She could run now, she thought. Flag down that guy in the pick-up and tear away from Rice and all his crazy shit. Go to the police, the FBI. Go to the damn Joint Chiefs to get Rice off her ass. Rice wouldn’t shoot her in broad daylight, would he? Not with a witness. Not so close to gas pumps.
But Linda didn’t run. She knew already that she could not confront the situation that way. Whatever it was that Rice and his friends had, it gave them incredible power. She could never hide. And whom could she trust? If what Rice had said was even partly true, then anyone around her could be a part of it: the military, the CIA, the ND, even the Secret Service. The agents of this “Life” could be anywhere. Everywhere. The guy in the pick-up could be one of theirs, a test to see how compliant she would be. Running wasn’t the answer. Not yet. Better to watch, and wait, and learn just what the hell was going on. It seemed unlikely they would harm her at this point. Why go through all of this if that was their plan? Linda walked around the front of the Jeep and followed Rice into the store.
Rice picked up a bag of cheese puffs, opened it and began to eat. He nodded at Linda. “Want something?” he asked, his voice muffled by a mouth full of crunchy orange. Linda looked down the aisle, chose a packet of gum from a display on the top shelf, not really knowing why. Rice nodded and walked to the back of the store without a glance at the attendant, a young woman with a large blue bow in her hair who sat looking bored or stoned on her stool, watching a game show on a small TV. Rice stopped at the gray metal door next to the soft drink cooler and opened it, motioning for Linda to follow. Feeling guilty about the gum, the President pointed to the girl behind the counter. Rice rolled his eyes. “It’s okay, Mrs. President. She doesn’t even know we’re here.” He walked through the door, letting it swing closed behind him. Linda glanced again at the girl, then slid the gum into her denim pocket and pushed her way through the door.
The storeroom was stacked high with cases of soda and boxes of snack-foods. To the right was a door which, as far as Linda could see, must lead straight to the side lot, given how small the store looked from outside. Rice stepped back as he pulled the door open, motioning for Linda to walk through before him. His hand quavered as it held the knob. Linda stepped forward to peer out the door, hesitant, not knowing what to expect. She was right: a rutted, gravel parking lot surrounded by scraggly pines, with a rusty dumpster in the corner. Linda flashed Rice a look of bewilderment and stepped through...
…into a small gray room, the ceiling so low that Linda had to duck her head. She turned around, looking for the door and Rice. The door was gone, but there was Rice, standing hunched over right behind her. His eyes were closed, his face slack and still, his half-eaten snack dangling from his fingers.
Linda turned back around, scanned the room. No chairs. No tables. Nothing but a small wire magazine rack in one corner, filled to overflowing with magazines and newspapers. Linda stooped to pick one up: Time, March 17, 1958, Lyndon Johnson staring back at her from the cover, and a banner shouting Spaceport USA: Beyond the Gates of Cape Canaveral. Linda put it carefully back into the rack.
There was only one door, directly across from the spot where, it had seemed to Linda, they had entered the room. Behind Rice there was now only blank gray wall, like poured concrete but without the pockmarks or bubbles. Linda stepped back around Rice to feel the wall. It was solid and cool. The floor was tightly woven, gray carpeting. The ceiling glowed dull and gray, as if it were composed of solidified fog. She crossed back to the other side of the room and tried the door. It would not open; the handle was frozen and unyielding. There were no windows. Linda walked back, stood in front of Rice. “Hey,” she snapped, “Rice! You wanna wake the hell up and tell ‘em we’re here?” Rice gave no sign that he had heard.
Linda put out a hand, touched Rice’s shoulder, and gave a slight push. Rice did not react, did not tense up. Linda pushed harder. It was like pushing on a statue, as if he were held in some sort of force field. Rice didn’t move at all.
The door clicked open behind her. Linda whirled at the sound of the latch to see an empty hallway beyond the door, brightly lit from above, as gray as the room. From down the hallway came the faint sound of music, as though an orchestra were tuning up a few rooms away. Linda walked to the door and pulled it fully open, half expecting to find someone standing there. There was no one. She stepped through the door.
To the right the hallway came to an abrupt end. To the left, the gray carpet stretched on and on, seemingly into infinity. Linda glanced back at Rice, then turned left and started slowly down the low-ceilinged hall, following the sounds of instruments as they plucked and bowed and blew their A’s and B-flats. Fifty feet or so down, on the right, was another door. Linda pushed and it swung inward.
The President walked into her high school auditorium.
5.5
“Program, Linda?” It was Martin ... Anderson, she remembered. He’d been in her French class. He looked just like she remembered him, lanky and oily, still only eighteen years old. Linda nodded, struck dumb, absently taking the booklet he offered her.
She walked down the aisle of the Pierpoint High School auditorium. There was the stage on which she had played Abigail in The Crucible in the fall of her senior year. On the walls hung huge paper banners from the glorious 1989 football season: Go Muskies! Underfoot was the red carpeting over which Mr. Blood – and oh the grief they had given him about his name! – had fussed so vocally, shouting until his face looked as if it would pop whenever somebody spilled a drink or dared to walk through with muddy feet. Overhead hung the chandelier she remembered, a gift from the senior class of 1962. Half the little bulbs were still burned out. Linda stood and looked around, knowing that she was in that very auditorium, knowing that she was not. It had been torn down in 1996, after a new one was built.
Another young man came toward her up the aisle. She recognized his face. Jon Shea. God, Jon! Linda’s stomach dropped to make room for her heart. She remembered all over again the night she had called it quits. She was off to college and wanted the freedom to date other guys there. Jon had smiled and said he understood. And Linda had promised that she would be back. But she had never returned.
Jon walked up to her, smiling warmly. He leaned in and gave her a gentle kiss on the cheek. “Hi, Linda,” he said.
“Jon,” Linda managed to say, her throat heavy and full. “Jon.” He was a vision from her distant past, a time of youth and possibility and freedom. He was no more real than the auditorium, she knew, but he was still Jon, untouched by time, smooth and clean and strong, unsuspecting of the hard life that awaited him, and the cancer that would kill him before he was even thirty.
Jon took the President gently by the arm and guided her towards the row of chairs to his right, a spot about halfway back from the stage. “Have a seat,” he said. Linda obeyed, picking the second seat in, hoping that Jon would sit next to her. Jon smiled and winked and took off down the aisle toward the stage without another word. He ascended the concrete steps at stage left and disappeared behind the maroon velvet curtain that hid the entire stage from view.
Linda sat back, stretched, made herself more comfortable, forgetting for the moment the briefing and the gun and Mr. Rice in the room down the hall, thinking only of Jon and the times they had shared.
The house lights dimmed just as Linda thought to look at the program in her hand. LIFE: A PLAY IN ONE ACT was printed on the cover in a script she should not have been able to read. Before she could open the pamphlet the auditorium went fully dark. Behind the curtain Linda could hear whispers and giggles and movement. A yellow glow seeped out from underneath.
The pit orchestra leapt into song, a big band sound, a show tune vaguely familiar. The curtain parted slowly. On the stage, four or five rows deep, forty or so members of the senior class of 1990, her class, sang loud and strong, their faces beaming under the lights. Jon was in the middle of the front row. And here and there in the troupe, strange little fellows danced and sang along with the
students, slight and pale, with large bald heads and fluid black eyes full of stars.
5.6
Cole pried apart the last remaining pieces of the phone and tossed them onto the pile on the floor before him. As the President had recounted her story, the phone, smashed on the rocks as it was, had started to ring again. Cole, so angry that he’d forgotten to be scared, had run outside, grabbed the phone, brought it ringing into the kitchen, and had proceeded to take it apart piece by piece with a hammer and screwdriver. There was nothing left to make a sound. “Ring now, you bastard!” he said, rising and wiping his hands in self-satisfaction. He looked down at Linda, who was watching him with amusement from her seat on the sofa. “Let ‘em bother us now!”
The President smiled weakly. “I wish I could tell you that that will help,” she said.
Cole spun around. There were no lights in the woods, no eyes at the window. “What? Are they—?”
The President shrugged. “They do what they will, Cole. We can’t stop them with a hammer and a screwdriver.”
Cole thought again of Grace’s account of the little kid in her room. Given what he’d seen, Cole was willing to take her story seriously. He grabbed the big night watchman’s flashlight from its spot near the toaster and bolted upstairs, checking the kids’ rooms again. But there was nothing there. And no sign of entry. The windows were whole and tight.
He made his way warily back downstairs.
“Everything okay?”
“Yeah.” Cole came to a stop across the coffee table from the President, looked down on her for the longest time. Catching himself staring, he took a seat. He sighed deeply and smiled. Linda was beautiful in the warm glow of lamplight. Her hair blushed and pulsed, as if goodness and caring were flames that flickered in her soul. He wanted to get lost in those flames. Cole blinked, shivered, checked his watch. It was after eleven. They were both tired, but there was no way he could sleep now. Not until the President made sense of this. “I’m confused,” he finally said.
Linda shifted her weight, rubbed at her leg, stretched her shoulders. Her eyes were soft and clear, as if the hardest part were over. “About what?”
“What’s with this whole school play thing?” Cole asked. “I thought ... why are you telling me about your high school and your old sweetheart?”
Linda shrugged. “That’s how they told me.”
“Those alien guys?”
“Yeah, those alien guys.” Linda finished her tea and put her cup on the table at the sofa’s end. Slowly she swung her legs off the table, first the good left leg, then the splinted right leg. Something was odd. Both legs felt strong and pain-free. She pushed herself up gingerly from the sofa and put some weight on her right foot. It felt impossibly normal.
Cole was at her side in a moment. “Can I help?”
Linda waved him off. “Something’s not right here,” she said, her voice trembling.
“What?”
Ignoring the question, the President pulled down her borrowed sweat pants and started yanking at the gauze-and-tape bandage that covered the puncture wound in her thigh.
“What are you doing?” Cole reached out as if to stop her. Linda ripped the dressing from her skin with a quick jerk. They both stared at her leg. There was no sign of a wound at all.
Linda looked up at Cole. “I think the break is better too,” she said quickly, bending to the task of releasing the Velcro straps that held the brace together.
“Wait,” Cole cautioned, stepping around to the President’s side to help her. “Sit down first. Then we’ll check.”
Linda sat with Cole’s assistance and placed her leg on the coffee table. Together they undid the straps. Cole pulled off the brace and Linda unraveled the elastic bandages. In a minute her broken leg was bare.
Linda reached out and ran her hands down her leg, rubbing the area just below her knee. “There’s no pain at all.”
Cole reached out. “May I?” he asked. Linda nodded. Cole took her right foot, noticing the electricity that flowed between them the moment he touched her. Gently he lifted her right ankle. “Does that hurt?”
“Not at all.”
Cole grabbed her right calf with his other hand and pushed gently down on her foot. “How about that?”
Linda leaned out and put a hand over Cole’s. “It’s healed,” she said, a slight smile conveying both puzzlement and relief.
“How?”
Linda’s eyes lost their focus in an instant, as if his question had ignited a firestorm of recollection that surged across her awareness, as if Cole were a hypnotist who’d just snapped his fingers. Her head started to loll slowly forward. Alarmed, Cole put out a hand to stop her. Before he could touch her, Linda jerked her head back like she’d been struck. Frightened and disoriented, she looked around the room as though it were filled with wasps. She drew back her hand to ward her face. “The bugs,” she whispered, trembling. Her eyes searched the air.
Cole pulled back on his haunches. “What bugs, Linda?”
The President looked at Cole as though unsure who he was or why he was there, her eyes clouded with forgotten encounters and half-remembered secrets. She frowned, started to speak, stopped, then closed her eyes and breathed deeply. After a few moments her face relaxed. Her frown dissipated like a passing storm. When she opened her eyes again they were clear and more focused. She managed a weak smile. “I think that’s what those moths were,” she said at last. “I think they were here.” She pointed toward the sky.
“You’re fucking kidding me…” Cole’s jaw dropped and he rose slowly, staring out the window behind the sofa. The pasture had lit up suddenly like a stadium.
Linda glanced over her shoulder to watch as the lights flickered back out, returning the farm to darkness. She turned to face Cole, smiling with encouragement. “Would you take me outside please?” she said, her voice shaded with meanings that Cole could not decipher.
“Outside?” asked Cole. The disbelief on his face was almost comic.
Linda’s smile broke apart into a short laugh. “It’ll be okay, Cole. There’s something I want to show you.”
Cole returned her laughter with a frown. He didn’t know what to do. Outside were strange lights and red eyes and alien creatures. He didn’t understand it, and it scared him. But the President asked him to trust her. There was something about this warm, strong woman that could not be denied. “Okay,” he said with a heavy swallow. “Let’s do it.”
The President rose, pulled up her sweatpants, and stepped slowly toward the door, testing her leg. Satisfied that it was whole and hale, she took Cole’s hand and pulled him eagerly into the night.
Cole pushed through the gate by the barn and into the star-lit pasture. The family’s horse, Fanny, a black Welsh pony almost invisible in the night, met them with a snort and a stamping of hooves. The goats and sheep shifted in their stalls but did not emerge. Cole reached out and patted the horse’s neck, nuzzling her with soft words of comfort, as much for himself as for her. He looked up to find Linda walking steadily to the pasture’s center, searching the sky as she picked her way across the uneven ground. Stepping away from the sense of protection he felt with the horse, Cole marched out to join the President. He stopped beside her and matched her gaze. The sky above was dark and sharp, the stars dazzling in their clarity. The sliver of moon had long since set.
They watched for a full minute, letting their eyes adjust to the night. After a while Cole noticed how some of the stars blinked out, stayed out for a time, then winked back to life. Whole groups of stars flashed in and out in unison. After a moment, Cole understood. “Oh my God,” he muttered.
He turned to the President at his side, whispered harshly. “What the hell have you brought here?” In the starlight he could just make out Linda’s face. What he saw there was deeply disturbing. Awe, and fear, longing, even love, had gathered in her soul and were welling up through her eyes.
He turned back to scan the sky. Overhead was a swarm of objects, huge ovals and di
scs and triangular shapes, black against black, moving slowly and randomly across the sky, blotting out the stars as they moved. There must have been twenty or more. Their immensity moved him profoundly, as if their massive presences were tugging on the fibers of his heart.
Linda spoke into the night. “They are the Life, Cole. They have followed me since I left the ranch yesterday. They come from very far away. And they do not seem to want the people of this planet to know that they exist.”
“At least not all of us,” Cole said.
“Not all,” Linda agreed.
“Will they hurt us?” asked Cole, peering up into the sky, his eyes wide. The objects overhead looked to him like a frenzy of sharks waiting impatiently for his boat to sink. Some swam over his house, as if they could smell the blood of his children in their bedrooms just below. His heart skipped with alarm. He almost shouted out. And yet he did not. Below his conscious awareness there was something else, something unexpected, something he could not put into words, something that is known only when one falls into the dark, dangerous ocean of the unknown: in the presence of the predator, the prey is reminded that it is alive. And that reminder is precious beyond reckoning.
“I don’t think so, no,” Linda answered, glancing at Cole. “They won’t hurt us as long as they need us.”
“Need us?” Cole did not like the sound of that.
The President exhaled slowly and deeply and tilted her head back once again to scan the sky, eyes wide with expectation.
“What are they trying to do?” asked Cole. “Need us for what?”
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