Authors: Kevin Leffingwell
“One moment . . . yes, she was here for about two hours but
it looks like she was discharged just an hour ago.”
“Thank you.” Darren hung up and dialed his home
number, thinking he might have just missed her.
After four rings . . . “Hello, you have reached the
Babineaux-Seymour residence but we’re not home right now. If you leave——”
“Darren?”
Allison said. He could hardly hear
her voice.
“Hi mom.”
The sound of lungs sharply filling with air came
through. “Oh my god, baby, please tell me you’re okay.”
“I’m okay, mom. I’m not hurt. Are you
okay? You sound drunk.”
“I just got back from the hospital a few minutes ago.
They gave me Ativan. I’m alright; I just got scared this morning.
Tell me what happened? The cops say it looks like there was some kind of
gun fight here, and the kitchen wall is demolished, and my poor baby Elvis is
dead, honey . . . someone nearly decapitated him. Please, baby, tell me
what happened.”
Darren closed his eyes, and his heart nearly let out.
“I can’t tell you. All I can say is that I got into a very nasty fight.”
“With who? Was it that Marcus asshole from school?”
Darren chortled. “No, mom, it wasn’t Marcus . . . I
can’t tell you.”
Another deep breath. “Darren, please come home.”
“I can’t. In fact . . . I’m going away.
Someplace very far.”
“Tell me where?”
“No. I know the cops are there right now listening—
—you
won’t be able to trace my call assholes!
Mom, do me a favor . . . get
to the airport and go to grandma and grandpa’s, okay?”
“Why? I’m not safe here?”
“No, that’s not it.” Darren’s grandparents lived in
the country outside Flint, Michigan, and he figured his mom would be safer
there than in a big city when the alien shit hit the fan. “I just think
you’ll be less worried about me with you being with grandma and grandpa, that’s
all.”
“Darren, I can’t take this shit anymore!” Allison shrieked.
“Why are you going hysteric?”
“Because it sounds like you’re saying goodbye forever to me,
damn it!”
Darren leaned against his Dragonstar. “Mom, I’m going
to be okay. I’m eighteen now, all
growed
up. Just pretend
I’m going off to college. I was going to leave in the fall anyway . . .
back to Michigan like I planned . . . right? You knew this was
coming. It’s just happening a little earlier, that’s all.”
Allison began to weep. “Darren, I know you are in
trouble and not going to college.”
Darren saw Tony poke his head up and gaze skyward, his
bloodshot eyes blinking rapidly. The pose looked rather comical,
instinctive and animal-like, the way a prairie dog would stand when
startled. Darren would have cracked wise about it but realized something
was wrong.
He looked around. “Mom, I’ll call you in a couple of
days, okay?”
Allison didn’t answer.
“Mom?”
“I love you, Darren.”
He listened carefully. A breeze with the scent of
ferns and pine blew into the clearing. But smells weren’t the only things
carried by the wind. Sounds too. Faintly, he heard the
reverberating whump-whump of approaching helicopters in the distance.
National Guard? No, it wasn’t Saturday. These
weren’t Weekend Warriors.
“Choppers!” Tony cried, pointing southwest through a
clearing in the trees.
“I-love-you-too-mom-gotta-go-bye!”
Darren hung
up and closed the PDA.
Two . . . no, three . . . no! Four large dots in the
sky! Growing bigger, getting closer, louder. “Forget your
suits! Get your helmets on! Get your helmets on! C’mon,
go!” They broke into a scramble. Darren grabbed the modules to his
suit and began tossing them into the cockpit.
Darren spotted his precious helmet to his right, the last
piece, and ran for it, just as a helicopter appeared over the trees and hovered
above his Dragonstar. A pair of ropes dropped, and yellow-suited soldiers
slid down with rifles slung over their shoulders. Darren seized his
helmet and ran for the indentation rungs under the cockpit. One of the
troopers landed on his Dragonstar’s nose. More helicopters appeared, more
ropes, more men in yellow suits, everything happening too fast.
Darren’s escape would not be by air. Sadly, he knew he
was going to lose his fighter——no time to get in and start it up, the trooper
on the nose about to jump right on top of him. He turned to run, saw
another soldier behind him raising a strange gun at him, and he swung his helmet
to bat the weapon away. The gun careened out of his hand, but so did
Darren’s helmet. The trooper lunged for him, but he spun around hard like
a running back escaping the clutches of a blitzing linebacker and sailed out of
the guy’s hold.
He ran hard, hoping he was quick enough to dodge hands and
flying tackles. If he could just make it to the trees, he’d have a decent
chance. Off to his left, he saw Nate being taken down but couldn’t help
his friend. Someone had to escape.
On the corner of his eye . . . a soldier with a small pistol
. . . Darren heard a
SSSTHNIP
, and something sharp stuck in his
side. The trees got fuzzy. His head got heavy. He managed to
take three more strides, before the ground spun under his feet and the lights
went out.
Wednesday, May 19
Voices. A machine beeping. He was slowly coming
out of a strange sleep.
“There’s another artifact. Weird. That’s
forty-three in just——how long?”
“Ah . . . five minutes, twenty-four seconds since we started.”
Darren couldn’t move or open his eyes, unsure why. His
brain tried to stir him into action but no good. He was very much
conscious, able to make out three other people in the room, but he had little
memory before now. He did remember a helicopter . . . and a dart gun.
“He has hyper-brain activity just like the other
three. I bet an MRI will show that he has that strange growth on his
brain too.”
Growth?
Darren became a little more attentive.
“Doc, what do you mean by artifacts?”
“They’re stray electrical signals from a non-cerebral
origin. Eye blinks, cardiac rhythms, tiny muscle flexes. EEG data
is always contaminated by artifacts, but these particular artifacts are unusual
because of their astonishing high number and signal strength. A PET scan
might help us isolate their origin . . . my money’s on those tumors.”
“Are they malignant?”
“I don’t know . . . strange.”
“Can I ask what’s with the anesthetic? We have guards
posted outside, he’s not going to escape.”
“We’re using Diprivan to keep him under general
anesthesia. It produces a more rapid, nonreactive EEG pattern and gives
us a cleaner baseline. Besides, he is conscious now, Colonel
Towsley. He can hear every word we’re saying.”
That’s right asshole.
“When will he be able to talk?”
“We’re almost done with our brain analysis. Another
two hours, and he’ll be able to move and talk.”
*
Two hours later, Darren had a terrible headache and a queasy
stomach. He was laying on a cot in a small white room. Sitting up,
the room began to spin. He quickly laid down again. Up in one
corner, a small video camera watched him. He saw a large glass window to
his left and another room just beyond that. The other room was dark, but
from the lights in his cell, he could see a desk and some chairs. An
observation room, he thought. To watch the monkeys.
The lights in the other room came on, and he slowly elbowed
up to a sitting position, his forehead pounding. A man and a woman both
wearing camouflage Airman Battle Uniforms entered. The woman he guessed
to be in her forties. She had short, blond hair and had her sleeves
rolled up, a little perspiration glowing on her skin. Her piercing blue
eyes cut into his like hypnotizing lasers.
Gotdamn . . . Air Force
Viking goddess!
The old guy he barely noticed. The two officers
sat down at the desk. Darren heard a speaker in the ceiling crackle to
life.
“Good morning, Mr. Seymour,” the man said. “My name is
Colonel Martin Towsley and this is Major Deanna Weinholt. Are you feeling
all right?”
“I have a headache, and I feel like I’m gonna throw up.”
“That’s just the anesthetic working out of your
system. It’ll go away in a bit. Would you like some aspirin?”
Darren thought about the possibility of being drugged again
with something other than aspirin. “No, I’m fine. Answer my
question. Why did you knock me out?”
“The location of this base is something we’d like to keep to
ourselves.”
“Just like the Bat Cave——clever.” Darren rubbed his
eyes. “Where are my friends?”
“They’re in the cells next to you. They’re doing
fine.”
“Where’s our fighters and our suits?”
“Up on the hangar deck.”
Darren looked at him longer and then laid back down.
“I don’t have anything more to say.”
“We just need a few questions answered. You don’t know
how glad we are to see you. We thought we were in this fight alone.”
Darren sat up again and said with a straight face, “What
fight?”
“We know about the aliens. We’ve known about them much
longer than you have.”
“Why have you kidnaped us? We’re not the enemy.”
“We want to know who you are.”
“You could have just asked us, you know? I don’t think
kidnaping was necessary.”
“This situation goes much deeper than just asking you boys
questions.”
Darren shook his head. “Then I don’t have anything
more to say to you.”
“Do you realize what’s going to happen? Every human on
this planet is in danger, and we need answers.”
“I realize everyone is in danger, so why don’t you let us
go?”
“You know we can’t do that.”
“Then hit the road.”
“Darren, listen to me. How did you get your
weapons? Where did your fighters come from?”
“Name, Darren Seymour. Rank, civilian. Social
Security Number, four-seven-six-three-three. . . .”
*
Weinholt turned off the microphone and said, “He isn’t going
to cooperate. We have to try something else.”
“Are you suggesting torture?” Towsley asked.
“Waterboarding, CIA-style?”
Weinholt rolled her eyes. “No, sir. Something
subtle.”
“Such as. . . ?”
“Maybe we should put all of them in the same cell. I
wouldn’t want to talk to anyone either if I were cooped up alone. Once
they’re together, they might loosen up.”
*
A guard in a yellow CBRN suit escorted Darren around a
circular corridor to a door marked
CONTAINMENT
UNIT 1——RESPONSE TEAMS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT
. The guard
opened the door with a plastic card he inserted into the wall and punched a few
numbers on the button pad. The door slid open, and Darren stepped in.
He looked around and noticed he was in another white room
with a pair of bunk beds. He also saw Nate, Jorge, Tony——and Geils.
“Hiya, Darren,” the runt said . . . with the voice of a
postman frozen before an unchained pit bull. “How’s your world?”
“You gotta be shitting me!” Darren shrieked.
As soon as the guard in the yellow suit closed the door
behind him, Darren walked over to Geils and without hesitation put him up
against the wall with a hard right hook to the jaw. Geils slid sideways
and landed on the floor.
*
“Okay, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Weinholt said.
Towsley peered through the glass grinning from ear to ear at
Geils sprawled on the floor. “Let’s just wait and see.”
*
“Loose lips sink ships, Geils!” Darren shouted down at
him. He felt vengeance coming on like an aphrodisiac. He scented
blood.
“Listen,” Geils said, getting to his feet. “This Towsley
dude told me you guys were terrorists, and that you stole those fighters from
Area Fifty-One.”
Tony gave both hands a hard clap and chuckled.
*
“Nice,” Weinholt said.
*
“Terrorists?” Darren cried. “You circumcised donkey
dick. He just fed you a line, and you fell for it.” Then he threw
his hands up and looked away. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“Look, I’m sorry. I really am.”
Darren sat down on the bottom bunk, realizing that their
plans had been waylaid by self-serving, loud-mouth, social leper Geils
Woodbury. They had been careless, too, however. They should have
left days ago, striking camp in a remote corner of the tropics somewhere.
Five miles north of America’s second largest city hadn’t been the wisest choice
for a base.
The left ear began to ring. Then the right.
Darren leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, praying the headache
wouldn’t knock him out again. It came slowly like a sinking blade
obstructed by bone. He squeezed his fists, tears coming to his
eyes. He took in short ragged breaths and hoped he didn’t draw attention
while Tony and Geils continued to bitch at one another. Then the pain in
his head began to roll away, until a moment later, he felt nothing. The
withdrawals were weakening, he noticed with relief, but he knew eventually he
would have to plug into his Dragonstar again. To get his fix.
Darren jumped back into the argument. “Shut up,
Geils. We’re screwed because of you.”
“Excuse me,” Towsley said through the ceiling speaker.
“If you boys are not in the mood for questions, then we might as well escort
Darren to the lab and get his analysis out of the way. Our medical staff
would like to perform some tests.”
“You guys just unplugged me an hour ago!” Darren
shouted. “What kind of tests?”