Jeremy Finley - The Darkest Time of Night

I paused. “I don’t believe you.”

“A tragic accident, from what I’m told. She drove off the road, crashed the van. She wouldn’t have been driving in this horrible weather if you hadn’t directed her to leave—”

“You’re lying.”

She sighed, took out her phone, punched with her finger and then held it out for me to see. “One of our officers came upon her wrecked vehicle.”

I leaned in and could see the van sunk in a snowbank. Even on the small screen, it was easy to see that the shattered back window was riddled with bullet holes.

“My God,” I whispered.

“No one wants any more tragic accidents involving anyone else you love.”

“You wouldn’t hurt William—”

“You need to start explaining how it is you came to find Argentum,” she said, having to raise her voice over the now-frantic popping sound. She turned around to the tube as the entire building shook for a moment.

In response, the long canister began to fill up, as if some sort of film was suddenly coating the glass from the inside. The building rattled again, and Deanna had to steady herself against the wall. When the shaking stopped, she began to type briskly on the computer.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Nothing you need to concern yourself with.”

The door opened and a man in camouflage stuck his head in, a long-range rifle over his shoulder.

“Ms. Ruck, you need to come. Right now.”

“I’m debriefing—”

The building shuddered. The wheels under my chair began to roll.

“Right now,” the soldier insisted.

Deanna held on to the wall. “You might have noticed, Captain, that I am not in your military, and I don’t take orders from you. And the tremors aren’t unusual. Gather them up—”

“Ma’am, there are two ships. And they’re sending them down.”

“They always come down.”

“No. Not people. They’re coming down.”

Deanna stood up. She stole one more glance at the tube and grabbed the door. “You’ll have to stay here, Mrs. Roseworth. I should be right back. Use this time to think about what we’ve talked about. You know what you need to do.”

As she hurried out, a series of beeps came from outside and another tremor rippled through the building. I went to the door. The handle refused to even move.

I covered my mouth with my fingertips.

Roxy.

My oldest friend, my constant companion for so many years, dead because she wouldn’t let me come here alone. My girls, my grandsons, Tom, all lost. The military would take Roxy’s truck and my Volvo from the Nashville airport, crash hers off some rural road in Paducah, and have mine crushed. If they had gone so far as to frame Steven for the death of William, they could certainly go to extraordinary lengths to hide the truth about what happened to us—

No. I will not. I began to pace, keeping my hand on the wall. I will not let it all be in vain.

The glass tube was now emitting a low humming sound. I approached it and knew why the sound was so familiar. My throat tightened in realization.

It wasn’t humming. It was vibrating.

Inside, thousands of ladybugs swarmed, frantically smashing against the glass and climbing on top of each other. The bottom of the tube was difficult to see, making it unclear where the bugs originated.

There was no doubt why the medical center kept a tube like this in the room.

The soldier said they were coming down.

The room shuddered violently and the lights dimmed as pads of paper and clipboards slid off the shelves and slapped onto the floor. I instinctively reached out to balance the tube, but found it firmly set into the concrete. William’s room had been empty, right? I didn’t remember seeing breakable things up high, heavy things, that could have fallen on him. Was he still in the room? What if they had already taken him somewhere else—?

The lights went out. I held tight to a table as darkness swallowed the room. I eased alongside the table, brushing up against a chair. I looked for the door, but the window in the door was nowhere to be seen, as the lights out in the hallway were also extinguished. I fumbled to where I thought the door was and slid up against the wall.

In the pitch blackness of the room, I saw it: the blinking light of the battery of Deanna’s laptop where it had fallen to the floor. Maybe there was wifi, maybe there was a way I could send an email or something to the outside world.

I felt through the darkness. But once I opened the laptop’s brilliant screen, my hopes were dashed. The internet signal was gray, with no bars.

I could still use it as a light source, try to find something to break through the door. But even if I happened upon a circular saw or a sledge hammer, I realized, I still couldn’t get through the electronically locked door.

The screen glared at me. The laptop belonged to a woman who had to be one of the top officials amongst the black suits. Maybe she had the pass codes to the doors in one of the folders.

Each file appeared administrative: budget, addresses, PowerPoint presentations, research models. I continued to read the headers: overlays, contact points, spreadsheets, survivors’ interviews, satellite coordinates—

I stopped scrolling down to instead use the track pad to move the arrow over to the second to the last folder in the row.

Survivors’ interviews.

I clicked on it to find several internal folders. Each was marked with a code: JFAZ206, HTNY85, RJIL72, EKOK11…

Get back to the main screen, keeping looking for anything that could contain pass codes .

I could barely navigate Microsoft Word on my computer, how could I possibly understand what these folders meant?

CJCA82, TRPA72, TDIL73, KVIL73, LSTN51—

Those letters and numbers… LSTN51 …

I held my breath. LSTN51. LS, my initials with my maiden name. TN for Tennessee. 51. The year I was born.

I opened up the folder. Three QuickTime movies were inside, each with their own label: subject camera, interviewer camera, and combined cameras.

The room rumbled slightly. I clicked on the first movie. After the color wheel spun for a few seconds, a screen opened up. When the video clip proves to be nothing, I’ll go back to searching the rest of the computer.

As the video began to play, my hand raised to my chest.

A little girl sat in a chair in front of a table. Despite the grainy footage that was obviously taken from a filmstrip, it was easy to tell she was exhausted. Even though it was in black-and-white, even though the clip had several jumps from when the old film flickered, even though the camera was several feet away, I knew her.

It was me, at five years old.

“Yes,” I heard myself say softly.

At the sound of the voice of an adult, I watched the much younger version of myself squirm at bit, looking around for the words. “I saw the people. The people I told you about. They change colors.”

I know this. My God, I know this.

I stopped the clip and moved the arrow directly to the “interviewer” video clip. Only after the video played for a few moments did I finally begin to breathe.

I had first seen the man in the video on Doug’s computer in the basement of Steven’s home. I remembered Doug had clamped the laptop shut, saying he would show me the rest of the video if I promised to go public. The first known interview of an abductee, he had said.

After I’d left, he’d followed us to the street, standing outside my window. “You’ll never know. You’ll never know the truth—”

I didn’t need to go to the end of the clip to see what it would reveal. But I did anyway, fast-forwarding to the end, as the man took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead.