The Stickmen (26 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

THIS IS AN AIR FORCE SECURITY SERVICE

SECURITY PERIMETER

ONLY CLEARED AIR FORCE PERSONNEL MAY
PROCEED

PAST THIS POINT, BY ORDER OF AFR 200-2

In the smeary red backup light, Danny read
the bold words on the warning sign at the bottom of the ramp, but
he thought little of it. It didn’t matter. After tonight, what good
would words be to him? Unless there was heaven.

Danny hoped so.

It was obvious that no one had entered this
place for a long time. Cobwebs festooned the metal walls, and he
could see heavy streaks of rust breaking out from blisters of
powder-blue paint. Danny could actually
smell
the rust down
here.

But…

Where do I go now?
he asked
himself.

Now that he’d come all the way down the
ramp, it was just a small metal-walled room that he stood in, dark
in the weird red light. Just four walls, no doors. He knew,
however, that this wasn’t the place where he was supposed to set
off the bomb.

He knew because the Stickmen had told
him.

That’s when he noticed the small glass panel
on one of the walls. He had to stand on his tip-toes to open the
panel, and then he had to squint through the red light to read.

MAIN POWER, read a tiny plaque inside. And
just below the plaque was a handle.

Danny stretched his arm up and pulled down
on the handle. He grunted, gritting his teeth, but the handle
wouldn’t budge; it was probably locked up with rust. For a few
seconds, Danny felt frantic but then he nearly laughed at
himself.

He reached up with his
other
hand—the
hand with the glove on it—and pulled down on the handle again. The
rust in the handle’s slot, hard as cement, ground and broke, then
the handle
thunked
to the bottom.

Bright white lights snapped on, filling the
small metal room. Danny flinched, shielded his eyes. Now the floor
seemed to hum, and he could hear distant clicks and snaps and sharp
noises below him, underground. Now, with the lights blazing, Danny
easily spotted the circular red button on the wall opposite.

Danny pressed the button, and then came a
loud CLACK!, then a steady groaning sound like a motor running.

Wow…

The metal-walled room was a room at all, not
really. It was an elevator.

The entire “room” began to
lower
.

As the top-edges of the walls separated from
the ceiling, Danny could see wheels turning and long fat cables
extending. The squeaky hum follow him down for what must have been
fifty feet, while the floor jiggled. Then another, louder,
thunk.

The floor shuddered to a halt. Flecks of
rust drifted down, dusting Danny’s head in its red-black grit.

Here,
Danny thought.

Deep.

He stepped off the elevator platform into
another room of blue-painted metal walls infected by outbreaks of
rust. More bright white lights blared. He set the ADM case down and
approached a very large white door that had sections and hinges
like the garage door back at his house.

Stenciled lettered in black paint read:

AREA NOVEMBER

(POST PLAT: 413, GRID: 66-798)

DEPOT 12

UNAUTHORIZED ENTRANCE PUNISHABLE BY
DEATH

Another rubber-tipped handle stuck out of a
slot in the wall. Danny yanked it down.

More humming and clanging. More rust sifted
out from overhead.

As the big hinged door began to rise.

Eventually the door’s slatted sections were
reeled overhead, leaving a wide open doorway before him, beyond
which more white spotlights beamed down. Danny picked the ADM back
up and walked forward into a another room, this one formed of not
painted metal walls but painted slab concrete.

This was the vault, Danny knew.

This was the depot.

The depot itself looked about as large as
the multi-purpose room back at school. Every step he took forward
echoed loudly around his head; Danny thought of the night-birds
outside, and the bats. It seemed to take a long time to walk to the
center of the depot.

And it seemed to be an awful lot of space
for just this.

The depot vault was big enough to house at
least a hundred cars, but all that sat in the middle of it were
three long, thin wooden crates lying next to each other.

The crates looked weird: eight or nine feet
long and only maybe a foot and a half wide. There was a part of
Danny’s psyche that couldn’t imagine what the crates contained.

But there was another part of Danny’s psyche
that knew exactly what the crates were.

Each crate had a stenciled label:

THESE CONTAINERS ARE THE

PROPERTY OF THE U.S. AIR FORCE MATERIALS
COMMAND

DO NOT TOUCH!

THIS MATERIAL IS BOOBY-TRAPPED!

UNAUTHORIZED OPENING OF THESE CONTAINERS

WILL RESULT IN A FATAL EXPLOSION

Again, Danny
knew
even though he
didn’t. The Stickmen had told him in his mind. This was just a
trick to scare people away.

I know,
he thought. Just like he knew
his own address.

Danny knew that the long wooden crates
weren’t really booby-trapped. And somehow he knew more. He knew
that someone from a long time ago had hidden these crates here—and
old bald man who was dead now—and that this man had put the phony
booby-trap warning on the crates on purpose.

The Stickmen had told him that.

Besides, he didn’t really need to open the
crates anyway.

I just need to blow them up with this
bomb,
he reminded himself.

Danny knelt at the ADM, and removed some
things from a canvas sack attached to it. He looked closely at the
things close inside the sack: a roll of tan-colored wire, a small
box with a clock on it, and a smaller box with square protruding
button.

He didn’t know what any of these things
were.

Then he opened a small book with a
light-yellow paper cover. The book was pretty fat. The cover
read:

FIELD OPERATING INSTRUCTIONS FOR

THE M129 (S-)A-D-M AND W-54 WARHEAD
ASSEMBLY

TECH LEVEL: MOS-12E50

FM: 233-24-65

Next, Danny turned open the cover, found a
heading in the Table Of Contents, and found a heading called
Primary Assembly.

It read:

EMERGENCY DETONATION PROCEDURES

1) Connect lead #1 (fig. 1) to DETCORD line
(fig. 2) to timer (fig. 3).

2) Connect lead #2 to M34 firing device
(fig. 4)

3) Unshunt one military (non-electric)
blasting cap (fig. 5) and fix to end of lead #1.

4) Insert blasting cap into ADM capwell as
marked.

Danny opened the ADM’s heavy black transport
case, and removed the heavy, block-like mechanism. It was covered
in an odd dark-green plastic with ridges. As best he could, he
followed all of the instructions he’d just read in the manual, then
looked back at the page.

5) Open safety cover of M34 firing device,
and switch safety toggle to OFF position.

6) Reclose safety cover and depress.

Danny hoped he was doing it all right, and
he had a pretty good feeling that he was. He followed the
instructions to the letter, using a diagram on the facing page as a
guide. Then he checked and rechecked and triple-checked.

It all looked right.

There,
he thought.
I think it’s
ready…

He picked up the little plastic box that was
the M34 firing device; he held in neatly in his hand. His thumb
slid over the safety cover.

All he needed to do was push down.

He wondered if he’d heard the explosion.

He wondered if he’d live long enough to even
hear a click.

But he did know one thing: he wouldn’t feel
anything when he died. It would all happen too fast.

“Bye, Mom. Bye’, Dad,” he said, blinking
tears out of his eyes.

I hope…I hope there really is a heaven…

Danny shut his eyes, squeezed them tight,
then began to press down on the plastic safety cover, until—

“Wait a second, Danny,” a man’s voice called
out.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Jesus Christ! I’m a writer, not a fuckin’
gymnast!
Garrett had thought as he’d cautiously repelled down
age-old elevator cables. His shirt was ruined, his $300 Italian
slacks ruined, his hands black with cable grease.

He didn’t know how he’d gotten here…but on
the other hand, he did.

He remembered being at the Vander house,
Danny’s butchered parents in the upstairs bedroom, and Sanders.

Oh, man…

He remembered killing Sanders.

Garrett didn’t know if it was right to feel
good about killing someone, even someone as corrupt, cold-blooded,
and simply as
evil
as Sanders. It probably
wasn’t
right, but…

Garrett felt good about it anyway.

Then he’d strayed around a bit, feeling
absolutely useless—even feeling guilty because Danny would die when
he set off the ADM, and there was nothing Garrett could do because
he didn’t know where Area November was, nor Depot 12.

And, more particularly, he remembered
damning
these foreign lifeforms for using an innocent kid to
do their dirty work. He remembered
hating
them for it.

Abducting and brain-washing a little kid for
their own devices….

Then—

He remembered more: the basement. He
wandered down to the basement, discovered the place where Danny had
hidden the bomb, then discovered the boy’s sketches.

But before he’d had time to leave, he’d
collapsed to the cold basement floor.

He imagined the worst tequila hangover he’d
ever had in his life, then increased that discomfort tenfold.
That’s what the headache had felt like.

It had struck him so suddenly that the
little rationale he had left suspected that all the booze, junk
food, and cigarettes had finally caught up to him, in Danny
Vander’s basement, of all places.

Garrett suspected that the Golden Hour had
arrived, by way of an aneurism or catastrophic stroke. When he’d
passed out from the eruption of pain, he actually expected to
die.

He expected to never wake up.

But he did.

He’d regained consciousness in a blurred,
glowing dream.
A trance-channel,
he knew at once, even
though he’d never before experienced such a thing. Reports of this
same phenomenon accompanied certain types of abduction reports the
same way meeting dead relatives accompanied near-death experiences.
Garrett’s own research community was well-versed with such reports.
A complex mode of telepathic thought- and image-conveyance, a crude
joining of minds that transcended language.

Garrett knew that’s what had happened.

The
things
 had touched his
spirit. They answered his questions when he’d desperately needed
the answers.

And they’d told him, in their own way, how
to find Depot 12.

He recalled little else of the experience,
almost no detail. Just nebulous colors and metallic scents. Words
appeared in his head that weren’t really words. And for a
moment—the most irreducible fraction of a moment—he saw them.

Figures tall and thin, skeletons scarcely
covered with flesh at all.

Narrow, post-like heads…

Hands with but two fingers each…

And that had been the end of it. Garrett had
awakened on the basement floor, knowing exactly what to do and
where to go.

And now…he was here.

With difficulty, he twisted his body up and
over the top edge of the elevator wall, smeared with gritty grease,
and dropped down to the platform’s steel floor. Beyond the
elevator’s open entry, he saw—

Holy shit!

—the vast empty depot, the three weirdly
narrow crates, and Danny Vander kneeling stoically under the harsh
spotlights mounted overhead.

Danny had assembled the ADM, and it looked
like he was about to—

“Wait a second, Danny!” Garrett called
out.

The boy’s wan face jerked toward Garrett,
eyes wide, terrified, but also keenly defensive.

Danny had the small plastic firing device in
his hand. Garret knew the consequences.
All the kid has to do is
press down on that switch until it clicks…and the show’s
over…

Garrett held up his hand. “Danny? Listen to
me for a second.”

“Who are you!” the boy wailed. “I don’t know
you! What are you doing here! No one knows about this except
me!”

“I know too, Danny,” Garrett said
softly.

Danny’s face strained, tears streaking his
cheeks. His thumb rested firmly on the firing switch. “You’re one
of the people against the Stickmen! You’re like that man at my
house who killed my parents!”

“No I’m
NOT!
” Garrett yelled
back.

“You want to stop me from blowing this
up!”

“That’s not true, Danny,” Garrett said,
trying to settle down. It was hard to settle down when one was a
half-second away from an instantaneous multi-million degree atomic
fireball. “I
want
you to blow it up, Danny. I know that you
have to do it. I want you to set that bomb off.”

Danny blinked, frozen. “You-you do?”

“That’s right, Danny. I was sent here to
make sure that you did. It’s very important, and you and I both
know that.”

Danny gulped, blinked again. “How did you
get here? Know one know about this place but me.”

“The aliens told me, Danny,” Garret said.
Then he thought:
What did he call them? The—
“The Stickmen
told me. They told me where you were.”

The boy’s paused lengthened. Then: “I don’t
believe you! The Stickmen only talk to me! I’m pushing the button
now!”