THEY ONLY DIG AT NIGHT
Sean Patrick Hazlett
There are lots of ways mankind could react to the discovery of ancient alien life, ranging from these wonders of the ancients sparking a new age of enlightenment or personal appreciation for our place in the universe, to all-consuming terror at the knowledge there exist beings beyond our power and comprehension.
Somewhere in the middle, we have Sean Patrick Hazlett delivering a cynical possibility: government cover up, and corporations and contractors immediately start trying to find ways to turn it into a product or turn a profit on it.
***
Travis’s Diner wasn’t much to look at. A hole in the wall off Highway Four, it was the kind of joint that was easy to forget; a place someone could go to disappear whether they wanted to or not. I sat in a wall booth with my back facing the entrance. Across the table, Burt Buckwalter stared at me through scratched Oakley sunglasses. Outside, nimbus clouds prowled the stark gray sky, pelting the parched earth with rain.
The Burt seated before me was an entirely different creature than the Burt I’d known twenty-five years ago. From his wiry appearance, he’d obviously shed some pounds since high school, or to be more accurate, a ton of muscle. He jittered with the nervousness of a soldier crawling through a minefield.
Burt had been waiting for me when I’d arrived. Two piping hot coffees had already been resting on the table.
“Thanks for the coffee, Burt,” I said, taking a tentative sip. “Been a long time. Everything okay?”
Burt glanced furtively to his left. “Steve, I’m just about the opposite of okay. I need to talk to somebody. Somebody with some juice at the company.”
The more I looked at Burt, the more he worried me. His pallid face. His restlessness. The filthy black watch cap he wore.
I smiled—a fake smile you might use to grin fuck someone in a business transaction; the kind of smile that severed yet another sliver of your soul; the kind required to prevent civilization from collapsing into a heap of homicidal chaos. “How can I help, champ?”
As he lifted his mug, his hand trembled. He took a careful, but unsteady drink. He stared directly into my eyes as one does to make sure a point sticks with a fella.
“It all began at the Antioch facility,” he said. “The project was real hush hush. At all hours, the company brought in earthmoving equipment. But they only dug at night.”
His mention of the Antioch facility surprised me. I’d never heard of it. As the Vice President of Global Operations at Absynthos, it was my business to know these things. Yet Absynthos did have a federal business that worked on all sorts of classified military projects, and we had a black budget. So it was possible I wouldn’t have been familiar with this particular site. Not likely, but possible.
“I cover a huge portfolio of the business, so can you remind me what they do at Antioch?” I said, masking my ignorance under the thin veneer of self-importance as one does in corporate.
“You mean . . . you don’t know?”
“I’m sure I can find out pretty quickly,” I said. “Look, if you want my help now, you’re gonna have to remind me.”
Burt flinched at my answer. So much so, I regretted I’d even hinted at having the slightest doubt about the facility’s existence.
He took another rickety sip. “We set a gated perimeter around the site about a year ago. Then all kinds of consultants and government officials started touring the site.”
“Like who?”
“Geologists from the U.S. Geological Survey. Consultants from the RAND Corporation, SRI, SAIC, Bechtel, and half a dozen other outfits. You know—the usual suspects. Even had some stiffs from NASA drop by.”
Now Burt really had my attention. Absynthos was a pharmaceutical company. Why the hell would we be working with NASA?
“Yeah. Seems kind of odd,” I said. “How can I help?”
“Get me the hell out of there, Steve. Get me reassigned. I’ll do anything. No job at the company’s beneath me.”
“Haven’t you tried going through the usual channels?”
Burt looked at me like I had a trumpet growing out of my forehead. “Course I did. My supervisor told me I was too close to the project. Said I’d become too valuable to reassign. You believe that shit? A rent-a-cop’s too special to let go?”
“It’s not like you’re a rent-a-cop at a mall. You work physical security for a major Fortune 500 corporation,” I said, nearly choking on my own bullshit.
He shrugged. “Just get me the hell out of there, Steve.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. The last thing I wanted was to make a promise to a crazy man.
“Ain’t good enough,” he said. “Either do it or don’t. None of this half-assed corporate horseshit.”
I shrugged. “Burt, I don’t even know what the project is called, and based on your description, it’s probably classified. I can’t make any commitments without knowing more.”
Burt looked down at his hands. A few seconds later, he peeked over his shoulder, then glanced to his left. He whispered, “They found something buried out there.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “Not sure exactly. At first, they just dug. For weeks. It was all a bit weird, but hey, I was just security and didn’t think much of it. Soon the unmarked black semis started showing up each night, shipping cargo out of the facility.”
“Then the accident happened.” Burt took another shaky swig from his mug. “I was on the night shift again. Before I left work that morning, I could tell the brass was real nervous about something. An hour before sunrise, on my way home to Oakley, the California Highway Patrol had blocked off Highway Four. There were helicopters everywhere.
“As I took a detour off the highway, I saw a faint phosphorescent green glow from the roadside. The next night at work, I heard through the grapevine that one of those black semis had rounded a corner too fast and rolled into a ditch.”
“Maybe it was carrying some sort of mineral. There are plenty of naturally occurring phosphorescent materials,” I said.
“That’s what my supervisor said after I’d told him what I’d seen. And I’d believed it too, until a few weeks later when the higher ups ordered an emergency lockdown.”
“You guys run those drills from time to time, don’t you?” I asked.
“Sure. But I’ve never been issued a military grade M4 carbine and told to shoot anyone who attempts to leave the facility.”
Despite my best efforts to conceal my shock, my jaw dropped. “Wait. What?”
“We had shoot-to-kill orders. The higher ups didn’t want whoever was trying to leave to get out alive.”
“You shoot anyone?”
“Not that time.”
“This happened more than once?”
“Yeah. Plenty.”
“Jesus.”
“The first night the alarm sounded, I saw a man try to escape—a bald man in a lab coat. He got as close as ten feet from me.” Burt paused. He covered his mouth with the back of his forearm. He stared down into his mug, then looked back up and continued. “Look, I didn’t want to kill anyone. Hell, they didn’t pay me enough to do that. I was just security; I was supposed to prevent bad guys from getting in, not employees from getting out.”
“Go on,” I said, impatient with a morbid curiosity that sickened me.
“I ordered the man to stop. He saw my rifle. He complied . . . for a moment. Then he held up his hands and slowly approached.
“I urged him to stop. And he did, about five feet from me. He was close. Close enough for me to see his green eyes.”
“What’s so special about green eyes,” I said.
“They were solid. Pure green. No whites or visible pupils. The man seemed to stare right through me. When he finally spoke, he said, ‘Make it stop. Please. So many turns. More than you’d think. In the quarry. More than you’d think.’”
I hesitated to ask the most obvious question. It was as if merely indulging my curiosity would somehow make me complicit in Burt’s likely crime.
“I can see the question in your eyes,” Burt said, sparing me the shame of smacking the elephant in the room with a Louisville slugger. “And no. I didn’t shoot him that time. My supervisor did.”
Burt quivered and covered his face with his hands. He sobbed. “Before I had a chance to process the rifle shot, I was covered in the old bastard’s blood and guts. I threw up on the spot. It . . . it was horrible.”
I couldn’t believe Burt’s story. It was nuts. I took a deep swig of coffee so I could compose myself. All I could muster was, “Did . . . did your supervisor contact the local authorities?”
Slowly, Burt looked up at me. He pushed his sunglasses against the bridge of his nose and shook his head.
“Christ, Burt. You need to notify the police. Otherwise you could be charged with accessory to murder.”
“Let me finish, Steve,” Burt said, barely concealing an impatient anger. “It gets worse. Much worse. After the shooting, Bob, my supervisor, the guy who killed the lab technician in cold blood, grabbed my elbow and escorted me to an office building on the outskirts of the facility. Once we were inside, he took me to an enclosed office near the entrance and sat me down. He tried to reassure me. Told me everything would be all right—that the company would have our backs. I didn’t believe a single fucking word of it. The whole thing was all jacked up. I just couldn’t accept it.”
Burt paused, taking a deep breath. He continued. “That’s when Bob pulled out a bottle of Jack Daniels from beneath a desk and poured two shots. I immediately downed one, then he poured another. And another. In thirty minutes, I was so numb and blitzed out of my mind that the killing became a distant memory.
“That’s when Bob offered me the green worm. Told me to swallow it whole. Promised it would calm me down. While I may have been completely sauced, there was still no goddamn way I was eating that fucking worm.”
Burt took another drink. “So Bob downed it himself. ‘See,’ he said. ‘Totally safe. And it really steadies the nerves.’
“I watched Bob for a few more minutes. After he’d blown that guy away, he’d also seemed a bit rattled; he’d just hidden it better than I had. But after taking the worm, he seemed to positively glow with an inner peace. Like the whole thing had never happened.
“‘What the hell was that?’ I asked him. He referred to the worm as the ‘Product.’ Said it was real special. One of a kind—pharmaceutical grade, but all natural. And Absynthos had sole access to the only source on the planet.”
“He just killed a man right in front of you and he’s engaging in shoptalk? Why didn’t you call the police?” I repeated.
“I passed out. Woke up the next evening tucked all nice and cozy in my bed. At that point, it was pretty damn easy to convince myself none of it had happened. Just a dream and all that jazz.”
I was on the edge of my seat. “So it all was just a dream?”
“In a matter of speaking. That is if you believe reality is the dream, and our dreams, reality,” he said cryptically, and in a way that made me conclude he didn’t have a clue what to believe.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Burt shrugged. “So I got dressed and went back to work for the night shift. Bob acted like nothing had ever happened, and I was happy to keep it that way.
“A few more weeks passed without incident. Then, one night, the alarm went off again. I grabbed my M4 and rushed to the source of the disturbance.”
My heartbeat quickened. Burt took another jittery gulp from his mug.
“It was the lab technician—the one Bob may have murdered—I’m still not sure. Only this time, the old guy grinned when he saw me. Like he recognized me. Said something like ‘and so the worm turns again; around and around it goes; when will it end? No one knows.’”
“What did you do?” I said.
“I did the only thing I could do: I blew his brains out.”
“For real this time?”
He lowered his head. “For real. And I watched the guy die a second time—assuming, of course, the first hadn’t been a dream.”
None of this could be real. My friend, Burt, was clearly three fries short of a Happy Meal. He had to be under the grip of some kind of madness.
“That night, I didn’t drink; I swallowed the worm. Then the worm swallowed me.” For an instant, Burt lowered his glasses just enough so I could see his eyes. Sickly eyes the color of bile.
I shuddered. “Jesus Christ.”
“The Product really is all it’s cracked up to be. A feeling of bliss overwhelms you—like heroin and meth all rolled into one, but without all the nasty side effects. It’s addictive, sure, but it sharpens your mind and it opens your thoughts to so many things. So many. Things. And that’s the problem. The problem of the forking paths.”
At that moment, I realized I was in way over my head. I stood up and motioned toward the door. “C’mon, Burt. We need to get you to a doctor. Now.”
Burt cackled. He rolled up his sleeves and showed me the underside of his forearms. Two deep gashes. “You don’t understand.”
I instinctively looked away, then forced myself to turn back to my old friend and sit back down. An eerie silence followed. The diner seemed to still, charged with potential energy.
“I’m glad somebody saved you,” I mumbled in a clumsy attempt to express both my sympathy and my relief that Burt had survived his attempted suicide.
When our frumpy middle-aged waitress stopped at the table to check on us, her face turned ashen. Burt looked down at the table and awkwardly rolled down his sleeves.
I held out my mug to blunt the woman’s shock. “Could you top me off, please?”
The waitress nodded, her eyes still wide. She headed toward the counter as if she’d appreciated the excuse.
I put my hand on Burt’s arm. “You can’t do that shit in public, man.”
He cackled again. “You think someone saved me? That’s rich. Truth is no one did; truth is I should’ve been dead. And more than once.”
“It’s a good thing you survived.”
Burt reached across the table and grabbed my collar with both hands. “You don’t get it, do you, Steve? I wasn’t supposed to survive. Each time, I woke up in a tub full of dirty green blood. So many branches. So many permutations. And not a single one where I die.”
I glared at him, then looked down at his hands. Blushing, he released my collar and slumped back into his seat. It was clear Burt needed professional help. Yet he was so unhinged, I doubted anyone could’ve made a whit of difference.
The waitress returned with a pot of coffee, pouring it into my mug with unsteady hands and a frugal glance seemingly optimized to keep the time spent at our table short.
Burt stared at me, his creepy green eyes hidden behind his shades. He expected a response.
All I could venture was, “What do you want me to say, man?”
“Help me,” he whispered.
The diner’s door swung open.
Burt bolted up. “Please, Jan. I know I’m not supposed to be here. I promise I won’t do it again. And again. And again.”
Jan? I thought. I glanced over my shoulder. Dr. Jan Remick, Abynthos’s Senior Vice President of R&D.
He wore sunglasses.
“Steve!” he said in a bout of unconvincing enthusiasm. “What brings you to this neck of the woods?”
I nodded toward Burt. “An old friend.”
“That so? Your old friend been telling you stories about our work out here?”
“A bit of this, a bit of that,” I said, desperately trying to downplay my unease.
He rounded the table and gestured toward Burt. “Go on. Have a seat, son.”
Burt shuffled toward the wall and sat back down. Jan shimmied into the booth next to him.
“Well, this is awkward,” said Jan. “I guess now that the secret’s out, we might as well go through the motions.”
Jan removed his glasses, revealing solid green orbs. He gazed at me—his expression teetering on the ledge of sanity. “They say whatever’s in the quarry, it’s been there a long, long time. Long before people ever set foot on this continent. Long before the first dinosaurs ravaged the earth. Eons before life as we know it crawled out of the primordial ooze. That thing’s been buried here for millions of years, and we’re only just beginning to scratch the surface of its possibilities.”
Jan reached across the table and put his hand over mine. “Now that you’ve been read into Project Wormwood, you’ll need to chase the worm.”
“I . . . I don’t understand,” I said. I made to stand up, but Jan grabbed my wrist and yanked it toward him.
His unsettling eyes bored into mine. “The problem with you, Steve, is that you were always good at everything. Unfortunately, being good at everything means you’re great at nothing. And Absynthos doesn’t need generalists; it needs specialists.” He released my arm. “But not all hope is lost for you, Steve-o. Soon you’ll be part of the pattern, bound to a chain of interlocking Fibonacci spirals extending into infinity. And because of that, you’ll have time to become an expert in crafting the Product. Forever.”
Jan opened his left hand, palm facing upward. A green worm writhed there. I shook my head and turned away. I heard a metallic click and, from beneath the table, felt the press of a snub-nosed revolver against my knee. When I faced him again, he withdrew it, leaned his back against the booth, and grinned. “Now, now, Steve-o. All you need to do is swallow. Everything will be okay. And you’ll have a chance to really make a difference in the world. Over and over and over again. Forever.”