Detours Ahead @lrobinsonscifi - Tumblr Blog

The alarm sounded. Thompson ordered general quarters. The intruder alert sounded over the loudspeakers. Guards with M-16’s roamed the corridors of Stanton Air Base, as Major Tom Thompson stood in the security annex scanning monitors. Thompson tapped his impatient fingers on the console, as men in fatigues ran down corridors in a rampant search. Thompson silenced the alarm. On the monitor, two armed guards were dragging the intruder into holding room.

Sargent Wilkins came into the annex and stood next to Major Tom.

“How long was he in the lab?” Thompson asked.

“At least an hour,” Wilkins said. “He was building this.”

Wilkins set a device on the table.

Thompson and Wilkins stared at it for a long, breathless minute.

“Any idea what it is?” Thompson finally asked.

“Nope,” Wilkins said.

“Oh come on, Bob,” Thompson said. “You’re the guy who plugs everything in around here. You’re telling me you can’t figure out what this Radio Shack reject is? It looks like a radio. It’s probably a radio.” Thompson picked up the device and felt a mild eclectic current in his fingers.

“It’s not a radio.”

“But there’s a dial and everything.”

“No.”

Thompson sat down in a chair. “I hate my job,” he confessed. “I do. Most nights, I’m here just to avoid going home to my wife. But this job, it just keeps getting weirder.”

“Your wife’s pretty hot, Tom.”

“Sure,” Thompson said with a sigh. “But you ever have a gorgeous woman in lingerie complain for an entire hour about you not picking up her dry cleaning? Or stand there in a thong bikini while she makes you look for shoes in her closet? I’d rather have my fingernails pulled out.”

Wilkins smiled. “Another fundraiser this weekend, huh?”

“Save the pumas, I think.” Thompson looked at the readout from the computer as the guards took the prisoner’s fingerprints. “Bowman, it says. Roger Bowman.” Thompson pressed print.

“Sounds like a real asshole,” Wilkins said.

“Just call everybody, will you? This guy works for NSA or DOD and he’s testing our defenses. I’m sure of it. I just want to go back to my office and finish my comic. Then, I want to go home, and hear my wife complain how I’m not doing enough around the house.”

Wilkins slapped Thompson on the back and squeezed his shoulder. “Hang in there, buddy,” he said with a mock whisper. Thompson walked into the holding room where the prisoner sat in handcuffs. The cuffs had a long chain attached to a steel loop on the table.

Thompson sat down in front of the man. His face seemed familiar.

“Look,” Bowman said, “there’s no way you’re going to believe me. But you have to. People’s lives are at stake.”

“I’m Major Tom,” Thompson said scribbling on the printout he’d attached to a clipboard. “Mind telling me how you got in?” Thompson looked at Bowman carefully for tells.

“That’s the part you’re not going to believe,” Bowman said. “Wait. Did you say your name was Major Tom? Is that supposed to be a joke?”

“No. My commanding officer is a die-hard Bowie fan.”

Bowman looked Thompson straight in his eye. “I don’t believe you,” he said.

“I don’t give a shit,” Thompson said. “How’d you get it in?”

“The same way I found this place. Remote viewing.”

“Okay,” Thompson said. “Who sent you? CIA or NSA?”

“Neither. I found this place on my own.”

“It’s a simple question. Tattaglia, or Barzini?” Thompson scribbled a little picture of a puma on the page next to Bowman’s picture. Thompson read more about Bowman.

Bowman was from a little town in Virginia. Coincidently, the Major had been camping near there nine years ago, when heavy rains had driven him in-doors. There, in a cozy little bar, Thompson had met his wife, who had turned his sex life into something strange and provocative. Thompson took a long look at Bowman and thought maybe that’s why he looked so damn familiar. Maybe he’d seen him there, at that bar.

Bowman was dressed in stolen Air Force fatigues. He would have passed for a soldier, except for his shoulder length brown hair and his three-day beard. “You can quote the Godfather all you want,” Bowman said, “but I’m telling you—I came here on my own. I need your help.”

Bowman’s voice exerted a quality of earnestness, a dedicated sincerity. Sincerity and dedication made Thompson sick to his stomach. Thompson was a true cynic. He didn’t believe in sincerity, he thought it was all an act. Thompson thought the only reason people ever sounded sincere, like politicians, was because they had a cause for every dollar in your pocket. People who expressed sincerity wanted to save the world, so they could take it home and shake all the money out of it. Thompson wanted all the sincere phonies rounded up, so they could be clubbed like baby seals.

“Just take it from the top,” Thompson said. “Start with explaining how you found this place.” Thompson got up and went to the corner, where he poured tea from a thermos into a two paper cups. He sat back down across from Bowman, sliding one of the cups over.

Bowman took a sip of his tea. “You ever heard of Zeta Reticuli?” he asked.

“Sure. They’re like a Starbuck’s chain, right?”

“Not exactly.” Bowman paused. His stare was intense. “It’s a star system.”

“Oh,” Thompson said. “That Zeta Reticuli. Of course!” Thompson slapped his forehead. “The one Betty Hill drew after she’d been abducted. The one people claim all the gray aliens are from. The one the ancient alien nuts point out that while it’s fifty light years away from earth, it’s only twelve point five light years from Zeta Reticuli A to Zeta Reticuli B. Since they’re just a hot minute from each other, they must play backgammon every Friday. Why, tonight is Friday, isn’t it? That explains everything.”

“You’re not working with them, are you?” Bowman asked in his sincerest tone yet.

“I’m a pilot in the Air Force, asshole. I have to fly by the stars.” Thompson’s face scrunched up. “Can we stop with the games?”

Bowman looked at his watch. “I have less than an hour before I get dragged back to a place you couldn’t imagine. All I’m asking for is five minutes. That’s all I need. I’m almost done. You looked at what I was doing. It’s not explosive. It’s not communicating with the Russians. Please.”

Bowman rubbed his eyes.

He looked tired.

Thompson took a deep breath.

Bowman continued. “I’m sure posted here, you’ve seen strange things,” he said. “You’re probably not cleared for it, but you probably suspect the government is working with them. The Air Force has since Kitty Hawk. You must have seen things you can’t explain, I mean—with your attitude I’m sure you always get the night shift…” Bowman’s tone waivered from confidence to fear. It was as if two people inside him were fighting for control.

“Who are they?” Major Tom asked.

“You know.” Bowman put his hands over his eyes like binoculars and blinked like ET.

“Uh-huh,” Thompson said. “Eliot is not going to save you on this one, buddy.”

“Can I talk to the person in charge?”

“I am in charge.”

“Sure. But you’re only a major. Where’s you’re commanding officer?”

“I’m the Major. It’s after ten, so my Colonel is home in bed,” Thompson said. “Not that he knows how to run this place anyway. So that’s where he’s staying. Bob Dylan said it best, you’ve got to serve somebody.” Thompson turned his attention to the clipboard.

“I get the feeling you’re a guy with issues,” Bowman said.

“It says here you did two years at Virginia Tech—then, you dropped off the grid. That’s a little suspicious. I’m thinking schizophrenia, and I’m thinking recruitment by the CIA. Now, you snuck onto a top-secret military base to put together a toy radio. This leads me to believe that you’ve either done a tremendous amount of drugs, or your working for the company off the books. Which is it?” Thompson looked over his clipboard at Bowman.

“I was recruited,” Bowman said. “I was trying to be patriotic. They used that old line about aptitude. I’ll let you in on a secret: Everybody’s got aptitude.”

“So they did send you here, to monitor our response.”

“No. I needed access, and you were the closest facility. We’re running out of time.”

“How long were you inside before we caught you?

“Nearly an hour,” Bowman said.

“So, you got past my guard dogs, and three million dollars of security, and all our top notch man-power—”

“Top notch, really?”

“Fair enough. Then, you climb into the side of a mountain, down an elevator shaft into an underground installation, which maybe three or four hundred people know about. Why didn’t you just rob a bank?”

Bowman drank the rest of his tea and crumpled up the small paper cup. The chain handcuffs didn’t give him much mobility, but he tossed the crumpled cup over his shoulder and hit the little wastebasket in the corner dead center. He flattened out his palms on the table.

“I’m telling you, if I’m here when they come, there will be residual damage. Let me finish my work. Then it’ll be like I was never here.” Bowman didn’t look crazy.

The Major studied his face. Bowman wasn’t shaking, or sweating. His eyes weren’t dilated. Bowman seemed like a regular guy with a sharp vocabulary, and he wasn’t afraid of being caught. The Major thought he could be a scientist, a con man, or a skilled thief—probably all three, if he’d been hired by the company. So, what was with the device he’d built? Something in the Major’s instincts told him Bowman was dangerous, but he couldn’t see how.

Sure, every once in a while, someone had stumbled onto the periphery of his base—lost hikers, wilderness freaks, pot growers. But the Major’s base wasn’t advertised like area fifty-one. Just to figure out there was anyone inside of the mountain you’d have serious homework. Maybe, the Major thought, some lowly corporal, after cleaning the toilets, had leaked information about this place in some coffee shop after one too many espressos to impress a cute girl. But no soldier here would risk his pension and prison to brag, not for a piece of tail.

Bowman reached out suddenly towards the major.

“Every time they come for me,” Bowman said, “they make me drink this sour, viscous fluid. It’s like drinking molten brains. It takes over my nerves, so I can think like they do. I can see the universe like they do. You don’t understand reality, until you’ve seen it through their eyes!” Bowman had small tears coming out of the corner of his eyes.

“I hate that,” Thompson said.

Thompson leaned back in his chair. “You know what else I hate?” The Major pulled out a pack of smokes from his front shirt pocket and lit up a cigarette. “My wife, she comes from money. A lot of it. It’s not like I’ll ever see a dime, because her father and mother, they’re going to leave it to all charity. Fuck it, I don’t care. Because they have piles of money, though, she drags me to these charity events every week. I have to put on a suit, I have to shave, and almost every single time I go—right before I go—I have to take a dump. Maybe it’s nerves or something. I’m in a hurry, my wife is yelling that we’re late, I’ve been eating the lousy food on the base, and so, every week I’m squatting in my suit while she’s pounding on the door. So then, under pressure, under duress, sometimes I forget to roll up my sleeves. Then, you know what happens? I get shit on my sleeves. I never think I do. I check! I do. I look, there’s nothing there. But then, I’ll be sitting next to some old woman who’s wearing a fur stole, and she’ll ask me to pass the butter. And out comes my sleeve, and there it is…dookie! Right there, and the old woman can smell it, too. That’s what I hate.”

Thompson leaned back and puffed out three rings of smoke.

“Sounds like you’ve got problems,” Bowman said.

“Oh, but I do. Nevertheless, I don’t have the problems you have, Bowman. I get crack heads wandering around the mountain every once in a while, or doomsday preppers, or people looking for buried treasure. They think nobody’s surveyed this goddamn mountain before. Like Google Map somehow missed an entire mountain. Like the US Geological Survey was a hoax or something. Everybody tells me they’re the first. I’ll bet you thought you were the first asshole to find this place.”

“As a matter of fact…”

“Oh, no. Thanks to the Internet, Anonymous, FOIA, pot growers, and Bigfoot hunters, I get an asshole wandering in here about every month. Now, just give me a story I can believe. You were tripping balls on mushrooms. Your girlfriend made you walk home and you got lost. You heard about a yard sale up the hill and you fell down a well. Something I can put down in my report except aliens. Anything, besides aliens. Because my Colonel, he hates that alien bullshit even more than I do. He’s not going to buy it.”

“Can I have a smoke?” Bowman asked.

“Sure. Why the hell not.”

While it was true that the occasional kook, or student hiker wandered off the trail and stumbled “technically” onto the base, there were actually several posts of Air Force personal in civilian clothes that caught and re-directed them. No one had ever made it inside the compound, let alone deep into the restricted labs at the lowest levels of the base, where Bowman had been caught.

Thompson knew Bowman was way to sharp to be crazy. This left sabotage and spying. He seemed too candid to be a spy, and too desperate to be a saboteur. Maybe that’s why he gave Thompson the creeps: Even more than an old woman at a fundraiser after two martinis telling him he looked just like her dead husband.

“All right, cards on the table,” Bowman said after a long drag of his cigarette. “I’m from an alternate universe.”

“Well, now we’re getting somewhere,” Thompson said.

Thompson stepped out of the room and slammed the door behind him. Sargent Wilkins was waiting for him in the hall. Thompson approached him and fished out another cigarette from his pocket. As Major Tom fumbled in his pocket for his lighter, Wilkins smoothly lit up his zippo and leaned back as the Major inhaled.

“Tell me you got something on this guy,” Thompson said with a mean, raspy exhale. Wilkins shook his head. “I called Langley, I called Homeland, I called Joint Forces. I called everybody except your mother-in-law. There’s nothing on this guy. Nobody’s heard of him, nobody knows him.”

“Well then he’s a rogue spook is all. The CIA just fucked up. Some general will be calling any minute with the training exercise excuse.”

“I don’t think so,” Wilkins said.

“Why? Why do you do this to me in the middle of the night when I could be getting my Netflix on? You know what I was binging? There’s this series on burnt out porn actresses. You’re taking away quality time from me, Sargent.”

“Tom, I’m telling you, there’s something disturbing about what he was working on.”

“Did you talk to Sia over at the Farm?”

“I did. She said no, he’s not one of hers. Officially, unofficially, cross her heart—he wasn’t sent here. I’ve hooked up that thing he built, and I can’t what the hell it’s for.”

Major Tom exhaled again and kicked his foot against the wall. “Yeah, okay—it’s not a radio. It’s not a transceiver. It’s not a Transformer. So what it is?”

“How it’s still putting a signal out after we pulled out the battery?” Wilkins asked.

Thompson turned around and faced the Sargent. “Really? That’s weird. What about someone here leaking our location?”

“C’mon. Everybody here is hand picked. They wouldn’t risk telling anybody. Even if they could, what would they say? They work inside a mountain? Like a coal minor for the Air Force? I don’t see that getting a soldier laid. Besides, I’ve been here longer than anybody, and I still don’t know what the hell we’re doing here.”

Thompson laughed. “Tell you the truth, Wilkins, neither do I.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No shit.”

“What? You mean you run the place, and they don’t tell you what we’re really doing here? Who puts a reconnaissance base in the middle of a mountain? What, we’re supposed to be on mole patrol?”

“My theory,” Thompson said handing the Sargent a smoke after he asked for one with his fingers, “was always that we were a fallout base for high level rich folks.”

“And all those abandoned labs that our friend here wandered into?”

“Budget cuts?”

“Really?” Wilkins said inhaling. “When exactly was the last budget cut for defense, anyhow? Even when they say they’re closing a base down, they open up five more. I’ve been on the job thirty years. There’s no such thing as a budget cut when it comes to defense. Especially the super-secret hollowed out mountain kind of defense.”

“You got a point.”

“I always do, Major Tom.”

“Fuck you.”

“What are you going to do with him?”

“Well, I don’t think holding him is going to—” Thompson was interrupted by a loud thump. All the base alarms went off. The walls started to shake and the floor rippled like it was taffy.

A huge crack appeared in the wall just above Thompson’s head. The floor split open, and Wilkins fell through. Thompson heard a scream. He ran into the interrogation room.

“Explain it again,” Thompson said, looking at Bowman.

Bowman was holding his head and blood was coming out of his nose.

“Make it fast!” Thompson yelled.

Another rumble shook the room. The walls seemed to merge, and then double, and then split apart once again.

“They’re here,” Bowman said. “Get me my device. You don’t have to believe me. Just evacuate the base, leave me here, and get out. All they want is me. Get your people out of here. If you don’t, the reality of the their universe will be slipped over this one. Since I haven’t finished the device, there will be ripples in the overlay. Cracks. It’ll crumble this base down inside of the mountain.”

Thompson looked at Bowman, and for the first time believed him. He un-cuffed Bowman. “The device is next door. Come on.” Bowman stood up slowly.

Thompson ran into the security annex, where the monitors were flickering. Bowman was behind him, picking up his device and adjusting it. Thompson opened a cabinet and threw a tool kit on the table.

“Attention,” Thompson said picking up the intercom. “All personnel evacuate the base. This is Major Thompson. All personnel evacuate, now!” The floor shifted violently. The walls continued to shake.

“I have to make sure they get out,” Thompson said. “When I get back, we’re going to finish our conversation.” Thompson ran out of the room. The men were heading out the east wing, which exited onto a plateau. Thompson waited until all the men were out to safety. Another earthquake hit, and the exterior fire door flew down the stairs at him, narrowly missing him. The stairwell crumbled. Thompson was trapped inside.

The quakes stopped.

Thompson ran to the annex.

Bowman was gone.

The device was still on the table.

From it came strange high-pitched noises, and a language Thompson couldn’t recognize.

_________________________________________________________

This story is a preview of the upcoming second volume of “Detours Ahead,” due this Spring. Contact the author through:

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: LRobinsonSciFi

Facebook: L. Robinson Facebook Page

Or leave a comment below-

_____________________________________________________

The first volume of Detours Ahead is currently available at:

Amazon

Smashwords

Barnes and Noble

iTunes Store

“Whatever happens, happens.”

-Spike Spiegel

Explain it Again The alarm sounded. Thompson ordered general quarters. The intruder alert sounded over the loudspeakers. Guards with M-16's roamed the corridors of Stanton Air Base, as Major Tom Thompson stood in the security annex scanning monitors.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Detours Ahead