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Turn looked at him and smiled. “Good, it wouldn’t be right if you didn’t.”

20 — In a Flash

Outside the main Blue Lake hangar the X-22 was warming-up on the tarmac, the night as black as can be in that part of New Mexico. All twenty-nine of the men were assembled, including the three that would stay back and command the mission from afar, Ellis, Carl and General Anderholt. In just a few minutes the group would break apart in to their individual teams, and it’d be the last they’d see of one another until the planned-forty-minute mission was complete… if they were lucky. Ellis looked around at the men and tried not to play out in his mind which would be skilled enough to come back and which wouldn’t, but he couldn’t help it — three wars had taught him the importance of weighing the future, even if a good-deal of luck always seemed to throw the calculations off.

“Listen up,” Ellis said loudly and in a no-nonsense voice, “I’m only going to say this once, so listen good.”

The joking and carousing continued for a few more moments, then generally died down. The Dutchman began.

“Everything was going according to plan with these bases until May 1, 1975. On that day all hell broke loose.”

Tommy cracked a laugh, expecting a good story.

“The plan was rubbish, right from the get go, the treaties nothing — the aliens never kept their end of the bargain. That technology we were promised? Nope, only allowed in the bases and then under intense supervision. And those men and women that we’d allowed the aliens to take and then return, the original abductees? Some you heard about the Betty and Barney Hill case and you might have seen the old black and white videos of the two. But they were the exception — more and more were never seen or heard from again. Later we learned out what’d become of them, and it wasn’t a pretty picture, not in the least.

Ellis took in a deep breath and you could have heard a pin drop, the room was so quiet.

“It was when they began to manipulate our thoughts,” he continued with a shake of his head, “that we really knew we’d gotten the short end of the stick. The aliens had never wanted to give us anything in the first place, it’d all been smoke and mirrors, a way for them to gain access to our minds and then our bodies and then eventually our society. High-level members of our government and military were brainwashed, had chips implanted in their brains, and sometimes were even cloned and replaced outright. The worst was when they had their very souls taken, God knows where. And the army of clones and half-human hybrids, things that would make the task of taking over the world a lot easier for the aliens?” Ellis sighed. “We knew we had to fight back, but in the end it wasn’t us that fired the first shot.

“It happened in the tunnels below us, when two Ret Four Grays demanded that an entire group of armed military personnel unload their weapons and then drop them. When the commander asked why the entire squad was killed, each with a shot to the head, although the aliens had no guns and from what we could tell from the cameras and the bodies we recovered later, these were nothing more than psychic shots, some kind of mind blast that killed.

The idea was that the Grays used their minds to do it, somehow through the bio-chemical circuit board that’s up in those big heads with huge black eyes. They figured out how to channel electromagnetic energy via specific neural patterns and pathways. It makes them virtually unstoppable.

“So how the hell do we kill ‘em?” Charlie asked.

Carl nodded at the six men that’d stepped forward. “That’s what we got the super soldiers for.”

“It was made clear to us after that initial massacre,” Ellis continued, “that the Grays were not our allies as they’d originally claimed, but conquerors come in disguise. Just because one officer questioned the need for our human forces to disarm themselves, the faux treaty was realized. It was clear that they Grays had to maintain discipline at all costs, even if that meant we knew they had no regard for us at all.”

There were murmurings of discontent, for it truly was a depressing tale.

“Not everyone was killed, though,” Ellis continued, to the raised eyebrows of some of the men. He glanced over at someone that others couldn’t see, then nodded before continuing. “I’m going to say some things we haven’t told the groups before, because this time it’s different. Those guns the humans had been told to disarm weren’t regular guns, they were the flash guns that were just then coming into use by our forces, something that’d been a gift from the Nordics, another alien race, more enlightened and advanced than the Grays, and one that actually has our interests at heart. It wasn’t forty-four that were killed that day, but sixty-eight. Of those that died, twenty-two were completely vaporized as the flash guns of the Grays were turned upon us. But more than just a single survivor managed to get away. In all, nineteen escaped back into the tunnels, and since the attack occurred on Level 2, it meant they had a good change of getting out, and twelve managed to do so. To this day they’re in hiding, crashing in motels and surfing couches, but alive, and safe… and ready to fight in any way they can.”

Tommy laughed. “Well, then where the hell are they?”

“Their time will come,” Walter said, and from the tone of his voice, it was almost as if he’d been one of the men himself.

“Just one Gray was killed in that massacre, a lucky shot from one of our soldiers,” Ellis said, picking up the story and bringing it to its end. “The thing wasn’t vaporized, but it died a slow and agonizing death, you can be assured of that.”

“How many of you men have seen a flash gun?” Stu asked, stepping forward from the front of the group, his voice echoing off the far hangar wall. The men grew silent in just a moment, so tense and on edge and just ready to go were they.

“How many of you have seen this?” Stu asked, holding up a small metal rod.

“Colonel… I’ve already got a pen,” Major Jake Zates said in that dead-humored voice of his.

“They’re flash guns,” Stu said above the few chuckles as he picked one up and weighed it in his hand, “although they were originally called the Armorlux weapon. It’s an advanced beam weapon that can operate on three different phases: stun, levitate and paralyze.”

Stu held it up for the others to see. It resembled a flashlight, with a black glass conical inverted lens. On the side were three recessed knobs in three curved grooves and each knob was a different size.

“Although we all know that ‘paralyze’ is just short for ‘kill,’ don’t we, Stu?”

Stu looked at Lieutenant Colonel Eddie Okamata. “That’s not quite accurate. On the higher position on the same mode it can create a temporary kind of death, one that I assure you any doctor would certify as clinically dead. What he wouldn’t know, however, is that the person’s — or thing’s in some cases — that the person’s life essence is actually lingering in some strange limbo, some kind of terrible state of non-death. In one to five hours the person will begin to wake up, or revive if you will, slowly at first, as the bodily functions start up once again, and then a few minutes onward, consciousness returns, followed by full awareness.”

“God, sounds awful!”

Stu smiled as he looked at Lewie. “What the Grays use it for might be worse. It’s in that mode that the alien scientists use to re-program the human brain and plant false information. When the person awakens, they ‘recall’ this false and implanted information as knowledge they’ve gained through real-life experiences. There is no way for a person to learn the truth after that, they’re simply too far gone. They’ll never believe you, will always resist. They’re lost to us.”