Quoting Hamlet, specifically a scene where the doomed prince holds a skull in hand while musing on the inevitability of death. “Inevitability” being the key word because that described the war that mankind had no idea was coming.
“‘… and likelihood to lead it,’” Raiff completed. “What do you think of that, General?”
The General was actually a marble bust of whom Raiff believed to be Labienus, Julius Caesar’s most trusted commander and confidante. Now his one and only of the same distinction, salvaged like virtually all the furnishings in Raiff’s underground lair from trash heaps and Dumpsters. The General wasn’t much of a conversationalist, of course, which made him a fine companion and even better chess opponent since, of course, Raiff never lost.
“Checkmate,” he said, moving his knight in for the kill. “As inevitable as what’s coming. I don’t suppose you’ve got an idea of how to stop it. No, only Dancer knows that, the problem being he doesn’t know what he knows. But it’s got to be there. That’s why he’s here, why I’m here.”
Raiff stopped, as if waiting for a response. Some nights, when the light was right, he thought the statue’s lips moved. No sound emerged, though, as if its makers lacked the ability to string vocal cords from marble. But not being able to speak didn’t mean the General couldn’t listen.
Raiff reconfigured the pieces on the chessboard, starting a fresh game from scratch with the dueling armies neatly staged across from each other. “But here’s the real problem, General: What am I missing? These androids didn’t come from the other world, they came from this one. Built right here. Where? How? How many? You see what I’m getting at? Dancer’s the only hope to stop them and whatever groundwork they’re laying for the real invasion that’s coming. Except that suggests spaceships pouring out of the sky packed with troops and weapons prepared to wage war. But we know they won’t be coming that way, don’t we? We know they’ll be coming the same way I did when I brought Dancer through the wormhole.”
But the boy’s remaining Watchers hadn’t checked in since last night. Could be Marsh’s Trackers had got them. Or maybe more of the drones. Either party honing in on metabolic signals and waves, which explained why Raiff had long ago built his lair underground instead of above it.
And in the last place anyone would ever think to look.
“Your move, General,” Raiff resumed, when the marble bust made no response. “Oh, that’s right,” he said, correcting himself. “It’s mine.”
TEN
LABORATORY Z
Secrets are things we give to others to keep for us.
—ELBERT HUBBARD
76
SAN RAMON
ALEX AND SAM STOPPED at an information desk inside the BART, short for Bay Area Rapid Transit, station a few blocks from the Buy Two store. A blue uniformed woman with milk chocolate skin smiled their way when she noticed them.
Alex leaned in toward her, but Sam shouldered him aside. “Let me this time.” Then, to the clerk, “This is going to sound crazy, but is there, like, a huge farm around here, something with livestock and cattle?”
“You mean like a ranch?”
“Yes, exactly!”
The woman stifled a laugh and shook her head. “Honey, there’s a ranch, all right, but you won’t find any horses or cows there.”
* * *
Bishop Ranch, it turned out, was a sprawling office park that ranked among Northern California’s most prestigious business locations. On the woman’s advice, they’d taken BART to the Dublin/Pheasanton station, where buses were conveniently available to take them the rest of the way to San Ramon in Contra Costa County, where Bishop Ranch was located.
“You can see it now.” Alex pointed out the bus’s window. “Over there on the right.”
Sam followed his finger to the massive interconnected complex of buildings that reminded her somehow of the Pentagon, trying to picture things as they were the day of the fire eighteen years earlier when Laboratory Z had burned to the ground.
Situated in a tree-laden valley dominated by rolling hills and the same oaks, elms, and spruce that grew like weeds over the entire Bay Area, the city of San Ramon sat in the shadow of Mount Diablo to the northeast. A curious mix of urban sprawl enclosed by untouched land that passed as wilderness ruled by grasslands and tree orchards. The dryness of fall had turned the vast planes of grasses a goldenrod shade that made for pleasant viewing outside the window of their BART car in the trek there. They’d had the car virtually to themselves, Sunday marking the return of casual drivers along what is less than affectionately known as “the Maze.”
“I can’t believe your parents grow weed,” Alex said to make conversation, when Sam’s gaze lingered out the window a little too long.
“Why?”
“I don’t know, it just seems strange.”
“No, strange was when they tried to pay the mortgage with a trunk full of homemade jams and jellies.”
“A trunk full of jams and jellies? That sounds crazy.” Alex smiled.
“Based on the past couple days, I don’t even know what qualifies as crazy anymore.”
“If I hadn’t been born on another planet, I’d wonder if maybe we weren’t switched at birth,” Alex said. “What with your parents likely preferring a football player and mine wishing they had a kid who actually was good in school.”
The smile slipped from his face at that.
“Alex…”
“No, don’t bother. I’m okay, Sam. Really I am.”
She shrugged, leaving things there.
“What are you thinking about?” Alex asked, when Sam’s gaze strayed out the BART car’s window again.
“You told Reverend Billy I was your girlfriend.”
“So?”
She turned back his way. “So what would Cara think of that?”
“What’s the difference?”
“No difference. I just…” Sam started to turn back to the window, then stopped. “I want to tell you something I promised not to tell.”
“That Cara’s breaking up with me.”
“She told you?” Sam asked, squaring her shoulders with her gaze now.
“No, you just did. Well, not really—I already knew it was coming, was just stringing her along. I mean, did you really think I wouldn’t find out about that college guy she’s been seeing?”
“So why lead her on?”
“Because she led me on first. And it was the brother of one of the other cheerleaders who told me and I promised to let her spill first. It was kind of fun.”
“Leading her on?”
“And seeing her for what she really was. It’s like, what was I thinking? How did I not see through her before?”
“You really want me to answer that?”
“I asked.” Alex shrugged.
“She was an accessory, like the souped-up wheels on your car or your new leather jacket.”
“I don’t have souped-up wheels or a leather jacket.”
“Figure of speech.”
“Yeah,” Alex said, “ironic, isn’t it? And Cara wasn’t always an accessory. I really liked her for a while.”
“You didn’t say ‘loved.’”
“For a reason.”
Sam shook her head, frowning. “Someday you need to explain all this high school stuff to me.”
“You mean, like be your tutor? Be careful, I’m expensive.”
“What happened to ‘All Free Tomorrow’?”
“Then we’d face the same problem in twenty-four hours. And right now we’ve got something more important to do.”
“Find Laboratory Z,” Sam finished.
77
BISHOP RANCH
“WHERE DO YOU THINK it was?” Sam asked Alex, as they walked along the outer perimeter of the sprawling Bishop Ranch Business Park, which seemed to stretch on forever.
“Only wish I remembered,” Alex said dryly, sweeping his eyes about. “Maybe I’m a different kind of human, but even my kind doesn’t seem to retain muc
h of what happened as an infant.”
He tried to keep his gaze indifferent, purposeful, avoiding thoughts of the fire from which his mother had saved him. It didn’t work. A coldness gripped him, spreading from the inside out, the chill as bad as any winter could muster. The somewhat cross-shaped spread of interconnected buildings was bracketed at each arm by parking lots that formed endless, glistening seas of steel. But Alex saw only flames and noxious white smoke, more like vapor, overspreading the area like a vast wave. The stench of it was something corrosive and sweet at the same time, and Alex fully believed had he been closer to the buildings themselves he would’ve glimpsed a tiny but brave Chinese woman lugging a baby from the death trap of flames that burned white hot.
Bishop Ranch had either risen from the resulting refuse or been part of the same complex all those years ago, only to be spared the brunt of the blast that had leveled Laboratory Z. “Ranch” was the word he’d overheard his parents use. Never any mention of the livestock Alex’s imagination had filled in. An Chin had said nothing of Bishop Ranch in the flash drive tucked inside Meng Po, which Alex took for a clear sign she never wanted him to come here. Or an even clearer sign there was nothing left to return to.
A waste of time. A fool’s errand.
Still, all he had right now.
“Alex?” Sam prodded.
“Huh?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“What’d you ask me?”
“What are we supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know. Haven’t got a clue.”
Then his eyes fastened on a lone figure in a sun-drenched clearing shrouded by a thick umbrella of trees.
“Maybe we should ask him,” Alex said to Sam.
* * *
The man was seated on a cream-colored blanket splattered with grass stains beneath a frayed and flimsy pop-up tent. He had long flowing white hair, gnarled and matted into ringlets in places, blue eyes the color of the sky, and a bushy beard that looked like cotton candy. The grounds he occupied alone had a park-like feel to them, likely still the civic property of San Ramon, which would explain why the man was allowed to stake his claim here unmolested. He held an unlit pipe in his mouth and a small pot hung from a swivel at his side beneath a sign that read, DEPOSIT A DOLLAR AND ASK THE PROFESSOR A QUESTION.
But it was a series of larger signs staked in a semicircle around the bearded man’s blanket that grabbed Alex’s attention first, among them: THEY WALK AMONG US, TRUST NO ONE, THE WAR IS COMING, and ALIENS GO HOME!
With the exclamation point formed into something that looked like a ray gun aimed downward.
The professor pulled the unlit pipe from his mouth and gestured toward Alex and Sam with it, as they approached. Alex couldn’t help thinking of Reverend Billy and THEND COMES stenciled across his knuckles. Maybe they were related or, more likely, keyed in to something on a cosmic level, able to hear and see things others couldn’t. Alex remembered a tutoring session during which Sam explained that if humans could see as well as dogs could smell, they’d be able to identify a man clearly a half mile away with the naked eye. Begging the question: Who knew more, things being relative and all?
“You kids lost?” the Santa Claus–like figure asked, uncrossing his long legs and stretching them across the blanket.
“That depends,” Alex told him.
“Does it now? On what, exactly?”
“On whether you can help us.”
The professor looked toward the small pot swaying slightly in the breeze. “Answers cost a dollar.”
Alex unfurled a crumpled bill from his pocket and pushed it into the empty pot. “Where was Laboratory Z?”
The professor looked at them with his sky-blue eyes turning narrow and suspicious. “Take back your dollar.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“That’s why you get your money back.”
“I don’t want my money back, I want an answer.”
“Then ask a different question.”
“Where was Laboratory Z located?”
The professor smirked, making him look even more like a mirthful Santa Claus. “Clever, aren’t you?”
“Not really,” Alex told him. “That’s why I’ve got my tutor, Samantha, with me. I’m Alex.”
The professor looked at both of them. “Do you always travel with your tutor, Alex?”
“Only when we’re on the run,” Alex told him, surprised by his own frankness.
The professor tried to look bemused, but failed. “What’d you do, rob a bank?”
“Actually, we’re being chased by really bad guys who killed my parents. Only, they’re not ‘guys’ at all. They’re robots, drones, androids—something like that.”
“And what’s their interest in you?” the professor asked, playing along as if it was something he was used to doing.
“I’m an alien.” Alex let the professor see him turn his gaze on Bishop Ranch, taking in as much of the sprawl as he could. “My adoptive mother rescued me from here, from Laboratory Z. The day of the fire. Her name was An Chin and she and my father were the best people I ever knew.”
Something had made him tell the professor the whole crazy truth. He couldn’t say what, exactly, something that told Alex this man wouldn’t be surprised by it. Not at all.
“And I can prove it.”
“Prove that your parents were the best people you ever knew?”
“No, that you’re right. They really do walk among us and a war really is coming.”
With that, Alex extracted the slap bracelet he’d taken from his father’s wrist from the pocket of the still-stiff jeans he’d purchased at the Buy Two store. His feet felt much better squeezed into cheap sneakers his own size.
“Alien piece of jewelry?” the professor asked him.
“I guess you can call it that. But slap it on and you won’t be going anywhere for a while.”
“What do you—”
The professor’s words froze in his throat when Alex slapped the bracelet on his wrist. His features seized up and his eyes bulged with fear until Alex stripped the thing off him.
“Where did you get that?” the professor asked, wide-eyed as he rubbed his wrist as if it were someone else’s.
“From my father’s wrist after they killed him.”
“After who killed him?”
“Androids, cyborgs.”
“We call them drone things,” Sam chimed in.
The professor looked at her briefly before returning his focus to Alex, the fear still in his eyes. “You’re saying a cyborg murdered your parents.”
“‘Cyborgs,’ plural, yes. And we haven’t even gotten to the ash man yet, a kind of astral projection. I’m the one he’s after because I’ve got what he wants.”
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“That’s why we’re looking for whatever’s left of Laboratory Z,” Alex told him. “Because maybe the answer’s there.”
78
MR. WIZARD
THE PROFESSOR CLIMBED TO his feet, one knobby knee cracking and then the other. He held his ground on the grass-stained blanket as if to keep his distance, then suddenly reached down and plucked Alex’s untangled bill from his pot.
“Here,” he said, extending it with a trembling hand.
Alex didn’t take it. “What’s with the refund?”
“You didn’t ask a question.”
“Yes, I did; you didn’t answer it,” Alex said.
The professor suddenly looked like a man who badly wanted to be somewhere else. “You need to leave.”
“Tell me where we can find Laboratory Z and we will.”
The old man’s eyes sought him out, seeming to view him differently now, with an odd mixture of wonder and apprehension. “What makes you think I know?”
“The way you looked at me, the way you looked at that bracelet.”
The professor sat back down. Alex
and Sam joined him on the blanket next to each other, with the older man centered across from them.
“I’ve been coming here every day for fifteen years,” he said, spooning a hand through his beard. “Around the last time I shaved. I don’t want to believe you. I want to believe you’re full of shit. I want to believe that bracelet’s something your tutor cooked up for a science fair project.”
Alex stuffed the crumpled dollar bill back into the tiny pot. “Do you think I’m full of shit?”
The professor shrugged. Sam realized the crown of his scalp was bald and he had a pointy, long nose with a pair of reading spectacles dangling on the tip. She thought he looked more like Mr. Wizard, the cartoon character who invariably rescued Tooter Turtle from all manner of mishap with a wave of his magic wand.
“I paid for an answer, Professor,” Alex told him.
“Then do yourself a favor and just accept another refund.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“Yes, it is.” He ran his eyes from Alex to Sam before settling his gaze somewhere between them. “How much do you know?”
“I told you what we know. The short version. There’s more if you want to hear it, lots more.”
“I meant about Laboratory Z. Let’s start there.”
“I know about the explosion, the fire, and my mom rescuing me,” Alex said, swallowing hard as he tried to fit all the pieces of what he’d learned together. “I know there was some experiment going on there, something big. I know that had something to do with the fire and the lab’s destruction.”
“Then you know more than just about anyone alive, except for me and one other man.”
“You worked there,” Sam put forth, “didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did, young lady. I had a particular area of expertise the lab was most interested in.”
“What’s that?” asked Alex.
“We need to back up first, young man. Laboratory Z was actually a NASA installation, a secret NASA installation that had existed already for more than a generation when you were born. Young lady,” he said to Sam, “what was the significance of 1960 to the space program?”
“The election of John Kennedy.”