by Edward Lee
“What’s…this?” Lynn asked, looking at yet another full-framed drawing. The label read: ARTIST’S RENDITION OF OCCUPANT BASED ON SKELETAL CONFIGURATION/ CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE PHYSIOLOGICAL SCIENCES UNIT.
“Pretty gross, huh?” Garrett commented.
Lynn gulped. The drawing was alarmingly detailed—an anatomical estimation of what the figure probably looked like before all its flesh was burned off. Thin sinews of muscle and veins ran beneath it’s skin.
The head seemed more like a skin-covered post. No mouth. No nose. Only a single slit where one would expect to find two eyes.
“Good God,” Lynn uttered.
“One of the pieces of the fourth skeleton appeared to be the head. But it was like no head you’d ever think of. It was just a length of bone slightly wider than the limbs, and it was cracked from the explosion that brought the vehicle down. The cranial vault was the size of a marble.”
Next,, Lynn flipped to an actual photograph, a close-up of the post-like skull. A large chip at the top revealed the tiny, empty cranial vault. She could see the charred slit that evidently served for eyes.
“Now, check out their hands.”
The next photo: a close up of one of the “skeleton’s” hands.
“Interesting, huh?” Garrett posed. “Only two fingers. What we’d think of as an index finger, and an opposable thumb.”
Lynn seemed to blanch at the eerie close-up, but then, finally, she offered her opinion. “This is scary stuff, Harlan. I’ll admit that. But I’m not buying it. It’s good, sure…but it’s still fake. And you want to know why I’m sure of that?”
Garrett thinly smiled. “Hit me.”
“For the simple reason that if this stuff was real, there’s no way it would be sitting here in your pig-sty apartment. If it’s real, Harlan, then that means it’s the entire case file to an extraterrestrial contact. It wouldn’t be sitting here in your apartment—it would be locked up in the most secure classified document repository in the country.”
“That’s weak, hon—”
Lynn winced. “Don’t call me hon. We’ve been divorced for years.”
“Fine…sugarplum. And the reason this case file isn’t locked up in a repository is because it was stolen, a long time ago.”
“Oh, by you?” Lynn chuckled. “Face it, Harlan. You may fancy yourself as this high-tech lock-picking black-bag operator, but the truth is…you suck.”
“Hey!”
“Come on. Every time you try something like that, you get caught and go to jail.”
“Not every time.” Garrett bitterly ground out his cigarette. “And besides—I’m not the one who ripped off this stuff.”
“Then who did?”
“General Norton T. Swenson,” Garrett said.
Lynn looked back at him with an expression of near-hilarity. “Swenson, your nemesis? He stole this and gave it to you?”
“Yeah. He’s dying now, but Swenson was the Air Force’s top dog on the subject. He was an MJ-12 member—”
“Bullshit,” Lynn said quickly. “It doesn’t exist and never did.”
“—and he oversaw all disinformation campaigns designed to debunk public UFO theories.”
Now Lynn laughed. “And it looks like he’s using you for the next one.”
Garrett nodded curtly, lit another cigarette. “Maybe. That’s the first thing that crossed my mind…. But, first, tell me one thing. What do you think—and I mean really—what do you think about what I’ve shown you?”
Lynn cast another look at the now-veritable pile of documents and photographs on the bed. She sighed. “Like I said before, Harlan. It all looks real good…but I still think it’s fake. Swenson’s used all of his resources, and every new-fangled high-end forgery technology to pull the wool over your eyes. He’s using you for his own gain.”
“Okay, but why?” Garrett asked. “He’s dying. He’s a withered old man bald from chemotherapy and radiation treatment. He can’t even stand up anymore. His life’s over—so why do this?”
“Devotion to duty,” Lynn came right back. “A lot of people take it to their graves. It’s what they lived for, and what they die for too.”
Garrett made another understanding nod. “I hear you. And ordinarily, I’d agree with you. But—” Garrett raised both brows at his ex-wife.
“But what, Harlan?”
“You still haven’t seen what else was in the suitcase.”
“What?”
“Open the flap on the side…”
Lynn, still sitting on the unmade bed, slid the suitcase toward her, over the piles of documents. She fumbled with a strapped flap on the front of the case, and eventually she removed a long folded black plastic pouch. The plastic crinkled when she opened it.
“Still think it’s all fake?” Garrett chided.
All the color drained out of Lynn’s face when she withdrew a long blackened forearm bone complete with a skeletal two-fingered hand at the end of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The window begins to glitter—the trapezoid.
Dark swirls of light flecked with shining pin-pricks. Then—
Danny quickly shields his eyes against the sudden explosion of white glare. Now the window glows bright as sunlight.
Danny is standing in front of the window. His face feels warms from the blinding white light, and now, somehow, he can see again. His eyes have adjusted. It’s just like it’s been every time. Behind him, crickets trill in the darkness and the town he lives in lies asleep under the moon. But Danny’s face is alight from the ship’s window.
School’s out now, but he knows he didn’t do very well. It’s hard to concentrate in class when he can’t get much sleep. He knows his father thinks there’s something wrong with him, he knows his father thinks he’s stupid.
But it’s not Danny’s fault.
They’re the ones who bring him out here most every night. They’re the ones who call him out to tell him what to do. Danny doesn’t like it…but he knows he has to do it anyway. He’s not sure why—he just knows.
They’re the ones he’s doing it for—
The white light slowly turned into churning smears of red and yellow. A slim, stick-like shape moved in the trapezoidal window.
It seemed to be waving at him.
Yes, they’re the ones.
“The Stickmen,” Danny said under his breath.
Then the Stickmen invited him in.
««—»»
The worst part was the beeping. The drip monitor, the heart monitor, the respiratory monitor. It was constant, a ceaseless hell. If he died amid such noise, would he take it with him to an afterlife? Or was this hell already?
Swenson lay in bed, though sometimes he’d drift off into half-dreams and see himself lying on something else: a morgue platform. The image left him coolly resolute. He’d had a good life, and he’d done important things. He’d had his time, and he’d made the most of it. Now his time was up. It was simple and logical. He wasn’t afraid of death. He only wished he didn’t have to listen to all these machines beeping.
The oxygen tube tickled his nose. Sometimes if felt as though tiny bugs were crawling atop his bald head, or around the inside of his pajama collar. Sometimes snakes seemed to slither up his legs. But these sensations he welcomed; they distracted him from the ever-growing pain. Too often the pain seemed like some demonic entity trying to force out Swenson’s spirit and take over his body.
You can have it, he thought.
Sleep taunted him, but he never quite got there. Sometime later, the door opened, and Wentworth, his butler for several decades, entered the beeping room He held a small silver try with a glass of juice.
“Time for my late-night fix?” Swenson joked.
“Your evening medication, General,” Wentworth said. “And Cranapple.”
Swenson sputtered under his breath. “Shit, Wenty, I’m going through this stuff like they’re M&M’s. You might as well go down to Fourteenth and U and buy me some smack.”
“Naw, not tonight. I’d be too much for her; she wouldn’t be able to walk for weeks.”
The butler smiled at the joke; Swenson had been celibate since the ’70s. Wentworth set the tray down and remained there until Swenson had taken the pills and chased them with the juice.
“Is there anything else I can get for you, General?”
“Naw, not unless you can find me a couple of new lungs. You think they got ’em at Sears?”
“I’ll check the catalog posthaste, sir.”
“Good. Oh, and tell the SP to help himself to a beer—the stuff from Kulmbach. Hell, I can’t drink it anymore.”
The butler looked offended. “Bugger the SP, sir. What about me? What am I? Chopped liver?”
Swenson shrugged. “Aw, sure, why not? You can have one too.” Both men chuckled, then Wentworth bid, “Goodnight, General.”
“Goodnight, Wenty. See you tomorrow…I hope.”
“Oh, you will, sir. Providence has cursed me with fluffing your pillows until the end of time.”
“Sounds good to me, Wenty.”
The butler left the room, closing the door quietly behind him.
Yeah, Swenson thought. Maybe—just maybe—God’ll let me hang around until Garrett’s done the job…
««—»»
Wentworth tracked across the dim foyer with the tray and empty glass. All levity gone. He’d miss Swenson very much. By design—perhaps a universal one—they were both loners brought together in a chaotic world. They didn’t fit in to the world, and they didn’t want to. They just wanted to do what life had ordained them to do. Swenson’s duties were complex, problematic, and super-secret. Wentworth was just a manservant. But that’s what he liked. The two of them were opposites who were the same.
He set down the tray on the kitchen counter, then mechanically washed and dried the juice glass. He looked around the empty, silent room, and—for the first time—wiped a tears out of his eye.
The beer, he remembered. Swenson had half a refrigerator full, German imports he always ordered from a distributor in Deale. Where’d the SP go? he wondered.
Come to think of it, Wentworth hadn’t seen him in over an hour.
He went back out to the foyer, glancing around. He checked the den and the study. He checked the half-bathroom by the stairs, then the dining room at the front of the house.
No sign of the SP.
“Sergeant?” Wentworth called out.
Wentworth looked down the hall, up the stairs. He rechecked the guard office.
“Sergeant? Where are you?”
Confused, the butler went back to the kitchen. He wouldn’t have gone outside, he considered. The house is locked up for the night, and the alarm systems are on. That’s when Wentworth noticed the small keypad beside the back door. The small green light would glow constantly when the alarm was active, and it would blink when the system was turned off. But—
“What’s this?” he whispered.
The green light was dead altogether. It couldn’t be a power failure; all the lights were on, and even if they weren’t the alarm system wasn’t powered by a domestic power line. Plus, there were back-ups.
Just as Wentworth turned, though, the heel of his shoe seemed to slip on something.
When he looked down at the floor, he saw blood.
For the next few seconds, reason did not occur to him; he felt numb when he opened the utility room door. More numbness—not shock or fear—gripped him when he saw the Air Force SP lying dead on the floor in the slowly spreading pool of blood.
The muffled pap which followed was barely louder than someone snapping his fingers once. Wentworth saw a plume of something red launch from his own forehead, then spatter against the shiny white front of the hot-water heater. He blinked, tried to mouth words, and collapsed, dying several moments later right on top of the SP.
««—»»
Was it a dream? Swenson saw a great blue sky and an endless ocean. The sun warmed his face. Was he on a boat? He must’ve been, for where ever this place was, he could feel himself gently rocking, as if on the sea. So beautiful, he thought in almost a desperate wonder. He squinted into the sun, watched its glow along the edge of the earth. Not a cloud in the sky, just teeming perfect beauty. It astonished him that after so many decades of life, he’d never had time to notice the simple beauty of the sky.
Until now.
But then the sky darkened as if some cosmic cloak had been drawn across the horizon, and when Swenson awoke and opened his eyes he knew the vision was only a dream. Either a very cruel one, or just the opposite. A last chance to really see something important.
The shadow stood just inside of the door, barely perceptible.
“You,” Swenson croaked. “I should’ve known.”
QJ/WYN never stepped out of the shadow; it seemed as though he were part of it. In one hand he held the small semi-automatic pistol with the chambered sound-suppressor.
“We meet again,” came the weirdly neutral voice.
“I knew you were insane the first time I saw you,” Swenson said. “I should’ve had you killed.”
“Yes, you should’ve. But that would have been a waste of time because you and I both know that your people aren’t good enough. They never have been. They’ve never really had what it takes—”
“To be like you?” Swenson interrupted. “Yes, I suppose you’re right. You’re the worst kind of creature that can exist in this business.”
“And you’re a creature right along with me,” the visitor said. “You know why I’m here, so you might as well talk.”
Swenson stifled a cough, managed a wizened smile. “Anything for a buck. That’s what it’s all about these days anyway, right? Not loyalty, not duty. Money.”
“You might be surprised.”
“I doubt it. Who are you working for now? The Company? Freelance? Private sector?”
The operative didn’t answer the question. “The Area November material, I want it
back.”
“I paid you for that package thirty years ago, when you worked for me.”
“Things change in thirty years. Let’s just say I have a new contract now, a higher bidder. These people won’t tolerate the release of that information.”
Swenson rasped a pained cough. “Don’t you understand what’s probably happening at Edgewood? The results could be catastrophic.”
The shadow merely stared back with eyes of darkness. “Where’s the material, General?”
“It’s not here. What, you think I’d keep it here? But you were never the sharpest pencil in the box. Don’t worry, my friend. What you’re looking for— Well, let’s just say it’s in safe hands.”
QJ/WYN removed an ice-pick from his jacket pocket. “CIC trained me well, General, but you’re we’ll aware of that. There are ways to inflict pain that you have never conceived.”
Swenson laughed outright at him. “You must sit on your brains. I’m so full of Dilaudid and morphine you could put a power drill through my friggin’ skull and I wouldn’t feel it. Look at you—the big bad hit man. I’m shaking, see? I’m so scared I’m wetting the bed. So why don’t you bend over real hard and see if you can stick your head up your—”
Three small red spots appeared almost simultaneously of Swenson’s chest. He jerked once, let out a gurgling gasp.
When the shadow left the room, the eye of Swenson’s mind was again gazing wondrously into an endless blue sky.
Beautiful, he thought. Beautiful. Then his heart made its final beat.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The information Super-fuckin’-highway runs deep, Garrett thought. His computer screen glowed with more official military brands.
U.S. ARMY PERSONNEL AGENCY
FORT BENJAMIN HARRISON, INDIANA
RESTRICTION CODE FOR THIS SITE:
CRYPTODINARARCO
WARNING: THIS IS A RESTRICTED DATA-VAULT.
IL
LEGAL OR UNAUTHORIZED VIEWING OF RESTRICTED DATA
CAN BE PUNISHABLE BY DEATH.
“Yeah, yeah,” Garrett dismissed the warning. Further down on the white- and powder-blue-blocked screen, he found what he’d been looking for.
m__ALLOCATE/SEARCH OBJECT [NAME]——…
FIND: SEARCH OBJECT:
[SANDERS]U.S. ARMY COUNTER-INTELLIGENCE CORP.
**** [SEARCH OBJECT FOUND] ****
“Got it!” Garrett celebrated, but then his enthusiasm deflated.
On the screen was a personnel photo of a man in a khaki shirt with a silver 1st lieutenant’s bar at the tip of one collar, and a gold sphinx at the tip of the other.
But the man’s face had been rubbed out in black.
A lot of good that does…
OFFICIAL DELETION: PHOTO-OBJECT REDACTED FOR REASONS
PERTAINING TO NATIONAL SECURITY
“What do you expect, Harlan?” Lynn said, standing behind him. She was intently watching the screen over his shoulder. “You’re in real deep here. You’re waltzing around in some highly restricted data channels.”
“Shit,” Garrett sputtered, lighting another cigarette. “Well, looks like we’re never going to know what he looks like, but at least we know who he is now.”
