Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (34 page)

Everything is just right.

Nada was an island of calm amidst turmoil as the helicopter dropped like a stone without engine power, the blades ripping off from the sudden stoppage.

Nada saw Carl Coyne cross the bay. Nada smiled at him.

The ground came rushing up.

Everything is just right.

The Keep was sweating, beads collecting on her forehead, rolling down her face.

“How much time?” Foreman asked.

“Two minutes,” the Keep answered.

“You can turn it off,” Hannah said.

“We have to contain—” the Keep began, but then the gate snapped out of existence, leaving the HUB sitting in its place on the top of the ramp.

“I’d turn the bomb off, if I were you,” Foreman said.

“Where are the people?” Hannah asked. “Neeley? The Nightstalkers?”

“They’ve rebooted,” Foreman said. “I hope.”

When it changed back, Mac hung from the wall of the mineshaft by one hand. “Where the frak is Kirk? They said we’d reboot!”

Eagle looked up. “It doesn’t work that way.”

“Frak that!” Mac said. He leapt off the wall and grabbed the rope, sliding down as fast as he could. “She told me Kirk would be okay.”

“She told me that too,” Eagle said. He put a hand on Mac’s shoulder. “Let’s go. We take care of our own.”

When it changed back, Doc and Ivar were in the massive Archives at Area 51 arguing, which wasn’t unusual. Doc was sitting on the bottom stair of the large rolling steps and Ivar was in front of him, pacing back and forth on the concrete floor.

A box was on the floor, one they’d just managed to find, buried deep on a top row, shoved well to the rear.

They didn’t understand how they’d found it, but they accepted it was part of things changing back. They’d begun going through the material and immediately launched into an argument over what they were reading: Odessa’s last notes.

“Everything is the same, but it isn’t the same,” Doc said. “Things must be self-consistent in the universe. There are rules to physics.”

“I know there are,” Ivar said. “But there are rules we haven’t even begun to realize exist. Conservation of mass and energy might not be what we think it is. We’ve rebooted, so where is Kirk?”

“If a single person represents a measure of order in the universe,” Doc said, “then there has to be some sort of balance. If Kirk is gone, something must be taking his place. We’ve seen some weird stuff, but there are rules!”

“Not the time to go into higher theory,” Ivar said.

“There have to be rules to this,” Doc insisted.

Ivar laughed. He was a long way from the university.

“You know, of course, it’s entirely possible that twenty penguins all farted at the same time and that brought the universe into existence and time travel along with it.”

“Why can’t you take anything seriously?” Doc demanded.

“I can,” Ivar said. “But my question again to you, oh genius, is where is Kirk if we rebooted? That means he didn’t die, right? So where is he?”

Doc’s phone rang. He answered, listened, and then put it away. “Let’s go. Eagle has the same question, and he thinks he knows the answer.”

When it changed back, Moms was driving down a two-lane road in Kansas with the faded yellow lines and raggedy asphalt that’s a testament to a road way less traveled and even more forgotten. If a road could be homeless and pushing a grocery cart full of worthless, tattered treasures, it would be this road. She’d been on it so many times, from trips in the bed of a pickup to a schoolbus to her last visit, that she remembered every pathetic inch.

Moms could see to the horizon in all directions and wondered, not for the first time, how any place could be so flat; and more importantly, why anyone would have stopped here on their way across the country to put down roots. Had they come from some place east that was worse? Had they not heard of the sunshine and beauty of California, which lay ahead?

Seriously.

The dark circle of a gopher hole to the right stuck out as much as one of those flailing balloon men in front of car dealerships because it shattered the monotony. As she drove on, she thought of all the places she’d been in this part of her life. The mountains of Afghanistan. The deserts of the Middle East. The high plains of South America along with its lower jungles. The cities of Europe. The job, however, had always been similar. She wondered what it said about her to come from this flat land, this place which is such a nothing. Nothing to see, nothing to amaze, and certainly nothing to inspire.

She paused at the battered mailbox, the victim of too many bored boys swinging a bat at the only thing vertical near the road. The numbers had been faded in her childhood, and now they were gone. As she started up the long drive, her tires crunched on the remnants of gravel and her stomach lurched. “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road” was a poignant song to Moms. Nada might have his Zevon, but she had her Lucinda Williams. But it didn’t grab her heart. It gave her a dull ache in her forehead, a reminder of how your head can get so sad and lonely that a sound can make your hair feel like crying.

The house was in view. People round here said it was on a hill. “You live in that house on the hill,” they would say. Now, she wondered what could be under that house to raise it the mere couple of feet so that anyone in Kansas would happily call it a hill.

A door to hell, perhaps?

Moms had just been through a gate that was close to that, where monsters, and men worse than monsters, abided. But this place wasn’t even high enough for a gate, or a Rift, and Moms found some dark humor in that as she stopped the car.

She didn’t get out. Not yet.

Moms knew what was beneath it. A root cellar with a dirt floor and wood beams and rotting ropes to hold the bags of onions, and whatever else was grown during the nauseating hot summer, to tide them through the brutal cold of winter. Everything here was extremes.

Moms got out of the car, but she didn’t start for the house. Not yet.

Everywhere else a bag of onions is a bag of onions, but under this house it was a ghost in burlap creaking as the drafts blew through the gaps in the crumbling rock and mortar foundation. Everything about this was a nightmare when she left, and not one thing had improved in the decades since. The paint that was once peeling was now completely stripped. The porch where no one had ever drunk iced tea and rocked and tried to make small talk about the weather was half collapsed, taking part of the overhang with it.

But the half-finished wooden dollhouse was still there.

All Moms’s life it was an old, neglected house that reflected the small and neglected family that it housed.

Moms was startled to realize she’d never called it home. It was never a home. She felt tears on her cheeks, sliding down. Because if you can’t say
home
then you never had one. She’d run away so fast and so far, she’d forgotten that. But standing in the drive, feeling the heat coming off the car engine, she began to remember.

Moms walked around and hit the little button. The trunk popped open.

She retrieved the shovel and one of the jugs of water and ignored the other contents. She walked to the porch, and then did an about-face. Army training. She paced off twenty steps and began to dig.

She dug for hours, stopping only to drink some water or pour it over her head. Before long she had to get another jug. But she was prepared; Nada had taught her well. As she got the next jug, she looked into the well-stocked trunk and thought of how much more she brought back with her now than she’d taken with her when she left.

She hadn’t brought gloves. She’d known Nada would have chided her for not purchasing a pair when she got the shovel. Her hands were calloused from her work, but the incessant shoveling began to dig through the rough skin, tearing through and bringing forth first blisters, then blood.

Moms relished the pain.

She kept digging, arcing the cleared space around to the side of the house. She paused for a moment to wipe blood off her hands and the shovel handle, and noted the broken glass in the window that was over the sink in the kitchen. The room where her mother spent all of Moms’s life sitting there in the same old kitchen chair, hair lank and gray far too early, her face weathered by alcohol and cigarettes, and carved into permanent creases of brittle disappointment.

Moms resumed shoveling, a mindless activity that allowed her mind to roam. Every day she’d come home from school and the only things that had moved were the pile of cigarette butts and the cracked teacup that had once been part of a glittering tea service for someone else. The cup, like the woman who held it, had long ago slipped down the ladder of life and found itself here, alone and bruised and lacking even its saucer. Her mother had been empty for all of Moms’s childhood.

Once a teacher had been kind and told Moms that when her mother was a senior in the same high school, she was the prettiest girl in her class. Always dancing and always smiling.

Moms kept digging until she turned the corner, out of the gaze of the empty socket of the window into the kitchen. She felt a bit better. But then she remembered she’d felt bad hearing her teacher’s words, such a contrast to what she knew of her mother. Now it made her almost happy to know there had once been a girl inside the faded housedress and cuffed loafers.

Her mother had always worn the loafers. They’d made a clicking sound when she did move, and Moms had liked that—the fact that she never snuck up on anyone.

Moms kept digging until it was too dark to see. Nada would have told her to bring night vision goggles, but then Nada had had his own issues with memories and how to deal with them.

Moms didn’t want to sleep in the car, so she threw a poncho liner on the ground and lay on it. She stared up at the moon, feeling the pain radiating from her hands, up her arms, and numbly into her brain. She remembered the creaking bags of onions, the sound etched into her brain so deep, she doubted Frasier and his machine could extricate it.

Because one day it wasn’t the onions.

Her brothers never checked back. They left and never looked back; Moms supposed men could do that. But even on the other side of the world, Moms would check in once in a while. And then one day at Area 51, she’d called and there was no answer and she knew, she just knew it was bad.