The Grays (9 page)

The Three Thieves would have been more efficient with Marcie, but the luscious fears, the darting hopes, the bright, wet desires that filled her smooth flesh were just too much of a temptation. Dan Callaghan was awake anyway, so the whole expedition was a waste. They might as well make of it whatever they could.

The Two, as the negative pole of the triad, showed her a long needle. Her eyes widened as she saw the silver of it appearing out of the dark that surrounded her. She could not see the Thieves, of course, they were too careful for that.

He plunged the needle into her forehead and she shrieked and they gobbled her agony . . . for the moments that it lasted feeling as alive as their distant ancestors must have, before they had enhanced themselves with machine intelligence, and lost contact with the only thing that mattered, in the end, which was feeling.

Without it, life was ongoing death, and to find it again, crossing a galaxy was as nothing, not even if the journey took fifty generations, not even if it took a thousand.

From a billion times a billion miles away, they had seen Earth glowing with emotion. It had drawn them like excited moths to its mystery, first in hundreds, then in thousands, and soon the billions would come to drink the healing waters of the human soul . . . if all went well.

THE KELTONS WENT CLOSE, RUNNING
low like actors on a movie battlefield. It occurred to Dan that Jimbo Kelton might be recording the prank for the later amusement of fellow perpetrators.

All the people in the neighborhood were not only known to each other, they counted one another as friends. Nancy and Chris were dear friends of Katelyn and Dan. Kelton was a historian, working at the far end of the campus from the Hall of Science, but still a member of the cozy little Oak Road crowd. The Warners and the Callaghans, were very close—or had been.

Nancy clutched her cell phone to her ear. Dan felt for his, miraculously found it in a pocket of his jacket. He punched in 9-1-1. “This is Dr. Daniel Callaghan, one-oh-three Oak Road. There’s a fire in the field behind our house that borders Wilton Road. Somebody’s trapped in it.”

The screams lost form, became a continuous roar of pain.

Dan closed his cell phone while the dispatcher was still talking. He was now convinced that this was serious. Those screams were real. He took off after Conner, going flat-out.

“Don’t let him near it,” Katelyn howled, passing him in her pursuit of her son.

As Dan ran, he looked for the basket, for the burning student, but he could see only the fearsome glare, like looking into a thousand car headlights or a flashbulb that would not quit. He shielded his eyes and struggled closer. “Conner! Conner where are you?”

“I can’t see him, Dan! CONNER! CONNER!”

Another scream came, trembling and high, desolate with agony, then the object wavered a little in the air. Far off, the thin wail of a siren could be heard, then more sirens, getting louder.

“Conner, oh thank God!”

He was with the Kelton boys, his small form hidden in the bulk of their teenage bodies.

“Come on, we’re getting out of here,” Katelyn said.

“Mom!”

“Come
on!”
She took him by the wrist, yanked him away, heading back toward their empty house.

“No!” He broke away.

And suddenly she was terribly afraid. Afraid for her son. He was vulnerable—to what, she did not know, but she knew that he was vulnerable.

“Conner, please, I am begging you. I am begging you right now to come back with me.”

“Mom, I think I know what this is!”

“Conner, no. You have no idea. Nobody does. But it’s not right and it’s dangerous.”

He threw his arms around her. “Mom, don’t worry.” In an instant, he had broken away and was running back into the light.

The Thieves were concerned now. Conner should not be here, and they could feel the fury and the fear of the whole collective. Of course everybody was scared: their survival depended on this child, who had been bred through fifty human generations.

Katelyn had the awful and frightening sense that the thing was somehow
watching
her son. She took off after him, her feet slamming into the winterhard ground, and she tackled him and brought him down.

It made him cry out in astonishment. Katelyn had never disciplined him physically. Such a thing was unthinkable, to humiliate a brilliant child in that way—or any child, for that matter.

She got up on all fours, crying, trying to keep herself between him and the thing. She had the hideous feeling that it would somehow suck him into its fire, and he would join the poor woman who was screaming there.

He stood up. Glaring down at her, he turned away from the object and strode back toward the house. Thanking God in her heart, she followed her son home.

THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT HANDED COLONEL
Robert Langford a sheet of paper. “My God,” he said as he read it.

“Sir?”

“This is under the blanket,” he said. The young man, who was not cleared to hear what was about to be said, left the room.

The glowboy that had been snooping around Wilton, Kentucky, had just done something that Rob had never seen, and that he was quite sure no monitor had seen from the beginning of this mission, which dated back to 1942.

He pulled up a satellite view of Wilton. The glowboy was bright, its plasma fully deployed. The thing was ready to move out of there fast. He zoomed in on the image. Disbelieving, he zoomed in on it again. What in hell were people doing crowding around the thing? The grays considered their secrecy essential, and they had threatened dire consequences if it was ever compromised. But they themselves were breaking it.

And also breaking a fundamental policy of the United States of America, which was to keep their secret until and if something could be said to the public other than, “We know they’re here, we know that they come into your bedrooms and kidnap you in the night, but we don’t know why and we are helpless to stop them. And yes, some of you disappear, and some of you die.”

He stared at the image, watching the figures move, trying to form some sort of a rational explanation of what might be happening.

Rob spent too much time in the Mountain, or so he’d been told by practically everybody who worked with him. Because the grays operated at night and tracking their movements was his duty, over the years he’d gradually become a night person.

Mike Wilkes had negotiated a treaty with the grays, using the interface between Bob and Adam and Eamon Glass. The agreement was that they would limit their abductions in number and region. In return, the United States had guaranteed to protect their secrecy.

It was Rob’s job to keep track of the abductions, and, in the most extreme cases of treaty violation, to put up a show of force.

This was not to be done lightly. The grays would not stand to be fired upon. That had been tried back in the forties, and the reply had been horrifying. The grays had caused six hundred plane crashes in the year 1947. Shortly thereafter, President Truman had ordered that they were not to be interfered with in any way. Nobody cared to challenge the grays, but now was one of those dreadful moments when something had to be done.

Early on, there had been a fear that the Soviets would find out how the collective minds of the grays worked, and announce to the world something like, “We have seen the future and it is Communist.” However, nobody except the United States Air Force possessed a gray. Therefore the rest of the world—including the remaining U.S. military, the intelligence community, and the government—was at best minimally informed. Within the Air Force, fewer than twenty people knew about this project.

He put his hand on the phone. There was nobody else in the world who could make this decision, or even offer advice. If he was wrong, there was just no way to tell what the grays would do.

Could he bring about the end of the world when he picked up that phone?

He lifted the receiver, punched in some numbers. “Jimmy, Rob. Do you have my glowboy coordinates?”

“Yes, sir. It’s been ground bound for a while, sir.”

“I need a scramble out of Alfred moving on it
instamente.”

“Yes, sir!”

He paused, then. Took a deep breath. “God be with us,” he said into the phone. His next step was to inform Wilkes of what was happening, and that required setting up a listening device on the call. Mr. Crew expected all contacts with Wilkes to be logged, recorded, and sent to him.

Personally, Rob was convinced that Crew was right to be suspicious of Wilkes. He believed that the man was using the empaths to discover new technologies, and selling them to the private sector. Also, Wilkes’s pathological hatred of the grays was inappropriate. He believed that they were bent on invasion. They scared him and that’s why he hated them. But hate does
not win wars, knowledge does, and that’s what Wilkes’s empath unit was supposed to be gaining from the one remaining gray in captivity. But damned little useful information came out of the new empath.

Rob did not understand the grays but he didn’t hate them. In fact, he found them incredibly interesting. They’d been here for fifty years and they hadn’t invaded yet, so that didn’t seem to be a very real concern. What they did to people was weird, but you didn’t see folks disappearing or being injured, at least not physically. Obviously, though, whatever the grays were doing to the people they abducted was damned important to them. Otherwise, there would not be threats. They were taking something from us, no question of that, but in the way a farmer takes milk, not meat.

The information flow, Rob believed, was being shunted to Wilkes’s real buddies, the quiet companies who fed off the United States’ one-hundred-and-twenty-billion-dollar annual black budget. In Rob’s opinion, there was a pipeline that led, through Wilkes, from Adam right back to the industry. It would certainly explain why an Oklahoma orphan boy, who had nothing to live on but his soldier’s pay, called a multimillion-dollar house in Georgetown home . . . and why an officer whose work was in a hole two hundred feet below Indianapolis, Indiana, even needed a presence inside the Beltway.

“Mike, it’s Rob. Sorry about the late hour, but I have a situation. There’s a glowboy on the ground near Wilton, Kentucky. I know, it’s very odd and very disturbing. What’s even more of a concern is that there are civilians in the field around him. He’s got his plasma deployed and he’s ready to run, but he ain’t running. There have gotta be video cameras down there, all kinds of trouble. I’m doing a scramble, I’ve got to get that guy out of there. Do you think you could get Glass in the hole with Adam? Let’s reassure him that it’s just a friendly warning that they might spill their own secret. And let’s please find out what we can about what in sam hill they’re up to.”

He waited until he heard Wilkes’s grunt of assent. The good colonel did not like to be dictated to, which is why Rob did just that whenever he had a chance.

ALFRED AIR FORCE BASE WAS
a training facility. It was still up and running largely because Kentucky’s senior senator was a member of the Armed Services Committee and powerful enough to hold onto his bases.

Whatever, Rob was damned relieved that the place was still operational. He widened the image on the overhead satellite, punched a couple of keys,
and saw a white outline of the base superimposed over its location. The base was barely thirty miles from the unfolding incident.

IN THE FIELD IN KENTUCKY,
they were standing in helpless amazement, watching the object. Nancy Jeffers had gone home, because she and her husband had no wish to leave their baby alone with something like this taking place. Katelyn and Conner were also gone, and Dan was just as glad. A child had no business out here, and he thought that Kelton was letting his boys get way too close with that camera of theirs.

Without warning, a clap of thunder hit. Dan cried out, they all did. Chris Jeffers covered his head with his hands. Dan saw a double star wheeling in the sky. Then he heard the shriek of a jet and realized that what he was looking at were afterburners. “It’s the Air Force!” he shouted.

Its underside glowing in the light being given off by the object, the fighter howled past so low that a hot stench of burning jet fuel washed over them.

The object turned purple. It moved, wobbling, above the ground.

The voice in the thing cried out, “Help me, help me, oh God, no!
NO NO NO!”

The light rose into the sky. It hung there, still wobbling slightly. The jet’s glowing afterburners turned and started back.

“Stop it! Stop that!” came the voice. Then more screaming.
“Ah! Ah! Ah! Oh aaaaaa . . .”

Maggie Warner screamed with her, crying into the agony of it.

In that instant, the object rose a hundred feet or so, then shot off to the north literally like a bullet. It went faster than Dan had ever seen anything go.

The jet passed over again, its engines screaming. It turned and followed the object. They watched the afterburners creep away into the sky.

Into the silence that followed, Chris said, “God help her.”

“That was a UFO,” young Jimbo Kelton announced.