Instinct (41 page)

“Come on, guys,” Romie said. “We’ll have to find some other way to get out of here.” She started to help Brad move in the direction of the driveway. Lisa stayed on Brad’s other side, and helped as well.

“Coming here was your idea,” Pete said to Romie. “You were so sure it was safe to come join up with these folks and now you’re running away from them.” He turned and headed for the tent area.

Robby stood alone, watching what remained of his little group split up. He walked slowly back towards the shed and stooped to pick up the plastic documents. He wiped mud off of them using his pant leg. People were still collecting gear and migrating to the driveway area. Robby found the folder and stuffed everything back in it.

He looked down at the folder. It was too dark to read anything. He pulled out his light, but didn’t bother turning it on. He looked in the direction Pete had gone and then looked back at the folder.

Robby dropped the folder. He didn’t understand the documents. If they were around, the answers were still underground, in that bunker. He turned and walked slowly towards the shed.

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Brad wasn’t injured, he was simply worn out. Climbing the ladder from the gray control room had sapped the last of his energy. He didn’t know how long he’d gone without eating, but his head had a constant buzz and little flashes lit up in the corners of his eyes whenever he took a step. Romie and Lisa kept him upright. His only job was to move his feet, and he was barely managing that.

They walked up to the Beardo with the bullhorn. He was standing at the driver’s side of a Land Rover. The bullhorn was powered by a cord coming from the interior.

He was about to make another announcement when they approached.

“Are you Denver?” Romie asked.

“Dover,” the guy said.

“Close enough. Yeah, that guy Hampton is looking for you. He’s in that big barn over there,” Romie said.

“Looking for me?”

“You’re Dover, right?”

“Yeah,” the guy said.
 

He looked at Romie and Lisa, flinched when he looked at Brad, and then set the bullhorn down on the driver’s seat. The Beardo trotted off down the path towards the big barn.

Romie opened up the back door.

“Get in!” she whispered. “I never in a million years thought that would work.”

Brad practically fell into the back seat and Lisa climbed in next to him.

Romie threw the bullhorn to the passenger’s seat and it squawked when it landed. Another Beardo, who was helping some of the regular citizens understand how much gear they would be allowed to bring, saw Romie as she closed the door.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Get out of there.” He began to run towards them. “That vehicle is for the commander.”

Romie gunned the engine and took off.

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Pete was surprised at the mess he found in the camping area. Half of the tents were still standing. Some of the others were torn down, but lying on the ground. People had sorted their possessions quickly, taking some and apparently throwing the rest in random directions. He found his tent and stared at it. There wasn’t anything inside he particularly cared about—just a sleeping bag and some underwear. Still, it seemed wrong to leave a mess behind.

He pulled up a couple of the stakes and saw a light moving through the field. People were crossing the pasture on the other side of the fence. He saw a few pairs of legs and then the light shut off again. Pete lost track of the people in the dark. Soon, another set of lights started out from the side of the field. These lights were carried by people with a purpose. When they were caught in beams of the pursuers, the runners froze. Soon the two groups came together and marched back towards the camp.

Pete tore down his tent, keeping an eye on the progress.

When they reached the fence, he saw what he had feared. The runners were only regular frightened people. Two men and a woman carried clothes and blankets in their pillowcases. Beardos were the pursuers. They had tracked them down and brought them back to the camp area. Pete glanced around at the night. He wondered how many other pairs of Beardos were wrangling the herd, and keeping anyone from escaping. He wondered why they were so intent on keeping everyone together.

Once the runners were back on the right side of the fence, the Beardos shut off their lights and shrank back into the darkness. There was no telling where they were, or who they were watching. Pete shook out his tent and began rolling it up.

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Robby was almost at the bottom of the ladder when he heard the hatch open above him. He dropped to the floor and scurried under the shelf of the control panel. He tucked his light under his shirt and then found the switch as feet began to clomp down the rungs.

The man reached the floor and stopped. He was looking almost directly at Robby and held perfectly still. He rubbed his temples. Robby didn’t dare to breathe. The weak light from the overhead bulb didn’t project much light around the room, but Robby felt exposed.

The man took a deep breath and looked up as he let it out. He flipped glasses down from the top of his head and opened a small panel in the wall. The controls there looked just as useless as the ones on the panel where Robby was hiding, but the man’s fingers moved with purpose. A moment later, a metallic clang erupted and the light from the bulb was augmented by several more lights, shining down from the ceiling.
 

When he turned, Robby got a better look at the man’s face. It was Hampton. Mercifully, he didn’t turn back towards Robby, but went straight for the door. Robby heard his feet as they rang down the spiral stairs.

When the sound of Hampton’s feet disappeared, Robby slid out from under the panel and ran to the ladder. The shaft to the surface was gone. A big steel plate blocked the ladder.

Robby investigated the panel that Hampton had activated. He didn’t see anything but rust and dust. Robby looked to the stairs. Placing each foot as gently as possible, Robby climbed down the stairs. At full power, the place looked completely different. Bright lights chased away the shadows from the big room at the bottom of the stairs. Some of the equipment made more sense now that he could see it. The thing against the far wall had a motor that drove a pump. Next to it, a machine had big steel plates that could be used to compact or crush with hydraulic force. Some of the machines appeared to be for manufacturing. Others, Robby couldn’t figure out just by visual inspection.
 

He wondered where Hampton had disappeared. Robby had a pretty good mental map of the place, after exploring with Romie, but he was only really interested in one room. Robby worked his way over to the doorway. From inside the room, he heard a turning page. Robby froze. Hampton was in there. He was in the room with all the information that Robby wanted to comb through. Robby looked back across the big room. There were plenty of places to hide, but he had no idea how long Hampton would be in there.

“What did you see?” a man’s voice asked from inside the room.

Robby was about to run when the voice spoke again.

“Robby? What did you see?”

Hampton rolled back in his chair and appeared from around the corner.
 

“Don’t run. Just tell me what you saw.”

“Where?”

“Up north,” Hampton said. “I assume you saw the landing site before the being retreated. Did you see a long tunnel of white light, surround by all your loved ones? Did you see the face of God?”

“No,” Robby said. He moved closer. When the man had first spoken, Robby had assumed that he was talking to someone else in the room. Now, Robby understood that Hampton was alone. The man seemed to be in charge of the Beardos, but he wasn’t menacing. Robby wasn’t afraid of him.

“Well, what did you see?”

“It was a big ball of light in a depression in the snow.”

Hampton moved his glasses higher up on his nose and looked back down at the documents on his desk. He flipped a page. “That’s Stage Three. There was a researcher named Higgins. He said that Stage Three would be followed by the final landing within two weeks. I suppose it’s a good thing he’s dead. He would have been really embarrassed.”

“How did he research? How did you know about any of this?” Robby asked. He leaned against the door frame.
 

Hampton waved him to a chair, but Robby held his ground.

“Part of keeping a population safe means keeping them safe from hysteria. Some information is so toxic that only a small number of…”

“Save it,” Robby said, interrupting. Hampton seemed shocked at first, and then a tiny smile touched his lips. “Where did you get your information about this phenomenon? You’re part of the same group that went to Brad’s house, right?”

Hampton leaned back and raised his glasses to the top of his head. His smile was bigger than ever. “Which question should I answer?”

“Where did you get your information?”

Hampton reached to his side and opened a drawer. He pulled a file from the very back of the cabinet and slapped it down on the table. “Ever heard of Crick and Watson?”

“Yes,” Robby said. “They discovered DNA.”

“Not exactly, but close enough. They figured out the chemical structure of the stuff. They won the Nobel prize for documenting how nucleic acids are able to
transfer information
in living material. People think their DNA just tells their bodies how tall to grow, or what color their eyes should be. It conveys a lot more than that.”

“You extracted information from DNA?”

Hampton seemed to consider this question carefully before he answered. “Given completely unforeseen circumstances, do you know what the smartest soldier in the world would do?”

“What?”

“Whatever he’s told,” Hampton said.

Robby waited for more explanation.

“It’s funny—I had this same conversation with Judy a few hours ago, but she was the one informing me,” Hampton said. “At least she thought she was. There’s some documentation here, and I’ve learned as much as I can from it. But I was the guy assigned to carry out the orders, not create them. I’m following a script that was written by people who were long dead before the world even ended.”

“So they knew this thing was coming, and you built this place?”

“We did.”

“Why didn’t they know about Brad’s house? Nobody showed up at his house until he found the vines.”

Hampton nodded. “Believe me, a lot of people wondered that same thing. Even at my level, plenty of fingers were pointed. In the end, it was Gertz who came up with the most popular explanation. He showed that the pattern of her arrivals is like an interference pattern between two waves. It’s like a double-slit experiment, except with time instead of light. Way beyond my understanding. He showed that sometimes the arrival is at one location. Sometimes it’s two. It can go up to five. The only prediction we get is the final location. Gertz said that the only way to know about the secondary ones was to wait and watch.”

“Why didn’t Luke help me fight that thing up north? If that’s your mission, why wouldn’t he help?”

Hampton shook his head. “That wasn’t part of our orders. Our confrontation happens here. We’re going to survive this the same way people always have. We wait for the arrival and then we drive it back. The only thing we’re missing is a pyramid, and the researchers assured us that it’s not critical.”

Robby considered that statement. “You’re missing the people, too. You just sent them all away.”

“Not far,” Hampton said, narrowing his eyes. “They’re close enough to bring back after the tornadoes have passed. You should get going. You don’t want to miss the last transport.”

“What about you?”

“I have a few more things to finish up before I go. I’ll be fine. I always believed the tornadoes would come through. It was nice of Judy to get us an exact schedule though. Makes everything simpler.”

Robby stood. Hampton flipped through a few more documents and the looked up at him with his eyebrows raised.

“I’d like to see that information first hand,” Robby said. “I think I’ve earned it. If we hadn’t stopped that thing up in Kingston, you wouldn’t be here to make your stand.”

Hampton laughed. “You think you stopped anything? That landing had run its course. Whatever theatrics you engaged in didn’t do anything to change it.”

“I disagree,” Robby said. “For one, I’m not sure you know exactly what we did. Two, I’m not sure it’s much different than what you have planned here. You’re going to let it hatch and then you’re going to feed it a human sacrifice, is that right?”

Hampton didn’t answer. His face was a blank mask.
 

“That’s what people have done historically, right? They just line up a bunch of people and feed it to the thing to make it go away. Do you even know
why
it’s done? Have you even seen the symbols, or did you simply let the researchers tell you they found the clues in our DNA? Why don’t you tell those people what you’re planning to do, instead of moving them around like cattle?”

“Part of keeping a population safe means keeping them safe from hysteria,” Hampton said again.

“What’s in the water?” Robby asked.

Hampton shook his head. “What do you mean?”

“Down that hall, where you had Brad, there’s something down there. What is it?”

“You’re smart, and you’ve figured out a few things, but this time I believe you’ve gone too far. We only used that silo to stress your friend. I have the reports from Herm. Brad Jenkins was remarkably quiet when Herm interviewed him, but he gave up the information to me.”

“Then he was lying. Brad doesn’t know anything.”

“On the contrary, Brad was a very rich source of information. If Herm had tried harder, he might have learned enough to keep himself alive.”

“You can’t blame Brad for what happened.”

“No, I don’t blame him, but neither do I trust him. There were over one-hundred men stationed at that landing. Your friend was the only one to walk away. Luck only gets you so far.” Hampton returned his attention to his documents.