Ship of the Damned

by James F. David

  “We need to split up,” Jett said. “Compton and I and a few of your people will try to stop Evans. You take Peters and the rest and try to find the doors Ralph mentioned.”

  “We know where they’re not,” Dr. Kellum said. “We’ll search the levels between here and Crazy territory. There must be branches we’re missing.”

  “We’ll find our way back to here, but you’ll have to set up a relay so we can find you,” Jett said. “I want to take one of your telepathics with us.”

  “Take Dawson, he’s the best,” Dr. Kellum said.

  A runner went for Dawson, and Jett studied the sailor’s walk as he came. He still had a bit of a limp, but his leg was well healed.

  Dr. Kellum shook Jett’s hand, wishing him luck. Peters winked at Jett, then followed Dr. Kellum and his people. Kellum’s group numbered about seventy, and there were other pockets of his people in hiding who they would pick up on the way.

  Jett took just four men besides Dawson and Compton. He refused Dr. Kellum’s Specials, instead taking two sailors armed with crossbows, one armed with a spear, and a Hispanic civilian named Roberto. Roberto had wandered into Pot of Gold while playing hide-and-seek with a nephew in the dunes of a Florida beach. He carried a homemade machete and handled it proficiently. With one of the sailors in the lead, Jett and the others set out to save what Jett had come to destroy.

  HOMECOMING

  “You don’t look so good, Elizabeth,” Ralph said as soon as he saw her. “You want I should get you a laxative or something? I had the chocolate kind once. It looks like a Hershey bar but it tastes yucky.”

  “It’s so good to see you,” Elizabeth said, tears of joy coming to her eyes. From her couch, where she lay covered with a quilt, Elizabeth reached out, and Ralph leaned down accepting the hug.

  Wes had been gone for a only a day, but seeing Elizabeth again had been a shock.

  “We called Doctor Birnbaum on the way back,” Wes said before she could ask.

  Ralph sat with Elizabeth and talked while Wes fixed dinner. Wes lived alone and usually cooked for one. There were only three of them, so he up-sized his spaghetti recipe. He added prepackaged salad, and biscuits made from a mix he found in one of Elizabeth’s cabinets.

  Elizabeth ate little, but Ralph wolfed his food down when he wasn’t talking. He slurped up long strands of spaghetti, leaving tomato-sauce tracks on his chin. His talk wandered from stories of weight lifting with “Nate” to the design on Elizabeth’s plates—which were decorated with fruit. Slowly they pieced together Ralph’s story, from when he was kidnapped until he walked through a green fog and into Carlsbad Caverns. Wes finished Ralph’s narrative by recounting the incident on the highway to the airport. After dinner, Ralph found the Cartoon Network on Elizabeth’s television and zoned out. Elizabeth sat at the kitchen table while Wes loaded the dishwasher.

  “It’s time to let me go,” Elizabeth said.

  She meant “let me die.”

  Wes kept his back to her, scraping plates into the garbage disposal. His eyes were tearing.

  “I can’t give up, Elizabeth,” Wes said.

  “You have to, Wes. Whatever is going on is real. It’s not a dream and it’s dangerous. People are dying.”

  “We only need to find Dawson. He’s the link to you and Anita. If I can get to him, maybe I can stop this.”

  “I don’t want anyone dying to save me. It’s too late.”

  “What about Anita?”

  “Anita can’t be saved, either,” Elizabeth said.

  Wes had never seen Elizabeth this way—exhausted and beaten. The dream was sucking the life out of her and there was little left to take. He continued working, wiping the countertops and table.

  “Promise me you’ll stop looking for the ship?” Elizabeth said.

  “I can’t.”

  Elizabeth’s chin sank to her chest.

  “I guess there’s no point in arguing,” Elizabeth said. “We don’t know how to get to wherever it is Ralph went to.”

  Her speech was slow and slurred. It reminded Wes of Margi’s speech just before she died.

  “Ralph said the place they left from was in a desert, and he returned in New Mexico,” Wes said. “Doctor Birnbaum thinks we might start by locating all the secret military bases in the Southwest.”

  “If they’re secret bases, then how will we find them?”

  “Doctor Birnbaum says there are groups that keep track of military movements and locate secret operations. He’ll contact them on the Internet.”

  “Even if you find where they took Ralph, they’ll deny everything.”

  “We don’t know that for sure,” Wes said. “Whatever is going on may be legitimate and explainable.”

  Elizabeth shook her head. “I’m going to lie down.”

  Wes made sure she got to her room without falling. Elizabeth sat on the bed, rested for a second, and then rolled to her side. Wes covered her with a quilt and reached for the light.

  “Leave the light on,” she whispered.

  He finished in the kitchen and then poured Ralph a glass of root beer and himself a glass of white wine. He put the glass on the table nearest Ralph, who sat cross-legged on the floor directly in front of the television.

  “Thanks, Wes,” Ralph said.

  The Jetsons were on. It was one of the few cartoons Wes recognized, although since meeting Ralph his knowledge of popular culture had grown significantly. His own childhood had been spent in libraries.

  The phone rang just as Jetson was being fired by his boss. Dr. Birnbaum was on the line.

  “I may have something for you,” Dr. Birnbaum said.

  “You found where Ralph was taken?”

  “Not exactly. There are at least twenty-seven government installations in the Southwest that are not acknowledged by any government branch. There was no way to narrow down the list based on what Ralph told you. Instead, I contacted our friend on the Internet who gave us the information about the Philadelphia Project. I’m still convinced that’s the most likely connection.”

  Wes wasn’t convinced, but he had no better ideas.

  “He suggested there is a link between certain disappearances and the ship Ralph visited.”

  “Disappearances?” Wes probed.

  “Yes. I downloaded some articles from a file he directed me to. They’re the kind of stories you see in grocery-store tabloids—someone walking down the street suddenly disappearing and never being found again, things like that.”

  “What’s the connection?” Wes asked.

  “Think of what Ralph said. One second he was on the ship from the dream and the next second he finds himself in a cave in New Mexico.”

  “I don’t understand,” Wes admitted.

  “Think of it in reverse. What if Ralph was walking through the cave and suddenly disappeared?”

  “It would sound just like a tabloid story,” Wes admitted.

  “Exactly,” Birnbaum said, excitement in his voice.

  “But we searched the cave and didn’t find anything like what Ralph described.”

  “No, but that might be because the passages are one-way. Ralph came from the ship to the cave. We need to find a route that goes in the other direction, to the ship.”

  “How?”

  “If there are such paths to the ship, then anyone who stumbles into one might disappear just as quickly as Ralph appeared. I have a dozen articles describing such incidents going back twenty years.”

  “All from the Southwest?” Wes asked.

  “From all over the country—one in Canada. I tried plotting them, but there’s no discernible pattern. Then my Internet friend sent me an article frrm a Las Vegas newspaper. It’s about a Hispanic Presbyterian church there that bought property near the outskirts of town. The minister was walking around the property when he suddenly disappeared. There were three witnesses who confirmed he vanished. The entire congregation turned out to search the lot, but they never found him.”

  “You think there’s a p
assage to the ship?” Wes said.

  “Yes. It happened only three days ago, Wes. We don’t know how stable these passages are. If it’s there, it might not last long. You must leave tonight. The Kellum Foundation jet is still at the Eugene airport. Mr. Daly is leaving it at our disposal.”

  Events were moving too fast, and Wes didn’t want to leave Elizabeth in order to run off on a wild goose chase.

  “But they searched the area and found nothing. Why would I have better luck?” Wes argued.

  “Because you have Ralph.”

  DOOR

  Wes wanted to buy Ralph new clothes, but Dr. Birnbaum had insisted that they leave immediately. So Ralph was still wearing his silver suit and boots when they returned to the airport. The Kellum Foundation jet was waiting where they had left it, refueled and ready to whisk them to Las Vegas. Ralph reintroduced himself to the flight crew, even though Wes doubted that anyone would forget a large retarded man dressed like an astronaut. Monica did her best to keep Ralph distracted on the drive to the airport, and away from Wes.

  The Kellum Foundation jet seated a dozen people; a separate area served as a small conference room. The interior was decorated in the foundation colors of gold and royal blue. The carpet was blue with gold fleur-de-lis, the seats gold with blue accents. Wes and Ralph sat next to each other, with Monica in the opposite seat facing them. Wes watched impatiently while Ralph fumbled with his seat belt, then pushed Ralph’s hands out of the way, leaned over him, and snapped it shut.

  “Thanks, Wes. Mine’s kinda hard to do. But I remember how to undo it.”

  Before Wes could stop him, Ralph pulled on the release and the seat belt was loose again.

  “Oops?” Ralph said. “I can fix it in a jiff.”

  Ralph fumbled with the seat belt again, finally sliding the tongue into the right slot. The seat belt latched with a satisfying click.

  “See, I told you I could do it.”

  Once they reached cruising altitude and the seat belt sign went off, Ralph was out of his seat and in the aisle, his head barely clearing the ceiling of the jet. The flight attendant had been amused by Ralph on the trip north from New Mexico, and actually seemed happy to be flying with him again. When Ralph finished with the attendant, he got into the cockpit and worked the pilots, who also greeted him like a long-lost friend. Ralph was like a joke that everyone in the world got, except Wes. Eventually Ralph remembered the free snacks and the refrigerator filled with sodas, and busied himself sampling everything.

  Despite Wes’s irritation with Ralph, a deeper part of Wes liked him, but he wasn’t someone with whom he could share his worries about Elizabeth. Monica was there too, sitting across from Wes, but he didn’t consider her a friend. She had been too eager to risk Elizabeth’s life by keeping her in the dream, and her reaction to Len’s injury was peculiar. She was more interested in the van and the helicopter than Len’s wound. Wes wished Len was with him, or Shamita. They had been the closest to him before he met Elizabeth. But Len was injured, and Shamita was needed at the lab in case they found the ship.

  Wes had refused to leave Elizabeth alone. And Elizabeth had stubbornly refused to have Shamita, Len, or Wanda as roommates. Only when Anita’s mother offered to have Elizabeth stay with her, had Elizabeth agreed. Wes had dropped her off on the way to the airport, helping her inside and to the living room couch. Looking nearly as haggard as Elizabeth, Anita sat beside her holding her hand.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Wes said to Anita’s mother.

  “She’s welcome here. She tried to help Anita and now she’s got the dream too.”

  With no one to talk to, Wes reclined his seat and closed his eyes. He drifted off to sleep, waking when the engines changed pitch for the descent to Las Vegas.

  There was a rental car waiting for them, arranged by the Kellum Foundation; inside they found a map marked with the location of the property where the pastor had disappeared.

  “How can they know all this?” Wes asked as Monica climbed into the passenger side and Ralph settled in the back seat.

  “I spoke with Mr. Daly,” Monica said. “He wanted to help us as much as he could.”

  As far as Wes knew, Dr. Birnbaum had handled the arrangements with the Kellum Foundation; and it was disquieting that Monica was on a speaking basis with one of the trustees.

  It was early morning, and the traffic was thick as workers hurried to their jobs. Slowly they worked their way to the outskirts of town where subdivisions spread across the desert. Eventually the subdivisions thinned, and soon there were open patches of desert and many constructions sites. They found the empty lot where the church was to be built, pulling over behind a blue Dodge pickup. There was a fish symbol on the tailgate of the truck. At the edge of the lot was a sign reading “Future Home of New Westminster Presbyterian Church—In Your Neighborhood For You!”

  Ralph was out first, slamming his door, waking a man sleeping in the pickup. The man got out and joined them by the sign. Ralph intercepted him, shaking his hand. The man studied Ralph’s peculiar clothes.

  “Hihowyadoin. My name’s Ralph and this here’s Wes and this here’s Monica. What’s your name?”

  The man was much shorter than Ralph, but just as broad. He had black hair and a thin mustache. He looked Hispanic, but when he spoke it was without a trace of an accent.

  “I’m Miguel Lopez. I’m the associate pastor of New Westminster Church.”

  “How did you know to meet us here?” Wes asked.

  “I got a call. Someone named Daly asked me if I’d come over and tell you where Pastor Rivera disappeared. He wasn’t sure when you would arrive, so I came over and spent the night in my truck. I didn’t want to miss you.”

  “He shouldn’t have gotten your hopes up,” Wes said.

  “Anything you can do will be appreciated. We’ve been praying for the pastor—and Mr. Daly’s call came in the middle of our prayer vigil. Maybe it’s God’s answer, maybe it isn’t.”

  “We’ll do what we can,” Monica said.

  It was the kind of reassurance Elizabeth would have given. Not a promise to find their missing pastor, just a promise to try.

  “Can you show us where you last saw the pastor?” Wes said to Lopez.

  Lopez looked into the field for a second and then into the distance at a housing project on the other side of the lot, as if he was using the project as a marker.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  He led them a third of the way into the lot and then stopped.

  “It was right about here,” Lopez said. “He was pacing along here, showing some of us how much of the lot the building footprint would take up. We were having doubts about whether the lot was going to be big enough. We wanted to have enough room for parking and a playground. We run a day care and preschool during the week.”

  “Can you describe exactly what happened?” Monica asked.

  “He was walking back and forth, pacing and counting his steps, and suddenly he just disappeared—vanished right in front of us.”

  “Was there a green glow when he did?” Wes asked.

  “I didn’t see one,” Lopez said.

  The vegetation on the property was sparse—dark green or gray in color—and had been well trampled by dozens of criss-crossing searchers.

  “Did you try following his footprints?” Monica asked.

  “Follow them where?” Lopez said, indicating the flat land. “We looked for a well, or sink hole, or anything he could have fallen into, but there’s nothing anywhere in the field.”

  Wes had no ideas for finding the pastor, but Elizabeth’s gaunt face haunted him, and so he tried the absurd. He began to pace as if he was using his stride to measure the perimeter of the building. Monica joined him, walking a different path but mimicking his movements. Ralph watched, chewing a wad of gum, his face blank.

  “We tried that,” Lopez said. “We even got out the plans and marked length and width and all the ins and outs of the plan. We walked it off, over and over.
We never found him.”

  Wes felt silly, but he kept walking, trying to think like a pastor who was proud of his new church building but worried that the lot they had purchased was too small. Monica gave up before Wes, going to stand by Lopez and Ralph. Wes kept trying, fearful that giving up would condemn Elizabeth to death. Eventually he had no hope left. Then he thought of Ralph.

  “Ralph, we’re trying to find a way to the ship,” Wes said.

  Ralph smiled, his loose lips spreading wide while his jaws started mashing the wad of gum between his molars at a rapid clip.

  “Is that what you was doing? I thought you lost something. I would a helped ya look, but I didn’t cause I thought it was a contact lens. I found one for Mrs. Binbam once, but I stepped on it first and it wasn’t so good after that.”

  “We’re looking for a way to the ship, Ralph. Can you help us find one?” Wes asked.

  “I dunno, Wes. I might could. I’m kinda thirsty, though.”

  “If you find a way I’ll buy you a Slurpee.”

  “Medium?” Ralph asked.

  “Yes,” Wes agreed.

  “Well okee-dokee then,” Ralph said.

  Ralph walked out toward Wes and then walked to and fro, head down, his face blank. Wes stood beside Lopez and Monica, letting Ralph have the run of the field.

  “Ralph’s a little different,” Lopez said tactfully.

  “Educable mentally retarded,” Wes said.

  Wes could imagine what Lopez was thinking. He had met them at the field with renewed hope, knowing that a scientist was coming to examine the field where his pastor had disappeared. But the scientist had been no help and had turned the investigation over to a mentally retarded man in a silver suit who was being paid in Slurpees.

  Ralph walking aimlessly, had no better luck. Wes was about to give up when Ralph stopped and stared straight ahead as if fixed on something in the distance. Then Ralph reversed himself, walking here and there just as he had before. Finally, he turned and walked directly toward Wes.