Whitley Strieber - The Grays

The Three Thieves would have been more efficient with Marcie, but the luscious fears, the darting hopes, the bright, wet desires that filled her smooth flesh were just too much of a temptation. Dan Callaghan was awake anyway, so the whole expedition was a waste. They might as well make of it whatever they could.

The Two, as the negative pole of the triad, showed her a long needle. Her eyes widened as she saw the silver of it appearing out of the dark that surrounded her. She could not see the Thieves, of course, they were too careful for that.

He plunged the needle into her forehead and she shrieked and they gobbled her agony… for the moments that it lasted feeling as alive as their distant ancestors must have, before they had enhanced themselves with machine intelligence, and lost contact with the only thing that mattered, in the end, which was feeling.

Without it, life was ongoing death, and to find it again, crossing a galaxy was as nothing, not even if the journey took fifty generations, not even if it took a thousand.

From a billion times a billion miles away, they had seen Earth glowing with emotion. It had drawn them like excited moths to its mystery, first in hundreds, then in thousands, and soon the billions would come to drink the healing waters of the human soul… if all went well.

THE KELTONS WENT CLOSE, RUNNING low like actors on a movie battlefield. It occurred to Dan that Jimbo Kelton might be recording the prank for the later amusement of fellow perpetrators.

All the people in the neighborhood were not only known to each other, they counted one another as friends. Nancy and Chris were dear friends of Katelyn and Dan. Kelton was a historian, working at the far end of the campus from the Hall of Science, but still a member of the cozy little Oak Road crowd. The Warners and the Callaghans, were very close—or had been.

Nancy clutched her cell phone to her ear. Dan felt for his, miraculously found it in a pocket of his jacket. He punched in 9-1-1. “This is Dr. Daniel Callaghan, one-oh-three Oak Road. There’s a fire in the field behind our house that borders Wilton Road. Somebody’s trapped in it.”

The screams lost form, became a continuous roar of pain.

Dan closed his cell phone while the dispatcher was still talking. He was now convinced that this was serious. Those screams were real. He took off after Conner, going flat-out.

“Don’t let him near it,” Katelyn howled, passing him in her pursuit of her son.

As Dan ran, he looked for the basket, for the burning student, but he could see only the fearsome glare, like looking into a thousand car headlights or a flashbulb that would not quit. He shielded his eyes and struggled closer. “Conner! Conner where are you?”

“I can’t see him, Dan! CONNER! CONNER!”

Another scream came, trembling and high, desolate with agony, then the object wavered a little in the air. Far off, the thin wail of a siren could be heard, then more sirens, getting louder.

“Conner, oh thank God!”

He was with the Kelton boys, his small form hidden in the bulk of their teenage bodies.

“Come on, we’re getting out of here,” Katelyn said.

“Mom!”

“Come on!” She took him by the wrist, yanked him away, heading back toward their empty house.

“No!” He broke away.

And suddenly she was terribly afraid. Afraid for her son. He was vulnerable—to what, she did not know, but she knew that he was vulnerable.

“Conner, please, I am begging you. I am begging you right now to come back with me.”

“Mom, I think I know what this is!”

“Conner, no. You have no idea. Nobody does. But it’s not right and it’s dangerous.”

He threw his arms around her. “Mom, don’t worry.” In an instant, he had broken away and was running back into the light.

The Thieves were concerned now. Conner should not be here, and they could feel the fury and the fear of the whole collective. Of course everybody was scared: their survival depended on this child, who had been bred through fifty human generations.

Katelyn had the awful and frightening sense that the thing was somehow watching her son. She took off after him, her feet slamming into the winterhard ground, and she tackled him and brought him down.

It made him cry out in astonishment. Katelyn had never disciplined him physically. Such a thing was unthinkable, to humiliate a brilliant child in that way—or any child, for that matter.

She got up on all fours, crying, trying to keep herself between him and the thing. She had the hideous feeling that it would somehow suck him into its fire, and he would join the poor woman who was screaming there.

He stood up. Glaring down at her, he turned away from the object and strode back toward the house. Thanking God in her heart, she followed her son home.

THE YOUNG LIEUTENANT HANDED COLONEL Robert Langford a sheet of paper. “My God,” he said as he read it.

“Sir?”

“This is under the blanket,” he said. The young man, who was not cleared to hear what was about to be said, left the room.

The glowboy that had been snooping around Wilton, Kentucky, had just done something that Rob had never seen, and that he was quite sure no monitor had seen from the beginning of this mission, which dated back to 1942.

He pulled up a satellite view of Wilton. The glowboy was bright, its plasma fully deployed. The thing was ready to move out of there fast. He zoomed in on the image. Disbelieving, he zoomed in on it again. What in hell were people doing crowding around the thing? The grays considered their secrecy essential, and they had threatened dire consequences if it was ever compromised. But they themselves were breaking it.

And also breaking a fundamental policy of the United States of America, which was to keep their secret until and if something could be said to the public other than, “We know they’re here, we know that they come into your bedrooms and kidnap you in the night, but we don’t know why and we are helpless to stop them. And yes, some of you disappear, and some of you die.”

He stared at the image, watching the figures move, trying to form some sort of a rational explanation of what might be happening.

Rob spent too much time in the Mountain, or so he’d been told by practically everybody who worked with him. Because the grays operated at night and tracking their movements was his duty, over the years he’d gradually become a night person.

Mike Wilkes had negotiated a treaty with the grays, using the interface between Bob and Adam and Eamon Glass. The agreement was that they would limit their abductions in number and region. In return, the United States had guaranteed to protect their secrecy.

It was Rob’s job to keep track of the abductions, and, in the most extreme cases of treaty violation, to put up a show of force.

This was not to be done lightly. The grays would not stand to be fired upon. That had been tried back in the forties, and the reply had been horrifying. The grays had caused six hundred plane crashes in the year 1947. Shortly thereafter, President Truman had ordered that they were not to be interfered with in any way. Nobody cared to challenge the grays, but now was one of those dreadful moments when something had to be done.

Early on, there had been a fear that the Soviets would find out how the collective minds of the grays worked, and announce to the world something like, “We have seen the future and it is Communist.” However, nobody except the United States Air Force possessed a gray. Therefore the rest of the world—including the remaining U.S. military, the intelligence community, and the government—was at best minimally informed. Within the Air Force, fewer than twenty people knew about this project.