Authors: Mack Maloney
They entered a cavernous storage room with boxes stacked to the ceiling. Small, airtight glass cases lined its walls; other larger containers were located nearby.
Pott explained the glass cases contained items AII had been studying before the program finally closed down.
“Prepare yourselves,” he said. “This is pretty strange …”
He directed his flashlight on the first case. Inside was an object that looked like an ordinary football, yet was white and stitched like a baseball.
“That’s how they play some sport, somewhere else,” Pott said.
He pointed his flashlight at the second glass case. It held a dusty photo album opened to a page showing New York City in the 1930s, with two Empire State Buildings standing side by side. The photo’s caption read:
EMPIRE STATE TWIN TOWERS.
The third glass case held three liquor bottles. One was a bottle of beer, and on its label was printed:
SERVE WARM.
The second was a bottle of champagne. Its label advised:
SHAKE WELL BEFORE USING.
The third was a bottle of sake. Its label read:
ICE MAKES IT NICE.
All of the items looked normal but different at the same time.
“How did all this stuff get here?” JT asked.
Pott said, “I guess my colleagues must have found a way to retrieve these items from ‘somewhere else.’ Other places. Other universes.”
“But how?” Hunter asked, astonished by the bizarre artifacts.
Pott just shrugged. “I don’t know.”
At that moment, a trio of FCSF troopers hurried past. They were carrying computer drives, external storage devices, and boxes of written files—data-rich items found inside the storage room. They were taking everything out to the Mitchells.
“Once I get into that stuff,” Pott told Hunter, “I’ll be able to tell you more.”
Standing in the middle of the chamber was the biggest display of all. Even in the shadows they could see it was at least sixty feet long and maybe forty feet wide.
It was covered with metal sheathing wrapped in chains that were locked tight. A couple of FCSF troopers were trying to undo the locks.
“We have no idea what’s inside there,” Pott said. “But like everything else, we’ll find out soon.”
St. Louis put his hand on Hunter’s shoulder. “It’s the treasure trove we were hoping for, Hawk,” he said. “I’m sure with all this data, we’ll find out what happened to you—and a whole lot more.”
Hunter almost choked up. He hadn’t expected the moment to be so emotional, but it was. His psyche felt like it was on fire now—things he just
had
to know were finally within his grasp.
He turned to thank Pott, when suddenly …
Gunfire.
Then people shouting.
Then more gunfire.
All of it coming from a hangar nearby.
Hunter groaned as he, Ben, and JT rushed out the door.
“I knew it couldn’t be
this
easy …” JT said.
T
HE GUN BATTLE WAS
over by the time they arrived.
A squad of FCSF troopers was standing around five bodies lying in front of a medium-size hangar. The bodies were clothed in black, with weapons that looked like sci-fi movie props. Futuristic helmets hid their faces.
JT gasped. “Jesus—are they ETs?”
Hunter sought out the FCSF squad leader whose unit had been involved in the brief firefight.
“We were securing the next hangar over,” he explained. “We came upon these guys trying to drag someone out of this building. They fired at us. So …”
Hunter studied the hangar in question.
“Someone’s inside there?” he asked.
The squad leader nodded. “Ready for this?”
He opened the door to reveal the hangar was filled with people. Men, women, teens, the elderly—dirty, ragged, and hollow-eyed. In the green tint of night vision, they looked like ghosts, hundreds of them. They were hugging the FCSF troopers as if they’d just been liberated from a concentration camp.
“What is this?” Ben exclaimed. “A homeless shelter?”
The squad leader shrugged. “It’s the only locked building we came to. Windows, all the doors, sealed tight from the outside.”
A middle-aged man wearing an old army jacket was brought forward. The squad leader said to him, “Tell these guys what you told me.”
The man’s eyes were wide with fear.
“We’re all street people,” he began shakily. “There’re lots of us these days. We were abducted down in Santa Monica a week ago. We were probed, and then locked up here.”
Hunter was incredulous. “By who? Who did this to you?”
“These creatures,” the man replied, pointing at the bodies. “They’re
eating
us!”
Hunter tried to calm him, but the man was becoming extremely agitated.
“They come out of the ground every few hours,” he went on, catching his breath. “And they take some of us—and whoever they take down the Hole, don’t come back. I’m telling you they’re
eating
us down there!”
“But
who
are
they
?” Hunter asked him again, to which a number of the street people shouted back: “Zombie Aliens!”
“Look at this,” the man said, rolling up his ragged sleeve to reveal a tattoo. It read:
TEST SUBJECT—WARM TO MAXIMUM POWER.
“I don’t know where this came from,” he said. “But that sounds like something from a recipe to me. And we all got them!”
Hunter looked at Ben and JT. They were just as bewildered as he was.
Hunter returned to the five bodies. He knelt down beside one, not quite sure what to expect. He slowly lifted the helmet’s visor.
What he saw beneath was a heavily scarred face and a pair of dead eyes.
But most important, the body was human—and Asian.
“AMC …” he whispered.
The building the AMC soldiers had emerged from was as bland as everything else on the base. Located just across from “Hobo Hangar,” it was the size of a two-car garage.
Hunter, Ben, and JT were outside its door, checking their ammo loads. Wearing AMC uniforms, helmets and all, they were going down the Hole to see if what the street people told them was true.
St. Louis was nervous though.
“This really isn’t part of the plan,” he was saying to Hunter. “I called back home. The C-119s are flying out, and we’ll get these poor people out of here. But remember we don’t want to start a war with these AMC guys. Not yet anyway.”
Hunter understood, but he replied, “What happens to the next bunch of civilians the AMC kidnaps? And what is the AMC doing to them? Those people might be down on their luck, but they’re still Americans. We’ve got to protect them too.”
Because of this unexpected twist, Hunter knew they’d have to stay at Area 51 longer than he’d planned.
“I just hope all we find down there is a little clubhouse with a few AMC freaks who are into killing bums.”
They entered the empty building and spotted an open door in the far corner. Inside was a small closet, not two feet square. Its floor was missing. Below was a vertical shaft with a ladder that went down one hundred feet to a metal floor. It looked like the entrance to a missile silo.
They switched on their night-vision goggles and down they went. Reaching the bottom, they found themselves in a dark tunnel that went in only one direction. They started walking … and walking … and walking. Finally, after what seemed like miles, they came to a massive sliding door. It was at least thirty feet in diameter and made of thick steel. It was connected to a huge bank of motors and chains, the mechanism by which the giant door opened and closed.
But at the moment it was slightly ajar.
“They don’t lock their front door?” JT asked.
They approached the opening carefully, hoping not to meet any real AMC soldiers coming the other way.
Reaching it, Hunter slowly slid the door all the way open … and that’s when everything turned fantastic.
There was no other way to describe it.
They found themselves on a gantry, fifty feet long, ten feet wide, with a metal grille railing on one side and the walls of a cavern on the other.
From there, they were looking out on an immense open chamber. It was like the biggest, grandest, most futuristic movie set imaginable. Its walls were thick with glowing white tubes, wire busses, giant fluorescent lights, and fast-moving glass elevators. At least twenty floors below, a huge ground floor contained towering banks of computers, consoles, and control panels displaying hundreds of screens, all generating bright circus-color lights, many of them blinking in unison. It was hypnotic and beautiful in a way. And definitely not military issue.
But the most fantastic thing of all: hanging along one side of the vast chamber were a dozen platforms, almost like a vertical parking lot. Sitting on each platform was what could only be described as a UFO.
Most were the basic flying-saucer design, maybe twenty feet across and colored bright yellow, red, or emerald. Others were shaped like spheres of pure silver. Still others were cigar shaped. In a word, they looked “otherworldly.”
Seeing all this, the three of them could barely speak.
Finally JT said, “There were always rumors about underground stuff out here, a place where the military kept UFOs. And we just found it …”
“You mean the AMC found it,” Ben corrected him.
This was true. The ground floor was crawling with AMC soldiers and white-coated technicians.
The center of their attention was a massive apparatus that looked like a giant ray gun. Small armies of technicians were walking around it, servicing it, checking it, admiring it. Directly in front of it was an immense hole that appeared bottomless.
“Look at the size of that thing,” JT said, meaning the giant ray gun. “What the hell does it do?”
Lying flat on the balcony floor and looking through the metal railing, they watched as AMC technicians rolled an old US Army Hummer to a spot about fifty feet from the ray gun on the other side of the bottomless pit. Once in place, someone pushed a button and a burst of light shot out of the ray gun, hitting the Hummer. An instant later the Hummer was gone.
“Goddamn,” Hunter breathed. “Did I just see that?”
Another Hummer was quickly moved into place. It too was hit by a beam and disappeared.
Then a two-ton troop truck was positioned and zapped. It vanished as well.
It was incredible. …
But then Ben noticed something. “What are those leftover things?”
After every object vanished, a pile of what looked like glowing embers appeared. They didn’t seem to quite touch the floor, though, as if they were hovering just above it. But now, after the three demonstrations, someone hit another button and a series of fans came on and blew the “embers” into the bottomless pit.
“That’s either an alien-built weapon,” Ben said, “or years ago someone found out how to zap all the hazardous material they were generating out here, so they could get rid of the evidence.”
Hunter studied the strange surroundings. He could see only two places in the vast chamber where one could enter or exit. One was another immense open door at ground level. It led out to another astonishing aspect of the chamber: an underground roadway, which they could clearly see from their position. It looked like a four-lane interstate, except it had been built inside a massively hollowed-out cavern. From the scope of it, it had to run for miles.
The only other means of entry was the big, round door they’d just passed through to get on to the gantry. Other than that there were no emergency exits, no other doors, at least none that could be seen.
Some hustle and bustle below indicated the beginning a shift change. Soldiers and technicians filed out the huge door leading to the underground roadway as an equal number filed in. The relieved shift got into trucks and disappeared down the cavern highway. The new shift went right to work, pampering the immense ray gun.
“Two doors,” Hunter said, almost to himself. “That’s it.”
Then he noticed something else. He pointed to the numerous conical-shaped dishes around the chamber. Most were about one-foot across. They were hanging everywhere, hundreds of them.
Hunter also saw lots of techs on the ground floor using what looked like ordinary handheld phones as controls instead of flicking switches and pushing control buttons.
“I think this place is run by sound waves,” he whispered to Ben and JT. “I’m guessing whoever built it didn’t want anyone to know they were down here. So instead of using a lot of electrical stuff and generators and creating heat and making noise, they run it all by bouncing sound waves back and forth via those handheld phones. It’s like everything is handled by remote control and sound is the transfer medium.”
“It would be a good way to lower your power output and reduce your IR signature,” Ben whispered back. “Not to mention your noise level. I mean, you can hear a pin drop in here.”
It
was
very quiet inside the huge chamber.
Hunter added, “And if each sound transmission is unique, you could have a million different signals running through this place easily.”
The shift change complete, the ray gun technicians were getting ready to zap another target.
But it was not a Hummer or a big truck this time.
About twenty ragged people were being led onto the expansive ground floor. They resembled the people they’d found in the hangar except these people were gagged and their wrists were bound. Ten were pulled out of the line and, fighting all the way, were forced into position by AMC soldiers.
Somehow the ray gun was activated, a beam shot out of it—and the people were gone.
Hunter was stunned; Ben and JT, speechless.
Before they could say a word, the remaining ten unfortunates were put in front of the ray gun and dispatched the same way.
Then the fans were turned on and the strange glowing embers left behind were blown into the bottomless pit. It all happened in less than a minute.
“Christ,” Ben finally whispered. “I know the AMC hates Americans, but is that what this is all about? Is this …”
He couldn’t say the words.
So JT said them for him: “Ethnic cleansing?”