NaNoWriMo, Day Twenty-Six

While I normally put in a lot of  internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.

After ranting in yesterday’s introduction about how I’ve done no outlining or plotting, I spent an hour last night laying out an outline for the remainder of the book. Like almost everything involved with this project, that wasn’t planned either, but I’m glad that I did it.

I started out with just a couple of notes that I wanted to leave myself about the next two or three chapters. Then there were some other notes. And more. And then I shuffled them all into order, realized that I should move a couple of them around in terms of sequencing, and then started realizing that for Event A to happen in Chapter X, I also needed to have Event B happen some time well before Chapter X. As in, it should probably happen in Chapter 21 or 22. But that meant that…

It tumbled out of my head onto the screen. I didn’t really mean to do it, honest! And there are still four or five things in bold red that are the equivalent of “And Then A Miracle Occurs!”.

But the end is in sight, I think. At least the proverbial dawn is on the proverbial horizon. (I’m mixing my metaphors I’m afraid.) I’ve “won” NaNoWriMo, but this zeroth draft will go on into December. But it will get done.

CHAPTER TWENTY (continued)

By the time Tom awoke, it was dark outside. The lights in the room had dimmed, apparently on some automatic system, probably to conserve energy since they had appeared to be dependent on their solar panels and wind generators. It was still warm in the room. Tom was surprised that there wasn’t some automatic override or remote control on that as well. As he started to shift and sit up, the lights came back up to normal.

Ellen had taken his watch, but there was a clock icon on the computer. It showed that he had been asleep for over three hours. He actually felt better now than he had before, calmer and less frantic, as well as more hungry. He got off the couch and went into the kitchen to fix some dinner.

Looking in the freezer for something to microwave, he noticed the ice cream. He picked one up and looked at it closely, opened it up and checked for anything unusual. He wondered again if he had been drugged. Since he had only slept for a while and had woken up unharmed in the same location, it didn’t seem as likely now. The only way he could think of testing the theory would be to eat some more and see what happened.

Tom stopped suddenly, replaced the ice cream, and closed the freezer door. He was making assumptions; he would have to watch out for that. The computer told him he had slept for three hours, but was that accurate? He assumed he hadn’t been touched, but had he? He assumed he was in the same place, but was he?

First, how did he know it had been three hours? He hoped it was still clear outside as he went over to the front door. The door was still unlocked and he slipped out into the cold, making sure to leave the door open a crack. This was no time to accidentally get locked out somehow.

The compound was dark. There were small lights near the ground between buildings, but they were dim, a reddish-orange tint, and aimed low to give a minimal level of illumination for anyone walking around. It was freezing cold, literally, and there was a moderate breeze that made the cold worse.

Above, the sky was clear and the stars stood out like beacons. Tom walked around the corner of his building so that he could see the eastern horizon. There, about thirty degrees over the mountains, was Orion. High overhead was Jupiter. To the west, a three or four day old moon was setting, along with Venus.

He hustled back into the warm building as quickly as he could. He had seen enough. Compared to the sky as he had seen it just two nights ago with the telescope, it had to be somewhere between 6:00 and 7:00 PM. He had slept for three hours.

Once inside, Tom checked out the rest of the suite. As far as he could tell, everything was exactly as he had left it, down to the clothes and shoes missing from his bedroom closet and dresser. Relieving himself in the bathroom, acutely aware again of the security cameras above, he checked to see if he could feel any injections or other physical changes, but he came up blank.

Satisfied, he went back into the kitchen and started going through the selection of frozen dinners. Picking one, he started the microwave on its cooking cycle, and then took a soda from the refrigerator.

There was a quick knock on the door. Before he could move toward it, the door open and Ellen came in, accompanied by another woman and four cats. Tom recognized the other woman, but did his best not to show it. She was the woman who he had seen picking up the mail when he had put the GPS tracker on Ellen’s car. The two women came in, pulled out chairs, and sat down at the kitchen table. The cats began to explore the suite.

“Come on in, make yourself comfortable,” Tom said. “Are you here for dinner? I can zap something for you if you would like.”

“No, thank you,” Ellen said. “We just came from dinner. Did you enjoy your nap?”

“Yes, it was fine. Thanks for letting me sleep, I guess. Did anything exciting happen while I was out of it? Chips implanted in my head, maybe, or body cavity searches?” He stopped, reminding himself he had decided his best course was to be more polite and less snarky.

Ellen considered him silently before deciding to ignore the question. “Tom, this is Morrison. She works with me.”

“Glad to meet you.” The microwave dinged and Tom started preparing his dinner for the next round of cooking. “Is ‘Morrison’ your first name or last name?”

“Both, neither, it’s just a name.” She sounded very tired as she answered.

“What is it that you do out here, Morrison?”

“I’m a researcher,” Morrison said. “I was originally trained as a veterinarian, but I’m now doing clinical trials of a sort.”

“Interesting. Out here?”

“You sound surprised,” Ellen said. “Perhaps we can start with you telling us what it is you think that we do out here.” Tom couldn’t tell if it had been a suggestion, a request, or an order.

The microwave dinged again, the dinner done. Tom took it out and moved it to the table quickly as it started to burn his fingers. “Do you mind if I eat while we talk? Between one thing and another I didn’t get lunch today.”

“You should have had something else before you had the ice cream,” Ellen scolded, “maybe some fruit or a sandwich. And no, there wasn’t anything funny in the ice cream. We didn’t drug you, you just fell asleep.” One of the cats, a calico, came over jumped up into her lap.

Tom had a mouthful of hot mashed potatoes, but his expression must have betrayed him.

“We’re not morons, Tom,” Morrison said, “and we’re really not your enemy, believe it or not. Would you like us to eat some ice cream for you to prove it? Would you like to pick which ones? Or should we taste test your dinner? It’s too late for the mashed potatoes, but maybe I can test the green beans and Ellen can take a bite of the apple cobbler. Would that help?” She was not really laying on the sarcasm, but there was definitely an undercurrent of it there.

Tom stopped eating and looked at the two women, then down at his dinner. He glanced up at his “guest quarters”. He would have made a lousy prisoner of war, or maybe the folks running this place had made breakthroughs in psychological warfare. He was going to have to stick to his plan and watch every word and every action, but there was a tiny crack of resignation in his shell of obstinacy.

“No, that’s not necessary,” Tom said. “I don’t have a clue what you’re doing out here. I was guessing it was another commune of some sort, since that’s where Annie was back in Colorado. But it’s pretty professionally built, where most of the communes I ever heard about were more ramshackle. So I’ve entertained the idea that it’s some sort of cult or religious group.” He stabbed a forkful of green beans and shoved them into his mouth to shut himself up.

“You’re not even warm, Tom,” said Morrison. “We’re not a cult and we’re not a bunch of hippies. The best description of this place is that it’s a research station.”

Tom took that in as he was chewing. “What kind of research station? What do you research?”

“That’s something we can’t discuss with you at this point. Perhaps later, depending on how things develop after you talk to Dahlia. I mean, Annie.”

“Does Annie know that I’m here?”

“Yes, we told her this afternoon,” Morrison said, “but she also was extremely tired after her work earlier in the day. She is in her mid-eighties, after all. That’s one of the reasons we let you sleep in.”

“Will I see her tomorrow then?” One of the cats, a jet black Bombay, trotted in from the living room and started rubbing around his legs.

“Yes, we’ve cleared her schedule so she can see you tomorrow.”

“What exactly does she do out here that keeps her so busy?”

“We’ll let her tell you what she wants to tomorrow if that’s alright.”

“Okay, you’re in charge,” Tom agreed. “Can anyone tell me who you are? If you’re not a cult, are you with some government agency? The military maybe? This site didn’t get built cheaply.”

“That’s another thing that we can’t give you too many details on yet,” Ellen said. “I can tell you that we’re not associated with any government agency or the military. As you can see from my companions this morning, some of us have worked for the military and other government agencies in the past, but we’re not part of any such group. We’re privately funded.”

“It’s good to have wealthy friends.” Tom had finished his dinner, so he stood, put the silverware in the sink, and started to put the plastic tray from the dinner in the trash. He stopped and looked back at the women. “Do we recycle here? I don’t want to violate any local mores.”

“We do, but it will be taken care of later. You don’t have to worry about it, but thank you for being aware and observant. We appreciate it.”

Tom sat back down and looked at Ellen. “I’m really not here to make trouble, I don’t do that. I just wanted to find my aunt and talk to her, see her again. Why did you freak out when I showed you her picture?”

“Well, as I said in Colorado, your aunt had left instructions about what to do if you ever showed up. You may not realize it, but she’s one of the more important people in this project. I did what I had been instructed to do once I realized who you were.”

“You were instructed to lie to me, bail out, and lead me on a wild goose chase across two states? By my aunt? That’s pretty hard to believe.”

“The details weren’t laid out, but when I let the people here know who you were, those were the instructions, yes.”

“Why? Why in the world would you do that to me instead of just bringing me here to her? That makes no sense at all.”

“You’ll have to ask Annie that, tomorrow. For now, we need to get these four,” she indicated the cats, “back to their homes for the night. We’ll be over about nine tomorrow morning. If you need anything, you can contact us through the terminal, someone’s on duty all night. If you need an alarm set, you can do that through the terminal as well.”

Ellen got up and Morrison followed her lead. They began to walk toward the front door and one of them gave out an odd, warbling whistle. The black cat rubbing up against Tom’s legs took one more swipe at him, then went to join the other three cats following the women outside.

Tom just sat there, more bewildered than anything. He had expected a lot of things after being abducted, but this was not anywhere on the list.

What the hell was going on out here?