In that moment Marsh thought he saw something in a corner of the ravaged FedEx Office, trapped between a crevice of shadows and the first of the dawn light sneaking in through the windows. An almost translucent figure that looked ash gray against the white wall: tall and gaunt with an irregular dark seam down its center, as if the two halves of him had been sewn together.
“You were thinking they may not be enough,” he said to Rathman.
“Sir?”
“After I mentioned I’d summoned all our teams to the area—I saw it in your eyes.”
Rathman stripped off his gloves, surveying the room yet again without denying Marsh’s words. “You were more correct than you could possibly realize, sir. The first thing you told me.”
“What’s that?”
“That we’re going to war.”
Marsh looked back at the corner where the sad boy inside him had glimpsed the ash-colored creature. But the old man saw nothing now.
“In that case,” Rathman was saying, “I’d like your permission to bring in some more soldiers.”
“Of course, Colonel. As many as it takes.”
“It’s not just numbers, it’s also experience.”
Marsh glanced about the wreckage once more. “With this?”
“With anything. That’s the kind of men I want to call in. Special operators who know their way around combat.”
“They’ve never encountered what they’ll be facing here,” Marsh reminded him.
“Close enough, sir,” Rathman said.
69
GONE
SAM AWOKE HUNCHED AGAINST a tree, Alex nowhere to be seen.
“Alex,” she said hoarsely through a mouth that felt all dry and pasty, imagining what her breath must have smelled like. “Alex!”
He was nowhere to be seen, having left her sometime in the night. She pulled herself to her feet, found her legs so gimpy she could barely stand.
“Al…,” she started to cry out again, but her voice drifted off before she finished.
He was gone. They’d slept leaning against one another and clinging to the warmth that the other’s body provided. She’d dreamed of this night for so long, never imagining it would come at so steep a price. But they had slept holding tightly to one another, afraid to let go, as if they might slip away. Or maybe he’d never been here to begin with and this really was all some crazy dream or illusion, an alternate reality starting to clear amid the dewy mist with the sun’s touch.
“Hey, you’re awake.”
Sam spun around so fast, her wobbly legs nearly gave out. She held fast to the tree just in time, as Alex made his way into the clearing.
“Where the hell were you?”
“Had some business to attend to.”
Sam realized he was zipping up his fly. “Oh.”
“I was up before,” he told her, “when the sun first came up. I found a stream, just down a path over there. Come on,” he said. “Fresh water, at least.”
Alex didn’t say a word about how torturous his night had been. Every time he drifted off to what passed for sleep, he saw the ash man, what Raiff had called a Shadow, split in half, talking literally out of both sides of his mouth at once.
You must come with me, Alex. You’ve evaded for this long, but now you’re ours again. We won’t stop. We’ll never stop.
The ash man wanted something from him, something Alex had no conception of. Raiff thought it might be something he knew instead of an actual object. Maybe the ash man didn’t know for sure, either.
“Come on,” Alex said, taking Sam’s hand, “you look thirsty.”
He led her through the trees deeper into the forest. Before long, Sam heard the soft sound of water slipping over rocks and moments later the stream came into view. Thin and shallow, looking more like a man-made drainage culvert than something natural.
Sam dropped to her knees and splashed her face, feeling herself coming back to life. Then she started drinking and couldn’t stop. The water was bitingly cold but refreshing and she kept raising her cupped hands to her mouth, as much of it spilling down her shirt as finding her lips.
Sam caught Alex half smiling at her, at least briefly. “What?”
“You should see yourself.”
Sam stiffened, only then thinking what she must’ve looked like after a night outside in the elements. She sniffed at her clothes, as if they might yield something.
“I said ‘see,’ not ‘smell.’”
“Don’t look at me.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m a mess.”
“Meaning I must be one too,” Alex managed.
“It’s different for you. You’re a guy.”
“That would make you a girl.”
Spoken as if he just realized it.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked her.
“What, like you’re an alien or something?… Sorry, that wasn’t funny.”
“Only because it’s true.”
Her expression changed, more what he was used to seeing from her. “Then why don’t you look any different from anyone else? I mean, I understand DNA, but, hey, we’re only a bit off from the great apes as human beings and we look totally different.”
“You forgetting the CAT scan that found something in my head? You forgetting all the shit Dr. Chu figured out about me from just a blood test?”
“Neither of those have anything to do with your appearance.”
“You mean, like I’ve got two arms, two legs, two eyes, two ears, two feet, two hands, two—”
“You can stop there. And the answer’s yes. The entire study of astrobiology postulates that alien life would develop according to its native environment, potentially so different from us that we wouldn’t even recognize or identify it as life.”
“So what’s your point?”
“I just made it. The odds that an alien species could develop along parallel or identical lines to our own would be off the charts.”
Alex rolled his eyes. “I’m guessing the odds of ever finding alien life of any kind would be off the charts. And you’re missing the real point, anyway.”
“What’s that?”
“Go back eighteen years, Sam. Somebody from that other world hid me here and made sure no one could follow. Raiff’s been waiting the whole time in case the ash man and these drones got wise to my presence. And if I’ve got something the bad guys want, it stands to figure it can help the good guys.”
“Which still leaves us with a big question,” she told him.
“What’s that?”
“Just who are the good guys?”
His expression tightened. “Your parents, Sam, and you need to call them. They’ll be going crazy now.”
“Call them with what?”
“We’ll buy one of those throwaway phones.”
“With what?”
“Haven’t figured that out yet, but I will.” He tried to smile, came up just short. “I’m the savior, remember?” A faraway look suddenly filled his sandy brown eyes. “Some savior. I couldn’t even save my own mother and father.”
“One thing’s for sure,” Sam told him, trying to bring him back. “We’re not going to find the answers we need in these woods.”
“I was thinking more like someplace that isn’t there anymore.”
“What’s that?” Sam asked.
“Laboratory Z.”
70
MARSHALING THE FORCES
RATHMAN FOUND LANGSTON MARSH in his Memory Room, polishing the wreckage of his father’s plane with a rag dipped in solvent that smelled like fresh lacquer.
“What do you remember most about your father, Colonel?” Marsh asked him, without turning from his toils.
“Getting smacked when he came home drunk.”
“For misbehaving?”
“For happening to be there.”
Marsh finally looked his way. “Unhappy memories, then.”
“I don’t think about it much, sir. Not at all, really
, anymore.”
“They’re memories all the same,” Marsh said, backing away and regarding the wreckage as if to inspect his own handiwork at keeping the metal as pristine and shiny as he could. “I have very few of my father and that number seems to shrink each year. One stands out, though, one that will never slip away.” Still regarding the wreckage, perhaps seeing the plane as whole again, he said, “Not long before that night, he took me flying. Just the two of us. Strapped me into the cockpit in the seat behind his in an old de Havilland Hornet F.1 he’d restored himself and kept hangared at the base. It had that famous Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. It was my first time flying. I remember being scared at first, but I was with my father and so long as I was with him, nothing bad could happen. I’m sorry it wasn’t the same for you, Colonel.”
“It was a long time ago, sir.”
Marsh’s eyes remained fixed on the wreckage. “It wasn’t long after my maiden flight that my father was shot down. I remember thinking it would never’ve happened if I’d been with him, because he never would have let anything bad happen to me. I blamed myself, Colonel.” Marsh looked Rathman’s way, his gaze curious. “Did you blame yourself when your father beat you?”
“I blamed the fact that he was an asshole, a lush, and a loser.”
“You joined the army to get away from him,” Marsh said, in what had started out as a question.
“I joined the army so I could come back one day and square things. My father was a big man too, sir, a dockworker and longshoreman who’d put any number of men in the hospital he took on in bar fights. Those were the nights he was the nicest, having already got it out of his system. He beat me because it was convenient.”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Square things.”
“He got sick before I had the chance. Cancer from smoking too many cigarettes and inhaling too much asbestos. I didn’t even recognize him in the hospital.”
“What about your desire for vengeance?”
“Never went away. I hoped he’d get better, go back to being the big strong man he used to be so it would mean something when I took him down. The cancer denied me that. It didn’t seem fair, left a hole inside me I’ve never been able to fill completely.”
Marsh was nodding. “Then you know how I feel. This boy, those things … Fate is granting me the opportunity it denied you. I’m going to get my shot at my father’s killers.” He started forward, leaving the plane wreckage behind him and seeming to step back into the present. “Tell me about these men you’re assembling who are up to that task.”
“I was only interested in the ones groomed in the special ops world.”
“Your world, in other words, Colonel.”
“The kind of men we need. The fees you’re offering will definitely get their attention.”
“How many?”
“Five hundred, give or take a few, and that’s only the ones I share a personal connection with, normally through their commanding officers.”
“When can they be on site?”
“Several are already en route.”
“I thought it would take longer than that.”
“These kind of men are used to rapid deployments, sir.”
“What about the enemy they’re going up against, Colonel?”
“Need-to-know basis, sir.”
“And what do they need to know?”
“What to shoot at and when.”
Marsh turned back toward the wreckage. In that moment, its remnants were replaced by the old de Havilland Hornet, and his father was beckoning him forward, ready to hoist him up into the seat that was waiting for him. He thought if he reached out, the jagged husks of scorched, ruined metal would be replaced by the smooth, freshly painted steel his father had lovingly restored to full working condition. But then the illusion passed and Marsh was again left with only the iron corpse in which his father had died, his body never recovered.
Marsh canted his body sideways, almost perfectly centered between Rathman and the wreckage. “Take a look, Colonel, take a good, hard look. They did this the last time they tried to take our world and would have, if brave men like my father hadn’t taken the fight to them. Now they’ve come back, with the same end no doubt in mind. Only this time we’re going to wipe them out, leave none behind to fight another day. You hear what I’m saying, Colonel?”
Rathman nodded. “I do, sir.”
“You were in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
“Saw the worst of things in both. Not so much the front lines, as places where the lines don’t exist.”
Marsh nodded, liking what he heard. “Men like my father saved the world once, Colonel. Now it’s left to us to do the same.”
71
ON THE ROAD
“HAVE YOU EVER HITCHHIKED before?” Sam asked Alex, as they started down the road.
“Nope.”
“I have,” she told him.
“You’re kidding,” Alex said, eyeing her incredulously.
“No, I’m serious. I was with my mom. Her Volvo, the one she had since I was born, overheated and neither of us had our phones. I remembered we passed a gas station a few miles back and started walking. A trucker who saw the Volvo pulled over and gave me a ride.”
“That’s not hitchhiking.”
“I was walking and somebody gave me a ride. What would you call it?”
“Did you have your thumb out?”
“No.”
“Like I said.”
“It smelled like the drone things,” Sam said suddenly, her thoughts veering. “When the car overheated, that burned smell. Like the drone things.”
Her gaze tightened on him, just as the sun caught his face, revealing the thin streaks of grime on his cheeks that seemed dragged down by tears. Alex’s hair was stringy and mussed, the way it looked when he took his helmet off during a game. She remembered stealing sight of his perfect butt framed by the contours of his form-fitting uniform, leaving pretty much nothing to the imagination, and hoping nobody caught her.
How dumb that felt right now after all that had happened, like her old life was really the dream set against an entirely new reality.
“You were a gymnast once,” Alex said out of nowhere. “What happened? Why’d you quit?”
“I got tall,” she told him.
“That’s not a reason.”
Sam hesitated. Why had she quit? She’d been good. Maybe not the best—but good.
“Time,” she said. “Time and priorities. I wanted to be a gymnast, but I realized I wanted to be something else more.”
“What’s that?”
“Promise not to laugh.”
“Okay, promise.”
“An astronaut.”
Alex laughed.
“Hey, you promised!” she said, smacking him in a shoulder that felt like molded steel.
“Couldn’t help myself. It’s funny.”
“What’s so funny about it?”
“I’m just trying to picture you in one of those outfits.”
Like I picture your butt in your football pants, Sam thought.
“You know how much you love football?”
“Sure.”
“That’s how much I love science. You think of playing professionally, don’t you?”
Alex’s shoulders dropped, as if the air had been sucked out of them. “Until yesterday, anyway.”
“Well, that’s the same way I think about being an astronaut. Not as funny as it is ironic. I so wanted to be an astronaut and find out the truth—like Scully and Mulder said: the truth is out there.”
“Who? What?”
“The X-Files.”
“Oh, the TV show.”
“You’ve never seen it?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Not even a single episode?”
“What did I just say?”
Sam shrugged, left it there. “Anyway, being an astronaut, that’s what I dreamed of—until yesterday too,” she added.
>
“Because why go to them when they’re coming to us?”
“It does change the way you look at things. But I meant it makes me want to be an astronaut even more, because now I know there really is something out there. Sounds silly, doesn’t it?”
Alex stopped walking and Sam almost plowed into him. To her surprise, he took her face between his hands.
“Not silly at all.” He grimaced. “At least, no more silly than me still thinking about playing pro football. Hey, you know what I’m craving now more than anything?”
“A hot shower?”
“A PowerBar.” His eyes widened, expression veering in mid-thought. “Do I smell?”
“Can’t tell. I’m holding my nose against the way I smell.”
“Okay, a shower and then a PowerBar.”
“You know, this is stupid,” Sam found the courage to say finally.
“What?”
“Laboratory Z. Going there. It’s been gone for eighteen years.”
“According to Meng Po, it was part of a complex.”
“Meng Po?”
“The flash drive inside. And the complex will still be there.”
“Doesn’t mean we’ll find anything.”
“Doesn’t mean we won’t.” Alex stopped, picked up again with his eyes on the road ahead. “And I need to see it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do. Maybe it’ll help me think, sort all this out.”
“Anne Frank,” Sam said without meaning to.
“You helped me with her diary,” Alex recalled. “For history.”
“English, actually. You were studying the memoir.”
“I thought it was a diary.”
Sam let the remark pass. “The book always scared me, her cooped up in that attic with the Nazis outside on the street, sometimes knocking at the door downstairs. Cooped up and surrounded by monsters. That’s what made it so scary.”
“I think I get the point.”
“The story didn’t have a happy ending, Alex. They get her in the end. She loses to the monsters.”
He reached out and drew her in close against his shoulder, a car engine sounding behind them. “Well, Anne Frank didn’t have me.” Alex stuck his thumb out too late for the driver to notice and the car, a souped-up Camaro, thundered past. “Damn!”