“Freeze!”
I was already frozen.
“Get your hands up where I can see them!”
He was young, maybe twenty-four. His face was flushed, and the gun wavered slightly in his white-knuckled hands. I dug into my coat for my pack of smokes.
“Don’t be reaching for anything! Get your hands up!”
I pulled out the cigarette pack and displayed it calmly. “Keep your pants on, Deputy Fife.”
Junior was obviously incensed, but unsure of what to do. He’d probably never pulled a gun on anyone in his life, though I was willing to bet he’d wasted untold hours fantasising about it. In his wildest dreams, he couldn’t have imagined that whoever he lost his gun-of waving virginity to would be so apathetic.
I pulled out a Lucky. “Got a light?”
“Drop the cigarette and get your hands up!”
“It’s not loaded.”
“Drop it!”
The second man trudged up from behind. “Put a lid on it, Todd.” he was older, probably in his late fifties. His MP shirt was open, revealing a dingy white T-shirt. His pants were baggy khaki trousers, and he was wearing sandals. He walked past Todd, the security guard, and pulled a lighter from his shirt pocket as he approached me. “Float me one?”
I held out the pack of Lucky Strikes, and the older guard drew one out. He lit my cigarette, then his own. “I ran out of smokes three days ago. Pure hell. Can you imagine being in a place like this with no smokes?”
I smiled compassionately. I’d run out a cigarette before, and it hadn’t been pretty. Behind the older guard, told lowered his gun, looking like a kid whose baseball had just gotten stuck on a neighbour’s roof. His polished-to-a-fault, military-issue footwear was coated with dust. I felt a little bit sorry for him. The Roswell complex didn’t look like it got much action.
Up close, my smoking partner didn’t appear to be as old as I pegged him, but he had the wrinkly brown face of a surfer-cum-alcoholic. He took a long drag and looked up at me.
“Sorry about the welcome. Told here is new on the job. I think you startled him.”
“I have that effect on strangers. It must be my hat.”
The older guard nodded. Told stepped up. “It’s against regulations for a civilian to be on the grounds. We have to arrest this guy.”
I looked from Todd to Cigarette Guy. He looked back at me and shrugged. “If there’s one thing Todd knows, it’s regulations, though we may have extenu-ating circumstances here. You don’t happen to have an extra pack of Luckies, do you?”
“Sorry.”
“Well, I’m afraid Todd may be right. Looks like we’ll have to arrest you.”
Todd perked up noticeably. “I’ll go get the handcuffs!”
“Don’t bother. Here’s my identification.”
I reached into my coat for the NSA ID and handed it to the older guard. He looked it over thoroughly, with Todd peering eagerly over his shoulder. After a few anxious moments, he handed it back to me. “NSA, huh? Haven’t had one of you boys down here for years.”
“Sounds like you’ve been here awhile.”
“Hell, what is it now? Twenty-three years. Six months… a couple weeks.” he glanced at his watch. “And about five and a half hours. I love this job. I don’t know who I pissed off, but they got me back real good.”
He turned and looked at Todd. “Todd doesn’t know what he did either, but he’s here to replace me. I’m training him to take over all my important duties. Tomorrow we’re gonna go over how to make a decent quiche in the microwave.” he looked back at me. “So, Colonel Murphy, What brings the NSA to our little corner of nowhere?”
“I’ve got to get into the underground part of the complex. By the way, I didn’t catch your name.”
Todd’s eyes got as big as Oreos. The older guard raised an eyebrow. “Willis. So you’re going down? Hasn’t been anyone down there since the war. At least not since I’ve been here. Don’t suppose you can tell me why.”
I shook my head. “Top secret. A matter of national security. Course, that’s what we do, you know.”
Todd caught his breath long enough to squeak in Willis’s direction. “How do we know he’s who he says he is? No one’s supposed to go into the underground section. That’s the one thing they keep telling me.”
“Shut up, Todd.” Willis glanced sideways at the younger guard as though he were the tenth person to tell him that he had a rip in the seat of his trousers.
“I know what they say. It doesn’t apply to the NSA. They can commandeer a bathtub while you’re in it taking a shower if they want to. They’re not accountable to anyone, not even the military. If you give Colonel Murphy any crap, he might just decide to blow your head off.”
I straightened my tie. “Well, I’m glad we understand each other. As for you, Todd, I suggest you check your regulations. The NSA is the exception to every rule. Now if you aren’t too busy, I could use a little help with directions.”
Willis was as co-operative as a man who’d been saved from nicotine withdrawal, and Todd was too cowed to raise any more objections. We walked to the guardhouse, and they disarmed half a dozen alarm systems. It was obvious that Willis had never done this in his twenty-three years of service. At one point, he pulled a lever to restore power to the underground complex. As he did it, he gave me a look that said, “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
Forty-five minutes after I’d landed, I was escorted to the large steel door in the side of the rock ledge. Willis stuck the key into a key hole on a panel door. The panel opened, and the old guard punched in some kind of code. With a dusty groan, the steel door swung open.
I stepped inside and looked around. The room was small and empty, except for an open elevator on the opposite side. The walls and floor had been carved out of the stone, and the dim, fluorescent lighting gave the interior a harsh, cold feel. The two guards were waiting outside like a couple of kindergarteners on the first day of school.
“Before I go down, tell me something. I’ve heard rumours about why the military shut this place down and sealed it off. What do you know about it?”
Todd looked at Willis, terrified. Willis cleared his throat. “The higher-ups don’t like to talk about it, but I’ve heard a few things. Bad things.”
“Such as —?”
“Well, when I first got assigned here, they told me never to turn on the power to the underground area, no matter what. I asked ‘em why. They just said never, ever do it, under any circumstances. Some people say there’s aliens down there. They say their photo-somethin’… I don’t remember the word. Something about being attracted to the light or heat. They say that’s why the military shut the place down, quarantined it. They say the aliens killed almost everyone down there and almost. I guess you’re gonna find out for yourself.”
Chapter Twenty-One
I stepped into the elevator and surveyed my options. There were buttons for Levels One, Two, and Three, I decided to start at the top and work my way down. I pressed the button for Level One, but nothing happened. To the side of the button panel, I noticed a blue card slot. Pulling out the blue card I’d been given with the NSA ID, I stuck it in the slot. The buttons lit up, and the elevator doors slid shut. I press the button for Level One again. This time of the elevator shuddered, then began to descend. After five or six seconds, the elevator came to a jarring stop, and the doors slid open.
A large, black number one it was painted on the wall opposite the elevator. I stepped out into a hallway and looked left, then right. The low, white fluorescent light gave the hallway the look of a morgue. There was nothing to see immediately, so I turned my left and walked down the hallway. My shoes left faint imprints in the thick layer of dust on the tile floor. My footfalls echoed all around the hallway. The mouldy smelling air felt dense, like breathing through a dust rag.