Whitley Strieber - The Grays

High above, a roar started.

“Move it! Now!”

PAULIE AND CONNER STOOD SIDE by side. Conner stayed close to the Warners, because they were not having these weird thoughts, not like the others, and they didn’t have shadows around them. They were shimmering with what he had come to see as normal colors of life.

The others came closer. He looked for his mom and dad, didn’t see them. The haze from the spray and the smoke was like a fog bank full of looming shadows, the roar of the fire and the rumble of hoses, and strange, echoing cries.

He dared not move, dared not call out. In his heart, though, he begged for his mom and dad, begged them to get him out of here.

Paulie and his family had no idea that anything was wrong. He innocently pointed his video camera at the burning elevator. Amy took pictures with her cell phone.

The whole wall of the building was now smoking. It shuddered and made a sighing sound.

“HE’S CALLING US,” DAN SAID. “I hear him clearly.”

“You can hear him? How can you hear him?”

“Katelyn, I told you, it’s the implant, and I’m sure that he’s in terrible trouble.”

“I can’t hear him! Why can’t I hear my child?”

“You don’t have an implant.”

“But that’s—”

“We’ll sort it out later.” He moved off, trying to see ahead through the smoke and haze and gathering dark. “Conner! Conner!”

CONNER DECIDED THAT, NO MATTER how it looked, half the town could not be coming after him. They didn’t even know him, most of them. So this was paranoia. He would not allow himself to react to a symptom as if it was real, he wasn’t that paranoid… yet.

Nearby, two people leaped into their cars and began driving this way.

Harley ushered the kids away. “They’re pulling out too fast in this ice,” he said.

Then one of them skidded into the other, and they both went spinning around, slamming into each other and bouncing off amid a flying shower of glass.

“DID YOU SEE THOSE CARS?” Dan yelled to Katelyn. “Conner! CONNER!”

They moved through the nightmare murk, both calling his name again and again.

As she walked beside him, struggling with him in this bizarre nightmare situation, she thought, If he has to, he will give his life for his family .

As if the sudden, deep love this realization made her feel had opened a door, she remembered being in a dark space, remembered it quite clearly. At her feet there was a round opening. Far below, she could see water in the moonlight. A boy was beside her, his dark hair scattered across his forehead. His eyes were scared, but he was so attractive that a shiver went through her when she saw him. She remembered reaching out to him, and in that instant knew it was Dan when they were children. She felt then the most exquisite, most deeply poignant sense of memory that she had ever known. Without being able to put it into words, but just feeling it, she saw the role she and Dan had to play in what she perceived as a plan of some sort that she could not even begin to understand, but that involved Conner.

“Dan, we have to find him!”

“I know it.” Then he pointed. “Katelyn, there!”

He was not thirty feet away, just visible through the swirling ice haze. And Kenneth Brearly, a Bell tenth grader, was standing in front of him pointing a pistol at him.

Conner disappeared behind a billowing mass of haze from one of the hoses. “Conner!” Katelyn bellowed, “Conner, run!”

DESPITE THE DANGER OF BEING seen by Wilkes or somebody under his orders, Lauren left the office and moved closer to the base perimeter. She had no car and dared not draw from the motor pool.

She had to get to Conner, she knew that, but how? It was miles to the town, there was no bus. She’d tried to call the cab company, but there hadn’t been any answer. Everybody was at the fire, no doubt.

That fire was bait, she was certain, set by Wilkes to draw the whole town. Conner was a twelve-year-old boy, he would be there. Mike would kill him and make it look like an accident.

She pulled out her cell phone and called Rob again. It was a futile gesture. She tried to somehow reach out to Conner, attempting to communicate with him via her mind.

Maybe he heard her and maybe he didn’t, but she certainly felt no response. She looked down the long road that led to the town, to the gigantic smoke cloud, magnificent in the fading sun.

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN so long their memory of it was nothing but a few dim sparks, the Three Thieves felt love. They felt it fiercely, hanging over the burning building, for the child down there in the mist, who glowed gold in the dull, swirling crowd of other souls.

They saw, also, the antenna and the signals flaring off it, impacting the red flaring implants in the heads of people in the crowd. That antenna was connected to a transmitter, it must be, but the live voltage would be too low to make the wire visible to them. They hung far above, their small oval ship out of sight above the smoke, watching Conner. And they saw, suddenly, somebody with a gun.

Help me , they heard Conner’s mind saying.

They felt something strange within them, the beating of the heart. And they understood at last why Conner was calling for help, what all these strange signals meant: Wilkes had used a primitive form of mind control to turn dozens of people into assassins.

KENNETH WAS AN HONOR STUDENT, an Eagle Scout, and a very proud young citizen, and he was absolutely terrified at what he was doing. He remembered some kind of a nightmare with this strange, whispering man in his room and he had woken up crazy like this, and he knew it was crazy, but he could not stop himself, he’d been turned into a killing machine, and the worst of it was that he just needed to kill this geeky middle schooler and do it NOW!

He kept losing him in the haze, but just for a second or two, so he was getting closer fast; then he found a clear shot, he raised the pistol, he aimed—and, Jesus. What the hell was that? Or no, he hadn’t disappeared, he was still there. He was four feet away. He could not miss. He pressed the trigger, which did not go back. He stopped, cursed himself, thumbed the safety off, and raised the pistol again.

Conner looked into his eyes, down the barrel of the gun—and felt his body begin making tiny movements, very quick, tiny movements that seemed somehow linked to the kid’s vision.

Kenneth started to pull the trigger—and this time Conner cleanly and clearly disappeared right before his eyes. There was no obscuring haze. He was just gone.

Then he saw him again, flickering back into existence as he shook his own head, as if that had been enough to make him visible again. Now he would not miss.

Dan tackled him from behind and he went down without a sound. The pistol flew off into the murk, and the next thing Kenneth knew, the world was dark.

“Dan, don’t kill him!”

“He’s just knocked out. Where’s that pistol?”

“Oh, God, Dan, look!”

Linda Fells did not know why she had brought her dad’s deer gutter. She loathed the ugly, hooked knife, hated it when he brought home does to carve up. But now she had to use it, and she knew on who and even though she was screaming in revulsion and fear, she marched toward Conner Callaghan, raising it as she went.

She screamed and shook her head, trying to get rid of these thoughts, but the thoughts only got stronger and stronger.

Dan ran toward her with all his might, but he tripped on a hose and went sliding in the ice, screaming for Conner to watch out, that she was behind him. Katelyn howled, “Conner, Conner,” and struggled as if through mud, crossing the slick of ice, hoses, and fallen people that lay between them and their boy.