Dust, Page 3

responded. Even supposing something in here might hurt you, the heat and Sun outside will definitely kill you! Now move it!

  With every last ounce of strength and courage at his command, Stan stepped forward. The door swung shut behind him with an echoing boom. Now the only light was the blue glow coming from the windows in the double doors. It flickered like a fire. Stan was not yet ready to face the darkness of the long hallway in front of him, so he turned to his right to go through the double doors.

  When he turned, he almost slipped. Dust must have drifted inside somehow. Little piles of it had formed here and there on the floor. It made the linoleum slippery when he walked over it.

  Looking through the windows, he saw the double doors opened upon a garage. Large toolboxes and workbenches lined the walls. Two flatbed trucks stood in front of a pair of enormous steel doors, which must have lead outside. Both of them were closed now. Next to the trucks sat a small metal trailer. It was the kind of thing you could pull behind a car, about ten feet wide and twenty feet long. Except this trailer had an extension welded to the hitch at the front of it. It looked like a pretty hasty job too, judging by the beads. A curving piece of metal rose up in front of it to about the height of an average man’s chest. Here a metal pipe had been welded onto it sideways, like a big set of handlebars. It looked like the trailer had been hastily adapted to be pulled by a pair of men, one on each side of the handlebars.

  In the back of the trailer lay a large wooden crate. It was smashed open, like it had fallen from a good height, and something lay in the center of the smashed boards. Stan couldn’t tell from where he was standing, but it looked like some kind of metal object, maybe a meter long.

  From out of a crack in the side of this object came a ray of flickering blue light.

  Stan remembered the crashed helicopter, with the tire tracks leading away from it. Had some poor bastards been made to pull this object all the way from the crashed helicopter to this base? Why hadn’t they just used the trucks?

  He pushed through the doors. This place seemed to have lost all power. The lights were dark and the air conditioning was certainly not working. The air throbbed with heat. His thirst lay heavy upon him. His head felt like a great kettledrum, upon which a giant was pounding a pair of enormous hammers. He felt tired, achy, confused, but most of all he felt old. So very old. And now, in this dark, unfamiliar, labyrinthine place, he had found a light. It flickered hypnotically, drawing him in like a moth. Without really thinking, he shuffled towards it.

  The dark cylindrical object lying among the broken boards of the crate did not resemble any piece of machinery or equipment Stan had ever seen. He didn’t recognize the metal of which it was made, or any of the various devices attached to the main body of the thing. Some of these devices and protrusions looked broken, and some were snapped off, as if the object had once been connected to a larger structure. A row of strange symbols ran down the length of it. They didn’t look like any language, diagram, or mathematical symbol Stan had ever seen before. The crack ran crosswise through this row of symbols. Motes of airborne dust danced in the blue rays emanating from it.

  To produce this light, the object must have some sort of power source, but Stan couldn’t see anything like a battery or generator connected to it. Maybe it was itself a source of power, some kind of reactor. None of the symbols on the outside of it looked like the universal radioactivity symbol, but it might not be safe to remain near it. He would go, but before leaving he leaned down to brush his fingers across the symbols written on the side of it. A layer of dust had formed across them, and he wanted to get a clear look at them before he left. He had not yet lost the sense that this whole adventure could yield a profitable opportunity, and this strange object sitting unprotected in an abandoned military base just might be greatest opportunity of his life. Who knew what kind of technology this thing represented? Was it some kind of secret military experiment, or something even more exotic? Stan had always dismissed the conspiracy theories of alien technology taken from crashed spaceships being held by the government, but now, gazing at this mysterious device, anything seemed possible. The object was a mystery. What Stan wanted, on a subconscious level that he was not even aware of, was to reach out and touch that mystery.

  The instant his fingertips brushed it, an electric current shot straight up his arm. He recoiled, his feet slipped in the dust and he fell backwards onto his butt, nearly breaking his coccyx. Wincing in pain, he hauled himself to his feet, moving with the painful slowness of an old man trying to rise up after a fall. Then he staggered through the double doors and out of the garage.

  He turned right down the dark hallway, moving in blind panic and hope. His only thought now was to find water. The hallway turned to the left, and then Stan found himself in a kind of cafeteria, filled with tables and lit by sunlight coming in through a row of windows on the far side of the room. Standing against the opposite wall, he saw the answer to his prayers: an ice machine.

  He staggered across the room to it. Opening the little door in front he saw that all the ice had melted. No power, of course. But that was just fine. Now the ice machine was filled with water. Stan dunked his head in and drank.

  He finally had to stop when his stomach cramped. He stood up, sputtering and clutching his middle.

  Too fast, he thought. Too fast. And then he fainted dead away.

  He did not know how much time had passed when he finally woke up. The light coming in the windows had moved across the floor and dimmed. Every muscle in his body ached. He could barely move. Where the hell were his rescuers? While struggling back to consciousness he had entertained the notion that he would wake up in a nice comfy hospital bed in an air-conditioned private room, surrounded by his admiring business partners (not family, he had alienated most of his natural family) with scores of reporters standing outside, just waiting for a chance to hear how the heroic adventurer Stan Owens had survived his harrowing plane crash and long trek through the desert. Instead, he was still in the cafeteria of the abandoned military base, lying on the floor next to the ice machine and trying not to puke his guts up.

  After several minutes he managed to pull himself up to his hands and knees. A wave of nausea hit him. He held still for a minute, waiting for it to pass with his head hanging down and his butt in the air, like some fag, like his son, waiting to take it up the ass.

  While in this position, Stan saw that the fingertips of his right hand had turned brown down to the first knuckle. Even the fingernails looked withered.

  He made the connection immediately. He had touched the strange object in the garage with this hand. It had done something to him and caused his fingers to rot. He thought of the blue light emitting from it. Radiation suddenly seemed much more likely.

  Afraid now, Stan crawled over to the nearest table and, grabbing the edge of it, used it to haul himself to his feet. He immediately slumped down into a chair. He put his face in his hands and tried to think.

  No one knew he was here. That was his first problem. He had to attract attention somehow. The smoke from the plane would draw rescuers to the crash. There was a chance they might find this place while looking for him. However, Stan now believed that the object in the garage was interfering with any electronic device that came close to this place. It may have even been the reason his plane malfunctioned when he flew over it. If the vehicles of any rescuers came near, they could break down before they reached this place. And if the crashed helicopter was any indication, it meant it would be very difficult for any rescuers to reach him here. At the very least, it would take them much longer to reach him on foot. Looking down at his hand, Stan wondered how much time he had.

  When he brought his hands down from his face, Stan saw plates of old, desiccated food lying on the tables. Glasses of iceless water, rancid milk and flat soda stood here and there. Whoever had left this place had left it in a hurry. Stan figured he had better follow their example.

  He got up and went to the windows. T
he shadows had slanted towards the afternoon, but it would still be blazing hot outside. Stan figured sunset was several hours away. Water or no, he didn’t think he could make it back to the crash site in this heat. He had to wait it out. In the meantime though, he wanted to put as much distance between himself and the thing in the garage as possible.

  A hallway ran eastwards away from the cafeteria. That seemed like a good place to start. Crossing the cafeteria, he turned left to go down the hall. Eventually he came to a row of offices. Offices had phones. Not much of a chance that they would work, given the current pattern of things he had seen so far, but it was still worth a try. Stan turned left into the first office he came across.

  The office was tiny compared to his spacious facilities at Owens International in Las Vegas. It was the sort of room where he would dump his middle management drones and HR reps. A premanufactured desk with overhanging shelves stood against the far wall. Patriotic, motivational posters hung on the other walls. Next to one such poster (which declared,