Chapter eighteen
IT WAS white.
Everything was white.
His eyes were (weren’t) open.
He was (wasn’t) human.
He didn’t understand.
But there were voices in his head, whispering numbers and letters, lines and colors. They were pulsing, and there were so many of them, thousands, hundreds of thousands. It was too much. He felt like he was being torn apart from the inside out. He could see everything. He could feel everything. Nate opened his mouth to scream, but it came out as a shape, a spinning triangle that looked as if roots were growing out of it.
He couldn’t qualify what he was seeing. Hearing. Feeling. Nothing made sense.
He heard another voice, somewhere inside. It said.
“Nate” an.
“Nate” and “You have to let go, you have to let go” and he—
He snapped his eyes open.
He was pressed against Alex’s chest, big arms wrapped around him, holding him close. Art stood next to them. The thumpthumpthump of the helicopter above was fainter, but it still shook the walls. Footsteps sounded on the floors above them, feet pounding against the wood. There had to be dozens of people in the house.
“What the hell was that?” he whispered.
“Home,” Art said, expression pinched.
“They’re calling me home. It’s almost time.” She shook her head.
“You could have been killed.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know. But it was… a lot. Even for me.” She looked toward the ceiling again.
“They’re coming.”
“What do we do?” Nate asked, closing his eyes and breathing Alex in. He was exhausted.
“The door is locked from the inside,” Alex said.
“It’s made of reinforced steel. It’ll take the Mountain time to get in.”
“But it won’t hold them forever,” Art said. She sighed.
“There’s no other way out, is there? No other door?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Alex said, holding Nate even tighter.
“As long as your people get you out of here, the rest doesn’t matter.”
Nate opened his eyes.
Art was staring up at Alex as if betrayed. “What?”
Alex squeezed Nate before letting him go. Nate stepped back, hands shaking.
Alex crouched down in front of Art. She glared at him fiercely.
“Why did we do this?” he asked her.
There was a banging on the metal door.
“No,” she growled at him.
“No. Stop. You stop it right now. You hear me? You don’t get—”
“Art.”
She shook her head and took a step back, just out of reach.
“You need to listen to me,” he said.
“The whole reason we did this, the reason we came this far, was to find you a way home. That’s the only thing that mattered.”
She rubbed a hand over her eyes.
“No. Stop. Alex, please stop.”
“And I told you that if something happened to me, you would need to keep going. Do you remember? You promised me.”
“Well, I didn’t mean it,” she snapped.
“I’m not leaving you behind. I won’t do that. I won’t.”
“You need to go home,” he said roughly.
“Nate and me. We can handle ourselves. Okay? Just… go.”
“Shut up, Alex. Shut up. Shut up.”
“Art—”
“No! And you just lied to me.”
“I’m not lying about—”
“You did. You lied. You said the reason we did this was to get me home. That that was it. That that was the only thing that mattered. That’s not true.”
“I don’t—”
“You saved me because you love me,” she shouted at him, voice breaking.
“You love me like I love you. Like I love Nate. Like you love Nate. You love me because we belong together. You are my friend. And friends don’t leave each other behind. Not now. Not like this.” Uncertainty flickered across her face.
“You do love me. Right?”
“You stupid girl,” Alex said, hanging his head.
“You stupid, stupid girl. Of course I love you. Of course I do. The both of you. How could I not?”
Nate put a hand on his shoulder, fingers digging in.
“She’s right. About everything. We’re in this together.”
“Until the end,” Art said firmly. Her eyes suddenly sparkled.
“One final ride, ain’t that right, hoss?”
For a moment, Nate thought Alex would fight against it. That he’d shout at her to leave. To get the fuck out of his sight and never come back to this goddamn planet.
Instead, he stood slowly. He looked at Nate, then back at Art. He scrubbed a hand over his face. He squared his shoulders.
“One final ride,” he said.
She grinned wildly.
“Then saddle up, partners. It’s time to take back our valley.”
IT WENT like this:
Nathaniel Cartwright was twenty-seven years old.
His parents were dead.
The only family he had left had forsaken him.
He’d gone to a cabin in the middle of the woods to mourn the loss of everything he’d known.
Instead, he’d had a gun pressed to the back of his head.
Instead, he’d found a man and a little girl who was the strangest person he’d ever met.
He’d been scared of them.
Of who they were.
And later, of what they were.
But fear can be a funny thing. You can fear what you don’t understand, but in the end, you can still be brave. You can still stand up for what’s right.
Nate hadn’t understood that before. Not really.
He did now.
“Stay behind me,” Artemis Darth Vader said, eyes alight.
“No matter what, stay behind me. I promise you I’ll show you the way.”
They followed her up the stairs, Alex gripping Nate’s hand so hard it felt like his bones were being ground to dust.
Sparks were coming around the door, and a line of molten red appeared across the top.
They were burning their way in.
Art stopped in front of the door, cocking her head at it.
A moment later, she reached out and knocked on the door.
The sparks stopped.
There was a beat of silence. Then from the other side of the door came a voice. “Hello?”
“Hello,” Art said through the door.
“Is this the water guy?”
“What? What water guy?”
“Randy.”
A pause. Then, “No.”
“Is he here?”
“Who is this?”
“Is. He. Here.”
“Not in the house” came the reply.
“Huh,” Art said.
“Thank you. If I asked you to leave, would you?”
“Kid, we’ve got orders. Open the door or we’re going to break it down.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“No. We’re not leaving. Look, do you live here? We’re looking for—”
She laughed. It sent chills down Nate’s spine.
“Oh, I know who you’re looking for.”
Muffled voices from the other side. “You do?”
“Yes. The Seventh Sea, right?”
“Yeah, we’re—”
“You found her.”
Silence. It stretched on for what felt like hours.
Then.
“Holy shit, run, run, run—”
The air around the little girl in front of them seemed to bend, the walls and door warping. Nate felt a harsh pressure in his ears before the metal door was ripped off the wall with a heavy groan, jagged cracks splitting around them. It floated out in front of them, moving into the hallway of the farmhouse, scraping against the plaster of the walls.
He heard men shouting, the sound of feet pounding the floors trying to get away.
Art didn’t hesitate. She took the last step out of the basement, and there was a push that Nate felt down to his bones. The metal door hurtled down the hallway, gouging the walls around it, knocking down everyone who hadn’t made it toward the front of the house.
“It’s time to go,” she said over her shoulder, her hair billowing around her head.
She walked down the hall.
They followed.
A man in full tactical gear burst from a door on the right. Peter’s office. He swung his rifle in their direction, eyes wide behind the mask covering his nose and mouth. Art barely twitched, and the man was knocked into the ceiling with a loud crash, plaster raining down around him as he fell to the ground, landing on his stomach. He didn’t get back up.
Alex reached down and picked up his rifle, snapping it free from the harness.
Nate grabbed a dropped metal baton.
“You know how to use that?” Alex asked.
“It’s a stick,” Nate said.
“You hit people with it.”
Alex snorted but didn’t say anything more. They followed Art down the hallway.
Soldiers lay sprawled on the ground where they’d been knocked down by the basement door, which had landed near the stairs. The front doorway to the farmhouse had been blown open, the wood around the frame charred. Two men ran down the stairs as they passed, but before Alex could swing the rifle in their direction, Nate stuck the baton between the posts, tripping the man in front. Both men tumbled the rest of the way down. They landed on the floor and immediately tried to get up. Art barely glanced in their direction before they were sent flying into the kitchen, slamming into the stove and oven. They didn’t get back up.
“Do you want to trade?” Nate asked Alex, feeling oddly giddy. He was most likely about to die, but he couldn’t remember feeling so alive.
“Bastard,” Alex said, but his answering grin was crazed and beautiful. He reached down and picked up a walkie-talkie from one of the fallen soldiers.
They headed for the blown-out doorway.
The front yard was filled with dozens of soldiers, black rifles pointed at them as soon as they stepped out onto the porch. There were armored vehicles and a helicopter above them. It was so close Nate could see the pilot inside, mouth moving soundlessly.
The grass was flattened by the force of the spinning blades.
Art cocked her head at them.
He should be frightened. He knew he should be scared for his life. Chances were he was about to die there on the porch of a farmhouse belonging to a dead cult leader. He hadn’t done half the things with his life he’d wanted to do. He’d never hiked Machu Picchu. He hadn’t swum in the crystal-clear waters of the Maldives. He’d never been on a roller coaster. He’d always wanted to learn how to swing dance. He’d never tried calamari, though it was probably disgusting.
And strangely, somehow he was okay with it.
He was okay with all of it.
He’d been lonely. He’d been sad.
But he’d found a purpose.
He’d found a reason. Two, in fact.
If he died right here, right now, there was a very real possibility that he’d done something good. That his life had mattered. That he’d loved and been loved in return.
And sure, there was fear with all those guns pointed at him, his human brain wondering if it would hurt in the end. But it was negligible. It was unimportant.
He’d read about last stands before. Of a group of people, beaten and weary, rising against a much greater force. Outmanned. Outgunned.
He knew what it meant.
His hand tightened on the baton. It wouldn’t do much.
A man pushed his way through the soldiers. He carried a bullhorn.
He didn’t look like he had when he’d come to the house posing as an employee of public works. That man, the water guy, had been smiling a little too widely, full of aw shucks and golly gee. Even when they’d run into each other in the store (quite a coincidence, that, Nate thought dryly), he’d been oddly intimidating, but it still hadn’t meant much.
It was different now.
The water guy, Randy, wore black trousers with a UTG Tactical leg holster around his thigh. A black pistol with a silver handle was attached to it. He had a white shirt under a black leather jacket. On his face sat mirror shades, reflecting the bright early-morning sunlight.
Nate looked up toward the sky.
There, amongst the clouds and fading stars, was Markham-Tripp.
It burned against the deep, deep blue.
It was a good day to die.
Nate looked down at the yard again when Randy brought the bullhorn to his lips and said.
“It’s over. You have to see that.” His voice echoed across the yard, audible even against the thumpthumpthump of the Black Hawk.
Art looked back at Alex. She held her hand out. For a moment, Nate thought she was asking for the rifle, but Alex handed her the walkie-talkie instead.
She frowned at it as she turned forward again, fiddling with the knobs at the top. Once she’d gotten it where she wanted, she held it out in front of her, wiggling it at the water guy. With her free hand, she held up two fingers.
The soldiers tracked her every movement.
For a moment, Randy didn’t move.
Then he looked over his shoulder and barked out something Nate couldn’t quite make out.
One of the soldiers came forward, handing him another walkie-talkie.
Randy twisted the dial across the top before nodding up at Art and holding it against his ear.
“Can you hear me?” Art said into the walkie-talkie.
“Yes,” he said through the bullhorn.
“Good. There are people inside. They lived here. They’re dead.”
“Did you kill them?”
“No.”
“Oren Schraeder?”
“Dead.”
Randy turned his head away from the bullhorn and said something to the soldier next to him. The soldier didn’t react. He came back to the bullhorn.
“That’s unfortunate. He was… There’s never been anyone quite like him.”
“He said you could never find him here.”
Randy smiled almost ruefully.
“Yeah. I bet he did. He was right, as much as it pains me to admit. We didn’t… We had no idea where he’d gone after he left the Mountain. He was supposed to remain under surveillance, but he managed to give us the slip. Never really believed he took his own life, but I couldn’t find a way to prove it. He was good. Better than he had any right to be. Makes me wonder if you had anything to do with that.”
“I didn’t.”
“You expect me to believe that? I’ve seen what you’re capable of. What you can do to a mind. We’re lucky someone spotted your vehicle driving through the last town. Imagine our surprise when we found out who you’d come here to see.”
“You’re going to let us go.”
Randy laughed soundlessly.
“You know I can’t do that. Look, this has been… fun. You’ve lasted a hell of a lot longer than anyone expected. We could have taken you back at the cabin at any time, but we let you stay. We let you live with Alex there. We understood that maybe a change was needed. To expand the parameters of the experiment. Change the variables, if you will. To see what we could see.” He glanced at Nate.
“And then the variables changed even further with the introduction of Mr. Cartwright here. That… wasn’t expected. But we were curious to see what you would do. To see what you both would do. The end result was unexpected.”
“He’s mine.”
“Do you understand, Mr. Cartwright, what it is?” Randy asked.
“What it’s capable of. It’s infected your mind. It has taken you over. It is controlling you. It’s how they do it. It’s how they work. They infect you until you can do nothing but obey. We are trying to stop that. We are trying to protect the world from things like them. Because they will come for us again. And we need to be ready. Look what happened to Oren. We found a way to remove it from him, but it was still able to find him even after all this time. We can’t let it do that to anyone else. It’s not a girl. It’s a thing. It belongs in a cage, locked away so we can find a way to stop it before it’s too late.”
“Wow,” Nate said.
“He’s pretty out there, huh?”
“Enforcers usually are,” Alex muttered.
Nate plucked the walkie-talkie from Art’s hand. He found the button on the side. There was a squeal of static as he brought it close to his face.
“I think I’m good right here, thanks.”
“What about your brother?” Randy asked.
“Nate, what about Rick? Don’t you think he’d want you to come home? Don’t you think he wants to see you again? You call him Ricky, right? Nate, I know he wants to see you. Hell, he told me as much. I’ve talked to him, Nate. Personally. He’s a nice guy. He doesn’t understand why you won’t come home.”
And that… that was smooth. Nate hadn’t expected that. He should have. “Rick?”
Randy nodded.
“Yes, Nate. Rick. He’s waiting for you, okay? All you have to do is come to me. Fight it, Nate. Fight whatever’s going on in your head. Whatever it’s making you do. I know you can do it. It’s… probably too late for Alex. But you? Nate, think of Rick. Think of your brother.”
Art looked up at him, a sad smile on her face.
“I understand,” she said.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have before, when I first came here. But I do now. Family is important. It’s everything, Nate.”
She was right, of course. Family was everything. Which is why he said.
“I have my family right here.”
Alex’s eyes were wide.
Nate handed the walkie-talkie back to Art. She kissed the tips of his fingers after taking it from him. In his head, he felt her. Felt her reach. There were images of flowers blooming in fields. She was happy.
“Nate sends his regards,” she said into the walkie-talkie.
“You can still leave. All of you can.”
“You know I can’t do that,” Randy said, voice harder than it’d been before.
“How do you see this ending? Surely you can’t stop all of us. I know what you can do. But you can’t be everywhere at once. I will kill Alex Weir right here, right now. I will take him from you unless you give yourself up. I will take both of them.”
Even before he finished speaking, Nate flinched when a bright light flashed in his eyes. It was only a split second before it faded. He blinked against the afterimage. He looked down. Across his chest were red dots, wavering slightly.
He swallowed thickly as he looked over at Alex. Alex had the same dots on him.
He followed to where Alex was looking and saw a group of men lined up on the second floor of the barn, standing at the open windows, rifles pointed in their direction, laser sights grouped over their hearts.
“Why?” Art asked.
“Because I can,” Randy said simply.
“Because I will do anything I have to in order to protect this country. This planet. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to keep my people safe.”
“We mean no harm. We never have.”
“I don’t believe you. Complacency means death.”
“Shoot first, ask questions later.”
“Yes.”
“You learn you’re not alone,” Art said. She almost sounded like she was pleading with him. The images in Nate’s head were getting more vivid.
“That there is more to this universe than just yourselves, and your first reaction isn’t to welcome it with open arms but to trap it. To study it. To hurt it. And when it doesn’t do what you tell it to, you threaten it with destruction. You threaten to take from it what it loves.”
“You don’t know how to love,” Randy said coldly. He reached up and took his sunglasses off, fumbling with them before dropping them to the ground.
“That is inherently human. Which you’re not. You aren’t capable of such a thing.”
“Even after all this time, after everything you’ve done to me, after everything you’ve seen, you still know so little about me. About what I can do. You’re right. I’m not human. I’m not like you. But I know what it means to be loved. To have friends. To have people I would do anything for. And I know how it makes me feel when those people are threatened.” She looked up at the soldiers in the barn, then the helicopter, then back at Randy.
“You really should let us go.”
“I can’t do that.”
Art nodded.
“So be it.”
Nate could see the moment the words sunk in for Randy. His eyes narrowed. His mouth was a thin line. He lowered the bullhorn. The men around him tensed.
And when Randy shouted.
“Don’t hit the girl!” Nate knew that he’d mattered.
In the end, he’d mattered.
He closed his eyes against the sound of gunfire cracking over the farmyard. In his head, flashes of images: his mother in the kitchen, sashaying back and forth as she baked a cake for his twelfth birthday. His father putting a hand on his shoulder the day he graduated and squeezing it gently. He and Ricky under a fort made of pillows and blankets, using flashlights to read comic books late into the night.
But there were other things too. Flashes that didn’t belong to him.
He saw Alex walking hand in hand with a little boy with a quiet laugh.
Alex standing in front of a man in a suit, nervous as he stared at a woman in front of him, a devilish smile on her face.
Alex in front of a girl in a cage, seeing her for the very first time.
Alex, his side feeling like it was on fire, watching through the window as a young man pulled up in an old truck in front of the cabin.
Then they were merging, and there it was, right? That first kiss, awkward and sweet and oh so fucking devastating. He felt Alex’s nervousness, his fierce want. He’d been irritated at first, even had himself halfway convinced that Nate had come from the Mountain, had come to try and take Art away from him.
But he’d learned, slowly but surely, that there was so much more to Nate. So much more to them both.
And then there was Art, and Nate was seeing things he couldn’t understand. There were structures under triple suns that burned pink, structures that were so close to being familiar but off just enough that he couldn’t understand them, couldn’t quite make them out. And there were these beings, these beings made of iridescent white light, and they were swirling around, speaking in a way that Nate couldn’t comprehend. It wasn’t even words, but there was intent there, and one of these lights, one of these bright gaseous things was almost… familiar. It moved along a path made of some kind of shiny metal, and it was young, and it was sad, though it didn’t understand what sadness was precisely. But there was such a pervasive sense of loneliness coming from it that Nate felt like he was drowning in it.
It wasn’t like the others.
It was like Nate. It was like Alex.
And it was here. It was in the woods, and there was a man standing in front of it, and it was thinking can you help me? can you please help me? although it wasn’t quite in those words. And Nate saw the moment a younger Oren Schraeder understood what was happening to him, understood what it was he was seeing in front of him.
The gunfire around them ceased.
Nate felt no pain.
He opened his eyes.
Surrounding them were hundreds of bullets, floating in midair.
Art’s eyes were wide and angry.
There was a moment, a brief, terrible moment when Nate felt that anger, felt what she wanted to do. She wanted nothing more than to send those bullets right back where they’d come from, send them into the heads and hearts of the men who thought they could take from her. Before this place, before she’d come here, she’d never understood the concept of violence. Of revenge. Randy had been pretty close when he’d said she wasn’t human, that she couldn’t experience something such as love. But that had been before. Before Cisco Grove. Before the Mountain.
She knew love. She knew rage. She knew violence.
And she wanted revenge.
Alex said.
“No. Art. No.”
And so she let it go.
The bullets dropped, clattering against the wooden porch, bouncing down the stairs and into the grass in front of the farmhouse.
The only sound came from the thumpthumpthump of the Black Hawk above.
And then Artemis Darth Vader was moving.
She took her first step down the porch stairs.
The soldiers began to shout.
Some fired.
The bullets ricocheted away as if hitting a large barrier around her.
She looked up at the helicopter.
It wobbled.
She jerked her head toward the barn.
It hurtled toward the snipers.
They shouted as they scrambled backward.
The helicopter crashed into the barn, the blades spinning through wood, causing it to splinter and break apart. The front of the barn fell inward under the weight of the helicopter. Nate half expected it to explode, but somehow, it didn’t. It fell through the second floor with a screech of twisting metal and landed on the ground, a great cloud of dust curling up around it as the broken rotor blades came to a halt.
The men in the yard looked dazed.
Randy didn’t.
He reached down to the gun holstered on his thigh.
Nate was running even before he knew what he was doing.
He hit the grass just as Randy slid the gun from the holster.
He was almost to Art when Randy pointed the gun at her head.
He almost looked… regretful.
Nate reached Art and wrapped his body around her, shielding her from Randy.
“Thank you,” he whispered to her.
“For everything.”
A gun fired.
And it—
Nothing happened.
He opened his eyes.
Alex stood on the porch, rifle raised.
Nate turned in time to see Randy falling to his knees, a hole in the center of his forehead. His eyes were sightless. A drop of blood trickled down over his nose. He fell face-first into the grass.
There was silence in the farmyard.
Then the soldiers raised their guns again.
And Artemis Darth Vader said, “No.”
LATER, WHEN the police arrived, sirens wailing, radios squawking with bewilderment, there would be confusion. They would find the remains of a helicopter in a barn, bewildered soldiers slowly picking themselves up from the ground where they’d been knocked off their feet, vehicles overturned and lying upside down. The sun would be high in the sky, and when the bodies were discovered inside the half-burned farmhouse, black cloths over their faces, a man lying on the ground with a bullet in his head, a pistol lying beside him, the picture would slowly start to become clearer.
In the days that followed, there would be reports all over the news, reporters breathlessly exclaiming how a cult had faced off against the military before retreating back inside the farmhouse, where they met their end at the hands of their leader. The pundits would say it was David Koresh and Waco all over again. So-called experts would weigh in, attempting to explain that people in cults (the word uttered with disdain) were often gullible, easily swept up in a grand design proselytized by a man with seemingly endless amounts of charisma and a desire to prey upon those weaker than him. He was most likely a sociopath, they would say. He would think himself a prophet.
And then there would be the tapes. The tapes where Peter Williams would sermonize his vision of the world, of a change that would come upon the Earth. He would speak of his time in a base called the Mountain (to which there was a resounding of course it’s not real when those in the know were asked about such a place), and while there was the admission that he had been enlisted, it was clearly documented that Peter Williams had been honorably discharged years before due to mental health issues. That he claimed to be Oren Schraeder, a soldier who’d been born in 1940 and had died in combat, cemented the world’s view on Peter Williams’s lack of sanity. Add in that he’d claimed to be possessed by an alien, of all things, and… well.
He was just a crazy cult leader, they said.
Just another wacko.
THE STORIES that poured out of the farm tended to focus on those in the cult, and on the outrage at a military intervention that possibly forced the hands of those who died. Family members came forward, telling tales of woe about loved ones who had one day dropped everything and disappeared. A woman named Rachel cried in many interviews, her children at her side, speaking of her mother, Dolores, how they’d been very close, how her kids who loved their grandmother very much couldn’t understand why she’d had to go away.
“How am I supposed to explain this to them?” Rachel asked tearfully.
“I mean, how could they ever understand?”
Others agreed with her, saying their loved ones weren’t crazy, they weren’t like this, this didn’t sound like them, and why would they ever do such a thing?
It had to be his fault.
It had to be because of Peter Williams.
Some had their loved ones buried.
Others, like Dolores, were cremated.
Rachel said she’d spread her ashes but declined to answer where.
When asked what would become of Peter Williams, reporters were told his family had come and claimed the body, but had requested privacy, so no further details were provided.
A STATEMENT was released regarding the downed helicopter. It’d been an ill-timed malfunction. It was similar to the incident that had occurred back in March when a Black Hawk had gone down outside the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center. The entire fleet would be checked to prevent such a thing from happening again.
ASIDE FROM the deceased in the basement of the farmhouse, there was only one other casualty on the raid on the Williams Farm, as it would come to be known.
A soldier named Randy Forks.
He’d been shot by Peter Williams before Peter had fallen back into the house and taken his own life.
He was given a full military funeral.
A folded flag was handed to his brother.
Later when the brother was interviewed, he’d said he hadn’t heard from Randy in almost a decade before he died.
“Sad,” he said.
“Real sad. Randy and me, we never got along. But he’s my family, you know? Sad that it had to end this way, killed by a crazy bastard who believed in aliens. What the hell is wrong with people?”
A VIDEO camera was discovered in the basement where the bodies of the members of the Light of Eve lay.
But Peter Williams must have forgotten to put a tape inside, because the camera was empty.
THERE WAS no spacecraft in Markham-Tripp, obviously. The comet began to fade as it hurtled away from Earth. Eventually, it disappeared from the sky. It wouldn’t return again until the impossible year of 4380.
There was a queer sense of sadness. How could so many people be fooled into believing such a thing occurred and then take their lives because of it?
“It’s a real tragedy,” a man named Steven Cooper opined on his daily radio show broadcast coast to coast.
“A real damn tragedy. It wasn’t time. They came. I know they did. But it must not have been our time. They must not have found us ready yet. But they will, friends. Mark my words. One day they’ll come back, and you’ll see I’m right. Those poor souls of the Light of Eve were misguided. They went about this the wrong way. I don’t know how or why they got it into their heads that they needed to off themselves to see what was plain as day for the rest of us. That Peter Williams must have messed with their heads. Come on, friends. Have you seen his rantings? He claimed to have been possessed by an extraterrestrial. Possessed. We all know that’s not how this works. The Greys don’t possess us. They aren’t capable of such things. This is why UFOlogy is looked at with such disdain! When we have crackpots like Peter Williams, it takes away the validity of our science. Peter Williams was nothing but a hoax. A false prophet. I don’t doubt our government is shady. I know that. You know that. What was the reason they were involved in the siege at the Williams Farm to begin with? Were they trying to avoid another Waco? Why wasn’t this left up to state and local law enforcement? I have my theories. You know I do. You know I always do. Peter Williams suffered PTSD. One too many concussion blasts. It happens. He served, god love him. He did his duty. But he became lost, after. And he got it into his punch-drunk head that he was something more than he was. He deserves our pity, friends. They all do. I think that’s why they came after him. Why the cops weren’t involved. He was one of their own, and they hoped to bring him back into the fold. But make no mistake, friends: by taking their lives as they did, it may well have set those of us that believe back fifty years. They will come, friends. I guarantee it. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But they will come. Caller, you’re on the air. What do you think about all this madness—”
EVENTUALLY, THEY left Rick Cartwright and his family alone.
The men in uniforms stopped coming to the door, though nondescript black cars followed him for months.
They wouldn’t tell him much, only that his brother had been a traitor, that it’d cost him his job at the Post, and that he was involved in something Rick would never get the details of.
He was curious, sure, but he wasn’t like Nate. He didn’t feel the burning need to ask question after question.
He let it go.
There were days he wouldn’t even think of his brother at all. He was a very busy man, and he had a family to support.
But every now and then, he’d stop and think about skipping rocks along the surface of a lake, his little brother’s voice ringing in his ears. He’d think of how Nate had sounded on the phone that late night, and how he’d called him Ricky.
A WOMAN named Ruth who lived in Washington, DC, watched the news coming out of Pennsylvania, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She was on an extended sabbatical, a decision she’d made after the men from th.
“NSA” had voiced their vaguely veiled threats toward her. She didn’t know what had happened, didn’t know where Nate was, but somehow she knew the Williams Farm had to do with him. With them. With the man and the girl.
“You keep running, kiddo,” she muttered at the TV, smoke curling up around her head.
“You keep right on running. Don’t you ever stop.”
She would die seven years later from a heart attack, having never heard from Nathaniel Cartwright again.
THERE WAS no mention of two men and a little girl who’d found themselves on the farm. There’d been a BOLO issued on them, their photos circulated before the Williams Farm was swarmed by the military. A little girl taken against her will. Two men who she was thought to be with. But in the spring of 1995, there was no such thing as AMBER alerts; in fact, the little girl for whom the AMBER alerts would be named wouldn’t disappear until January of 1996.
The BOLO was eventually recalled. No connection between it and the Williams Farm was ever made.
It was as if they never were at all.