do it now, couldn’t I?” he tried to reason. “But
I’m not that kind of person. I’m not like the…man at the house. I’m
here to help you. Will you let me help you? If you say no, then
I’ll walk away right now. But if I do that—”

“The Stickmen,” Danny whispered. “I didn’t
do what they needed…”

“Let me help, okay?”

A last long stare. Then Danny nodded.

Garrett walked to the center of the vault.
He wanted a cigarette,
real
bad, but that probably wasn’t a
very good idea considering his vicinity to a conventional fuse
assembly.

Danny buried his face in his hands. “I
fuh-fuh-failed them…”

“No you didn’t,” Garrett assured. “There’s
probably just a few kinks to work out of this thing.”

“I failed them… Just like I failed my
father.”

“You didn’t fail you father. You didn’t fail
anyone. You’re a good kid and you’ve always done your best.”

“My father wanted me to play sports and
stuff. But I was never any good at it. I just wanted to draw.”

Garrett knelt down beside the warhead
housing of the ADM. “Let me tell you something about fathers,
Danny. Sometimes they say things they don’t mean. Sometimes they
have their own idea about their kids. But later, after they’ve had
time to think about things, they want you to do what
you
want. I’ve seen your drawings, and they’re real good. You’ll be a
great artist one day. And I’m sure your father was very proud of
you.”

Danny sniffled through some abating sobs.
“You think so?”

“I’m sure of it.”

Garrett looked at the top-face of the bomb
chassis.
Yeah, I know what I’m doing,
he sarcastically
thought. But at least the kid seemed to have put it together. “How
did you do this?” he asked.

“The book,” Danny said, pointing.

Ah, the good old operational
instructions,
Garrett thought, and picked up the fat Army field
manual lying beside the device. He scanned the table of contents.
“How old are you?” he asked. “Eight?”

“Eight going on nine.”

“Well, even for a smart eight-year-old like
you, this book’s pretty thick and complicated. You think maybe I
should take a crack at it?”

“Yuh-yeah.”

Garrett flipped to crucial pages, noting
quickly that Danny had used the emergency detonation guidelines on
the inside front cover, which made no mention of the timer
protocol, nor the safe-distance perimeters.
Getting this thing
to go bang shouldn’t be too hard.
As he continued to survey the
manual, he said, “After the Stickmen told me how to get here, I
couldn’t help but notice that it’s a good five-mile walk from your
house, and five miles is a long way for an eight-year-old boy to
carry a big heavy thing like this.”

“The Stickmen made me strong,” Danny said
with little interest. “They gave me the glove…”

Glove?
Garrett wondered, looking up
from the field manual. Then Danny handed him what looked like a
flap of grayish-black fabric, and when Garrett examined it, he
discovered that it was indeed quite glove-like: a thin sack of
mysterious cloth that felt oddly metallic. But when Garrett held it
up—

That’s some glove…

A glove for a narrow, two-fingered hand.

Garrett remember Danny’s sketch that he’d
found in the basement. A sketch of something like a glove…

“It doesn’t fit right ’cos the Stickmen only
have two fingers,” Danny said. “But when you put it on, it
stretches.”

Garrett slipped it over his own hand. The
bizarre material widened as if elasticized; Garrett slipped his
thumb into one finger, then squeezed the rest of his own digits
into the second finger until it appeared that he was wearing a
tight black mitten.

Now, Garrett was beginning to get it.

He put his covered fingers into the ADM’s
lug-slot—and lifted up the entire device as if it were a Styrofoam
box.

“See?” Danny said.

A simple explanation via a highly complex
extraterrestrial technology. As astonishing as it was, Garrett,
now, wasn’t particularly shocked.
A poly-nano textile? A
molecular weft?
Many remote theories of physics and motion
could account for something like this.
A gallium-based isolator
in a nano-morphic shell, each microscopic in actual size yet
replicated a billion-fold could comprise such a material,
Garrett surmised. Simple body heat would suffice for a power source
whereupon the material would be able to harness one-half of the
proximal available gravity and convert it into foot-pounds of
force.

Instant human fork-lift…

Garrett, now that he could see it with his
own eyes, was actually surprised how
un
surprised he felt. It
wasn’t much of a stretch to believe that a race of lifeforms
capable of inter-galactic flight could develop a lifting tool

“So this is how you tore open the security
fences and broke those locks,” Garrett said.

“Uh-huh. I threw a baseball with it once
and…it disappeared.”

“I’ll bet,” Garrett chuckled. “And I’ll bet
you could knock Mike Tyson out with one punch.” He took off the
glove and went back to scanning the manual. “So tell me more about
the Stickmen, Danny. They came a couple weeks ago, and they took
you on their ship, didn’t they?”

“Yeah, but no one believed me,” the boy
dejectedly replied.

“
I
believe you, Danny. There are all
different kinds of Stickmen, and I know lots of people who’ve met
them. Just like you. When the Stickmen took you onto their ship,
what did they do?”

“They…talked to me—well, sort of. They told
me how to help them, then they left real fast.”

“But they continued talking you after that,
too, right?”

“Yeah, like in my dreams, or during the day
when I’d get the headaches. They talked to me in my head, from far
away.”

“What else did they tel you?”

“They told me they’ve only been here a few
times. The first time was a long time ago, and that ship crashed.
They told me it was because of something called a valence frequency
shift displacement, but I don’t know what that means.”

“It means that the propulsion system on
their ship—the engine, Danny—can’t work for very long near earth,”
Garrett postulated. “There’s a magnetic field around the earth
that’s, like, the opposite of the magnetic field that they’re used
to. That first ship stayed too long, and its engine lost all its
power. That’s why it crashed. So the Stickmen on the other ship
asked you to help them. They want you to set off this bomb. The
radiation in the bomb will bring the dead Stickmen in those boxes
back to life, won’t it?”

Danny nodded glumly, looking at the long,
narrow wooden crates. “But I’m not too sure what happens after
that.”

Garrett could guess, now that all of the
theory was falling into place. “Then the other ship will come back
real fast, pick them up, and take them back home.”

“But it has to be tonight—that’s what they
told me too,” the boy added. “Because of something called an
apogee. I don’t know what that means either, but they said if it
doesn’t happen tonight, then it would be a really long time before
they could come back again.”

“What that means, Danny, is that they live
so far away, they can only come here at special times, when the
earth’s orbit is at a certain point in space.”

“Wow. You know a lot.”

Garrett raised a brow. “Well, let’s just say
that I
think
I know a lot, and if I’m wrong…” He didn’t
finish the speculation. “Right now we gotta set this bomb off like
you promised the Stickmen.”

“But it didn’t blow up. When I pushed the
button. It must be broken.”

“Well, let’s just check it out…” After a few
more moments of inspection, Garrett saw just how close they’d both
come to instant death.
Jesus. What luck.
And again he
thanked God, not really knowing if he believed in God. Garrett
figured now might be a good time to start.

He disconnected the main lead and saw that
Danny hadn’t properly unshunted the blasting cap, preventing a full
electrical circuit. Garrett carefully unwrapped the protective
insulation off the cap’s firing wires, then reconnected the
lead.

We see the timer close. Garrett turns the
timer indicator to 30 minutes.

STANDARD DETONATION PROCEDURES (cont. from
Line 4, Page 1-a).

5) Set Timer. [CAUTION: This device requires
a minimum safe distance of 2000 meters!]

6) Enable “Timer-set” to ON position.

7) Depress safety cover of M34 firing device
to activate timer.

8) Seek safe-distance perimeter!

Garrett followed the instructions and turned
the timer dial to 60 minutes. Now he had everything ready.
At
least I HOPE I have everything ready…
“I think this’ll do it,”
he announced. “This will give us plenty of time to get far enough
away that we won’t get hurt.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Garrett passed the small firing device to
Danny. “Push the button now, Danny. Then we can go.”

Danny looked at the plastic firing device.
His thumb pressed down on the cover—
click!
—and then the
timer began to tick.

Garrett took the boy’s hand and led him back
to the elevator platform. They both took a final glance at the
three strange narrow crates sitting just beyond the ticking ADM.
Not coffins,
Garrett surmised.
Not really.

“Let’s get out of here, Danny. That sound
good to you?”

“Yeah.”

Garrett pushed the power-button on the wall.
The motor kicked in and the gears and cables overhead began to
squeal.

Then the elevator began to rise, taking them
out.

««—»»

“I never thought I’d get to see the
nighttime again,” Danny said in the strangest tone, “or hear the
crickets.”

“No need to worry about that now,” Garrett
said. “You’ve got a whole great life ahead of you.” But Garrett’s
heart dipped a bit just after he’d said it.

What kind of life
did
Danny have
awaiting for him? It wasn’t enough that he’d been abducted and
manipulated by extraterrestrials—he’d been terrorized by a
contract-killer, had witnessed his own parents being savagely
murdered.
That can fuck a little kid’s head up for life,
Garrett realized.

What
really
awaited Danny? Foster
care, adoption agencies, etc.

The night-sounds swirled above them. The low
moon wanly lit the fields before them. Once they’d left the depot,
they’d briskly walked north for a half an hour, Garrett leading
them both well-past the minimum safe-distance. Before this night
was officially over, there was still a show to see.