Whitley Strieber: The Grays

She screamed, then, and suddenly she was not a deer at all, she was a gray and in terrible trouble, being torn apart by the maddened dog. It leaped away from Manrico, one arm dangling, its head wobbling horribly.

Conner screamed and ran for the fence, but Lauren tackled him. “No!”

Sparks like fluid began spewing out of the gray. As the dog screamed and twisted against itself, the gray whirled faster and faster, until it became a dervish of sparks and flying fire.

Then it was gone, nothing left but a melted area of snow, some smoking earth, and the seared body of Manrico.

“Get in the car!” Lauren shouted.

They did, but they could go nowhere. “We have to change that tire,” Lauren said from the backseat, where she’d gotten in with Conner. “You three stay here, I’ll do it.”

“I’ll help,” Conner said.

“No,” Lauren said.

“I’ll help!”

Lauren responded: No, it’s too dangerous .

Why are you so good at this?

I’ve been in training for years to be your teacher .

He looked up at her and frowned. “I find teachers extremely boring.”

I won’t be .

Mike was still out there somewhere, maybe incapacitated but maybe not. She could not expose Conner to the long, clear sightlines that led back to that concealing wood.

Overhead, a dark helicopter appeared, a red cross on its belly. Katelyn and Lauren got out and waved and shouted, but it set down behind the trees, in the clearing where Rob and dead Jimbo Kelton lay.

Terry Kelton, who had refused to get in the car, began to cry, standing on the roadside, holding his head in agony.

Another car appeared, coming from town.

“Careful,” Katelyn said.

“Conner,” Lauren whispered. “Can you tell?”

“How can he possibly tell?” Katelyn snapped.

Conner closed his eyes and found that he could go racing down the snowy road and look into the car. It’s Paulie. They’re okay .

Thank God .

The grays made me like this?

Yes, they did .

It’s never gonna end, is it?

She smiled at him. “Do you want it to?”

He met her eyes, and she found it hard, very hard to look at him. She missed Adam.

Conner suddenly got out of the car.

“Conner!”

“It’s okay, Lauren.”

The Warners pulled up behind them.

Conner started to walk toward their minivan.

“No,” Lauren said, coming up to him, putting her hand on his shoulder. “No.”

“Listen,” he said, “it’s okay. They’re not—not affected.” He whispered to her. “Let me go.”

She released him.

He got into the van.

“You missed it, didn’t you?” Paulie asked.

“I got a picture on my phone.”

“Mom! Dad! I told you and told you, they missed the riot!” He regarded Conner, his face alight. “There was a whole huge riot in the town and the National Guard’s there in Humvees, and it’s gonna be on the network news. It was totally incredible, and you missed it, lil’ fella. Momma had to take you home.”

Katelyn leaned in the window. “Dan needs a hospital, we’ve got to take him to Berryville right now.”

FAR ABOVE, A SMALL SILVER dot glittered in the rising light of evening. The worn space inside the little craft where the Three Thieves had lived through so many long ages now was empty. The iron bedsteads where Katelyn and Dan had had their souls mingled, where Marcie had been laid, and Conner, and so many thousands of others over the centuries, stood still and silent.

As if it was alive—which it might be—the little vehicle turned round and round, looking for some place to go. The collective, at a loss, tried to understand how to replace the last triad. But who could do the work of another without training? Their minds were not flexible enough.

There was no place for the little machine, nobody to replace its triad. It hung there, left empty in the sky.

CONNER SAT QUIETLY BETWEEN PAULIE and Amy in the van’s third row of seats. In front of them, Mom and Lauren helped his dad.

He could feel his dad suffering, could hear whispers of fear coming from the implant that connected the two of them, but he intended to be very, very careful in listening to what it broadcast, to use it only if it was absolutely necessary. He wanted his dad’s love, not his fear.

As he listened to the humming of the tires and the soft voices of the adults, and Terry’s miserable sobs, he kept feeling an absence in him, and the more he felt it, the more he came to understand that it was the absence of the collective. For a little while, being part of it had felt like a kind of music in him, and he knew that he could conduct that music, could make it bright and great and true.

One day, perhaps, he would be strong enough to reach the collective on his own, to join it to his mind. Until he could, though, he would be in the most profound sense blind.

He needed the Three Thieves, they were woven into his being, part of him. Without them, he could feel the vague, distant presence of the collective calling to him, Conner, Conner , but he could not answer, not without the mind of the Three Thieves to amplify and relay his response.

Conner swept out of his body and through the snowy woods, following a glowing silver wire that connected him to a burned place near the Niederdorfer’s fence, where lay a pitiful little mess of rags and sticks and empty black eyes.

Wake up , he said in the secret air of the mind, come back to me .

There was stirring in the snow, but only a little, for the damage the Two had endured was very great.

A sentence came to Conner, Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken… and he knew that it was the love written in the bible, a secret code for those who know.

“Behold,” he murmured, “he comes leaping on the mountains…”

And in the field, broken flesh fluttered in the night wind.

In the seat in front of him, Terry Kelton sobbed, his head hanging low on his chest.

Conner thought, I can help him . He did not know how it was or why it was that he could leave his body so easily. He knew all about out-of-body travel, of course, he’d experimented with it, as he had with remote viewing and all such things, because he understood the physics of superposition, and how it was that the electrons in the brain, during meditation, would become ambiguous, no longer in any one place, and you could use that to prowl in hidden pathways.

He slipped upward and outward, and saw, in his mind’s eye, four Air Force guys with two aluminum gurneys in the snow. He looked at the faces of the victims, and saw that John and Mrs. Kelton were alive. “Your mom and dad made it,” he told Terry. “You lost your brother and Manrico.”

Terry turned around. “How do you—”

Conner met his eyes. Your soul knows , he said inside himself. Terry blinked, then looked away and was silent for a time. Finally, a whisper: “Thanks for telling me.”

Conner had work to do. He brought to mind the Three Thieves as they had appeared last night, dumpy and scared, hiding behind the trees and terrified of making a mistake. He imagined them bobbing along in the night the way they had, so upset about scaring him, so unable to understand how not to.

I need you , he said in his mind.

His thought was met by silence.

They pulled into the Berryville Hospital emergency room. Medical personnel in green oversuits ran up, their portable stretcher rattling on the concrete driveway.

The Air Force helicopter roared into view, dropping down onto the hospital’s rooftop helipad.