CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Past midnight now. The warped moon hung low, as if sitting atop the treeline, a sickly dark-yellow glow. The air—still warm and sticky even at this time of night—seemed to throb back and forth in its faint yet somehow deafening chorus of crickets. peepers, and nightbirds.
Danny Vander’s sneakered feet took him over another low, weedy hill. The mon followed him along the trees. The harsh Maryland summer had brought a lengthy drought, browning the post’s vast grasslands, sucking life from plants and flowers. The parched weeds crunched beneath each of Danny’s steps. Several times, owls hooted at him from high trees, and every so often, he felt a creepy, silent whir above his head: bats.
By now, as he marched on, Danny thought he must be going crazy. Why else would he be seeing a psychiatrist? Why else would he feel like everything around him was breaking up into hundreds of pieces like a pop bottle dropped on the pavement? Between his anguish at home during the day, and the Stickmen at night, sometimes Danny wished he could just die.
Steady tears kept his cheeks wet. What had happened just a little while ago seemed like a terrible nightmare. But this nightmare, he knew, was real.
That terrible man who’d come into the house….
And what he’d done to Danny’s parents while the man had made him watch…
He…cut off…Mom’s…
Danny gagged, squeezed his eyes shut, and stopped for a moment. He pushed it all out of his mind, forced himself not to think about it, not to remember it. He had to pretend that it didn’t exist.
My Mom and Dad are dead…
It took a little while—to push it all away. But he knew it was the Stickmen helping him.
And they had helped him, hadn’t they?
Well, sort of.
They’d helped him get away.
Yeah, he thought, but only so I can help them.
He didn’t understand, and he guess he never would. And for some reason, he knew he wasn’t supposed to. He knew that he couldn’t, he couldn’t understand. It was like what his parents had told him about God, that time just a little while ago when they’d all been in the living room watching the news channel about the big earthquake in some place on the other side of the world called Turkey. Thousands and thousands of people had died, all in one night, and Danny didn’t understand, so he’d asked “How could God let that happen?”
His Mom and Dad had both looked at each other funny, but then his mother had said, “He didn’t let it happen, Danny. It just happened because—”
“The devil owns the title deed to this world, son,” his father had cut in, drinking beer like he almost always did at night. “It’s been that way since Eve bit the apple, since mankind said no to paradise.”
Danny did get it, and his mother didn’t look too happy with Dad’s explanation. “God’s much bigger than us, honey,” she said. “He’s a lot smarter than us, and there are a lot of things about his plan for us that we simply can’t understand because we aren’t able to.”
Danny still didn’t get it…but he guessed this must be pretty much the same thing. He didn’t understand why all of this was happening because humans couldn’t understand it. They weren’t smart enough. But God understood because He was smarter.
So were the Stickmen, Danny figured.
After the man had killed his parents and handcuffed Danny’s wrist to the bed, he’d gone back downstairs.
That’s when the Stickmen had come back into his head and told him how to get away.
The glove…
Danny always kept it in his back pocket, just like the Stickmen had told him.
He continued walking, carrying the big case along with him. He knew where he was supposed to go now—the Stickmen had told him that too, just a little while ago.
Danny felt like a doll being pulled apart four different ways. But he just kept walking. He just kept moving on, to the place he knew…but didn’t.
This…this must be it, he thought. His skin started to prickle, and he heard a drone in his head. It was the way that the Stickmen talked to him when they couldn’t be close enough to actually see him or put the weird shape-like words in his head.
The prickling, the drone.
At least, after tonight, there’d be no more headaches. The Stickmen promised him that.
He stood in a clearing now, just slight dip against the belt of trees along the rising hills. The moonlight drenched the entire area in its creepy yellow light. Danny set the big case down, then lowered himself to his knees. He began sweeping the leaves away with his hands, moving brush off the dry ground. It took him a while; there was almost an inch of soil beneath the leaves, and he had to dig through that, too. Several earthworms came up between his fingers but he flung them aside. He knew this was the right place.
He just didn’t know what the place was.
He smoothed his hands around some more—it began to hurt, scuffing against his skin—but then after only a few more seconds, he felt it.
Something underneath.
Underneath the leaves and branches and dirt.
Here…
It felt perfectly flat and cool, like metal. Then he felt something else: a Square bump, like a box about half the size of a video tape like the kind they rented sometimes at Blockbuster.
When he brushed off all the dirt, he could see it in the moonlight: the small box.
It was a lock.
The lock had sort of a lid on top, and Danny simply flicked a little switch on the side, then the lid popped open, to reveal ten buttons that reminded of the buttons on a telephone. It was a combination lock, and the buttons were the combination.
Danny didn’t know what the right buttons to push were—but he didn’t really care.
It didn’t really matter, did it?
He firmly gasped the body of the lock with his gloved hand, and pulled.
The lock broke open with a loud snap!
Danny threw the pieces off to the side. Then he grabbed the heavy steel ring underneath. He lifted the ring…
And then the cool flat surface beneath the dirt began to rise, and that’s when Danny figured out what this was.
A great big trapdoor—in the ground.
The face of the door itself was about the size of his bed mattress. When he lifted the door up all the way to standing height, he effortlessly flung it back. Its hinges screeched a little, then the doors fell back flat against the ground with a muffled swoosh, then a thud.
It was a square black hole that he was looking at now. Then, very slowly, a light came on, faint at first then gaining in strength, until Danny could see its detail. The light was red, mounted on the side of a metal wall inside the hole, like a backup light on a submarine.
Now he could see inside of the hole, he could see what was there:
A gridded metal ramp.
Danny stood there for a time, wrapped up in the warm summer air and the swarming nightsounds. The owl hooted again, and deeper in the woods, he could hear the quick rustles of an animal, squirrels probably, or a fox.
Even though he was only eight years old, Danny felt a sudden and very complex notion of loss. Just being able to stand in some grove in the middle of the night was something he’d taken for granted. There was an astonishing beauty in the world that he’d never really noticed until now, until just this precise moment. The humid, sweeping night, the calls of crickets and peepers, the hush-like sound of an errant breeze straying through the woods.
It was all exponentially and indescribably beautiful.
And for that same handful of isolated moments, Danny felt like a grownup, thinking such things, becoming aware of how beautiful the world was.
And understanding that he’d never see any of that beauty ever again.
It’s almost time, he realized.
It was time to go down, down into the hole.
Danny picked up the ADM and began to walk down the red-lit ramp.
««—»»
The kid’s gonna die, the thought pounded into Garrett’s head. It was a peculiar impact of emotion. Kid’s shouldn’t die, but they did every day. Across the globe millions of kids died every month, from starvation, disease, remnant anti-personnel mines, and the mindless wars of men. Garrett didn’t even know Danny Vander, had never met him…but that didn’t matter at all. He was just another kid.
Just another innocent who’s gonna die because of something he doesn’t understand.
Garrett felt impotent, useless.
He had done his job, though, hadn’t he? Swenson’s last vital order had been carried out, and so had Warrant Officer Ubel’s.
Ubel’s instructions repeated like a whisper in Garrett’s mind. If Danny Vander is not allowed to set off that ADM at exactly the right time, then… Christ, I don’t know what will happen. Who knows what those things might do in retaliation?Garrett had nixed the threat; he’d killed Sanders. So now Danny Vander would be able to set off that bomb at the proper time.
And he’d die.
Garrett understood the influence that the aliens must have over Danny, and he couldn’t forget that they’d influence Swenson too. But in all their clear psychical and technical superiority over the human race, Garrett sorely doubted that they had the capability of communicating the proper timer and fuze instructions to Danny in a way that would allow him to escape. Even if the bomb had instructions, how could an eight-year-old kid discern all the details?
“Fuck!” Garrett suddenly shouted, and punched the wall in frustration. The wall had barely dented—he’d struck a stud—and then his knuckles throbbed in pain. Dickhead! Break your hand why don’t you? That’s just what you need!
It was futile to be angry. There was nothing he could do. What ever it was that needed to happen tonight in all likelihood would happen. Not even Garrett was sure what that could be, but he knew it was crucial. Danny Vander would die, but something more important than Danny, than Garrett, than anyone on the planet, would be served.
That’s just the way it is, Garrett thought.
He meandered around the house, fully aware that the dead bodies upstairs would have to be tended to in some way. Garrett himself, of course, could not be present to explain…because who would believe such an explanation? No, a simple “anonymous” phone call to the base security office would suffice. He’d leave the post soon, and stop at the nearest payphone. And that would be the end of it. No one in authority would ever figure it out, and that was fine. It would look like some kind of militia murder, and Sanders’ body would never be able to be officially identified except by the highest cells who knew all about this already. Case closed.
Garrett helped himself to a beer from the Vander refrigerator (he doubted that the general would mind), then sullenly shuffled about and smoked, perusing the family room without really seeing anything.
Walking through a bad dream.
The house sat totally silent; Garrett felt edgy. There was something unnerving about being in a house that had three dead bodies upstairs, wasn’t there? The darkest musing caused his heart to skip a beat. He was the only one alive in the house. What would he do if he heard someone coming down the stairs?
Garrett flinched.
His mind was trying to spook him, but he knew it was only remorse. Why didn’t he just leave?
He tapped an ash in the sink, then cocked a brow toward the other side of the kitchen.
What’s…that?
He noticed two doors.
One of them was obviously an exterior door which lead out to the back yard. But the second door stood slightly ajar.
Basement? he wondered.
When he approached and pushed it open, he found exactly that. He flicked the light switch next to the wall and was looking down a flight of wooden steps.
He took them down, found a typical basement. Mostly storage for old stuff that had outlived its usefulness but no one had the heart to throw away or give to Good Will. Lots of cardboard boxes and old lamps and chairs with sheets draped over them. He turned on another light from a dangling string. And stared.
There, along the farthest wall, Garrett easily noticed a number of disarranged moving boxes. They appeared to have been pulled out, pulled away from the wall. Garrett walked closer and leaned over. He squinted.
This is where Danny hid the ADM, he knew at once. Swathes of dust on the floor had been plowed away when the boxes had been pulled out, and it was clear it had happened very recently. The boxes left lines of dust from their movement.
“So that’s where Danny stowed the bomb,” Garrett voice aloud. The words echoed dully. A short flight of wooden steps lead to a pair of cellar doors which, when pushed up, provided an exit to the basement. It was all right in front of him now: Garrett knew that he was looking at Danny’s route with the bomb.
When he went over to the cellar doors, he wasn’t surprised to find a broken Master padlock. He mounted a few of the steps, pushed up one of the cellar doors, and was next peering out into the night.
He’s out there, somewhere, he thought. An eight-year-old kid with a tactical atomic explosive device…and I have no way of finding him.
Still glum, Garrett came back in, let the cellar door flap shut. He was about to go back upstairs and leave the house, but then he noticed the short work tale erected off to the side. He turned on another overhead bulb and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just a regular workbench with a vise mounted in the corner. Various tools hung from clasps in peg board sections on the side wall. Big deal, he thought. But then he noticed the corner of a folder sticking out from under a package of sandpaper. Garrett withdrew the folder and found it filled with sketches.
Garrett began to flip through the sketches. Looks like Danny had an interest in drawing… Though clearly rudimentary, it was damn good artwork for a kid; in fact, when Garrett thought back to the files Swenson had given him, and the CIA’s Physiological Science Unit’s artistic renditions of the Nellis crash based on eyewitness accounts—he decided that, if anything, Danny’s drawings were better.
And definitely based on the same theme.
He’d drawn several versions of the ship, to the same specifications and levels of detail related by witness descriptions from over thirty-five years ago. The long, narrow fuselage, all black, a cylinder in the sky. The thin illumination element running underneath like a thread of light. The bizarre trapezoidal shapes on the sides that could only be windows or viewing ports. Next came a salvo of drawings depicting the beings themselves: tall, lanky stick-figures, nearly flesh-less, a creepy stub for a head. Worse was the face…if it could be called that. No features whatsoever, save for a single slit for eyes.
But what bothered Garrett more than any of that was the meticulousness with which Danny had drawn the only part Garrett had actually seen for himself.
The beings’ hands.
They were identical in configuration to that of the forearm bone he’d found in the storage garage.
Just two multi-jointed fingers joined at a narrow wrist.
Garret shuddered.
Several more drawings showed a young boy—obviously Danny’s depiction of himself—standing on a hillock at night, gazing up at the cylindrical vehicle. Another sketch of the figures standing over Danny’s bed, leaning over, and several more of Danny standing in a place that could only be the inside of the craft.
The kid must’ve been shit-scared, Garrett considered, then wondered how well he would handle the same situation.
Probably not very well.
The final few sketches, however, were easily the most curious.
What the hell is this?
Garrett peered at the next drawing. It was Danny carrying a fat suitcase-like container away from a fence that had been pried apart. The bomb, Garrett realized. He had a theory for everything else, but not this.
How did an eight-year-old kid bust open a twin-layered electrically charged fence, break three unbreakable high-security locks?
That’s what I wanna know? Garrett thought, urgently examining the sketch.
Then he noticed something curious. In Danny’s own sketch of himself lugging the bomb away from the fence…
What’s…that?
There seemed to be something on his hand, the hand that gripped the slot-like handle in the ADM’s case. But…what was it?
A glove? Garrett wondered. .
He couldn’t be sure; the details of the drawing were minute. But there was definitely something on the figure’s hand in the drawing, the hand carrying the bomb, and it could’ve been a glove, or…just something odd that seemed to be covering Danny’s hand.
Then:
Wait a minute, Garrett slowly thought when he flipped to the final sketch in the stack. Is that a…
The last sketch was simple and stark. A grainy black shape with an oval opening at one end and two long…fingerlike shapes extending from the other end.
Like a glove.
For a two-fingered hand, Garrett thought.
Garrett stared, cruxing, contemplating.
This was very interesting.
But then the full reality snapped back into his power of cognizance. What difference did it make? There was nothing Garrett could do. Even if he could figure these sketches out completely, the fact remained that Danny Vander was already on his way to Area November, Depot 12, to set off the ADM in a crudely nuclear detonation that would surely vaporize his eight-year-old self in a single five-million-degree second.
Garrett didn’t know where Area November, Depot 12, was. And there was no way to find out.
Therefore, he was helpless to save Danny Vander.
So what am I worrying about it for? he reasoned. If I could do something, I would. But I can’t…because I don’t know where Danny went.
That was it. That was the final truth.
I might as well just get out of here, go home, get back to my life. I did my best, but the final pieces just didn’t work out.
For some reason he couldn’t quite define, he picked up the pile of sketches, placed them back in the folder, and prepared to take them. Some last vestige, at least, if this little kid he would never meet but who was carrying out a paramount task nonetheless.
Something to remember him by.
An innocent kid…
Another confused anger welled up, though, even though he realized it was a futile emotion. Whatever these things were, and from wherever they came—
Fuck them, Garrett thought. Fuckers…
Swenson’s last order had been fulfilled. And these beings, sure, they were getting what they needed, but they were doing so at the expense of a little boy—a little innocent easily manipulated human boy.
What right did they have to do that?
With all the hypotheses and common-sense deductions that any alien race capable of traveling to earth would have to be superior—
It’s all shit.
They’re just as self-serving and selfish as we are.
Garrett, at least, knew this: if his own survival depending on the sacrifice of a little boy…he’d say to hell with it. He wouldn’t let a little boy die to save his own skin.
`He wouldn’t. He simply knew it.
He lit a cigarette, spewed frustrated smoke into the cramped basement. Maybe people were the same everywhere overall. On this planet or any other.
No compassion anywhere.
The whole thing’s just so…fucked up.
He placed the folder of sketches under his arm and turned to leave, turned to put this whole nightmare behind him, when—
CHRIST!
A stab of pain shot into his head like a slaughterman’s air-bolt gun. Garrett’s face contorted into a twist of agony. At first he thought that someone must’ve shot a bullet into his head, but when he collapsed to the basement’s cement floor, he vision showed him that he was undeniably alone.
Then the pain in his head trebled, and trebled again, such that he lay completely paralyzed. Tears squeezed out from the corners of his eyes, his face a rictus. His mouth froze open but he couldn’t even muster a whimper much less a scream.
Garret knew he was having a stroke.
He knew he was going to die.
But he didn’t know that he was wrong—
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THIS IS AN AIR FORCE SECURITY SERVICE
SECURITY PERIMETER
ONLY CLEARED AIR FORCE PERSONNEL MAY PROCEED
PAST THIS POINT, BY ORDER OF AFR 200-2
In the smeary red backup light, Danny read the bold words on the warning sign at the bottom of the ramp, but he thought little of it. It didn’t matter. After tonight, what good would words be to him? Unless there was heaven.
Danny hoped so.
It was obvious that no one had entered this place for a long time. Cobwebs festooned the metal walls, and he could see heavy streaks of rust breaking out from blisters of powder-blue paint. Danny could actually smell the rust down here.
But…
Where do I go now? he asked himself.
Now that he’d come all the way down the ramp, it was just a small metal-walled room that he stood in, dark in the weird red light. Just four walls, no doors. He knew, however, that this wasn’t the place where he was supposed to set off the bomb.
He knew because the Stickmen had told him.
That’s when he noticed the small glass panel on one of the walls. He had to stand on his tip-toes to open the panel, and then he had to squint through the red light to read.
MAIN POWER, read a tiny plaque inside. And just below the plaque was a handle.
Danny stretched his arm up and pulled down on the handle. He grunted, gritting his teeth, but the handle wouldn’t budge; it was probably locked up with rust. For a few seconds, Danny felt frantic but then he nearly laughed at himself.
He reached up with his other hand—the hand with the glove on it—and pulled down on the handle again. The rust in the handle’s slot, hard as cement, ground and broke, then the handle thunked to the bottom.
Bright white lights snapped on, filling the small metal room. Danny flinched, shielded his eyes. Now the floor seemed to hum, and he could hear distant clicks and snaps and sharp noises below him, underground. Now, with the lights blazing, Danny easily spotted the circular red button on the wall opposite.
Danny pressed the button, and then came a loud CLACK!, then a steady groaning sound like a motor running.
Wow…
The metal-walled room was a room at all, not really. It was an elevator.
The entire “room” began to lower.
As the top-edges of the walls separated from the ceiling, Danny could see wheels turning and long fat cables extending. The squeaky hum follow him down for what must have been fifty feet, while the floor jiggled. Then another, louder, thunk.
The floor shuddered to a halt. Flecks of rust drifted down, dusting Danny’s head in its red-black grit.
Here, Danny thought.
Deep.
He stepped off the elevator platform into another room of blue-painted metal walls infected by outbreaks of rust. More bright white lights blared. He set the ADM case down and approached a very large white door that had sections and hinges like the garage door back at his house.
Stenciled lettered in black paint read:
AREA NOVEMBER
(POST PLAT: 413, GRID: 66-798)
DEPOT 12
UNAUTHORIZED ENTRANCE PUNISHABLE BY DEATH
Another rubber-tipped handle stuck out of a slot in the wall. Danny yanked it down.
More humming and clanging. More rust sifted out from overhead.
As the big hinged door began to rise.
Eventually the door’s slatted sections were reeled overhead, leaving a wide open doorway before him, beyond which more white spotlights beamed down. Danny picked the ADM back up and walked forward into a another room, this one formed of not painted metal walls but painted slab concrete.
This was the vault, Danny knew.
This was the depot.
The depot itself looked about as large as the multi-purpose room back at school. Every step he took forward echoed loudly around his head; Danny thought of the night-birds outside, and the bats. It seemed to take a long time to walk to the center of the depot.
And it seemed to be an awful lot of space for just this.
The depot vault was big enough to house at least a hundred cars, but all that sat in the middle of it were three long, thin wooden crates lying next to each other.
The crates looked weird: eight or nine feet long and only maybe a foot and a half wide. There was a part of Danny’s psyche that couldn’t imagine what the crates contained.
But there was another part of Danny’s psyche that knew exactly what the crates were.
Each crate had a stenciled label:
THESE CONTAINERS ARE THE
PROPERTY OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE MATERIALS COMMAND
DO NOT TOUCH!
THIS MATERIAL IS BOOBY-TRAPPED!
UNAUTHORIZED OPENING OF THESE CONTAINERS
WILL RESULT IN A FATAL EXPLOSION
Again, Danny knew even though he didn’t. The Stickmen had told him in his mind. This was just a trick to scare people away.
I know, he thought. Just like he knew his own address.
Danny knew that the long wooden crates weren’t really booby-trapped. And somehow he knew more. He knew that someone from a long time ago had hidden these crates here—and old bald man who was dead now—and that this man had put the phony booby-trap warning on the crates on purpose.
The Stickmen had told him that.
Besides, he didn’t really need to open the crates anyway.
I just need to blow them up with this bomb, he reminded himself.
Danny knelt at the ADM, and removed some things from a canvas sack attached to it. He looked closely at the things close inside the sack: a roll of tan-colored wire, a small box with a clock on it, and a smaller box with square protruding button.
He didn’t know what any of these things were.
Then he opened a small book with a light-yellow paper cover. The book was pretty fat. The cover read:
FIELD OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS FOR
THE M129 (S-)A-D-M AND W-54 WARHEAD ASSEMBLY
TECH LEVEL: MOS-12E50
FM: 233-24-65
Next, Danny turned open the cover, found a heading in the Table Of Contents, and found a heading called Primary Assembly.
It read:
EMERGENCY DETONATION PROCEDURES
1) Connect lead #1 (fig. 1) to DETCORD line (fig. 2) to timer (fig. 3).
2) Connect lead #2 to M34 firing device (fig. 4)
3) Unshunt one military (non-electric) blasting cap (fig. 5) and fix to end of lead #1.
4) Insert blasting cap into ADM capwell as marked.
Danny opened the ADM’s heavy black transport case, and removed the heavy, block-like mechanism. It was covered in an odd dark-green plastic with ridges. As best he could, he followed all of the instructions he’d just read in the manual, then looked back at the page.
5) Open safety cover of M34 firing device, and switch safety toggle to OFF position.
6) Reclose safety cover and depress.
Danny hoped he was doing it all right, and he had a pretty good feeling that he was. He followed the instructions to the letter, using a diagram on the facing page as a guide. Then he checked and rechecked and triple-checked.
It all looked right.
There, he thought. I think it’s ready…
He picked up the little plastic box that was the M34 firing device; he held in neatly in his hand. His thumb slid over the safety cover.
All he needed to do was push down.
He wondered if he’d heard the explosion.
He wondered if he’d live long enough to even hear a click.
But he did know one thing: he wouldn’t feel anything when he died. It would all happen too fast.
“Bye, Mom. Bye’, Dad,” he said, blinking tears out of his eyes.
I hope…I hope there really is a heaven…
Danny shut his eyes, squeezed them tight, then began to press down on the plastic safety cover, until—
“Wait a second, Danny,” a man’s voice called out.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jesus Christ! I’m a writer, not a fuckin’ gymnast! Garrett had thought as he’d cautiously repelled down age-old elevator cables. His shirt was ruined, his $300 Italian slacks ruined, his hands black with cable grease.
He didn’t know how he’d gotten here…but on the other hand, he did.
He remembered being at the Vander house, Danny’s butchered parents in the upstairs bedroom, and Sanders.
Oh, man…
He remembered killing Sanders.
Garrett didn’t know if it was right to feel good about killing someone, even someone as corrupt, cold-blooded, and simply as evil as Sanders. It probably wasn’t right, but…
Garrett felt good about it anyway.
Then he’d strayed around a bit, feeling absolutely useless—even feeling guilty because Danny would die when he set off the ADM, and there was nothing Garrett could do because he didn’t know where Area November was, nor Depot 12.
And, more particularly, he remembered damning these foreign lifeforms for using an innocent kid to do their dirty work. He remembered hating them for it.
Abducting and brain-washing a little kid for their own devices….
Then—
He remembered more: the basement. He wandered down to the basement, discovered the place where Danny had hidden the bomb, then discovered the boy’s sketches.
But before he’d had time to leave, he’d collapsed to the cold basement floor.
He imagined the worst tequila hangover he’d ever had in his life, then increased that discomfort tenfold. That’s what the headache had felt like.
It had struck him so suddenly that the little rationale he had left suspected that all the booze, junk food, and cigarettes had finally caught up to him, in Danny Vander’s basement, of all places.
Garrett suspected that the Golden Hour had arrived, by way of an aneurism or catastrophic stroke. When he’d passed out from the eruption of pain, he actually expected to die.
He expected to never wake up.
But he did.
He’d regained consciousness in a blurred, glowing dream. A trance-channel, he knew at once, even though he’d never before experienced such a thing. Reports of this same phenomenon accompanied certain types of abduction reports the same way meeting dead relatives accompanied near-death experiences. Garrett’s own research community was well-versed with such reports. A complex mode of telepathic thought- and image-conveyance, a crude joining of minds that transcended language.
Garrett knew that’s what had happened.
The things had touched his spirit. They answered his questions when he’d desperately needed the answers.
And they’d told him, in their own way, how to find Depot 12.
He recalled little else of the experience, almost no detail. Just nebulous colors and metallic scents. Words appeared in his head that weren’t really words. And for a moment—the most irreducible fraction of a moment—he saw them.
Figures tall and thin, skeletons scarcely covered with flesh at all.
Narrow, post-like heads…
Hands with but two fingers each…
And that had been the end of it. Garrett had awakened on the basement floor, knowing exactly what to do and where to go.
And now…he was here.
With difficulty, he twisted his body up and over the top edge of the elevator wall, smeared with gritty grease, and dropped down to the platform’s steel floor. Beyond the elevator’s open entry, he saw—
Holy shit!
—the vast empty depot, the three weirdly narrow crates, and Danny Vander kneeling stoically under the harsh spotlights mounted overhead.
Danny had assembled the ADM, and it looked like he was about to—
“Wait a second, Danny!” Garrett called out.
The boy’s wan face jerked toward Garrett, eyes wide, terrified, but also keenly defensive.
Danny had the small plastic firing device in his hand. Garret knew the consequences. All the kid has to do is press down on that switch until it clicks…and the show’s over…
Garrett held up his hand. “Danny? Listen to me for a second.”
“Who are you!” the boy wailed. “I don’t know you! What are you doing here! No one knows about this except me!”
“I know too, Danny,” Garrett said softly.
Danny’s face strained, tears streaking his cheeks. His thumb rested firmly on the firing switch. “You’re one of the people against the Stickmen! You’re like that man at my house who killed my parents!”
“No I’m NOT!” Garrett yelled back.
“You want to stop me from blowing this up!”
“That’s not true, Danny,” Garrett said, trying to settle down. It was hard to settle down when one was a half-second away from an instantaneous multi-million degree atomic fireball. “I want you to blow it up, Danny. I know that you have to do it. I want you to set that bomb off.”
Danny blinked, frozen. “You-you do?”
“That’s right, Danny. I was sent here to make sure that you did. It’s very important, and you and I both know that.”
Danny gulped, blinked again. “How did you get here? Know one know about this place but me.”
“The aliens told me, Danny,” Garret said. Then he thought: What did he call them? The— “The Stickmen told me. They told me where you were.”
The boy’s paused lengthened. Then: “I don’t believe you! The Stickmen only talk to me! I’m pushing the button now!”
“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 unsurprised 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.
Garrett didn’t want to miss it.
He’d picked a good spot just past the highest rise. The forestbelt extended past on either side, and now they crouched down behind a substantial hillock. Two miles distant lay the hidden dell that was Area November, Depot 12.
Garrett lit a much-needed cigarette, then glanced at his watch. They sat with their backs to the bank. “Whatever you do, Danny, keep your eyes closed and don’t look toward the depot.”
“I guess it would hurt our eyes, huh?”
“You bet.”
“But if we can’t look at it, what are we waiting to see?”
“We want to see what happens after the bomb goes off. I think it should be pretty neat.” Another glance to his watch. Ten seconds… Garrett put his arm around Danny. “It’s almost time, sport. Don’t be scared.”
“Will it be loud?”
“I—” The question puzzled Garrett. “I don’t really know. That depot’s pretty strong and deep. We’ll find out in a few seconds…”
The next lapsed of time seemed more like several minutes. Then a loud bang! echoed from behind them. “This is it!” Garrett exclaimed. “Close your eyes and hang on!” Garrett held the boy tight against him.
The earth beneath them seemed to tremor slightly, and instead of a cacophonous explosion, what Garrett heard instead was more like a long crackling roar. He felt the air temperature around him rise, and even with his eyes closed and his face pointing away from the bomb, he sensed a flash of light. Then came a vast rustling—shock wave, he thought—as the trees around them began to shake slightly.
What neither of them saw was the small spectacular fireball that rose from the depot over a mile distant.
Garrett waited for the roar to drone down, then he looked over his shoulder. “Okay, Danny, it’s safe to look now…”
The boy turned around, and they both peered over the edge of the hillock.
A proverbial mushroom cloud unrolled upward. Garrett was surprised how small it seemed. The mushroom’s head looked filled with dark throbs of light.
Trace fires had broken out around the woods. Garrett wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected small movements in the distance. Damn it! Too far away, too dark!
Then the darkness gradually turned to light.
“Look!” Danny shouted, pointing up.
An immense wedge of broad daylight seemed to cut through the night.
Good God, Garrett thought.
A long black tube in the sky, hundreds of feet long. A drone pressed Garrett’s ears as the vehicle hovered, then began to descend several hundred yards down the field.
Garrett and Danny’s hair blew around as if in a stiff breeze. Garrett note dark-red light wafting like smoke from what he guessed was the ship’s engine vent, and the queer, trapezoid-shaped window at the opposite end.
And then he noticed—
“There they are!” Danny exclaimed. “They came out!”
Garrett peered. They’re still alive, he thought. All of the speculation turned out to be true. Under the craft’s intense illumination, he could see the three thin figures walking away from the exploded depot and into the middle of the field. They walked a bit further, then stopped, their post-like heads looking upward.
The vehicle landed, and in only moments, its long-lost passengers had been picked up.
And the ship was gone.