NaNoWriMo, Day Twenty-Nine

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.

One more day. It will be so nice to work on this because I want to instead of because I have to. I also recognize that being at 64K words with two days to go makes it hard to stay motivated. Back to the marathon analogy, if I had trained and busted my ass to get a sub 6:00 time and I’m now on the home stretch with less than a mile to go and I’m only at 5:15, am I still going to be going all out for the last mile in order to get a 5:25 time? Or am I going to be perfectly happy to dog it for the last mile and get a 5:45 time, because it still makes my original goal? It would be nice to think it would be the former, but the latter might sound really, really tempting.

Technically, especially having never actually done this before, I’m finding that keeping track of who’s doing what and when in two point-of-view threads like this is harder than I expected. In a good way, I think. The storytelling technique of splitting the story when Tom got kidnapped and following Ellen for a while, then jumping back to Tom for that same time period of time, that technique felt like it was the right thing to do at that time and it still does, but if (okay, when) I do another NaNoWriMo I might avoid it, especially if I’m not way ahead of my word count pace. I find that since I’ve done it I have to spend a lot of time every day going back and reading the previous chapters to make sure that there aren’t any discrepancies.

For example, when I got to where Tom had had the nap, wasn’t sure if he was being lied to about the time, and went outside to look at the stars, I had to go back to where I was describing Ellen’s night to see what I had said one way or the other. I had mentioned that it was clear and cold as she was walking while talking to Jason, so that worked. I’m not sure what I would have done for Tom if I had described the night as cloudy and rainy.

It’s a learning process. If anything that Chuck Wendig and Neil Gaiman and others have preached is true, it’s that you can read every “how to” article in the world, but the only way to actually learn how to do it is to do it, making mistakes along the way, and learning from them. Give yourself permission to suck and be terrible. It’s only by sucking and being terrible that you have the opportunity to learn and get better and grow, so that someday you will not suck or be terrible. It’s not a goal that’s achievable by osmosis or divine intervention.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Tom was stunned, his brain in danger of shutting down. He knew he couldn’t allow that to happen. He needed his brain to be active and functioning well, not crawling into a hole and pulling the hole in after it. He had to think.

Ellen was correct, of course. He hadn’t thought of Annie in decades, let alone tried to reach her. The only reason he needed to find her now was to see if she knew anything about the invisible disks. He had been in the presence of one, been scared out of his mind by it, and the only clue he had was that Annie had spoken to him of weird things like this when he was a child. Part of his determination over the last week had been fueled by his fear she wouldn’t know anything at all about the disks or she would be dead and unable to answer his questions.

That lingering, unspoken doubt had now been swept away in seconds by Ellen’s pictures and her accusations. Ellen knew about these things. That almost certainly meant Annie knew about them also. There had been one in this room. The answers he had been chasing for the last week could be right there for him to take.

There was one huge problem. Those answers were in the hands of a shadowy group with unknown motives and goals, a group apparently with tremendous power and influence, a group that had with kid gloves kidnapped him off of a city street. He and the answers were being held by a group which had spent tremendous effort to stay hidden and maintain tight security. And now they knew that he knew about one of the big secrets they were hiding.

Did that mean the answers he had been seeking were there for him in some way? Or did that mean that he was a serious security breach to be silenced and disposed of? He was balancing on an extremely dangerous knife-edge with no guidance about which way to go.

In addition, it finally registered with Tom that Ellen had described this as a ‘safe house’. Since the beginning he and Jason had wondered over and over if the invisible disks were dangerous or not. They most certainly were terrifying and horrible to look at. Ellen’s tone and comments seemed to confirm that serious danger was associated with the disks.

Tom looked around the suite and saw how Ellen’s story fit the facts all around him. It had never made sense to have that many security cameras to cover every inch of the living space. He had assumed that it was overkill on the group’s part in watching his every move, but it could have been done with far less equipment. More importantly, the equipment could have been hidden. Tom had assumed it was being done this way in order to be intimidating, but Ellen’s story also fit the facts.

And they hadn’t harmed him, when they could have at any time. They had in fact taken pretty good care of him so far. He hadn’t actually been kidnapped, technically, although the threats against him if he hadn’t complied had seemed real enough. But perhaps he actually had had an option yesterday in that parking lot.

Still reeling from what he had just learned, Tom looked back at Ellen, who was patiently waiting for him to process what she had said. “What do you want from me?” was all he could croak out.

“Do you admit that you’ve seen these things?” Ellen demanded.

Tom didn’t see any point in trying to deny it at this point, but he still desperately wanted them to not know about Jason. “Yes, there was one in my home a week ago. It terrified me.”

“Did you see it with your own eyes?”

“No, it showed up on a video camera I was using. My cat was acting weird and I was recording him. I don’t know, maybe I thought that it would be a hit on YouTube. Then when I played it back… Wait! That’s why you have so many cats around here.”

“Very good,” replied Ellen. “What happened at my place in Colorado?”

“Again, I didn’t see anything, but your cat was acting the same way that mine had. I didn’t know if one of those things was there or not or where it might be, but I was afraid that you might stand up and touch it. I didn’t know what would happen if you did. I didn’t know if those things are dangerous or not, but they sure look ugly. I still don’t know if they’re dangerous.”

“Neither do we, unfortunately. Remember yesterday when we said this was a research facility, not a cult or a commune. That was the truth. These things are what we’re researching.”

Tom’s world was shifting all around him. What he had known about the world a week ago had been turned topsy-turvy by the thing in his home. Now the new reality that he had cobbled together trying to find Annie had been flipped upside down again.

“Again,” Tom said, “what do you want from me?”

“We want your help. We want you to join our team. We need you as much as you need us.”

“I’ll ask you the same thing you asked me. Why didn’t you just ask me days ago?”

“When you saw that thing, did you tell anyone about it? Of course not, because you would be in a rehab center or a psychiatric ward if you did. There’s more you don’t know yet. Trust me, if you had tried to tell anyone, you wouldn’t be here. This is not exactly the kind of thing you go to the newspapers about.”

“Right,” said Tom, “I thought all of that through a week ago. I didn’t want to be locked up so I kept it to myself.” At least that part of what she was telling him fit what he wanted her to believe. As long as he didn’t trip up and say something stupid, Jason should be safe for the moment.

“That’s why we didn’t approach you in town or in Colorado. We couldn’t be sure if you had actually seen one of these things, and until we were confident that you had, we couldn’t let you know what we knew.”

“I can see that,” said Tom, “but what if I had just given up after you stood me up? What if I didn’t have the skills or the resources to track you down? What if I made it to Farmington but then lost your trail and gave up? You say that you need my help for some reason and want me to join your team, but I don’t understand why you made it so hard for me to find you if you wanted me here.”

“That’s something else that we can get into if and when you join the team. Suffice it to say we had to make it difficult in order to know you had what it took to join us. It was in some ways a test. The fact that we’re having this conversation means you’ve passed several milestones so far. There are more to come.”

“It’s a strange little system you have here. Now that the cards are on the table, what are my options, especially if I don’t want to join your team? Maybe I can figure out a way on my own to prove that these things exist, which I assume you would not want me to share with anyone? You can’t take that chance, can you? You would have to either keep me against my will for a long time, or you would have to simply get rid of me as a threat.” He knew the latter option probably meant that he would be killed, but he couldn’t force himself to say the words.

Ellen smiled at him. “We’re not the C.I.A. or some drug cartel. We really are a research group. We need and want your help. If you choose not to help us, we have procedures we can follow that will leave you essentially unharmed but not remembering anything of the last two weeks. After that, we’ll monitor you very closely to make sure you don’t make any further problems for us. But we’re not going to put you in a shallow grave out here someplace.”

“Well, that’s good to know,” Tom said. “You’re a research group. Who are you associated with? Who runs all of this, and who pays for all of it? I think I understand what you’re researching, but I don’t know why.”

“I can’t give you all of the details, they’re on a need-to-know basis and you obviously don’t rate access to that information yet. I can tell you that we’re private, not associated with or funded by any government agency. We’re not part of any military group or think tank. There are some very wealthy individuals who fund us. As an organization we work very hard to be invisible.”

“I still don’t understand why you need me, why you want me to join your group. Enlighten me if you would, please.”

(Chapter Twenty-Two to be continued)