Time Patrol (Area 51 The Nightstalkers) (9 page)

Eagle didn’t believe in adrenaline rushes anymore. He was older than the two young men clinging to the wall and everyone would agree he was smarter. They were all combat veterans, but Eagle had a scroll of scars on the left side of his head, marring his chocolate skin, and he liked to think he’d had some common sense burned into him when that IED had gone off in Iraq years ago.

The truth was deeper than that though. Eagle was one of those people who’d been born old, with wisdom and common sense always far ahead of his physical age. He’d learned to read by age two, and accelerated from there. So trying to kick your buddy off the wall of a mineshaft for shits and giggles struck him as just plain dumb. He didn’t rate the actual climb itself much higher on the common sense scale, but the climb was a quarterly requirement. Who knows when they’d have to climb some rocky, vertical surface in order to achieve their goal? Eagle had pointed out, every time the test came up, that he flew their transport, the Snake. He could put them at the top of any cliff or wall they desired with no sweat.

Such logic held little sway with Nada and Moms, neither of whom, Eagle noted, were currently with them. He filed that away because he would make damn sure they did their quarterly evaluation climb when they got back.

Eagle hated the climb. It reminded him of the rope he couldn’t climb in ninth grade for his Presidential Merit certificate. Perfect academic scores hadn’t been enough. But maybe there had been a purpose to the requirement, because when he failed on his first attempt, Eagle worked out for six months, ate his first salads, and practiced technique until he could climb the rope in under thirty seconds and touch the ceiling of the high school gym.

Except that he did it alone, with no one to certify the effort. That’s when he realized he sought no approval but his own. He never climbed it in front of others, even when he “failed” during gym classes and some of his fellow students called him names. He was content with his secret knowledge of his own achievement. It gave him a thrill he was sure Frasier, the Nightstalker shrink, could put some DSM-IV tag on, but Eagle had never shared that memory with Frasier, or anyone else.

Which was why he thought Mac and Kirk were a pair of idiots trying to outdo each other just because he was there, even though he was pointedly not watching. They were both expert climbers, the ones who Nada would turn to if he needed someone to “lead” the team up a tough pitch in case they had to take down some mad scientist who set up his lair at the top of, say, Mount Everest, or more likely, a volcano. Mad scientists always seemed to put their lairs in volcanoes in the movies. Particularly active ones, which just seemed dumb to Eagle. Still, Eagle smiled as he recalled Doctor Evil’s monologue about his childhood from his volcanic lair. Word for word it ran through his brain.

Eagle waited patiently, trying to ignore the two idiots above and trying to read a book on his phone. He loved his print books, but he’d been converted to the eBook a few years ago mainly by the convenience: His books were literally at hand as long as he had his phone with him and, as a Nightstalker, he always had his special phone at hand.

Eagle frowned as the screen flickered for a moment, the digital letters becoming hazy, then re-forming. He’d have to take the phone in to IT for a checkup. He’d never had to take a
book
book in to IT to get fixed, he thought with the grouchiness of the techno leery.

“Rock!” Kirk called out, and Eagle did as he’d been trained, tucking his chin in to his chest. Proper training, he thought as he waited for a boulder to splat him into oblivion. Most people very wrongly looked up at the alert.

Mac’s climbing shoe bounced off Eagle’s helmet.

“What the frak?” Eagle yelled. “Would you two idiots cut it out?”

Frak was still a buzzword on the team, even though the
Battlestar Galactica
marathon was long in the past. Moms frowned on cussing, so the team had picked up the word, and it had stuck for some of them.

“Sorry,” Kirk said as he tapped the worn wooden plank that indicated the top of the climb. Mac shoved in and also tapped the plank, and then they tried to beat each other back down.

“Be faster if you just let go and let gravity do the work,” Eagle observed before going back to his book, a history of ancient Rome.

“Funny guy,” Mac yelled out. He was the team engineer, more commonly referred to as the demo man, although he had built some things on occasion. He was movie-star handsome if one considered a young Tom Cruise handsome, and his humor was always on the edge of painful irony, masking some inner darkness, which did not make him unique on the Nightstalkers. One usually did not go into Special Operations and then the covert world of black ops unless you were outside the bell curve.

And one was not selected for the Nightstalkers unless you were “special,” and special didn’t necessarily mean on the plus side of the bell curve, as Eagle tried to point out to the other members of the team enough times that they didn’t listen to him anymore about it.

Kirk partially took Eagle’s advice and leapt off the rock face of the mineshaft for the safety line both had heretofore ignored. He grabbed it and slid down as fast as he could without burning the skin off his palms. He reached the bottom a couple of seconds before Mac.

“Pay up,” Kirk said. He was the Nightstalkers’ commo sergeant (although the Nightstalkers didn’t do rank, some things associated with the Special Forces A-Team stuck): a narrow man, all bones and lean muscle stretched over the skeleton. Hailing from Parthenon, Arkansas, zip code 72666, he was a former Army Ranger whose expertise at cheating and willingness to do anything for a cause he believed in had caught Ms. Jones’s attention and brought him eventual assignment to the team. He was serious about money because he sent practically all of it back home to his younger siblings to “keep them on the farm,” according to Mac. Actually he was helping them keep the farm, since their father had blown himself up cooking meth.

“What’s wrong?” Kirk asked as Mac forked over the bills.

Eagle hadn’t been aware he was frowning as he looked at his phone’s screen. “Strange. Here it’s stating that the Lateran Obelisk is still in Egypt.”

“Oh, that’s bad,” Mac said with the sarcasm of the ignorant.

“But it’s in Rome,” Eagle said. He was sliding his finger on the screen, trying to find out why this mistake was in the text. “This author is very reliable on his history.”

“History is written by the winners,” Kirk said, nudging Mac.

“Funny guy,” Mac said.

“History is important,” Eagle said, looking up from the phone. “It’s the absolute of our past leading into the possibilities of our future. You can’t mess with history.”

“Right,” Mac said. “Your turn to climb, oh wise one.”

With a sigh, Eagle put the phone in his pocket. He moved to the rock wall and looked up. He was rescued from starting as his cell phone belted out a Warren Zevon tune: Nada’s personal one. Mac’s and Kirk’s phones joined the chorus.

“This isn’t good,” Eagle said.

Whether he meant the call or the burp in history or both remained to be seen.

It changed for Moms by figuratively traveling into her past, both in place and time. She was already in the place, having made the drive of tears back home. She was sitting on the front porch of the abandoned shotgun shack where she’d grown up in the middle of Nowhere, Kansas. Interstate 80 was to the south, across the flat plains, but so far away that no sound traveled from the eighteen-wheelers racing across the middle of the country.

There was no other house in sight, just miles and miles of slightly undulating fields, and despite all the years since she’d left, Moms still had a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. It had started when she’d entered Kansas and grown stronger every mile she drew closer to “home.” The house was empty, long deserted. Her younger brothers never came out here, smarter than she was, understanding some memories only brought pain.

It seemed Moms was a masochist, going back to her roots in order to remember.

But sometimes, going into the past is necessary in order to move forward.

There are variations on that, such as changing the present in order to move forward, which Moms was soon to discover.

She was not only back here in Kansas, she was back at the place where she’d begun. She dared not enter the house. Bad things had happened here. Sometimes, alone and off duty, with a half-empty bottle on the table next to her bunk, Moms had allowed herself to remember.

Moms had a cheap picture album on her knees, made of imitation leather, with gold lettering on the cover: OUR WEDDING.

This was her way of traveling back in time, but avoiding the one time and person she couldn’t face.

Moms’s mother had purchased the album with her employee discount at the Dollar Store in town. Things were so bad here in this part of the country, even that store had gone under during the last fiscal crunch.

With a deep sigh, Moms went back, flipping open to the last page of the album.

It was not about a wedding. It was a recording of futility, lost dreams, and broken lives. How Doctor Golden from the Cellar had tracked it down, Moms had no idea. The Cellar’s reach was long and deep and never stopped at personal boundaries.

The latter part of the book was filled with travel postcards. The last two were from Istanbul, and just before that terrible visit. Moms sighed, now seeing how futile and naïve it had been of her to send them to her mother. She’d picked them up on a layover, en route to a clandestine deployment to Afghanistan.

Moms flipped back in time, noting the postcards her mother had carefully pasted in the book, all from places Moms had traveled through en route.

Moms paused. Maybe that was the story of her own life: en route. Always to places where there was bad. She never sent the actual destinations. And all she’d ever done in the en route places was get the postcards because she’d been going to a destination to do a job, and there was no time for anything else.

Postcards from the edge
, Hannah, the head of the Cellar, had called them.

Then Moms reached the part of the album where the postcards ended and there were the earlier pictures cut out by her mother from
National Geographic
magazines. Places her mother had dreams of visiting.

But never did.

Moms went further back, recognizing some of the places from when her mother had first cut them out and pinned them to the old, wheezing fridge with magnets boasting grain company emblems.

Then she got to the dreams her mother had had of a fancy wedding. Fancy by poor Kansas standards. Cut out from magazines: A white dress. A church. Most importantly, a groom.

None of it had come true.

Moms looked up from the album. A half-finished dollhouse, three feet high by six long, big enough for a child to crawl into, rotted on the end of the porch. Her father had started it for Moms one Christmas day, and then disappeared (the proverbial leaving to get a pack of cigarettes), never coming back, making the dollhouse a testament to abandonment.

At first Moms had thought it was some kind of forlorn monument to the failed marriage, but later in life, with the wisdom of age, she’d realized that her mother simply hadn’t cared enough to do anything about the dollhouse.

Which was worse.

What if he had stayed? Would things have turned out differently? Moms had no idea, because she really didn’t understand how her mother had turned out the way she had.

Moms flipped the page to the first one, the only one that featured something other than dreams of an event and places never traveled to.

Moms shook her head and sniffled, wondering for a moment if she were catching a cold.

The picture was of the family. Her mother standing in the center with both hands on a five-year-old version of Moms standing in front of her and the younger brothers flanking both of them.

The picture was blurry and, for a moment, Moms thought it was because her eyes were full of tears from the trip down a memory cul-de-sac.

It was all wrong. Moms wiped a sleeve across her eyes and squinted, not believing what she was seeing. The Polaroid picture was faded, more faded than she remembered, but it had been years since she’d last thumbed through it. But that wasn’t the issue.

Because now there was a man standing next to her mother where there had been no man before. A man she vaguely remembered from childhood but was certain had never been in this picture. And her mother was in a white dress, the dream wedding dress on the next page. And she was smiling.

Moms tried to remember her mother smiling, but all she could conjure up was her mother in a drunken stupor, face slack. That was the most peaceful she’d ever looked. The rest of the time her face had been full of rage and pain and darkness.

Moms flipped the pages.

The rest of the book was as she remembered.

Moms went back to the first page. The picture wasn’t as faded, as if the Polaroid film was slowly developing after more than thirty years.

Then her phone phone began to ring, a tone she’d only heard once before when Nada had played it for the team. His personal cry for help.
Keep me in your heart . . .