Category Archives: Science Fiction

It’s another “roll-the-dice-for-who-where-and-uh-oh” set of instructions from Chuck Wendig for this week’s Flash Fiction Challenge. I rolled a four, a ten, and a one. The title of my “1,000 words or so” about a dirty cop in a casino who is betrayed by best friend will be “Pit Boss.”

As an assignment, this random grouping of who/where/what seems pretty clichéd, and I hate clichés unless I’m making fun of them or spinning them on their heads, so I will, of course, see if I can come up with a suitable curve ball. Or at least come up with an unexpected cliché. (And I think I nailed the length, 1001 words. Woo hoo!)

As always, comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated.

PIT BOSS

The casinos weren’t the same since they had banned smoking. “Freaking health nuts,” muttered Hendricks. “Every breath used to tell you this was a lousy place to be. It tasted like somewhere bad for you, someplace that had something really addicting and toxic to make you be here despite that shit.”

“Which rant are you beating to death again?” asked Moore, her partner. “Why do you always have to talk to yourself like you think your bra is bugged?”

“That’s why I don’t wear a bra,” Hendricks said.

“At least it’s as noisy as ever. Wait until some asshole sues over losing his hearing in here.”

“We won’t be here when it happens. There’s Stan.” Hendricks led Moore through the clamor and flashing lights toward the casino’s pit manager.

“Ladies, what a pleasure!” Stan’s slimy grin was big and flashy, finely crafted to put the sheep at ease, but you didn’t need to look too deeply beyond it to see maggots writhing. “You’re looking particularly attractive today Detective Hendricks.” His eyes were locked on her cleavage and he looked ready to drool on her. “Is there a problem? I wasn’t expecting to see you until next month.”

“Your office. Now.” To the casual onlooker, Hendricks also seemed to be cordial and pleasant, but there was steel behind her clenched jaw. “Let’s make sure all the cameras are turned off in there, including all the ones you think we don’t know about.”

For the briefest moment there was a flicker of concern on Stan’s face, but he wiped it away in an instant. “Of course, please follow me.” He gestured for an assistant to take his place before leading the two women down a non-descript, unmarked hallway.

After passing through two security doors, Stan opened the door to his office. The lights came on automatically while he crossed to the desk. He reached underneath and flipped several switches. Hendricks sat casually in a chair in front of the desk, never taking her eyes off of Stan. Her expression got more threatening before she lowered her head slightly and raise her eyebrows in expectation.

The staring match lasted several seconds, before Stan caved. Reaching onto the bookcase behind the desk, another switch was flipped. Hendricks never blinked or looked away, waiting for more. Moore paused inside the door watching the two of them before shaking her head in bemusement and walking over to the small wet bar. There she picked up what looked to be a very expensive statuette and smashed it down. It shattered, exposing the wires and electronics hidden inside.

“I’m impressed,” said Stan. “You obviously have a very deep informant. It will be exciting to track them down.”

“You won’t be tracking anything, Stan,” Hendricks said. “We’re not here to show off.”

“Your décolletage says otherwise, but I’m sure this visit is for business, not pleasure. Do we need to make another adjustment to your stipends?”

“That deal is over, Stan. There’s a problem you’re going to help us solve. Once it’s done, we’ll let you save your own skin.”

“I see. I hope you haven’t given me too much credit. What is this problem?”

“First you help us. We need to disappear before certain people start asking questions we would very much prefer not to answer. You once indicated you could get people out of the country. Is that true?”

Stan seemed taken aback by the information. “You two? Both of you need to disappear? Who or what is chasing you?”

“It’s bad to worry about things that don’t concern you, Stan. Don’t forget what curiosity did for the cat. Can you do it or not?”

“Perhaps. When do you need this to happen?”

“Now. Yesterday. Immediately.”

“Interesting,” said Stan. “What if I’m unable to do this thing for you?”

“Then when we get fried, we’ll go down knowing you fried first. We’ll probably even build your pyre. Maybe we’ll earn a bit of mercy for ourselves.”

Stan gave a thin, humorless smile. “I wouldn’t have expected anything less of you. Yes, I can get you out of the country immediately.”

“Both of us,” said Hendricks flatly.

“Yes, of course, both of you.”

“Fine. Do it.”

“What about me?” Stan asked. “When do I get what I need out of this deal?”

Hendricks considered her words for a moment. “There’s a federal task force, some hot shot out of the Las Vegas FBI office working with that crooked slimeball new district attorney. They know about us, along with a dozen other places and cops working deals. They’re going to be coming down your throat. Once we’re on our way, we’ll tell you when and how so you can be somewhere else when the trap springs.”

“Since you have left me no other decent options, it will have to do. Lieutenant Moore, if you would join the detective, please?”

Moore walked over and stood immediately behind Hendricks’ chair. Stan looked directly into Hendricks’ eyes. His voice deepened as he spoke.

“Do you swear this is what you want to do, Detective Jenny Hendricks?”

“I do,” replied Hendricks, struck by the odd phrasing of Stan’s question as well as her response.

The lights in the room began to dim and redden. Moore grabbed Hendricks from behind, pinning her arms. Hendricks tried to get up and break away but found her partners’ grip to be unbreakable.

The room filled with smoke. The stench of sulfur became suffocating. Moore straightened up and yanked Hendricks to her feet, smashing the chair to kindling. Now facing the mirror behind the bar, Hendricks was shocked to see her partner transforming before her eyes.

Moore was growing taller and stronger in seconds, her skin turning dark. Long, sharp horns were sprouting from both sides of head. Hendricks’ kicking feet were grabbed and held tight by Moore’s sinuous, forked tail.

The floor became translucent and insubstantial, filled with enormous, leaping flames that burned Hendricks to her soul. Locked tight in Moore’s delivering embrace, Hendricks began her long fall.

After finishing 2013 with the five-week, five-part Flash Fiction Challenge (which was a ton of fun!), followed by a couple of weeks off for the holidays, Chuck Wendig this week has given us this task to start the Flash Fiction Challenges for 2014. I rolled a 16 and an 18, so the title of my “1,000 words or so” will be “Spiral God.” As always, comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated.

SPIRAL GOD

The being that was a starship which was the starship that was a being had taken its time approaching the tiny world, sniffing, watching, tasting, probing.

For an epoch which was merely the blink of an eye it had been near this star, first touching many tens and dozens and thousands of the cold, sterile, icy balls and lumps far out from the heat and light. Deep in its belly it had grown millions of different strains of organisms, all ancient, all new, all rare. On each frozen shard it had deposited a diverse assortment of organic colonies to lurk, to hibernate, to wait for the warmth of maybes and the glare of possibilities.

Moving patiently and steadily inward, the being the starship had visited cold and cloudy worlds, screaming winds churning their atmospheres, hemorrhaging away what little precious energy there was out in the deep dark. Here it chose and built, picking and choosing, making new organisms from a vast catalog of suitable organic building blocks, designing airy lifeforms to dance and float in the frozen, hellish hurricanes.

Millennia later, now close enough so the star was at last more than just a bright spot over there barely moving, gas giants wrapped spacetime around themselves and tortured the æther with blistering radiation and gargantuan gravity wells balancing dozens of smaller cosmoses on the abyss. The starship the being worked slowly to craft hardy and vicious organisms that could survive in such hells, weaving carbon into diamond for protection and strength while thriving at pressures and temperatures unheard of except for in the souls of the stars themselves.

Fulfilled and satisfied with its gifts for the gas giants, the being the starship turned toward the many moons swimming in the electromagnetic soup and warming themselves in the tidal torture. To each one it gave a custom designed cornucopia of seed cells, trillions upon trillions of lifebits created with the wisdom and experience of a billion years of experimentation, all scattered for the sole purpose of eating the sulfur rains or swimming in the dark oceans under the ices.

Approaching the rocky inner planets, the being the starship found a dying world, its feeble gravity unable to maintain its tenuous grasp on the life preserving atmosphere. Without consideration for the long odds because in the end all life was fighting uphill against the only painful and incredibly long odds allowed by an uncaring universe, cells were crafted to thrive and grow in brief and transient periods with water and warmth before sleeping patiently for an aeon when extinction hovered near.

Methodically continuing down into the star’s gravity well the being the starship detected something new as it approached the next planet. An anomalous taste followed by an enigmatic sniff triggered subroutines and memories long dormant and engaged protocols only used twice in hundreds of star systems past.

Here there was something unique, something precious beyond all measure.

The starship the being began to test and retest, to sample, to question, to analyze, to categorize. Meticulously it disassembled the evidence it found floating on the solar wind and skimmed off of the most uppermost layers of the atmosphere. At long, long last it was convinced.

The highest priest of a religion based on facts and not on faith, the being the starship now believed that it had found that most precious and rare of all objects in the universe, a new form of life which had arisen spontaneously and unbidden out of the mathematical probabilities of necessity.

With infinite gentleness and love the starship the being gathered and dissected the tenuous wisps of this new and precious life. It found the enzymes used and the complexities embedded within as it teased out every secret and nuance of this biological treasure. It marveled at the complex yet flexible structures in the helical spirals that this new life used, so different from the various crystalline and geometric structures that all other life in its experience had utilized since the ancestors and creators of the being the starship in the far, far distant past near the beginning of time.

It practiced reproducing this new life on demand before it ran experiment after experiment to verify that the fruits of its creation were accurate and compatible with the miracles which had preceded it.

When finally the being the starship had examined and sampled and tested millions of samples from all locations on this verdant and fertile incubator world, warm and wet and soft and blue and white and brown and green in the ebony depths of the endless distances between the stars, it backed away from this world of gods, giver of new life, mother of infinite generations to come.

Blessed to be in the sacred and divine presence of such a god world, having received the beneficence and loving grace of a new solution to the eternal problem of creation, bringing being into existence from mere chemistry, the starship the being began to sing across the interstellar depths, telling its far-flung kindred of the new miracle. It shared and taught and spread the benediction of this newly found state of living grace, setting the stage for all of the beings the starships which were part of itself and itself a part of the whole to spread and use this new life as the backbones of billions of new experiments on warm and wet worlds throughout the galaxy.

Singing its song of creation and discovery and sharing, the being the starship spread its immense gossamer wings and sails and began the slow and unfaltering journey outward to the next star surrounded by barren and sterile balls of rock and ice and gas and gravity, spinning patiently in anticipation of the starship the being’s promise of the gifts of life.

Here we are at the end, week five (of five) for this odd task in Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge.

In summary:

• Four weeks ago, I (and many others) wrote a 200 word fraction of a story, intended to be the first 1/5 of a story.
• Three weeks ago, everyone took someone else’s first 200 word fragments and wrote a second 200 word addition.
• Two weeks ago, everyone took two other people’s first 200 and second 200 word fragments and wrote a third 200 word middle section.
• Last week, everyone took three other people’s first, second and third 200 word fragments and wrote a fourth 200 word section.
• This week, I’ll take the first 800 words created by four other folks and add my final 200 words.

In previous weeks we were instructed to not work on any story we had worked on previously. This week we have the option of completing the story that we started four weeks ago. Since I was fortunate enough to have my original piece picked up and enhanced each week, I’ll see if I can bring it to an end.

My thanks to Michael D. Woods, Liz Neering, and Kyra Dune who took my original story and ran with it. Michael also gave the story its title. My thanks as well as Angela Carina Barry who also picked it up and took it in a different direction in Week Two, even though it didn’t get picked up further by anyone (as far as I know, at least) in Weeks Three or Four.

As always, comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated.

WINTER TAKES ALL (THE FINAL TWO HUNDRED WORDS)

(First segment written by Paul Willett and posted here.)

The first time I saw it snowing in Los Angeles it was the sixth day of a three-day juice cleanse. Snow was definitely not something one normally saw down in the basin, at least, not then.

Because of my need to purify my body and aura, the news and media, filled with nothing but anger and pain, had been cast away along with the other toxins. My base aural color had always been a lavender or sky blue. Recently though, it had started to get muddied and dark. I would have thought my third eye would have seen the unusual weather coming, but it didn’t, so I was caught off guard.

When I first saw the falling flakes I thought I might have overdone the cleanse. Last time I had seen Elvis riding an ostrich on the seventh day. My transmundane counselor had resolved the issue with some orange juice, chocolate, and a sandwich, but that solution didn’t work on the weather. It was still snowing on the pier.

In Santa Monica we only got three inches, but of course it was more than enough to spread gridlock all the way to Riverside. Then, of course, things got much worse.

(Second segment written by Michael D. Woods and posted here.)

Wolves sprinted northward along the shoulder of the Interstate. Spectral at first, their forms quickly firmed from fog to massive, grey-white beasts, all fur and fang. Screaming people climbed from cars and ran eastward, away from the pack. The pack, on the other hand, paid little mind to the panicked masses.

I finished my sandwich, tipped back the last of my orange juice, and glanced over longingly at the waiting chocolate. Damn it. Opening the car door, I stepped out and manifested my Third Eye. My gaze followed the wolves, past the traffic, beyond the mundane. And there, further north, a silver radiance fluoresced from sky to soil, the obvious beacon guiding the will of these dire wolves.

Gridlock held my Taurus in its palsied grip so I opted for a more direct mode of travel. Delicately, I pulled along the seam of my own aura. With practiced ease, I unthreaded the edge and stepped beyond it into–

My third eye slammed shut, transcendental tears splashing my cheeks. Before me, what had once been a paradise of color and fragrance was now a blighted wasteland of ash. And in the distance a brilliant wound ripped the world from Heaven to Hell.

(Third segment written by Liz Neering and posted here.)

The wolves were moving towards the rift. With my newly clear vision I saw the beasts for what they were: I saw them in all their terrible glory, fearsome and monstrous and beyond mortal comprehension. Their spirits resonated with my own, their primal power dragging me, and the aura around me, back into darkness. I gasped for breath, but nothing came; it caught in my throat, hard as a stone.

I walked on.

With each step my legs felt weaker. I looked back, only to see my footprints were unsteady, of varying depths and direction. I looked back to the rift, attempting to regain my bearings. But the rift had shifted, now, its silvery light coming from somewhere else altogether. I stopped, then turned to each point of the compass, making my signs of respect and power each time. At first the familiarity of ritual calmed me. But my troubled aura confirmed what I already knew.

I was lost.

I heard the howling of the wolves around me, harsh and cold and wind. Snow flurries kicked up at the sound of their voices. Winter closed around me, and true darkness followed close behind.

(Fourth segment written by Kyra Dune and posted here.)

Oh, it still looked like a wolf, for the most part, only it kept shimmering to show me glimpses of something otherworldly beneath the guise. Something ghastly. But though I was desperate to look away, I dare not.  I had the feeling if I showed the least hint of weakness the grinning monstrosity before me would gladly rip my head off.

(Fifth segment written by Paul Willett)

“Are you not afraid to die, pitiful, ephemeral mortal?”

“Of course I am,” I answered. “Fear of a thing does not mean that it must be avoided.”

The wolf howled with laughter, a painful and cruel wail that erased all humor and joy from the universe. “You will be the first to die, while I destroy your world. You are too ignorant to even understand why you are dying. You see before you the path to immortality, yet you cannot go on that simple journey.”

“You are arrogant, demon. It’s not that I cannot grasp immortality, it is that I choose not to. Immortal, you are incapable of understanding the power of sacrifice. Without that you cannot love. Without that you cannot truly live. Slay me and accept your fate.”

The demon sprang into my welcoming embrace, ripping out my throat as I consumed him. My tears fell, my blood spilled, my pain enveloped his being. I joined with it. We neutralized each other, complimented each other, fulfilled each other – combined.

Together we left our worlds behind, collapsing to an infinitesimal point, dropping through the fabric of spacetime, emerging on the far side, blossoming, exploding outward, creating a new universe.

Coming down the home stretch in week four (of five) for this odd task in Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge.

Three weeks ago, I (and many others) wrote a 200 word fraction of a story, intended to be the first 1/5 of a story.

Two weeks ago, everyone took someone else’s first 200 word fragments and wrote a second 200 word addition.

Last week, everyone took two other people’s first 200 and second 200 word fragments and wrote a third 200 word middle section. Seeing a pattern here?

This week, I’ll take the first 600 words created by three other folks and add my fourth 200 words.

As always, comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated.

JOE’s BAR (THE FOURTH TWO HUNDRED WORDS)

(First segment written by The Urban Spaceman and posted here.)

“Buy me a drink,” he said, bloodshot eyes meeting mine from further down the bar, “and I’ll tell you how I broke the world.”

I gave a snort, took a long swig of my G&T, and turned my attention back to the game being shown on Joe’s decrepit TV.

“Go on,” he insisted, in a voice ravaged by years of strong alcohol. “It’ll be worth it.”

Glancing around, I looked for help, but none of the other patrons of the grotty bar were paying attention to me being pestered by the old loon, and the bartender was very focused on cleaning a glass. The old man’s eyes bored into me from beneath his dirty mop of hair, and in the dim light of Joe’s Bar I saw the dark red stains on his grey trench coat.

“Alright.” The game was dull anyway. “What’s your poison?”

“Scotch on the rocks.”

I nodded at the barkeep, and the old man watched hungrily as the amber nectar was poured.

“Go on then,” I prompted him. “Tell me how you broke the world.”

He took a sip of his drink, gave a happy sigh, and looked up at me with those bloodshot eyes.
  “It all started in 1939…”

(Second segment written by Rebecca Douglas and posted here.)

Nineteen thirty-nine?  That was an obvious place for a claim like his.  “So you were responsible for Hitler?” I guessed, humoring the old man.  He might have been alive in 1939, but he certainly wasn’t old enough at the outset of WWII to have played a significant role.  To have broken the world.

“Not exactly.”  His voice was still coarse, but now seemed somehow stronger.  “I was Hitler.”

I laughed.  “Yeah, you look it, Old Man.  Tell me another.  You were Mussolini, too, right?”

He wasn’t laughing.  “Yes.  And Stalin.  They were all aspects of me, and because of my incompetence millions suffered and died.”

I sighed, and bought him another drink.  The first one had sort of evaporated, and I wanted to hear what kind of story he’d spin.  The game really was dull as dishwater, and this lunatic at least had some imagination, unlike the coaches, who kept trying the same failed moves.

His voice was much clearer now, the ravaging effects of the whiskey fading as he began to tell his story.

“I thought it would be for the best.  I started with Stalin, when Russia needed a strong leader.  Times really were bad, you know.”

(Third segment written by Jim Franklin and posted here.)

“Yes, I’ve read that.” I said pushing my drink away, and turning to face him.

He stared at me intently, happy as if he had done everything he could to enthrall me in his tale. To be fair to him, he had, though I wasn’t sure if it was his tale or his mental condition that had grabbed me.

“So you were Stalin and Hitler?” I repeated, with as little disbelief as I could.

“Yep, Errol Flynn too but that was more of a holiday”, he smiled to himself, but stopped when he saw I hadn’t got the joke.

“You once broke the world, and now you feel you need to tell me everything?”

“We can’t do what we have to do, unless you’re brought up to speed.” The old man had scarcely touched his drink, and his eyes were now focused on me.

“We?”

Before my question was answered I felt a hand on my shoulder. A delicate, and intricately tattooed hand, with lime-green fingernails.

I looked up its owner. She was stunning; piercing green eyes, spiked black hair and a ring through her lip. She leaned down and spoke gently into my ear.

“We need your help?”

(Fourth segment written by Paul Willett [momdude])

If the old man had held my attention because he was a few sandwiches short of a picnic basket, the punk goddess grabbed it by the balls. Her breath in my ear sent a shot of adrenaline through me like I hadn’t felt since I lost my virginity.

“What can I help you with?” I asked, trying to sound casual and sophisticated.

“Not me,” she breathed, “us. We’re a pair, inseparable.”

I managed to break her gaze long enough to look back at the old man. He looked abused, broken, and beaten, but not drunk. I looked back to her and found her to be just as hypnotizing and infatuating as she had been five seconds ago.

“He’s what…your grandfather? Father? Uncle?”

“He is me, I am him. I am yin to his yang, he is the shadow to my light. We are one, yet we are asunder, wounded, and incomplete.”

Okay, maybe she was the one who had been drinking way too much. Time to keep track of her hands and make sure they stayed away from my wallet.

“What do you need help with?”

“To be reborn we must die together,” she whispered. “You alone must kill us.”

We’re now in week three (of five) for this odd task in Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge. Two weeks ago, I (and many others) wrote a 200 word fraction of a story, intended to be the first 1/5 of a story. Last week, everyone took someone else’s first 200 word fragments and wrote a second 200 word addition. This week, I’ll take the first 400 words created by two other folks and add my third 200 words. Clear as mud? It’s actually quite fun and interesting

As always, comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated.

THE THIRD TWO HUNDRED WORDS

(First segment written by Jeremiah Boydstun [boydstun215] and posted here.)

The soldiers carried the man across the narthex and through the nave. They lumbered along like some giant, wounded insect, three pairs of cold, stiff legs shuffling clumsily beneath a motley carapace of steel and leather. Close upon their heels, the master-of-arms was careful to avoid the hissing droplets of blood that the insect left in its wake. His sword was drawn.

At the end of the nave and standing at the foot of the chancel, the bishop held a gilded crosier at arm’s length as if to thwart the advance of the shambling mass making its way toward the altar. In his other hand he grasped a large silver crucifix. Despite his advanced age and diminutive stature, the crimson-robed bishop made for an imposing figure. “No further,” he whispered. The soldiers stopped , unsure of themselves. One of the men looked down nervously into the pale face of the man he carried while the other two turned their heads in askance to the master-at-arms. For several moments the only sound was the steady hiss of the blood as fell from the lifeless man and met the cold marble floor.

“It must be done here,” said the master-at-arms. “Take him to the altar.”

(Second segment written by Adrienne and posted here.)

The bishop moved aside, letting the soldiers scramble up the few steps to the altar. His crimson robes did nothing to shield him from the cold radiating from their frozen armor. The slick marble stairs proved difficult for the exhausted soldiers as they stumbled and fell under their heavy load. Grim-faced, the master–at-arms followed their procession, only sheathing his sword to offer aid in heaving the unconscious man atop the bare altar.

The soldiers scurried away, stealing a glance at the stone table before fixing their gaze on their snow-crusted boots. The master-at-arms moved to the side of the altar where the man’s head rested. His shallow breaths produced a faint mist in the cold air. Steady drops of blood from his mouth had already created a small pool that hissed quietly on the stone. The master-at-arms looked down at the man’s face, searching for any hint of the soldier he once knew, but finding only the thing he had become. A sharp intake of air through the pale, bloodied lips tore the master-at-arms away from his thoughts.

The bishop joined the master-at-arms. Two terrified altar boys carrying trays covered with vials, books, crucifixes, and various cutting tools followed closely behind.

“It is time.”

(Third segment written by Paul Willett [momdude])

The master-at-arms glanced at his men. “Stand ready,” he said, “if we fail, the abomination must not be allowed to leave this place.”

He took a heavy knife from an altar boy’s tray and began to cautiously cut through the frozen leather straps holding the man’s armor together. He was careful to jostle the breastplate as little as possible, each touch of it bringing a soft moan of pain from the dying victim. He studiously avoided looking at the gaping hole in the center of it, or the throbbing, writhing creature inside.

As the master-at-arms worked, the bishop began sprinkling holy water across the shuddering figure on the altar, murmuring prayers. He took a thurible from an altar boy, sprinkled incense over the coals, and circled the altar slowly. A thin, warbling chant escaped his lips.

When all of the armor save for the breastplate had been cut away and removed, the bishop retrieved the heavy silver crucifix and stood on one side of the altar, while the master-at-arms stood on the other and prepared to tear away the sundered steel. Their eyes met and the bishop gave a small nod.

A powerful woman’s voice echoed through the cathedral. “Stop!”

We’re now in week two (of five) for this odd task in Chuck Wendig’s Flash Fiction Challenge. Last week I (and many others) wrote a 200 word fraction of a story, intended to be the first 1/5 of a story. This week, I’ll take Rebecca B’s first 200 words and add my second 200. I really liked my little 200 word snippet from last week, but to the best of my knowledge no one else on the site has picked it to use as the starting point for their second 200.

As always, comments and constructive criticisms are appreciated.

THE SECOND TWO HUNDRED WORDS

(First segment written by Rebecca B. and posted here.)

Blustering winter wind was violently blowing her long brown hair back as she looked over the 103rd floor rooftop ledge. The rooftops were normally locked, but she had a pick and skills to undo them. Her internal fire and heat sinked clothing kept her warm where normal people would have felt cold. Her eyes scanned the darkening skyline and she rocked mindlessly onto the balls of her feet and back down.

She had lost sight of him just as he jumped over the edge of the roof, laughing in a way that told her he no longer cared about his own life, and so could not possibly care about others. After his leap he stopped midair to laugh at her, mocking her, screaming “You call yourself a super hero?! Come and get me if you’re so super!” He flew off, knowing fully well she couldn’t fly. She had to find him. Time was running short.

She stayed there until stars were popping out and she knew it was unlikely he’d return, and futile that she’d be able to see him in the dark. Heroic actions would need to be taken, and she knew just the girl to take them.

(Second segment written by Paul Willett)

As she opened the stairwell door the lights on the building’s helipad lit up, shattering the night. Above her she spotted either a very brave pilot or a very stupid one trying to land in the gale. Abandoning caution, she sprinted across the icy rooftop toward the helipad stairs. As the helicopter turned into the wind for its final approach she crouched at the top of the stairs, ready to move.

The chopper touched down with a thud and the pilot fought to keep it there. She could see he was alone, probably here to pick up some multi-billionaire pretty boy. Like a flash, she crossed the short distance to the pilot’s door and yanked it open wide.

The pilot was caught completely off guard. She popped his seatbelt loose with her right hand while grabbing his coat collar with her left. Her first jerk got him off balance, her second sent him skidding across the helipad and over the side onto the safety netting. She leapt into the cockpit and started to spool up the big turbine for her escape. In seconds, she was lifting off to brave the winds herself, risking all to pursue her mortal enemy.

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.

NaNoWriMo is hard. Running a marathon (to which I’ve been comparing NaNoWriMo all month) is hard. Getting ready for it, you may think you know how hard, but you don’t. Even if you’ve tried and fallen short once or twice, you still don’t really know. But if you keep going, you get through it, you meet your goal, you get to the end, then you truly understand how difficult it is.

Then… Then you think that you know, or at least have a better idea, how hard it’s going to be to go from having completed NaNoWriMo (or your 7:30 marathon) to actually having a novel that other people are going to read and enjoy (or your 6:00 marathon). Now you must get through editing, and rewriting, and re-editing, and shuffling, and cutting, and re-re-editing. You think you know now how hard that will be. But then you remember just how ignorant you were before, and before that, and you finally get a glimpse of how ignorant you might still be now.

You have learned to doubt, to question.

But… But wait, there’s hope.

When I trained for the LA Marathon, we started out with a three-mile run. I thought I was going to barf up a lung and die. I was praying I would barf up a lung and die. But I didn’t. The next week we did four miles. Then five the next week. After building up for a few weeks, we would have a “cut back” week where we would run a shorter distance and take it easy. Then we would start building up again.

Towards the end, when we had run twenty miles one Saturday, then twenty-two the next, and then had a cut back week to only run sixteen miles, we were chatting about what was a breeze that sixteen mile day was going to be. We were only running sixteen miles! We could practically do that in our sleep and, no, we were not being sarcastic or snide. We really felt that way.

Our trainers reminded us that four months earlier, we had wanted to barf up a lung and die after three miles. Yet now we were legitimately scoffing at only sixteen miles. How had that happened?

Here’s the really, really big point. It’s the reason that this marathon vs. writing analogy has rung so true for me throughout this adventure.

When we have doubts going forward in the writing process (and we will) we need to keep this example from marathon training in mind. On that first weekend, when we were dying after three miles, of course we would have literally died if we had tried to run twenty-six miles. It would have been even more ridiculous to think we could run a 3:00 marathon on that first day. If we had tried to do that, we would have quit after six or seven or twelve miles. But we would have quit. We would have “failed”.

Similarly, at this point in our writing careers and experience, we can’t simply sit down and have a readable and publishable novel flow from our fingertips on the first draft of the first try. It would be even more ridiculous to expect a flawless masterpiece to be produced. If we try to do that, we will get discouraged. We will quit. We will “fail”.

But if we train, if we are patient, if we put in the work — we can do it. If we write and write, even though we will often write utter crap, we will learn. Most importantly, we will keep trying, even though it’s utter crap. Because the next time, it will be a little better. And a little bit better the time after that.

We’ll learn to edit and re-write and probably hate it at times. Often we’ll wonder why we’re putting ourselves through this, but we’ll do it. We’ll do a lousy job of it. But we’ll keep on doing it, confident that it will be better next time.

We have to trust the system, trust what our mentors are telling us (THANKS, CHUCK!!), trust in our ability to learn, grow, and do better. We have to give ourselves permission to experiment, to fail, to make horrible, hideous mistakes. That will be how we will learn.

Right now I look at what I’ve written this month and posted on this blog and I’m proud of it. I know it’s a long way from perfect and it needs a metric shit ton of work, but there’s a spark in it, a possibility. Even if this particular story never goes anywhere more, I know that I’ve learned so much about characters and plot and dialogue and what my writing strengths and weakness are. I have no doubt that in ten years, or five years, or six months, I may look back on this and wonder how in the hell I could have ever been foolish enough to put this bilge slime out in front of the public. But right now I’m proud of it, and I should be.

NaNoWriMo is hard. Running a marathon is hard.

I’ve now done both.

If they were easy to do, everyone would have done it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO (continued)

“I would prefer to let Annie give you those details,” Ellen said. “But as I said earlier, if you’ve just found out about the Disks in the last few days and you’ve had the sense to keep that discovery to yourself, there are things we’ve discovered that you haven’t had time to find out yet. For example, have you wondered at all why the Disks haven’t been all over the news? Why no one has ever reported seeing them before, even if it made them sound like they were insane? No conspiracy theories, no photos on the cover of National Enquirer?”

The questions gave Tom something new to think about. “No, I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way. I figured if I took my video to the press or to anyone else, they would figure it was some kind of movie special effects. If I insisted it was real, they would write me off as a crackpot. If I kept it up long enough and loud enough, I would get locked up as a loon. I hadn’t thought about fringe groups.”

“You would have discovered very quickly that you had a much bigger problem on your hands. You see, most people can’t see the Disks. At all. Period.”

“I couldn’t see them either, they were invisible to me. I only saw how the cat was reacting to them since they apparently can see them. I don’t know how that can be, but it is. I could only see it on the video for some reason.”

“What would you expect to happen if you showed that video to someone?” Ellen asked.

“I figure they would freak out just like I did if I could show them one live. Or like I said, if I showed them a recording, they would assume that it was fake, some kind of special effects. These days just about anything you can imagine can be made one hundred percent believable for movies or television. It’s not even that expensive or difficult.”

“That’s not at all what would happen. The person you showed it to would think you were either pulling their leg or psychotic. They would not see the disk. They would see the room or the setting where you made the recording, but it would look completely normal to them. No disk.”

“You’re kidding,” said Tom.

“Not at all, I assure you. Remember the recording of this room I showed a few minutes ago? If we showed it to anyone down in town and asked them to tell us what they saw, they would describe a dark, empty room where the lights came on for some reason, nothing more.”

Tom forced himself to maintain his best poker face. If Ellen was telling him the truth, Tom now had even more reason to not let her know about Jason. Jason could see the Disks in the video.

“Okay, assuming we’re putting our cards on the table and this whole affair just keeps getting weirder by the second, what are these things?”

“We don’t know,” Ellen said. “We have some theories we’re testing. We’re trying to establish a methodology for studying them but it’s tough when you they seem to appear at random times in random places. If you join our team, we’ll bring you up to speed on what we know and what we’re doing. Not before.”

“Why can the cats see them and we can’t?” Tom asked.

“We don’t know.”

“If only some people can see them in the videos and pictures, can only some cats see them in real time?”

“Good question, it took us a while to ask that. No, most cats can’t see them, but the percentage of those which can is much higher in cats than in humans.”

“Dogs? Horses? Dolphins? Ants? Any other critters that can see them?”

“We don’t know. Again, good ideas, but very difficult to test since we can’t create the Disks ourselves and we can’t predict where one will appear for us to experiment with. Personally, since they appear in the air, I would love to know if bats, birds, and insects see them. If they do, what happens when they touch one? We just don’t know.”

“What happens if we touch one? You indicated this was a ‘safe’ house. What is it safe from? The Disks? You showed me a video of one right here. Are the Disks dangerous to us?”

“We don’t know, exactly. We have some information on that, but it’s incomplete. That’s another thing that you should ask Annie about. For the time being, we recommend that you avoid contact with them if possible.”

Tom wanted to send the conversation off in another direction in order to see if he could rattle Ellen the same way she had kept him off balance. “Why did you build this facility out here in the middle of nowhere? Why not put it in an industrial warehouse in Los Angeles or Omaha, hide it in plain sight?”

“There is a very good reason, but Annie will have to show you. This spot was carefully chosen.”

“Are the Disks a recent phenomenon? Are they some kind of attack or invasion from Planet XQ17 or from the Nineteenth Dimension?”

“Again, we don’t know for sure. There are reasons to believe they have occurred in the past.”

“So why aren’t there pictures of them taken by accident from before there existed the kind of special effects technology we have now? If one of these things just happened to pop up in a scene from ‘Gone With the Wind’ most people wouldn’t have seen it according to you, but surely someone would have.”

“Video hasn’t been around that long. The Disks don’t appear on film, and before you ask, we don’t know why.”

“Not visible on film either, just video? Is there any particular kind of video format or equipment that works while others don’t?”

“We’ve tested that, we’re still working on it.”

“Can the Disks be detected by any other method? When one appears are there changes in the magnetic fields? Electrical? Infrared? Gamma rays?”

“We’re working on that,” Ellen said.

“You’re working on a lot of things. Is this your only location? How many people are here?”

“You’ll be told that later if you need to know.”

“Let’s get back to the video thing. Statistically, while video is relatively new, it’s all encompassing now. There are security videos covering a huge chunk of the planet. What you lose in historical terms you should more than overcompensate for with massive coverage. Someone has to have noticed these things.”

“They did, eventually. This group was established when Disks were seen by someone with access to massive amounts of security video data.”

That stopped Tom cold. It sounded like she was describing a security company. If someone prominent in the security industry already knew about these things, it was possible that Jason was vulnerable to being completely blindsided. Tom would have to find a way to warn him.

Tom pointed to the cameras around the room. “You’re looking for them from above. The video I got was from above. Is that the only way they can be seen?”

Ellen shook her head. “Yes and no. We know they appear to be some kind of two-dimensional manifestation in our three-dimension space. We managed once to get lucky and we were able to get pictures of a Disk from a variety of angles in the vertical plane. They’re far more visible from the top, but they can be captured on video from below. From the side, they’re completely invisible, like they were infinitely thin.”

“What are the grey shapes that are swimming around? And what are those rows of teeth?”

Ellen sat very still and stared at Tom. The pause went on long enough to make Tom start to get very nervous all over again.

“What’s going on?” Tom asked. “What did I say?”

“You really need to talk to Annie as soon as possible. It’s time for you to decide how you want to proceed. Do you want to join us and help find some of those answers? Or do you want to go back to your regular old life with memories and souvenirs of a ten-day binge in Las Vegas?”

“Really? Las Vegas? That was the best you could come up with?”

“Time to choose, Tom. No bullshit. Both paths are one-way trips. Make good choices.”

Tom leaned back and closed his eyes so he could focus. He didn’t doubt for a minute that they could make the last week disappear in his memory. The only problem was that they couldn’t make it disappear from Jason’s memory. Ellen had said he would be monitored if they released him, to make sure he didn’t cause future problems. When Jason contacted him, they would find out everything he had so far kept hidden from them.

If he went forward with this, would he be able to still keep in contact with Jason? Would he be able to function outside of the group while keeping those inside the group ignorant of it? Would he even want to after he found out what they knew?

There was only one way to find out. He had gotten this far for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. He had to keep moving forward, even if it meant playing someone else’s game.

He opened his eyes, sat up, and looked at Ellen. “Okay, I’m in. What’s next?”

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)

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.”