The Rift (5 page)

Scout yelped because her mouth suddenly got hot and her back molar was tingling like she’d lost the filling and hit a nerve. She jerked the toothbrush out of her mouth so quick, she forgot to shut it off, spraying herself and the blue window seat and the window with spittle and toothpaste. Before she hit the off button, it stopped. As did the music and the lights overhead.

Her first thought was she’d have to clean the window and wash the seat cover.

Great. Her mother couldn’t even make French toast without flipping a circuit breaker.

She looked over and the iPad screen was dark, which was weird, because even if the power went out, its battery should keep it on. And then she realized the battery-powered toothbrush wasn’t wired in to a circuit breaker either.

Scout tossed the toothbrush in the sink and went downstairs. Her mother was standing in front of the stove, the French toast sizzling, the lights on.

“What’s up with my room?” Scout asked.

“What do you mean, honey?” Then the range exhaust fan stopped, as did her mother. “Well, that’s weird.”

“Must be the breaker box,” Scout said, even though she doubted her mother knew what one was, never mind where it was.

And she knew it wasn’t the breaker box. One could hope.

Sometimes hope isn’t a good thing.

Then all the lights went off and the two just stood there for a moment staring at each other.

Scout was about to tell her mom she’d check the box in the garage when the fan started with a low whir and the lights flickered, coming back on. Scout realized she still had a dull pain in her molar and went into the downstairs half-bath and turned the light on. She looked in the mirror, opening her mouth wide. There was the faintest golden glow in the tooth, which slowly faded out.

The skin on the back of her neck tingled. Scout ran back upstairs, ignoring her mother. The iPad was on, music was coming out of the speakers, and the lights were bright.

The toothbrush was rattling in the sink, vibrating the water, which was also glowing golden. Scout hit the sink stopper and the water drained out, taking the golden glow with it.

With a trembling hand, Scout picked the brush up and hit the off button.

It shut down.

Scout waited, not sure what to expect but having a feeling it wasn’t going to be good.

Tentatively, she tried the toothbrush. It rattled to life, no golden glow, and shut off when she hit the button.

So far, so nothing.

Which was good. Perhaps.

Scout went to the window and sat on the window seat. She squinched her eyes shut and thought hard: Was the toothbrush new or had it been recovered from her destroyed bathroom in North Carolina, where her curler had been possessed?

She realized there was no way of knowing without asking Cleaner, who’d supervised the reconstruction of the room after the Nightstalkers had taken out the Firefly that had possessed the curler.

Or had they?

She’d been on the porch with Nada. But Moms, she’d been in there and she’d said they done it, and although Scout had only known Moms for a couple of days, Scout knew Moms wasn’t a woman who imagined things or guessed.

If Moms said they got it, they got it.

So what didn’t they get?

And where was it now?

She looked toward the bathroom and mentally traced the flow: gold in toothbrush, into water, down the drain. Drain went to septic tank to drainage field, which was in the backyard.

Her mother called for her and Scout reluctantly went downstairs to get her meager breakfast. It looked like her mother had cut the slices of bread into even thinner slices, which required the skill of a surgeon, but her mother was quite good at paring food down. There was, of course, no maple syrup to drench the French toast in. Scout took the plate and went to the nook table, where her mother was always trying to get the family to eat meals together.

This took Mother by surprise, since Scout always wolfed her food down at the bar or trudged upstairs to her room to eat alone.

“Are you all right, dear?” Her mother had taken to calling her dear, not Scout. A compromise.

“I’m fine,” Scout said. The nook gave a nice view of the yard and the river.

Her mother shouldered the heavy bag of workout gear and whatever else she hauled around to make it through her day. “Enjoy your ride, dear.”

“You, too, Mother.”

Her mother stood in the doorway to the garage, staring at Scout as if she’d grown two heads. “You know, Greer—” she began, and Scout perked up.

“Yes?”

“Nothing, dear.” Her mother shrugged and the door shut behind her.

And then Scout was alone. She took the plate to the sink and washed it.

Then she went to the back door. She wanted to just gear up and go ride Comanche. But then she thought,
What would Nada do?

He’d wait and watch. Something strange had happened and it was easy to ignore an anomaly.

Easy was bad.

So Scout waited and watched and then she saw it, thirty minutes after the water had gone down her sink, a golden shimmer in the grass in the backyard. Scout was tempted to walk out there, but that was tempting fate.

So she waited a bit longer and then she saw a translucent snake of golden water surface in the river, and then disappear underneath the muddy surface.

“This isn’t good,” Scout muttered. She went back into the house to her room.

Scout grabbed the Leatherman multitool out of her backpack and went to the air intake grill on the wall. She carefully unscrewed it, making sure not to mark the perfect white paint. A lockbox was set inside. She dialed up the combination and opened it. Inside there were the usual items a normal seventeen-year-old girl would hide, but even more items an abnormal seventeen-year old girl would hide.

Such as some spent shell casings of various sizes she’d scavenged from the fence line of Senator’s Club where the Nightstalkers had destroyed the backhoe—Cleaner’s team was good but not perfect. An empty eggs and ham MRE packet, a tribute to Nada’s willingness to take one for the team. And a postcard from the Little A’Le’Inn, located in Rachel, Nevada, along Highway 375, aka Extraterrestrial Highway. She’d received it just a week after the events in Senator’s Club, her name and address printed on a label.

And the only thing where one would send endearments or “wish you were here” was a phone number. And the words
Text in case of emergency
. Then someone—she assumed Nada—had scrawled,
But it will take a while.

Scout took the card to the window seat and placed it in her lap as she sat down. Something was different. She closed her eyes and focused, and then realized it was the lack of something that had caught her attention. She opened her eyes and saw that the guys on the barge across the river were staring at their pile driver, one scratching his head.

The driver was silent, frozen in mid-movement.

With trembling fingers, she typed in the number on her iPhone, knowing she was initiating something that could have tremendous repercussions.

Then she typed in a message:
Nada. Scout. In TN. We have a golden problem.

Scout pressed send and the message shot to the top of her page.

She waited, then realized the odds were low there would be an immediate reply based on Nada’s addendum. She put the phone in her pocket.

Looking up at the sound of a thud, she saw that the pile driver was working again, doing its job.

Then she stared at the river, the water flowing by so slowly, held up by Loudoun Dam downstream, so much so that they called this a lake. And she felt it again, that feeling of trouble having arrived and more trouble coming.

Looking out the window again, she could see a boat was stalled out, about a quarter mile downstream, the driver fussing over the engine.

Yeah. There was a problem.

“Welcome to Area 51,” the old man in desert camouflage fatigues said to Ivar. The small plane that had dropped him off just moments ago raced down the runway and was airborne within seconds, as if the pilots were anxious to get out of here. Its running lights twinkled in the dark sky; the only hint of dawn was a slight red tinge on the eastern horizon.

Ivar looked around. “This isn’t Area 51.”

Nothing but desert in all directions. The runway was a pitted concrete strip, half covered with drifting sand, with just a tattered windsock hanging limply on a rusting pole.

“Sure it is,” the old man said with as much spirit at the windsock. “I’m Colonel Orlando. You’re”—he paused and looked at a clipboard—“Ivar. For now,” he added.

“Area 51 has the longest airstrip in the word,” Ivar pointed out.

“Well, third longest,” Orlando said, “and that’s the main strip. Which is a long ways thataways.” He pointed vaguely to the southwest. “This is an auxiliary strip. We’re having some, uh, well, security issues, so we thought it safer to bring you here.”

“What kind of security issues?” Ivar was tall, thin, but no longer stooped as if afraid of the world. Seeing the Rift open at the University of North Carolina, the Russians die, and a year of Special Operations training had changed him. Into what, even he wasn’t sure yet.

But he liked the changes.

His face was still thin, his hair brown and thinning. His eyes were dark and there were lines around them that hadn’t been there a year ago; before the Nightstalkers blasted their way into the lab he was working in at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Colonel Orlando might have stood tall once upon a time, but the years of working in the covert world had accumulated on his shoulders, much like the way the gray crept into Moms’s and Nada’s hair.

Instead of answering, Orlando turned toward an old battered jeep, indicating for Ivar to follow.

“I wasn’t done with my training,” Ivar said.

“Ms. Jones believes you are and when she says you’re done, you’re done.”

“Who is Ms. Jones?” Ivar read more into Orlando’s statement than the obvious, which he had a feeling was intended.

“I’m taking you to her.” Orlando got behind the wheel. “Coming? It’s a long walk to anywhere from here.”

Despite being the subject of numerous documentaries, blogs, newspaper reports, movies, and so on, very little of the truth of Area 51 is known to the outside world. It’s in the Middle of Nowhere, Nevada, and you have to want to get to it to even take any road close to it. And you couldn’t get to it, unless you were invited, which few people were.

Ivar was now one of those.

To the west of Area 51 is the Nevada Test Site where 739 nuclear weapons had been exploded by the U.S. Department of Energy.

And another one, just last year, by the Nightstalkers. That one wasn’t listed on Wikipedia.

Nobody wanted to get to the Test Site. And even if someone got to it, they wouldn’t last long, given the lingering radiation.

Going back to its origins, the location received its name when a large chunk of Nevada was bought (appropriated) by the government during World War II because the military at Nellis Air Force Base needed some place for its pilots to practice dropping bombs and strafing targets before shipping them overseas to do the same against the Japanese and Germans.

Traditionally, the military took training posts and divided them into training areas. It was easier to do numbers, and sometimes, surprisingly, even the military took the easy way. So the portion on the map surrounding Groom Lake had received the number 51. It might have easily been 50 or 52, but 51 it was.

The conspiracy theorists do have one thing right. Majestic-12 did begin at Area 51 and from there on out the place became the hub for a lot of super-secret activity, including mundane things such as testing beyond-state-of-the-art aircraft.

As far as the aliens from Roswell being brought there?

No such luck.

There were no aliens from Roswell.

It really was a weather balloon.

But the best cover-up is a cover-up of something that never happened to cover up something that happened. Anyone in covert ops knows that, and if one can wrap their brain around that concept, they might have a chance of surviving in the Black World. Roswell was leaked to the press and appeared to be a cover-up for recovery of an alien artifact and bodies, because one state away, at super-secret Area 51, they were dealing with another problem altogether: a Rift.

Over the following decades, enough weird stuff happened around Area 51 that couldn’t be completely covered up, and UFO enthusiasts began to focus on it. Every day a flight from McCarren Airport in Las Vegas took off and landed at Groom Lake, on the aforementioned third-longest runway in the world, depositing workers. It returned to Vegas each evening, taking them back home.

While the stuff they worked on was classified, the real work happened farther underground, at levels none of those on the plane would ever get access to. Nor did any of them particularly want access to those levels. Sort of like you might find the Mines of Moria interesting to traverse if you absolutely had to, but you don’t want to know what’s way down there in the darkness.

Speaking of which, Ivar asked Orlando as he got in the passenger seat, “I thought I’d be taking Janet in?”

Orlando laughed. “Been checking Wikipedia?” He threw the jeep into gear. “Nightstalkers don’t take Janet. Hell, son, they aren’t even stationed in Area 51 proper. You’ll see.” The jeep moved forward with a lurch.

“The government actually got some stuff right there at Groom Lake,” Orlando said as he spun the wheel and they rolled onto a paved road, heading south. “They been flying worker bees in and out of Area 51 since ’72. The planes and pilots were under several front companies for the National Security Agency, until someone got smart and said fuck it, let’s just let the air force do the flying for the government, since that is what the fucking air force is supposed to do, right? But they still paint the fuckers weird, red stripe down the side. Like they was trying to draw attention to the fact that the flights weren’t fucking normal.”

Orlando had not taken part in the
Battlestar Galactica
marathon.

Orlando glanced over at Ivar, who could swear he smelled alcohol wafting across the jeep from the colonel, but who also picked up the challenge. “So they’re a diversion too?”

“Don’t say it with a question mark,” Orlando said. “The Nightstalkers like statements, not questions. And the big jets, the 737s, they got the red stripe. The little ones, like the one you just flew in—”

“Had a blue stripe.”

“So you were paying attention,” Orlando said as he shifted gear, the jeep’s transmission protesting loudly. “That’s how folks like you get in and why you land out here, rather than at Groom Lake.”

“How do I get out?”

Orlando laughed. “You might be smarter than you look. You aren’t even there yet and you’re asking about leaving.” He had one hand on the wheel, the other on the gear shifter, and he slammed it into the best the old jeep could do. “It’s easy. You just say no.”

“No?”

“Did I stutter?” Orlando said. “When Ms. Jones asks you, you just say no and you get to leave, go home, go back to whatever fucking rock you crawled out from under.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it.” Orlando then reached into his pocket and pulled out a flask. He expertly unscrewed the top with the same hand holding it and took a deep drink. He held it out to Ivar.

“No thanks.”

“Suit yourself.” Orlando screwed the top back on and slid it into his pocket. “Funny thing is, no one has ever said no to Ms. Jones. That I know of. Now, of course, I do think some should have. But she’s got a way of putting things.”

“So she’s going to ask me what?”

“To be a Nightstalker, son,” Orlando muttered, then in a low voice, “
Maybe
.”

Ivar leaned closer. “What was that?”

“You met some of the Nightstalkers in North Carolina,” Orlando said. “That’s what they’re called now, but they’ve had a lot of names over the years.”

“It’s a cover name,” Ivar said.

“So you listened in some of your classes,” Orlando said.

“The army’s elite Special Operations helicopter unit is called the Nightstalkers,” Ivar said. “Task Force 160 is its official designation. They flew us on some of the training missions. I assume these Nightstalkers aren’t helicopter pilots.”

“Yeah,” Orlando said, clearly not impressed. “The team has had some dumb-ass names over the years, but we all kinda like the current one: Nightstalkers. Go after things that go bump in the night. Catch ’em and destroy ’em.”

“What about study them?” Ivar asked.

“Spoken like a true fucking dumb-ass scientist,” Orlando said. “Anyway, the team was first based at Area 51, because some dumb-ass scientists opened the first Rift there, way back when. Most of those idiots ended up getting snarked through, never seen again. The ones that weren’t sucked through the Rift ended up dead.” He glanced across at Ivar. “Ms. Jones must have seen something in you, boy, because if she just wanted you to be a scientist, she’d have made you an Acme, one of the Support people. Maybe even an on-call Acme. But she sent you to Spec-Ops training so that you’ll know which end of the rifle the bullet comes out of. So she wants you to be a Nightstalker. There’s a big difference.”

“A scientist can’t be a Nightstalker?” Ivar asked.

“Not many.” Orlando snorted. “It’s real simple. When it comes down to it, do you want to study the fucking problem or solve the fucking problem? Nightstalkers solve problems, usually caused by scientists, so that the human race can go on, ignorant and blissfully unaware of the shit they just avoided. Little things, like the end of the world.”

Orlando twitched the steering wheel to avoid some road kill. “The team moved out of Area 51 proper when it got too popular. TV shows, news reports, all that bullshit, even the CIA releasing data on it via the Freedom of Information Act. The Nightstalkers hate media almost as much as they hate scientists. We call our new home the Ranch. Because it actually was a ranch, which we bought. It’s technically private land, which is good because we can use deadly force to protect the grounds while the guards at Area 51 just escort dumb-asses off the perimeter and wag a stern finger at them. Ought to stick that finger up their ass.”

They came to a stop sign where the road T’ed. Orlando actually stopped, even though they could see to the horizon in either direction and there wasn’t a vehicle in sight. Orlando put on his turn signal.

But he left the jeep in neutral, staring straight ahead out the windshield. Ivar waited patiently, for at least thirty seconds, which doesn’t sound long, but most people can’t sit behind someone at a green light for two seconds without blaring their horn.

“Something wrong?” Ivar finally asked.

“Yes.”

Ivar looked where Orlando was staring. “What?”

“There’s an intruder out there.”

Ivar peered ahead. In nautical terms, it was BMNT—begin morning nautical twilight—where the horizon to the east was clear but the sun had not yet broken the plane.

“Where?”

“You can’t see it. But I can.”

“What
it
?”

“But you can see the M4 in the bracket in front of you, right?”

It wasn’t hard to miss the automatic rifle clamped to the dashboard in front of the passenger seat. “Yes.”

“Slowly, very slowly, take it.”

Ivar looked out into the desert. There was nothing moving, nothing out of the ordinary. Not even a rabbit.

Ivar removed the M4 from the bracket.

“Careful, son, there’s a round in the chamber.”

“I know how to use a weapon. Now,” he added, and nodded. “The bullet comes out of that end.”

“Big difference between the firing range and real life,” Orlando said. He still hadn’t moved.

“What’s out there?”

“The enemy.”

Ivar stuck the M4 out toward Orlando. “Here. You see it, you shoot it.”

“I can’t,” Orlando said. “I’m being targeted. Don’t you see? On my chest?”

Ivar look at Orlando’s chest, but all he saw was the name tag and the Combat Infantry Badge Velcroed to the uniform.

“I don’t see anything.”

“Good,” Orlando said. “If you can’t see it, maybe it can’t see you. Ready your weapon, soldier.”

Ivar had the rifle in his hands. He stared at Colonel Orlando hard, then put the stock to his shoulder, his eye to the sight. “What am I aiming at?”

“One o’clock. One hundred and fifty meters. See that pile of rocks?”

“Yes.”

“Eight inches to the left of the last rock. It’s about four feet tall.”

Ivar saw nothing. He curled his finger around the trigger.

“Fire.”

Ivar pulled the trigger. He saw a puff of sand about forty meters past the “target.”

“Damn, son,” Orlando said. “Close. About six inches to the right.”

Ivar adjusted.

“Give it three rounds.”

Ivar quickly pulled the trigger thrice, riding out the recoil.

Three puffs of sand.

“Hot damn!” Orlando exclaimed, slapping Ivar on the shoulder. “Stand down, son, stand down. You got ’im.”