The cop-turned-cop-killer never slowed.
Frank had no choice but to fire.
The first round slammed into Sytniak's chest, punching him backward. He took the second high on the shoulder.
Sytniak jerked his gun up. Frank's third round caught him just under the chin. Sytniak's hand flew to his throat. He coughed, blood spraying from his mouth, and his eyes glazed over. He sank to the floor and came to his eternal rest beside the boss he had just brutally murdered.
Eyes wide, I stood there, my ears ringing, my heart slamming against my ribcage. I raked my hands through my hair. Three people had died. In the span of a few minutes, three lives were irrevocably lost, all police officers. My mind had trouble processing it.
The egg rested in Gordon Couttis's hand. I picked it up. Once again, blood coated the metal. I tried cleaning it off with my finger but I had as much blood on me—blood and bone and tissue. Disgusted, I slipped the egg into my pocket.
Frank tapped me on the shoulder to get my attention.
"We have to go," he shouted. His face was pale. "Before more cops arrive."
I nodded wearily and followed him out. I'd had enough of killing. Except, our wives were still missing. We needed to find them, and we needed to rescue them.
Coated with gore, we climbed into the Charger. The bitter, coppery scent of blood quickly filled the confined space, and underneath it, starting to form: the sweet stench of decaying flesh.
The smell turned my stomach. I leaned out the door and vomited.
Frank waited patiently behind the wheel. When I was done, he pulled out of the parking lot. He kept the flashers off. He took his time, obeying all traffic lights, and soon we were on the road out of Emersville.
* * *
Returning to Frank's house was out of the question. Looking as we did, we would end up frightening his kids more than they already were. I didn't want to return to my house, either. The Emersville goon squad had already paid it a visit, and with three of their own now dead, it wouldn't be long before I received another courtesy call.
Frank overruled me. "We need to clean up. Your house is the only place I can think of where we won't draw attention to ourselves. You don't have clothes that'll fit me, so I'll ask a patrol car to run by my house, check on the kids, and pick up jeans and a shirt."
Walking up to my house, I remembered the front door had been damaged and couldn't be firmly closed, let alone locked.
"Shove something in front of it," Frank said. "If anyone but a Rock Mills officer knocks, give a shout." He handed me his Sig. "Use this if you have to."
As Frank trudged toward the bathroom, I pushed a heavy vanity in front of the door. It may not stop a determined intruder, but it would give me enough time to defend myself.
Frank returned minutes later wearing a towel around his waist.
"Your turn," he said. "Make it quick."
I was cleaned and dressed in less than ten minutes. I thought I’d heard voices while in the shower, and when I found Frank in the foyer, he was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. His police friend had come and gone.
"How are your ears?" he said.
"Better. At least the ringing stopped. Everything good at your house?"
"The kids are awake but seem okay. Come on, we have things to discuss."
No shit, I thought, and followed him into the living room.
"You're the expert on human behavior," he said, practically collapsing into a chair. "Tell me, what did we witness back there?"
"I don't know. I've been trying to piece it together since we left."
"Let's tackle it one person at a time. Start with Jacaruso."
I nodded. "Suicide, obviously, but her behavior was inconsistent. All business at first, then flying into a rage because of the egg. At the end she seemed more normal. Sad and desperate, but normal."
"What's your take on the alien invasion?"
"Normally, I would have called it a classic paranoid delusion, a symptom of an underlying major depressive disorder. It can lead to irrational thinking and profound hopelessness. In a perfect world, it would explain her suicide better than little green men."
"We're not dealing with a perfect world."
"No, we are definitely not."
"You mentioned a dead planet, one with orange soil."
I told him about my dream. "At the time, I dismissed it as an aftereffect of the accident with the Malibu. Now I'm not so sure. Jacaruso certainly reacted to it."
Frank paused. "She acted as if someone was inside her. She even had a name for it."
"Thyll."
"Yeah, Thyll. Sounds like the name of a person."
Or a thing, I wanted to add but didn’t.
Frank massaged his temples. "I don't believe I'm saying this, but could this Thumbkin have been inside your head at the time of the dream? Could it somehow have made you to see the planet?"
I recalled Thumbkin's admonition—you weren't supposed to see this!—and said, "I think it was the other way around. I think I was in hers."
Frank let out a low whistle. "This is some far out shit."
"It gets worse." I leaned forward in my chair. "Doug Belle. Like Jacaruso, he complained of someone in his head talking to him, telling him things he didn't like. Out in the marsh, I had the impression I was talking with someone else, someone much older than Doug. And like Jacaruso, when the other presence went away, Doug killed himself." I lifted my eyes to Frank's, saw the doubt, and plunged ahead anyway. "He mentioned a leader, a Green Queen who wants our world."
"You expect me to believe bug-eyed monsters are taking control of people and plotting to overthrow civilization?"
"I know. I'm having a hard time believing it myself."
"Putting aside the H. G. Wells crap for a moment, we still need to find the girls."
"I think they're intertwined—the technology, the conspiracy, our wives. To deal with one, you have to deal with them all."
"The proximity lock," Frank said. "Jacaruso and Sytniak recognized it, but Couttis looked puzzled, like he'd never seen one before."
"Maybe Sytniak killed him because he wasn't supposed to have seen it."
Frank grunted. "The conspiracy goes only so far."
"Then there's Conrad Hunter." I touched the bruise Emersville's mayor had raised on my cheek. "He seems to be part of it."
"It makes no sense. Why have the mayor in the know but not the police chief? It'd be easier if both were working together. You'd have better control of information. Inquiries would have layers of protection. The last thing you'd want is the police chief looking into the mayor about some irregularities. If you want to hide something, you do it from the top down, not the bottom up."
"An imperfect conspiracy," I said.
"Exactly.”
I thought for a moment. "Jacaruso was part of it. So was Sytniak. Hunter's involved. I think we can include Anabelle St. Crux, the woman who sold the dolls."
"Dolls that contain proximity locks."
I withdrew the egg from my pocket. The blood coating it had dried to a hard crust. I ran my thumb over the tiny hole its side. It looked like a jeering mouth.
"We only know a name," I said. "Proximity lock. It contained enough energy to shock Doug Belle, but it doesn't have a visible power source. Except for the blood, it looks harmless, an Easter ornament. Something to hang off the branch of a tree."
Frank settled back into his chair. He looked weary—a polar bear left too long in the heat. "What do we do next?"
"The technology is real. Whether it's alien or terrestrial is in doubt."
"You want Steve to examine the egg?" he said, referring to my brother.
I shook my head. "I want to leave him out of it for now. His tests might do more damage than good. Besides, I don't think we have time for an analysis. We don't know what's happening with Toni and Kerry. Wait too long and we may never see them again."
"All right, you got a better idea?"
"Yes," I said. "We get a second opinion."
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* * *
After a brief power nap, something neither of us wanted but couldn't afford to go without, we drove to Culver and pulled into the weed-choked parking lot of Womblic Auto Repairs.
"You sure about this?" Frank said as we approached the store entrance.
"I'm not sure about anything." The mechanic was the only space buff I knew, and I hoped to find some real-world answers to our extraterrestrial questions.
I pulled the door open and we stepped into the lobby. A small bell sat on the counter. Frank smacked it with the palm of his hand.
The door to the garage opened. Ricky Womblic poked his head out. He was dressed in mechanic blues. A grease-stained bandanna held back his long hair. His eyes widened when he saw us.
"Hey, wait a minute. I fixed the truck's gate."
"I'm sure you did," Frank said. "We're here on another matter."
"What matter?" the mechanic said.
"Can we talk in your office?" I asked, stepping up to the counter.
"I'm in the middle of replacing tie rods on a stubborn bitch of a Buick. I don't have time for chit-chat."
"Please," I said. "It's important."
"So are old man Starkey's tie rods," Womblic said. He pulled a rag from his back pocket and wiped his hands. "How long is this going to take?"
"It depends," said Frank. "How big is space?"
* * *
Womblic sat in his chair and stared at us with undisguised anger.
"Aliens. People taken over by beings from another planet. Our world in peril." He glanced at the photographs tacked to his wall—planets, nebulae, entire galaxies—and shook his head. "I can't believe you came all this way to make fun of me."
"No one's making fun of you." I sat in a chair opposite Womblic. The smell of motor oil and gasoline rolled off him in waves. "We're here because we respect you. We want your opinion."
Frank leaned against the door, arms crossed over his chest. "This isn't a joke. Our wives are missing."
"Well, if the joke's not on me, it's certainly on you," Womblic said. "The idea of aliens visiting Earth is a myth. It can't happen. Someone's messing with you big time."
“There's been talk of alien encounters for decades.” I'd done a quick internet search on the subject and had gotten hundreds of thousands of hits.
"That’s because people don’t understand the tremendous distances involved in space travel," Womblic said. "It would take thousands and thousands of years to get from one star to another. No rational civilization would send a ship full of its own kind, only to have them arrive at their destination dead. It would serve no purpose."
I thought of malevolent dolls that could move and mysterious proximity locks. "What if their technology was vastly superior to ours?"
Womblic shook his head. "Even if they could travel at half the speed of light, we're still talking centuries."
"Suppose they could travel at the speed of light," Frank said. "Or even faster. Would it be possible then?"
"Faster-than-light travel is another myth," Womblic said. "The faster an object moves, the heavier it gets, which then requires more and more energy to accelerate it. It works for a while, but as you approach the speed of light, an object's mass approaches infinity. I don't care how advanced a civilization's technology is, there's no power that can propel something that massive. Like it or not, the universe is stuck with slower-than-light travel."
"What about nearby stars?" Frank said. "There have to be a few of them. Maybe they came from there?"
"Detective, the nearest star system to ours is Alpha Centauri. It has three stars—A, B, and the more distant Proxima. Alpha Centauri B has an Earth-sized planet, but its surface is molten rock. No chance of life. But for the sake of argument, let's say the planet has intelligent life." Womblic looked at Frank. "The Alpha Centauri system is four and a half light years from us. Using some kind of fancy constant acceleration drive to approach light speed, the ship would still take about a decade to get here. They would need ten years’ worth of fuel and food. Waste disposal and medical care for everyone on board. Then there are the dangers of space itself. Lethal levels of radiation, dust particles or small rocks impacting with the spacecraft. At those speeds, anything with mass would penetrate the hull and exit the other side. Everyone would die from explosive decompression. If that's not bad enough, what about the psychological implications of a one-way trip, because if they were traveling near light speed, they would age far slower than the beings they left behind. Everyone they knew would be dead before they returned. There would be no point in coming home."
Womblic sighed, a wistful mixture of hope and regret. "All of it makes for an impossible journey, and that's looking at our closest neighbors, who we know have barren, lifeless planets. As much as I wish it weren't true, we will never meet a being from another world."
Frank pointed to a photo of the space shuttle Atlantis tacked to Womblic's wall. "With our current technology, how long would it take us to get from here to this Alpha Centauri?"
"Using that as a model," Ricky Womblic said, "roughly one hundred and sixty-five thousand years."
I let Womblic's words sink in. A voyage to our nearest stellar neighbor would take longer than the entire span of human history. Go farther out, and the numbers became more daunting. I was beginning to doubt our hypothesis about aliens.
"Thanks for your time, Mr. Womblic," Frank said. He’d obviously come to the same conclusion. "You've been very helpful."
I started to rise. Womblic stopped me. "What makes you think aliens are involved? It's not the first explanation a rational person turns to."
"It wasn't our first," I said. "We came to it reluctantly."
Womblic licked his lips. "You said the townsfolk are behaving oddly."
"That's an understatement," Frank said. “Downright crazy would be more accurate.”
"And you haven't seen evidence of an alien presence?" Womblic asked. "No bodies or spacecraft or such?"
I shook my head. "Only creepy dolls moving on their own and this." I pulled out the metal egg and showed it to him. "It's called a proximity lock."
"May I?" Womblic stretched out his hand, and I dropped the egg into it.
Womblic examined the proximity lock. He turned it over, testing its weight. He set it on his desk and spun it like a top. He held it close to his eye and peered through the latticework (which, for some reason, gave me a serious case of the willies). He found a pair of pliers and tried to pry open the hole blown into its side. When it didn't work, he handed the egg back to me.
"Strange," he said. “What's the red stuff?”
"Blood," I said. "Any idea what the thing is?"
"No clue, but I can tell you the metal is unusual."
Frank swung his big shoulders around to confront Womblic. "Unusual in what way?"
"It's almost parchment-thin yet has surprising strength. I’m no metallurgist, but I doubt we have something like it on earth. Have you had it analyzed?"
"We've considered it," I said, “but the thought of putting something unknown into a high-powered machine makes us nervous. It's already knocked out one child." I tried not to think of Doug Belle, lying in cold storage with his eyes and mouth glued shut. "Bombarding it with energy could be disastrous."
Womblic picked up a pencil and began doodling on a scrap of paper. He drew ovals, much like the metal egg, making a chain of them.
"Why do you call it a proximity lock?" he asked as he scratched out oval upon oval upon oval.
"We don't," Frank said from the doorway. "It's what the congregation of the Holy Church of Spielberg call the thing."
"So," Womblic said absently, "it's supposed to keep something locked in place."
"It could also function as a GPS," I said.
Frank snorted. "Yeah, and it makes French fries while you wait for E.T. to phone home. Let's beat feet, Paco. We got people to find."
I watched Womblic draw. His ovals, linked together, looked like a tunnel; a structure you would trave
l through. That reminded me of something Doug—or whatever was inside him—had said. "One of the so-called aliens said something about going through space rather than across. What do you think he meant?"
My wanna-be astronomer-turned-garage-monkey looked up from his doodling. "Say again?"
"Going through rather than across. He seemed to think it was some kind of brilliant feat, an act of unparalleled genius, but to me they sound the same."
Womblic glanced at his doodles: rings of graphite forming a tunnel across the page. Using his finger, he traced a path through them, from beginning to end, his grease-stained nail never leaving the center. "That must be it," he said, a smile spreading across his face. When he looked up, his eyes were bright. "Son of a bitch, that must be it."
I leaned forward. "What, Mr. Womblic? It must be what?"
Frank wandered over to join us. "Yeah, spill the beans."
"The distances are too vast if you travel across space the conventional way," Womblic said excitedly. "Think about an airplane flying across the globe. To get from here to Australia, it will always take a certain amount of time to travel the circumference of the planet."
"We got that part," Frank said. "Get to the space stuff."
Womblic picked up the paper on which he’d doodled his tunnel. "While there are large bodies out in space, like we said earlier, the big problem is the distance, but distance becomes irrelevant if you can fold space." He folded the paper in half and punched a hole through it with his pencil. "You can go incredible distances in an instant."
"You're talking about a wormhole," I said, my pulse quickening. "A tunnel through space."
"Yes," Womblic said. "It must be how they got here."
Frank snatched the paper from Womblic's hand. He unfolded it, folded it back again, unfolded it, folded it back. He looked like a kid trying to make a paper bird fly. "This is bullshit. Space is empty. There's nothing to manipulate, to bend." He tossed the paper on Womblic's desk. "You'll need to come up with something better."
If Frank's condemnation upset Womblic, he didn't show it. The mechanic sat forward in his chair, rubbing his hands together like a child about to play with his favorite toy. "Einstein showed how mass effects space-time. The greater the mass, the greater the bend in space-time, and the bend forces us through space. We follow the contour of space-time, similar to the way a marble rolls in a funnel, except we call it gravity. Generate enough mass—enough gravity—and you could fold space into a tube connecting one part of a galaxy to another. A wormhole. Theoretically, it's possible, but in a practical sense..."
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