Paradox Valley Read online

  “Holly? Are you okay?”

  “Yes. What was that? An earthquake?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  She made her way slowly to the sound of Holly’s voice. Darkness had settled over the town of Paradox and she looked toward the large windows in the front, thankful they had not broken. Most, if not all of the shops had closed up hours ago. She took Holly’s hand and they walked toward the door even as the darkness enveloped them.

  Chapter Five

  Dana laughed as her cousin was recounting a tale from their childhood. She and Butch had been quite a pair, born only two days apart and growing up no more than a mile from each other. She knew everyone had heard this story plenty of times over the years, but it never got old.

  “Covered in pig muck, head to toe,” he said.

  “I didn’t even recognize her,” her father supplied. “If not for her ponytail, I’d have thought Butch done drug home a stray.”

  “It was his fault,” she said, pointing at Butch. “It’s not like I wanted to try and catch a pig.”

  “You never could turn down a dare,” he said with another laugh.

  “I had Louis spray her down with a garden hose before I’d let her in the house,” her mother added. “Threw her clothes away too.”

  Darkness had settled in the valley, but no one seemed to be in a hurry to leave. Besides Butch and his parents, another aunt and uncle had come over as well as their closest neighbors, Irene and Paul. Her father had cooked ribs and chicken on the barbeque, and her mother had made her special potato salad that Dana loved. Aunt Fredda brought two apple pies, and Dana had topped her piece with ice cream. It brought back all sorts of childhood memories, and she recalled many an evening with these very same people sitting around sharing a meal. Of course, there were more kids back then. Like her, most had moved away. Butch, however, still lived at home, content to work side by side with his father on their farm.

  “This has been fun,” Butch said. “You should come home more often.”

  “I know. Only it’s hard to get away sometimes,” she said. That wasn’t really the case. At thirty-one years old, she had her own life, her own friends. But her parents were getting older, and she knew she should see them more often than she did.

  “I wish—”

  Her mother’s words were cut off as a violent rumble shook the ground around them. Lights flickered on and off, losing the battle as they went out completely, plunging them into darkness on the back porch. Dana jumped up, afraid she would fall from the chair she was sitting in. She fell anyway as the earth seemed to shift beneath them. It stopped as suddenly as it had started, and she grabbed the porch railing, unable to see anything around her. She looked up into the sky, finding no moon this evening, nothing to cut the darkness.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “Is everyone okay?”

  “I can’t see a damn thing.”

  “Earthquake?”

  “Didn’t last long if it was one.”

  * * *

  Jean noticed the light flickering before she felt the first tremor. Hal was in his recliner and she hurried over to him, cringing as their wedding china rattled in the hutch. She reached him seconds before the power went out, but as the house shook around her, she fell to the floor, unable to keep her balance.

  “Jean?”

  “I’m here,” she said, grabbing his hand tightly.

  In the darkness, they heard a crash and she knew the coffee cup she’d been using earlier had fallen off the counter. It was her favorite one, she thought crazily as she clung tightly to Hal’s hand.

  They sat there in silence for several moments after the shaking stopped, as if fearing it would start again. Hal finally stood up and helped her to her feet.

  “Let me get a flashlight,” he said. “You stay here.”

  She heard him shuffling toward the closet, and she turned, holding her hands out as she made her way back to the kitchen. Her shoes hit the broken coffee cup and it crunched as she walked over it.

  “Jean? Batteries must be dead. I thought we changed them out a few weeks ago,” Hal called.

  “We did.”

  She pulled out the end drawer by the back door, the drawer that had become a catch-all. She felt inside it blindly, searching for the book of matches that she knew was in there.

  “Where’s another flashlight?”

  “In the washroom. I’ve got matches,” she said as she wrapped her fingers around them. She moved slowly back to the living room, feeling on the bookcase for the candle she kept there. The first match went out before she could light it, and she noticed that her hands were trembling. The candle lit on the second try, chasing some of the darkness away.

  “You think it was an earthquake?” he asked as he came closer to the light. “They keep saying we’re due a big one. Ever since they put that damn injection well in, ain’t no telling what’s happening around here.”

  “It didn’t seem like it lasted long enough to be an earthquake,” she said. “Remember the one back in 2000?”

  She took the candle into her laundry room and opened the cabinet, seeing the small flashlight she kept there. She turned it on, but there was no light. That was odd. She’d used it just yesterday when she’d lost one of Hal’s socks behind the dryer.

  “The batteries must be dead in this one too,” she said.

  “Nothing ever works when you need it to,” Hal said from the doorway. “I’ve got one out in my shop. Be right back.”

  “Best make sure the dog is okay. Lucky doesn’t like thunderstorms,” she reminded him. “This noise likely frazzled him.”

  * * *

  “I told you we need to keep extra batteries around for this very thing,” her mother said. “I can’t believe that every single flashlight we own has dead batteries.”

  “I’ll get the generator going in a minute. Butch? Can you give me a hand? We’ll bring it over on the four-wheeler.”

  Dana pulled out her phone, remembering the flashlight app on it. She frowned as the phone remained off. Had she forgotten to charge it? No. She’d charged it that morning. In fact, it had been plugged in all night.

  “Mom? Where’s your cell phone?”

  “It’s in my purse. Why?”

  “Mine’s not working.”

  Uncle Joe pulled his out. “I’ll call on up to the Bradford’s and see if they’ve got power,” he said.

  Dana walked off the porch, thankful for clear skies, although the stars cast very little light down on them.

  “Well, that’s odd. The damn thing won’t turn on.”

  Okay, she thought, it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out something was going on. First the flashlights, now their cell phones?

  “Uncle Joe, let’s go around front and see if your car will start,” she said.

  “Why wouldn’t it start?”

  “Because I think we’re having some kind of an issue with our batteries,” she said. She looked through the darkness to her dad’s workshop. They should have already had the generator loaded, but there was no sound of the four-wheeler’s engine.

  “Maybe we should head on home,” Irene said quickly to Paul. “Make sure everything is okay. My phone is dead too.”

  The four of them made their way around to the front of the house, and Uncle Joe got in his car. The interior light did not come on, and Dana wasn’t surprised when he turned the key and there was only a dull clicking sound.

  “Let me try ours,” Paul said, but he had no better luck.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Uncle Joe murmured.

  * * *

  The generator thundered outside and they finally had lights. They’d also determined that anything that used batteries was now useless. She couldn’t even get her laptop to boot up. They plugged the TV into the power strip, but they couldn’t get a signal on the satellite.

  “I can’t stand not knowing what’s going on,” Dana said, hearing the panic in her voice. She held her phone up. “I’m used to
being connected.”

  “Calm down,” Butch said. “We’ve got power to the fridge. We’ve got lights. We’re fine. I’m sure they’ll have the electricity restored tomorrow.”

  Irene and Paul had walked the half-mile to their house, but the others stayed. Butch and his parents lived only a little more than a mile away, but they would wait until morning to go home. Her other aunt and uncle lived over in Bedrock, so they were stuck here until they had a vehicle that worked.

  “I need a drink,” she murmured. “What do we have?”

  Her mother laughed. “The only thing other than beer is your dad’s whiskey that he hides up on the top shelf.”

  “Great. I’ll find it,” she said, going into the kitchen. “Anyone else want one?”

  Butch was the only one who did, and he followed her. “You okay?”

  “No,” she said. “I hate not knowing what’s going on. Was it an earthquake? Something else? I can understand the power but all the batteries?”

  “Yeah, that is a little weird,” he said.

  She held up a Coke and he nodded. “What if the power doesn’t come back on tomorrow? How long do we wait?”

  “Well, it’s not like we can drive anywhere to find out,” he said.

  She added her dad’s whiskey to the glasses with ice, then topped them off with the Coke. “My old bicycle is here,” she said. “Do you have one? We could use them to get around.”

  He laughed. “There’s one in the barn, sure. It doesn’t have tires, though. Not sure why we keep it. I think it was Tony’s bike,” he said, referring to his younger brother.

  “What about that purple one you had when we were kids?”

  He looked at her skeptically. “Dana, you do know that we’re over thirty, right? I had that bike when we were seven or eight.”

  She sighed. “Yes, I know we’re over thirty. God, where did the years go? It seems like yesterday I was heading off to college.” She sipped from her drink. “Do you ever regret not leaving?”

  He shrugged. “Sometimes, yeah. I’m content, though. It’s a relatively stress-free life here.”

  “You still dating Holly Filmore from over in Paradox?”

  “We still go out, yeah.”

  “Is marriage on the horizon?”

  “No. She doesn’t want to be a farm girl,” he said.

  “So why don’t you move on to someone else?”

  He shrugged again. “I like her…I’m content. Besides, out here in Paradox Valley, single women don’t grow on trees. Like you, most move away.”

  “Well, maybe she’ll come around.”

  “Yeah, maybe she will.” His face turned pensive. “And maybe she won’t.”

  She looked past him, seeing the others in the living room huddled together. They had two lamps hooked up to the generator, and they cast an almost eerie glow in the room. Her gaze drifted to the window where outside was nothing but the black expanse of darkness. She sighed and pulled her cell phone out of her pocket, hoping it worked now. It, too, remained dark.

  Chapter Six

  He yawned as he held his thumb on the security scanner. It was 2 a.m. and he’d gotten to bed before eleven, for once, only to be woken up a few hours later by an urgent call. As he’d told Lieutenant Duncan…this better be good.

  “Good morning, Colonel Sutter.”

  He glared at the soldier who saluted him. “Is it?” he mumbled as he walked past.

  He went directly to the control room where Lieutenant Duncan had asked him to meet. He was surprised by the activity and the number of people in the room. They were all looking at various monitors and talking at once.

  He cleared his throat loudly, waiting until they acknowledged his presence.

  “At ease,” he said as he tossed out a salute.

  “Good. You’re here, sir,” Duncan said.

  “It’s goddamn 0200 hours on Sunday morning. What the hell is so important that it couldn’t wait?”

  Duncan turned to one of the soldiers at the monitors. “Peters, bring it up.”

  Sutter walked behind him, watching the screen. A quick flash of light, then nothing. “I hope you got more than that because I was in the middle of a very nice dream when you called. A redhead with big tits was about to give me a lap dance. So tell me this isn’t what you hauled me in here for.”

  “This was picked up on radar, 2046 hours, local time, sir,” Duncan said.

  “So what’s the thought? Drone? Missile? A damn meteor? What?” he asked.

  “Unidentified. We’ve spent the last several hours going over satellite images, even telescope images. It doesn’t show up anywhere. It was on our radar for all of four seconds.”

  “What’s the conclusion? Hostile?”

  “A craft definitely using stealth technology,” Duncan said. “Where it originated, we have no idea. As you know, several countries have comparable aircraft to our B-2.”

  “Yes. But most are friendly.”

  “Russia has one.”

  Sutter pointed at the screen where the image played over and over. “It’s not a bomber. It disappeared as if it landed. An aircraft the size of the B-2 can’t land just anywhere. You got coordinates yet?”

  “Without knowing the size of the object, we can lock it down to about two hundred square miles. Best guess is right across the Utah border into Colorado.” Duncan turned and snapped his fingers. “Pull up the map.”

  When it appeared on the large monitor, he walked over to it. “Here’s the area we’re looking at,” he said, making a circle with his finger.

  “Any civilian reports?”

  “Nothing yet, sir.” He moved to another monitor. “Here is the current satellite image. It’s remote country, most of it. But there are pockets—Squaw Valley, Paradox Valley—where people live. Farms, mostly, and a handful of unincorporated towns.” He circled an area again. “Sparsely populated, but there should still be visible light. Bring up the satellite image from two nights ago,” he instructed.

  Sutter nodded at the difference. “So we’ve got a power outage in the area. Have you checked with the utility company?”

  “Yes, sir. They have no reports of damage, no reports of outages from their customers. They only get feedback once a day from their meters so they’ll be able to get us something Monday.”

  “They’ll be able to tell what area is affected?”

  “Yes, sir. That’ll help us narrow it down.” Duncan cleared his throat nervously. “But there’s something else we need to consider,” he said. “This thing…it could be something that…well, that didn’t originate on this earth.”

  Sutter would have laughed if not for the seriousness of Duncan’s voice. “UFO? Are you suggesting we have a goddamn UFO that landed out there in the middle of nowhere?” he asked, pointing to the map that was still up.

  “I’m…I’m saying it’s something we should consider, sir.”

  “You’re out of your fucking mind if you think I’m going to General Brinkley with a goddamn UFO theory.”

  “With the power out to that area, it could be something with an electromagnetic pulse of some sort. That might explain why there have been no civilian reports. No power. Cell towers in the area are probably useless. I’d guess—”

  “I don’t want a goddamn guess, Lieutenant Duncan,” Sutter said harshly. “Let’s send out a Black Hawk at first light.”

  “A Black Hawk, sir? Are you sure? I mean, maybe we should—”

  “I need something more than a guess, Duncan. Send a helicopter out.” He stared again at the image of the flash of light on the screen as it repeated over and over. “I’ll wait until morning to inform Brinkley.”

  “Yes, sir. Of course.”

  Sutter shook his head as he left the room. UFO? What the hell was Duncan thinking? That wasn’t a goddamn spaceship. If word got out that he was even thinking that…they’d have another Roswell on their hands and the place would be crawling with conspiracy theorists thinking they were hiding little green men on the base.
<
br />   “UFO,” he muttered with another shake of his head.

  Chapter Seven

  Lucky started barking a few moments before they heard pounding on their door. Hal and Jean turned at the same time to stare at it. Breakfast had been a simple meal of fried eggs and bacon with the homemade bread Jean had baked the other day. Trying to save fuel for the generator, Jean had dug out their old percolator and they’d had their coffee the old-fashioned way, cooked on the gas stove. They’d managed just fine since the power had gone off and they hadn’t lacked for anything. Well, except for information. They could only speculate as to what was going on. They’d heard the helicopter early that morning and had gone outside. It never got close enough for them to see it, but they’d heard the crash. Breakfast had turned somber after that.

  “I’ll see who it is,” he said to Jean. As he walked to the door, he glanced against the wall where he’d put his rifle. Only as a precaution, he’d told Jean. He pulled the curtains back from the window, relaxing as he recognized one of his neighbors. “It’s Carl Milstead.”

  He went out on the porch, extending his hand to Carl in greeting. Lucky was already there, sniffing Carl’s boots.

  “You and Jean okay?” Carl asked.

  “We’re making it.” He glanced behind Carl where two others sat atop horses. One held the reins of the horse Carl had been riding. “Jim, Graham,” he said in greeting.

  “Hal,” they said with a nod of their heads.

  “Did you hear the helicopter this morning?” Carl asked.

  “Yep, sure did. Heard it crash too,” Hal said.

  Carl nodded. “Sounded like it was over past the creek, up near the high ridge, maybe. Good ways west of the valley, I imagine. We’re going to get a group to go check it out. Thought you might want to join us.”

  “Up past the creek? That could be anywhere,” he said. “Only the three of you going?”

  “Got Curtis and Dusty too. Just came from Dusty’s place. His wife is putting together some supplies. They made a whole mess of elk jerky over the winter. We figure to only be gone a couple of days. Three at the most.”