Welcome to Field Station Delta. This novella is a paranormal military thriller that I am releasing as a serial for my readers on Substack.
Day 3, 20:07
Metzger awoke to the sight of countless tiny stars shining brightly against a deep velvet sky.
No.
Had she crossed over to the other side again? She sat bolt upright and found that she was lying in the flatbed of the SOCOM Humvee. So, she was still out in the badlands. That was something, at least. How had she gotten here? Where were the Awwakkulé? Her head swam and she felt nauseous.
“Dammit.”
“Easy, Airman Metzger,” came a voice close by. It was Cathy Doyle.
Metzger groaned. She had to break this frustrating habit of blacking out in the face of the uncanny. It was getting old real fast.
“What happened?”
“Honestly, you’d probably know the answer to that better than I,” Cathy said.
Airman Whittaker came up at that moment. “Howdy, Metz! Returned to the land of the living?”
“Seems so,” she said. “And Whitts—Don’t call me ‘Metz.’ Ever.”
Whitts shrugged and moved off towards a small crowd of people gathered around the second Hummer. In the gleam of the headlights, Metzger could see both airmen and folks in civilian clothes. To her shock, she recognized one of these was Mary Bonds, who was sharing a warm embrace with Airman Valdes.
“Wait. It can’t be…” She trailed off in disbelief.
Cathy squeezed Metzger’s shoulder and grinned. “The people of Van Cleef,” she said. “Mary Bonds and the others are back safe and sound. Doctor Bradford and Airman Hopko too. How that happened… Well, frankly, we have no idea.”
Metzger turned to look at the Medicine Wheel and stared speechless. The stone megaliths were gone. They had vanished without a trace. There weren’t even holes in the earth to mark where they’d once rested. It was as if they had never existed at all.
Unreal…
“I don’t think we’ll be hearing from our little gray friends again anytime soon,” Cathy said.
“Maybe,” said Metzger. It seemed too much to hope that this would be her last close encounter.
One week later
Emily Metzger looked up and down the hallway of the ARG building as a pair of airmen she didn’t recognize finished loading the last couple of crates onto a handcart. Field Station Delta was officially being decommissioned.
The base was crawling with Air Force personnel—likely looped into some Special Access Program—whose job it was to haul away everything but the kitchen sink so that not a trace of the military’s presence remained.
“Plausible deniability.” Typical.
She exhaled sharply and turned to one of the airmen lugging boxes around.
“So, did you just draw the short straw for this job or did you somehow end up on Cartwright’s shit list?” She looked at the name patch stitched on his uniform. This guy’s name was SMITH, apparently.
Metzger rolled her eyes at that lack of subtlety. She snorted when “Smith” ignored her and wheeled a cart full of boxes towards the exit.
“Fastest change of station I ever heard of,” she murmured to Whitts, who was likewise loitering around for lack of anything better to do. All the Delta personnel had packed up their things yesterday. About the only thing that was left was the TV in the rec room.
“I tell ya what, we’d be famous if we didn’t have SUPER-DUPER TOP SECRET stamped on our foreheads for the next two hundred years,” Whitts said
Metzger shrugged. She wasn’t surprised. It was just “Military Secrecy 101.” Neither was she surprised that a convoy of unmarked black SUVs had descended on the Ranch and on Van Cleef and spat out a small army of Air Force lawyers who politely compelled all the locals to sign thick stacks of papers giving up their right to ever so much as think about the Medicine Wheel incident ever again.
Lucy Hopko sidled up next to them. “Sergeant Phan just got word from the Colonel,” she said quietly. “We move out in an hour. Wheels up at 10:00 hours, sharp.”
“No shit?” said Whitts. “Where to?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Same old story,” Whitts scoffed.
“Any idea where Valdes is?” asked Metzger, feigning ignorance.
Whitts rolled his eyes. “Yeah, that’s a big mystery.”
“Just checking. It’s too bad, you know. He and Mary are kind of cute, right?”
“Kind of,” Whittaker admitted. “Hope they like long distance relationships. Hey, ya’ll think maybe Cartwright & co. will quietly reactivate this place after the dust settles.”
Metzger shook her head. “It’s not impossible. In the same sense it’s not impossible I’ll be elected President.” Still, it was pretty damn unlikely. If she were a gambler, she’d put down hard cash that ATLOG’s time at Field Station Delta was well and truly finished.
Cartwright had scuttled down to Washington a week ago. She’d returned the same day as the Air Force lawyers, staying just long enough to nab a visibly reluctant Violet Olstead and fly off into the wild blue yonder.
“Well, somebody’d better grab a Hummer and track down Valdes before he gets it in his head to go AWOL,” said Whitts.
“Thanks for volunteering,” said Metzger with a grin. Whitts groaned in mock disgust.
“Hey, guys…”
The three Airmen turned and saw Cathy Doyle peeking out of an open doorway down the hall and beckoning them over.
“What’s up?” Metzger asked.
Cathy glanced down the hallway to make sure there was no one else in earshot. “Colonel Nolan assigned me to a ‘special IT project’ over the last couple days, while Dr. Cartwright was away.” She paused. “Remember last week, during all the craziness, how Cartwright was constantly on the phone ‘with Washington’? Well, it turns out she was not calling the Pentagon. It took a lot of digital elbow grease, but I discovered that she was actually dialing a private number in Northern Virginia.”
“How did you find that out?” Metzger asked.
Cathay hesitated and coughed. “Well… It’s kind of complicated.”
“Humor us,” said Metzger.
“Like I said, it wasn’t easy. I wouldn’t have any luck cracking Cartwight’s private inbox. And it would be too risky to try, anyway. Of course I had no access to her personal cell. Luckily, it turned out that Cartwright used one of our on-site secure landlines to make a few calls. I'd almost given up before I managed to retrieve a partial number.”
“So much for our ‘secure lines,’” snorted Whitts.
“Why are you telling us all this anyway?” asked Metzger.
Cathy looked straight at Airman Hopko and said, “I thought that Congressman Hopko’s office might be interested in what I found.”
Lucy nodded.
“And there’s this,” Cathy continued. “If you’re all going to stay with ATLOG, I think you should have a better idea of who you’re really working for. Of course, on paper you’re still USAF, technically. But ATLOG is Cartwright’s operation. You answer to her. The only question is—Who does Cartwright answer to?”
“Maybe it’s the Cigarette Smoking Man,” said Whitts with a smirk.
Metzger rolled her eyes. But Whitts probably wasn’t far off. Whoever pulled Cartwright’s strings, they weren’t in the normal military chain of command.
She sighed and leaned back against the wall.
“Shit,” she said. “Well. At least we kicked those ugly gray freaks back to where they came from, right? I call that a win.” Her tone invited no disagreement.
Cathy shifted uncomfortably and smiled. Whitts and Hopko both nodded.
It’s a win, Metzger told herself. It’s a win.
I see your X-files reference! A great wrap-up. I can't wait for more adventures.
Is this the last chapter? Are there more adventures coming?