Into the Void – Chapter 2
After ten hours barreling down the highway, chasing power lines over mountains and through valleys, Dylan stumbles from the car and pulls on his coat. He walks Hendrix to the bushes, but the dog just plops on its haunches and stares up at him. “Dude, you haven’t gone since St. George, what’s the problem?”
A minute of tense standoff and he takes a knee. The dog jumps up and licks his face. “Alright, alright, anyone ever tell you how bad your damn breath stinks? No wonder we don’t have a woman.”
He wrestles with the dog, kisses his neck and pushes him back. “Do your deal,” he says, and when Hendrix scampers into the darkness Dylan stands and gazes at the neon sign buzzing over the ramshackle building: END OF THE ROAD.
After returning Hendrix to the car, Dylan slips on his mask and enters the tavern. A metal riff greets him like a blast of hot wind. A few bikers sit at the bar, alongside an elderly woman in a tattered dress and trucker hat. Dim red lights accentuate grindhouse movie posters on the walls: High Plains Drifter… Dawn of the Dead… Altered States… The Psychic…
The crack of pool balls cuts through the music, the table in back beneath a green exit sign. A couple, both in flannel, playing darts. Not a soul looks up.
At a shadowed booth in the corner he spots the security uniform. She waves for his attention.
“Anya?” he says, and when she nods he slides in across from her.
Calling Skinwalker Ranch the Mount Sinai of the paranormal is a bit of an understatement. With a long history of UFO sightings, spectral events and cattle mutilations, it’s unclear what’s rubbish and what’s at least partially based in fact. The miles and miles of electrified fence ringed with barbed wire only amps the rumors. For the longest time Dylan considered the whole thing a vast urban myth, until a Freedom of Information request last year revealed that Jordan T. Kaine, the wealthy owner of the Ranch, had signed a twenty-two million dollar contract with the U.S. government to oversee a classified ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ operation. But that’s the extent of what’s been verified. Everything else is speculation, and as Kaine keeps the compound on such tight lockdown—ironclad NDAs, exorbitant pay and benefits—not a single witness has ever come forward.
Until tonight.
“Mind?” Dylan asks, and without waiting he lifts the pitcher and pours a glass, and when he starts to pour the other—
“We don’t fucking have time, they know,” she hisses.
Dylan downs half the beer, then wipes his mouth. “Yeah, well I just drove ten hours to get here. My back’s killing me and I’m dog-tired, but okay, your call, let’s do this—they know what?”
She glares until the song ends, then slides her phone and a pair of earbuds between the pitcher and glasses. “Just watch.”
He inserts each bud and starts the video. Hands cupped over his ears, he watches until ten seconds in he pauses the screen: “Wait, who’s that woman with the pink hair?”
“Eve, she runs the program.”
“The government UFO program?”
“No, these kids are subjects for the tower initiative. She designed the drugs.”
“Hold on, what do you mean, Tower? What kind of drugs?”
Anya touches the screen and plays the video. “Watch first, questions after.”
After a minute Dylan’s eyes widen. Screams erupt and he winces, then shoots her a skeptical look. The screen goes black and he takes out the buds. “Are you telling me that was real?”
He tries never to insult during an interview, as it instantly undercuts a subject’s trust, but cynicism is part of the job, no matter how legit a lead seems. Take last year, when he investigated a story on a Depression-era Victorian home in the Salinas Valley. The family had just moved from Chicago, and right away the younger brother started hearing strange noises at night, and even found words scrawled on his bathroom mirror:
the walls have eyes…
to watch little boys die
The teenage daughter woke with unexplained bruises on her arms and neck, and just after midnight she opened her eyes to find a massive man with straggly black hair naked at the foot of her bed. She screamed until her parents ran in and flipped on the lights. The room was empty. Finally, exhausted and at the end of her rope, Mom rang The Star tip line (she loved the celebrity gossip), figuring: What have we got to lose?
Dylan interviewed the entire family, one at a time, and when they dipped for dinner at a Chinese joint he combed every inch of the house, then set up hidden cameras.
The next week he collected the footage. No ghosts. No paranormal phenomena. Just typical teenage angst. The night-vision cameras showed the daughter sneaking into her brother’s room and marking the wall with a thick red crayon. Turns out she was distraught over leaving her boyfriend of three-and-a-half months, so she staged the theatrics in a bid to scare the family back home.
Classic case of nothing.
Dylan pulls out his own phone and jots notes. “So you work security at the Ranch, right? Skinwalker Ranch?”
“The world needs to prepare for what they’ve unleashed. Things are only going to get worse.”
“Back up, what exactly is going on out there?”
She glances at the front door, then leans close: “That woman, Eve, she got busted transporting designer drugs across state lines. Kaine posted bail and pulled strings to get the charges dropped. She’s an underground chemist who now runs the program. He owns her, like he owns everything and everyone. You know who he is, right?”
Dylan pecks away with both thumbs. “Jordan Thomas Kaine. Of course. Made a billion in roadside motels. He’s owned the Ranch for nearly a decade now—”
“No, it was Ethan, his son, that purchased the property. Odd bird, that one. Brilliant, but odd as they come. He was a physicist at Los Alamos, and I heard that led to his current research. Kaine only took control after Ethan vanished deep on the property. I think it was after the third or fourth test of the tower.”
“Tower? You keep mentioning a tower. What kind of research was he doing?”
“Shit, quantum waves or fields, I think? We kept hearing something to do with dark matter. I really don’t know, I’m just a guard.”
Cold air sweeps across the table. Both glance over. Two black suits step through the door, scanning the bar.
“Damnit, I told you—” Anya pulls a gun from her holster and sets it behind the pitcher, as though blocking it from view.
Dylan pushes back from the table. “What the fuck are you doing?!”
“Giving you a head start.”
“Anya, they might not even be here for—”
She slides from the booth, pistol tucked behind her back. She stops and leans back, “Nine one six five eight,” she says, then heads for the entrance.
Heart jacking in his chest, Dylan hunts for his keys—jacket, jeans, wait, hooked to his belt—glasses? glasses?—on his face! Mouth dry as dirt, he downs the rest of the beer and pushes from the bench, and trying to pass incognito, suddenly lunges back and snatches her phone.
Striding past the pool tables, he keeps his eyes trained on the exit sign. Sure, he wanted something real, a bonafide lead, but this is insanity. Hoping, no praying, for the silence to last at least another four steps.
Three.
Two.
A death metal song blares from the juke just as he hits the door, and shoving into the frigid night with her warm phone cradled in his hand, he sprints across the gravel parking lot and the first gunshots ring out.