I was in an accident. She remembered the eyes in the headlights, the car leaping off the road, slamming into the ground. The weight of something terrifyingly heavy pushing against her body. The machine and the lights and the pain—and David.
What happened to David?
Dizziness swamped her, and she closed her eyes. The room seemed to be spinning, and she curled into a fetal position as nausea swept through her.
If she had survived, that meant he had too. Didn’t it?
Her gut clenched. She didn’t want to think about the alternative, and it was several minutes before she had calmed herself enough to open her eyes again. She was now staring directly at the computer next to her bed, and the monitor was dark. Her mouth felt fuzzy, as if there was something nasty on her tongue.
Where am I?
Slowly she pushed herself up to a seated position and then swung her legs over the edge of the bed. The movement made her stomach heave, and she doubled over for a minute, gasping, as she waited for the nausea to subside. She saw speckled gray linoleum below her bare feet, and pale remnants of bruises ran up her left shin and over her knee.
The sight of the bruises sent a cold shock through her. She stared at her legs. The right leg was bruised too, but even more stunning was a long pink scar running diagonally across her knee and thigh. When she touched it, she felt a slightly raised ridge there, and goose bumps rose all over her skin.
She took a few slow breaths. The IV tube swayed. She straightened up and held out her arms, examining each of them. The IV needle was inserted into her left arm just below the elbow crease, held in place with white tape, but otherwise the arm seemed normal. On her right arm, the area around her elbow felt tender, but she couldn’t see whether there were any bruises there. On her right wrist she wore a plastic bracelet imprinted with a code: PLATO PA83 HOLLOWAY. She was wearing an open-backed hospital gown printed with a pattern of tiny blue diamonds.
She looked around the room, hoping that something here would give her a clue to where she was. There were two doors: one closed, the other slightly ajar with a hint of tile floor beyond. She guessed it must be a bathroom. The walls were painted an industrial shade of beige, and the only furniture was the bed and the bedside table that held the computer. She scooted off the bed, stepping onto the floor.
Her feet and legs tingled the way they did after they had fallen asleep, and she hissed with pain as she limped the few steps to the computer. She turned the monitor around, looking for any identifying markers, but there was only a serial code that meant nothing to her. The computer itself was clipped below the tabletop, and she felt around the edge of the rectangular box until she found what must be the power button. She pressed it, and the machine hummed on. For a moment she was elated, but her excitement was short-lived. The first thing that appeared on the screen was a login box prompting her for a password.
She abandoned the computer and wheeled the IV-drip pole away from the wall, using it like a walker as she headed to the window. The pins-and-needles sensation in her legs subsided a bit as she walked gingerly across the floor, but they still felt jellylike. At the window, she tugged on the string attached to the blinds, and they rattled up.
Outside, the sun beamed white-hot over a small parking lot where a lone, dirty Jeep was parked. Past the small, paved surface, the desert rippled with heat. In the distance she saw a long, low building with tan, windowless walls. Far beyond that a lumpy mountain range defined the horizon, and above it all the pale blue sky seemed almost bleached of color by the sun.
She was still in Nevada—she had to be. This desert looked exactly like the other hundreds of miles of desert she and David had driven through after leaving Phoenix. As she pressed her face to the glass, she caught a glimpse of her eyes barely reflected in the window, ghostlike. She drew back, unnerved, and her reflection disappeared.
Behind her she heard the door opening, and she spun to see a woman in a lab coat entering. She had dark brown hair worn in a precisely cut bob. “I see you’re awake,” she said, an eager look on her face. “I’m Dr. Evelyn Brand. You should be careful with that IV; let me help you get back into bed.”
“Where am I? Where’s David?” Reese asked. Her voice sounded rough, unused.
The doctor briskly crossed the room. The door clicked shut. “You shouldn’t be walking around with that drip attached to you,” Dr. Brand said. She put a cool, dry hand on Reese’s right elbow and firmly propelled her back to bed, pulling the IV pole behind them. Startled, Reese let the doctor swing her legs up and tuck the thin blanket over her.
“Let me take a look at you,” Dr. Brand said, pulling out a stethoscope. Her eyes were such a light brown that they were almost gray.
“Where’s David?” Reese asked again as Dr. Brand pressed the stethoscope against her chest. “He was in the car with me. Is he all right?”
“Don’t worry. David Li is fine,” Dr. Brand said. The knot of dread in Reese’s belly loosened. David was alive. “But you both had a very nasty accident. Your car flipped over, and we had to cut you out. It’s a good thing you crashed where you did.”
The stethoscope slid cold and hard over Reese’s skin. “What do you mean? Where did we crash?”
Dr. Brand gave her an apologetic smile. “That information is classified. I’m sure you remember approximately where your car crashed, but I can’t tell you much more. Because of that, you’ll need to remain in your hospital room for now. I can’t authorize you to wander through this facility.”
Reese stared at Dr. Brand, stunned. “But… what happened? Did I have surgery? I saw a scar on my leg.”
“You broke your leg and fractured your arm, and you had some serious internal injuries as well. Your spleen was ruptured, probably from the impact of the steering wheel, and you had a concussion.”
Reese was confused. She felt as if her brain were thinking in slow motion. “I broke my leg? Shouldn’t it be in a cast, then?”
“If you were at any other hospital, yes, but we’ve used some very advanced medicine on you—medicine that isn’t available to the general public. Normally, you’d have been in a cast for three to six months, but because of the treatment you received, you can walk already.” Dr. Brand wound the stethoscope back around her neck and put her hands in the pockets of her lab coat. “How are your legs feeling?”
“They… they feel sort of like they were asleep.”
Dr. Brand nodded. “That’s normal. You might have some of that tingling sensation for the next few days off and on, as well as some nausea as you come down from the medication. In order to speed your healing processes, we put you in a medically induced coma, so there will be a period of adjustment from that.”
Dr. Brand sounded so calm, as if all this information was entirely ordinary, but Reese felt a pricking of unease all over her scalp. “A coma? How long was I asleep?”
“Twenty-seven days.”
Reese’s heartbeat quickened. “Twenty-seven days?” She finally seemed to wake up fully. “I need to call my mom. Does she know I’m here? Why isn’t she here?”
“We already told her about you, but visitors aren’t permitted here. There are no telephones in the hospital rooms, but we’ll make arrangements for you to call her yourself soon.”
“When can I go home?”
“You’ll need to stay here for another couple of days so we can monitor your recovery, but you’ll be able to go home soon. Since you had a concussion, you’ll likely have some headaches for a few weeks, particularly after stressful situations, so you’ll want to take it easy. Does your head hurt right now?”
“No.” Something that Dr. Brand had said floated to the surface of her consciousness. “You already called my mom? How do you know who she is?”
Dr. Brand smiled. “We did recover your driver’s license. Clarice Holloway—that’s you, isn’t it?”
The smile on the doctor’s face was disconcerting. An odd feeling flashed through Reese, as if she had seen Dr. Brand somewhere before, but s
he couldn’t figure out where. “I—I don’t go by Clarice. My name is Reese.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” Dr. Brand gave her a sympathetic look. “Are there any other questions I can answer for you?”
“Can I talk to David?”
“He’s still asleep. But as soon as he’s awake you’ll both be debriefed and we’ll get started on the paperwork to get you out of here. I’m going to leave you now, but—actually, I’ll bring you some magazines, how about that? I’m sure you’ll want to catch up on what you’ve missed while you were asleep. I’ll be right back.”
Dr. Brand left the room as briskly as she had entered it, her shoes tapping smartly across the floor. Reese leaned back against the pillows, a dull pain beginning to blossom at the base of her skull. She closed her eyes, the doctor’s words echoing in her memory. She was in a classified facility. She had received advanced medical treatment. David was alive.
Mr. Chapman was dead.
Her eyes flew open just as Dr. Brand returned. “Here you go,” Dr. Brand said, laying the magazines on the edge of the bed. “A lot has happened, but—”
“I have to tell you something,” Reese said.
Dr. Brand looked startled. “What is it?”
“When we were in Las Vegas—David and I—we were with our debate coach, and he was shot outside a gas station. We were just there to buy some gas, and this carjacker came and shot him. David and I left—we had to leave because the guy was about to shoot us. But then we could never find our way back to the gas station. We meant to call the police, but the phones never worked. You have to tell someone. You have to call his family or the police or something. His name is Joe Chapman; he’s a teacher at Kennedy High School in San Francisco.” As she spoke, the dull throbbing in her head began to expand into sharp jabs of pain. She grimaced.
“Calm down, Reese.” Dr. Brand glanced at the IV drip, then pulled a hypodermic needle out of her pocket. “If you become overexcited, that can also trigger the headaches.”
Reese sat up too quickly and winced. “But you have to call the school! You have to tell them.”
“I heard you. I’ll contact them. Let me give you a little painkiller, all right?” Dr. Brand did something with the needle and the drip, and a cool sensation washed through Reese’s arm and into her body. The headache began to dissipate, but she also began to feel numb, as if her emotions had been turned off. “Just rest,” Dr. Brand said. “I’ll call the school.”
Reese succumbed to the drugs, relaxing down into the pillows. “Thank you.” Her speech sounded slurred. The doctor smiled at her again, patting her hand, and then left.
After the door closed she rolled onto her side, accidentally knocking the magazines Dr. Brand had brought onto the floor. Groggily, she leaned over the edge of the bed and gazed down at them. There was a Time magazine on top, and on the cover was a photo of an airport on fire. Bright orange flames licked into the sky, where a giant cloud of black smoke plumed up from the inferno. The headline, in bold red font, screamed: The Truth Is Out There. The subtitle read: Riots, conspiracies, and clues—what really happened during the June Disaster?
Twenty-seven days, Reese thought. She had been unconscious for almost a month. Fighting against the wave of numbness brought on by the painkiller, she leaned over the edge of the bed and reached for the magazine.
The Truth Behind the Terror
By Patricia Martinez; Alan Thompson, Ellen Wu, Mark Ritter/Washington, Steve Elliott/Denver
Conspiracies can be doggedly enduring. The Kennedy assassination, the moon landing, even 9/11 have all been subject to detailed and often frighteningly convincing conspiracy theories. But rarely have those theories translated into real-world consequences as quickly and as fatally as those that followed the plane crashes of June 19.
That afternoon, shortly after President Elizabeth Randall addressed the nation and urged us all to remain calm, conspiracy theorists lit up the Internet with calls for disclosure. Jason Briggs, the pseudonym of the man behind the conspiracy-fueled website Bin42.com, was one of the first to issue warnings to Americans. Stock up on supplies, he suggested. Get to your bunkers and lock your doors.
Had it not been for a perfect storm of events, Briggs’s exhortations might have been dismissed as the ravings of a crackpot. But as the first twenty-four hours of the ultimately seven-day-long flight ban ticked by, the evidence seemed to pile up, and it was all on Briggs’s side.
In Chicago a plane crashed but was not acknowledged by the FAA. Bits and pieces of video footage from the crash site leaked onto the Hub, but were repeatedly removed. Members of the hacker collective Black Hat claimed that they detected US government interference blocking traffic on the Internet backbone. Cell phone and broadband service was disrupted in up to 85 percent of the United States. In Las Vegas a plane crashed onto the Strip, leading to a forced evacuation of a large portion of the city. Stranded tourists with slot-machine tokens in their pockets were herded by the National Guard into a caravan and shipped off to a tent encampment in the middle of the desert, where they were unable to call their loved ones.
And then came the straw that broke the camel’s back. At Denver International Airport, less than eighteen hours after the flight ban was instated, a disagreement between several travelers turned violent. When Transportation Security Administration officers intervened, the situation escalated, ultimately resulting in a riot that ended only after the deployment of tear gas.
After that, the gloves came off. Mobs began to descend on supermarkets and warehouses, looting freely and invoking Bin 42’s theories as justification for their actions. For the first time since the Civil War, the United States Army rolled into major urban areas believed to be on the verge of instability, including Los Angeles, Denver, and Boston. Curfews were instated across the country, even in sleepy small towns.
Briggs—and his website—had become the vocal leader of a new conspiracy, one that has become disturbingly mainstream. The theory? The United States government is hiding the cause of the June 19 crashes because the government itself had a hand in it.
But is Briggs right? Or were the disastrous events of June simply the tragic result of bureaucratic mismanagement compounded by misinformation spread by crippled communications systems?
White House press secretary Carolina Lopez categorically rejects the assertion of Bin 42 and its cohorts. “These websites have no real evidence,” Lopez says. “President Randall understands that people are on edge right now, but stirring up fear with these conspiracy theories doesn’t help. We are working day and night—in cooperation with the Canadian and Mexican governments—to pinpoint the cause of these bird strikes.” Lopez notes that the United States was not the only nation affected by the deadly bird strikes that caused a dozen planes to crash, killing more than two thousand people in North America over the course of twenty-four hours.
“There is just no way that the United States government could be behind this event,” says Peter Vikram, professor of history at Harvard University and author of Conspiracists United: A History of American Skeptics and Their Beliefs. “These kinds of theories cropped up after 9/11 also, because believing in a government-organized conspiracy can be comforting. It gives order to a series of frightening events that otherwise seem entirely random. If we know whodunit, then we can catch the killer. Unfortunately, in this case, there is no single villain; there are many. That’s the real trauma that the United States is facing now—coming to understand how we could have done the things we did, motivated only by fear of not knowing why the planes crashed.”
Jason Briggs denies that he and his cohorts are fear-mongering. “That is bulls—” he states in an e-mail interview. “We are releasing the truth as the evidence comes to us. Everyone can judge for themselves. Of course the Randall Administration isn’t going to admit that they’re culpable—that would be political suicide for the president, and she’s only halfway through her first term.”
The so-called evidence that Briggs has been am
assing on Bin 42 draws from citizen reporting of alleged cover-ups of crash sites as well as theories incubated by conspiracists over decades about classified military projects. Several threads lead directly to beliefs about UFOs.
Briggs is unapologetic about the connections to those fringe theories. “Anyone who dispassionately examines the evidence will come away with a conviction that the government is involved in a cover-up about UFOs,” he writes. “I’m not saying there are aliens walking the Earth right now, but there is something there that the government doesn’t wish the public to know.”
Millions of Americans clearly agree with him. Traffic to Bin 42 quadrupled once the Internet went back online, and chatter on the Hub has centered almost exclusively on those theories. The Randall Administration’s efforts to turn the public’s attention to rebuilding and moving on after the June Disaster have been largely met with skepticism.
Outside the White House every morning, protesters pace back and forth. Written in large, hand-lettered block capitals, their signs declare, “Birds don’t destroy planes, people do,” and “Tell us the truth, President Randall!”
But perhaps the truth is greater than the conspiracies detailed online. Perhaps the real issue is not whether the government orchestrated the plane crashes, but instead, do we trust our elected officials? And if we don’t, why have we elected them in the first place? Democracy, at its root, is based on the faith that our representatives have our best interests at heart. If we as a nation no longer believe that they do, that may be even more disturbing than the idea that aliens are among us.
CHAPTER 8
I thought you’d like to put on some real clothes before you and David are debriefed,” Dr. Brand said, wheeling in a damaged suitcase on a dolly.
The top was bashed in and the zipper broken, but Reese recognized it as her carry-on. The sight of it, all squashed and misshapen, was disturbing. She and her bag had been in the same accident; had she been as damaged when she was pulled from the wreckage?