“Playing both sides is right,” Ellis says, “and I have no doubt that the debriefing we just did will somehow filter back to the Grays.” He shakes his head again, swears silently under his breath. “Everything we do, everything we say — the Grays will find out.”
“Until we find this traitor in our midst,” Mark says, and Ellis nods.
“And until then, we need…”
Ellis trails off as Eddie comes into view, a smile on his face and his eyes locked on the both of them. The Japanese-American is no doubt still in a good mood from the joyride he took on the small alien fighter craft he pilfered from Dulce Base.
“Mark… just the man I’ve been lookin’ for,” he says when he’s a dozen feet from them.
Mark turns around. “Oh, Eddie… well, yeah… what is it?”
“Stan’s got a question about the X-22.” Eddie gave a half-shrug, half-wince. “Says he might have to scrap the whole damn thing if you don’t get your ass down to Hangar 7 right away and tell him what’s what…” Eddie puts his hands up at Mark’s expression. “Hey, his words not mine!”
Mark rolls his eyes before looking back to his father.
“It’s alright — catch up to me later,” Ellis says, and he starts down the hallway again. “I’ll be with the women.”
5 — Heather
The Dutchman keeps replaying the words his son had said as he walks down one of the lower-level hallways of the Blue Lake base. Trust no one, even those that you think are on your team.
Ellis didn’t like it. He’d never known the Sirians or the Nordics to worry easily, either for themselves or for others. They were analytical, higher-level beings that put logic foremost and emotion much further down the list… if it was even on there at all. Ellis hadn’t been face to face with one of the beings in years — not since the Lake Oswego Incident — but he doubted they’d changed much in that time. And what Mark was saying was true — with the treaties nearly in tatters and the Grays and Reptilians pounding the drums of war once again, anything could happen. Earth could become the galactic battlefield that many always said it would, though Ellis couldn’t quite make himself believe things were that bad.
“Yet,” he says under his breath, and just before he reaches the area he’d been heading to, a row of nondescript and unmarked doors. He goes past two more and then stops at the third. He gives a polite, two-rap knock and then turns the knob.
“Hello, hello,” he says amiably upon entering, trying to inject some cheer into what he knows is about the un-cheeriest situation one could imagine. He can barely imagine it, being held in a cage, or a vat, or God forbid, worse. Yet these women had not only done that, they’d survived it.
The room was large, about the size of an elementary school gym, and several men in lab coats were going around with clipboards, talking to the women they could. There were around a hundred women there, most in hospital gowns but a few still halfway naked, with hundreds more in similar areas around the base. Many were crying, though most seemed to be taking it stoically, looking forward with the kind of thousand-yard stares that Ellis remembers from his days in WWII. He can only imagine what has brought on those looks. The endless experiments, the sleep deprivation, the forced sex, the impregnations… it was all too much. There’d of course be abortions, dissections, implants, surgical removals, and even complete mind-wipes. The way some of the women leaned their heads against the wall, a thin stream of drool coming from the corner of their mouths, made Ellis think that mind-wipes had indeed been employed. He gritted his teeth and tried to hate the Grays even more, if that was at all possible.
Women in nursing uniforms were also moving around, giving injections, taking temperatures and measuring blood pressure. They too jotted notes down on clipboards, though Ellis knew it was the men that were getting the real information. Much of it didn’t even need to come from talking — the way the women looked, certain marks on them… it all told a tale. That tale was one of a battle between two races — the humans and the Grays — and as Ellis looks at that room of more than a hundred women, he’s not sure who’s winning.
“Ellis!” a muffled shout comes, and the Dutchman looks over to see Stu there in a white lab coat, clipboard in hand, and his other hand waving him over. Ellis nods and starts that way.
“Stu,” he says when he’s a few feet away, and Stu nods before turning back to the woman sitting on an exam table in front of him.
“This is Heather… a very interesting abductee.”
Ellis offers a smile and sticks out his hand. “Hello, Heather.”
“Sir,” she says, keeping her eyes mostly directed at the floor.
“Heather here was in captivity for nearly a year, and during that time she saw a lot, suffered a lot too.”
“Oh?” Ellis says, glancing from Heather to Stu and back again.
“You can say that again,” Heather says after a moment of silence has passed.
“But I’d rather hear you say it,” Ellis says.
Heather frowns, but then launches into it. “I was taken at night, from my home in Texas, the classic abductee story about waking up, seeing Grays at the foot of the bed, and then suddenly being aboard their ship.” She rolls her eyes. “It was the operating room, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?” Stu asks.
Heather scoffs. “Why, because I’m a woman, that’s why! As soon as they get a woman they shoot someone’s — or something’s — sperm into her and boom, just like that she’s pregnant.”
“And that happened to you?” Ellis asks.
“Three times.”
“Three…” Stu starts, but trails-off.
“Three times,” Heather repeats. “They impregnate us and then about three months later they come and harvest the fetus, taking it out of us and then… I dunno, off to some lab somewhere, I guess.”
“And this happens to all the women that wind up in Dulce?” Ellis asks.
“All but the ones they mutate into something else.” She glances around and then lowers her voice. “Did you see the tanks?”
Both men nod, but Ellis is the one to speak. “Lots of women in those tanks, lots of women that look like you.”
“He means, ‘beautiful’ women,” Stu says, and Heather blushes for a moment before an awkward silence falls.
Ellis takes on an amused smile. “And I guess you’re about what they’re looking for, then… huh?” Heather looks up at him as if she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, so he fumbles forward, nearly tripping over his words. “I mean… uh… they want petite women in their early twenties — maybe early thirties — am I even halfway right?”
Heather laughs. “I’d say you about hit the nail on the head there, sir.”
“But there was more than just women down there,” Stu says, and Heather nods as she collects herself.
“They like small to medium size men in their mid-twenties to mid-forties. Their favorites, however, are dark-haired boys between five to nine. The boys are favored because at that age their bodies are rapidly growing, and their atomic material is adaptable in the transfer chamber.”