The Grays Read online

  You communicated with Bob and Adam via thought—or rather, Eamon, who was the only person they’d ever found who could manage it, communicated with them.

  Somehow, the man used his mind to exchange pictures with them. It was a very strange business, and nobody was sure if it was even really working, but it was all they had, and some of the technological information Eamon had gotten from the creatures was making valuable scientific sense, so there had to be something in it.

  But they could not find out what the grays did with people. It was awful, though, that was certain. Awful and it came from the sky and the Air Force couldn’t do a damn thing about it. So it was secret, and would remain secret.

  He groaned, turned over, waited miserably for the pill to work.

  IN THE SILVER VEHICLE, THE children struggled, twisting and turning in their captivity. Dan saw something white. He looked at it, trying to resolve its meaning in the haze that still obscured his vision. It was very dark, but he could still see this thing. It dangled as if it was hanging on a clothesline, and he thought it might be a big sheet, wet, because it was dripping, the drops pinging on metal somewhere below.

  It was a very strange sort of a sheet, though, because it had a kind of face, a mouth gaping like that of a big lake bass, with two distorted black sockets above it. Were they eye sockets? He thought they must be, because there was also a darkness above them that looked like it might be hair. Then he saw a curliness to it, and a lightness and he knew that it was blond hair—and he had seen blond hair on Katelyn when she lit the match.

  He tried to say her name, but there was only a gusty whisper. He wanted his mother, he wanted his dad, he wanted Uncle Frank, who was damn tough, to come up here and help them!

  Drip, drip, drip.

  Then he saw that there was another one, and it had short brown hair and its face was all wobbled like a mirror in the Crazy House at Madison Playland.

  When he stared at it, though, he knew: it was his skin. But if it was up there and he was down here, then—

  His stomach churned, his heart began raging in his chest, and his throat became so dry it felt as if it had been stuffed with ashes. He wanted to scream, he wanted to beg God for help, but he couldn’t make a sound.

  Off in the dark, a buzzing sound started. The things in the dark were coming. He looked, but he knew he would not see them, he never had.

  Then his skin flew up and out, and spread like a huge cloud above him, a cloud with a gaping mouth and holes for eyes, and it came down on him as gently as dew falls when you are camping under the stars, and enclosed him in the deepest warmth he had ever felt in his life.

  He uttered a long, delicious groan of raw human pleasure and profound relief. Beside him, Katelyn groaned, too, and he knew that she had, as well, been covered once again in her own skin.

  Instantly, without them going out through a door or anything, the silver ship was rushing away overhead, turning into a dot. Wind screamed around them, their hair blew, and Dan thought they’d been pushed out and were going to die in the lake.

  Below, Mr. Ehmers saw beams of light playing out of the summer clouds. “What the hell,” he said. Then Frank said, “Ho, got a strike goin’ here.” They brought up another bass.

  DAN WOKE UP SCREAMING. HE was upside down and the covers were all over the room. He got out of bed, immediately felt incredibly thirsty, and went into the bathroom and drank and drank. His mother heard him and came in behind him. “You okay, Dan?”

  Then he cried, clutching her with all his might, burying his face in her nightgown that smelled of cigarettes and gin.

  “Hey, hey there—”

  “Mom, I had a dream. It was real bad, Mom.”

  She went into his room with him and sat at his bedside.

  “It was these Indians, they got us, and they skinned us alive.”

  “Skinned who alive?”

  “Me! Me and—her. I don’t know. Me and this girl.”

  A cool hand touched his forehead. “You dreamed you were naked with a girl, and that’s a little scary, isn’t it?”

  “The stars,” he said, “the stars . . .” But what about the stars he could not recall. He closed his eyes, and his mother’s hand on his brow comforted him, but deep inside him, down where screams begin, there was a part of him that remembered every terrible moment, and would never forget.

  His mother, drunk though she was, sad though she was, sat a while longer with her child, then went back down to the kitchen and resumed her mechanical and relentless assault on a bottle of cheap gin.

  Katelyn found herself on the floor naked and covered with sweat. Not understanding how she had gotten there, she scrambled to her feet—and found that she was afraid to look in the mirror—terribly, agonizingly afraid. She stood, her head bowed, holding onto the sink and crying bitter, bitter tears.

  Her mind could not seem to make sense of what had just happened. Why was she naked? What was she doing on the floor? Who was that boy, and why did she remember a boy at all?

  She returned to her room, found her nightgown, and put it on. She went to her window seat and sat down, and watched the moon ride low over the lake, and smelled honeysuckle on the air.

  Then she was sick, and ran into the bathroom and threw up. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and finally saw in the mirror her own haggard face. As if she was seeing a miracle, she touched the glass. Tears beaded in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She went to her bed, then, and lay down, and slept the dismal and uneasy sleep of a captured soul.

  TWO

  ON A SOUR OCTOBER FORENOON in 2003, Lieutenant Lauren Glass watched her father’s coffin being lowered. She was now alone, given that her mother had abandoned them when she was twelve, returned to Scotland, and no longer communicated.

  Also at the graveside were four men, none of whom she knew. They were, she assumed, members of whatever unit he was involved in. She did not know its name, what it did, or anything about it at all.

  The wind worried the flowers she had brought, the chaplain completed his prayers, and she threw a clod of earth and said inside herself, You will not, you will not and then she cried.

  He had died on duty, somehow. She had not been told how, she had not been allowed to see his body. The coffin was sealed with federal seals warning that it was a crime to open it. Lead solder filled the crack beneath its lid. She had wanted to at least be alone with it for a short while, but not even that had been allowed. There had been no obituary, nothing to mark all he had done in this world, what she believed must have been a heroic life.

  She had been given a five-thousand-dollar death benefit, and he had been listed as killed in action.

  Killed how? In what action? He’d left home as usual that morning, then driven to his work, she assumed. They lived on Wright-Pat in Dayton, but he commuted to Indianapolis on the days he worked, which were sporadic.

  As the ceremony concluded, to her amazement a missing-man formation flew overhead, wheeling majestically away toward the gray horizon. Then, down at the end of the field, an honor guard she had no idea would be there fired twenty-one times. The highest salute. Taps were sounded.

  He was being buried with the highest of honors, and she felt bitter because she did not know why.

  The four men were walking away from the grave when she caught up with them. “Can you tell me anything?”

  Nobody answered.

  “Please, I’m his daughter. Tell me, at least, did he suffer?”

  One of the men, tall, so blond that he might have been albino, dropped back. “Should I say no?”

  “You know how he died?”

  “I know, Lauren.”

  He knew her name. But who was this man in his superbly tailored civilian suit, as gray as the autumn clouds, with his dusting of white hair and his eyes so pale that they were almost white as well?

  “Who are you? Can you tell me what my dad did?”

  “I want you to come to an office. Can you do that?”

  “Now? Is
this an order?”

  “I’m so sorry. Are you up to it?”

  This walk across this graveyard was the saddest thing she had ever done. She did not understand grief, it was a new landscape for her. Could you go to an office in grief? Talk there in grief? In grief, could you learn secrets? “I want to be at home,” she said.

  He gave her an address on base. “You think about it, and I want you to bear in mind that we wouldn’t be asking this if—”

  “I know it’s urgent. Obviously it’s urgent.”

  “I’m Lewis Crew,” he said. “If you don’t mind, please do not mention the appointment to anybody, or my name.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Will you tell me what happened to my dad?”

  He gave her a long look, long enough to be disquieting. He was evaluating her. But why? She had no clearance, she was a lowly procurement officer, she had not cared to follow her dad into Air Force Intelligence.

  “Will you?” she asked again.

  “I’m so sorry to have to ask you to come in on a day like this.”

  “So am I.” She walked away from him then, passing among the neat lines of identical military graves into which the Air Force had poured so many lives, in so many steel coffins, most of them too young, too innocent, too good to die the sorts of improbable and terrible deaths the Air Force had to offer.

  It was duty that had taken them. Duty, always, her dad’s breath and blood. “The oath, Lauren, never forget the oath. It might take you to your death, and if it does, that’s where you have to go.”

  She’d thought, If some stupid president sends me to some dumb country where we shouldn’t even be, is it my duty to die there?

  She’d known the answer.

  Had Dad died a useless death? She hoped not, she hoped that the missing-man formation was more than just a passing honor.

  Her life with her dad had not been perfect. Eamon Glass could be demanding, and he had not been happy with the way her career was unfolding. “You need to push yourself, Lauren, Air-Force style. Be ready when it matters, be willing when it counts.”

  Boy, was he out of it. He was part of another Air Force, as far as she was concerned. In her Air Force, the main issues were things like padded bills and missing laptops, not duty and dying amid huts and palm trees.

  “Who were you, Dad? Why did this happen?”

  Dad had nightmares. God, did he have nightmares, screaming cyclones of terror from which he could not awaken. And you couldn’t get near him. He’d belt you and then in the morning be so upset by what he had done that he’d be in a funk for days.

  Often, he would ask if he’d said anything in his sleep. It worried him, obviously, worried him a lot.

  She’d listened for some meaning in the screams, but never found any.

  She got in her car and started it, eager for the heater to drive out the deep Canadian cold that was sweeping down the vast plains from the north, shivering the naked trees and the stubble-filled fields.

  She drove home across the great, gray base to their apartment. She stood in the living room thinking how anonymous it all seemed, the inevitable landscape on the wall, the not-too-challenging books on the shelves, the oldish TV. And his chair, big and comfortable, and beside it the magazine rack filled with Time and the National Review and National Geographic.

  All so ordinary, and yet so filled with him that every step deeper into the place was a step through more memory and greater loneliness.

  She made coffee, and was drinking it when she realized that it was Dad’s mug in her hand. That did it: she cried again. These, she knew, were the anguished tears of the bereaved, that belong both to grief and defeat.

  She had a last confession of love that must remain frozen in her forever. Most importantly, there was the conversation that had been their life together, that could never now be brought to rest.

  A whole career, and there had only been five people at his funeral. But it hadn’t been announced in any way. So his unit was not large, obviously. A colonel, looked about fifty, with the name tag Wilkes. A younger one, Lieutenant Colonel Langford. Maybe thirty-eight. Then a civilian, dumpy, wearing an ill-fitting suit. He’d cried, the civilian had, silent tears that he had flicked away as if they had been gnats landing on his face. And then Mr. Crew, tall, no way to tell the age, looking a little like the Swedish actor Max von Sydow. Great suit, and those eyes. White-gray. Unique.

  Dad’s people. His coworkers. She shook her head, considering the little collection of silent men.

  She went into her bedroom and lay down, closing her eyes and contemplating what the voyage of her life would be like now.

  Dad had had one of those stealth tempers that would boil up out of nowhere and, for a few minutes, rock the world. He had been bitter about never making general. “It’s the damn work I do, nobody else can do it and it’s not a general’s job.” He had hated it and loved it. He would drink at the kitchen table, lifting shots of vodka, and then he would be poetic, which was beautiful and awesome and scary, because he had such a huge memory for quotations, and because when he was like that, being with him was like looking into the darkest room in the world.

  “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” she could hear him reciting, “I all alone beweep my outcast state . . .” and then looking at her and adding, “pardon my bathos.”

  “Oh, hell,” she said, “I’m going to miss you! I am going to miss you!”

  How could he be dead? How in God’s name do you get KIAed in Indianapolis?

  Well, hell. As far as he was concerned, the day she received her commission, she had been on her way to general. He would manage her career. “You can’t fly combat, so you need to get on a hot staff.”

  He had stared at her orders to report to the supplies depot for a long time. Stood there and stared, so still she thought he might have gone to sleep on his feet. He put them down far too carefully, on the back of the couch. Then he had marched off into his office. She’d heard him yelling, and gone to his door, which was not right, she knew, but she was involved, for God’s sake. She’d only heard one thing, but it had been repeated a number of times, “put her on ice.” And he’d cursed the person at the other end of the line with a venom that was far beyond his worst tantrums, that had frightened her because it had implied that the hidden thing in his life somehow also involved her.

  Thinking back, she closed her eyes for a moment. Fortune and men’s eyes . . .

  There had also been another thing between her and Dad, that would come at moments of silence and his strange sorrow, a kind of bond that would seem to enter the air between them, almost as if they could somehow link their minds. Or so she imagined.

  The phone rang. She looked at the incoming number. Base call. Could it be the guy from Dad’s funeral? Could he actually be pressing her this hard, on this day? She didn’t believe it.

  “Hello?”

  “Lieutenant—”

  “Look, mister, are you somewhere in the chain of command, because if you aren’t, very frankly, I am here trying to deal with the death of my father and really my only friend, and I am just not doing this.”

  There was a silence. It extended. “I am in the chain of command,” he said at last. “My orders are legal.”

  Could this be real? Could this guy really, actually be on the phone pushing her around like this now?

  “I’d like to do this tomorrow.”

  “You have your orders, Lieutenant.”

  She hung up the phone and wanted, very badly, to do something hurtful to this man. But that was military life, wasn’t it? You weren’t here to grieve.

  She reported to an impressive but sterile office suite that had all the anonymous earmarks of being some kind of official visitor’s lair. She was called in immediately.

  With Mr. Crew was the younger of the two colonels, Langford. She was just as glad—the older one had exuded something that had made her uneasy, Wilkes or whatever his name was.

  The office was large and the furni
ture real wood, but there wasn’t a single citation on the walls, nor a photograph, nor anything that might identify him further. Obviously, a spook, but not Air Force or he’d be in uniform.

  She saluted the colonel. He returned. “At ease, Lieutenant,” he said, smiling and shaking his head slightly.

  “Please take a seat,” Crew said.

  “I want to extend my sympathies, too,” Langford added. “Your father was a great man and a national hero. You should know that he’s going to receive the Intelligence Medal.” He paused. “And also the Medal of Honor.”

  She knew that her mouth had dropped open, because she had to snap it closed. “The Congressional Medal of Honor?”

  Crew nodded.

  She was stunned silent. In awe. In sorrow that he had not been able to share what terrors must have beset him in his work, and had killed him.

  “Do you remember the tests you took at Lackland?”

  What in the world did that have to do with anything? “I took a lot of tests during basic.”

  “One of them involved a page of numbers, and you were supposed to draw lines between them.”

  “Sure, I remember it,” she said. The test had been tucked in among the standard battery of aptitude tests she’d taken as a recruit. “Sort of connect-the-dots type thing.” She’d sort of doodled it, as she recalled. “I messed it up.”

  The two men stared at her, saying nothing. They looked, she thought, like people must look to an ape from inside his cage. “What on earth does it matter now?”

  “I have another test for you,” he said.

  “Another test? That’s what this is about? Because—”

  “Lieutenant, it’s terribly important.”

  Langford’s voice had an edge that told her to listen and keep her mouth shut.

  “You need to fill out a consent.”

  “I thought you were going to let me know something about my dad.”