Two flights up, he opens a glass door that’s an inch thick. We enter another corridor with floor-to-ceiling windows on one side. They look out over a hangar, which the corridors appear to encircle—four levels in all—like an atrium.
I drift toward the windows to get a better look, but Leighton guides me instead through the second door on the left, ushering me into a dimly lit room, where a woman in a black pantsuit is standing behind a table as if awaiting my arrival.
“Hi, Jason,” she says.
“Hi.”
Her eyes capture my stare for a moment as Leighton straps the monitoring device around my left arm.
“You don’t mind, do you?” he asks. “I’d feel better keeping tabs on your vitals a little while longer. We’ll be out of the woods soon.”
Leighton gently presses his hand into the small of my back and urges me the rest of the way inside.
I hear the door close behind me.
The woman is fortyish. Short, black hair with bangs just skirting striking eyes that somehow manage to be concurrently kind and penetrating.
The lighting is soft and unthreatening, like a movie theater moments before the film begins.
There are two straight-backed wooden chairs, and on the small table a laptop, a pitcher of water, two drinking glasses, a steel carafe, and a steaming mug that fills the room with the aroma of good coffee.
The walls and ceiling are made of smoked glass.
“Jason, if you have a seat, we can get started.”
I hesitate for five long seconds, debating just walking out, but something tells me that would be a bad, possibly catastrophic, idea.
So I sit in the chair, reach for the pitcher, and pour myself a glass of water.
The woman says, “If you’re hungry, we can have food brought in.”
“No thanks.”
Finally taking her seat across from me, she pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose and types something on the laptop.
“It is—” She checks her wristwatch. “—12:07 a.m., October the second. I’m Amanda Lucas, employee ID number nine-five-six-seven, and I’m joined tonight by…” She gestures to me.
“Um, Jason Dessen.”
“Thank you, Jason. By way of background, and for the record, at approximately 10:59 p.m. on October first, Technician Chad Hodge, during a routine interior locality audit, discovered Dr. Dessen lying unconscious on the floor of the hangar. The extraction team was activated, and Dr. Dessen was removed to quarantine at 11:24 p.m. Following decontamination and primary lab work clearance by Dr. Leighton Vance, Dr. Dessen was escorted to the conference theater on sublevel two, where our first debriefing interview begins.”
She looks up at me, smiling now.
“Jason, we are thrilled to have you back. The hour is late, but most of the team rushed in from the city for this. As you might have guessed, they’re all looking on behind the glass.”
Applause breaks out all around us, accompanied by cheers and several people shouting my name.
The lights come up just enough for me to see through the walls. Theater seating surrounds the glassed-in interview cubicle. Fifteen or twenty people are on their feet, most smiling, a few even wiping their eyes as if I’ve returned from some heroic mission.
I notice that two of them are armed, the butts of their pistols gleaming under the lights.
These men aren’t smiling or clapping.
Amanda scoots her chair back and, rising, begins to clap along with the others.
She seems to be deeply moved as well.
And all I can think is, What the hell has happened to me?
When the applause subsides, Amanda settles back into her seat.
She says, “Pardon our enthusiasm, but so far, you’re the only one to return.”
I have no idea what she’s talking about. Part of me wants to say just that, but part of me suspects that maybe I shouldn’t.
The lights dim back down.
I clutch my glass of water in my hands like a lifeline.
“Do you know how long you’ve been gone?” she asks.
Gone where?
“No.”
“Fourteen months.”
Jesus.
“Is that a shock to you, Jason?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, pins and needles and bated breath and asses on the edges of our seats. We’ve been waiting for over a year to ask these questions: What did you see? Where did you go? How did you get back? Tell us everything, and please start from the beginning.”
I take a sip of water, clinging to my last solid memory like a crumbling handhold on a cliff face—leaving my house on family night.
And then…
I walked down the sidewalk through a cool, autumn night. I could hear the noise of the Cubs game in all the bars.
To where?
Where was I going?
“Just take your time, Jason. We’re in no rush.”
Ryan Holder.
That’s who I was going to see.
I walked to Village Tap and had a drink—two drinks, world-class Scotch, to be exact—with my old college roommate, Ryan Holder.
Is he somehow responsible for this?
I wonder again: Is this actually happening?
I raise the glass of water. It looks perfectly real, right down to the way it sweats and the cold wetness of it on my fingertips.
I look into Amanda’s eyes.
I examine the walls.