3 of a Kind (13 page)

Irwin pulled the SUV into a lonely petrol station and got out to fill the tank.

Tilly stayed in the car while the Knightleys stretched their legs, entering the attached convenience store.

‘Nice night, ain’t it?’ grunted the cashier: a large bearded man in denim dungarees and a trucker hat. Talk radio rattled out of an old stereo.

Darkus noticed a row of plastic action figures lined up behind the counter, then realised they were all little green men with reptilian eyes and no ears:
aliens
. With some trepidation, Darkus noticed the cashier’s hat had a slogan on it:
They’re Out There!

Knightley smiled, feeling right at home, finding a model of a flying saucer suspended over the cold drinks section. He selected a bottle of water for Darkus and a Dr Pepper for himself, then approached the cashier.

‘Excuse me, sir.’ Knightley put a couple of dollar bills on the counter. ‘Have you ever actually
seen
an Unidentified Flying Object?’

The cashier looked up from his magazine. ‘Seen one?’ he squeaked. ‘How ’bout every darn night? Just over that ridge …’ He pointed a grubby finger through the window. ‘Like the Fourth o’ July.’ He let out a hysterical giggle.

‘Can you describe what you saw?’ Darkus enquired from beside his father.

‘On the inside or the outside?’ the man responded, adjusting his dungarees.

‘You’ve seen the inside?’ asked Darkus, confused.

‘Oh, sure. When I got abducted by a couple of greys over at Billy Bob’s.’

‘Greys?’ asked Darkus.

Knightley gently guided his son away from the counter, explaining privately: ‘“Greys” is a term for light-skinned aliens. But I fear this witness is not to be relied upon.’

The Knightleys got back in the SUV and Irwin pulled out of the service station with Rufus riding shotgun.

Darkus noticed Tilly still staring into the night, her hand clutching the smartphone, her knuckles showing white. ‘Is everything OK?’ he asked her.

‘Never been better,’ she murmured.

Not wishing to trigger the fine tripwires of her personality, Darkus left her alone in a cocoon of silence. The stress of waiting for answers was taking its toll on Tilly. Or there was something else going on – but Darkus couldn’t deduce what.

Just then, Knightley leaped out of his seat and pointed through the window. ‘
Look!
There …’

Incredibly, in the night sky, four brilliant white lights appeared on the horizon, then scorched a path upwards in rapid succession, each following their own trajectory.

‘I don’t believe it,’ shouted Knightley excitedly, grinning like a child. ‘
Real
UFOs!’

Darkus followed his father’s gaze and saw them too; then furrowed his brow, not sure what to make of them. They appeared to accelerate and disperse with such smooth, steady velocity. Strangely, the Bradleys didn’t even look twice.

‘Hate to break it to you, Alan,’ said Irwin, ‘but they’re military flares, released to guide airplanes into Area 51 under cover of night.’

‘Ah,’ said Knightley, deflated.

‘But what type of airplanes they’re guiding in,’ Rufus elaborated, ‘and why they’re flown at night, that’s a whole other mystery. Early prototypes resulted in innovations like the stealth bomber.’

‘He’s right, Dad,’ said Darkus. ‘There are even theories that UFOs were just a smokescreen created by the US government to cover up their own technological advances.’

‘Next time, I shall be more rigorous in my deductions,’ Knightley apologised.

Irwin informed his passengers, ‘OK, things might get a little rough.’

The SUV detoured right off the highway on a dust track. Tilly and the Knightleys took hold of the overhead handles as the Chevy went off-road, bouncing and
lurching over the uneven surface, its knobbly tyres throwing up rocks and sand in their wake. Outside, Darkus noticed a faded government sign that read:

WARNING. RESTRICTED AREA.
NO TRESPASSING BEYOND THIS POINT.
PHOTOGRAPHY IS PROHIBITED.

Behind it, a high wire fence extended along the crest of the hills.

‘Switch to infrared,’ Irwin instructed his son.

‘Ten-four, Pops.’ Rufus pressed a row of switches that turned off the vehicle’s headlights, tail lights and even the dashboard.

Bradley & Son then flipped down their sun visors, which each contained night vision goggles that they quickly strapped to their faces. The SUV skirted the perimeter of the restricted area and entered a vast valley with dunes looming on either side.

‘Off to your left you’ll see the infamous Groom Lake, aka Area 51,’ announced Irwin, like a tour guide.

In the distance, Darkus could make out a community of white, rectangular aircraft hangars and a set of runways, like a concrete village at the base of a small mountain range. The whole area was fenced off with checkpoints and razor wire. A few floodlights were the only signs of life.

The SUV bounced further into the desert, crossing an enormous, dry lake bed, navigating a wide path around the restricted area, before progressing deeper into the former nuclear testing ground.

‘We’ll have to hike the last mile or two, to avoid detection,’ said Irwin as he pulled the SUV over in a cloud of dust.

Darkus and the others got out and shouldered their rucksacks. The ground was rocky, dotted with parched, skeletal bushes and teeming with tumbleweeds rolling in the direction of the breeze. The only illumination came from the coin-like edge of a crescent moon.

‘Look out for rattlers,’ advised Rufus.

‘Snakes?’ said Knightley, alarmed. ‘Nobody mentioned those.’

Irwin led the group into the bleak scrubland in single file.

‘That’ll be to disguise our numbers,’ Darkus told Tilly, but was met with a disinterested shrug.

They cut across the brow of a hill, then descended through dense brush and cactus trees, reaching a flat plain. In the distance the moonlight picked out gaping, circular craters stretching as far as the eye could see. The chasms were perfectly round, ranging from approximately a hundred to a thousand metres in diameter, and evenly spaced in geometric patterns. Darkus realised
these were entirely man-made: the result of decades of underground nuclear testing.

A white metal sign stood straight up in the ruined earth, with a warning:

RADIATION HAZARD. TOUCHING OR REMOVING
SCRAP OBJECTS IS PROHIBITED.

A hundred metres away, they saw an even stranger sight: the chassis of a classic American car, charred and twisted by an unimaginable force. Beside it was a collection of long steel rods, like dropped toothpicks, that had once formed the reinforced concrete of a building. Darkus felt his catastrophiser jittering unevenly at the back of his head, like a compass needle jumping at a magnetic field, or a Geiger counter detecting a radioactive charge. The fallout here had long settled, or been blown elsewhere by the wind, but the memory remained. Of all the crime scenes he’d ever witnessed, there was something very wrong about this place.

Tilly was visibly shaken too, though it did nothing to change her mood – in fact, it seemed to match it. Darkus suspected she was bottling up a highly flammable emotion that could go nuclear and tear them apart at any moment. The tension was compounded by the spectre of the Combination looming over every step of
the investigation. Darkus wondered: had they really outplayed the enemy? Or were they being watched at this very moment?

Darkus continued after the Bradleys as a familiar square shape emerged from the gloom. It was a house: a mock home that had somehow been saved from the annihilation, perhaps fortunate enough to be standing just outside the blast radius. Around it were an array of half-destroyed structures; some with supporting walls still standing, but the roofs blown off; some reduced to blocks with wires protruding like torn ligaments; others simply razed to the ground.

Irwin checked a GPS device and confirmed: ‘Welcome to Survival Town.’

‘This is all that’s left?’ said Darkus, inspecting the single family home.

‘It would appear so,’ replied Irwin.

The mock house was clad in wooden boards, the windows were long shattered and gone, but the frames were still intact. A neatly pointed brick chimney extended upwards, but there was no light or life within the building’s walls.

It appeared that nobody was home.

Darkus took a small penlight from his top pocket and approached the doorway, which lacked a door. His father quickly stopped his arm and led the way instead. The others watched cautiously.

The Knightleys crept over the front step and Darkus angled the penlight from behind his father, illuminating the faded decorations of a living room, casting long shadows across the peeling walls. Knightley Senior
stepped inside the room while Darkus panned with the torch beam, until …

A face leered up at them, its arm reaching out for theirs. Knightley grabbed his son in fright.

‘It’s OK, Dad. It’s just a dummy.’

Darkus focused the beam on the figure: a grossly distorted mannequin, still dressed in a business suit, its eyes staring out, its head partly caved in and its limbs bent in unnatural angles. Darkus swallowed his fear.

Knightley Senior caught his breath. ‘I believe I’m the dummy.’

‘Bogna …?’ Darkus called out into the dead air of the house.

There was no response.

Darkus continued to probe the room with his penlight, picking out a lounge with a sofa, the remains of a TV set and a kitchen complete with cupboards and a cooker. Then he flinched as he saw the rest of the mannequin’s family in various poses around a dining table. The wife was wearing an apron, her shoulders hunched over and her head planted face down on a dinner plate. Two children, one with short hair, one with pigtails, had fallen off their chairs and were lying in abject positions surrounded by cutlery. Darkus started as a large rodent scampered across the kitchen counter, rattling the chinaware and vanishing behind a cupboard door.

Feeling a shudder, Darkus crept over the terrifying human figures and followed the torch beam through a narrow hallway to a back room.

‘Bogna?!’ Knightley yelled.

‘Dad …’ Darkus beckoned him down the hallway.

The floorboards were covered in a fine layer of dust and desert sand, revealing several footprints circling the room.

Darkus knelt down and observed three sets of distinct prints. ‘Size twelve Crocs,’ he noted, pointing at one set with a sharpened pencil that he’d plucked from his top pocket.

‘Bogna,’ his father confirmed with a nod. ‘Once again, we’re too late. Judging by the size and inflection of the other prints, she had two heavyset captors. They’d need to be to contain her.’

On a dressing table, Darkus spotted a familiar straw hat. ‘It’s the one she wore at Heathrow.’

‘But where is she now …?’ replied his father anxiously. ‘If she tried to make a break for it, she could die out there.’

Darkus found it difficult to grasp the concept of Bogna dying of hunger, thirst or exposure. She had the constitution of an ox, the determination of a pit bull terrier and the strength of several men.

Instead, he turned his mind to the here and now and
followed the concentration of male footprints to a rickety side table with a small, blank notepad sitting on it. He flicked through the pages, hunting for clues but finding only blank sheets. He took his pencil and scribbled on the top page, shading it to see if any indentations might betray themselves. The shading produced no meaningful inscriptions: no words; just a doodle depicting a simple triangle. Darkus kept scribbling, revealing a two-dimensional pyramid shape.

‘Does this mean anything to you?’ he asked his father.

‘Not really,’ Knightley replied, looking over his shoulder. ‘I suppose it could refer to the conspiracy theory surrounding the Egyptian pyramids.’

‘Huh?’

‘The Egyptian pyramids exactly match a pyramid rumoured to have been found on the dark side of the moon by the last manned lunar landing, Apollo 17, in 1972. Presumably it was the work of an alien civilisation.’

‘O–K, Dad,’ said Darkus dismissively.

‘Don’t you think it odd that we’ve never been back to the moon since?’ his father asked.

Darkus thought about it for a while, then shrugged it off. He carried on his sweep of the room, until the torch beam struck upon a familiar shape sitting on a shelf. ‘Look …’ It was a large jar of
Polish dill pickles
– nearly
empty. Darkus ran a gloved finger over the lid and found no dust. ‘It’s recent … I’d say within the past twelve hours.’

Knightley inspected the container. ‘At least she’s not being mistreated.’

Darkus held up the jar and silently cursed himself. So far their foreign investigation had produced little more than a triangle and a jar of pickles. This was pathetic by any standards. He angled the container and shone the penlight through the murky greenish liquid, hoping for a miracle, but finding only a cluster of unappealing, fermented vegetables bobbing about like a school of whales. He balanced the light between his teeth and unscrewed the aluminium lid. A strong aroma of vinegar stung his nostrils. He lowered the jar and quickly went to reseal it when he noticed something on the inside of the lid … scratched into the metal with a sharp object – a hair clip, he deduced. He angled the light with his mouth and squinted. The crude engraving showed two words: