The Grays (13 page)

“But if Mike’s concluded that life with the grays wouldn’t be worth living, I think we have to respect that.”

“Evil is a funny thing. It comes out of fear. Mike and his people think of themselves as the saviors of mankind. But they’re genocidal monsters.”

Rob found the scale of the thing so large he could hardly think about it intellectually, let alone morally. He shook his head.

“Here’s your question,” Crew said gently. “The one we need to ask you. In your mind, which is worse? Die, as a species, or take our chances with the grays?”

“Think carefully before you answer,” Simpson added.

The only possible answer was immediately obvious to him. “I don’t have a right to make a decision like that. None of us do.”

“You pass,” Simpson said. “Any other answer, and you would have failed the test, as a result of which, you would now know too much.”

“I came close, then,” he said.

“I don’t think so,” Simpson said. “I’ve always respected you. You have a good, strong conscience. You realize that this decision has to be made by every individual human being. This child, when he grows up, is going to give us the chance to do that.”

Rob thought of a question so crucial that he almost didn’t want to ask it. He did ask, though, he had to. “Are you saying that they might give us a choice? I mean, if we don’t like the idea of sharing our genes with them?”

“We won’t,” Simpson said. “We’ll say yes.”

“How can you be sure?”

“The grays will be here, billions of them, asking for life. We will say yes, it’s human nature, because we are fundamentally good. And this child, grown up by then, will help us do it right.”

“You know, I have another question. Why are
we
like we are? Why are we so much less intelligent?”

“We have less knowledge. We lost it during that ancient war, the basic knowledge of how the world really works, knowledge the grays have preserved intact. This is why we can no longer account for those engineering marvels you mentioned—Baalbek and such. We’ve literally forgotten how we did that.”

Crew gave Rob a long look. “We’re trying to sell you on something I sense you’re still dubious about. That’s how you see this whole conversation.”

“You’re not reading me right,” Rob responded. “I don’t see any alternative. We have six billion lives to save. It’s a completely unimaginable responsibility, and this poor damn kid, boy, there is one hell of a lot on his shoulders. You know how I feel? I feel like I would give my life, without hesitation, to protect him.”

“That might happen,” Simpson said. “Because Mike will go after him if he finds out about him, and Mike is good.”

“Then we’ve got to put him under arrest. Roll up these friends of his.”

“We cannot even consider that,” Simpson said. “They’re more powerful than we are. Anyway, it would show our hand and we don’t want that. We’ve been lucky in one respect, that Mike doesn’t understand this child thing at all. He has no idea that the grays are even trying to save mankind. He’s sitting back, confidently waiting for the extinction to ruin their plans. And they’ve played that like the experts that they are, warning him constantly about the environmental crisis, in order to make him think they’re helpless to prevent it.”

“What happens to this kid? Does he suffer?”

“Does he suffer? Being that intelligent? That alone? I don’t think it’s an answerable question.”

“So we protect him. Can do. But why did they do this glowboy thing? Point him out like that?”

“It looks like some triad being bad. Not all that unusual. It’s actually a signal to us, and it’s full of information. It tells us that the child is right in the area of Wilton, Kentucky, and that they’re going to begin the process now. It’s up to us to do our part, find the child in our own way, and put down the kind of protection the grays can’t.”

“Which is?”

“Up close and on the ground, supported by good threat intelligence.
Their ability to determine things like what’s going on in a human social group is very limited. They’ll be there to react if somebody jumps out of the damn bushes, but we’re the only ones who are going to be able to see a threat developing.”

Pete Simpson leaned forward. “Which gets us to your new mission. We need you to move your operations to Alfred AFB, Rob. Right now. Your orders are to identify and protect that child. We know that he’s somewhere in Wilton. Possibly even on Oak Road, where the glowboy touched down. But don’t be too sure of that. The grays are very, very careful, remember. Assume he could be anywhere in the region.”

The three men fell silent then, each sinking into his own thoughts, all feeling the same sense of being swept up by a current that was easily powerful enough to drown them.

Through the last darkness at the end of the night, a black triangular object had been coming, flying just feet above the treetops, taking its time, moving in absolute silence. Fifteen minutes ago, it had arrived over the house. It hovered overhead now, enormous, darker than the night itself, a triangle three hundred feet long, two hundred feet across at its base . . . and six inches above the roof.

Inside the triangle, in a low-ceilinged cockpit, a woman in a USAF flight suit sat adjusting a sensitive device. Every word being said below was being recorded and transmitted with digital clarity.

Literally as they spoke, Mike Wilkes listened. He sat in the facility in Indianapolis feeding Lauren questions based on what he was hearing.

His mind raced. This child—dear heaven, it was the single most toxic thing on Earth, the most dangerous creature ever to live. He would lay Wilton, Kentucky, to waste.

Or no. He had to be certain that he’d gotten the right child. Absolutely certain. He needed to be careful, here.

He watched Lauren sitting in the easy chair she’d insisted on bringing into Adam’s hellhole, watched and considered how to form his next question, which would be the most important one that, in his whole career of dealing with the grays, he had ever asked.

OVER THE THREE YEARS SHE’D
been working here, Lauren had done what she could to make Adam’s cell more endurable. Rather than the steel table and hard chairs that seemed to have been enough for her dad, she’d made a very unwilling Wilkes get her a Barcalounger and had a daybed installed. On the walls, she had a copy of one of Renoir’s Aline and Pierre paintings, of Aline holding little Pierre in a way that she hoped one day to hold her own babies . . . off in the future when her life was no longer at risk and she was no longer tangled in an ever-growing web of secrets, and she could finally settle down to a husband and a family. There were also views of forests and mountains, intimate little waterfalls and another one that she especially liked, Van Gogh’s
Starry Night
, that seemed to contain, in some way, the same fiery and mysterious energy she found in Adam.

As Mike watched her, he reflected on just how careful he had to be right now. The grays must not find out that he knew about this little monstrosity of theirs. “I want you to transmit an image of the satellite photo again, Lauren,” he said smoothly.

She closed her eyes.

“Lauren, pick it up and look at it. Do it right.”

“I’ve already done it ten times! Come on.”

“You barely glanced at it.”

“Shut up and let me work!”

Her dad had been a guy you could settle down with after work and knock back a few drinks. In fact, Mike had wanted to bring him into the Trust. It was too dangerous, though. For some years, it had been obvious that the grays couldn’t read minds well—not normal minds. But Eamon’s
mind was a different story, like hers. They had to be kept strictly unaware of any secret the grays shouldn’t know.

Although the daybed appeared empty, Lauren knew that Adam was lying on it. She had learned to see him in her imagination, even though his tiny movements, synchronized to her flickering eyes, prevented her from observing him in detail.

Mike wanted her to be careful, so she’d be careful. She formed a thought series this time. First, a picture of a map of the state of Kentucky. Then a vision of the satellite image of the event in the field behind the Oak Road houses.

Nothing came back.

She formed another thought:
React, Adam
. She called up a sense of urgency, stared, tensed her muscles.

There exploded into her mind an image that at first seemed to make no sense. She was looking up at a towering, immense wall of ice, ghostly white and iridescent, blue against a deep blue sky. And then she heard a sound, a gigantic snapping noise that combined with a strange sort of sigh, as if a thousand people had simultaneously gasped.

She was on the upper deck of a cruise ship. They were glacier-watching. The deck was jammed with people . . . and the ice was curving slowly over them, bringing with it a shadow that turned the bright afternoon an eerie, glowing blue.

The ship’s huge horn began to sound, thundering again and again. The whole body of the vessel shuddered as it strove to get underway, the propellers churning, smoke gushing from the stacks.

With a boom to wake the dead, a gigantic boulder of ice—an ice mountain—slammed down on the foredeck. The whole ship lurched violently upward and forward. Water, clear and frigid, surged over the bounding deck, and the passengers were hurled screaming into the waves.

Lauren looked up again and saw, dropping toward them, an even greater mountain of ice, an eternity of ice.

She was back in the cage. She asked Adam a question with her mind, felt the question in her heart: what does it mean?

Then she saw—

A supermarket, bright lights . . . voices bellowed, a little girl toddled past with a tin of sardines, a man swooped down, grabbed it, knocking the child aside. Screams came, merging with the bouncy shopping music. People clawed for bread, raced down long, empty aisles, hollow people, their
eyes wild, ripping open boxes of uncooked pasta, gobbling it, throwing back raw oatmeal, eating from the mashed garbage on the floor.

Gunshots. Soldiers in dirty uniforms, tired young faces, terrified eyes, shot into the crowd—and people just sat there, staring like a dumb animal stares who has no idea what’s about to happen. As they got shot, they crashed back with astonishing force into a shattered freezer, and then the soldiers passed down another aisle.

“What’s going on in there?”

“I don’t know! He’s showing me some sort of tragedy.”

“Wha-a-at?”

“Ships sinking, people starving in a supermarket—”

“Christ, will you get me what I need!”

“Damn you, Mike, what I am gonna get you is what I always get you. I am gonna get you what he has to give!”

Because Adam was showing Lauren images of the coming extinction, he might be aware of the conversation Mike had been listening to, which made continuing this way too dangerous. “Okay, that’s it. Come out. We’re done.”

“I love my baby,” she whispered, getting up from the Barcalounger. She reached out, touched the cool, soft skin of a hand that only became visible when she held it, the narrow fingers and lethal black claws fading when she withdrew.

Adam shot back an image of a mother nursing an infant, his standard good-bye. As she got up, he made one of his audible sounds, a cry like a shocked and despairing woman. Did he feel anything? She didn’t know. But she did know that he was trying for sympathetic attention.

“Adam, I know you have a message for me connected with all these disasters, and I know I’m not getting it. However, we’re asking you about a
specific incident
, and—”

She got no response from him. She knew why: he’d heard the words, but unless you formed your thoughts in your mind, he didn’t understand you.

“Lauren, break it off!”

“Mike—sir—”

“Lauren, there’s no time!”

No time? What the hell was he talking about? She had all the time in the world. And God knew, Adam had time. “I’m going to get this thing rolling.”

“There is no time!”

But Adam had different ideas. Adam’s mind was all around her, she
could feel it. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let herself go blank.

He came into her, as always, like a dog sniffing for a buried bone. Letting him get inside her felt kind of good, but also oddly sad . . . a sadness that he brought with him. He would go into her memories and kind of troll there, bringing up all sorts of things from her past, things she’d just as soon have forgotten, stuff done when drunk, that sort of stuff. He liked the intense things. Sort of ate them, she thought.

She let him go deep into a familiar little corner, the cardboard box experience when she was about ten, one of the first things she’d ever done that was related to sex. She smelled the slightly damp cardboard box again, saw Willy Severs’s plump, white body, felt his hand go under her blouse—and then shut
that
door with a great crash.

She shot her question at Adam: the satellite image again, the town of Wilton, the houses on Oak Road.

For the split of an instant, she thought she glimpsed a boy’s face, but it was not Willy Severs. Curly hair, slightly chunky, looked about fourteen or fifteen.