Second Contact, page 25
part #2 of Not Alone Series
He was really waiting on two things: neither were straightforward, but, to his mind, both would be very positive. He understood that his reunion with Emma might be more than a little frosty at first due to what he’d done immediately before she left, but he had still been looking forward to her return from almost that very moment.
And judging by the air-traffic tracking website he’d visited countless times throughout the day, Dan knew that Emma’s arrival back in Birchwood and the second thing he was waiting for could well end up happening within minutes of each other.
The message on the gift tag Emma had attached to the telescope encouraged Dan to “never look down, never look back.”
All Dan could think about now was what Trey would see at Lolo when he looked up, and just what it might mean moving forward.
C minus 35
Private Jet
Milan to Denver
If there had been any question about Emma Ford’s level of exhaustion, it would have been decisively answered when she fell asleep in her welcoming seat on Timo’s plane prior to the take-off process which normally had her on edge.
Timo, who had been lucky enough to catch a few more hours of shut-eye than Emma had over the last few days, informed her that President Slater had made a second comment in support of the GSC following yet another day of medium-scale protests in various locations.
“It’s another indirect comment,” he called back from his own forward-facing seat. “I don’t want to say that Slater is hedging her bets… but if she was fully committed to supporting Godfrey and fully confident that he was going to stay in power, don’t you think she would be saying these things on camera instead of in low-key statements through her press office?”
A few seconds passed.
“I know she’s been deliberately avoiding getting drawn into anything with either Cole or Godfrey, but I can’t help but think we can read between the lines here,” Timo went on. “Don’t you agree?”
After this second question, only really asked because Emma hadn’t immediately replied to his first, Timo turned around and belatedly realised that she was fast asleep. Despite having told her on several occasions that she didn’t have to work quite so hard during their short stay in Italy, he couldn’t help but feel guilty for her tiredness. Jet-lag was an additional issue that she had been wrestling with, and upon considering this he then couldn’t help but feel admiration for how long she had lasted before finally nodding off.
“I’ll wake you when I see the Rockies,” Timo whispered, despite knowing she couldn’t hear him. “Just like you asked.”
C minus 34
Interstate 90
Passing through Missoula, Montana
With a thousand miles gone and only a few more in front of him, Trey Myers had never been more excited in his life than he was as he passed through Missoula on the final leg of his long, long, long journey to Lolo National Forest.
The chain hotels he saw advertised at the side of the road seemed like appealing alternatives to sleeping in the van before driving back to Colorado. He then smiled as he passed the airport, thinking that a flight seemed like an appealing alternative to driving back at all.
The next few miles posed the only part of the long, three-break drive which required Trey to pay attention to his van’s satellite navigation system, as the small parking area he was heading towards was not well signposted. The same screen which showed him the way also told him the time and temperature. He had the better part of two hours until 02:28, in which time he only had to park and walk for around thirty minutes. Time would be tight, but not too tight; just as the air would be cold, but not too cold.
The parking area proved easy to access and was delightfully vacant on Trey’s arrival. This was unsurprising given the time, but Trey breathed a sigh of relief nonetheless.
He fired a quick text to Clark, as requested, to let the McCarthys know that he’d arrived in good time. After that he made light work of the three sandwiches that had been tempting him since his last stop in Billings, but he thought better of washing them down with any more coffee.
At 01:09, Trey decided it was time to get his field equipment ready and make a move towards the precise location of Dan’s coordinates.
On one hand, standing outside in the cold and dark middle of nowhere for forty-five minutes after a half-hour walk didn’t sound like the best of ideas. But on the other, he knew that Dan wouldn’t have sent him all this way if something incredible wasn’t on the horizon and that he would never be able to forgive himself if he missed it for the sake of a few more minutes in the reassuring warmth and safety of the van.
Better to be forty-five minutes early than forty-five seconds late, he figured.
Outside, he pointed his supremely powerful flashlight towards the area of woodland he would have to pass through to reach Dan’s spot. It hadn’t seemed like a wide stretch in the satellite images, but from the ground it looked more than a little too imposing for a comfortable solo pass at this time of night.
This better be worth it, Dan, Trey thought to himself. He then smiled broadly as he locked the van. Who am I kidding? Of course it’ll be worth it…
C minus 33
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
“Emma just got home and Timo’s not there,” Clark announced, his deep voice booming through the unseen speakers of the basement’s intercom. “That’s her at the front door now, man… she just knocked. Are you ready for this?”
“Yeah, send her down,” Dan replied. He unlocked the basement door and glanced up at his clock — the moment of truth at Lolo was getting close. “And tell me as soon as you hear from Trey again, okay? He should be at our spot by now.”
Twenty seconds later, Emma made her way down the last of the stairs into the basement. “Timo’s at the Gravesen, before you ask,” she said. Her voice was hardly warm, but it wasn’t quite as fierce as Dan had feared.
“Hey,” he said. “Thanks for my telescope. And sorry about what happened on the plane.”
“In that order? Really?”
Dan paused. “Ascending order.”
Emma tried not to smile. “This doesn’t mean I’m not still angry, you big idiot…” she then said, moving in to hug him. With her head on his shoulder, she then whispered in his ear: “But seriously, what were you thinking?”
“I had to tell him,” Dan said as they separated. “Timo can make things happen and we’re going to need his help. He can put up bounties for information, he can put pressure on the GSC if that’s what we need to do… there are all kinds of things he can do to help us. This isn’t an excuse, it’s an explanation, okay? I’m sorry. I didn’t weigh it up and decide that it was worth putting you in that spot, because I didn’t even think about that. I knew you’d be able to tell him what he had to hear — which was that he had to keep it between us — but I didn’t think it would be too difficult for you. For anyone else it would have been, but—”
“That’s the whole thing,” Emma interrupted. “You have me on this pedestal where you think I can just snap my fingers and deal with anything. Sure, locked inside a plane, alone with the richest man in the world who just found out we’ve been lying to him and everyone else about the most important thing ever… a day before he’s going to take me to a country where I don’t speak the language, and where the only person I know is him… why wouldn’t I be able to deal with that?”
Dan hesitated. “But you did. You did deal with it, and I did have to tell him.”
“So tell me first!” Emma yelled, properly shouting at Dan for the first time he could ever remember. “This isn’t just about the unbelievably stupid risk you took — it’s not even mainly about that. It’s about you lying to me when you said you agreed that this had to stay between us; it’s about you going behind my back and telling him the way you did. I’m angry, Dan, in case you can’t tell, but I’m also upset. Since when do we lie to each other? The world is a messed up place; I’ve known that for a long time and you’ve known it since the day you found that folder. Sometimes we have to lie. But since when do we lie to each other?”
Dan didn’t say anything, partly because he didn’t want to interrupt but largely because he just didn’t know what to say. She was right, on all counts; as he himself had already alluded to, no explanation could excuse the way he’d done things, however necessary it might have been to do them.
“Do you want to know what I was thinking on the way to New York?” Emma continued. “I was thinking that I’ve more than done my part here and that if you were so desperate for Timo to know, you could call him next time you need help. That’s the angry part. But then I was thinking that’s not the only reason I’m still here, and that’s the part that made me upset. Because it’s not just about, you know… this. It’s about us. I thought the us was bigger than the this, but you put this before us when you went behind my back.”
Dan glanced up at the time display on his giant trend-ticker.
“Are you even listening to me?” Emma asked. “Why do you keep looking at that?”
“I’m listening and I’m sorry,” Dan replied, “but I’m expecting an important call, any second now.”
“From who?”
“Trey.”
Emma’s expression fell. “Dan, seriously… please don’t tell me you told—”
“I didn’t tell him,” Dan interrupted. “All I told him is that something big is about to happen, and where it’s going to happen.”
“What are you talking about? What’s about to happen?”
“That’s what he’s there to find out. A lot of stuff happened when you were gone, and you wouldn’t pick up your phone. We had to deal with some things without you.”
Before Emma could ask another question, Clark’s voice filled the basement via the intercom once more. “He’s there, man. He just texted me again to say he’s on the spot. Open up and let me down.”
Once Dan reached for the button to remotely unlock the door, Clark rushed down the stairs and was sitting on the bed within seconds.
Emma looked at Clark. “What have you done?” she asked, her tone sharp.
In turn, Clark looked at Dan. “You didn’t tell her yet?”
“Tell me what?” Emma interjected. “Dan, where have you sent Trey?”
Dan smiled; it was a serene smile, but nowhere near as reassuring as he intended. His mouth then slowly opened and spoke the last word Emma expected to hear: “Lolo.”
Part 4
Lolo
“It is dangerous to be right
in matters on which
the established authorities are wrong.”
Voltaire
C minus 32
Lolo National Forest
Montana
There’s nothing here, Trey thought to himself.
He thought this over and over again in the minutes he stood motionless in the empty valley, so much so that he began to doubt the accuracy of Dan’s coordinates.
The silence and darkness of the night had made Trey’s walk through the small but dense wooded area between his van and this spot sufficiently creepy that the starlit valley felt positively welcoming in comparison. But as time ticked on, his mind grew fearful of every distant animal’s call and every creak and snap of every nearby tree and twig.
An alarm sounded on Trey’s digital wristwatch at 02:27, alerting him that there was now only one minute until the moment of truth. His equipment — as much as he’d been able to carry in an oversized backpack and an additional briefcase-like container — had been fully set up for several minutes and was already recording. He had multiple cameras and microphones positioned close by, ranging from basic models to a recently-purchased motion-tracking camera which he had very high hopes for. In addition to those, he also wore a head-mounted night-vision camera and tightly grasped his primary handheld camera.
Next to his watch he wore another wrist-strap, this one containing a single button which could remotely control the small but powerful floodlight he had placed five metres to his right. If the ‘big thing’ happened in the sky, the floodlight would hinder the acuity of his footage; if it happened on the ground, the floodlight would prove worth its weight in gold.
This better be worth it, Dan…
Trey’s eyes were on his watch as 02:27 ticked over to 02:28. After that, he didn’t look down again. He counted steadily as the seconds ticked by, something he was very good at doing accurately, and by the fifteen-second mark he noticed how much more quickly his heart was beating than it had been just moments earlier.
Now that the time had arrived he felt anticipation rather than impatience, but each passing second saw unwelcome doubts creep in as he couldn’t help but start to wonder whether—
And then, in response to an astounding flash of light low in the sky, Trey’s jaw quite literally dropped as an altogether different kind of wonder took over.
He kept his head perfectly still as he stared at the light source which had first appeared in his peripheral vision, and he fought a shaky hand to point his handheld camera towards the light.
The flash had been far from total and it neither blinded nor dazed Trey for even a second. Instead, it had been a localised flash in the distance which heralded the arrival of a small and faint dot of light which was now zipping across the sky.
From Trey’s perspective, the dot appeared to be rising as it grew larger and brighter.
It’s coming towards me!, he dared to assume.
There was now no fear, only excitement. Dan hadn’t sent him all this way for nothing, and he knew that if this really was what he was starting to think it might be, it would have been worth driving a thousand times further than he had.
By now, Trey had naturally stopped counting. If he had kept counting or glanced at his watch when the initial flash occurred then again when the dot came close enough for his eager eyes to make out some detail, he would have known that it took only seventeen seconds for the precise shape of the craft to come into view.
It was round — more discus than saucer — and although Trey’s mind was shot, he could see enough detail on the underside to know that it was passing overhead lower than a plane. From the apparent scale, he inferred that its diameter couldn’t be much greater than the length of an average passenger jet. It was also utterly silent, which he didn’t appreciate fully in a moment when an incredible sight was the only sense he could focus on.
These observational thoughts were brief and secondary to the childlike amazement Trey felt as his eyes and hand followed the passing craft. It was remarkable, incredible, awe-inspiring…
No single word nor even a collection of words could come close to describing Trey’s emotions. The one word which echoed in his mind more than any other had grown in prominence as the light approached and he slowly came to realise that it really was what he thought and hoped; that it really was an alien craft; that it really was… them.
Even as the discus-like craft continued to arc into the distance before disappearing behind a line of trees, the detail of its underside remained imprinted in Trey’s mind so clearly that he may as well have still been looking at it.
I just saw a UFO, he thought to himself, smiling widely and freely. He then paused to consider that it wasn’t really all that unidentified, since he knew exactly what it was. I just had a close encounter!
A new thought then entered Trey’s mind, less positive.
Long before he ever met Dan McCarthy, Trey had followed up on several alleged UFO sightings in the hope of capturing a few seconds of decisive footage which would have made him a comfortable man for the rest of his life. On one occasion he had arrived at a supposed hotspot to find that another would-be eyewitness was already on the scene. That seemingly reasonable man, who Trey had barely thought about for several years, insisted that he had once seen and recorded a series of inexplicable lights in the sky over Denver… only to find minutes later that none of them showed up in any of his footage.
The man’s description of several bright and distant lights performing “conspicuous manoeuvres”, as he had put it, didn’t fit with what Trey had just seen. But recalling the rest of the man’s experience — the experience of the incredible sight he witnessed not showing up in any of his footage — caused Trey’s heart-rate to soar all over again.
Trey clicked his floodlight to life, instantly illuminating a small circle around him, then stopped recording on his primary handheld camera and navigated through its touchscreen menu to replay some footage. When he realised he would have to fast-forward through many minutes of nothing on this camera and that his motion-tracking camera would provide a far quicker answer by either reporting a tracked event or not, he moved towards it instead.
He walked with his fingers crossed, hoping and praying that the footage would be there. If it was, nothing would ever be the same. If it wasn’t… well, he didn’t even want to think about that.
Either way, his own perspective on the Messengers would never be the same and he would be sure to get an answer from Dan as to how he had known something was going to happen where and when it did.
He also knew that Dan would live up to his promise of making the exhausting trip to Lolo financially worthwhile — Dan always lived up to his promises — but that would do little to ease the crushing disappointment should the craft prove to have been unrecordable.
Trey didn’t want to think about this, but he couldn’t help it.
The will-it-or-won’t-it-be-there question felt like the only thing in the world as it circled and spiralled in Trey’s mind with each of his steps towards the motion-tracking camera. It circled and spiralled, faster and deeper, until something else blew it out of the water.
