The Grays

by Whitley Strieber

  Then he saw that they had a lantern. He looked at it, glowing in the snow, the interior flickering orange.

  “Mom,” he called, but it came out as a whisper. He fought to form the word. “M-o-o-mm.” It stayed in his throat.

  They came across the snowy lawn, sort of floating just above the ground, floating and flickering.

  Conner was terrified beyond anything he’d ever thought possible. It was freezing-cold fear, a fear so deep he had not known that it could exist.

  Had he been insane? Why had he done this?

  The thought crossed his mind that this was yet another joke, but then he heard them, a buzzing sound like huge flies, a sound that was really, really strange, that was not of this world. They remained out in the gushing, swirling snow.

  The lantern wasn’t a lantern at all, it was a very black metal thing with glowing holes in it that sort of looked like eyes, and it seemed to Conner as if it was sort of alive, too. The three aliens came closer, moving swiftly and accurately now, no longer floating and flickering. They were like wolves in the snow, now, and they were clearly interested in him.

  And then there was something on his shoulder, as light as if a bird had landed there. Almost too scared to move, he looked down. A hand was there, with fingers like long, thin snakes, and black claws.

  EIGHTEEN

  CONNER HAD TO RUN, HE had to get out of here, but then the world distorted, seeming almost to bend, and the glowing thing was right in front of his face and he was staring into the orange light inside where there were millions of glowing threads. They were just threads of light, but he couldn’t look away from them, he had to keep staring.

  One of the creatures pulled his shirt front up, and he felt something pushing against his chest and getting hotter and hotter and he couldn’t stop it and he had to because it was burning him.

  The snow swirled and lightning flashed and there was a loud snap like a wire had come down and was spitting in the yard.

  Suddenly Conner realized that he was alone. He was standing in the snow and he had to get back inside because somebody was out here who should not be, and he was in danger.

  He’d seen black eyes and orange light, terrible light, but the rest of it was all confused. Had he met the aliens? He wasn’t sure. Or no, he was sure. He hadn’t. He’d pointed the light at the sky and everything, but they hadn’t shown up.

  He opened the door. He walked past Paulie who, without a word, went into the bathroom and drank glass after glass of water. When he came out, he was transformed from a posturing preteen into the little boy he had been as recently as last summer. “I want to go home,” he said quietly. Then he ran upstairs.

  Conner ran after him.

  Paulie burst into the living room. “I want to go home,” he yelled.

  “Paulie?” Katelyn asked.

  Paulie looked toward Conner, his face soaked with tears. Conner went closer to him. “Hey, man?”

  “Don’t let him near me!”

  Katelyn got to her feet “What in the world did you do to him, Conner?”

  Conner shook his head.

  “Here, come here to me, Paulie, honey. I’ve dealt with a lot of scared guys in my time, honey.” Katelyn took him by the hand. “Now, we are going into the kitchen, fellas, and guess what we’re gonna do? We are going to make a big, old-fashioned pot of hot chocolate flavored with brandy. Would you like that?”

  “We have brandy?” Dan asked.

  “I’m not allowed to drink.”

  “This is a very tiny bit, Paulie,” Katelyn said as she drew him toward the kitchen.

  “Hey, guy,” Dan said to Conner.

  “Yes, Dad?”

  Dan patted the couch cushion. Conner sat down beside him. “Conner, did you—no. Better way to do this. What did that to him?”

  “Dunno. He was okay, then he wasn’t.”

  “Did you, perhaps, have a fight? It was awfully noisy down there at one point.”

  “No. No fight.”

  “No, that wouldn’t make him cry. What made him cry, Conner?”

  “Homesick, maybe?”

  “No.”

  Conner’s chest hurt. He tried to sort of move his shirt away from it to not have anything touch it.

  Dan saw, and lifted it. “What’s going on here?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Yeah, there is. Katelyn, could you come back, please?”

  Conner heard a voice, Hello, Conner.

  “Hi.”

  Dan said, “Hi what?”

  Be quiet!

  He started to talk, but it was like somebody had grabbed his throat from the inside.

  This is real, Conner.

  A coldness raced in Conner’s veins. This was somebody that was inside him, somebody else alive, in him!

  “Katelyn, something’s not right here.”

  Don’t tell them, Conner.

  She came in.

  “Look at his chest.”

  “Conner, what have you boys been doing?”

  Paulie had followed her. She turned to him. “Paulie, you tell me. Have you boys been playing too rough?”

  “No, Mrs. Callaghan.”

  “Mom?”

  “Son, you’re all skinned up! You look like you’ve been sandpapered, so I want to know what you were doing.”

  Conner had no way to respond. He wasn’t sure why he was hearing this voice, only that it was not being heard by anybody else.

  That’s right, Conner.

  Mom and Paulie returned to the kitchen, followed by Dan. Conner hesitated a moment, then hurried after them. He was trying not to be scared, because this was the real thing, this was contact. But he was not just somewhat scared, he was so scared that he was actually dizzy.

  He knew what had been done to him: they had put a communications device in his chest.

  Right again.

  The kitchen was filling with the smell of cocoa and it seemed so wonderfully comfortable it almost made him burst into tears. He ran over and threw his arms around his mother’s waist and tried not to let Paulie hear him crying.

  “What is the matter with these boys?” Katelyn asked.

  “I think it’s called nervous energy. Running on fumes. When’s your bedtime, Paulie?”

  “Whenever.”

  “I repeat the question, Paul Warner. When is your bedtime?”

  “Nine-thirty.”

  “It’s already ten forty-five,” Dan said. “You must be tuckered out.”

  “Conner’s an eleven o’clock guy,” Katelyn said. “But you’re tired, too, right?”

  “I’m tired.”

  Paulie nodded into the mug of hot chocolate that Katelyn had just poured him.

  They drank their cocoa in silence, and the voice did not recur. Conner began to hope that it had been an auditory hallucination, because if contact was going to mean you had a voice inside you, that was going to take a whole lot of getting used to.

  He’d read most of his father’s abnormal-psych texts, so he hoped it wasn’t an early symptom of schizophrenia, the curse of the excessively intelligent. Even though that might actually be better than having an alien communications device buried in his damn chest.

  He and Paulie did not argue about going to bed upstairs. There was no way that either of them were going anywhere near that basement again tonight. In fact, Conner considered proposing to Dan that they brick the thing up tomorrow and just forget about it.

  After they were both in pajamas and had their teeth brushed, Paulie said, “I’m sorry about not believing you.”

  “About what?”

  He put his arms on Conner’s shoulders and pushed his lips close to his ear. “The aliens! I saw them. I saw the whole thing!”

  “Forget it, Paulie.”

  “Forget it? Are you nuts! I saw aliens in your yard, man, three of them!”

  “We don’t know what we saw.”

  “Hello? You were the big believer. You were the guy who was vectoring them in.”

  “Maybe
I made a mistake.”

  “Maybe you didn’t.”

  They left it there, and soon Paulie was asleep. Conner watched the night, listened to the snow whispering on the windowpanes, and wondered how the world really worked.

  There came that voice again, very quick, trembling with something like fear and something that, oddly enough, sounded to Conner like a sort of awe: Soon you will know.

  NINETEEN

  CHARLES GUNN PULLED UP TO the presidential safe house on Embassy Row. The mansion had been acquired during World War II when the Roosevelt Administration was concerned that Hitler might develop a long-range bomber and attack the White House. Successive administrations had continued to use it, and during the cold war, tunnel access had been added across the mile that separates it from the White House. Now it functioned as a very private presidential enclave, at present ostensibly owned by Washington insider Larry Prince, but actually under the control of the Secret Service.

  He walked quickly to the door, which was opened as he approached. A young man in a dark suit, with an earbud in his ear and the bulge of a small machine gun under his jacket, stepped aside and let him through the metal detector. Another young man fell in ahead of them, and the three of them proceeded silently down the hall, then turned right into the president’s ornate office.

  The president didn’t know it yet, but he was going to provide a diversion that would, hopefully, deceive the grays into looking in the wrong direction for the source of danger to their evil little child. It might well mean that the president would himself be killed, but to Charles this was of little consequence.

  He was watching the news and paging through a speech. “Hey there, Chester,” he said without looking up, “just give me a second, here.” Then, a moment later, “Pull up a chair.”

  “It’s Charles, sir,” Charles said as he sat down.

  On the wall of this office there were paintings chosen by FDR, the most spectacular being a Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos. As Charles knew, and as FDR had certainly known, the geometry of the painting resolved into a date: 2012. That this was the year of tribulation had been known by the secret societies that had created western civilization literally from the very beginning. The date had been handed down through the Masonic community from the ancient Egyptian priesthood who had divined it by looking through the last, clear glass of man’s old, lost science: a window into the future. This had been at Abydos in Egypt, and some of the other things they had seen had been commemorated on beams that held up the temple’s roof to this day.

  “So,” the president finally said, “how are you gonna make me miserable today, Charles?”

  “Mr. President—”

  “You never come here with good news. All your good news is secret. So, hit me.”

  “The grays are acting against us in a major and very bizarre way.”

  “The grays are acting bizarre? You’re kidding. I sit here astonished.”

  Charles had constructed his lie carefully. “Sir, they’re going to do something that will reveal to the public the fact that the government’s been concealing their presence for sixty years. They’re going to destroy our credibility.”

  The president pointed a finger at his own temple.

  “Exactly. They’re trying to undermine the government. First, the public becomes aware that they’re real. Second, people tell about their abductions. Third, it’s discovered that we’re helpless. Chaos follows.”

  The president was silent for a moment. “And, for some reason, you can’t get control of this situation, which is why you’re here. First, tell me why it’s out of control. Second, tell me what you need.”

  “It’s not out of control.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Sir, I need a TR-A. I need to surveil in the area where this disclosure event took place.”

  “You have TR-A1.”

  “Mike Wilkes is using it. He’s on detail out there now, but he needs backup.”

  “Okay, you’ve got another TR. I’ll cut orders for you to have access to one. What else?”

  “I need some people killed, toute suite.”

  “Just do what you gotta do.”

  “You need to be aware that one of them is Mr. Crew.”

  “Oh, fuck.”

  “Exactly. Our friend from the beyond is not our friend.”

  “He’s—what’s he done?”

  “He’s giving the grays support.”

  “Next.”

  “I need one other thing.”

  “Hit me.”

  Charles smiled. “I don’t want to hit you. I want you to hit Wilton, Kentucky, with an earthquake. Enough to disrupt the place and reduce the college that’s there to rubble.”

  The president stared at him for some little time. “Why?” he asked at last.

  “We need a diversion so that we can clean up all the principles. We need it to look accidental. All the folks who were present during the disclosure event.”

  “I see.” He looked down at the top of his desk. This time, his silence extended even longer. When he spoke, his voice was soft with what Charles knew must be pain. “You know, it feels like the best day in your life when you walk for the first time into the White House as president. President of the United States—wow, and wow again. Then you find out the secrets, and you spend the rest of your life in mourning.”

  “Mr. President, this will be a very localized hit. It’s not going to activate any fault lines, nothing like that. We’ll see significant disruption and a few deaths, obviously. It will be a cover for us to sterilize the area. We’ll confiscate all original video, and deal with the people who were firsthand witnesses. We have assets already at work who will get a local physics professor who saw the thing to debunk it. Our media people will see to it that his message gets spread far and wide. But the damage and the deaths will be the minimum necessary, let me assure you of that. I feel the same way you do about the American people, of course.”

  “You’re assuring me that this will not do any more than the minimum damage necessary?”

  “Absolutely. It will be very precisely contained. We’ll have a TR directing the pulses from the immediate vicinity of the target.”

  “And the grays are not going to react adversely? That is one limb I sure as hell don’t want to go out on.”

  “Sir, again, there is no way. They are not going to be able to connect the dots, as it were.”

  “I’ll redeploy the scalar weapon.”

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll call you when I need it fired.”

  God only knew what the grays would do to the president after he unleashed a scalar pulse that devastated the whole center of the United States and threw all of their plans awry. One thing was certain, Charles planned to stay far, far away from this particular moron after he pulled that particular trigger.

  “I have a state dinner in an hour. I gotta go over to the rathole and put on my monkey suit, and spend the evening with the prime minister of Thailand—whose name I will never, ever learn to pronounce—who is here to whine at me about some damn thing or other.”

  He stood up. The interview was at an end.

  MIKE WILKES LAY IN HIS motel room trying to do anything except worry about the next few days. He had a difficult, complex task, and if the grays detected him, he was going to be something worse than dead meat. Over the years, they’d found bodies of people who had been attacked by the grays, mostly airmen who’d gone too close in the early days, when Truman was still trying to shoot them out of the sky.

  They would have their lips cut off, their eyes and tongues gouged out, and their genitals removed. There would generally be seawater in their lungs, no matter where the bodies were found. The grays would cut them up, drown them, then leave them as warnings. The grays could very definitely be crossed, and this particular action was certain to qualify.

  He really did not feel so comfortable right now, sitting in this dismal little hole of a room and, frankly, waiting to start g
etting cut to pieces by somebody he couldn’t even see. He’d long held that the grays couldn’t read minds beyond a few feet, and that they had trouble even understanding what was going on in the human mind. But lying here on this bug-ridden bed watching Jay Leno wish he could suck any part of his guest, Drew Barrymore, he feared that the opposite might be true.

  His only chance was speed. If he could get this done by tomorrow night, he could be back in D.C. by noon on Wednesday, and maybe he would be okay. Maybe.

  AT ALFRED AFB, THE FLIGHT line was being used for foul-weather training runs, and the sound of engines being fired up and jets screaming off into the night could be heard clearly in the disused office block where Lauren Glass and Rob Langford had been together for hours. Since he had caught up with her last night, he had not let her out of his sight.

  And now that she’d understood that there were two opposing groups within the Air Force, she was glad that she had ended up with Rob. She had never liked Colonel Wilkes, and had not been surprised to discover the danger he posed to her.

  She sat across from Rob in the office, watching the snow sift past the windows. She was exhausted, and she was hoping that he would soon let her rest.

  He remained formal and distant, though, and showed no sign of either becoming more at ease or of offering her a place to sleep.

  She wished it was not so. He was a lovely man, handsome in a way that made her want him, simply and frankly. His eyes were gray and intense, but also had a sort of wide-open look to them, as if he was as friendly as he was dedicated. They were the eyes of somebody who worked hard, but, she thought, also liked to have fun.

  He did not trust her. There was a secret he wanted to tell her, but he was wary. If he decided that she was the enemy, what then?

  She knew what then. She just didn’t want to think about it.

  “Tell me again about your relationship with Adam,” he asked. In all these hours, she had not refused to answer a question, no matter how often he had repeated it. She knew this interrogation technique. She would let him use it. She would cooperate fully.