Mrs Nguyen flung open the door and looked down the stairwell at us. I was standing with Ace at the bottom of the stairs, I had a badminton racket in hand, while Ace had taken up a dumbbell handle from the nearby, unused, rack.
“Good, you’re all okay,” she said, scaling the stairs quickly and surveying the basement.
“Mom!” Katie called out loudly. “What was that? What’s going on?”
Mrs Nguyen sat the odd weapon she was holding on the nearby weight bench and hugged Katie, holding onto her hard.
“It’s a long story, peanut,” She said and looked to the faraday cage with Elijah seated within. “But it looks like you four know more than you think.”
“The bugs weren’t the cause, they were the symptom,” Elijah said, wiping the blood from his nose. “The signal coming from the W.E.D.N Tower is also a symptom. So, the cause has to be something else. Something deeper. Something secret.”
Kim Nguyen stiffened when Elijah came out of the cage. Something about her immediately hardened, like she was a soldier in a lineup rather than a mother and friend who just survived something out of deuteronomy. She stepped back, away from Katie, closer to the device she had sat on the weight bench, out of instinct it looked like.
“There’s a lot going on in Eden Falls kids,” she said, almost like she was grounding herself in a maternal shield, the default obfuscation we’d come to expect from adults. “But … you’re right, Elijah. You’re right.”
Ace stepped forward, still holding onto the dumbbell bar like she was ready for a fight. “Right about what, Mrs Nguyen? About the tower? The bugs? Or the secret you’ve been hiding up in Fort Savannah with the rest of the town?”
“Yes. It is connected to the Fort, Anastasia,” Mrs Nguyen said, calling Ace by her given name. “But that’s all I can say right now. We need to get ready for the next swarm.”
“Next swarm?” I asked. The dead love bugs were caked on the small basement window and barely let any light through. “How often is this going to happen?”
“It’s connected to the broadcasts,” Elijah said. “I think it had to do with the top of the hour live cut in. Otherwise, we’d have seen this more often.”
Kim looked at her Seiko 6309, the standard issue watch of the Fort Savannah military. I wouldn’t have noticed it normally, but she pushed a button on it and a fourth hand that glowed a monochromatic green began ticking down.
“What’s that, Mrs Nguyen?” I asked, looking closely at the watch.
She looked to me, instinctively, but momentarily, covered the watch with her free hand and then sighed.
“It’s a Subsonic Pulse Receiver, tied to a special project at the Fort.” She said, “It’s not important right now, but it gives us a window to work with.”
She walked into the cage and pulled the plug on the radio. The heavy metal handle snapped open and she slung it down like a pendulum.
“Elijah, you and Katie get the antenna off the side of the house,” she said. “Benjy, get all of the documents and put them in the binder, I need them.”
She looked at Ace. “Get the weapon, but don’t mess with it. It’s very sensitive and dangerous.”
She gave us our marching orders and lugged the heavy transmitter up the basement steps.
For my part, I walked into the cage and gathered up all the loose papers and folders. The folders were marked with acronyms like SCI, SAP, and COMSEC and each had a colorful orange cover sheet clipped to the front. While gathering, I saw something called PROJECT GATEWAY on one page and HARDBALL on another. It was all stamped TOP SECRET and FORT SAVANNAH.
We always joked about how Katie’s parents were top secret scientists and spies for the government, that they worked on all manner of twilight-zone style projects up at Fort Savannah, but the jokes had stopped in my mind because I was holding the proof in my hands.
GATEWAY’s front page looked like it had some kind doorway with a massive energy draw, pulling directly from the Monolith Power Station’s nuclear reactor. I flipped through the pages quickly, trying to see if I could find something that made sense, but all I got was more questions.
“Let’s go!” Kim shouted from the top of the stairs.
I hustled up and met the others in the living room, where our pizza and drinks now sat covered in the remains of thousands of love bugs.
“Get everything in my truck,” she ordered.
I saw Elijah and Katie screwing the antenna that they pulled off the house onto the receiver of the all black Dodge Ramcharger. In the back, Kim had put the radio from the basement onto a platform with radios, sirens and a device that looked like a typewriter. It was a MDT, a Mobile Data Terminal. I had seen one on the cover of a BYTE magazine in Elijah’s bedroom but all of that computer stuff was way beyond me at the time.
“Where are we going?” I asked, climbing into the back seat with Ace and Elijah. Katie was in the front passenger seat and Mrs Nguyen climbed in and started the engine.
She didn’t waste any time and pulled out of the garage, tapping the automatic door button on her center console.
“We have to get to Monolith,” She said, slamming the Dodge down into drive. “It’s the only power supply large enough to broadcast the jamming signal and drown out W.E.D.N”
Ace sat between Elijah and me, still holding that weapon. The dog tags she wore, from her brother Alonso, hung outside her olive drab t-shirt. She always wore his Army M65 Field Jacket on cold nights and she looked, to me at least, a proper warrior sitting there.
“Mom,” Katie said. “What was that all about? You said it was something from work?”
Kim chewed on her answer for a long minute. The Ramcharger thundered down the road, outpacing the street lights that were slowly coming to life. They cast long shadows on the ground behind us and the world seemed a little darker when she spoke.
“Your father and I have been working on a project at the Fort for years, Katie.” She said. “And something we all did has caused all of this.”
“Project Gateway?” I said, looking at the binders still in my lap. “Or Hardball?”
Kim’s eyes met mine in the rearview mirror, the same look that parents often gave whenever children were acting up in the back seat. I knew it well. But, I held her gaze for a moment before she looked back to the road.
“Gateway,” she said.
“Dad’s involved?” Katie stammered. It was a rare break in her analytical mind. Ultimately, she was still daddy’s girl and despite all of that she knew and thought she knew, still her hero.
“I thought he was a behavioral scientist? How can he be involved in all of this? What did you do?” Katie asked. Her rapid fire questions almost pelted her mother from across the console.
Kim’s hand tightened on the wheel, I could hear the leather creek under her grip. She shot a glance at Katie and sighed, blasting past a blue dodge caravan on the double line. The engine roared and groaned, but she kept the gas down and weaved through traffic expertly.
“Gateway wasn’t just a window, sweetie.” She said softly. “It’s a door that goes both ways. When we opened the door, something came through. Something intelligent. That’s what your father is studying … before it gets out of hand.”
“It’s already out of hand, Mrs Nguyen.” Elijah said bluntly. “It’s using the radio tower, controlling bugs with a hive mind … and it took Tony.”
Ace shifted in her seat at the mention of Tony. Nobody believed us then and we expected the same from her now.
“How is he?” She said softly, glancing up at the rearview again. “This is why you shouldn’t run away like that.”
She paused. Her watch beeped and she glanced at it. Then she looked back at the rearview at Elijah.
“Your friend touched something he shouldn’t have down there,” she said. “And we need to make sure he’s not completely compromised.”
There it was. Something in Eden Falls pushed the adult mind into obliviousness, almost like a defense mechanism of some kind or knee-jerk reaction, but that glowing green light on her watch focused her. Gave her memory back.
I saw it, real time, and it shook me. I had to uncrumple one of the documents I was holding.
“Compromised?” Ace’s face was stern. “He’s not a soldier, he’s our friend and we had to go to the Letter House to get him back. I didn’t see any of you or your G-Men helping us get our friend back.”
“You’re right. You shouldn’t have had to do that alone.” Kim said. “This thing, the Ochre, is complicated and the situation is far worse than you know.”
Ace blinked. She was right and was told so by an authority figure. No yelling. No screaming. No hitting. Just a simple acknowledgement of the situation and … trust … that she was mature enough to speak to with honesty. I saw her eyes soften and her grip on the weapon loosen slightly.
“Ochre?” Katie said. “Is that the black goo?”
Kim nearly put us in a ditch, but she composed herself quickly and and stayed on the road.
“You saw it? In The Letter House?” She said softly. “How close did you get? Did any of you touch it? What did you see?”
It was her turn for the rapid fire questions. Katie inherited it, it seemed.
“None of us touched it,” Elijah said quickly. We knew it was a lie and coming from Elijah it was one that stopped us all cold. “But Tony did and it nearly killed him. What is the Ochre, Mrs Nguyen?”
She pulled us onto the back road that led up to the power plant. It was a service access route that we often saw military trucks using when we were out riding around.
“Imagine reality is a photograph,” She said. “The Ochre is the chemical that dissolves the picture, leaving nothing behind but blank paper. It’s a parasitic, primordial, contaminant that’s, quite literally, anti-reality. It somehow warps our reality to … whatever is on the other side of Gateway.”
Anti-reality. Even the concept of it was hard to wrap my mind around. What is the opposite of is? … Isn’t? Nothingness? I could feel the pressure behind my eyes pushing against the understanding in my mind and the vacancy that the question left in it.
I saw Elijah slump back in some strange sense of knowing. Ace gripped the weapon tightly, biting on her lip in a defiance of dread.
But Katie … Katie just turned her face to the window and looked outside.
Kim pulled the truck through another gate, passed an array of containers that stored the nuclear waste from the reactors. They were huge cylindrical tubes, made of concrete and lead, and each of them had a Radiation Warning that was spray painted by stencil on the sides.
The cooling towers, four in total, belched huge plumes of steam up into the atmosphere as we approached. The sound of the turbines whirring was a grounding sound that brought us back to the grim reality of our situation.
She shut the engine down right in front of a huge transformer substation. It was behind a security checkpoint and a chain-link fence, where two armed soldiers stood and watched us carefully.
“Keep that weapon out of sight, Ace.” Kim said when she got out of the truck. She opened the rear door for the three of us to pile out.
Katie closed her door softly and walked to the back of the truck where Kim had opened the hatch and pulled out the radio device.
Kim sat the radio on a wooden furniture dolly she yanked out of the back of the truck. She pulled her identification from around her neck, it was tucked in her shirt where always was, It was the first time I actually saw it in person. It had all the things you’d expect from an ID card:
Name: Kim A. Nguyen.
Height: 5’5”
Weight: 120 LBS
Hair: Black
Eyes: Brown
CLEARANCE LEVEL AA5
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
DARPA. We had heard the stories of M.K Ultra and the horrors of the government experimentation in the 50s from the nightly news radio broadcasts from The Garden when the story broke. To me, the people at DARPA were monsters in lab coats, snatchers who take bad children and experiment on them in dark rooms. And Katie’s mom was one of them.
Kim pushed the dolly up to the gate and presented her badge to one of the soldiers.
“Get this for me, Corporal, it’s heavy and I’m in a hurry.” She said to the other one with the authority of God.
The soldier with the badge looked at it and immediately snapped to attention. The one she ordered to push the dolly just picked the whole radio up and nodded a quick “Yes, Ma’am”
We all walked through the gate with a dumbfounded silence. Yes, it was Mrs Nguyen the scientist who worked at Fort Savannah. Yes, it was someone with deep secrets and a dark past. But it was also Katie’s mom … and that was just weird.