Terminus: A Novella of the Apocalypse (13 page)

Silently, we wonder where those nocturnal alien bugs go to sleep during the day and, like me, most of them appear concerned for our pending adventures given the previous night’s display.  After refreshing ourselves and eating, we return to the truck with the rise of the sun to discuss our plans.  To my surprise, I find none are pushing to return to The Village.  Having arrived, everyone wants to explore the site to determine what, if anything, Area-51 has to do with Terminus, the alien, and all those weird bugs crawling around the desert.

Back in the truck, we back out of the service bay and The Kid pulls the rolling door shut behind us, in case we want to use the same facility one more night.  Our initial exploration circles the BX.  We find a modestly endowed baseball diamond, tennis courts, a gym, and other recreational amenities.  Across a sand-driven road, we see a truck lot with several vehicles parked inside, most of a normal configuration and a few that sport specialized trailers clearly intended to support esoteric field operations, perhaps related to research.  Behind this facility, we see a sprawling electrical sub-station, which seems overpowered for the size of the base.

During the first hours of the morning, we drive around the airstrip, encounter a handful of jet fighters and transport aircraft, most with developmental equipment attached, all abandoned and gathering desert sand.  The buildings are nondescript and, for the most part, windowless.  Many are hangars or in some other way devoted to the service of aircraft, large and small.

We see no bodies, but we see plenty of dried, black blood sign.  Whatever happened here during Terminus, someone or something came along afterward to remove the corpses.

Once we cover most of the surface area without venturing into the buildings, we return to the baseball diamond to re-orient ourselves and discuss our options.  Sitting in The Guide’s small office, I spread the gold foil map across the top of his desk to scroll it back and forth, up and down, virtually exploring the hidden structures we cannot see.

In time, we notice a pattern to the underground passageways.  They are apparently secured by multiple internal gates, while access is restricted by a limited number of entries.

I point to the southwestern end of the Groom Lake saltpan.  There, an isolated set of structures juts out into the alabaster basin at the end of a short road defended by a pair of gates and a ring of fencing.  Most of the subterranean corridors radiate from this location like the irregular spokes of a wheel.

“This is where we begin,” I announce, tapping the foil, which I have zoomed to the first level of hidden passageways.  Then I move my finger along a particular underground hallway to a large void beneath the saltpan that can only be a buried hangar.  “We’ll make this our first destination.  It will be barricaded and locked, and these won’t be flimsy chain-link fences or glass doors like we see above ground.  They’ll all be set into reinforced concrete and made from steel.  The Guide’s lock picks won’t help.  Neither will The Girl’s magnum.”

The Engineer offers, “I saw some oxy-acetylene rigs in the garage.  There are bound to be some cutting tips mixed in with the welding gear.  We could use those to hack through the doors.”

“We should grab some sledgehammers, too, in case we need to demolish something made of concrete.  Chisels, also.  That sort of thing.”  Chief fingers the bristles of his five o’clock shadow.  “Since we have nothing but time, it won’t be too much trouble.  I’m more concerned about the bugs.  Who knows where they go to roost during the day?  Maybe they like those dark, confined places best of all.”

“Maybe,” I hedge, “but I suspect not.  We won’t get inside easily.  Dumb animals won’t get in, at all.”

“What about the spaceman?”  This from The Guide, speaking softly for all his distraction, his busy eyes as ever fixed on his camera displays.  “If those guys wanted in, you can bet they got in.  Years ago.”

“Undoubtedly.  So, we’ll go armed,” I conclude, re-folding the foil and handing it over to The Girl for storage in her bottomless luggage.  “If worse comes to worst, it will simply be a short vacation.  At best, we’ll get some answers.”

“Yeah,” grunts The Engineer, pushing away from the desk, “even if the only answer is that this ain’t the place to look.”

After collecting the requisite gear and driving to the select location, we gather before the bumper of the truck, confronting the small, non-descript, single-story building that is our destination.  It resides at the end of a sandy one-lane road that at first appears to be pressed into the pebbly soil.  Our exploration ultimately reveals its construction in concrete, which has been poured, textured and painted to resemble the desert medium while remaining resilient enough to support heavy traffic.  Indeed, on closer examination, we determine that the building is, in fact, not a single story, at all.  Rather, it has been cleverly sunken into the desert at the end of a descending apron.  Standing at its base, we see it is actually as tall as many of the hangars behind us.  Further, while the structure’s façade reveals a single pair of doors embedded in the far right side of the building’s frame, we quickly determine that the remaining face of the building can slide wide in collapsible panels to allow something huge to pass in or out of it.

Additionally, the security barricades approaching the building are of increasingly resistant construction.  First, we use a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters to hack through a chain spanning a fence gate.  Second, we use the torch to slice open a padlocked cable stretched across the roadway just inside the gate.  Next, we must use the torch to cut through a carbide steel deadbolt sealing one of the facade doors, and we find this to be an especially difficult undertaking, since the lock is inset into an equally durable butt plate.  Ultimately, we must resort to cutting around the door’s hinges so we can pry it out of the frame backwards using a stout crowbar.

Inside, foot traffic once passed through a narrow corridor caged in steel plate and a series of manned and unmanned security checkpoints associated with increasingly prohibitive control features, which elicits a collective groan from our little troupe.  As we debate the most efficient way to cut through it all, Engineer sparks the torch and begins burning through the wall in a low arc that, when finished, resembles nothing so much as a mouse hole.  With the aid of the crowbar and sledgehammers, we punch our way through into the dark cavern of the hangar, itself.

Shining our flashlights around cautiously, we first make certain the echoing volume is free of alien bugs.  To our disappointment, we also determine it is also quite empty of anything else that might inform us.  Signs point to fire extinguishers, secured one-way exits and other safety features, but nothing obvious tells us how they used the interior or why.  In fact, only the structure, itself, informs us.

Rather than terminate at the rear wall, the gradual descent of the apron continues on an even grade through the massive front door.  Outside, the building’s architects employed the ramp to conceal the true height and utility of the building, itself, while inside the plunging floor appears to have served the same practical purpose.

The Engineer whistles softly, shining the beam of his powerful light from left to right, top to bottom to fully encompass the width and height of the corridor.  “They could have moved the Hindenburg through here with room to spare.”

“Hindenburg?” mumbles The Kid.  “What’s that?”

“A huge airship from a hundred years ago,” I reply.  “It was the floating equivalent of the Titanic.”

“Yeah,” breathes Chief appreciatively, “and they both met similar fates.”

“What the hell did they haul through here, do you think?”  The Engineer motions for us to temporarily abandon our heavy gear, and then he starts down the ramp, his footsteps tapping with a staccato rhythm to lead us all behind him.  Answering his own question, he adds, “I don’t think it’s an accident they situated it alongside the runways.  It also might have something to do with the extraordinary length of the strip crossing the Lake.  To be so long, something fast probably landed there.  Something not necessarily designed for aerial flight.”

“Why do you say that?” I ask.

He shrugs, though his form is scarcely visible for the shadows and low light.  “Aircraft like jets and prop planes need wings to maneuver through the atmosphere, but spacecraft don’t.  At the same time they provide lift, however, wings also add drag to the structure.  I’m not an aeronautical engineer, of course, but it seems to me a transatmospheric, reusable vehicle of some kind would benefit from reduced flight control surfaces, making it faster going up but more difficult to maneuver while coming down.  Hence, the need for a longer landing run.  Judging from your foil map, I’m guessing the tarmac crossing that saltpan is two or three times longer than required by a jumbo passenger jet.”

Following The Engineer, we descend beneath ground level.  The rear wall of the hangar passes overhead.

I ask, “Couldn’t it also be necessary for something very large?  Something that is simply many times bigger than a jumbo jet?”

“You mean something big enough to need a building like this one?”  From our suddenly reserved Guide.

Engineer nods.  “Big, maybe.  Or heavy.  Very heavy.”

Chief grunts, “Or both.”

“It’s a funny thing, too,” continues Engineer as he walks down the ramp, ogling the extreme engineering supporting the structure from its sides and top.  These features are visible only at the extreme verge of our light beams, and we cannot see to the end of the tunnel in front of us.

When he stops talking, overwhelmed by his awe for this extreme example of civil engineering, I prompt, “What?  What’s funny?”

He shakes his head to clear it and re-center his thoughts.  “The roadway leading to this facility.  At first glance, it looks like a one-lane dirt road.  In reality, it’s eight lanes of concrete, probably double-thick and heavily reinforced, covered over with a painted, textured surface to look like a one-lane gravel track.  They went to a lot of trouble to conceal this space.  It’s a hidden spot within a hidden spot.  Why?”

“Yeah,” muses our Asian comrade, his pinched voice suspicious and sly, as though he has for the first time begun pondering a rather nasty thought, “what’s waiting for us down there?  And do we really want to find it?”

“Who cares?” groans Chief.  “If we do find something and it ends us, then at least we’ll go knowing what happened.  Maybe why.  That’s more than billions got during Terminus.”

“Right,” confirms The Engineer.  “We push on.  Go for broke.”

For the first time, I realize we are speaking in whispers.  The oppressive darkness and overbearing construction has buried us deep.  We speak in the hushed tones deserving of a tomb.  I wish I could hope to survive it, but I don’t.  Since we found the spaceman and the map, I don’t care much for anything except learning, if I can, why I did what I did.  Should I find the time or opportunity, of course, I would like to get some payback.  Otherwise, I can’t find the interest or temperament to care what happens after.

We walk in silence from there.  The tunnel is long.  And deep.  We descend continually until I determine we might be forty meters underground.

At this point, perhaps a kilometer further into the saltpan overhead and situated where the ramp levels again, we encounter the first obstruction in the passageway.  This is a massive pair of rolling doors designed to stack vertically in panels and then fit into spaces recessed to either side of the corridor.  It remains open at the center, a gap of perhaps half a panel.  Wide enough to pass a bus.  Maybe two.  We collect to one side of it like ants crawling through a pantry, shining our lights into the gloom.

The Engineer is the first to gasp.  He plays his light up, up, up.  The spacecraft is huge.  American.  Alien.  Both.  English markings.  Otherworldly markings.  U.S. technology.  Technology from another, infinitely more advanced era and place.

“Son of a bitch,” growls Chief.  “It’s true.  All true.”

“What?” asks The Guide softly, awestruck by the sheer size and bulk of the craft resting on bulging tires before us.

“The so-called conspiracy theories.  They say we’ve been reverse engineering captured flying saucers here for decades.  Nobody believed.  Everybody said they’re just nutjobs and nothing better to do with their time.  This clinches it, though.  If it doesn’t, I don’t know what would!”

From behind, an unexpected voice startles us.  Gruff and vulgar, his tone base and his accent heavy, Russian I think, an unannounced male announces, “Americans don’t know the half of it.”

THE ENTERPRISE

We spin to confront this new perceived threat, our individual weapons ready in one hand and our lights flashing in the other.  We see a stocky man dressed in foreign fatigues standing before a doorway set into the side of the massive corridor behind us, a portal we missed for all our distraction with the towering barricade and its disturbing revelation.  From the Cyrillic text, I confirm my suspicions of the man’s nationality.  The stereotypical Russian soldier, he is broad shouldered and tall with deeply set eyes of slate, a bushy mustache and craggy facial features.  Unarmed save for a pistol strapped to his belt, he greets us with his hands splayed wide, palms facing us, his knees slightly bent.  He blinks in the direct shine of our flashlights and turns his head slightly, but he remains unafraid.

His accent is thick, but his English is nevertheless readily interpretable.  He says, “Be calm.  Be calm.  No threat here.  Not here.”  Then he smiles thinly, “But through there… much danger.  Better to follow me.  Yes?”

Without lowering his guard, Chief growls, “What the hell is a Russian doing down here?”

“Down here?” queries the man with disconcerting joviality.  “Down here?  Everywhere!  It’s no secret.  Not to the rest of the world.  Only you Americans don’t know.  I will tell you.  I will tell you everything, but come!  Follow!  Quickly!”

The stranger backs toward the door and stretches his right behind him to pull it open, motioning with his left for us to follow.  Light pours into the gloom from the opening.  When we hesitate, his jovial expression falls away to be instantly replaced by one of the most menacing and hostile faces I have ever seen, despite Terminus.

Tilting his chin low to regard us through his bushy eyebrows, he hisses, “If you want answers, you don’t have a choice.  No choice at all.  Choose as you please, but I cannot allow you to interfere with this operation.  Not when we have come so far.  Please… come.”

We exchange glances.  We shrug.  We follow.

He pulls the door open for us, nodding and grinning, that happy face returned.  “Good!  Very good!  You make a good choice!”

Inside the pedestrian-sized hallway, our Russian host follows, saying, “Of course, it is not so good that you cut open the doors up top.  Not so good, at all.  By tonight, they will know you are here, but tonight was always going to be too late for them!  Too late by hours!”

“Too late for who?”  Engineer asks the obvious question.

“Oh, come now,” enthuses The Russian, “we know you know.  We saw you using your map.  Technology like that doesn’t come from home.”  He pushes through our small crowd to stand before us, and he points through the ceiling tiles, “It only comes from up there.  Way… way… up there.”  Softly, he claps his hands together, and then he announces, “Still, you are the first to come so far.  Very surprising, really.  Not after Terminus, for sure, but before Terminus, yes.  Most Americans,” he sighs, turning to lead us toward a right angle in the passageway perhaps half a kilometer distant, “they happily, as you say, drank the Kool-Aid.  Have been drinking it for generations.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” from Chief.

“Them!  The bugs!  You saw them last night.  We know this.  They waylaid you on the highway.  We know this, too.  In fact, we Russians know many things you do not.  Americans, they know nothing!”

Before my comrades can intervene to provoke a conflict or muddy the discourse, I ask, “How long?”

Facing away from us, confident we must follow, he shrugs.  “Seventy years?  Since long before your so-called ‘Roswell incident’.  You know it?”

“Of course,” whines The Engineer, “everyone knows that story.”

“Yes.  The whole world knows, and all of us except you Americans know the truth.”

“And that is?”

“You saw that thing parked in the hangar.  That doesn’t help you to guess?”

“It was real?” mumbles The Kid.  “The flying saucer was real?”

The Russian tips his crewcut head, “Real enough.  Except, it was no flying saucer.  That’s part of the myth.  Did the spacecraft you found back home look like a flying teacup?  No.  It looked like the functional spacecraft it was.”

“You also know about our wreck?” wonders Chief.

Another shrug.  “We can guess.  After all, we shot down so many.  Us and the Chinese.  Oh, to be sure, the Indians, Pakistanis and even the Iranians shot down a few, too.  The rest of the world, that part of it in the American camp, including the English… nothing.  Not a round fired.  They drank the Kool-Aid too long ago to betray their bug-eyed overlords.”

“Wait a minute here,” protests Chief.  “You’re saying we were all in cahoots with… them?”

“Yes.  And no.  Not willingly, of course.  Just the same, though.  Yes.”  When we momentarily stop following him, variously stunned, outraged or simply dumbfounded, he turns to placate us with another supplicating gesture.  “Aw… don’t feel bad for yourselves, my American comrades!  It could not be helped!  We know this, and have known it for years!  Please.  Continue.  Just this way, and many questions I will answer.  Please.”

Reluctantly, we push ourselves forward.  Our footsteps echo along the austere, institutional corridor, while our shadows flitter and dance for the uncertain buzz of fluorescent lights.

“What you called the ‘cold war’, in my country we call the ‘war for earth’.  Have you never questioned why your country has been continually gearing for a massive, global conflict since the Great Patriotic War… what you call World War Two?  Think about the technology you have pioneered during the intervening years.  Electron microscopes.  Computers.  Optical communications.  Missiles.  Spaceflight.  Teflon.”  The Russian laughs heartily, “You think human beings really went from horse-drawn carriages to your Space Shuttle in eighty years without help?  Lots of help!  Lots of alien help!”

“But… but… why?” stammers The Engineer.

The Russian shrugs and continues marching along without hesitation.  “Why not?  When I was a boy, I used to ask my father the same endless question.  Why?  Why?  Why?  He was a good man.  He answered as many times as his nerves could stand.  Then he simply replied, because.  Because.  Because.  When he came to that point, I knew the conversation had ended.  I had exhausted his supply of answers.  To your question, then, my answer must be simply, because.  Because they can do it?  Because they want to do it?  Because they must do it?  You choose.”

I ask, “And the rest of the world?”

Another shrug.  “For some reason we cannot comprehend, they chose this country.  Your people.  The bugs made first contact in 1929.  Are you familiar with that year?  You should be.”

“The stock market crashed.  It was the beginning of the Great Depression.”

“Good!  Very good!  At first, your government engaged the cover-up to prevent that sort of thing from happening over and over again as they encountered more and more of the spacecraft with their not-so-little green men.”  Before him, that bend in the corridor approaches with each staccato footstep, “You all probably believe we fought The Great Patriotic War to stop nationalist aspirations.  The Nazis.  The Tojos.  Not true.  These were the first global attempts to respond to your one-sided acquisition of alien technology.  The rest of the world’s nations attempted to band together to create a unified front to oppose the alien influence growing from your country.  Obviously, they failed.  Sort of.  Only the Communist east resisted, perhaps only because we were so isolated and backwards then, the Chinese and we Soviets.  We drank the Kool-Aid, too.  For a while.  Then we learned the truth during the war.  Stalin was a bloodthirsty bastard, but he was clever, too.  He saved us.”

“Yeah, right,” grunts Chief, “he saved your people by shuffling millions of you into his gulags and shooting millions more in the backs of their heads!”

“So,” enthuses our newfound Russian friend, “you know the history lessons.  Brainwashing!  All of it!  Please, take no offense, big man.  You can’t help yourself.  It’s all you know.  The truth is more complicated.  True, he murdered millions and imprisoned millions more.  And for the same reasons you know.  He suspected them of western influence.  Of course, now you begin to realize he wasn’t simply referring to capitalist influences.  Rather, he suspected them of alien corruptions.  Those he suspected of being fully compromised, he promptly executed.  The rest, he held until he could prove or disprove his suspicions.  Since this has never been an easy prospect, however, many of them died before their time came.  Oh, well.  Such is life.  It is a hard thing, because it is a hard war.  Aren’t they all?”

“I got you there,” grouses Chief.  “You say all our technology is reverse-engineered from alien artifacts?  Yeah, well… you people use that same technology!  You were once on your way to the moon, and you tried to build your own space shuttle.  It was almost a direct copy of ours!”

“Ah, the Buran.  Right.”  The Russian chuckles, “What a joke!  Please understand, my friends.  Your version of the truth is not all lies.  Most of it is, in fact, the truth.  The real truth.  They changed just enough of it to keep you all in line.  Not all of it.  Sure, Stalin built an effective intelligence apparatus that infiltrated your so-called industrial military complex from the start, even before the 1929 contact.  This is how we got the A-Bomb.  The Hydrogen Bomb.  The Neutron Bomb.  And much more.  Including the Buran.  After all, we had to survive.  Somehow.”  Here, he raises his hands, palms upward, without turning around.  “How could we hope to fight what you saw back there with steam engines and bolt-action rifles?”

“Wait just a minute, here,” complains The Engineer.  When he stops, we all stop and turn to face him, The Russian, too.  “You claim you stole their technology through your networks of spies in the same breath that you use to tell us the rest of the world has remained alien-free?  That doesn’t make sense!”

“Ah, you are upset.  Understandable!  Completely understandable.”  The Russian’s gruff features soften.  “I cannot blame you for putting words onto my tongue, as you say, but do try to keep up, if you can.  Time is short.  By now, Post-Terminus, you must at least believe something is not right with the world.  This is apparent, even to Americans.  Use that known event as a stepping-stone along the pathway to the truth.  The real truth.  And get there as quickly as you can.”

I concur, “He’s right, of course.  After Terminus, we should doubt less and listen more, I think.”

“Nothing can be worse than what we’ve already seen…,” mumbles The Kid, his eyes blinking harshly, “…than what we’ve done.”

“When you say the rest of the world has remained alien-free, you are wrong.  Everywhere you Americans are successful, you bring them with you.  Consider what you know of the world.  According to your own history books, the entire planet is aligned in two camps.  You, and the rest of us.  My country.  China.  Iran.  Pakistan.  All the countries I mentioned earlier have long resisted American domination of the world.  Your country always taught you this resistance stemmed from economic, political, and theological differences.  Now you know better.  Sure, we human beings rarely agree on everything, but I think we might have all agreed we would be better off as Earthmen, rather than slaves to bugs.

“Here, again, you forced words onto my tongue.  You make the mistake of assuming your country is in… as you called it, cahoots?  Cahoots with the aliens.  Not so.  You never had a choice.  Not really.  As an example, one of many, recall your Joseph Kennedy.  He favored the Nazis, at least at first.  Why?  His oldest son and namesake, a man who assuredly would have been one of your presidents, died in a mysterious explosion during a training exercise during The Great Patriotic War.  His next heir apparent, assassinated.  And the one after that.  Truth be told, by the time the baton rolled down to Teddy, he didn’t want it.  He lacked the resolve of his older siblings, or perhaps he was smarter.  All of these things are connected.  That connection is a familial understanding of the truth, and an unstated intention to resist it.  They were not sufficiently cautious, however.  They spoke one too many times to one too many untrustworthy associates.

“No, your government was never in ‘cahoots’ with the bugs.  Not directly.  Sure, certain aspects of it, certain individuals and agencies of it, knew and complied, but the vast majority simply believe the same way you all believe and for the same reasons.

“In fact, we think the bugs don’t really care one way or another.”  When we remain unconvinced, The Russian sucks his tongue for a moment, clearly struggling for an apt analogy.  Then he tries, “Think of it this way.  How do you feel about cockroaches?  Hmm?  You are not overly concerned for them, but you don’t want them in the house, if you can help it.  You interact with them only to the extent that you must do so to avoid unpleasantness, and not because you fear them or you need them.”

“If we’re cockroaches, why pass advanced technology to us?”  I ask not because I doubt, but simply because I want to know.

“Advanced technology,” scoffs The Russian.  “While we don’t know which star the bugs call home, we do know a few things about the cosmos.  For example, the nearest star to Earth is a binary system called Centauri.  Those two stars are approximately four and a half light years away.  Via standard rocket power, travel there would require several thousand years.  Using theoretical propulsion systems drawn from our most realistic science fiction scenarios, the voyage would require decades, at the least.  Centuries, more likely.  How has our development of Teflon helped?”