The Filter Trap (30 page)

“Give it time, Pete, you haven’t been major for a whole week yet,” Leto reminded him.

The other privates bristled and the major gave Leto a death stare. “I know you think because we used to play poker you can be all buddy-buddy with me Ledesma, but this is a war zone. If I didn’t need your arms to be in shape to hold that rifle I’d order you to drop and give me twenty. You will never again address me by my first name while either of us is in uniform. Got that?”

“Yes, Major. Sir!” Leto said with a mocking salute.

“If we weren’t friends I would think you didn’t mean that, Private,” Pete warned.

“If we weren’t friends.” Leto repeated and smiled. “We’d all better become fast friends now, makes dying for someone easier.”

Pete grunted, seeming to agree. “Tuesday, you’re the odd man out. Silversun and Ledesma know me from basic. Preston here joined us for riot control in Frisco after the Event. So what’s your story, Private?”

“My
story
, sir?” Tuesday caught himself. “Oh, right. I grew up in Pasadena, near the suicide bridge. Joined up after high school graduation. I was on leave
when the Event happened. They called me off to rendezvous with you, so here I am.”

“Seen any combat?” Pete asked.

“Not like this,” the young soldier said.

“You mean not at all!” Leto puffed.

“Stow it, Ledesma!” Pete shook his fist. “We need to be useful down to the last soldier out here, and what we’re up against ain’t gonna follow any of the tactics you learned in Iraq or anywhere else.” He turned back to Tuesday. “How’s your aim?”

“2nd in my company,” he replied with pride.

Leto shot him a sideways glance.

“At Pendleton recruit training,” Tuesday admitted.

“Let’s hope these aliens like to stand still,” Leto said.

“Let’s hope they’re not as tough as you, Ledesma,” Pete said sarcastically.

“Who you want in a firefight,” Leto asked, “me or the freshman here?”

“I’ll take Silversun; she’s got the radio!”

“And service awards,” Preston added.

“Merit badges
and
a magic ring!” Leto tried his best to imitate a cartoon buffoon.

“And a watch,” Amanda added, rolling her eyes at Leto. “Time for us to move out.”

Pete turned around to peek out the door of the night club. “The rest of the troops have finished branching off and streaming out. Let’s Move!”

The troops before them followed directions perfectly; the street running west in front of them seemed utterly deserted as they’d all fanned out into the residential streets beneath Wilshire.

Pete’s group hustled down Wilshire and cut south just before Rodeo Drive. Tuesday stood at the corner for a moment, taking in the scene. A large fish was impaled on the fourteen foot high silver Torso statue still standing at the intersection of Rodeo and Dayton.

Pete shoved him towards south Rodeo Drive. They hurried down but had to stop and turn back when they realized that the contents of a shoe store had been emptied in the street. A mountain of brightly-colored running shoes stood between them and the next block.

They jogged back to Wilshire and took the next street to the south. A large parking lot halfway down the block turned to a graveyard for squashed luxury barges. Black painted steel body panels and still-shining chrome wheels blocked their path.

“Through here,” Pete said quietly, “good cover till we get to the houses on the other side.”

They snuck slowly and deliberately through the wreckage, avoiding upsetting any moving parts ready to clang into each other. Amanda heard a snap from behind and whipped around to catch Ben pocketing a hood ornament. “Souvenir,” he whispered. She shook her head and turned back around.

They snuck across the next side street and into the long slatted sheets of residential houses. Each candy-bar shaped lot used to house millionaires but now homes still standing were empty. They passed a two-story stucco mini-mansion, still intact save for a black SUV half-eaten by the living room window.

As they swung around each home they had to make a deliberate attempt to not look in the requisite backyard pools filled with bodies that had come to float there when the tsunami waters subsided.

“How come there’s so many bodies in the pools?” Ben asked.

“Because the easy meals were on solid ground,” Leto answered.

“Easy meals for what?”

“Bears, mountain lions and coyotes used to come down from the Santa Monica Mountains and eat out of my uncle’s trash bins on Los Feliz,” Tuesday advised.

Ben turned green. “Ugh, forget I asked.”

“If you think that’s nasty, you should see what ISIS does to people while they’re still alive,” Leto said with the excitement of an unemployed undertaker. “First they hoist you up in handcuffs behind your back till your shoulders pop out, then they—”

“Shut the fuck up, Ledesma!” Pete demanded.

“You think the aliens will be any less barbaric? They don’t even
know
what hurts us.” Leto leaned to speak into Tuesday’s ear. “I’d hate to be the one they test everything on to find out. They won’t be taking
me
alive!” Leto removed his Beretta and put the tip in his teeth for a moment. Tuesday stepped back in shock.

“Goddammit, Leto!” Pete gritted his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut.

“Don’t you mean
for Pete’s sake
?” Leto laughed.

Pete grabbed Leto by the shoulder and pulled him close. “You will
not
disrespect your weapon like that in front of me, God, or the Corps. I know you’ve been through hell over there, I know. Nobody understands, I get it. But you can’t fuck this up for the rest of us because you’re scared to go back to civilian life and you’d rather go out shooting.”

“I want to go out . . . on my feet!” Leto uttered with his lower lip quivering and eyes bulging. “You don’t know anything. I’ve seen death in person. You’ve only read about it.”

“Are you trying to impress somebody? Is that supposed to intimidate me? Because I’m not moved by you, Hero. I’m not scared of them
or
you.”

“You should be.” Leto shook his head slightly.

Amanda slung her rifle and pushed the two men apart. Pete pointed at Leto.

“Don’t open your mouth again unless you see an alien. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. That’s an order, Private.”

Leto gave a mocking salute in reply and Amanda loosened her stance between them.

“Keep an eye on him,” Pete whispered to her after Leto turned away. “For his own sake.”

They continued on in uneasy silence. It was hard to keep track of their westward progress as they traveled diagonally. When they were maybe three blocks in, a sound came from inside one of the houses.

“Hey!” Tuesday excitedly whispered, “I think somebody’s in there.”

“We’re not the Red Cross,” Pete said and turned around, continuing on to the next yard.

Tuesday, an Eagle Scout before joining the Marines, couldn’t accept that answer. He quietly stepped into the open side-door of the house. The door led to a one-car garage, with the garage door pushed halfway into the room. On the other side of the garage, by the door leading into the house, a middle-aged woman lay on the steps. A single shaft of light from a crack in the wall landed on her head. She peeked from a floor to ceiling pile of debris in the unlit room when she heard Tuesday step in.

“Please,” she pleaded, “help me!” releasing a wail of frustrated anguish.

“Just a minute ma’am.”

Tuesday poked his head outside the garage door.

“Hey guys, there’s a survivor in here!”

The three other privates stopped in their tracks and craned around to look back at him.

“I can’t leave someone here to die,” Tuesday said, running back to the group.

“I can,” Leto whispered with menace and turned back around to leave.

“Where?” Amanda whispered to Tuesday.

“Come on,” Ben whispered to Amanda, shaking his head at Tuesday.

The woman started wailing from inside the garage. It weighed heavily on Amanda’s heart and she lingered for a moment before mouthing a silent “I’m sorry,” to Tuesday before turning.

“Selfish,” Tuesday said under his breath and headed back into the garage. This was a fellow Angelino-he couldn’t just leave her there. He’d pick up the woman, take her to the evac site, and honor his commitment to the Corps
and
his community.

“I’d tell those guys to get lost, but without me, they probably will anyway,” he muttered as he pushed aside debris.

He looked over at the woman. “Ma’am, if you could come meet me I’d sure appreciate
—
” He saw in the darkness what he hadn’t noticed in his previous hurry. The debris in front of him, concealing most of the woman, was from the smashed-in garage door and front wall. However, that was wrapped around what used to be an exotic car. The matte black paint job made the wreck nearly invisible from the side-door, but Ben was close enough and in the room long enough to see the outline in the dark. She had nearly three thousand pounds of Italian carbon fiber pinning both legs against the steps leading into the house.

Tuesday froze, trying to calculate his options. They were short on time; the entire neighborhood could be a cinder by nightfall and the evac choppers would all be long gone. Alien cavalry was already on its way. No human being should be here for that, so he had to try to get to the woman.

He was close enough in the small garage to touch the overturned and smashed former speed-demon. His hand over the still pristine hood emblem of a gold raging bull, he pushed hard, but nothing budged. He looked back at the woman, suddenly silent. Surely her mind was attempting to guess what ran through his.

“You just . . .” she stammered, desperation sinking into her voice, “just need a lever . . . there’s . . . wood in the house . . . two by fours . . .”

A strange shrieking noise sounded far off outside, a reminder of urgency, fueling the instinct to flee. Tuesday wasn’t a good poker player, his emotions plain on his face. The woman stopped her stumbling appeal, reading his intentions before they were apparent to him. She shook her head and said “no,” but no sound came out. On autopilot, Tuesday turned away and got out of the garage as fast as he could.

She wasn’t about to let him leave without a gift of guilt he’d have to carry as long as he lived. Finding her voice, the trapped woman screamed all manner of obscenities. Anything she’d ever held back was coming out, anyone who’d ever wronged her; Los Angeles drivers that cut her off on the 405, late delivery drivers, the caustic jealous bitches at the firm, the macho pigs who polished the glass ceiling, and most especially her ex-husband. As bad as they all were, none of them left her to die, and she wanted the private to know and remember it.

Pete and the other privates were long gone. Involuntary tears rolled down Tuesday’s cheeks as he frantically started to run, knocking over debris in his path. He deliberately tried to smash down as much as possible, kicking drywall and trash against the sides of the house, anything to drown out the horrible screaming coming from inside the garage and his conscience at the same time.

The strange sound boomed again, but closer than before.
The aliens are coming!

Tuesday darted through the backyard at breakneck speed, focused on making the evacuation. He took too long to notice he’d turned to the north, the wrong way, lost in an endless flotsam of former mini-mansions. But how to reorient himself? Thinking to his time in the Scouts he looked at the Sun.

But this was a different Sun than the one that guided great sailing ships across oceans and Boy Scouts through the Santa Monica Mountains; this one was dimmer, older, closer to death. Ben couldn’t trust it, and in the middle of his panic that woman still screamed, her voice carried on the wind.

Until it stopped, leaving no sound at all.

Tuesday felt heat before he saw the blast or heard the thunder. God’s fist pounded on his chest, pushing him back. He looked up to see the entire block where he’d been a moment before transform into a purple-tinged bubble of swirling fire. His legs turned and ran without being asked. He prayed God’s hand was still there to carry him away before the flames did.

Flame burned deep behind his open eyes. He squeezed his eyelids tight, wishing they could stay closed. His mouth filled with a smoky aftertaste he couldn’t exhale. He stood, and felt pressing weight on his shoulders, while every vertebra moaned. He stretched, his tendons cracking like brittle tinder. Even his neurons ached.

Nagging anguish sopped at Allan’s spirit day and night. It wasn’t the state of the world and his stake in it that kept him awake; it was the fear of a desperate parent-the fear that his wife and children were dead.

When he’d boarded that Chinook atop Mt. Wilson it was on the promise that his family would remain safe, but none of the military men had anything to say about it, adding the physical manifestation of depression’s pangs to his very real insomniatic pain.

He had skated around the feeling of failure with adrenaline before; escaping fireballs and volcanos will do that. Holed up below the Colorado mountains he felt more like a prisoner. He wasn’t alone; surely Jill and Kam felt incarcerated down here, but neither of them had children outside the cage.

The military couldn’t take care of their own, so how could Allan trust them with his family? The brave young pilots that rescued Allan and Jill twice from disaster had all succumbed to the human race’s new vulnerability. No longer the commanders of earth and sky, humans scattered like roaches before the exterminator. Allan snickered at the thought that hiding down here under the Colorado Rockies would save anyone. Something moved the Earth through space and time easier than flicking a marble in a game of, well, marbles.

Allan’s only solace came from a constant reminder that he was lucky; this prison had a bed, walls, and guns to keep him safe. Not safe from the powers behind the Event, but perhaps for a time from the invaders at Earth’s doorstep. Or from themselves.

Millions of Americans up top were starving, or worse. They would eventually turn inward, on the very organizations they trusted to keep them safe that had failed. Allan started scouting exits early; he didn’t want to be around when the Marines started firing on their own citizens to protect the president.

Those dark thoughts only came around in the silence of deepest night. Otherwise, Allan’s mind was well-fed with amazing revelations shaking the understanding of the universe and their place in it. He was present at a time of discovery unparalleled in human history, but struggled to enjoy it.

Something else seemed to visit Allan in the cool dark of slumber, something he feared more than the general, more than the aliens even. The Searcher that visited him in dreams after the Event only gained in strength deep in this dark vault. Allan became convinced he was tussling with a long-repressed faction of his psyche. The Searcher prodded and pushed, insisting it was not a machination of a stressed subconscious, but an entity, a thing; something important, not to what happened inside the walls of Allan’s skull, but to what happened outside the walls of his prison.

That was the scarier part: that it might be real, that the aliens had already won. They could walk into his dreams like a horror movie villain. That was somehow worse than the furry tarantula things crawling about in the Mojave. He could hide from them, but he couldn’t shield his mind. The thing he treasured most in the world was now a shared property. How long until none of it remained? How long until they spoke to him in daylight? His body fought with him, urging him to sleep, but his terror persisted. Worst of all, if his family was alive, who would be there to eventually greet them: him or this
thing
, the Searcher? Maybe he was the last to go, the holdout for the entire human race. How could he know?

At four in the morning, Allan’s mind surrendered and he drifted into deep sleep. Coming into a waking dream he cursed, knowing the Searcher would find him soon.

“Get up, Sands!” Pith shouted as he opened the door.

Allan whispered, “Thank you,” but Pith didn’t seem to notice.

“C’mon professor, you’re
needed
.” Pith said the last word like a bug had crawled into his mouth.

“Don’t you have anybody else you can harass?”

“I wish. You were on the president’s list, not mine. You liberal types are a dime a dozen at MIT, problem is MIT’s still under water.”

“You sound truly heartbroken.”

“Mr. Sands, I took an oath to protect every last citizen of this country with my life! Even bleeding heart professors that vote bleeding heart presidents to be my boss. But I have the same rights to complain about it you do.”

“Sorry, General, I’m just so tired, can’t you come back later?”

“We’re all tired. Soldiers up top have to sleep with one eye open and one finger on the trigger. But I suppose I was trained to handle times like this; you weren’t. I’ll try and remember that. I can’t come back later though-need your eyes on something right now.”

“Just let me get dressed and I’ll take a look.”

Pith turned his eyes away from Allan’s flab hastily disappearing under a base-issued gray shirt. “By the way, Doctor, I’ve some information that might put some pep back in your step, or at least help you sleep at night.”

Pith licked his lips. He liked to see broken hearts mend, even bleeding ones. “Your wife and kids are here.”

“What!” Allan leaped up at attention, belt still unbuckled.

“Thought that might wake you up. Yeah, they’re fine. They’re asleep right now. Let’s get this done before they wake up, then you can go see ‘em.”

“Thank you. Yes, of course.”

Allan’s mind riveted with another jolt of adrenaline. He’d do anything Pith asked if it meant seeing his family. He could see the finish line. He buckled his belt. “Okay, what do you need?”

Pith looked up at a dark spot in the corner of the ceiling. “Not here.”

“What? Are they watching me?”

“Can’t be helped, you’re a civilian in the most secure military complex in the world. These rooms aren’t usually used for storing friendlies.”

Allan shuddered at what that meant. This had to be one of the CIA’s famous
black sites
. How many dead terrorists haunted his bunk? He stifled his curiosity and anger, reminding himself he was one more interrogation away from seeing his family.

He came to the door and motioned for Pith to lead on, suddenly realizing how much he might have in common with the former occupants. Were they lying to him too, promises about family reunions only used for motivation in a never ending con-game? At least they didn’t torture him, although wasn’t sleep deprivation a form of that?

They walked briskly down the dim lodging corridor, looking even more like a prison after the Pith’s admission of the former inhabitants. After making a few turns in the underground maze they came to a room with two armed guards. The guards saluted Pith, went inside the room, and emerged again. “Room secure, sir.”

Pith saluted back but said nothing. He ushered Allan inside, where there were a few steel chairs sitting at a noticeably bruised table in front of an obvious two-way mirror. Allan had always thought of the roundabouts in the war room as interrogations, but now he was in a real interrogation room. Also unlike the other rooms, his fellow scientists, and Pith’s coworkers, were missing. Allan began to realize, despite his outward pomp, that Pith not only needed him for something, but needed him to keep very quiet about it.

Allan’s thoughts broadcast involuntarily from his gentle face.

Pith rolled his eyes. “Yes, you’re my ‘special’ consultant this morning, and I’ll make life real hard for you if you spill any of this to your buddies
—
or mine
—
before I’m good and ready.”

“Right.”

“Good.” Pith took out a tablet and handed it to Allan. “I got the infrared shots you requested. Nobody else has seen these yet and I need your take so I don’t waltz in front of the president with nothing I can prove.”

Allan studied the photos on the device while Pith kept complaining.

“You know how hard it was to reroute and pilot a Global Hawk to Mojave? Most of the drones in the air crashed in the Event, before they could switch over from GPS. The boys in blue have been very stingy with ‘em since they haven’t worked out all the kinks of driving on a pure inertial navigation system. That’s why all those other stills were from U2s; plop a kid in the cockpit and he goes up, navigates with his eyes, and comes back. No engineers or satellites required. You know, I twisted a lot of wrists to get you these pictures, so if you can’t tell me something
—”

“Of course!” Allan exclaimed. “That’s what they’re doing.”

“Keep talking.”

Allan smirked and put his fingers on one of the U2 images, taken on a sunny day. He ran his fingers up from one of the slender, black stacks emerging from the alien facility in the desert.

“You can tell a lot more about the Sun by looking at it in infrared and ultraviolet than with sunglasses, General.”

“Cut the bullshit, Sands. I got about ninety minutes before NORAD and everybody else puts their peepers on these. Why are you pointing at clouds?”

“Well, you can’t actually ‘see’ them, but you can see the effect of what I’m pointing at.” Allan zoomed in on the photo. “Look here, above the complex, at what look like heat waves.”

Allan pulled up an infrared image from the Global Hawk. “The complex is absorbing the heat. This confirms my earlier postulate that the black nanite material is an incredibly efficient endothermic energy source.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning those ‘heat waves’ in the clouds aren’t heat at all. They’ve got a space elevator.”

“An
invisible
space elevator? If they have cloaking technology why show us their ugly faces but hide an elevator?”

Allan pointed at a wavering spot where a few clouds dipped down for a bit and back up. “I don’t think they’re hiding it at all. The heat wave lines on the visible spectrum photos are the light that did escape the elevator crisscrossing back into the sensor and making that slight change in the image.”

“Oh, yes, now I see. DARPA was working on this. An invisibility cloak, bending the light around the material.”

“Not bending light, but absorbing it. The elevator would be visible up-close, it’s just so small that you can’t see it from far away, even with your best cameras. The strand could be only a few atoms thick, possibly invisible to the human eye without a magnifying glass.”

“Well that’s an interesting
theory
, but I need more to go on than that. They still just look like lens smears or heat waves to me.”

Allan brought back up another infrared shot and zoomed in.

Many dark lines, only a few pixels wide, extended from the top of the black complex into the sky and beyond, out of the view of the picture.

“Water red-shifts the further it gets from solid. To our eyes it goes from glassy to clear, but in infrared, it shows up as varying wavelengths with the clouds darker, or redder, than the liquid.”

Allan waited a moment to see if Pith understood.

“Mother of God! They’re shooting the water into space.”

“I suspect they’re using thousands, maybe millions, of atom-thin pieces of that black stuff and pulling the water up, maintaining it with surface tension somehow.”

“Professor, I know you’re all proud of your deductions, but you forgot something. Water freezes before you get too high up. Remember the ice flakes on your last plane ride?”

“Not a problem for these guys. Clearly this material the strings are made of can absorb heat, so it stands to reason it could have exothermic properties as well, and if they’re doing their little operation in the daylight, it gets a lot hotter again once they get out of the mesosphere.

“But that’s not the problem. About a hundred miles up they’ll have to start bottling it or it might turn into gas when the pressure drops too low. In fact, maybe that’s their plan all along. Once water turns to a gas in a vacuum, it cools off into ice again. At that point capturing it would be easy, especially in such small individual amounts. Frankly, it’s brilliant. Instead of using tons of energy they just use air pressure to pull it up and then use surface tension to keep it going until the problem solves itself.”

Pith looked at him with a questioning scowl.

“General, remember what happens when you put your finger over the top of a straw in a glass of water and lift it up? The water stays in the straw until you let go. That’s the pressure working. If you’ve ever siphoned gas you know how the water keeps flowing. And the reason bugs can skate on water is why it doesn’t dissipate-surface tension! All they need to do to keep the surface tension is keep the water heated or cooled to a liquid state.”

“Won’t that take them forever?”

“At pharmaceutical rates, there are about 100,000 drops in a gallon. A million strands could move ten gallons a second, 600 gallons a minute, 3,600 gallons an hour, 86,400 gallons a day
—
”

“I get it, I was wrong! It’s a lot of fuckin’ water.”

“Maybe. But it’s not fast enough to steal and send home. America alone must use tens of billions of gallons every day; they’d need hundreds of thousands of their little ships.”