Decimate, p.12
Decimate, page 12
Randy felt like it was rude not to help her, but it also felt like this process was about to become intricate and dangerous and he might screw it up if he intervened. So he watched her hoist the storm doors open, revealing a set of stairs. He neared the entrance so he could get a better look down, realized, with a knot in his gut, they went far deeper than your average storm cellar.
She gestured for him to go down first. He just stared at her.
“I’ll give you a gun if it’ll make you feel safer,” she said.
“I’m carrying.”
“And I haven’t asked for it, so that should be a sign you’re all right.”
“Guns aren’t much good against radiation,” he said.
“There’s no radiation on Thunder Ranch.”
With a placid smile and a jerk of her head, she gestured for him to start moving.
He descended, hearing the well-oiled hinges of the doors being closed overhead. Then suddenly there was darkness, save for the glowing lights of another keypad on the wall in front of him.
“Put the glasses on,” she said next to him.
“Lady, if this is some kinda—”
“I know it’s dark now, but if you don’t put the glasses on, you’re not going to be able to see a damn thing when the door opens.”
He consented. Saw her finger make shadows against the glowing keypad. There was a slight hiss. He realized it was an electronic lock opening, and then suddenly the woman was pushing open a door into a silent explosion of fierce light that quickly turned her into a black silhouette.
Caldwell gestured for him to step into the glow, and he did, feeling his mouth hang open at the dazzling sight before him. She was right—he would have been blinded without the glasses. He still felt blinded. After a few moments, he realized he was staring down a corridor lined with glass cells, similar in architecture to the one in that movie Silence of the Lambs, only from inside each one came a shimmering radiance.
He didn’t even notice her close the door behind him because his feet had taken over and now he was walking down the length of the cells, staring within. Some of them looked like those silly terrariums you’d see at a natural history museum, the kind with stuffed animals positioned in vaguely lifelike-looking poses. But the closer he looked, the more he realized each cell only contained scattered elements of wilderness environments. Broken branches or stones, and their reason for being there was simple. They were either the source of the rising, pulsating blue radiance, or inextricably bonded to it.
His gut told him that if he peered too closely into the light, he’d lose either his mind or his lunch, so he tried to take in the other details first. Saw that on the outside of each cell was a photograph of a different animal. No explanation or text, just a picture. One cell showed a picture of a bear, the other a deer, the other birds.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, he thought. That’s what they used to be. That’s what these shimmering things used to be.
“The color,” Agatha said. “Is it the same color, Randy? The same color you saw when you got shot?”
“Death,” he said before he could stop himself. “It’s the color of death.”
“Oh, but see, Randy, that’s just the problem.”
She followed his gaze to what had once been a grizzly bear but was now a gentle, rolling storm of blue light rising toward the ceiling like smoke from a splintered section of tree trunk.
“What we’re looking at,” Agatha Caldwell said, “can’t die.”
II
The Park
Death is a word, and it is the word, the image, that creates fear.
—Jiddu Krishnamurti
10
When the first burst of turbulence hits, Claire raises the window shade next to her seat, braced for the sight of her little brother’s face. But there are no serpentine trails of fog reflected in the glass, no glimpse of Poe’s bright orange jacket. Just clouds ripping past, briefly glowing ivory in the plane’s flashing wing light before vanishing into darkness. One admonishment has scared him off. If she wants him to reappear, will she have to invite him?
She feels a sense memory from that moment in the guest bathroom at her house, of the tingling that spread from the back of her neck across the crown of her skull as her little brother extended his hand to her from the other side of the glass. Feels a sudden burst of longing for the ghostly sight of him that’s been stalking her ever since the crash. Is her mind opening, or is she losing it?
I can’t draw, she hears herself saying again. Panic attacks and breakdowns are one thing. Manifesting an elaborate skill out of nowhere is quite another.
The plane bounces so hard Margot holds her iPad to her chest. She’s warned Claire an early snowstorm’s blowing into the Flathead Valley, the kind that might get them redirected if they were flying commercial.
Margot tucks her iPad into the big padded pocket on the side of her recliner-size chair. She didn’t ask why Claire wanted all the shades down, even during flight. Hiding from reporters was a good excuse on the tarmac, but at cruising altitude? She’s been exceedingly patient with Claire, and Claire appreciates it, even if she thinks it’s a sign Margot knows the reunion awaiting them is going to be challenging.
As soon as the plane leveled off, Margot moved to the plush leather seat facing Claire across a table that could fit two formal place settings with room to spare. No doubt she’s been reading everything she can find about Poe’s crash and doesn’t want to upset her with any of the accompanying images.
Claire’s never been a nervous flyer, never hit a bout of turbulence strong enough to trigger memories of being knocked off her feet that night in Glacier. There was a car wreck with her aunt Eileen that did it when she was younger, left her shaking and dazed for hours, even though both of them walked away without a scratch. And contact sports were never her favorite thing. Another player slamming into her could trigger memories of that night and the way it had felt like someone had yanked her head to one side with vicious force.
Her dad’s been right about one thing so far: The plane is nice, comfortable. Thick carpet, plush leather seats, lavender air freshener that smells like it costs more than a seat in coach does. There’s even a sleeping compartment in the back Margot said she could use but which Claire hasn’t set foot in.
“How come you didn’t believe him?” Claire asks.
“Your father?”
“His alien theory.”
Margot considers this, crosses her hands over one knee. “Not enough missing time, for one. Abductees sometimes report hours lost, half days. And there were other little things that didn’t fit with what I’ve found in the literature. With abductions, there’s often a sort of preparatory dance between a craft and an abductee, and maybe a searchlight of some sort that scans the area and the person. Almost like the human subject is being examined before they’re taken up. There was none of that.”
“You mean in the versions he didn’t make up,” Claire says.
“Correct.”
“What do you think it was?”
Margot raises her eyebrows and clears her throat, as if she’s accessing a mental file in her head that’s within reach but hasn’t been opened in a while. “Well, to me your father described something with defined borders. A quick, blinding pulse. He was a good distance away from you and your brother when it struck, so he could probably see the nature of it, the shape, pretty well. Better than either of you could.”
“Why wasn’t there more damage, then?” Claire asks.
“You and your brother had significant injuries.”
“The trees, though.”
“Didn’t you tell the doctors that a bunch of branches broke and came down on you?”
“If it was a shock wave like he described, it would have been entire trees coming down.”
“There was some damage, apparently, but the Park Service blamed downdraft from the helicopter that lifted you guys out of there. All I know is that I believe you experienced something powerful and unexplained. But earthbound. I don’t think the three of you left the ground during the experience. And I wanted him to embrace that. That it could be unexplained and significant and life changing without being an abduction story.”
“But then he’d have to cop to all the lies he told about it,” Claire says.
Margot doesn’t dispute this.
“How’d you get into all this?” Claire asks. “Not just my dad. I mean, this world of . . .”
“Nutjobs?” Margot smiles. Claire smiles back. “I experienced a sighting. When I was fourteen.”
“Where?” Claire asks.
“My family’s lodge in the Cascades. It was pretty typical of the stories you hear. A craft that moved too quickly through the sky, made maneuvers that weren’t possible given the technology of the day. Or today, for that matter.”
“And so from fourteen on you were just . . . devoted.”
“Obsessed. And it was more like twenty-three on.”
“Why twenty-three?” Claire asks.
“I dismissed the experience for years, and then one night several members of my family admitted they’d seen it too. And we’d all just never said anything about it. We’d gone . . . what? Nine years having witnessed something truly mind-boggling and none of us ever said a word. So I visited the towns nearby, started asking questions, and eventually I turned up more people who’d seen the exact same thing that night. I mean, they described it to a T. Without any prompting. Many of them didn’t even know each other, and they all said they’d never discussed it with anyone.”
“How many people did you find?” Claire asks.
“Fifteen,” Margot says. “That’s when I learned how powerful the fear of ridicule can be. It kept fifteen people silent about an experience they couldn’t explain, an experience with incredible implications. And I thought, how many people are there like us the world over, shoving extraordinary experiences into the back of their minds because of this fear? Imagine all the discoveries that could lie behind that wall of shame.”
Claire is thinking now of the hours she’s spent on YouTube watching seemingly sane and ordinary people describe in vivid detail experiences that defy explanation. Encounters with crafts like the one Margot just described or big hairy monsters in the woods. One after the other, she’d watched them, hunting for the ones she could dismiss. The ones who seemed to hog the camera in some desperate bid for attention or whose stories spiraled ever outward into ridiculousness with each new, theatrical detail. But more often than not, she found herself sitting awestruck before the accounts of people whose tones didn’t carry a whiff of ego or insanity, wondering if she could have become one of those people had she taken a different path.
“Claire.”
“Yes?”
“May I ask what you think it was?”
“Military.” Margot looks startled by the answer, so Claire gives her a second to process. “It was so quick. I thought maybe it was a downdraft from some kind of aircraft they were testing over the park. But then I’d think maybe I was just confusing my memory of being airlifted out with what happened before. So I don’t know, is basically what I’m saying.”
“And your mother?” she asks.
“We didn’t talk about it.”
“Poe?” Margot asks. “What did he believe?”
It comes out of Claire with ease, the story of the past twenty-four hours. Up until that moment, Margot, like most CNN viewers, has only known of the possibility that Claire received some sort of psychic message from her brother as the plane went down. The other details leave her wide-eyed and stricken, maybe because she has no fundamental resistance to them, no self-protective skepticism.
Then Claire feels it, the massaging of a muscle inside her arm.
“Paper,” she says.
“What?”
“It’s happening again,” Claire says. “Give me paper.”
Margot is scrambling for her carry-on bag suddenly, no small feat given the plane’s rock-and-roll descent. Eventually she pulls out a leather portfolio, flips it open to reveal a legal pad. She manages to get a pen into Claire’s hand before stumbling back into her seat and hurriedly buckling her seat belt.
It takes effort not to fight it this time, maybe because the transmission’s exerting greater power to overcome the bouncing turbulence. But a sketch is taking shape once more. Only it’s not Pier 39. It’s not anyplace familiar.
It’s not anyone familiar, even though it’s a person.
A man.
Perfectly balanced features, an angel’s face, except for the frenzied markings indicating both filth and a heavy beard, and the thick hair so matted it looks like a broken helmet.
Claire thinks the whole thing might be over with. Then her hand starts to move again. Writing this time. Is she actually going to sign the damn thing like a professional artist?
HE KILLED SOMEONE
The second her arm goes lax, Margot’s pen slips from her hand and drops to the thick carpet.
The engines groan, the plane rocks side to side as it battles crosswinds. She’s not looking for it, so when she sees it, she lets out a startled cry. Little Poe is visible inside the plane’s window now, and for the first time, his palm is pressed flat to the glass. His hair is being tousled by lazy winds completely out of sync with the ones ripping the clouds behind him. How is that possible? A hallucination, she figures, would steal from and twist what she’s actually seeing, not add a completely separate layer over it. How could her mind create a completely different set of winds that only affect her brother’s hair and nothing else?
“Claire?” Margot asks. “Are you seeing him?”
She nods. Poe lowers his palm and backs away into the dark, and she realizes the fear in his expression was enough to match her own.
“You didn’t, I take it?” Claire tries to maintain calm, but she sounds as if she’s breathing through a straw.
Margot shakes her head. When she sees the sketch, she falls silent, stares at it.
“Who is this?” she finally asks.
“I have no idea.”
Margot is nodding as she studies it, but it looks reflexive, nervous, like she’s trying to maintain her calm as well.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Claire asks.
“Automatic writing, yes. But a drawing this detailed . . .”
“Out of someone who can barely draw an orange.”
Margot is silent for a while.
“Let’s wait to tell your father all this,” she finally says. “Let’s . . . see what kind of condition he’s in first.”
Condition. The word doesn’t seem to come easily to Margot, and it leaves Claire wondering if a potential book deal was the only reason for their breakup.
Finally, Claire nods and does nothing as Margot closes the leather portfolio and slides the sketch into her carry-on. And it takes Claire a moment to realize that Margot, who travels the world studying all manner of extraordinary events, is astonished by what she’s just witnessed.
11
Twelve Years Ago
They didn’t plan to stay the entire night, but they set up camp just in case. The temperature started falling the minute the sun went down, the valleys far below pooling with a darkness that felt alive. The storms that had thundered through the park over the past few days had left everything with a wet sheen that glistened in the moonlight, so they laid saddle blankets on the rocks that would offer them the best view. It had been almost a year since Agatha had first shown him her cellar and the miracles within, but in that time, she had shared the nightmare that gave birth to their source as well, and as a result, Randy’s opinion of her had been forever changed.
She wasn’t lying when she said she knew war in ways he didn’t. She was being humble.
He’d also done the most sacred thing a combat veteran can do—he’d shared not just everything he experienced in combat, but almost everything he’d felt about it since. And she’d listened patiently, maybe because she felt it was the price she had to pay for ensuring he kept her secrets.
She’d assured him their current campsite would be the perfect vantage point to watch the display to come, if it did. All the atmospheric readings were lined up, placing them inside what she referred to as the “risk window.” If the ranger had done what they paid him to do, the valley below was clear of life. He’d reported two families camping close to the edge of the danger zone, heedless of the rain, and had managed to encourage both of them to decamp with false reports of bear sightings. Just in case, Randy had swept the treetops with Agatha’s little heat-seeking drones earlier that day. The scans turned up nothing human, but some animals always slipped through, Agatha assured him. Hence, the need for her cellar. The small creatures would be broken by the shock wave, their shimmering remains easy to collect. That was good because it meant the birds, the ones most likely to fly away before their team could capture them and hide their secrets from the world, would be instantly killed; the larger animals might be injured and have to be carted away, which would take more work. But never again, she’d told him with greater emphasis each time, could they let humans slip through their barriers.
“What would you have done?” Agatha asked him suddenly, as if picking up a conversation they’d been having all day, when the truth was they’d been all business for the past few weeks. “If I hadn’t tracked you down, what would you have done?”
“With my life, you mean?” Randy asked.
She nodded.
“Fixing up my dad’s house, probably,” he said.
The house where she’d surprised him one rainy day with her business card and an enticing offer. He’d barely visited the place since and was considering putting it up for sale.
