Second contact, p.26
Second Contact, page 26
part #2 of Not Alone Series
This something else slackened Trey’s jaw all over again and sent his fingers fumbling to both kill the floodlight and reactivate his handheld camera.
For high in the sky, in roughly the same area from which the extraordinary craft had first appeared, a meteor-like trail was rapidly forming as something — some unknown thing — pierced through Earth’s atmosphere and either plummeted towards the surface or burned up towards its death.
Trey stood only a few feet from the motion-tracking camera and heard its small motor whirring as it turned to focus on the new visual stimulus its sensors had detected.
That same new stimulus brought a new word to the front of Trey’s mind as he focused his eyes and handheld camera on the ever-extending trail of fire: Kerguelen.
Whatever was falling from the sky looked passably like the meteor which had exploded over Kerguelen; and although Trey was perfectly placed to capture unobstructed footage if this object exploded, it looked close enough for him to hope and pray that it didn’t.
To his relief, the object burned up very quickly and died with a fizzle rather than a bang, leaving a relatively short and unusually vertical trail in its wake.
Trey felt confident that his readiness meant that he would have the best footage of the object’s short-lived appearance within Earth’s atmosphere, but he also knew that its brief brightness combined with the prominence and longevity of its trail would ensure that there would be plenty of eyewitnesses to turn it into another media event. And coming so soon after Kerguelen, questions were bound to be asked as to whether there might be a connection between the two incidents.
But what would normally have been the biggest sighting of Trey’s year was a distant runner-up to what had come moments earlier, and as soon as he was absolutely sure that no sonic boom was looming he switched his handheld camera off again and finally got down to the all important analysis of the motion-tracking camera’s footage.
Trey Myers had seen a UFO — he had seen an alien craft — and nothing could ever take that away from him. But when it came to sharing it with the world, everything rested on whether his cameras had been able to capture the amazing sight of the low-flying vessel or whether some kind of cloaking mechanism or electrical interference would result in the footage containing a heartbreakingly empty sky or even an error message about corrupted data.
Trey pushed a button to stop the motion-tracking camera’s ongoing recording and then held his breath as he instructed it to play back the recording from the first sky-based visual stimulus it had detected.
On the small screen, a bright flash appeared and soon became locked in the centre of the picture as the camera tracked its movement.
Don’t disappear, Trey pleaded as the small light grew closer. Please don’t disappear.
His heart-rate reached all new levels with each passing moment until a throaty laugh of disbelief escaped his open mouth when the craft came close enough for the detail on its underside to come into clear visibility.
Trey fell to his knees and threw his hands to his head in a display of unprecedented joy, casting a silhouette that might well have struck an outside observer as that of a man in despair rather than one who had just hit the jackpot.
The global significance of what Trey had just recorded was not lost on him, but he couldn’t help but think primarily of what it was going to do for him and his young family. While Emma and Dan had generously rewarded Trey’s loyalty in the past, recent months had been lean for the Blue Dish Network business he ran with his wife. Their business model, based on being the first professionals on the scene of developing news incidents and selling their footage to major networks, was being squeezed tighter every day by the total market penetration of HD smartphones and the near-total spread of fast mobile internet which allowed everyone to live-stream such incidents from almost anywhere.
But tonight at Lolo, Trey wasn’t just the first responder of the media world; he was the only show in town. He was too caught up in the joy of the moment to think much about why the Messengers were back and how Dan had known they were coming, much less why their low flight over his head had preceded what looked like the arrival of another sizeable meteor.
For now, while Trey Myers gathered up his equipment and the priceless footage contained within it, only one thought rose high above the others in his mind:
Thank you, Dan.
C minus 31
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Dan began his explanation as to why he’d sent Trey to Lolo with a brief recap of his own trip to Richard Walker’s cornfield, during which he had seen a clear vision of a triangle in the sky over the familiar valley and after which he had conversed with Walker himself.
Emma was stunned from the very beginning.
“You spoke to Walker?” she asked for starters. “After they called you there again, without you knowing, just like last year?”
Dan nodded and continued to the more recent part, when only twenty-two hours ago he had received a second message of sorts in the form of a dream which told him the precise time when something big was going to happen at Lolo.
Emma’s next questions for the brothers were the obvious ones: why hadn’t they discussed any of this with her before now, and why had they sent Trey rather than themselves?
Dan automatically recited the answers, obvious in his mind: she hadn’t picked up his earlier calls, and he hadn’t been called to Lolo like last year; this time, he had been alerted to Lolo. Clark butted in to repeat what he’d told Dan about the difficulty they would have faced in reaching Lolo themselves without being seen and without struggling to justify a sudden and unplanned two-day road trip.
“We didn’t make this decision behind your back,” Clark said to Emma. “Your back wasn’t here.”
To Dan’s mild surprise, Emma didn’t display any outward signs of disagreeing with their course of action. Indeed, just a few seconds later she voiced her support: “Trey was probably the best choice you had; we can trust him to come to us first with whatever he sees, before he goes public with it.” A grin then crossed her face. “And at least you didn’t send Tara.”
Dan and Clark shared a quick and uneasy look, as though wordlessly discussing whether or not this was a good time to tell Emma that Tara had seen Richard Walker after following their car to his place for an innocuous reason. Since it hadn’t directly involved the Messengers or any other external developments, Dan hadn’t even mentioned this second trip to Walker’s in his brief recap of recent events and now very subtly shook his head to tell Clark that this wasn’t the time to tell Emma anything about Tara; all of that could wait for tomorrow, once Tara was awake and Trey had reported his findings.
But despite the subtleness of Dan’s head-shaking signal, the silent exchange which preceded it had gone on long enough for Emma to notice.
“What was that look?” she asked. “You didn’t ask Tara to go before you asked Trey, did you?”
“Of course not,” Dan said, surprised Emma would even ask. “We—”
A sharp intake of breath cut off Dan’s words and a pained grimace suddenly took over his expression. His hand shot to the back of his neck; no other part of his body moved at all.
“Dan!” Emma yelled, rising from the bed and stepping towards his chair. “Are you—”
This time, Emma’s words were cut off by a cry of pain, somewhere between a yelp and a shriek, as she fell to the ground as though her legs had been swept from under her. She clasped the back of her own neck with two hands and let out a low bellow. Her legs and spine appeared to have stiffened while her hands moved slightly as though trying to claw something out of the small scar where the Messengers had once connected their communications interface.
Clark’s eyes flitted between the two of them for a few panic-filled moments before he crouched down to help Emma, who was clearly feeling the effects of whatever was causing their neck twinges far more acutely than the more accustomed Dan.
Emma writhed in pain for several seconds until her body relaxed and her expression returned to something approaching normal. She took one hand away from the back of her neck, revealing more than a little blood where her fingernails had been digging into the soft skin. She wasn’t crying, but there were tears of pain in her eyes.
“Emma, are you okay?” Clark asked, trying to sound and look calmer than he was in an effort to relax her. He glanced quickly at Dan and saw that he too was now past the worst of the pain but was also still holding one hand against his neck.
Dan, having felt the initial burst of pain slightly earlier than Emma, only then realised that she was on the floor. He leapt to his feet, knocking his chair backwards, and hurried to her side. While Clark was reluctant to move her too much or too quickly, Dan wasted no time in helping Emma upright. He told her he was going to move her left hand, which was still pressed against her bleeding neck, and then gently did so. With a silent tilt of his head, he asked Clark to go upstairs to get something to clean her up. Clark got right to it.
“It’s okay,” Dan whispered softly. “The first time is the worst. I don’t know if you felt it because you’re with me, because they wanted you to know for sure that I’m not crazy, or because whatever they just did at Lolo was a bigger intervention than the bolide at Kerguelen. All I know is that everything is okay.”
“You’ll get it on your hand,” Emma replied weakly as Dan tried to move her blonde hair away from the surprising amount of blood on her neck.
“That’s okay, too,” Dan said. He then carefully wiped the tears from under her eyes with his other hand. “Don’t worry; this one is clean.”
Emma quickly used the scrunchy around her right wrist to tie up her hair before leaning forward and resting her head on Dan’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I didn’t totally believe you about Kerguelen right away,” she said, “when I said it could be a publicity stunt or a false flag or even random chance. If I’d known you’d felt something as painful as this, I never would have doubted it for a second. How the hell were you so calm after it?”
“Because I know they’re on our side,” Dan said, and that was all.
Clark returned through the unlocked door with a briefcase-like first-aid kit in one hand and his phone in the other.
“Phone!” Dan said.
Clark hesitated for a second before it clicked in his mind. “Oh yeah,” he said, quickly running back up and placing it outside the door. “Sorry, man. I just got a text from Trey. He said something like ‘Holy shit, double happening… unbelievable… I’ll call when I’m in the van and it’s safe to talk.’ He didn’t say what it was, but it sounds like we’re about to find out.”
Dan took the first-aid kit from Clark and dabbed Emma’s lightly bleeding scar with an antiseptic wipe.
“Thanks for the warning,” she said sarcastically, recoiling at the sudden and sharp stinging feeling.
“The anticipation is the worst part,” Dan replied. He then turned to Clark and asked him to check on the TV and computer for any live news streams or current trends which might hint at what had just happened, encouraging him to pay special attention to anything related to unusual lights in the sky. So far, the trend-ticker had reported nothing of note.
Emma used her hands to push herself to her feet, slowly shaking out the stiffness in her joints. “You should check it out,” she told Dan. “I’m okay now.”
Dan didn’t need to be encouraged twice. He lifted his laptop from the desk and carried it over to the bed where Emma had just taken a seat. Clark sat at the other side of him, looking keenly at the screen.
Within a few clicks, they had their answer.
“Is this Kerguelen: Part Two?” Dan read aloud from the Blitz Online headline. “Fear and excitement as multiple eyewitnesses in northern Idaho and western Montana report spectacular meteor.”
The only photograph in the article was a low-quality image from a driver’s dashcam, but it was enough to bring a smile to Dan’s face.
“That’s what he must have meant by double happening,” Clark said. “First Kerguelen, now Lolo. But if so many other people saw it, why did the Messengers make you think we had to send someone?”
“We’ll find out exactly what he saw in a few minutes,” Dan said, clicking away from the article to search for some more eyewitness reports and images. “They didn’t give me advance notice of this for nothing, so Trey’s footage might show some important details no one else could see.”
For once in his life, Dan McCarthy had no idea just how right he was.
C minus 30
Lolo National Forest
Montana
Back in the safety and seclusion of his van, Trey leaned back in the driver’s seat and shook his head in joyous disbelief.
If he didn’t have the footage of the alien craft flying overhead, he knew that he may well have doubted his own sanity and memory. Slightly more troublingly, he likewise knew that he may have had some doubts about the footage had it been someone else’s rather than his own. The subject matter was so explosive… so incredible… that the burden of proof was as high as could be.
But the clarity of Trey’s footage, as well as the multitude of angles from his various cameras, led him to believe that in this case it really would be enough. Just as many people would probably try to disprove the footage as defend it, but he knew that the truth was on his side.
This must have been how Dan felt last year, he thought to himself. He knew it was real, so he knew the doubters would run out of ammo eventually.
Trey reached for his phone and dialled Dan’s number. He didn’t know that the call would be routed through a cable into Dan’s signal-proof basement, but he still didn’t have to wait more than a few rings.
“Trey!” Dan said when he picked up, just as excited as his faraway friend.
“Are you alone?” Trey asked. “You might want to be sitting down for this…”
Dan didn’t have to invite Emma and Clark to crowd around his wired phone to hear Trey’s words — they were already doing so. “I’m ready for it. So what was the double happening? What did you see apart from the meteor?”
“Them, Dan… them! The aliens. They were right here at Lolo!”
Emma and Clark both instinctively turned to Dan, but his eyes remained fixed on the surface of the desk. “The aliens, or the aliens’ craft?” he asked. For reasons he didn’t fully understand in the moment, he firmly hoped it would be the latter.
“The craft,” Trey replied, giving Dan the answer he wanted. “It was flying, but it was so clear. I’ve got different angles from my different cameras, from beginning to end. This is real proof, dude, and we can’t ignore the fact that they were there right before the meteor. I don’t know exactly what this means for Kerguelen or what it means going forward, but it sure as hell means they’re back!”
Before Dan could reply, Emma muscled in to take control of the phone. Dan was interested to hear what she had to say, so he didn’t protest.
Her orders were simple: “Trey, you need to start driving and you need to come straight here. You need to guard this footage with your life and you can’t say anything about it to anyone. We need to talk about how we’re going to manage the—”
“What is there to talk about?” Trey interrupted. “This footage is dynamite! I don’t think anyone else will have seen the craft, but the meteor was high enough to make sure a lot of drivers will have picked it up on their dashcams. That footage won’t be half as good as mine, but quality doesn’t count if I’m not allowed to show anyone! Time is money on this. How about if I trim some of the meteor footage? I’ll keep everything else under wraps until I’m back in Birchwood — promise.”
“You don’t need to promise anything,” Emma said. “I know you’re too smart to ignore what I’m telling you, which is that you can’t do anything with any of the footage, craft or meteor. Until you get here and we can talk properly, you’re just going to have to trust me when I tell you that what’s really going on here is a lot bigger than some lights in the sky. Okay? And I don’t want to alarm you, but if you don’t follow my instruction to come straight to us with this — if you do anything that lets anyone know where you just were, let alone what you just saw — your life could be in serious danger. This is big, Trey. A lot bigger than you realise right now.”
“Jesus…” Trey groaned. He leaned back again and rubbed one hand against the stubbly hair at the back of his head. “Dan, are you still there? I’m getting the feeling that you know something I don’t, dude… something you want to say but can’t tell me until I get there?”
Emma handed the phone to Dan. “It’s complicated,” he replied. “Just get here soon, okay? And make sure none of your cameras are set to upload any footage to cloud backups or anything like that. No one can know about any of this until you get here, and you can’t risk any slip-ups. You’re not going to be in any trouble or anything like that, so long as you don’t do anything stupid. I stayed safe last year by doing what Emma said, and we’re both here to help you now, man. We just need to know that you’re going to help yourself by keeping this stuff quiet. It’s just like me last year: you need to concentrate on doing the smart thing, and then the good things happen later. I know you’d make a lot of money from—”
“Dude… it’s not the money,” Trey interjected. “It’s never the money. I just don’t know why you want me to keep this quiet. Isn’t this what you wanted me to see? You did somehow know they were coming back, didn’t you?”
“I can’t say too much right now, but the reason I chose you is that I trust you more than anyone else. I know that you’re a newsman and a businessman, but I also know that you’re a good man and a loyal man. And most importantly I know that you believed me from the start, before literally anyone else, and that you kept quiet about the Kloster letter even when you could have sold me out. I’m a loyal man, too, Trey. You’ll do well out of this, but right now all that matters is that you bring the footage here without letting anyone else know what you saw or even where you saw it.”
