Night Talk (33 page)

“If he catches up with us, we'll need cops.”

“He knows we're ahead of him. When he reaches the streets below he'll keep going onto the freeway.”

She shook her head. “I just hope this guy is as logical as you are. Who the hell is this nut? A killer someone hired to get the file?”

“No, not to get the file. He didn't seem to know anything about a file back at the house. He just wanted to kill us, make it look like a gas explosion. Not caring that arson investigators would find evidence that it was set.”

“If they don't want the file, what do they want?” she asked.

They both knew the answer. “They want to kill us. They are eliminating everyone who had anything to do with the file. I think whoever is behind this at some point decided I really don't have the file but might get my hands on it.”

“So they kill us before we can find it.”

He took his eyes off the dark road just long enough to glance at her. “If you know anything about the contents of the file you better share it now. This isn't a time to have any cards under the table.”

“I don't have anything under the table but my shaking knees. It's called the God Project and Ethan said they were trying to play God. Who they are and how you play God is beyond me.”

He drove slow, keeping his foot off the brake to keep the brake lights off. He used the hand brake when he had to slow the car down.

They went deeper in, not knowing where the road went or how long it was, but unable to turn around because it was too narrow.

Something suddenly shot in front of them and Greg jerked the wheel, swerving to the right. Ali shouted, “Deer!” and they hit a tree head-on. Neither had a seatbelt on and the impact threw them both forward.

Greg bounced back from the wheel. He was strangely disoriented but he didn't think he had hit his head. It was quiet, eerily calm, with everything frozen in place as if the very earth had paused in its rotation.

Light—bright light—erupted in front of them.

At first he thought it was the headlights of the van but the lights were too intensely bright, not just blinding but penetrating, like X-rays piercing him, stabbing his eyes and exploding in his brain.

 

64

The stabbing light vanished as quickly as it had erupted. Greg no longer felt his core being penetrated by the rays. But now he couldn't move. He was a prisoner of whoever or whatever had sent the light.

It was dark, pitch black, a void as empty and endless as outer space, where there is a complete absence of light beyond the pinpoint shine and sparkle of heavenly bodies. But he knew the light was still there; it was his mind that had been shut off, not the piercing rays.

He had consciousness, an awareness of who he was, but he could not feel anything or move any part of his body. He was numb, all of his nerves deadened. He didn't sense his heart pumping, his lungs working. He didn't feel paralyzed even though he could not move a muscle. Instead he sensed that the light had encased him, wrapped around him like a tight membrane that kept him from moving and deadened his sensations to a state of morbidity. He was in a cocoon, a wrapping in which all his bodily needs and homeostasis—body temperature, fluids, blood oxygen, kidney filtering—were maintained.

Sensations of life were gone but he still had an awareness of self, of being—he knew that he existed because a small spark was still lit in a deep recess of his mind. He had no sense of feel or smell or taste, heard nothing, had no ability to move and no thoughts except for that quiet awareness of still existing, of knowing that he was Greg Nowell.

His awareness of self also told him that there was something out there beyond the paralyzing light, living things but not like him; they were entities not of Earth. He was their prisoner, held by the light.

Then there was movement, not initiated by him, but as if whatever he was encapsulated in was being drawn up, pulling him out of the car, his body floating with no effort on his part, as if his spirit was rising, being drawn, sucked out without effort on his part, leaving his corporal body behind as if his essence was lighter than air, like the helium used in party balloons.

Was this how dying worked? Giving up the ghost? His soul rising? But where was the light at the end of the tunnel?

He moved deeper into the darkness, as if the utter black wasn't empty space but a fluid, an ocean he floated in, his essence not carried by someone or something but as if he flowed in a source of energy, a dense gaseous plasma thicker than water and lighter than air, being carried on a river of the substance to a large silver object he realized had generated the lights. The smooth sleek metallic lines told him that it was a spacecraft as he flowed toward it and entered through a dark opening on the craft's side and into another black void.

He still didn't breathe. Couldn't breathe, but didn't feel the need to take a breath or let one out. His heart remained still. He stayed in suspended animation. No blood was circulating, no oxygen feeding his brain. He was clinically dead. But he still had that spark that told him he existed.

He saw nothing inside. Felt nothing. Heard nothing. He had an utter loss of his five senses and of the senses beyond those ordinary five—pain, balance, internal functions.

What he did sense was a presence. Not creatures, beings or entities. Just movement in the utter bottomless void as if parts of the darkness had substance. Midnight shadows, he thought of them, movements in the void that told him he wasn't alone yet nothing took shape.

He sensed minds. Not like his, not human or machine, not animal, vegetable or mineral. Something different. Alien. Energy without a form visible to the naked eye. Masses of neutrons similar to those humans carried in their brains and nervous systems but free-floating rather than in a brain encased by protective bone. He sensed small, individual clouds of them in the darkness, swarms of neutrons. Or were they just screwing with his mind, giving him images and memories that were false and misleading?

There was communication, not to him, but between the alien minds to each other. Thoughts that he understood but could not describe because they were not human thinking. Even though he couldn't have told others precisely what was said, he understood the essence. He realized that there was no malice toward him. No emotion at all. Rather the thoughts revealed curiosity being satisfied by a systematic evaluation of him. Measurements and testing of both his mental qualities and physical quantities was being done without any strong feeling toward him. What he would expect from a human scientist examining a lab rat. One they had examined before—he felt as if he was there for a follow-up medical visit.

He sensed that they believed they were superior to him. He understood why. He was a modern human being, Homo sapiens, whose closest living relatives were gorillas and chimpanzees; he shared 98.8 percent of his DNA with tree-swinging, knuckle-walking chimps.

The entities examining him knew about the creatures on planet Earth, knew about man and ape. Biologically, he was a naked ape who had a larger brain capacity but was physically weaker than his hairier cousins. Pound for pound man was weaker and frailer than most of the other animals and insects on the planet, with just a fraction of the strength of an ape or an ant.

The entity examining him knew that humans were incapable of surviving without proper food, shelter and temperature, making them a primitive biological specimen that could only function in a narrow range of environments. Compared to creatures that had fur, fat or other biological features that allowed them to function in extremes, the naked ape had a body temperature range so restrictive that the species could not survive most environments without clothing and shelter.

Also unlike its hairy cousins, many Homo sapiens were morally weak and easily tempted to harm their own kind and other creatures not just for food and survival, but for their own gratification. He sensed that the entity didn't find as much fault with killing as it did with the base motives that most often underlined it.

He realized that the comparison of people to animals was wrong because all the physical, brain capacity, artistic and technological comparisons left out the most important human trait of all—the soul-searching introspection mankind does, pondering his being, his fate, the meaning of life and his purpose on the planet and in the universe.

No other creature thought about, talked about and wrote about where it had come from and where it was going, or what the meaning, the purpose, of human existence and its spirit was.

He knew that he was far inferior biologically and in terms of brain capacity to the midnight shadows that were examining him. But then he realized that he sensed their thoughts—and they didn't know it.

He had a sense beyond the five-plus counted by science. He didn't know what it was called or how it worked. A sixth sense? A form of psi—the extrasensory perception of telepathy? He was not a mind reader, had never experienced sensing the thoughts of another human being, but he understood if not the actual thoughts at least the reasoning of the entities that were examining him.

They had controlled his life forces, his breathing and heart rate, paralyzed his muscles and put his body and brain into temporary hibernation, but they didn't realize that in some deep place, hidden among the billions of the electrical- and chemical-charged signals in his brain, a tiny spark glowed that gave him an awareness of their thoughts without them knowing it.

And he understood that despite their superiority in technology, despite their ability to travel light-years across empty space, feats far beyond human accomplishments achieved perhaps for no other reason than that they had been on a planet that developed long before Earth, his mind was superior to theirs.

It just had some catching up to do.

 

65

Greg was awake. He was in the car, on the driver's seat, his hands on the steering wheel. He felt the pain in his chest from hitting the steering wheel. The pain was good. It told him he was alive.

His eyes told him he was looking at a tree. The front bumper of the car was against it. There was no bright light, no light at all except the soft glow from the moon. No enormous UFO squatting in the forest.

“What happened?“Ali rubbed her head. “I hit my head on the windshield. We hit a tree.”

“The light blinded me.”

“Light? What light?”

“Ali … you saw the light. You must have.”

“What light? What are you talking about?”

“The bright light. It blinded me—us.”

“I didn't see a light, but that's definitely a tree we're up against. Does the car still run? Did we damage the engine?”

“I—I don't know.” He turned the key and the engine kicked on. “Did you—do you remember?”

“What?”

“There was a UFO, its lights blinded us, that's why we hit the tree. Then it took us aboard.”

“Aboard? Are you crazy? What are you talking about?”

“I—” He pointed at the car key in the ignition. “The key was in the off position a minute ago. The motor was turned off.”

“You must have turned it off.”

“I didn't turn it off. You didn't see me turn it off.” He was getting frustrated. And he knew it was useless.

“I hit my head—” Ali began.

“I never turned the engine off. How did it get turned off?”

“Oh my God. Are you telling me that aliens turned off the engine? Is that what you're saying?”

“I'm telling you that there was a passage of time between when I saw the light that was so blinding it caused me to hit the tree and the time we both were aware again of being in the car. During that time I experienced being aboard an extraterrestrial craft.”

“You were aboard a spacecraft for the couple of seconds I was stunned by hitting my head? Is that what you're telling me?”

“I don't know how long we were out. A couple seconds to us could be hours if an entity is able to control our sense of time. Remember what I told you about the Hills? They experienced an altered state of consciousness in which they lost track of the passage of time.”

“I don't have any lost time,” Ali said. “I was stunned but probably not more than a second or two. It doesn't add up to the time it would take to be abducted and examined, whatever it is that you said you experienced.”

“You don't remember having an experience in which time passed. I do. It happened to me before. Years ago. I experienced an abduction. It's haunted me my entire life. I was awake during it, Ali. Awake when I was taken aboard an alien craft and examined. I was awake again tonight. They didn't know that I could tell what they were thinking, that I knew they had examined me before.”

She leaned toward him, staring at him intently, concerned. “Greg, listen to me. I don't know if you hit your head or what, but nothing happened here except we hit a tree in the dark and we both went flying forward. Anything else is something you've imagined because you've been immersed in the UFO thing for so long. I don't blame you, we've been hit by crazy things in spades today.”

“You don't understand. For some reason they didn't want you.”

“I can handle that kind of rejection any day. Let me drive. You need some rest.”

He put the car into “reverse” and it backed up without any horrible noises that would indicate there was damage.

“Are you sure you're all right to drive?” she asked.

“The key was in the off position. I didn't turn the ignition off, you didn't see me turn it off. They turned it off.”

“Greg—”

“Drop it. We have to get out of here with no headlights and my foot off the brake.”

 

66

Greg turned the car around and got it moving back down the bumpy dirt road. He was acting out of pure instinct because his mind wasn't on driving or escaping a killer. Disgust over what had happened to him when he was abducted and examined like a bug had taken the place of fear and caution.