Whitley Strieber - The Grays

Crying and coughing, she began the long trek upward on the narrow circular escape stair. As she trudged along, pacing herself to avoid exhaustion, she wracked her brain to understand how a grass fire next door had spread to the facility. Sparks must have somehow entered the ground-level air intake and started a conflagration in the air-conditioning system.

Three-quarters of the way to the top, she dragged her cell phone out of her pocket, but it was still out of range. She continued on, reaching the surface so winded that she had to stop and catch her breath before she could even manage to open the door that led into the foyer.

She felt it, noted that it wasn’t hot. She cracked it, looked out into the foyer. There were two firemen standing there. Above her head, thuds indicated that another man was on the stairs to the offices.

There was a rumbling from below and smoke came bursting up the stairwell. In an instant, it was fiercely hot, her eyes were burning, and she was choking again, even worse than before.

She had no choice but to act. She could not stay here. Again she opened the door. The intensity of the smoke increased at once. Behind her, the heat rose. Opening the door turned the stairwell into a flue.

The next instant, the door flew out of her hand and the firemen dragged her out, slamming it shut as soon as she was safe.

“Are you conscious?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, dizzy?”

“No, sir. My chest is burning.”

“Is there anybody else down there?”

She wanted to say yes, she wanted them to try to rescue Adam. That could not be allowed, though. These men had no clearances. These men could not enter the facility.

She fumbled in her jeans, drew out her credentials. “That facility is classified,” she gasped. “There’s nobody else in it and it cannot be entered without authorization.”

“This is a fire situation, lady. We’re gonna go in there.”

“No! It’s illegal!” She struggled to her feet, went for her cell phone again. “I’m calling my supervisor.” She punched in the colonel’s speed dial… and got his message. “Colonel, there’s a fire here, we’re dealing with a lot of unauthorized personnel and I need somebody here to control this situation!” She hung up.

At that moment, Andy appeared. He came hurrying in and threw his arms around her. Then he held her at arm’s length. “My God, you’re burned, you have no eyebrows.”

The foyer door burst open and fire gushed out with the ferocity of water from a burst main. They got out of there, and the firemen began deploying hose.

“It’s totally out of control,” she said to Andy.

“Where is he?”

“I couldn’t manage to save him.”

“Dear God.”

“They mustn’t find remains. We can’t let them find remains.”

“I know it.”

Her cell rang. “It’s him,” she said. “Colonel, there’s a fire in progress here.”

Silence. Then, very calmly, “What happened?”

“There was a grass fire next door. When I heard sirens, I came over here from my place. The fire didn’t appear to be serious, but I felt that I should be with Adam, so I went down. A few minutes later, the whole facility filled with smoke and fire. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What’s Adam’s status?”

“He’s still down there!”

“Is he dead, then?”

“I would assume so.”

More silence. Then a sound that Lauren thought might be a cry, but it was so loud and so close to the phone that it broke up into a series of shattering electronic noises. Then she could hear him taking breaths. He said, finally, “Okay. You cannot let those people down there. Anything could be going on, this is outside the envelope.”

“Sir, I can’t stop them, they’re ignoring my credentials.”

“I’m gonna blow somebody’s brains out if this doesn’t get handled,” he said, but so mildly that it didn’t seem like the threat she knew that it was.

“Sir, where are you? Can you get here soon?”

“I’m an hour out in my plane, damnit! YOU handle it, Colonel .” He sneered the word. Then he disconnected.

“He is one pissed-off guy,” she muttered.

“Oh, yeah, he would be. You know what we lost here? We lost the most important thing this country possesses, that’s what we lost. And that man is the person who has to take the heat for it. So he is gonna be pissed.”

Mike couldn’t pace in the plane, the cabin was too confined, so he sat rubbing the arms of his seat. He had to report this, he had to do it immediately. He said into the intercom, “I need the code box.” This small, highly sophisticated device transmitted and received in quantum-encoded bursts that could not be decrypted by intruders.

The first officer brought it back from the equipment bay behind his station, then returned to the flight deck. Mike turned off the intercom, then glanced at the flight-deck door to make certain that it was closed.

He pulled out the red handset and punched in Charles Gunn’s secure number. It rang once, part of a second time.

“Gunn.”

“Charles, I’m in condition two-one-zero-one. Do you understand?”

“GODDAMN YOU!”

“I’m in the plane, for God’s sake. It was Glass. Glass let a situation get away from her.”

“Glass. Glass doesn’t matter anymore. Glass is a liability and so are any other support personnel.”

“I realize that, Charles.”

“Well, act accordingly.”

Mike replaced the phone. He stared, thinking. The grays were not sitting still, they understood that there was a threat, and the direction it was coming from.

Okay, first things first. Do the support personnel. Andy was a good man and that would be hard, but Lauren—pretty as she was, he was going to enjoy putting her down.

The Goddamn bitch had lost ADAM!

DAN HAD COME HOME REEKING of booze, of all the incredible things, and gone in the living room and begun playing the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth over and over again at blasting volume. He lay there now in front of the stereo in the dark, splayed out on the floor like a great, gangling rag doll. She’d wanted to put her arms around him and mother him a little. His mother had been mostly indifferent to her little boy, and she felt that he needed the reassuring support of his woman right now.

She knew, of course, what had happened: Marcie Cotton had ditched his tenure. She was scared, too, she had to admit, because they could not remain here on just her salary. So what was going to happen to them was that they were going to fall off the academic cliff into the stew of little, tiny colleges and junior colleges and spend the rest of their lives scrimping and scraping.

She looked at the clock. Eight-twenty. She went into the living room, turned on a lamp.

“Please.”

“Dan, you’ve been in here for hours.”

“Please leave me be!”

“Dan, no.”

He did not respond.

She went on. “It’s about time for Conner to get home and I want you to come down out of the tree and face this together.” She had to bellow over the music. “Let’s turn that off, now.” She went to the stereo, flipped the switch. “Enough is enough.”

He rose off the floor, then went to the bar. “What’s in here? God.” He came up with an ancient bottle of crème de menthe, left over from some distant summer party when they’d poured it over ice cream. Earlier, she’d removed the rest of the booze to the garage.

“You already stink of bourbon. I hope you didn’t do this at the Peep?” The Peep Inn was the campus dive, where a professor most certainly did not need to get drunk.

“I did indeed. I consumed alcohol there, in the absurd hope that I could drink myself unconscious before the fall of night.”