by D F Capps
“Inspector Howard, come in, please.”
Hollis hesitated before entering the home.
“Mark, I have some people from the Department of Homeland Security who would like to hear Jamie’s story, if she’s up to it today.”
Mark glanced toward the back of the house.
“She said she is. If it gets too much for her . . .”
Hollis nodded. “Of course. We can leave at any time. Thank you for doing this.”
Mark led them into the family room at the back of the home. Jamie sat in a comfortable chair set back against the bay window. She was thin with dark blond hair and green eyes. The lightweight curtains were closed. Diane and Ryan sat on the couch next to Hollis. The rest of them sat in chairs placed in a wide circle.
“Jamie, these are the people I told you about,” Hollis said. “I’ve asked them to listen to your experience and be respectful of your privacy, but they may have some questions. Do you feel up to that?”
Jamie scrutinized the people in the room. “Maybe. I’ll have to see.”
“We can stop at any time. You just let us know what you need, okay?”
Jamie moved uncomfortably in her chair. “It all started nine and a half years ago. Mark and I were visiting Mesa Verde National Park to see the cliff dwellings. We left when the park closed, at sunset. We were driving east on U.S. 160. It was dark—hardly any traffic.”
She pulled a tissue from a box on the table next to her.
“A bright white glowing thing swooped over the road in front of us. The car stalled. We were blinded by an intense beam of light.”
Diane swallowed hard, her heart racing. This is what happened to Daniel, she thought.
“The next thing I knew, the thing was gone and two hours had passed. I felt really strange, but didn’t know why. We drove on to Durango and spent the night in a motel.”
Jamie breathed deeply, broke eye contact, and wiped the tissue under her nose.
“I began having nightmares of monsters—things with gigantic gray heads and horrible long fingers. They had these huge black eyes and a tiny mouth. They did excruciatingly painful things to me. I screamed, but I couldn’t hear any sound at all. I thought they were just dreams, you know? But they wouldn’t go away.”
Mark nodded. “We were confused,” he said. “We were both having these strange nightmares. It took us almost two weeks to realize we were having the same dreams—well, almost the same. Jamie’s nightmares were worse than mine.”
Jamie watched Mark as he spoke, then turned her attention to the group.
“That’s right,” Jamie said. “The following month I found out I was pregnant. It turned out to be twins. I was so happy. I thought the dreams would eventually go away.” She wiped the corner of her eye with the tissue. “They got worse instead. I didn’t know what to do. I tried talking with my doctor. He prescribed a mild sedative. It didn’t help. I stopped taking it to protect my babies.”
Diane’s heart was pounding, her hand trembling. She could sense where the conversation was headed and didn’t really want to go there. As much as she wanted to get up and leave, she forced herself to sit and listen.
“At five months, I had an ultrasound. Twin girls. Everything was normal. Then I woke up in the middle of the night. Those little monsters were here, in my bedroom. I felt paralyzed. I couldn’t move. They took me out through the wall and up into their ship.”
Tears flowed from Jamie’s eyes. She dabbed at them with a tissue. She glanced out the window, as if the saucer was still there, in her back yard.
“Jamie, do you want to stop?” Mark asked.
She shook her head. “They need to know what these monsters are doing.” She took a deep breath and continued, “They took my baby. Those little monsters took my baby and I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop them. They hurt me so much with their shiny metal instruments. I couldn’t even open my mouth to scream. All I could do was cry. I’m still crying. I can’t stop.”
Diane glanced at her teammates. Helen was wiping her eyes. A tear ran down Clay Obers’s face. Mark sat and stared at the floor, guilt and hopelessness etched into his expression.
“Four months later I gave birth to Julie,” Jamie said. “She’s eight now. That’s her picture on the table over there.”
“She’s in school today,” Mark said, “so she doesn’t know you’re here.”
Jamie’s hands began to tremble. Her breath was labored.
“Was there any sign of the second baby?” Helen asked.
Jamie closed her eyes and lowered her head for a moment. She took another deep breath.
“When I gave birth to Julie, there was only one baby, but there were two placentas. The doctor was surprised and said something about it to the nurses.” She paused to wipe more tears from her eyes. “After I finally realized everything that had happened to me was real, I went back to my doctor and asked to see the records of Julie’s birth. They told me they couldn’t find my records. They said they couldn’t remember anything about what happened or what was said. They wouldn’t even look at me. How could they lie to me like that?”
Jamie was shaking now. Her frustration, fear, and anger barely contained.
“So Julie is normal? She’s okay?” Helen asked.
Jamie glanced at the photo of Julie on the small table.
“Yes.” She nodded slightly and wiped more tears away. “Julie is the one good thing that came out of this whole terrifying ordeal. I’m just afraid they’ll come back for her.”
Helen looked horrified at the prospect of the aliens coming back for the child.
“What makes you think they’ll come back?” Diane asked.
“They already did—a year and a half ago. They took me from my bedroom and up to their ship. They showed me a small child. She had light blond hair and big blue eyes. She looked a lot like Julie, but her head was much larger than it should have been and her eyes were way too big. They pushed me closer to the child. That’s when I realized it was my other baby—the one they took. I could feel it—I could sense she was mine.”
Oh god, no, Diane thought, her eyes welling up with tears.
“She didn’t recognize me, of course, but I could tell. I think they wanted to see if we would bond or something. I don’t know. I just couldn’t. I know she was my child, but I just couldn’t feel what they wanted. I had been through so many horrible things with those little monsters. I couldn’t overcome the pain and the fear. I still have nightmares. I’m still terrified that they will take me and do all those disgusting and hurtful things to me again. Every night I cry myself to sleep, scared to death that they’ll come back. I don’t know what else to do.”
Mark stared at Jamie, trying to be as supportive of her as he could.
Even if you really love someone, Diane thought, how do you overcome something like this?
“Mark and I have discussed having my uterus and ovaries removed,” Jamie continued. “Maybe if I’m not fertile, they will finally leave me alone. I don’t know. Mark tries to protect me, but we both know he can’t. How can you be safe from those little gray monsters when they can take you right through the wall in the middle of the night? We don’t have any way to stop them. We’re helpless.”
Jamie was trembling, losing control over her fear.
“Mark, did they ever take you after the first time?” Clay asked.
Mark closed his eyes and nodded slowly. “Yes, several times after that.”
They keep doing this? Diane thought. Can’t they leave these poor people alone?
“What did they do to you?” Clay asked.
Mark changed position in his chair, glanced at Jamie, then looked back at Clay. “Not much compared to Jamie.”
Clay glanced at Jamie. She looked as if she were falling apart. “What did they want?”
“Genetic material,” Mark said, looking ashamed.
Clay appeared clearly shaken. “They took your . . .”
Mark looked up, took a breath, then looked at Clay.<
br />
“Yep. Not in a pleasant way, either. It was painful and involuntary.”
Jamie was shaking uncontrollably.
Diane was shocked that this experience was still so raw and terrifying to Jamie and Mark. She closed her eyes and lowered her head. It was still raw and terrifying to her, too, and she hadn’t gone through anything near what they had endured.
“Jamie, you look really stressed,” Hollis said. “Would you like to stop now?”
She nodded as she brought a trembling hand up to dab at her tears. “I have to pull myself together. Julie will be coming back from school.”
Hollis stood and said, “Thank you for doing this.”
The group got up and walked out to the cars.
“Those poor people,” Glen said, once outside. “How many folks get abducted like that?”
Hollis glanced at the flight team and said, “Twenty to twenty-five a night.”
Glen appeared stunned. “Every night?”
Hollis appeared to be struggling with the anger swelling up within him. “Yes. Every night. And that’s just in the U.S. This is going on in every country around the world and it’s getting worse. The number of abductions has doubled in the last year alone.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re going to have some lunch and then there is another person you need to meet.”
Chapter 18
After lunch they headed south on U.S. 84 for more than twenty miles before turning left on a gravel road. Eight miles in, they stopped at an old dilapidated house that looked abandoned, except for a black SUV parked in front with G14 on the left side of the government license plate.
Hollis led Diane and the rest of the group inside. Two agents in dark suits stood in the small central room glancing out the dirty windows. Chairs were placed in a semicircle.
A thin man, a little taller than average, stood in the middle of the room. To Diane, his most notable trait was the level of stress and anxiety he seemed to be experiencing. He couldn’t sit or stay in one place, but paced nervously, keeping his hands in motion, occasionally digging at his fingernails.
Hollis stepped before the group. “This is Greg. He is putting himself at risk in order to talk to you. Use your own judgment regarding what he has to say. Greg?”
“You’re going to think I’m crazy. Some days I think I am, too. Other days I know I’m as sane as anyone. Those are the hard days. It’s easier to think everything was a delusion, some trick my mind was playing on me. But what I’m about to tell you really happened.”
Diane frowned. Whatever this guy went through, he was more traumatized than Jamie and Mark.
“I was an army sergeant, assigned to security in an underground base in northwestern New Mexico. Am I allowed to say it was in New Mexico?”
“For this group, yes, you are allowed,” Hollis said.
Greg glanced at the group sitting around him.
“Anyway, there was a large hangar in the center on ground level. The hangar door was kept closed unless one of their vehicles was entering or leaving. There was a huge hole in the center of the hangar that extended down for a hundred and fifty feet. There were seven levels that I know of, could have been more, I’m not sure. Each level was a series of five tunnels that branched off the central section in different directions with rooms off each side of the tunnel. I think the vehicles landed on level five. It was hard to tell. The central shaft was closed off by a wall on levels one through four. I got a look at it once from the hangar.”
Greg paced back and forth, stopping to look briefly out the dust-covered window at the back of the room.
“Army security controlled outside access to the base and all of Level One. Our orders were to keep ordinary people out and away from the base. Part of my job was to interact with the aliens on the lower levels. I’ve been down to Level Four once, Level Three several times, and Level Two a lot.”
Greg looked at his trembling hands, then put them in his pockets.
“When I first got there, I thought Level One was amazing. Doctors and scientists were doing experiments on advanced equipment that could measure the human aura and consciousness. I saw devastating diseases cured and severely damaged body parts being renewed, missing limbs literally being regrown.”
Diane looked at Ryan, eyebrows raised. His mouth was hanging open.
“They can do that?” Diane asked.
Greg nodded. “That and more, but they don’t let us have the machines or the technology. They keep it for themselves.”
“Then what are they doing with it, if they’re not sharing it with us?” Helen asked.
Greg paced some more and looked out the back window again. “I’ll get to that.” He looked at Hollis, who nodded back at him.
“Then I was allowed into Level Two, where I saw people and animals in cages. I was told these people were hopelessly deranged and I needed to stay away from them—that they were too dangerous. I gradually learned that they were subjected to gruesome medical experiments. I was horrified at what was happening.”
He breathed in and out deeply and looked out the window again.
“Eventually I got to Level Three. There were vats of stinking liquids and some kind of large membranes hanging in the vats. Each membrane contained six, sometimes seven alien bodies growing inside. In another part of Level Three I saw strange creatures. Some looked like combinations of part human and part animal. Some appeared to be part human and part alien. There were all kinds of genetic experiments going on. Some of what I saw I can’t even describe to you. I don’t have words adequate to give you an accurate idea of what was going on.”
Greg’s forehead glistened with sweat, even though it was cold in the room. He picked up a small bottle of water and took a drink.
“The one time I was allowed into Level Four I saw large vats where human and animal body parts were being dissolved. I later learned the liquid from the vats was being used to grow alien bodies and was a form of liquid nutrient for the small Grey aliens.”
Diane’s stomach churned, that sour taste filled her mouth. She struggled to keep from throwing up. Is this what they did with Daniel? She shivered involuntarily.
“That’s when I made my decision to leave,” Greg said. “I couldn’t take it any longer.”
Diane couldn’t imagine serving under those conditions.
“They just let you walk away from your post?” Clay asked.
Greg shook his head. “Being in security, I had become aware of certain gaps in surveillance. I crawled out through an air vent one night. I’ve been on the run ever since.”
Diane shook her head. This is just too incredible to believe.
“I can’t believe our people could be involved in something like this. Our own military?” Helen said. She looked disgusted, shaking her head in disbelief.
“All I can tell you is what I saw and what I experienced,” Greg said. “I followed orders. That’s all. Over time, from what I understand, the medical experiments grew completely out of control. What was supposed to be a joint operation devolved into our military people either compelled to work for them, or being totally mind controlled. Same thing for the doctors and scientists who started on level one: They were gradually either coerced, or mind controlled to the point of total delusion. By the time they got to the lower levels, they were totally under alien control.”
Glen Simmons was shaking his head, too.
“You said you were in security. What type of security is in place?” Clay asked.
Greg looked at the flight team, the corners of his mouth turning down, then looked straight at Clay.
“Hundreds of cameras. The halls and rooms are lined with some kind of sound device. I’ve seen it used. You can’t hear it, but within five to six seconds you lose consciousness. I’ve seen people just drop to the floor, unconscious. The small Grey aliens come and haul them away. Then you never see those people or hear about them again. They’re gone, like they never existed. Even their personnel files disappear from the security office.”
/> Helen’s mouth was open as she stared at Greg.
“What about weapons?” Clay asked. “Did you have a weapon?”
Glen glanced at Clay, then focused on Greg, a frown formed on his face.
“Sure,” Greg said, looking at the floor. “A standard issue .45 automatic—useless against the aliens.”
Clay frowned, too. “Why?”
“Because of the cameras. You do anything suspicious and a device on the ceiling emits a flash of light. Ten minutes later you wake up with a massive headache. That’s assuming the Greys don’t haul you off, never to be seen again.”
Helen looked torn between disbelief and curiosity, and said, “So, genetic experiments?” She shivered and shook her head.
“Worse than any horror movie you could imagine,” Greg said. “I threw up the first time I saw them. After a while, your brain just gets kind of numb: You see it, but it doesn’t really register. That could be part of the mind control they use in there, too. It’s hard to tell the difference.”
Diane felt conflicted. The information was intriguing, but difficult to believe. Was this guy for real?
“You saw Levels One through Four,” Diane said. “Any idea what happens on Levels Five through Seven?”
Greg shook his head strongly again. “I didn’t want to know.” He pulled his hands out of his pockets and held them out. “Believe me, this is not something you want inside your head for the rest of your life.”
He let his arms down, blinked hard, and looked off to the side.
“You must have heard rumors,” Diane said.
Greg turned and looked at Hollis.
Hollis nodded. “You can tell them.”
Greg looked around the room and glanced at the window again.
“I heard there are tunnels connecting hundreds of underground bases, all over the world, with a high speed transit system. I heard you could travel from Denver to Paris in less than twenty minutes.”
Diane jerked back. How could you ever get from Denver to Paris in twenty minutes without killing everyone with the acceleration and deceleration forces in the process?
