Whitley Strieber - The Grays

She drove past 101 Hamilton and was, frankly, confused. It was a house. Looked like it had been built around 1910 in the Craftsman style. Beautiful place, for sure. But a house? An Air Force facility was in a house in a neighborhood?

Okay, so be it. She pulled into the driveway behind a very sweet-looking SLK convertible, that was, no, not your usual Air Force colonel’s automobile. It was possible, of course, that the car belonged to somebody else, but she’d been told that the chilly Colonel Wilkes ran the place and this car was in a special little chunk of tarmac all its own. Commanding officer’s privilege, for sure; she knew her Air Force.

There was only one other vehicle there, though, and the garage was padlocked. The other car was an Acura, not too young. So there was Colonel Wilkes with a fast car and a flunkie to be named later. Not the lowest of the low, they’d be in your Focus or your Echo like her, trying to make ends meet on just enough money to make that impossible.

As she mounted the stairs to the porch she noticed, of all things, a pair of longhorns over the front door. She stood looking at this incredibly improbable choice of decoration for Indianapolis, Indiana.

The front door had one of those old-fashioned bells on it that you twisted. She turned it and was rewarded by a dry crunching sound, not loud. In fact, hardly audible. So she did it again, a couple of times.

She was still doing it when the door swept open and Colonel Wilkes, looking shockingly older than this morning, stood there staring at her out of bloodshot eyes. “Please come in,” he said, stepping aside.

His voice sounded sad, and she had the odd impression that he might have actually been crying. She noticed that there were boxes against the wall.

“They’re yours,” Wilkes said. “Eamon’s things.”

“Colonel, nobody has told me yet what happened to my dad. I’ve been ordered to come to this place and I have no idea why, beyond reasons that sound like some sort of science fiction crap to me, and I have to tell you that this is not being done right. Couldn’t someone have at least warned me that I’d come here and see Dad’s stuff in damn boxes!”

“Who sent you here?”

She could not believe that he actually didn’t know. “I’ve been ordered not to tell you.”

He nodded, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. She followed him into an office that had clearly been carved out of what was once the master bedroom.

“This place was built in 1908 by Indy’s only cattle baron,” he said as he dropped down behind his desk.

There had been no exchange of salutes. But he was her superior officer, so she brought her hand to her forehead and said, “Lieutenant Lauren Glass reporting as ordered, sir.”

He looked up at her. “Obviously. Please go to the scrub room and get prepped.”

“Excuse me?”

“The scrub room. You’ll find it at the base of the shaft.”

“Sir, I have to explain to you, I have no idea what’s going on here. I would like a little more information, sir.”

“You’ll get the hang of it.”

“Uh, look, what is this scrub room? What do I have to scrub for?”

“Listen, I know you don’t understand any of this. We were planning to bring you along as your dad reached retirement. Nobody thought it would be like this. But we have a desperate situation, Lauren.”

She found a chair. “Sir, I’m sorry to disabuse you, but I have not been on any training program in any way, shape, or form. I am not prepared for whatever this is. I basically have no idea what you’re doing here at all, but whatever it is, it killed—” She had to stop. Her grief, appearing suddenly, had choked her on her own words.

“Lauren, I knew your dad for a long time. So you’ll know that what I’m about to say is not meant to be hard or callous. It is what your dad would say to you if he could talk right now. Your dad would say to you, ‘Soldier, you have a duty. Do your duty.’ ”

“Sir, respectfully, you tell me in one breath that my predecessor is a KIA, then you tell me to proceed into whatever situation he was in with no training or prep whatsoever. Sir, I would like to understand this order a little better. I know that I am dealing with somebody called Adam, and my father dealt with him and with somebody called Bob, and my father died as a result. That is the extent of my knowledge.”

He stood up so suddenly that she did, too. He turned his back on her and strode to the window. “There is no training, and there is no time. I want you down there now, because we have a situation, Lieutenant, and I believe—no, I know—that you are the only person remotely available to us who might be able to help.”

When he attempted to smile at her, she saw that coldness again, this time more clearly than she had at the grave. This was a driven man, she thought, a fanatic. And she wondered, should she trust a fanatic?

Well, Dad had. This was his commanding officer, this frosty man with his carefully decorated office and his fabulous car.

He showed her to a small elevator that opened under the front stairs. “There’s a very skilled man at the other end who will be there to help you.”

She stepped into the dim interior and descended. It felt as if it was moving fast, and continued for more than a minute. When the doors opened, she found a chunky young man in a white sterile suit waiting for her… and saw that he had been the fourth man at the funeral.

“I’m Andy Morgan,” he said. “Welcome to the facility.”

“This place is deep.”

“We’re two hundred and eighty feet down. Deep in the bedrock.” He tapped a foot on the floor. “Basalt.”

Faintly, she could hear another voice. It was groaning and sounded tired. Also angry. She looked around but saw nobody.

“Who is that?”

Andy Morgan shook his head. “You’re good,” he said.

“Who’s moaning? What’s going on in here?”

“Lauren, listen to me. You’re going to meet him in a moment. Sort of meet him. What you’re hearing is coming through a six-foot-thick tempered steel wall that is further protected by a high-intensity electromagnetic field.”

“Then how can we possibly be hearing it? Because it’s perfectly clear. And the man is in agony.”

“I can’t hear it.”

“But that’s crazy. Listen to him, he’s wailing!”

“The fact that you can hear his thoughts is why you’re here.”

“What thoughts? He’s crying!”

“You need to go in there,” Andy Morgan said. The same tone, she thought, that he might have used if he had told her it was time for her to do her wingwalk, or perhaps go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Behind him was a steel door, armored and locked with great, gleaming bolts. Why in the world would anybody be that locked up? What did they have in there, some kind of deranged superman? She tried to conceal her total and complete mystification, not to say her fear, and to concentrate on what she needed to know, here, on a practical basis. “Now, is this person going to be violent?”

“Baby, he is flyin ’ in there! He’s been bouncing off the walls ever since the colonel bought it. Excuse me! Since your dad passed away.”

“Before I go in there, I think you’d better tell me exactly what happened to him.”

He lowered his head. “Nobody told you?”

“They did not.”

“Okay. Your dad got a scratch.”

“A scratch?”

“That caused an allergic reaction so intense that he bled out.”

She did not need to think very long about that. She sat down in one of the two chairs that stood before the control panel. “I’m not doing this.”

He was a gentle-looking guy, more than a little overweight, with sad, sad eyes. “They sent you all the way down here without telling you a damn thing, didn’t they?”