‘Five days ago, three hundred people vanished without a trace from a town called Clearwater. The town now looks as though nobody has set foot in it for fifty years. I want the both of you to go down there and find out what the hell happened.’
Lopez’s studied indignance vanished almost immediately as she digested what Jarvis had said.
‘How is that possible? Did some sort of time warp just whisk them away or something?’
‘Intelligence resources detected a powerful energy emission in the area and a very bright light, but other than that we have absolutely nothing to go on.’
‘Why us and not DIA agents or paramilitary troops?’
‘DIA boots have already been on the ground at Clearwater, two agents sent down to take a look at the scene. They didn’t find anything significant but my boss doesn’t want to expose our awareness that anything untoward has occurred there, in case … ’
‘Majestic Twelve,’ Ethan finished the sentence for Jarvis. ‘You guys think they’re involved.’
‘Nellis can’t be sure but similar events in other countries mean that this could be an MJ–12 job, and he doesn’t want to let them know that we’re onto them. He wants you two to go and take a look and figure this thing out.’ Jarvis glanced at Lopez. ‘That’s if you’re not too busy, of course.’
Lopez studied her fingertips for a moment.
‘We may have the time to take a quick look,’ she replied. ‘How come the media’s not all over this story already? They’d have a field day.’
‘Nobody knows, as far as we can make out,’ Jarvis replied. ‘There are ghost towns all over Missouri state and many others, a legacy of the gold rush and mining towns long abandoned. It seems like a cover up, but what we don’t understand is why they’ve decided to shut this town down, what they’ve done with the residents, and how come it is that if they’re still alive they’re not talking to anybody about what happened to them.’
Ethan looked across at Lopez, who in turn stood up and offered Jarvis a mild grin.
‘We’ll take the case,’ she said. ‘How are we getting down there?’
‘That, I’m afraid, is up to you,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Unless the case develops enough for Nellis to prioritize it, the days of military jet flights on commandeered aircraft are long over, although you can still bill the office for gas use – after all, you’ve only got to travel one state over. Have a nice day.’
***
IV
Piedmont, Missouri
‘It’s at times like this I actually miss that battered old Catalina airplane your friend owns.’
The sky above them was a crisp, clear blue, the horizon bright with the glow of a new dawn as Ethan drove south through the small town of Piedmont, the streetlights still glowing and most cars still parked in their drives awaiting the dawn commuter rush.
‘Arnie?’ Ethan asked, and chuckled despite his weariness from the long drive down from Illinois. ‘The last thing he said to us after Argentina was that if he ever saw us again he’d shoot us, and if he missed, he’d shoot himself.’
Lopez was sitting in the passenger seat with her boots up on the dashboard, shades pulled down over her eyes and her arms folded across her chest. She had slept like that for the last few hours, after taking the first stint as driver out of Chicago. Ethan, significantly taller than his partner, had spent an uncomfortable few hours curled up on the back seat before taking over somewhere outside of Springfield, Illinois.
‘I kind of liked him,’ Lopez replied, ‘mostly because he didn’t like you.’
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ Ethan shrugged as he drove slowly through the town while consulting a local map for the correct logging trail off the main road that led to Clearwater. ‘But he would have been useful here. Most of these trails are the only access points to the deep forests, and he could have landed us on one of the lakes instead.’
The logging trail was just south of Piedmont, a dusty track that switched back off the main road and plunged deep into the shadowy forests. Ethan had wanted to reach the site on or around sunrise, both to avoid the traffic around major towns and also to limit the possibility of ambush out in the wilderness. Neither he nor Lopez had any doubts about the determination or ruthlessness of the assets assigned to Majestic Twelve after their experiences in Peru and Argentina.
The logging track wound for miles through dense forest, the tops of the trees rising high above the vehicle as it crunched along the gravel track. At times it simply wasn’t possible to see more than a few feet around the car, rare openings in the forest through which Ethan could see the occasional, unnaturally dead straight path of fire breaks between the trees.
It took almost an hour to traverse the wild terrain before they finally reached a deep valley. Below them was the glassy surface of a slow–moving river winding between the soaring hills.
‘There’s a bridge ahead,’ Lopez said as she pointed out the windscreen.
Ethan looked ahead and saw a white painted bridge, constructed from wood and with the paint peeling as though it had been left untended for many years. It crossed from the wooded hillside on the opposite side of the river, and as the car turned the corner on the track he could see the road straightening as it led into Clearwater.
Ethan reached down instinctively beneath his left arm and felt the reassuring cold metal of his pistol. One of the few advantages of them once again working for the Defense Intelligence Agency was a licence to carry weapons as part of official government business. Although they were not allowed to officially associate themselves with the agency itself, presenting the permits to any law enforcement officer would result in a computer search clearing them with a “right to carry”. Satisfied that his weapon was close by and ready, Ethan continued to drive toward the small town. The car crept to a halt on the dusty gravel just as the sun was rising behind them in the east, casting a warm golden glow across distant clapperboard houses, church, and rows of old shops that stretched away down Main Street and turned right into the woods.
Ethan pulled into a lay–by in the forest and killed the engine as he glanced at Lopez.
‘This is it,’ he said simply as he opened his door. ‘Let’s see what we can find.’
‘The town’s that way,’ she replied, pointing ahead.
‘Indeed, and we don’t know what’s waiting for us in there, so we’ll take a hike and watch for a while from an elevated position. Infantry tactics, one–oh–one.’
Lopez got out of the car. ‘I think you’ve already forgotten who’s in charge here.’
‘It’s not about authority, it’s about common sense. Unless you’re going to just head in there on your own?’
Lopez snorted something in response but followed Ethan out of the car and up a nearby hillside, deep forest concealing their path as they climbed up and around to a position that overlooked the town. Ethan located a suitable spot and they settled down to watch.
‘Is this really necessary?’
Lopez’s voice was a whisper as she lay in the deep, damp grass overlooking the small town. Below them stretched the silvery thread of the river that wound its way between the deep valleys and beneath the rickety old bridge that crossed the river into the small town.
Ethan lay beside Lopez, a pair of binoculars in his hands as he surveyed the town. The sun was not yet fully up, the horizon glowing and tendrils of mist draped like fallen angel’s wings across the forests around them.
‘We don’t know what we’ll find down there,’ Ethan said in a soft whisper as he swept the town once more with the binoculars. ‘I’m not about to walk into another trap like we did in Argentina.’
‘That was different. We already had people after us at that point, but nobody knows we’re here.’
‘As far as we know,’ Ethan cautioned as he watched the town.
Clearwater was barely a spot on a map, an old mining town that had been left behind by the rest of the world fifty years before. Logging and forestry work kept the town’s three hundred inhabitants in work, if
three hundred people could be called a town at all. The fact that the state had not seen fit to pave the road that led into the town from the highway several miles away across the wilderness revealed how little the town had to offer the outside world.
Small town America was often seen as the quaint, grassroots heart of America, but the small towns were the first to go during economic crises. In his time Ethan had often driven long range across America, and more than once passed through the boarded–up remains of what had once been a thriving community, or witnessed the remains of modern houses and apartment complexes sitting alone far out in the wilderness, the funds for construction having dried up long ago. Both types of ghost town seemed like memorials to the past, the American dream gone bad.
‘My ass is wet.’
Ethan rolled his eyes as he looked across at Lopez. ‘It’s not like this is your first rodeo in the woods, Nicola.’
‘I certainly hope it’s my last,’ she shot back. ‘We came to check the town out up close, not sit on a hillside in the damp heather. Are we going down there or not because I’m not sitting up here for another hour waiting to freeze to death?!’
Ethan sighed and took one last look through the binoculars. ‘Fine, let’s go.’
The air this far out in the wilderness was scented with the odours of pine and cedar and possessed of a freshness Ethan rarely experienced in Chicago. It was also entirely silent, no sound of birdsong and only the whisper of the river passing by in glassy silence beneath the nearby bridge to accompany them as Ethan led the way into the town.
‘Looks like nobody’s been here for quite a while,’ Lopez observed as she looked at the various shops lining the right–hand side of Main Street.
Most of the windows were opaque with grime, once bright colors now faded and the wood peeled with age. Several of the roofs of the buildings had collapsed, many of their windows broken. Main Street ahead of them was littered with debris, and Ethan could already see that the church that dominated the town had probably not heard a service in decades.
‘Clearwater is not really mentioned any more on the census,’ Ethan said as he recalled the contents of the file that Doug Jarvis had handed to them. ‘According to official documents nobody has lived here for about forty years. Clearwater is one of countless ghost towns across the USA.’
‘It’s off the grid enough that nobody would notice if the place had vanished entirely,’ Lopez agreed. ‘Always makes me wonder who lived here and what happened to them?’
‘Especially now,’ Ethan said as he turned towards some of the shops lining the parade nearby.
A series of wooden steps lead up onto the parade, a simple fence across the front cut from trees many decades before and likely used to tie up horses in the days before vehicles. Ethan put a foot out and tested the first step, cautious of such old timbers collapsing beneath his weight, but he found it solid and firm beneath his touch. He climbed up onto the parade and looked into the windows of an old supply store, wiping the grime from the glass and peering inside. The interior was almost completely empty, stripped of any wares the owner of the shop might once have sold.
Ethan frowned thoughtfully, then stepped back from the window and looked at the line of shops. All of the properties were built in a similar style, well over a century old and with roofs that were tiled with different materials over the decades. The parade on which he stood was dusty, the paint long since scoured from the wood by years of rain and burning sunshine.
‘You sure Jarvis is right about this place?’ Lopez asked. ‘It sure looks like nobody’s been here for a long time.’
Ethan’s eyes drifted across the street alongside them, his gaze falling on other properties further up Main Street that were likewise dilapidated in their appearance. Something was missing, something important that he could not put his finger on.
‘I don’t know,’ he murmured thoughtfully.
Ethan crouched down and stared at the wooden planks of the parade beneath his feet. The paint had peeled, but the planks themselves were still dead straight, not warped by the sunlight and the constantly alternating bitter cold of winter and heat of summer. He would have expected many of the planks to have bowed under the change in temperatures over the years, and then those bows to have filled with standing water during the rainy season, rotting the wood.
Suddenly he realised what was missing. ‘Scat,’ he said.
‘What?’
Ethan surveyed the parade and then the fronts of the houses, the shops and even the bridge itself.
‘There’s no animal scat,’ he repeated as he stood up and looked around. ‘Rats, foxes, birds, all sorts of vermin should have been all over this place for years but I’m seeing nothing, barely any bird droppings even.’
Lopez looked around, clearly beginning to realise what Ethan was getting out, and as he looked further so he saw more things that did not make sense.
‘The bridge is still intact and looks solid,’ Lopez observed, ‘even though the paint has peeled off it still looks like it could hold us.’
Ethan nodded, glancing up at the parade of shops. ‘Some of the shops windows have been broken, and the interiors look like they’re filled with dirt and debris, but there are no plants growing inside them. One of the first things that happens with old towns like this is that nature takes over, tree roots grow up through foundations and such like. These properties are just clapperboard constructions, the kind of thing that plants would have no problem pushing through in a matter of months let alone years.’
Lopez turned and looked at a nearby property and then the lawn in front of it.
‘Grass isn’t overgrown,’ she pointed out. ‘That must have been cut a few days ago, a few weeks at the very most, because we’re already in summer. It should be up to our knees by now.’
Ethan nodded as he stepped down off the parade and began walking down Main Street with Lopez alongside him. He began searching in earnest as they walked, seeking further evidence that what they were witnessing was not an aged ghost town at all.
On the edge of one lawn, itself covered with a layer of short grass that must have been cut recently, he saw a series of tyre treads where somebody had backed out of the drive and just clipped the edge of their lawn. Ethan hurried over and examined the track.
‘Wide tread, deep too,’ he said as he glanced up at the house, ‘left by a modern vehicle, not something from the 1950s.’
Ethan set off up the drive toward the front door of the house, which was hanging open from a timber frame covered in curls of peeled paint. Ethan reached up to brush some of the paint off, which fluttered to the ground like brightly colored leaves. Ethan touched the timbers themselves, the bare wood smooth and hard to the touch.
‘The wood hasn’t rotted here either,’ Ethan said.
Beside him, Lopez reached beneath her jacket and produced a pistol that seemed too large for her hands.
‘I don’t like this,’ she murmured softly as she peered into the darkness and the gloom of the house.
Ethan eased inside with Lopez covering him. Although he felt certain the town was indeed deserted, he now had serious question marks in his mind about how it had come to be so. Ethan crept forward, glancing to his right into a living room devoid of furniture, the paint on the walls faded with age, the floorboards uncarpeted.
They moved on slowly into a large kitchen that faced out across broad open lawns, the grass short and glistening as the sunlight struck early morning dew.
‘Look at this,’ Lopez said from one side.
Ethan walked across to where she was crouching down on the floor beside a grubby square mark on the tiles where a chiller had once stood. She pointed down to the skirting boards that lined the wall where it met the tiles, and there among the grime were a few morsels of food that must have spilled from the chiller when it was moved.
‘Peas, if I’m not mistaken,’ Lopez said. ‘And they haven’t rotted, yet.’
‘Three hundred people skip town, taking all their p
ossessions with them, and within days the town looks as though it hasn’t been occupied for decades. It must have taken a lot of work to make this town look the way it does.’
‘My guess is that the townsfolk were in on it,’ Lopez replied. ‘They made the town look this way on purpose, but what on earth could cause three hundred people to just leave their homes behind and take everything with them and disappear into history?’
Ethan shook his head slowly as he led the way back out of the house and into the glowing golden sunshine outside.
‘Every one of them must have made use of paint stripper to age their properties, and I suppose it’s possible they could have loaded vacuum cleaners with dust and set them on reverse to spray all this muck over everything. Mixed with a mild adhesive it would have stuck quite easily to the windows and surfaces, ageing them overnight.’
‘It doesn’t make any sense,’ Lopez said. ‘What about the collapsed roofs?’
Ethan glanced up at one of the skeletal remains of a colonial style house’s roof. ‘It doesn’t take much to saw out some wood and let the weight of tiles and rafters do the rest. It’s an extra touch and it’s quite nice but I suspect if we went up there we’d find that the beams are cleanly cut, and not rotted away and...’
Ethan broke off as he saw movement up on the hillside over the river. He froze for a moment as he sought the source of the movement and saw a shape hiding in the grass, just below the treeline above an open, grassy clearing on the slopes. Almost at the same moment he saw it struggle, the grass waving around it, a frantic movement and then something burst from the forest behind it.
The figure moved with immense speed and grace, leaping like a gazelle across the slope as it charged in on its captured prey, and Ethan saw the flash of a blade in the sunlight as the figure plunged down on what must have been a rabbit or similar prey captured in a trap in the grass. Moments later the blade flashed down and the creature stopped struggling.
Ethan and Lopez stood in silence for a long moment before Lopez finally looked at him.
The Fusion Cage (Warner & Lopez Book 2) Page 3
