I stopped scrolling down to instead use the track pad to move the arrow over to the second to the last folder in the row.
Survivors’ interviews.
I clicked on it to find several internal folders. Each was marked with a code: JFAZ206, HTNY85, RJIL72, EKOK11…
Get back to the main screen, keeping looking for anything that could contain pass codes.
I could barely navigate Microsoft Word on my computer, how could I possibly understand what these folders meant?
CJCA82, TRPA72, TDIL73, KVIL73, LSTN51—
Those letters and numbers… LSTN51…
I held my breath. LSTN51. LS, my initials with my maiden name. TN for Tennessee. 51. The year I was born.
I opened up the folder. Three QuickTime movies were inside, each with their own labeclass="underline" subject camera, interviewer camera, and combined cameras.
The room rumbled slightly. I clicked on the first movie. After the color wheel spun for a few seconds, a screen opened up. When the video clip proves to be nothing, I’ll go back to searching the rest of the computer.
As the video began to play, my hand raised to my chest.
A little girl sat in a chair in front of a table. Despite the grainy footage that was obviously taken from a filmstrip, it was easy to tell she was exhausted. Even though it was in black-and-white, even though the clip had several jumps from when the old film flickered, even though the camera was several feet away, I knew her.
It was me, at five years old.
“Yes,” I heard myself say softly.
At the sound of the voice of an adult, I watched the much younger version of myself squirm at bit, looking around for the words. “I saw the people. The people I told you about. They change colors.”
I know this. My God, I know this.
I stopped the clip and moved the arrow directly to the “interviewer” video clip. Only after the video played for a few moments did I finally begin to breathe.
I had first seen the man in the video on Doug’s computer in the basement of Steven’s home. I remembered Doug had clamped the laptop shut, saying he would show me the rest of the video if I promised to go public. The first known interview of an abductee, he had said.
After I’d left, he’d followed us to the street, standing outside my window. “You’ll never know. You’ll never know the truth—”
I didn’t need to go to the end of the clip to see what it would reveal. But I did anyway, fast-forwarding to the end, as the man took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead.
The camera panned for a moment from the man to where my five-year-old self sat at the other end of the table.
Though the camera was on me, I heard the man whisper, his mic still picking up his words. “I’m not getting anything here. Get the Propofol ready.” The film stopped rolling.
My breath caught in my throat. Every card-carrying member of AARP knew that Propofol is used before major surgeries, but can also cause memory loss. My God—
I doubled clicked on the video labeled “combined cameras.” It began as the second video had—with the man in the horn-rimmed glasses and the fierce part in his hair.
“Are you comfortable?” the man asked.
The video then cut to show five-year-old me sitting at the table, looking out the window beside me. “Yes,” I said, squinting in the sunlight streaming through. When the camera adjusted to the lens flare from the sun, I could see endless waves of water stretching out from a long beach.
The edited video featuring both cameras continued with the man leaning forward. “Can you tell me about what you saw?”
“I saw the people. The people I told you about. The people in the sky change colors,” I heard myself reply.
“What do you remember about the ship in the sky?”
My little eyes looked back to him. It looked like I started trembling. “Mama and Daddy took me to St. Louis once, it was bigger than that. It changes colors too. Especially when they caused it to rain.”
“Rain?”
I watched myself nod. “When we came back down… everything was clear… then it got stormy. All around us. Bad clouds. Big winds. They did it. They brought the storm… when they came down.”
The man furiously scribbled and then tapped his forehead with his pencil.
“I know you’ve been through a lot. I need you to explain this to me. You told me before that you never actually talked to the… people in the sky. That you… understood them—like you spoke with your thoughts.”
“We shared.”
“You shared?”
I nodded. “Some of mine, some of theirs.”
“This is very, very important, Lynn. Is this how they communicated with you? Was it like a conversation?”
“Back and forth. Back and forth. I showed them the cornfield by my house, they showed me how they fly over cornfields. But then… it was not nice. They… wanted more. Like when they wanted to see if I get sick. I showed them when I got chicken pox that one time and Mama made me take a bath in all that white stuff. And then… I saw how they want to make other people get sick, and eat food that’s bad, and get hurt. In all kinds of ways.”
“How are they going to hurt people?”
I watched as my younger self reached up behind my head and winced. “There’s something… in me. And in the other people they bring back. They want to see… if everyone around us… gets hurt by what this does. I don’t want it in my head—”
“Get hurt by what?”
“What’s in here,” I saw myself motion to the base of my skull. “Can I see my mama and daddy now?”
“That’s all for now. Thank you, Lynn. I know it’s been difficult. You’re a strong, special girl—”
I stopped the video with a sharp tap.
Special ones, Verna had said. They don’t know why for sure. But unlike the adults, a few of the kids actually remember. I’ve heard the docs whisper—‘cause they don’t think I can hear—that it’s a genetic thing that their memories are stronger than whatever those bastards in the cosmos do to them. And if those kids come back, well, the Suits have all kinds of good drugs to make those memories, and everything else, go away—
No, no, no, I thought, exiting out of the folder and frantically scanning the others. A genetic thing…
The government gave me drugs—certainly the Propofol—and took everything I knew about my parents away.
WCTN11, WCTN11, WCTN11–
Oh, no.
The very last folder was WCTN11.
WC, William Chance. TN, Tennessee. 11. He was born in 2011. I clicked on it. Again, three movies. I frantically opened the third.
The video was incredibly clear, obviously recorded in high definition, and this time it was a younger man sitting in a stark white room. He adjusted his black tie and smiled with the warmth of an ice rink.
“Hello, William. Are you OK?”
My grandson sat in a chair, his short legs dangling. “I want to see my mommy and daddy.”
I blinked back angry tears. He remembered us.
“You will, son, but I need to ask you a few questions—”
“Want to see my mommy and daddy and my nanna.”
“Sure you do. But I need to talk to you first. About what you saw. And what you drew for us.”
“I already told the other man. They’re mad. I wanna go home.”
“They’re mad?”
“Really mad. I wanna go home. Don’t let them take me back up there.”
“You’re safe now, William. You told my colleague Dr. Cody that the people in the stars who took you—”