NaNoWriMo, Day Twenty-Eight

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.

Whose bright idea was it to put a major holiday right here in the middle of NaNoWriMo? Am I not supposed to be stuffing myself with a third piece of pie and watching football right now?

This scene is one that will need some serious tweaking in the next draft. It’s really a pain to keep track of who knows what and how they know it, so I’m sure I’ve got at least a couple of major continuity / factual errors buried in here. But this will get the first pass at it out of the way.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE (continued)

“A device which you just happened to have with you? Is that standard equipment for science reporters these days?”

“I had it because the only plan I could come up with was to find your car. I had picked it up as a contingency in case I succeeded.”

“So why were you wearing one as well?”

“By the time I bought them I had figured out I was into something bigger than I had expected. I got one for myself as a backup and insurance, in case I was still underestimating the trouble ahead. You had me pretty paranoid by that point. Congratulations.”

“Who do you have doing the tracking at the other end?”

“Only my home computer system. All of the data is collected and stored there.”

“Really? How does that work to keep you safe?”

“Really?” Tom threw back at her. “It’s a software dead man switch. Programmers have been building and using them for forty years. If I don’t check in every so often and reset it, it goes off and starts calling for help.”

“So you’re telling me the clock is ticking. When does this alarm go off?”

“We have roughly two days,” Tom said. “I guess it’s up to you to see that we don’t get close to that deadline.”

“How did you know to come to Farmington to look for me?”

“You called out here from your store phone. The phone number shows it’s somewhere in this area, even if I didn’t have an address.”

“So how did you know that I called here from the store? I don’t believe in lucky guesses.”

“The woman at your store told me you called someone but she didn’t know who. I used some aggressive investigation techniques to find out what the number was. That led to Farmington.”

“What do you call ‘aggressive investigation techniques’?” Ellen asked.

“Those would be a tool in a reporter’s toolkit. Utility records can be obtained if you know how to look.”

“Not legally, they can’t. Do you want me to believe you did this as a science reporter?”

“I never used them for a science job, but I worked for decades with plenty of other reporters who did know how to get private information when necessary. One of them owed me a favor.”

“So you interrogate my employee, violate my privacy, stalk me to here, find my car, illegally bug it, and then spy on us from the air. At that point, why didn’t you contact us by normal means?”

“Your actions in Colorado gave a pretty good indication that you were less than friendly. Plus, you demonstrated yesterday that it’s not trivial getting out here. I doubt my rental car could have made it.”

“Yes, your rental car. Why did you change cars in Pueblo?”

That confirmed to Tom that they had put a tracker on his first rental car. “How did you know about that? What does it matter? There was a problem with it, some mechanical issue. I was heading cross country over three hundred miles in bad weather and I didn’t want to take a chance of getting stuck.”

Ellen thought about that for a minute before moving on. “Even if you would have had trouble getting out here from town, why couldn’t you have just called us or gotten in touch some other way? What was stopping you?”

“What other way? Should I have dropped a note from the balloon? I was afraid if I called this place you would… Well, that you would do what you did yesterday.”

“You could have talked to Emerson when you put the tracking device on my car.”

“Emerson? When I planted the tracker I never saw a driver, just the Tahoe. I assumed you were driving. I didn’t know who you might be with and I didn’t know how you would react to being surprised by me in the parking lot. What if you had been with the Burly Dudes?”

“The who?” Ellen looked confused.

“The Burly Dudes? Our two companions from yesterday. You know, about so tall and so wide, their sense of humor surgically removed?”

“That’s Edward and Kevin. They’re good guys.”

“I’ll take your word for it. What would they have done if I had surprised you in a parking lot with them tagging along? That’s why I didn’t just ask nice.”

“By your own admission you had the phone number. You could have just called.”

“And I would have tipped you off so you could run even further and hide even better. Good plan.”

“Alright,” said Ellen, “that explains how you got here with a minimum number of lies. It doesn’t tell me anything about why you are here.”

“I’m trying to find my aunt, obviously. That’s all I’ve been trying to do since the beginning.”

“Why do you so desperately need to see your aunt?”

“The family hasn’t seen her for years, we were worried. The holidays are coming up and after I had talked to everyone I thought that I would try to get back in touch with her.”

“You’re going to all of this time, expense, and trouble just to find Annie and give her an invitation for a Christmas party? You don’t think that’s just a little bit far-fetched, do you? Most folks would have given up in Colorado. You might have been pissed off at me and you might have been confused, but you would have dropped it at that point. Instead you turn into Junior James Bond and start messing in things you’re really not supposed to be messing in. Why is that? Enlighten me, please.”

“I’m getting stubborn in my old age. I’m tired of taking crap from people.“

“All of this rage and obsession comes from not being able to talk to your aunt? How many times in the last ten years have you tried to contact her by any means? The last twenty years? In the last thirty years have you ever even once tried to find Annie and talk to her?”

“No, when I was a teenager she got told by other members of the family to stay away. I hadn’t thought of her in a long time, but now I have and I wanted to get in touch. Why do you think that’s so unusual? It’s not.”

“No, it’s not unusual, not in and of itself. What is unusual is why you’re in such a tremendous rush, why you are so frantic to talk to her immediately. Tell me why you can’t take normal routes to track her down or talk to her in a month, or three months? Sure, she would miss the holidays, but there are other holidays, birthdays, other events she could come to. Why are you so driven to do this immediately, almost at all costs?”

“You pissed me off,” Tom said, starting to get angry and frustrated. “I’m retired. My wife died five years ago. It’s not like I had to be back at work or home in forty-eight hours. I got tired of being pushed around and decided to push back.”

“That’s an amazing mid-life change,” Ellen said. “But it still seems implausible to me. People don’t do what you’re doing for the motives you’re telling me about. I have to wonder if there isn’t something more, something that you’re just not telling me about.”

“You’re right, there is more,” Tom said with a bit of sarcasm creeping back in again. “I ordered a whole load of chocolate from your store. I was going to use it for Christmas presents. Since you had bailed on me, I wanted to see if the order was going to be filled or if I needed to cancel it and keep shopping. Now are you happy?”

“Since you brought it up, let’s talk about our conversation in Colorado. Do you remember? We were sitting at the table by the window and you were drinking chocolate, telling me about your aunt. I think that my cat was on the counter behind me. I started to stand up to get something and you grabbed my arm and pulled me down. It startled me. Why did you do that?”

Tom had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, but did his best to hide it. Up until now he had hoped that Annie might know something about the invisible disks that only the cats could see, but he had no idea that Ellen or anyone else out here might know about them.

“I saw that the cat was acting weird and it looked like it was about to jump on you,” Tom lied, hoping it didn’t show too badly on his face. “You remember, I asked if she might be hitting the catnip. I didn’t want you to get hit by the cat. It could have hurt one or both of you.”

“Bullshit,” said Ellen. “I think that there was something odd going on in that room, something that you couldn’t see, buy my cat could. I think it was something that you had seen before, something new that you had seen recently, something that scared the crap out of you. I think you were looking for Annie because you remembered her telling you stories when you were a little kid.”

“That’s crazy,” Tom said, trying to sound convincing. “What do you mean, something that the cat could see that I couldn’t. What are we talking about here, ghosts? And you think that my story doesn’t make sense.”

“Why do you think that there are so many cameras in these rooms?” Ellen asked.

“What?” Tom was thrown by the sudden change in the topic of conversation. He looked up at the cameras, then back at Ellen. “They’re here to watch me in this glorified prison you’ve got me locked up in. What else?”

“Wrong, Tom. They’re here to protect you. This isn’t a prison, it’s a safe house. The cameras aren’t here to watch you at all, but to watch for things that you can’t see. Let me show you something.”

Tom started to have icicles trickling down his back as Ellen got up and walked over to the computer. She entered an access code of some sort and called up a video on the screen. It was the room they were sitting in. A time stamp in the lower left corner indicated the images were from over a month ago.

The room was dark in the picture with just a bit of light coming in from the window. No one was visible. It looked like there was no one there at all. Suddenly something dark appeared in the middle of the room and the lights came on. The disk-like object hovering in midair expanded rapidly to be over two yards wide. It hovered for a moment, vague grey shapes swimming about inside. In an instant, rows of teeth started converging from the edges toward the center. When the teeth filled about half of the disk, the disk vanished in a blink and was gone.

Tom tried to look calm and blasé as he sat looking at the now-blank screen. “Okay, what in the hell was that and why are you showing it to me?” he asked.

Ellen came back to stand in front of Tom as he sat on the couch. “Let’s not get into the ‘what’ yet. You’re way, way too calm to have seen that for the first time. Can we cut the crap now? You’ve seen those before. You thought there was one in my store in Colorado. You think that Annie can give you answers. That is the motivation for your obsession with getting here and finding her.”