David Morrell - The Shimmer

He hoped Anita had the camera rolling. He didn’t know where this conversation was going, but he had a suspicion he’d be able to use footage from it. The guard was too far away for Brent’s microphone to pick up his voice, but Brent was speaking loudly enough that his own portion of the conversation would be recorded.

He expected the guard to say that the person to talk to was gone for the weekend-some sort of polite brush-off.

The guard’s curt “no” caught him by surprise.

“No?”

“Like the sign says, this is government property. If you want to get prosecuted, just hang around while I call the cops. But if you want to end this with no hard feelings, get in that van and drive back to the road. Now.”

Brent’s gaze focused on the open door behind the man. The object he’d been dragging lay in the shadows inside the shed. Part of it was round, resembling a soccer ball.

“Well, maybe I could interview you,” Brent offered. “How does it feel to work here? Is it exciting to be part of a project this big, or, like most jobs, does it get boring after a while?”

The guard squinted harshly.

Brent kept trying. “Does the observatory study only stars and comets and black holes, or is it also part of the SETI project?”

The guard’s squint became more pronounced.

“You know, SETI,” Brent said. “The Search for Extraterrestrial

Intelligence.”

Now the guard scowled. “I know what SETI means.”

“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”

“The joke I heard is we ought to be searching for intelligent life on Earth.”

Brent focused again on the door that stood open behind the guard. The soccer ball in the shadows beyond it seemed to have hair.

Oh, shit.

Brent tried not to show a reaction.

“Do you live on-site?” Brent managed to keep talking and prayed that Anita did indeed have the camera rolling. “What’s that like, being out here away from everything?”

The guard’s hands were at his side. He bunched his fingers into fists. Opened them. Closed them. Opened them.

“Tell you what. I’ll give you exactly a minute to get out of here. If you don’t want to be prosecuted, just get in your truck and drive back to the road.”

Brent tried to be subtle when he switched his gaze toward the truck next to the guard. Several objects were piled in the back. They came up only slightly higher than the sides, making it difficult to tell what they were. But one of them looked a lot like it might be part of a shirt-still on someone’s arm.

“Fine,” he said, finding it hard to remain calm. “I’m sorry if we bothered you.” The sudden rapid pounding of his heart sickened him. “I just figured this place would make an interesting story. But I can see I was wrong.”

The guard was noticing things also. He stared past Brent toward Anita, presumably toward her camera. Then he appeared to realize that Brent was hiding a microphone next to his leg.

“We don’t want any trouble,” Brent said.

“Of course not. You’re right. This place is really fascinating. Why don’t you stay right where you are. I’ll go find the guy you need to talk to about permission to do a story.”

He motioned for them not to move, then turned and went into the small building, where he shifted the object he’d been dragging so it couldn’t be seen any longer. Then he disappeared into the darkness.

“Anita, let’s go,” Brent said urgently. He pivoted and saw that she held the camera at her side, a seemingly innocent position.

But the camera’s red light was conspicuous. Regardless of how frightened Brent felt, he was elated that she seemed to have recorded everything.

The van was pointed away from the observatory. Anita rushed to the vehicle’s side hatch and shoved the camera onto a seat.

“There are bodies in that truck,” she said starkly.

“Yes, and he was dragging another body from that shed. What the hell happened here?” Brent hurried toward the van’s passenger door. His lungs felt starved for air, as if he was running a hundred-yard dash.

Anita rushed toward the front of the van, desperate to reach the driver’s door as quickly as she could.

Blood spurted from her left arm.

She dropped.

Brent gaped, suddenly aware of shots-loud and rapid, as if from a string of huge firecrackers. Something zipped past him. Metal clanged repeatedly. He swung toward the observatory and saw that the guard was standing in the open door of the shed, firing an assault rifle. The three rows of fences acted like screens, the chain links and wire deflecting a lot of the bullets. Chunks rose from disintegrating metal. High-voltage sparks flew.

Feeling the heat of a bullet nicking his ear, Brent rushed to Anita and dragged her to the front of the van, out of the guard’s sight. A month earlier, he’d done a story about a gunfight between three bank robbers and a solitary policeman. The policeman had survived be- cause he’d taken cover behind the front of his cruiser, behind the engine, which-Brent was told-could stop just about any bullet.

“Anita.Anita.”

He was relieved to find that she was conscious, but immediately he registered just how wide her eyes were and how rapidly she was blinking in pain. Her dark skin was pale. When he’d dragged her, she’d left a trail of blood on the dirt. The jagged wound in her upper arm was wide, and deep enough to show bone.

She’ll bleed to death.

Brent almost threw up.

Straining to remember what he’d learned in a long-ago emergency first-aid class, Brent tugged off his necktie and twisted it around the top of Anita’s left arm, above the wound. One of the instructors had insisted, Improvise. Sweating, he knotted the tie, pulled a pen from his shirt pocket, and shoved it under the tie. He twisted the pen, tightening the cloth enough to restrict the flow of blood.

“This’ll make your arm partly numb.” He remembered a doctor telling him that. “It might help with the pain, too.”

“God, I hope so.” Anita bit her lip.

The shooting stopped. Amid a hot breeze, Brent smelled burned gunpowder. Struggling not to panic, he peered around the front of the van. At the open door to the shed, the guard dropped a magazine from the bottom of the rifle and inserted a new one. The man’s face was twisted into a grimace that suggested he was in pain. He finished reloading, looked in Brent’s direction, and fired toward the van’s rear tires. Again there were sparks and a spray of metallic fragments as the fences deflected many of the bullets, but enough got through to shred the tires. Brent heard them exploding.

The rear of the van sank.

We’re going to die, he thought.

No matter how quickly his chest heaved, he couldn’t seem to get enough air. He imagined the guard throwing their bodies into the back of the truck with the others. Frantic, he yanked his cell phone from his belt and hit the buttons, but when he held the phone to his left ear, he moaned. All he heard was dead air.

The expression made him taste bile. Dead air.

“I bet I can guess what you’re doing!” the guard yelled. “You’re trying to use your cell phone! Save yourself the trouble! It won’t work! There isn’t any civilian service this far out!”

“My boss knows we came here!” Brent shouted back. “He’ll send people to look for us!”

“When they see the sign, they’ll have brains enough not to trespass on government property! How long will your boss wait before he wonders where you are? Two hours? Three? If people do come here looking for you, by then-believe me-they won’t find you!”

Brent flinched as the guard fired another volley. More of the bullets got past the metal in the three fences and shattered the van’s rear windows.