“Very well,” Geri said, glancing off into the dark. “Shall we proceed?”
Flynn’s mind was racing with questions, all of them unanswered, all of them urgent. But before he could speak, Diana and Geri moved off toward the edge of the runway. Simultaneously, the light went out and the ship ascended, swiftly disappearing into the night.
A familiar sort of chime sounded. Flynn saw a Jeep Cherokee on the edge of the tarmac, revealed by its interior light. Diana had just unlocked it with its remote key. She went around to the driver’s side and got in.
Flynn opened the passenger door.
“Backseat,” she snapped.
He got in. The alien got in the front beside Diana. They drove off toward the buildings of the Area 51 complex, through a desert night lit only by the distant stars and the beams of their headlights.
CHAPTER SEVEN
FLYNN SAT silently in the Jeep, fighting back confused feelings of hatred and longing. He was used to living in a reality that he didn’t quite understand, but not like this. This was too much.
They came to the familiar Science Building 3, with its glass doors and its lobby lit with glaring neon. In the days of the Lockheed Skunk Works, this had been Lockheed’s on-site office building, two stories of cubbyholes now filled with exobiologists, alien ethicists, exopsychologists, and other irrelevant, time-wasting dreamers.
They crowded together, at least thirty of them, their brilliance well hidden behind their slack jaws and childishly wide eyes.
Diana went front and center with Geri in tow. Flynn hung back. He didn’t even like these people to see his face, and socializing with them was not going to happen.
“Ladies and gentlemen, a lot of history has happened in this building, but I think that this qualifies as a—”
“Excuse me, I can introduce myself,” Geri said. “Please call me Geri or Colonel—either will do. I’m the equivalent of a colonel in your air force, or a senior police commander. I’m from Aeon Central Police Command, and my mission is to get this situation under control, because it’s obviously running amok. I’d shake your various hands, but I’m here to work, so if Major Glass would show me to my office, please.”
Diana, fumbling out words like “of course,” and “thank you,” led her away. The lobby emptied.
There was an old metal desk in one corner and a wooden chair. Flynn took the chair and put his feet up on his desk. He pulled his iPad out of his duffel and turned it on.
When he input his password to reach the secure network, he was denied entry. He read the FAILED LOG-IN ATTEMPT warning. He was attempting to access a secure network, and his identity was known. If he continued, he would be in commission of a felony.
“Here you are, Officer Carroll. Come on, we’ve got work to do.”
Geri stood over him, the shadow of Abby smiling in her face.
He followed her into a spartan office—gray linoleum floor, gray walls, dingy white ceiling tiles. He had to hand it to Uncle Sam; the old fart had a real talent for interior decoration.
She dropped down behind the desk. “Sit,” she said, gesturing to the one steel chair in the room.
“Where’s Diana?”
“Licking her wounds. She got a lecture.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I told her she was incompetent and her operation was an embarrassment to her and a failure for this planet.”
“How many planets are involved?”
She raised her eyebrows appreciatively. “Nice question. Very quick. You should know that you’re talking to the person who was most strongly in favor of executing you. And I’m still of that opinion.”
“Fine. Let’s head to Dodge. Face off at high noon. Gun to gun.”
“I don’t carry your sorts of weapon. Frankly, mine are better and I am faster.”
“Good, then maybe you can increase the kill rate around here. Because I need to get the last of the murderers.”
“You don’t understand anything. That’s stupid.”
“Stupidity and ignorance are two different things. A person who doesn’t get that is a fool.”
“Remember that English isn’t my native language. If I’m too blunt, just tell me.”
“Inside of five minutes, you’ve told me that my boss is incompetent, our operation sucks, you want me dead, and I’m stupid. That’s too blunt.”
She did not reply as fast as she had earlier. He could see the calculation in her eyes. Despite all her bluster, she was beginning to see that she was on unsure footing.
“You need to slow down,” he said. “If you’re going to be calling the shots, you’d be well advised to at least inspect our operation. Do you even know how it’s organized?”
“In such a way that it isn’t working right.”
“Oh? We save lives. Human lives. So it’s working just fine, thank you.”
“One field operative who destroys every biorobot he encounters, not knowing that his actions are only going to goad them into becoming more aggressive. That’s not our definition of ‘working right.’”
“I can’t capture them. Nobody can. If I’m lucky, I can get an occasional kill. Where’s our choice in that?”
“You’re a police officer. I’m sure you have procedures.”
“My guess is that you know exactly what those are.”
“I do, and you don’t even try to follow them when it comes to our mechanisms.”
“Biorobots? Mechanisms? So I’m right about what they are.”
Diana came into the room. Geri went to her feet. “No, not needed, please leave.”
Diana’s eyes met Flynn’s. Nothing needed to be said. They both thought exactly the same thing about Commandant Geri. “We have a situation.”
“Exactly our concern,” Geri said. “That’s why I’m here. You stress these entities enough, they amplify the conflict. If you keep destroying them, their numbers will continue to grow. Think of them as cancer. Your planet has cancer, but so far, the tumor is small. I am here to help you keep it that way.”
“I think that the conflict has just been amplified. We have a problem in a community called Elmwood, Texas. The entire town has been set on fire.”
“Elmwood? So they’re trying to lure me again.”
“Lure you?” Geri asked.
“Sure, they did Dr. Miller for two reasons. One, because they apparently didn’t like the work he was doing. Two, because they wanted to lure me. They got me where they wanted me, but then had a bit of a setback. So they’re trying again. Of all the places in the world, they know for certain that I’ll go to Elmwood.”
“Why would that be?”
“My family founded the town.”
“Should you, then?”
“They’ll keep causing trouble until I do—you can be sure of that.”
“But given what happened in Mountainville,” Diana said, “wouldn’t they try something else?”
“Destroying the town my family founded qualifies as something else, I think.”
“Seems as if we have our first case as a team, then,” Geri said.
Diana ordered transportation to Menard, and the three of them headed to the flightline.
On the plane, Flynn asked Geri why they couldn’t use her ship, and received a long lecture about how they couldn’t introduce technology that was too far ahead of our own without disrupting our society. It made a kind of sense, but he didn’t buy it. He wasn’t buying Geri at all, except for one thing, which was that she had something like a ghost of Abby in her, and he was going to find out why that was.
The flight was two and a half hours, twelve hundred miles. Geri sat staring straight ahead the whole time, her hands folded in her lap. It was unnerving.
“What’re we going to do about her uniform?” Diana asked. “She can’t traipse around Texas in a blue jumpsuit.”
He thought about that. Then he made a decision. On the surface, it probably seemed simple. It was not simple, and it might bring some unexpected results. He said, “I?
??ve still got all of Abby’s stuff. They’re just about the same size. We can stop by the house on the way out.”
When he was very small, he’d gone to the country school in Elmwood. He closed his eyes, remembering the clapboard building where class had been held. His mind drifted back to his granddad, a stately old Texan who was just as polite as a preacher and as formal as an undertaker until you got him on a quarter horse. He could toss a lariat like the cowboy that he was, and cuss like he was the devil’s understudy.
The family had come before oil, when this part of Texas was all about wheat and cattle. Wheat if you were a gambler and crazy, cattle if you were only crazy.
“Flynn,” Diana asked, “how tired are you?”
“Not tired.”
“False. You ought to get some sleep.”
“If I sleep now, I’m liable to wake up and find the whole town dead, in addition to all the cops and rescue workers who are probably trying to save them.”
Menard’s airport was closed down for the night, but the automatic lights came on during their approach.
The moment they pulled up to the terminal, Geri got out of the plane.
Flynn made a call on his cell phone while he and Diana watched Geri become involved with the tall cyclone fence that separated the apron from the outdoor luggage station and the parking lot. Finally, she returned.
“I’ve called the custodian,” Flynn said. “He’ll be along in ten minutes to let us out. He’ll also drive us to my place, and we can get you changed.”
They waited on the tarmac, with the prairie wind blowing down their necks. Flynn kept his anguish to himself. Whatever was happening over in Elmwood was his fault, no question.
Robert Greaves, the tiny airport’s custodian, finally pulled up, pie-eyed and trying hard not to topple over. “I hear you workin’ in D.C.,” he said.
“Yep.”
“Menard ain’t changed a lick, you’ll find.”
“I know it.”
Greaves drove by aiming the car along the curb. The smell of bourbon filled the car.
When Flynn saw his house, which he had not entered in nearly a year, he felt a real catch in his throat. This was going to be hard as hell, giving this weird woman things that had belonged to Abby. He wanted it all, every ballpoint pen and every blouse, every hair curler and cocktail gown, and all the jeans and all the tees. Geri was stiff and uneasy as she walked up to the front door. Was she sensitive enough to understand the pain this was causing him? He doubted that.
Diana was on her cell in the car, and still on it when they entered the house as Greaves drove away. Finally she closed it and came in. She said, “Nothing’s happened for a couple of hours.”
“How many are dead?”
“So far, three. The locals are still going from house to house.”
“Where is this culturally appropriate clothing?”
He led Geri up to his and Abby’s bedroom, which was still as it had been on the day of her disappearance, Abby’s top drawer still opened an inch, everything just as their life together had left it.
Silently, he opened her middle drawer and took out a blouse; then he got jeans from the closet, sneakers, socks from her sock drawer, a bra, underwear. He laid it all on the bed.
There was a hissing sound, and her uniform fell away. “Help me with this clothing. It’s unfamiliar.”
“I’ll send Diana up,” he said.
“I want you. You help me.”
“No.” He went downstairs to Diana. “Get her dressed,” he muttered. “She can’t do it.”
“Goddamnit, Flynn, I don’t want to be alone with that crocodile.”
“Get her dressed!”
She hurried off, stomping up the stairs. He couldn’t blame her.
Aeon. Beautiful name. It meant “life.” It meant “eternity.”
He remembered his mother sitting years ago at the great table in the dining room, throwing out tarot cards. She had been good with things like tarot cards and the I Ching. Once, she had thrown him the Tower and said, “How funny, it falls in the place of the future.” She had looked up at him, and he could still remember the fear in her eyes, the haunted fear. “The future, Errol,” she had said, then turned the destruction card facedown, as if sealing a tomb.
They should have called Aeon that: the Tower of Destruction. It was death riding down the night, pale and quick, in the form of creatures whose cruelty was as much part of their blood as love was part of the blood of man.
He thought these thoughts sitting in the same easy chair that his father had used and his grandfather before him. He wondered where this situation was really going. Having failed, why would they try the same trick of luring him to another isolated spot just twenty-four hours later?
Only one answer to that question: because it wasn’t the same trick.
He listened to the slow movement of the old house. A house has gestures, the sigh of a footfall on a carpet, the creak of a step, the whispering crack of wainscoting as the floor it borders is pressed by a stealthy weight.
“I dislike this clothing.”
He got up from the chair. “It’s what women here wear.” Dressed like this, she could have been Abby’s twin, which made him want to rip them off her back. He smiled. “You look entirely American now,” he said.
“Well, I’m not.” Her tone reflected her arrogance.
He took them outside and opened his garage. The Ferrari stood there in its red grandeur, the Range Rover beside it, looking very stuffy and staid.
He opened the truck and they got in. He thought it might not run, but it did, turning over after a few hesitant grinds of the starter.
As he drove down the familiar streets of Menard, he said, “I don’t know what we’re going to find out there, but I have to say, I feel way out of my depth.”
Geri said, “Just remember procedure. That’s the important thing.”
“Yeah, procedure,” Diana muttered. “Hear that, Flynn?”
He said nothing.
A couple of deer appeared in the road, bounding off into the darkness as the truck approached them. He no longer saw creatures like deer and owls in quite the same way.
“What if we kill some of your people tonight, Geri?”
“If we follow procedure and that happens, then it happens.”
“Tell me, what’s your procedure?”
“Much the same as yours: Demand compliance. If the perp has a weapon, warn that deadly force will be used.”
“In this case, the perp is the weapon. It’s their speed and those claws. They don’t need guns.”
They drove on in silence.
“Okay, here we go,” he said. There was a large police blockade ahead, dozens of light bars flashing, SWAT vehicles, even a riot tank, all spread across the road in a disorganized mass. Beyond the barricade, the remains of Elmwood glowed and flickered on the horizon.
“They expect us,” Diana said as one of the state cops peered in the driver’s-side window, then waved them through.
As they were passing, Flynn got a surprise. Standing there with the state brass in a pair of worn chinos and a leather jacket was his old boss, Eddie Parker. His face was hidden under the shadow of his Stetson, but Flynn didn’t need to see his expression to know how very unhappy he was.
He stopped the truck.
“Excuse me, drive on.”
He got out and walked over to Eddie.
Malcolm Dodd, the chief of state police, and Fred Carter, captain of the Texas Rangers, both watched with Eddie as Flynn walked up.
“Eddie.”
“Three dead, all old folks who couldn’t get out of their houses.”
“I am so damn sorry.” Flynn didn’t say how relieved he was that they hadn’t been maimed like Dan Miller.
“Can I tell ’em what you do?”
Eddie couldn’t give away any secrets. “Sure.”
“This is a Menard guy. Flynn Carroll. He’s a fed now. Way up there.” He fluttered his fingers.
&nb
sp; “Can you help us?”
“We need to have a look.”
“What happened?” Dodd asked. “Do you have any idea? I mean, the whole place caught on fire at the same time. Within minutes.”
“This will be handled,” Flynn said. He had no idea how, but these frightened, hollow-eyed men needed something that would restore morale.
“He’s the man,” Eddie said. “We’re gonna get past this.”
“It was a secret weapon, wasn’t it?” Fred Carter said. “Some kinda terrorist thing.”
“That’s right. Terrorists. A secret weapon. They chose to test it on Elmwood, probably because it’s out of the way and vulnerable. It would have been done from above. A plane. We’ll get them, fellas, never fear. And anything you find, put it in channels right away.”
He got back in the Range Rover and closed the door, then drove on toward the town his family had founded a hundred and fifty years ago.
Ahead, Elmwood’s low, familiar buildings lay in smoking ruins. One of them was the Carroll General Store, now a Rite Aid pharmacy, where Flynn had played on the porch as a boy, rolling his beloved toy stagecoach back and forth under the hard Texas sun.
As they moved ahead, he kept watch on the night sky. Sooner or later, he knew, their disk would come—small and old, perhaps, by the standards of a place like Aeon, but here on Earth, still immeasurably advanced and breathtakingly dangerous.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FROM THE first moment he saw Geri, Flynn had understood that he had to get away from her, or it. He needed to deal with the present problem, then follow the trail he’d been given, the code, and he didn’t want her along for the ride. 333676. Somebody on Deer Island was calling his attention to Miller and to the island.
“Okay,” he said, “at this point, we need to enter the community.”
“Flynn,” Diana said, “the aliens are there—you know it.”
“I do.”
There was something moving at the end of Plainview, which was Elmwood’s main street.
Flynn got out of the truck. They were in front of a ruined storefront that had once been Jack Holt’s barbershop. Beside it was another empty store, which had been spared the fire. A Mode O’Day women’s shop had been there.