Second Contact, page 35
part #2 of Not Alone Series
After inspecting Clark’s facial injuries, Emma glanced into the back seat and saw Rooster. “So Walker is gone?” she asked, deducing as much but keen to be sure. “He was taken?”
“Yeah. I heard him talking to Crabbe. I opened his bedroom door but then there was a flash and a massive force threw me back against the wall on the other side of the hallway. The dog was going apeshit and this weird humming or buzzing sound started. The door stayed open, but there was a white light. Then I heard Walker again, talking to them, and then everything was quiet — no humming, no buzzing… nothing. I ran towards the light in the doorway and that was it: bang. Face-first. Walker’s computer was dead but I don’t know exactly when it died. How much did you see on Crabbe’s interview feed?”
“Nothing,” Dan said. “Walker was there for a few seconds but there was no flash or anything, it just cut out. One second he was there on the right-side of the screen with Crabbe on the left, and the next second it was Crabbe on one side and an empty black square on the other. That’s what Tara and Timo said, anyway. Me and Emma felt it in our necks again — the worst yet — so we didn’t see anything. The last thing I remember was Walker saying ‘Joe, at last!’, and then it hit me like a brick had fallen onto my neck from the top of a tower.”
Clark thought for a few seconds. “So no one has any reason to suspect that something happened to Walker? That means we found something out — the Messengers are keeping a close eye on everything — but that no one else learned anything. I’m pretty sure my nose is broken in at least two places and it sounds like you guys had a rough time, too, but this could’ve ended a lot worse.”
“And you definitely positively got all of the security camera footage?” Emma asked. “The part when they came will just be a flash, but obviously the part when you arrive will be there.”
“One hundred percent,” Clark confirmed. “I’ve got all the memory cards in my pocket, I’ve got the dog, and I’m still alive. Now we need to hurry up and get the hell out of here.”
Emma hurried to the car and returned quickly with a small first-aid kit. “You can’t go home looking like that,” she said, handing him the box.
Clark opened a pack of antiseptic wipes without looking at the label and wiped the blood from his face. He groaned and grimaced more than a little at an extreme stinging sensation he hadn’t expected having not realised that they weren’t regular baby wipes.
With the blood gone, the extent of the injury to Clark’s nose became even clearer. Dan didn’t say anything about it — there would have been no point — but he did offer to drive Clark home.
“Thanks, man, but I’m good,” Clark said. “It’s a lot less painful for me to drive than it would be for me to get out of this car and get back in on the other side. My back, my shoulder and especially my ribs took a serious hit when the initial force threw me against the wall. Those fuckers don’t take any prisoners when they’re putting up their forcefields, I can tell you that.”
Clark rolled up his window in a clear sign that it was time to go. He let Emma turn her car around to lead the way home.
Despite the craziness of the last half-hour, Dan’s mind turned towards California as Emma drove towards Birchwood. Clark tailed them until an unfortunately timed traffic-light change created a break between their cars which was filled by a few other vehicles, but they knew he wasn’t far behind.
Emma didn’t say anything at all until they reached her driveway, which Dan would have registered as more than a little unusual had his mind not been fully occupied with so many other things.
“I’m going to get Rooster out of the car and take him into my house as soon as Clark gets back,” she said, getting out of the car to wait for their arrival.
Dan walked around to her side of the car and leaned back against its door. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“This is a lot to deal with,” she said, also leaning back and gazing up at the stars.
“Yeah, I guess I’ve had a few quieter Wednesday nights,” Dan quipped.
Emma smiled without laughing and turned to face him. The smile then faded as she shifted her feet, gazed into his eyes, put her hands on his cheeks, and softly kissed his lips.
Softly… unexpectedly… perfectly.
The revving of Clark’s approaching car broke the serenity of this moment too soon, leaving Dan staring dumbly at Emma and wondering if this crazy Wednesday night could even be real as she turned towards the increasing noise and accompanying headlight beam.
She then squeezed Dan’s hand and looked at him again. “I’m scared,” she said, uttering those words for what he thought must have been the first time in all the time he’d known her. “And when I don’t know what tomorrow is going to bring, I don’t want to keep wasting todays.”
As Dan McCarthy looked into Emma Ford’s eyes, he was feeling a lot of things. Scared wasn’t one of them.
Clark’s car pulled into the McCarthys’ driveway, at which point Emma made an immediate move to get Rooster from the back seat. Standing alone, Dan then turned towards the sudden sound of a fist knocking quickly and repeatedly on glass. He saw Tara standing at Emma’s window, grinning like an idiot and pointing two fingers at her own eyes before gesturing them towards Dan.
I saw that.
He didn’t reply, instead turning to help Clark out of the car.
Rooster was understandably quieter and less energetic than normal as Emma led him inside, but he looked calm enough; certainly compared to the manic state they’d found him in after the Messengers’ first intervention at Walker’s cottage a year earlier.
“Your nose is really messed up,” Dan said, no longer able to keep this thought to himself as Clark slowly stepped out of the car.
“It was like a fucking wall,” Clark lamented. “Just absolutely solid… and I ran right into it, face-first, because I didn’t even know it was there.”
“Are your teeth okay?”
Clark opened his mouth and felt around to check, which obviously meant that they were. “Seems like it. My forehead took a bit of a hit but my nose definitely bore the brunt of it, because I was lurching forward into the room. Seriously, man… if this was you, you’d still be squealing like a pig.”
Dan shrugged. “So what did you hear Walker saying the second time, anyway? When you said he was talking to them?”
“You know when you hear stories of what one guy says when another guy is holding a gun to his head, right before he’s executed?” Clark said. “And you know how you can never be sure if it actually happened like that? Well, this did happen, because I heard it. He said ‘Do it. And at least finish the job this time, you bug-eyed sons of bitches.’ That was the last thing he said. Those things were right there in his room, man, and he was talking to them like he was in charge. I’d like to think I would be so strong in that situation, but who knows. Richard Walker is a different breed. Well… he was.”
There was no denying that, and Dan replied with a distant nod as he saw Timo and Tara coming over.
“Emma said she’ll come next door in a few minutes, once Rooster is settled,” Tara explained right away. She turned to Dan. “So… anything exciting happen with you guys since you left?”
“Clark’s hurt pretty badly,” Dan replied, knowing fine well what Tara was getting at.
“It’s not that bad,” Clark said.
But Tara’s playful smirk faded in an instant and her eyes widened like dinner plates when she belatedly looked at Clark and saw his misshapen nose. “What the hell happened to you?!” she shrieked.
“I lost a fight with a forcefield,” Clark replied, trying to downplay it with a hint of humour and pointing towards his house to encourage Tara to start walking. “But listen: be cool and don’t say anything until we’re in the basement, okay? I don’t want my dad to see me like this tonight, or at least until I can think of something to say when he asks why I look like I’ve just gone twelve rounds with a pissed-off silverback.”
Very subtly, Timo pulled Dan back as Tara and Clark approached the front door. He kept walking at Dan’s side but slowed the pace to ensure they stayed out of the others’ earshot.
He then leaned towards Dan and spoke quietly: “Alessandro called when you were gone. He has a confident estimate of the perigee which is far more precise than what he had when you left.”
“Really?” Dan said, barely able to control his volume in the excitement of this revelation. “How sure is he of his analysis?”
“Alessandro is very sure, but this isn’t just his analysis,” Timo replied. “This has come from a very reliable friend inside the GSC’s Argentine complex.”
“Perfect!” Dan said.
Timo’s expression and tone, however, were far more measured. “But that’s not all that our contact told Alessandro,” he said. “Apparently, Chairman Godfrey has ordered his top minds to assess the relationships between recent high-profile incidents, both in terms of the phenomena themselves and also their precise locations and timings.”
“He’s specifically looking for relationships between the locations?” Dan asked, suddenly far from happy. “Why?”
Timo answered very bluntly just as he and Dan stepped through the front door: “Well, Dan… it seems to me that he knows the aliens are sending us a message. Our saving grace for now is that he doesn’t know anything about Lolo, but we really need to get our hands on this plaque as quickly as we can.”
“This perigee completes the map,” Dan replied with a slow nod, wearing an expression of total focus. “Now it’s time to find our treasure.”
Part 5
Treasure
“There comes a time
in every rightly-constructed boy’s life
when he has a raging desire to go somewhere
and dig for hidden treasure.”
Mark Twain
C minus 12
McCarthy Residence
Birchwood, Colorado
Dan had long feared that it was only a matter of time before others — powerful others — began searching for relationships between recent events which could no longer be dismissed as ordinary.
But even though his group alone had the advantage of knowing that a certain spot in Lolo National Forest was a crucial piece of the puzzle, this made it no more palatable for Dan to learn that GSC Chairman William Godfrey was now asking questions about extraterrestrial involvement and looking for answers in the right kinds of places.
“Alessandro has informed us that GSC staff are working on the basis of the perigee point being near the northern shore of Huntington Lake,” Timo announced as soon as he and Dan entered the basement. He didn’t mention the part about Godfrey’s recent alien-related enquiries, leaving it for Dan to decide whether this was something that Tara and Clark would benefit from knowing right now.
Emma buzzed the basement’s exterior intercom just moments later, returning far sooner than expected and reporting that Rooster had settled in her house immediately. “He obviously remembers the place from his visit last year,” she said. “It’s like he never left.”
With everyone reunited, Dan decided that they should all know everything; he wasted no time in bringing Emma up to speed on the perigee and then revealed what Timo had just told him about Godfrey. Despite Emma voicing a thought similar to Dan’s about Lolo being a crucial detail that no one else knew anything about, Tara and Clark were visibly unsettled by the news that Godfrey was closing in on the truth about the recent incidents.
Dan, meanwhile, closed the computer folder containing Trey’s Lolo footage for now and got straight to the urgent work of seeking more precise measurements than his printed maps and hand-drawn triangles would allow.
Other than Clark, who was recuperating on the bed, everyone gathered round as Dan opened a mapping program and selected a menu option to place a transparent equilateral triangle over a map of the Western United States. Trusting the program to account for the curvature of the Earth in a way that his earlier and cruder approximations had not, he then moved one of the triangle’s three points to his particular spot at Lolo and went from there, slowly rotating and resizing the overlaid shape until its second point fell on the northern shore of California’s Huntington Lake.
“Here we go…” he said as he zoomed out from there and then zoomed in on the third point to see where exactly in Colorado it fell.
Rather than falling to the northwest as it had when he was working with the social media heat spot, using the perigee point gleaned from a source at the GSC caused Dan’s third point to fall only seventy-five miles west of his Birchwood home, in the immediate vicinity of a small town called Salida.
He turned away from the screen, looking primarily at Emma. “We need to find a precise location that makes sense — a store, a street name, an interesting resident, something like that — either in or near Salida. The exact point I’m getting is just to the northwest of Salida, but we’re talking a mile, mile-and-a-half at most, so I definitely think Salida should be our starting point. Right now, so soon after the fireball passed through, we definitely can’t assume that the perigee we have is accurate to that kind of level. Each side of this triangle is over 700 miles long; one mile here or there is absolutely nothing.”
“But what’s in the exact spot of the triangle’s third point?” she asked, understanding Dan’s point but simultaneously thinking that it was worth being as precise as possible with the data they had. “Anything with a name?”
Dan looked again and zoomed in even further. “Uh, there’s a tiny little place… there we go: Smeltertown.”
From nowhere, Tara barged into Dan’s shoulder and knocked him away from the computer’s keyboard and touchpad. “Smeltertown?!” she echoed with a level of excitement no one could understand in the slightest. “Smeltertown, Colorado? No way! Let me see this…”
“Uh, anything you want to share with the rest of us?” Emma asked, at least as confused as Dan.
“American Treasure!” Tara said, like this made any more sense. She had by now opened a web browser and started typing something into the address bar. “I don’t know what little town the guys were in but one of them was looking at a map while the other drove, and he mentioned that there was a place called Smeltertown nearby. They were laughing at the name and then later in the show, whenever they made a deal, one of the guys kept making jokes like ‘We smelt it, we dealt it’ and stuff like that.”
Timo was the first to react. “American Treasure? Isn’t that the new show from the same Australian guys who came forward to confirm that Hans Kloster sent them a letter warning against exploring Lake Toplitz, back when they were doing Treasure Trawl Titans? I must say… that is some kind of coincidence.”
“Coincidence my pretty little ass,” Tara said. She pointed to two images from the episode in question which were placed among a synopsis on the show’s official website. “This is deliberate. In fact… Dan, that was the very episode I was watching when you and Clark came over to try to calm me down about seeing Walker! It was literally paused on Emma’s projector while you were sitting on the couch. There was a tiny little antique store somewhere nearby but the family who owned it had outbuildings full of junk they said they hadn’t even looked at since the old collector guy died. I’m telling you: the plaque is gonna be sitting right there in one of those buildings!”
“Right under our nose,” Timo said, grinning from ear to ear.
“And American Treasure is a pretty new show, like you said,” Dan added. “That episode can’t have been filmed all that long ago, so the people will still be there. It’s… it’s so perfect. It’s in Colorado, and the idea of it being in a hoarder’s outbuilding fits like a glove with the storage-locker theme from Salzburg. And that’s without even thinking about how weird it is that Tara recognised the name Smeltertown straight away because she watched this specific episode so recently. Don’t you think?”
Dan’s final words were addressed solely to Emma, who was yet to give anything away in regards to what she made of Tara’s eureka moment.
“I’m not saying this isn’t it…” she began, flicking her eyes between Tara and Dan. “But are you actually telling me that you think the Messengers were controlling which episode of some Australian reality show was going to be repeated on American TV that night?”
“It wasn’t airing that night,” Tara said. “I downloaded it the night before. I searched for episodes where the guys visited Colorado and that was the top result, probably because they were here for the whole hour instead of just one segment.”
Emma didn’t relent. “So are we saying that the aliens told you to download it?”
“Don’t be mad at me just because, for once, you’re not the one who worked it out,” Tara replied, losing patience. “This is it, and you know it as well as I do. You should be saying thanks and I should be saying you’re welcome.”
“We’re wasting time,” Timo said. Emma was smiling slightly at Tara’s latest comment — this was no serious sisterly argument — but Timo was firm and correct in his assessment. “What we all know as well as each other is that this place ticks all of the logical boxes, it falls perfectly on the point of Dan’s triangle, and something that Tara saw just a few days ago could well be leading us to the exact family we need to talk to.”
“I still have the episode downloaded,” Tara added. “Do you want to check it out?
“Definitely,” Dan said, “but let’s quickly check out this footage Trey shot at Lolo. It’s all finished copying over.”
Everyone crowded round the computer again, except for Clark who only shifted on the bed to make sure he could see. Quite understandably, the sight of a bona fide alien craft in glorious high definition elicited awestruck responses from Tara and Timo, while Clark’s greater distance from the screen prevented the details from reaching him so clearly. It equally understandably did less to excite Emma and Dan given that they had encountered the Messengers’ larger craft up close and in person, but it was nevertheless an incredible thing to see.
