Contact

by Johnny B. Truant

  And still she heard it.

  A suggestion, like a command:

  Plug the hole.

  And a promise:

  It’s all beginning.

  But which hole should she plug? Where? The need to know was urgent. Lila felt sure that if she didn’t do what the voice seemed to be telling her, something awful was going to happen.

  And what was beginning? That authority was she taking for true, if something was? Too many questions to ponder, each making Lila feel more unhinged than the one before it. She didn’t even want to think about it. In order to consider the notion that she’d seen this coming (the way she’d seen Morgan Matthews), Lila would have to admit she was seeing visions and hearing voices. She’d have to admit that the more she considered it, the thinker, dreamer, and speaker of those thoughts and voices wasn’t Lila herself. No. Ever since coming out of the bathroom feeling as weak as she must have looked (judging by her mother’s reaction), she’d started to entertain the idea that there was actually someone else talking to her. And that someone was …

  No. That was too insane. Too ready for the rubber room.

  She might as well say that she’d been getting personal messages from Jesus, or hanging out with Shakespeare’s ghost. Forget what anyone else might think. If she started believing things like that, Lila herself would think she was crazy. Supposedly, if you worried that you were nuts, that meant you couldn’t be. But it wasn’t a rule of thumb Lila was willing to test.

  She could barely see through the clutch of taller bodies. Terrence and Vincent were at the front, pointing at the monitoring screen and talking low, pinching and swiping to magnify and swap views. She couldn’t hear all of what they were saying from back here, but snippets came to Lila like scraps of sheared-away fabric:

  “ … camera six, on the utility pole, if you can … ”

  “ … a fire? Maybe one of them spilled … ”

  “ … not a fire. You felt it. Well, the rest of us felt it, and … ”

  “ … back there, though — isn’t there a way to see … ”

  “ … all of them, and what the hell would … ”

  Trevor appeared at Lila’s side looking downright insulted. She’d seen him rush into the room just behind Vincent, but he’d been squeezed backward and out. Now the four original members of Cameron’s group were front and center, making a scrum, mumbling and pointing. Raj was somehow up there, too. The room wasn’t much more than a closet; it barely fit three comfortably, and they’d jammed five tight like sardines. Trevor had been ejected, and they probably didn’t even know they’d pushed him out.

  “What’s going on up there, Trevor?” Lila’s mother asked from behind them. She’d wanted to ask the same thing, but speaking had been hard for the last few hours. She’d barely had the strength to tell Mom about the abdominal pains and hadn’t told her the rest. It scared her to say the words, in the way it would scare her to ask a doctor about a new lump in her breast. People got diseases all the time. Could they get mental diseases, too? If the bunker still had the Internet, she would’ve already spent way too much time on WebMD, deciding just how terribly ill she was.

  Hearing voices? Check.

  Feeling paranoia? Check.

  Disorientation? Confusion? Increasing difficulty separating reality from fantasy? Triple check.

  Well, then, congratulations, Delilah Dempsey — our diagnosis is that you’re shit out of your mind.

  “Something on the cameras.”

  A lump rose in her throat. What felt like a bubble popped in the back of her mouth; she practically gasped. “Is it Dad?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Heather grabbed Trevor’s arm. “You’re saying it might be?”

  “Why would Dad make the walls shake like that?”

  “Trevor!”

  “Look … ow! I don’t know, Mom. Let go! That hurts.”

  Lila kept hold of Trevor’s arm. She watched her, seeing the same stupid, vacant-eyed optimism in her mother’s eyes that Lila had to admit she felt in her own. Who was this woman? She was never serious, never not making crass jokes and talking about penises. But right now she looked frazzled and lost. Like Lila felt.

  “Is it Meyer?” Heather shouted.

  Vincent turned back. “Everyone sit down.”

  “Answer me!”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was the same answer as Trevor’s. But that didn’t make sense. Saying he didn’t know while looking right at the monitor (after Terrence had called him over, urgent and perhaps even panicked) made less sense than seeing just about anything. Of course he knew. She wished he’d just say something outright absurd instead of pretending he didn’t know.

  The sun just set in the middle of the day, Lila. Everyone topside has stripped naked and painted themselves blue, Lila. Fetuses can talk, Lila.

  But he wasn’t going to budge. He turned back to the monitor. Lila was about to object when her mother stuck her outstretched arms between Trevor and Dan then pushed. She wasn’t subtle. She would either get through or squeeze herself to death, so Dan rolled out of the room, and Heather rolled in. Lila followed, staying in her mother’s wake like a race car drafting off the leader’s slipstream.

  Lila glanced back and saw that the others were all out in the living room, including Raj, whom she almost wanted to wave apologetically to. They were letting Lila and Heather stay where they wanted. Because all men knew to stay away from crazy women.

  “Is it Meyer?”

  This time, Terrence turned, his face unreadable. “I don’t think so, Ms. Hawthorne.”

  “How can you not know?”

  He tapped the monitor, stepping aside and reaching to allow the women to see. Lila saw the front lawn from maybe twenty feet up, angled down, where the hippies had made their shanty town. The shanties were still there, but there were no people at all.

  Terrence narrated, his voice like a mission commander delivering a brief.

  “You’re seeing the east lawn. There’s not much to do down here, so I’ve counted their tents and bivouacs a few times. In this shot alone, there’s almost forty. And there’s more here — ” He changed the shot with a finger: more camping setups but again no people. He touched the screen a few more times, scrolling through empty views. “ — and here and here and here. All told, guessing at an average of two people per setup, I guess we have maybe four hundred campers up top. But now look at this.”

  He touched the screen again. This time it showed a multiview — the topside cameras all visible at once, as thumbnails. He found the one he wanted and tapped it to expand. The new view filled the monitor — the first he’d pulled up so far with anyone in it — perhaps a dozen people apparently at the rear of a larger crowd, on one side of the screen, jockeying for position in the same way Heather and Lila had jockeyed inside the control room.

  “So what?” said Heather.

  “What are they looking at?” Lila asked.

  Terrence nodded at Lila and ignored her mother. “That’s the question.”

  “You don’t know?”

  Terrence shook his head. “A minute ago. Did you feel that thud?”

  Lila nodded.

  “Right after it happened, people on the monitors started running. Actually running. Not walking but stopping what they were doing and hauling ass toward … toward whatever it is. But there are no cameras over there.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s off the property. There’s a small open area to the side of the lake. See here?”

  It took her a minute to reorient. After he’d shown her the shanties, Lila assumed she was looking at something right around the house. But this was down by the lake, maybe forty or fifty yards away. And the ground had shaken in here? It had felt like a boulder tipping and falling.

  “Why are there no cameras out there?”

  Lila looked over at her. It was strange how seeing her mother lose it made Lila feel better about her own sanity.

  “It’s too far,
Mom.”

  She reached forward anyway, jabbing and swiping at the screen. Images changed more rapidly than anyone — including the woman supposedly looking for something in them — could follow.

  “Heather … ” said Vincent.

  “We have to go out there.”

  “What?” Vincent shook his head. “No way.”

  “What if he’s come home?”

  “If he has, he’ll come this way. We’ll see him.”

  “What if he’s hurt?”

  “Mom,” Lila said.

  Heather turned to Terrence. She looked almost panicked, hysterical. “Why are all these people here? You guys seem to have all the answers. So why the fuck has everyone camped on our front lawn?”

  “I don’t have a cl — ”

  “Oh, but you knew right where the fucking flying saucers had gone, didn’t you? Knew exactly who they’d picked up. And they just kept coming back, didn’t they? You’ve got your radios and someone’s telling you shit, and you come in here like some sort of assault force and — ”

  Vincent held up his hands. “Cameron told you all we know.”

  “But how? How do you know?” Heather jabbed her finger at the screen, accusing it. “And how can you not know what’s going on out there?”

  “There are no cameras that show — ”

  “How can you not want to know? You’re the big, bad men, here to protect us with your guns!”

  “It’s not that simple. After Morgan and the rest of our group ‘left’ and never came back, they’ve been rotating through shifts in the house. A regular commune. Right there in the kitchen, there’s a — ”

  “It might be him! We have to see!”

  Heather was having none of it. They’d been down here for more than a quarter year, and day by day nothing changed. Safe but trapped. To Lila, it felt like the joke might be on them not the rest of the world. The hundreds-strong community above wasn’t fighting and killing and stealing from each other. Meyer had nicknamed this place something reminiscent of a spiritual oasis, and that’s the way everyone topside was treating it. Lila and Heather had chatted often, wondering at what point staying in the bunker made sense. The ships might hover forever. They might be stuck here, like in that old alien ghetto movie about South Africa her dad had liked so much. And if the world paused where it was, never getting better or worse, did it make sense to hide forever?

  This felt like the final straw. Mom had been keyed up for a few days. She seemed almost desperate to leave the bunker. She also seemed afraid — worried that something here was vulnerable and that if they weren’t careful, whatever it was might be taken or harmed. How those two things went together, Lila had no idea. Heather hadn’t liked hearing about her strange pains either and seemed to sense something troubling Lila’s mind even if she hadn’t admitted to the craziest of her crazy feelings.

  She said that Lila needed a doctor and that they had to get out and go. Lila’s baby couldn’t be born in the bunker. Not in this fucked-up place, were her exact words.

  Vincent watched her, his expression neutral.

  Heather’s face twisted and she pushed her way out of the control room, marching toward the spiral staircase.

  “Heather!” Dan shouted after her.

  She didn’t turn. “You don’t want to go? Fine. But I’m going, and my kids are going with me. We’re going!”

  “Mom!” Trevor yelled. Lila watched her younger brother with jealousy as he shuffled after her. Trevor was at home here — more now, in fact, than at the beginning. Unless he was hiding it well, he wasn’t suffering any of what Lila or their mother was. No visions. No hallucinations. No overheard snippets of conversation or song. No growing certainty that something was off — and that they weren’t on solid bedrock as it sometimes felt but were somehow suspended above a pit like a distressed damsel in a classic film.

  She was up the stairs in a determined flash. Lila was below, looking up, seeing her mother through the metal lattice staircase.

  Terrence came to Lila’s side. “Ms. Hawthorne … ”

  “Open it. Open the door, and let me out.”

  “Come down, Heather,” Vincent said.

  “Come on down, Mom,” Trevor echoed.

  Heather banged on the door with her fists. “Open the goddamned door, Terrence!”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Vincent said.

  “I don’t give a shit if you think it’s dangerous! Let me out! We can’t just assume it’s nothing when the entire goddamned fucking shit-ass hippie colony ran down there the second something happened by the lake, and instead just sit here with our thumbs up our asses watching TV and — ”

  There was another thud.

  And another.

  And another.

  “What the fuck is going on out there?” She screeched from above. But now — unbelievably, for the caustic Heather Hawthorne — Lila thought she could hear tears in her mother’s voice.

  “It’s all beginning,” someone said.

  It took Lila a minute to realize the voice was hers.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Morning broke behind them, painting Cameron’s back and his horses’s rear in an amber spotlight. Piper followed behind on her mount, westbound with the highway distantly visible to the north, obediently mute. She’d need to let Cameron cool down. Only then should she attempt conversation again. Until then, he’d only shout. Not that she could blame him.

  He’d been furious after realizing their gear was missing. Piper had been furious too, but she hadn’t been allowed to indulge her rage before Cameron started stalking around the barn, ranting and kicking hay. She found herself pinned between the worst of both worlds: angry and made to feel stupid on one hand, the butt of impotent anger on the other. She was betrayer and betrayed, caught in the middle, unable to move.

  Cameron — twenty yards ahead, his back seeming to scowl — was sulking. The worst thing was Piper thought he had a right. He hadn’t wanted to bring the family along with them, but she’d insisted. Because they were people, and people had to stick together. They were a mother, a father, and a small boy. And what was more, Piper and Cameron had saved their lives. How could they be any harm? How could allowing them to tag along for an afternoon possibly cause any problems?

  She’d thought Cameron was being callous, rude, uncaring. Of course they had to help. They had supplies, and the family had none. How could Cameron argue? He’d watched their backpacks get carried off with his own eyes. He’d shot at the bandits himself. They weren’t being asked to take these people on their word, swallowing a story of high risk on the mountain trail. They’d been there.

  The old saying was that the life you saved was your responsibility forever. Piper wasn’t willing to go that far, but she’d surely felt they could give the Nelsons twenty-four hours.

  That simple act of mercy had cost them too much. Maybe everything.

  All of their water.

  All of their food.

  All of their extra clothes.

  And a bunch of gear that Cameron and his men had relied on to reach Vail in the first place. Right down to compasses, cooking gear, a pair of the night vision goggles they’d used when claiming the bunker, matches, a water purification kit … everything.

  Cameron had wanted to leave the family to their own devices, and that had struck Piper as so, so wrong. But in the end, he’d been right. They’d woken in the middle of the night and stolen both backpacks, leaving them less than the Nelsons themselves would have had if they’d walked away as Cameron had wanted. They were left with what was in their pockets or on their bodies, including their guns.

  Piper had been thinking about that last bit while saddling two of the barn’s horses and riding away from the rising sun. If one of the guns had been in the packs or laid to the side, would Mike and Rachel have left them sleeping? Or would they have covered their tracks further — and more permanently — just in case the two looted travelers decided to track their robbers and retrieve what they’d sto
len?

  Surely not. But if this morning had proved anything to Piper, it was that everything really had changed. Maybe there were towns out there where business had returned to normal in the absence of alien activity. But now you could be robbed by anyone. Piper didn’t want to find out if the same was true of being shot in the back.

  It was all her fault.

  She rode behind him for miles, doing her time in her moving dunce corner. He slowed as the sun climbed. Piper slowed to stay behind, embarrassed and ashamed. Finally, he stopped entirely, turning in his seat to face her for the first time since they’d set off that morning.

  “Are you getting thirsty?”

  At first, she didn’t answer. It sounded like mockery. They had no water. The nice family they’d saved from rape and death had stolen every drop.

  “Are you?” he repeated.

  Maybe it was a serious question. “Yes.”

  “I hear something this way. Come on.”

  Piper looked back through the trees, watching the highway vanish as they headed farther south. She didn’t want to ask Cameron what he had in mind, but after a while she heard it too: the muffled babble of a stream.

  When they reached the small waterway, Cameron dismounted and looked around.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “A way to tie my horse.”

  “You don’t think she’ll stick around?”

  “I’d rather not leave it to chance.” He was still looking, slapping his hands on his thighs. His medium-length brown hair kept falling in his face. He didn’t look nearly as young as she’d first taken him to be, back when she’d thought him one of Morgan’s bad guys. He had to be midtwenties, maybe late twenties. How had he made himself seem barely eighteen? It had been something surprisingly convincing in his manner. She wanted to ask him if he’d ever taken acting classes but was still too gun shy about her mistake, and the question felt too familiar.